Cry of the Peacock: A Novel Read online

  "Marry me," she told him, "and I will give you a son. I will stay in your house forever and you will never know pain."

  Isaac lay beside her—cold, silent. He had been expecting the question, wondering what he would say when it came. If he married Esther he would be shamed forever, unable to look into the eyes of other men, ridiculed and ostracized by all his friends. No one married a woman he knew was not a virgin.

  "She is old," he reasoned with himself, "perhaps eighteen, perhaps more. Her womb is tired, and infected with the seeds of other men. She may never give me a child, and if she does, I won't know that it is mine."

  In the long silence that spread between them, Esther the Soothsayer read Isaac's doubts and became furious. She made love to him again, this time with anger, and all the while Isaac did not dare look in her eyes. Then she left his house and said she would never return.

  Thick Pissing Isaac dreamt of her through nights of agony and anticipation. He saw himself lying beside her and woke up to find that he was alone. He stood by the teahouse all day in the hope that she might walk by his door. He could not stop wanting her; his flesh burned where she had touched him last. He went to look for her.

  "Come back," he cried.

  The next day they were married.

  The night of her wedding, Esther the Soothsayer became pregnant. She dreamt of a bird with blind eyes and silver wings—a giant who flew toward her out of the red desert sky and sent rats and scorpions digging the earth in their fury to hide. It came closer, its wings shimmering against the light, and just as the sun was about to rise, the bird landed in Esther's hands. It had a woman's breasts.

  Esther the Soothsayer woke up and touched herself. Her face and neck were covered with moisture. Her hair had clung to her throat as if to choke her. She felt her stomach, her groin. She closed her eyes. It was dark. She saw her child.

  She told Isaac that she carried a boy, that it would look nothing like anyone he had ever seen. She told him that he would be wise, that he would bring honor to their name, that he would walk in the sun one day with his arms full of glory and his eyes full of pride. Isaac wanted to believe her, but all of Juyy Bar was laughing.

  The child, they said, would come before its time. It would look like an Arab, or a stranger, but nothing like Isaac himself. It must have been conceived out of wedlock—from Isaac, or perhaps another man. Esther must have come to Esfahan pregnant, run away from her own town to hide her shame and find a man simple enough to marry her.

  “Watch yourselves," Rabbi Yehuda the just warned the women of Juyy Bar in his sermons. “A child conceived in sin will bear the mark of his mother's dishonor."

  Thick Pissing Isaac began to doubt and could not stop himself. He loved Esther, loved her smell, the echo of her voice. He wanted her and wanted the son she had promised him and he would have been content if only the ghetto had let him. But after a few weeks he could not help looking at Esther differently. He went to see Yehuda the Just.

  "You must wait before you judge," the rabbi advised. He was trying to appear calm, but his eyes, Isaac would remember later, gleamed with excitement. "Count the weeks of your wife's pregnancy and mark the day she delivers. If she comes short of nine months and nine days, she is carrying a bastard. Then come see me and we will return just punishment."

  A month went by, then another. Every night when he lay down, Thick Pissing Isaac put his hands on his wife's stomach and prayed that the child she carried was his. Then he went to sleep, leaving Esther terrified, awake, trapped. She knew the rumors about herself and the child. She knew the fate of adulterous wives. She had named her son Noah. She begged him to wait a full nine months before he claimed his place in the world.

  But in the seventh month of their marriage, Esther the Soothsayer woke up one night to find her bed full of blood. She ran to the basement and locked the door.

  She endured the labor alone, without a whisper, and for three days she did not leave the basement. She sat crouched above a tray full of ashes, dug her nails into the hard ground, and vomited with the force of every contraction until all the darkness had been jolted out of her and all her fears were purged and she felt nothing but the warmth of the child sliding out between her thighs.

  Esther the Soothsayer wrapped her son in her chador, then buried the placenta. Outside, Yehuda the Just waited. She opened the basement door and walked toward her fate.

  They had come since dawn, standing in huddles around the main square, in the doorways of houses and shops along the street, on top of the roofs overlooking the square. An hour before noon the heat became nauseating. Sweating under their black chadors and thick veils, women pressed their children against themselves and sighed expectantly. Men stood together, spitting on the ground every once in a while as they talked to one another about unrelated things. Their attention was elsewhere, their minds preoccupied with the anticipation of the event they had come to watch. Not since the death of Sabyah the Adulteress fifty years ago had a woman been punished in Juyy Bar.

  At noon the wailing sound of the Muslim namaz rose from the minarets of Esfahan. Minutes later they brought Esther the Soothsayer—her face unveiled, her body uncovered, her legs bare. A woman who had lost her honor, Rabbi Yehuda the Just had ordained, must not appear in honest garb.

  She walked to the center of the square and sat on the ground, crossing her legs under her skirt so as to cover them. She was still pale from the birth, bleeding so hard she had to keep herself wrapped in layers of cloth. Her breasts secreted a clear liquid that was bitter and tangy and without nutrition. The child she had borne—Noah the Gold—had to be nursed by strangers. Esther the Soothsayer had lost the will to fight, lost even the memory of what she had come to

  Esfahan to seek. Her eyes were devoid of fire, her voice was no longer full of echoes.

  Yehuda the Just allowed for an appropriate interval, then made his own entrance. In spite of the heat, he wore a long black coat, a white shirt buttoned to the top, a black hat. His red hair glowed in the sun and made his freckled skin look even more jaundiced. He stopped next to Esther the Soothsayer, looked at the audience, drew a breath. This was, he knew, his greatest moment.

  He began his sermon.

  “It is said in the Torah that an evil woman is like a snake," he started calmly, then turned away from the audience to face Esther herself. "She poisons the lives of her husband and children, and casts her seeds for generations after she is gone—so that the fruit of damnation will blossom in her house till eternity."

  He saw Esther tremble, and was pleased. He had dreamt of this day, prayed for it over a lifetime of longing and anticipation. For twenty years he had been chief rabbi of his ghetto. He had spoken every sermon, observed every holiday, performed every wedding and every burial, and all the time he had prayed for the chance—the moment when he would be called to judge, to control the fate of another, set down the law.

  "A woman's crimes go beyond individual harm," he screamed.

  "Sins against family and honor reap nothing but blasphemy and the harvest of all things damned. A single act will corrupt society to its roots. One person's betrayal will cause the downfall of an entire community."

  He paused. Sitting there before him, Esther the Soothsayer looked small—smaller than a child, smaller than the fairies that were born, in the tales of mad poets, of old women's sighs and the tears of virgin brides.

  He could have come out in Esther's defense, he knew. He could have asked Isaac for proof of Esther's infidelity, considered the possibility that the child was born prematurely. He could have done what the Book really preached— asked for indulgence, demanded forgiveness, forbidden vengeance. He could have saved Esther and her child. But to do this, he would have to forgo his one chance at immortality.

  “So the fate of one must be made into a lesson for all," he delivered the verdict.

  “The whore"—he pointed at Esther—“must not be put to death, for revenge is not the message of the Torah. She must be shamed instead, in publi
c, so that all who know her will bear witness to her crime and learn the consequences of her betrayal. So that—" he stopped. The silence was deafening. “So that she may go on living, shamed and without honor, never daring to show her face, never able to hide it."

  Far away in his teahouse where he still saw Esther's shadow, Thick Pissing Isaac pressed his hands over his ears and cried like a child.

  When the rabbi had finished his sermon, David the Butcher's son came forward with his blade. He grabbed Esther's hair in his left hand, pulled it back so that her chin pointed upward and he could see the rapid pulse of the vein that ran up the side of her neck. He began to shave her hair.

  David the Butcher's son wished he had never accepted this task. He was a good butcher, quick and honest and cleaner than most. In his shop he could pluck five chickens at one time: He held their legs in between his fingers and slit their throats, plucked them so fast they would dash across the shop with their skin bare and their heads hanging over the side of their necks until the last drop of blood had rushed out of them and they fell to the ground. He could skin sheep faster than any man in the ghetto, clean out the intestines and the stomach before the water for the stew had begun to boil. But a woman's head he had never shaved before. As soon as he put the blade to Esther's head it became entangled, and he had to force it out, pulling her hair and in the process cutting her scalp. Blood dripped from every patch of skin he had managed to lay bare.

  He took an hour to shave Esther's head. Hair piled high on the ground around her feet. Blood licked her scalp, her face, her neck. With her hair gone, her eyes looked larger than usual. Her face was pale, thin—like a series of lines etched together into reality. David the Butcher's son looked at her then and knew he had sinned. For weeks after the punishment, every animal he slaughtered in his shop would have empty veins. He would bury them in the ground and take a loss: Kosher laws barred the Jews from eating an animal with no blood. Muslims would not buy meat from a Jew. David the Butcher stuffed the earth under his shop full of dead roosters and lamb, and he knew all along he was paying for his crime against the Soothsayer.

  He tied Esther's hands behind her back and raised her on her legs. He reached into a bag on the ground and took out a lamb's stomach—white, slithery, glistening with moisture. He pulled the stomach over Esther's shaved head. Then he lifted her by the waist and placed her on the back of a mule.

  He guided the mule out of the square. The crowd stepped back reluctantly. At the end of the street that led away from the square, Parvaneh the Professional Mourner made her way toward them. For thirty-seven years she had been married to a man who dragged himself on two stumps that had never grown into legs. She came forward, looking into Esther's face, the corners of her mouth twitching with disdain, and spat at Esther.

  "7 remained chaste."

  All of that day, David the Butcher's son paraded Esther in Juyy Bar. He banged a wooden stick on the outside of a tin can and sang as he walked.

  "Come one, come all, and see the whore of Juyy Bar."

  His voice became hoarse and his arms ached and his feet grew blistered, but still he went on. Long into the night, the punishment completed, he stopped. He untied Esther's hands and gave her back her chador.

  “Go," he said without looking at her.

  For a long time after she had left Juyy Bar, Esther the Soothsayer had the sensation of traveling through the familiar. Once or twice she even turned around to look back at the ghetto. Behind her, Juyy Bar shrank under the sun, its gates and many arched roofs getting smaller as Esther walked away from them into the city that had been the pride of Persia for so many centuries.

  But here, too, the houses were dirty and crowded and half-ruined. The streets were narrow and dark, the children hungry and haggard. The old men who sat smoking opium on their doorsteps were yellow-skinned and toothless, their eyes eaten by trachoma, their faces marked by the smallpox that had plagued their childhoods.

  She came to a long and very narrow street with quiet houses where the doors were closed and the air was heavy with an uneasy silence. There were no people here, no one walking on the street, no children playing. The doors were all painted the same faded gray. From behind some of them Esther thought she heard the hushed whispers of women and the muffled cries of infants. She stopped, overcome by the fear she had carried from Juyy Bar, the instinctive warning of a danger she could not identify: beyond the veil of silence that spread over the street and its houses, she heard the rhythmic, metallic sound of camel bells approaching.

  Suddenly she realized there were eyes staring at her, peering through the doors on both sides of the alley. She imagined faces watching her, imagined she heard the sound of breathing and whispers. She had come to the Castle.

  This was the street where all of Esfahan's prostitutes lived with their “keepers" and their many bastard children. They stayed inside most of the time, waiting, with their faces veiled and their bodies covered, for night to fall and Muslim men hiding in the darkness to call on them. The men would slip through unmarked doors and into small rooms where they waited, along with a dozen others, for their turn. One by one they would crawl into beds that smelled of sweat and dirt and the bodies of other men. They took from the women's bodies their many diseases and left in them the seeds of children who would grow up fatherless, doomed to watch their mothers lie with strangers every night until the boys were old enough to leave home, and the girls ripe enough to be sold as virgins.

  But the Castle was forbidden to Jewish men. The prostitute who held a Jew's body with her own would forever become soiled, and in turn contaminate the Muslims who came to her afterward. Thick Pissing Isaac had told Esther about the Castle. Years ago a Jewish man had taken off the yellow patch on his robe and slept with a prostitute here. His body had not betrayed him, for Muslims, like Jews, circumcised their boys. But in the euphoria of his first experience with love he had forgotten himself, and dared to speak to the woman. She had known his way of speaking, the garbled language of Esfahani Jews that was a mixture of ancient Farsi, Arabic, and incorrect Hebrew. She had called her keeper, who had come with three others, tied the Jew to a tree, and cut off his penis.

  Esther heard footsteps and turned around. Behind her in the alley, under an opening in the arched roof where sunlight shone in the shape of a perfect cylinder, she thought she saw Yehuda the Just.

  She began to walk again, away from Yehuda the Just, toward the distant music of the bells. She rushed down the alley, past the houses that stretched on either side of her, toward the mouth of a tunnel that opened where the Castle ended. When she had got closer she realized that the tunnel was three steps underground and pitch dark. She went in.

  The stale air froze the beads of perspiration on her face. She walked down a dirt track that sloped first deeper into the earth and then slowly rose, up seven steps that took her out of the tunnel and into the abandoned cobblers' bazaar, past the small shops all boarded up and forgotten, toward an opening at the end of the corridor where she could see daylight. Her eyes were fixed on the light, her body overtaken by its own momentum. One more step and she was out.

  She stopped. She peeled off the lamb's stomach from her head, threw away her chador. It was dawn in Persia. Esther the Soothsayer was at last free.

  All around her was endless, open space. The street was wide and long, paved with cobblestones and lined with old willow trees that shivered lightly in the late afternoon breeze. The air, pale blue and sweet, smelled of jasmine and apples. Water flowed in the gutters, like streams of liquid glass. Farther behind the trees and the gutters, brick walls reached to the end of the street.

  Above her the sky was calm, not oppressive, an infinity of light and colors that stretched over the roofs of houses— red brick and marble and tiles. The horizon was dotted by brown minarets and the blue domes of mosques. Far away, she could see the green jade columns of the Shah's Square: the sun was red, sinking into the glass walls of the Palace of Forty Pillars.

  Esther the Soot
hsayer stood, belittled. She heard the sound of trumpets and drums, of women's cries and men's cheers. A crowd had appeared at the end of the street, an excited congregation of people and colors and sounds. Esther raised herself on the small platform alongside a wall and looked: Agha Muhammad Shah had come to Esfahan. His cavalcade was passing through Char Bagh Street.

  Esther the Soothsayer saw a two-humped camel in front, covered with purple embroideries, ridden by the Supreme

  Marshal of the Imperial Camel Drivers. Behind it was a train of Arabian camels loaded with trunks, two bells hanging from heavy silver chains on each of their flanks. They were followed by the Royal Mule—cloaked in ornaments and draperies, ridden by the High Chief of the Shah's Mule Drivers. Three hundred other mules followed, charged with tents and equipment, carrying bells of different shapes and sizes.

  There was a pause. Then came a procession of riflemen. They were dressed in black tunics and riding boots, rifles slung over their shoulders, each wearing two belts of cartridges. Behind them rode the “Shah's Warriors," carrying no weapons except ornamental swords.

  A multicolored parade of high officials and royal attendants, of courtiers and pages, of seers and astrologers and spies followed. The men all wore elaborate outfits of embroidered silk and velvet, rode Arabian horses with tails painted red to show the purity of their stock.

  Then came the eunuchs—beautiful young boys with pale faces and arched eyebrows, dressed in bejeweled gowns, looking forlorn and nostalgic.

  Esther the Soothsayer left her corner and approached the procession. The crowd was fighting to get closer to the cavalcade. Bodies pressed forward, hands grabbed blindly. He had come to their town, Agha Muhammad Shah, the King of Kings, the Shadow of God. He had come, and the people's lives would never be the same for having seen him.