Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (38 page)

Besharat the Bastard emptied the safe in his room, and hid the contents inside the sacks of flour stored in his basement. He rolled up the more expensive rugs on the floors and the walls, and dragged them up three stories to a storage room beneath the roof. Then at last he called the household and, trembling, broke the news:

"The Shah has fled the country," he said. "There's going to be a bloodbath."

In the summer of 1953 the Shah's twin sister, Ashraf, had been in exile in Europe when she was approached by members of the American CIA. They asked her to return to Iran, smuggle herself into the palace where the Shah was surrounded by Mossadeq's soldiers, and deliver a word to His Majesty. Always the braver and more ruthless of the twins, Ashraf agreed. She returned to Iran with the aid of friends, reached Queen Sorraya, and handed her a letter, the contents of which have never been fully discovered. Two weeks later the Shah and Sorraya boarded a small plane and left Iran in the dark of night. They flew to Baghdad, and from there to Rome. Behind them, the CIA moved in to fight the Russians.

They did not bring troops; they hired an army in Iran. They paid starving, unemployed Iranians, and asked them to stage demonstrations in support of the fleeing Shah. They enlisted the help of Shaaban the Brainless, leader of a workers' union in Tehran. Shaaban carried around piles of banknotes that he distributed to anyone who would declare himself a lover of the Crown. They spent so much money and stirred such force that Mossadeq became terrified:

"The CIA has come to kill me," he cried.

No longer the bold man with the unfearing heart, he ran to his home—this veteran of Reza Shah's jails, who had been willing to sacrifice three generations of Iranians for the sake of pride—and surrounded himself with armed soldiers. On the streets, fighting had broken out between the Tudeh and the Shah's new supporters.

In the house of Besharat the Bastard, Yasmine had not slept for three nights. She remained at the window, dressed in her street clothes and her shoes, and watched every event on the street. She had no money; she had never seen Peacock after the day she came to warn Yasmine against leaving. But she told herself that she would sell the ring elsewhere, and raise enough to buy food for a few weeks and a ticket out of Iran.

Above all, she kept herself from seeing her children.

On the morning of August 19,1952, Yasmine saw American tanks rolling down Palace Street toward Mossadeq's house.

"My God, it's happened!" Naiima screamed downstairs, running in circles like a blind mouse.

Gunfire erupted on the street. From her window Yasmine saw Mossadeq climb onto the roof of his house, and run away like a thief in the night. She saw Tudeh soldiers fleeing before American tanks. Seeking shelter, they scaled the walls of Besharat the Bastard's home, crawled through the barbed wire, and landed in his garden with bloody clothes and pieces of torn flesh hanging from their hands and faces. They ran through the dusty, dry rose gardens, and broke down the door to the house. Yasmine was ready. She grabbed her coat and ran.

Downstairs she heard the sound of her children crying. In a blur, she saw Besharat the Bastard, his son and older daughter in his arms, looking for refuge from the invading Tudeh mob.

"Yasmine!" he called her, his voice—she was startled at this—ringing with the same urgency with which he had spoken to her in Paris. "Yasmine!"

She went out the door.

On the street, she forced her way through the mob, blinded by fear and dust, deafened by the sound of gunshots and the roar of the tanks rolling toward her.

"Stand back!" someone screamed at her, but she kept running. "Stand back!"

The tank fired. The force of the explosion hurled Yasmine off her feet and carried her a few yards till she crashed against the side of the gutter. Daylight burst into flames. Yasmine heard the sound of the wounded screaming, and felt the heat of the fires around her. Mossadeq's house was half-crumbled. The Tudeh was on the run.

Lying there on the ground, Yasmine watched the battlefield on Palace Street and, for the first time since she had left Paris, understood she could not go back: "It's like
this,"
she told herself. "It's all destroyed."

She saw the streets leading nowhere, the buildings inhabited by rats, the monuments wrecked and obsolete. She saw the invalids who still felt pain in limbs they no longer owned, women shivering in food lines, dropping dead. She saw her parents' apartment, full of cobwebs and her mother's moth-eaten clothes.

It was too late.

She tottered back to the house of Besharat the Bastard and accepted her prison.

Cyrus the Magnificent
lived with Peacock for a year—until Laa-Laa sold to Heshmat the apartment building she had stolen from Cyrus. Cyrus the Magnificent rented his old flat back from his mother, but everywhere, he saw reminders of Laa-Laa. He hated her and missed her at the same time. He would have taken her back— even married her, he knew, to keep her from leaving again— but she did not come, and Cyrus grew resentful. Instead of Laa-Laa, he directed his anger at the Russians. In the months after Mossadeq's failed coup, when the Americans brought the Shah home and once again made him King, Cyrus the Magnificent watched the crackdown on the Tudeh and other communist sympathizers with inordinate pleasure. He told himself the Shah was avenging
him.

The Shah had returned to Iran determined not to lose control of his throne again. He captured Mossadeq, placed him under house arrest—he was afraid to create a martyr by killing him—and set out to purge the country of all opposition. In the armed forces he apprehended a thousand officers on charges of conspiracy and sedition. In the cities he appointed military governors to search every house for communists. Day after day, suspects were rounded up and taken away to prison. Trials were short, sentences predetermined. Defense attorneys sympathetic to their clients ran the risk of coming under suspicion. Judges who failed to hand down severe sentences were investigated and abused.

Throughout the crackdown and the purges, Cyrus the Magnificent felt his anger subside and his wound begin to heal. He still despised Russia, but he forgot Laa-Laa's betrayal and went back to look for her in the house she had bought with money from the sale of the building. She lived there with her new lover, and she had told the servants to beat Cyrus if he ever came calling for her.

Cyrus the Magnificent never did recover from the humiliation of being confronted by Laa-Laa's maids. Nevertheless, he stayed in Iran, and told himself he would never leave. He still loved America, but he could not bear the thought of being so far away from Laa-Laa.

He found himself drawn to the increasing numbers of Americans who came to Iran after 1953. They were technical and military advisers, and they brought their families and lived in exclusive enclaves built in the most prestigious parts of the city. They brought their music, their schools, their films. When the first movie house opened in Tehran, featuring an American Western, Cyrus the Magnificent felt he was about to be reborn.

He had seen the film seven times already, sitting amid a handful of adventurous youths who brought their own chairs—the theater did not provide a seat except on the floor—when someone's mother walked in and dragged her son out of the hall. Within minutes the theater was invaded by frantic parents trying to save their children from the evils of cinema: the local mullah, Cyrus soon learned, had declared movies unholy.

“The images on the screen," the mullah had declared that day in the course of his afternoon sermon, “come to life by extracting the souls of the people in the audience."

There was no point in questioning the issue; the mullah in question had confirmed the ruling with a superior, who had in turn asked God in his sleep.

“It stands to reason," the superior mullah had argued in defense of the theory. “How else could these American actors suddenly learn to speak in Persian?"

So the theater shut down, and it would have remained closed except that many young men from more educated backgrounds protested, and at last the owner gave in to his greed and reopened with a different film. This time the room filled up. Driven by curiosity, anyone with the slightest taste for danger had come to find out if souls were indeed extracted from among the living.

On the day of the first screening, Cyrus the Magnificent stood up for the national anthem, sat through the newsreel, and watched the entire movie without incident. When the lights went on, everyone gathered their chairs and their picnic dinners and filed out into the street, where a crowd of their friends waited for the results of the encounter. They were still talking in the alley when the theater owner appeared, looking as if he had been bitten by a scorpion.

"God help me," he whispered to Cyrus the Magnificent. "There is a corpse sitting in that hall."

So the theater shut down indefinitely, and Cyrus the Magnificent felt a void in his life he could not fill. In 1960, looking to duplicate the thrill of the movies, he went to the American Community School in Tehran and asked for a course in theater and acting. The school, he was told, offered no such course. The closest they came was history lessons. Cyrus the Magnificent enrolled in a class, and met "Miss Jansen from Hollywood."

She was the school's history teacher, serving a three-year term in Tehran. She was not beautiful or glamorous or rapacious, like Laa-Laa. She had a flat bust, skinny legs, dull blond hair.

Cyrus the Magnificent knew she was not pretty, but he found himself drawn to her nevertheless: she was American— Laa-Laa's political opposite—and he thought if he married her, he could forget Laa-Laa and find the courage to leave Iran.

He invited her to his house and showed her the postcards he had collected during the war. She brought her gramophone and played for him her American records. They made love. She told him he was magnificent: "Better," Cyrus boasted later to his friends, "than American men." He knew she was flattering him, that she had been a virgin until she slept with Cyrus, and had no way of comparing him to anyone else. He liked her kindness.

"Miss Jansen from Hollywood," he introduced her to his friends, "land of moguls and movie stars."

He went to see his mother, and announced he was marrying Miss Jansen.

"But she's a
Christian,"
Heshmat cried. "Jews don't marry Christians." Cyrus the Magnificent married "Miss Jansen from Hollywood," and told her he would go back with her to America. The year was 1964, and the world, as Cyrus liked to say, was again about to be remade.

Ruhollah the Soul of God
was born at home, in a small mud-brick shack in the rural town of Kho-mein. His father, a mullah of the Musavi clan, was poor but powerful. He claimed to be a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad. He wore a black turban; lesser clerics wore white.

Ruhollah the Soul of God spent his childhood amid the tumult of the Constitutional Revolution. In 1921 he moved from Khomein to Qom, where he studied theology and learned to preach. There he heard of a Cossack soldier— Reza Khan the Maxim—who had risen to the top of Persia's government. Ruhollah the Soul of God had never liked the Cossacks or the government. He knew he would despise Reza Khan.

He stayed in Qom and continued his studies. He watched Reza Shah pave streets through mosques and bazaars, close down religious schools, conscript the youth of Iran—the mullahs' soldiers—into his own army. At the mosque, and inside religious circles, Ruhollah began to preach against Reza Shah. At thirty he married Batoul, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a powerful mullah in Tehran. Later he earned the title of Ayatollah—Image of God. When Reza Khan implemented a law demanding that every citizen choose a surname, Ruhollah the Soul of God called himself Khomeini.

He watched Reza Shah undo himself by opposing the Russians. Ruhollah the Soul of God told himself he could do better: Reza Shah had commanded only an army; Ruhollah the Soul of God would command heaven and hell.

In 1941 he published a book—
Secrets Exposed
—in which he attacked the monarchy and its servants. Over the next decade he professed a vigorous application of Islam to the everyday life of all citizens, preached that the clergy must direct itself at politics as well as social issues. He preached for ten years, but in the 1950s he found his voice drowned by the clamor of Mossadeq's rebellion. Ruhollah the Soul of

God was growing restless and impatient. He would have made a bid for control of Iran, but the Americans brought back the Shah.

In the ten years after Mossadeq's coup, Iran became rich from oil. The Shah did not insist on national control; he shared the profits equally with a consortium of British, European, and American companies. Nevertheless, Iran's share of profits rose from $34 million a year to $437 million. With the money, the Shah rebuilt the armed forces destroyed by the occupation, established schools and hospitals, constructed roads and dams. He brought jobs, education, a system of public sanitation and health. Seven hundred years after the Shiite invasion, he said, Iran was once again on the road to progress.

But the people's expectations grew faster than the Shah could fulfill them. The most fortunate ones moved out of their hovels and away from their poverty. Overnight, a class of millionaires was created who lived in mansions, drove American cars, and took shopping trips to Paris and Rome every summer. They stopped practicing their religion. They never went to the mosque. They celebrated Christmas: they liked the tree, and the lights, and the amusing old man in the red suit.

In the provinces, peasants and shepherds and smalltown merchants heard of the new wealth, strapped their lives onto their backs, and came to the cities. They saw the mansions, but when they searched for a place to live, they were forced into shantytowns made of tin cans and cardboard, into the old Jewish ghetto now abandoned by Jews, into hovels dug underground, or into wooden crates.

''Look around you," Ruhollah the Soul of God screamed in the mosque. "The Shah has given Muslims nothing but pain and shame and moral degeneration. He has allied himself with infidels, made himself rich at others' expense."