Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (41 page)

The Shah called the ambassadors back to the palace.

“How many deaths," he asked, “would Jimmy Carter tolerate in order to save an invaluable ally?"

The generals realized that the Shah was ill, and had lost the will to fight—that he was brokenhearted to see the extent of the hatred against his rule, that he was under pressure from the United States to give in, that he had lost support at home and abroad and knew he would not gain it back again. They suspected that he was undergoing cancer treatment that clouded his judgment and made him vacillate between one position and another—that he was depressed and had lost touch with reality, even refused to read the press, which no longer referred to him as the “King of Kings" and the “Light of the Aryan Race," but simply as “the Shah." They knew that he was betrayed by his most trusted friends, his army, his guards. But as the Shah watched the fall of his throne, he became concerned above all with his name in history, and decided once and for all he would not kill his own people.

For a while he tried to appease the mobs by making more and more concessions. He pretended that he had not known of their ills. He turned against his most loyal friends, blamed them for the corruption and the cruelty of his own government, dismissed them from their posts, and sent them to jail or to exile. He appeared on television, looking drawn and ill and stricken with grief, and for the first time in two decades he tried to speak to his people as if they understood. He did not refer to himself with the royal We, did not call himself King of Kings. He asked for patience, compromise, faith. He warned against the division and chaos that caused weakness. “Don't give in to the plans of foreigners," he warned. “Don't let Iran be consumed by the Russians. Don't let war destroy the Middle East."

In Paris, where he had moved his headquarters, Khomeini responded that the time for compromise had passed. The Shah must go, he said, no matter what the cost to the lives of the believers. He was not afraid to sacrifice people for victory; every dead man became a martyr and inspired others to die for the cause.

On Friday, September 8, 1978, the mullahs called for a sit-in at the Jaleh Square in the slums of Tehran. Wavering once again from his position, the Shah allowed the use of force. His army opened fire, and found itself forever drowned in a sea of blood.

Peacock
looked out the window of her house in Niavaran. It was early morning, January 1, 1979. Snow had fallen the night before, and the street was quiet. A man, dressed in his pajamas, opened his front door. He was grabbed by three others with machine guns. They shot him, set fire to his corpse, then left.

All across Niavaran, people heard the gunshot and saw the flames. No one came out of their house. These were the last days of the Shah's rule, and the reign of terror had begun.

In the three months prior to the Shah's departure for Egypt, more than a hundred thousand Iranians had escaped to the West. Among them were Peacock's daughter and grandchildren—gone to join Cyrus the Magnificent in Hollywood—all of her Jewish friends, and most of the Muslims. Heshmat had begged Peacock to go with them.

"I was
born
here," Peacock had said in response. "My daughter is buried here."

She had lived through a century of war and upheaval. She would see the end.

The Shah left on January 16, 1979. Two weeks later, Khomeini returned. Almost immediately, the leaders of the revolution confiscated the wealth and properties of the rich. Peacock lost everything but the house she lived in.

Nevertheless, she stayed in Tehran—alone but for Naiima, who came calling once every few weeks. They had known each other for years, ever since Peacock had first brought the diamond necklace that Besharat gave Yasmine on the occasion of her son's birth. Naiima had always disliked Peacock, but now that they were alone and trapped in war, she came to seek her company. Besharat the Bastard, she told Peacock, refused to leave his house. He had already warned Naiima that the revolution was going to destroy him. One by one, Naiima's servants had quit their jobs, then returned to the house—the women in chadors, the men wearing beards—to warn Naiima of her day of reckoning.

"I can't make Besharat leave, you see," Naiima cried to Peacock, who offered no response. "It breaks my heart to see him so resigned, so unwilling to protect himself. This man was a lion, you know. In his days of glory, no one in the world could have matched his courage or his vision."

On the streets, armed bands of Komitehs—revolutionary councils—and Pasdars—revolutionary guards—conducted massive roundups and on-the-spot executions. Suspects were arrested in their homes, or dragged into parked vans in every neighborhood, where they were summarily tried and sentenced.

“There is no room in revolutionary courts for defense lawyers," the leaders of the revolution had declared. “They keep quoting laws to play for time, and this tries the patience of the people."

On February 15, Khomeini carried out his first formal executions. The victims were four of the Shah's top aides, betrayed by him and handed over—in a last attempt to save his crown—to the opposition. Among them was Nassiri, an army general who had served the Shah since the beginning of his reign, and gone to war for him against Mossadeq in the 1950s. Nassiri was taken onto the roof of the former girls' school in Tehran, and shot in the head. His picture, along with that of Prime Minister Hoveyda, appeared on the front page of the evening paper.

Thousands of executions followed. Khomeini gave his people a mission to defend the revolution of God against its enemies, to end the corruption of the rich and the infidel, to stop the influence of the Shah's former agents. Scores of unemployed youth enlisted in the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They were given plain green uniforms with yellow-and-blue badges encased in plastic and attached to their breast pockets. They were given arms—weapons confiscated when the armed forces joined the revolution—and sent out to gather suspects. But they were not trained in the use of the weaponry at their disposal, and they did not understand the awesome power of their tools. Every day a dozen children died accidentally as they played with hand grenades and machine guns. Scores of unsuspecting adults were hit by gunfire from weapons in the hands of playful youths. They were called martyrs—heroes of the revolution.

In Tehran's Behesht Zahra Cemetery, the line to bury the dead was half a kilometer long. Mourners carried the corpses up to the gates of the cemetery, then stood in line for an entire day waiting for undertakers to wash and bury the dead. By nightfall, many were still waiting. They left the corpses in the open air, there outside the gates of "Zahra's

Heaven," and went home to sleep. The next day the waiting would continue, but at the end, many returned disappointed. Undertakers refused burial to anyone who had been killed by the revolution. Enemies of Islam, they said, did not deserve a Muslim burial.

Naiima
could hear the jeeps rolling in her sleep. There were thirty Guards—eight jeeps—and they all had their machine guns aimed to fire. They broke down the gates of Besharat the Bastard's house in Zafaraniyeh, and drove through the desolate garden with the dried flower beds full of dust, where for years nothing had grown. They charged through the front door, blasting it off the hinges in an explosion of dust that mushroomed around them till they were blind. Naiima heard the explosion and sat up in her bed.

"Oh, God," she whispered. "It's happened."

She called for the maid to come and drag her out of bed. She could hear the Guards running through the house, tearing at every room and calling out for Besharat the Bastard. Naiima screamed for the maid again, then suddenly remembered the woman was gone—quit, like all the other servants. Only Mirza Muhammad, the Cook, had stayed with Besharat, but he was a religious man, and he would never enter a woman's bedroom.

Naiima struggled, and at last descended from the bed. As she stepped onto the ground, the weight of her body raised a cloud of dust from the floor. Her nightgown was made of two large white sheets sewn together at the top. Her hair was long and white, hanging around her gigantic face, which dripped with the sweat of fear and exhaustion. She took her crutches and lumbered out of her room on the first floor. Her feet, round and fleshy, left prints in the dust.

A dozen Guards were running up the marble staircase to the second floor. The rest were scattered through the house, searching the living room and the kitchen, the yard, the bathrooms. They were stabbing the walls, emptying closets and drawers, tearing the covers off the furniture, ripping through the drapery and the rugs, poking holes into the air vents and the ceiling as they looked for incriminating evidence: money stashed away; a bottle of whiskey left over from the days of corruption, or bought on the black market for eighty times its original value; pictures of the Shah or his family, once required in every household to prove loyalty to the Crown, now evidence of opposition to the Imam. They went through the rooms no one had used in twenty years—where dust lay in a blanket three centimeters thick, undisturbed and sovereign in the house of Besharat the Bastard.

“Stand back!" a Guard screamed as he saw Naiima appear at her door. She recognized Mustafa the Orchid—the gardener Besharat had employed in their house on the Avenue of the Tulips. Naiima froze. The Guards were running up the stairs to the second floor. They found Besharat the Bastard's room, and kicked it open.

"Rise! Rise! You're under arrest!"

Besharat the Bastard stood dressed in a three-piece suit, his heavy leather shoes polished to perfection, his face shaved, his hair—thin and gray—combed back with precision. He stood next to the carved wooden table with the screaming lions' heads—the fingers of his right hand gripping the surface of the wood—and he did not move as the guards invaded his room. They put a machine gun to his chest.

"Are you Besharat the Jew, son of Assal of the Pit?"

Besharat the Bastard lowered his head in assent.

"You're under arrest for the crimes of Zionism and corruption."

A Guard pushed him from behind, and Besharat the Bastard started to walk. He moved with difficulty, his joints having atrophied from disuse, the suit he had not worn for years hanging loose from his frame. He came to the top of the stairs and saw Naiima, her face white, covered with a film of sweat and dust, her hands, like red balloons, clutching the corners of her chador under her chin.

"Besharat!” she implored as their eyes met. "My Besharat!"

She watched him descend the stairs. He was thin, old, helpless. In his eyes she saw a world of sorrow.

"Move!" The Guards' leader poked Besharat with the barrel of his gun.

At the bottom of the stairs, Mirza Muhammad the Cook knelt before him and kissed Besharat's hand.

"Agha," he sobbed, "I told them they are wrong. Yesterday the Komiteh stopped me to ask about you, and I told them you never bothered a soul. Agha, these men are non-Muslims, the enemies of Islam. Agha, they are worse than the Shah, worse than the Savak."

Mustafa the Orchid put his gun at the back of Mirza Muhammad's neck, and shot him.

"Let's go," he said, and shoved Besharat again.

At the door, Naiima wailing behind him, Besharat the Bastard stopped for a moment, looked at the explosion of blood and flesh that had been Mirza Muhammad, then turned his head and searched above the stairs. He saw no one.

He crossed the gravel pathway that led through the garden. A jeep waited for him. Trailed by the dust and the sound of Naiima's shrill screams, Besharat the Bastard greeted the Guards quietly. Just as he was about to board the car, he looked up at the house, and caught Yasmine watching him from her window.

They remained frozen, staring at each other. Besharat the Bastard raised a hand and waved at Yasmine, asking for absolution.

Yasmine saw a tall stranger, handsome and arrogant and unsure at the same time, standing outside her parents' apartment in Paris, waving at her one glorious morning as she stepped out in the white and lavender dress she had worn to her wedding. Her mother was wailing behind her.

“My child," she said, "I will never see you again."

"The Forces of Revolution execute Zionist Criminal."
Peacock stared at the headline in the evening newspaper, and felt her stomach burst with fear. She went to Besharat the Bastard's house.

"Ya-Allah! Ya-Allah!" she cried through the dust-filled corridor, but there was no answer. Naiima was not home. Peacock found Yasmine in her room.

"Ya-Allah, Madame Yasmine," she said as she entered uninvited. Yasmine turned away from the window. Her face was streaked with tears.

"I learned the bad news. I have come to offer my condolences, to see if I may lend a hand, to help with the burial and the wake."

Yasmine's eyes were like glass. Her face, wrinkled and deformed for lack of teeth, revealed nothing of the beauty she had once boasted. She made Peacock feel small and incoherent and expendable.

"I thought we could go to Evin and claim the body," Peacock persisted. "We may be able to arrange for a plot in the old Jewish cemetery."

Yasmine turned her back to Peacock, and stared out the window.

"Do what you like," she said. "He had it coming."

Hours later, Naiima came home. She trudged through the garden and into the house, panting from the weight of her body, and the moment she saw Peacock, she burst into tears.

"Peacock, Peacock," she sobbed as she struggled to walk faster. "They
killed
him. They
killed
my Besharat."

She grabbed Peacock's hand in her own wet palms.

"I was there, you know," she started again when her tears had subsided. "I was at the prison when it happened, begging for his life and promising dollars, and all of a sudden a Guard walks in to say he's just been shot."

She broke out sobbing again. She went to the bottom of the steps, and howled for Yasmine.

"Come down," she said. "We're both widows now."

She sat down on the floor. Her face was a deep purple. Her breath was about to shut out.