Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (2 page)

The next day she took all her money and bought a place on a caravan bound for the north. For three weeks they traveled—the men riding in front, sitting cross-legged in wooden boxes that hung from the backs of camels and mules, the women walking behind the animals. At night they camped on the road, or in caravansaries along the way. Esther the Soothsayer kept to herself and pretended to be Muslim. When they reached Esfahan, she left the caravan and went to find the Jews' ghetto. She had come far enough, she thought. Destiny had lost track of her.

The Jewish ghetto
of Esfahan was called Juyy Bar. It was a collection of houses and shops, an old square, four synagogues, three public baths. It stood on barren ground—the earth beneath it composed of an impenetrable layer of clay that served as a good foundation for homes, but created shallow wells that soon dried. The wells were infested with worms—long, milky white creatures that crawled in staggering numbers from a never-ending source in the earth. They slid down the walls and into the water where they laid their eggs. Across the ghetto in Esfahan, the river Zayandeh-Rud—Life-giver—irrigated hundreds of acres of land and returned some of the best crops in the country. But water was controlled by the mullahs, and they denied it to the Jews.

In Juyy Bar, the Jews lived like ants trapped inside an underground hole. Their houses were all one-story high, built of mud and clay. The rooms were small and dark and without windows, separated from the courtyard by columns of red mud that were cracked and lopsided and on the verge of crumbling. In the courtyard there was a pool of stagnant water where women washed the day's clothes and dirty dishes, children bathed in the summer, and frogs screamed through the night. In one corner was the only toilet—an open hole in the ground. Next to the toilet was an underground oven that all the tenant families shared.

The Jews, as anywhere else in Persia, were considered impure and untouchable. They were not allowed to live and work outside their ghetto, to plant their own food or drink from public waters. The men wore red or yellow patches on their clothes, the women covered their faces with thicker veils than those reserved for Muslims. Anything a Jew touched became soiled forever. If accused of a crime, a Jew could not testify in his own defense. He could not even step out of the ghetto on a rainy day for fear that the rain may wash the impurity off his body and onto a Muslim's. Esther the Soothsayer looked at the ghetto and went cold. She had escaped the harem, she realized, but not her bondage.

She tried to find a place to live, and was met with refusing eyes and probing questions. The Jews had been talking about her since she arrived. They said that she was a whore because she had traveled without a man, that she was godless because she claimed to know the future. They were suspicious because she spoke a different dialect, ate different food. They insisted on knowing why she had left Bandar 'Abbas.

"I have come to change my destiny," Esther the Soothsayer told them as if she were God. "I have come to leave my fate and find a new life."

No one understood.

She must have been
driven
out, they decided—punished by her own people and banned for a crime she had come here to hide. She must have been a thief, an adulteress, a whore. She must leave Juyy Bar and take away her corruption.

“Go!” Rabbi Yehuda the Just screamed at Esther in his Sabbath sermon. "Leave, and take your talismans and your spells.”

Esther the Soothsayer could not fight the ghetto. But she had come to Esfahan for a reason, and for that she wanted to stay: out in the heart of the city that had once been the capital of Persia, she had been told, there was a palace built entirely of glass. She thought her dream had called her here.

She knew that if she were married, the Jews would not chase her out. She looked around and found Thick Pissing Isaac: a big man with a bald head and a shyness that made him look away every time she passed by. He owned the teahouse at the far end of the ghetto and lived alone. As a child, he had once sat with his friends to eat a bowl of soup. There was not enough for everyone, and the boys had started to fight. Desperate to eat and too shy to fight, Isaac had stood up in the midst of the quarrel and urinated in the soup. Then he had sat down, crying, and finished the food.

Esther the Soothsayer liked the story of Isaac's childhood. She liked his eyes that never dared look at her, his loneliness that reminded her of herself.

So she went to call on him—in his dreams at first, where she appeared every night and spoke his name—and by the time she knocked on his door late one night when all of Juyy Bar was asleep, she knew he would not refuse her warmth.

Thick Pissing Isaac
lay terrified in his bed. He was awake, hours after midnight, listening to Esther call him. For many nights now he had been dreaming of her—a tall creature he thought he had seen before but could not place. In his sleep he had tried to remember who she was, strained his mind until it was dark. She stood so close to him he could smell her skin. Now at last she had spoken, and her voice had forced him awake.

So he went to her, drawn by her call and the need to feel her. He found her standing by his door, a shadow in the night, and even before he had touched her he knew that she was naked under the black chador, that her hair was unbraided and long and dark as her eyes, that her skin was soft, and her tongue blistering red.

She walked in and slipped into Isaac's bed—under the old comforter that smelled of tobacco and dust—and taught him what she had learned of love in the long and murky nights of Bandar 'Abbas. She went back to him every night, hiding in the darkness as she traveled the distance between his teahouse and the rubble where she stayed by day. Afraid his neighbors would see her come in, Isaac waited for her in the light of a candle, then closed the door and prayed that no one heard their whispers. He offered her tea and dates and all the food in the house. He was startled by her passion, filled with a thousand questions he dared not ask. He waited for her to speak first.

"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.