Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (37 page)

He kept Yasmine in the room on the first floor and called on her every morning, noon, and nighttime, and though he did not sleep with her anymore—a breast-feeding woman could not become pregnant—he treated her gently and with kindness. He only forbade her to speak French to the boy; she might poison the child's mind against his father, Naiima had suggested, and Besharat agreed. Yasmine was asked to speak only Persian, so that Naiima could understand her when she eavesdropped. At night she was allowed to keep the infant in her own bed.

Slowly, as she watched the child grow bigger and felt her heart overwhelmed with love, Yasmine found herself less preoccupied with the thought of leaving Iran. After a decade of isolation, she was at last becoming part of the household, and could no longer stand the thought of living alone. She spoke to the maids, the cook, the vendors who came to the door with their merchandise stacked on the backs of lame donkeys, the peddler women who carried their junk on their backs. Most of all, she spoke to Peacock—who was called to the house regularly, always instructed to bring identical pieces for Besharat the Bastard's two wives. Slowly, Yasmine stopped listening for the evening news. At night, instead of waiting for Mossadeq's radio to start, she would close the windows, watch her son in his sleep, and wish she could see his dreams.

She breast-fed the boy till he was two years old. The summer after the Russians left Azerbaijan, she became pregnant again.

"Give me the boy," Naiima begged her husband with tear-filled eyes. "You have given that stranger two children. You owe me at least one."

Besharat the Bastard recalled the pledge he had made long ago to Naiima and her God: as the husband of an infertile wife, he could marry twice, provided he gave equally to both women, slept with both of them till they were old, and forced the natural mother to share the children with the other wife. He took his son away from Yasmine, and gave him to Naiima.

Yasmine fought Besharat for the child. She fought Naiima and Assal and all of their relatives, but in the end, everyone knew she would lose. Naiima moved the boy out of Yasmine's room and into her own. She hovered around him all day long, objected to the slightest contact between mother and child. At night, when the boy cried for Yasmine, Naiima stood in the doorway and refused her entry.

So Yasmine attacked her, with her words and her hands and her anguish, and the two women rolled on the ground fighting like stray dogs until they were both wounded and bleeding and the maids separated them.

"Watch out," Naiima told the child every time Yasmine approached him. "That woman is violent."

Besharat the Bastard observed the battle between his two wives and refused to interfere. In a few months, he told himself, Yasmine would have another child, busy herself with the new infant, and make peace with Naiima again.

"You are committing an unforgivable crime," Peacock warned Besharat every time she came to the house and witnessed the fighting. "You are buying a curse that will never release you or your children."

Yasmine had a girl—dark, like Besharat, but with purple eyes. Besharat the Bastard rejoiced at her birth and promised Naiima would never touch the girl. Two years later, when the child was weaned from the breast, he reneged on his word.

"Suit yourself," Naiima had told him with a cool head. "Let that stranger raise your daughter, but remember, no one will marry a girl trained by a Christ-worshiper."

Besharat the Bastard made Yasmine pregnant for a third time, then gave her daughter to Naiima.

Peacock rushed to see her the moment she heard the news. “Madame Yasmine," she said, “you must not give in so easily to Naiima. You must fight her, fight Besharat." Yasmine was cold, pale, hard. She had fought her best battle and lost. Now she was thinking of escape.

"You must help me,”
Yasmine told Peacock the day she came to warn her against surrendering to Naiima. Yasmine stood up and went to the door, looked through the crack, then opened it to check for spies. She found no one. Not even Naiima dared eavesdrop on Peacock.

Yasmine came back and sat close to Peacock. Her lips were pale, her eyes drained of color.

"I must leave this country," she said, shocked at the greatness of the confidence she entrusted in Peacock. She looked down at her stomach. She was three months pregnant. "When this child is born, I must flee."

She waited for a reaction. She thought Peacock would be astonished or frightened or outraged. Instead, she found her unmoved—as if listening to a story she had heard many times before.

"I need money," Yasmine went on, trying to keep her resolve intact. She raised her wedding ring to Peacock.

"Bring me cash," she asked, "in return for this ring. I can't take it off as long as I'm here, but I will leave it for you, I swear, before I go."

Peacock shook her head in sympathy. For years she had known—everyone had known—that Yasmine was contemplating escape. It was the natural response, and Besharat the Bastard had prepared against it.

"You could never leave," Peacock told Yasmine. "Even if you had money and a passport, you couldn't get across the border. Every Iranian woman needs written consent from her husband or father to leave the country."

Yasmine knew about the required consent form; she had heard about it on Mossadeq's radio.

"All I need from you," she told Peacock, "is enough cash to get me back home to Paris."

"Madame Yasmine," Peacock insisted, "don't give up your children. Don't give up your man. They will haunt you till the end of your life, leave a hollow space, the size of a baby's hand, that you could never fill inside your heart."

Yasmine drew her hand away from Peacock, and immediately she was closed and hard and out of reach again.

Peacock felt old and exhausted. She stood up and left Yasmine without another word. Behind her, Yasmine heard the door close, but did not turn to look. She had forgotten Peacock. In her mind she was retracing the maps she had so often studied as a young girl in Europe, watching herself, free and unharmed, walk out of Besharat's home and across Iran's borders, wearing her winter coat and her high-heeled shoes.

In 1947, Princess Foziyeh left the Shah; just as the Soviets were leaving Iran, the Queen took her only daughter and moved back to "civilized Egypt." Soon after that, Muhammad Reza Shah's twin sister, Ashraf, found him another wife: Sorraya, daughter of a Kurdish tribal chief, and the most startling beauty Iran would ever remember. She was sixteen years old, innocent and ravishing. She had white skin, high cheekbones, black hair and emerald eyes, and a queen's manners. She liked crocodiles; people said she kept them as house pets in the palace.

So the Shah married Sorraya, stepped out of his palace to reign, and discovered that his country was in famine. In 1945, Iran had no food and no income. By 1950 she had even run out of bread.

But the poverty, Muhammad Reza Shah knew, was largely artificial. Iran had oil—oil that was pumped and refined and controlled by the English, oil that had been given away by the Qajars in a concession to the English, who took eighty percent of the profits from the sale of Iran's oil. Now that she was starving, they said she was a bad risk, and refused to lend her money.

The Shah went to them—politely—and asked to share the oil money on a more equitable basis. He offered a fifty-fifty formula. The British laughed at him. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, they said, pumped Iran's oil, refined it, and sold it. Without English technology, Iran would have to let her oil stay in the ground, give up even her twenty-percent share.

The Shah came home empty-handed and braced himself for famine. He had done his best, he told the people. There was nothing else to do.

But inside Parliament, Reza Shah's old enemy, Dr. Mos-sadeq, went to war. In 1944, Mossadeq had initiated a law that forbade the government of Iran to negotiate any oil agreement with a foreign power without the prior consent of Parliament. Now, faced with the Shah's reluctance to confront the British, he stood up before the nation and cried the words that shook the world:

"Nationalize
oil!"

Yasmine had another girl—also dark—but this time, when they brought her the child to feed, she refused. She put her two hands over her breasts, closed her eyes, and bit down on her lip as the infant cried in her lap and begged for food. Besharat the Bastard came in and ordered her to act like a mother, but Yasmine would not move. He tried to force her, but in vain. Even after they had dragged Yasmine's hands away from her breasts, she fought so hard that she frightened the child, and it could not eat. For two days they struggled. Then Besharat the Bastard gave in and hired a nursemaid.

"You're not a mother," he told Yasmine, "you're a witch."

Yasmine gave up her children, and moved back into her old room on the third floor. She found it small and melancholy and buried in dust. It did not matter, she told herself. She would not stay long.

Inside Parliament, Mossadeq had won the representatives' support for his plan to nationalize oil. He stepped forth and asked the Shah to declare himself on the issue.

Muhammad Reza Shah came out opposed.

Nationalization, he said, was illegal and would anger the British. It was also unwise, for without foreign expertise, Iran would be deprived of what little income she was allowed.

"Traitor!"
Yasmine now heard Mossadeq's voice broadcast on the same radio he had listened to every night for a decade. He was accusing the Shah of being a coward, of serving the British at the expense of his own people. Oil, he said, was more than a source of revenue for Iran; it was a matter of pride, of national integrity, of human dignity.

"Let us starve!"
he cried in the course of violent and spectacular speeches in which he became agitated and angry and so inspired by his own vision that he would fall to the ground unconscious and be carried out by his aides.

“Let us
all
starve. Let the English leave and take with them their engineers. Let one generation of Iranians sacrifice itself and regain our national resource."

Afterward, he received journalists and photographers in his home. Yasmine watched them file into the house, heard Mossadeq scream at them the terms of his nationalism. He would appear in his pajamas, sitting cross-legged on his bed, and he spoke so fervently that Yasmine could feel the street come alive with his words. It mattered little, he said, that two or three generations of Iranians would suffer from poverty. It mattered even less that the English would not be there to pump the oil from the ground. Let the oil stay in the earth. A time would come when Iran could train her own experts, and make her own children masters of the land.

He spoke sincerely, his bald, cone-shaped head shaking with excitement and his face flushed with passion as he captured, in one session, the sympathy of his harshest critics. He had already taken control of Parliament. Now he took the people.

In March 1952, Mossadeq called on the workers of the Abadan refinery to strike. In Tehran, he forced five consecutive prime ministers out of office, and took the job himself. Eager to succeed, he allied himself with the only organized political force inside Iran: the Communist Tudeh, which shared Mossadeq's enmity toward the British. It was a desperate move—a clear alliance with the Soviet Union—but in the heat of the battle, Mossadeq had lost sight of his nationalist dreams, and wanted most of all to win. He expropriated the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and sent the English engineers home.

Suddenly, the British wanted to talk. Mossadeq refused. He was ruling the country, and he did away with all pretense. He locked the Shah in his palace, and surrounded him with troops loyal to himself. He sent members of the royal family—among them Ashraf—into exile in Europe and America. Afraid that he would be assassinated, he planted soldiers all the way up and down Palace Street and all around his own house.

"There is going to be a war soon," Besharat the Bastard warned his guests on the first floor of the house. All through that year, the house had been filled with neighbors and friends and curious relatives who came to watch the happenings in Mossadeq's house. Besharat the Bastard was so confident of his vision that he had already taken steps to protect his household against the Tudeh and the invading British army: he had drawn barbed-wire fences all along the top of the brick wall that surrounded the house. He had built shutters for every window, bought locks and wooden poles for every door. He had even filled his basement with food and supplies to last the family three months.

"Mossadeq has antagonized the British,” he warned his guests, "and now there is going to be war."

Upstairs in her room, Yasmine used her hand to wipe the dust off the window glass. Through the opening she created, she watched the soldiers standing guard around Mossadeq's house, and thought about the time they would draw their guns. She, too, was counting on a war—on a day when Iran would plunge into chaos, the police and the army would become engulfed in battle and lose count of their citizens. Then Yasmine would run, in her high heels and her winter coat through the streets of Tehran and across the city's borders and all the way north to Russia, where, years ago, she had arrived on a ship from France.

Besharat the Bastard
returned home only an hour after he had left for the office. He jumped out of the car, and dismissed the chauffeur:

"I won't need you for a few days."

He grabbed the keys from the man and stuffed a handful of bills, much more than a week's salary, into his fist. He pushed the chauffeur toward the door, then locked the gates.

He walked into the house, screaming for Naiima.

"Send the maids home!" he commanded, rushing toward the kitchen and the backyard where the servants worked. Naiima ran behind him and watched as he ordered the maids and the cook to leave the house immediately. He paid them all—ransom money, Naiima thought, meant to curb their resentment of their masters and perhaps even induce a sense of loyalty. When they had all left the house, Besharat the Bastard locked all the doors, and barricaded them with long wooden poles. He nailed all the shutters closed, and ordered his children again to keep away from the cracks in the doors and windows; members of the Tudeh, it was known, were ruthless fighters who spared no innocents. For weeks they had been walking the streets, intimidating the citizens in order to gain support. Outside every house, they stopped and shoved the blades of their butcher's knives through the cracks in the doors and windows, stabbing unsuspecting inhabitants.