Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (10 page)

She sold everything—the house, the shop, the antiques, even her children's inheritance. She converted all to cash, bought a horse and a carriage, and told Muhammad she would take him to Russia.

She waited until they were out of Baku before asking questions.

She knew Muhammad had a secret, that he was running away. She knew he was a Jew—knew it from his accent and his manners and even his taste in food. She knew of the stone he kept wrapped in a cloth around his leg.

“Let me see it," she demanded, and he was afraid to refuse. She gasped at its beauty.

“It will make us rich," she said.

Muhammad the Jew felt his stomach turn with anguish: Mad Marushka, he realized, wanted him for life.

She was old, he suddenly noticed, and her skin was dry. When she kissed him, he remembered how she had been prepared to kill her sons to defend her lover. When she rolled over to make love to him, he remembered how she had rushed to bury her husband; the undertaker had had no time to stuff the corpse with cotton. At the burial, the man's intestines had erupted and stained the shroud. Still, Mad Marushka had refused to unwrap her husband and clean him before he was laid to rest.

Mad Marushka felt the change in Muhammad and understood he was thinking of escape. She sensed his reluctance when they made love, tasted his bitterness when she talked with him of the future. Yet she commanded his love and claimed his body and rode with him across frozen roads into once-glorious cities of the Czar's falling empire. She drove the horses herself, sitting in front of the carriage with her face unveiled and her hair flowing in the wind, and at every ruined town and avalanche-covered passage they crossed, she stopped and called Muhammad to make love to her till she trembled with exhaustion.

“If you leave me," she told him once and only once, “I will follow you to the end of the world and turn your tears into blood."

From Moscow she took him to St. Petersburg, and from there back into Persia. For a year they traveled, spending her money, aimless and wild and never concerned with the future. At every stop, Muhammad the Jew promised himself he would leave Marushka in the next town. In every city he was held by his greed, and the fear of Marushka's vengeance.

In 1855, Mad Marushka announced she had run out of money.

"We must sell the ruby," she said, and Muhammad the Jew realized the end had come. They were in the province of Khorasan on Persia's northeastern frontier. Mad Marushka had come here looking for an abandoned "undertakers' village."

Ancient Zoroastrians celebrated life and believed death evil. Anyone who touched the dead—all undertakers—were considered impure and outcast. They lived apart, inherited their positions from their fathers, and married only among themselves. They did not bury the dead, for the earth was holy and burial would defile it. They built mortuary towers where the dead were left exposed to the sun—which purified them—and to vultures.

Upon the mortuary tower of the Khorasan village, Mad Marushka summoned Muhammad the Jew and made love to him in the rabid wind.

He lay beneath her that day, his hands repulsed by the coldness of her skin, and despised her breath. He repeated the motions he had practiced for three years, and when it was all over she fell asleep in his arms. Muhammad the Jew stood up and dressed himself. He burned Marushka's clothes, took the pouch full of her husband's money. He took his own ruby, their horses, their food and water. He rode away, and left Marushka to die.

Joseph the Winemaker
was thirty years old and searching for a wife.

He had been married once before, to the daughter of Five-Headed Moses, whom he had taken away with the promise of two gold coins and twelve gold bangles. He was eighteen years old then, she seven. The night of the wedding, he had tortured her to death. Her name was Khatoun. She was small and frail and so innocent she had not known what it meant to be married until it was too late. She had black eyes, black hair, and skin the color of white tulips. The night of her wedding she had gone to Joseph's house dressed in new clothes and a white chador. Excited by all the attention she was receiving, she had played with the other children, then fallen asleep in her mother's lap. When the guests started to leave, Khatoun had woken up and asked to go home with her mother.

They explained to her that she was now married to Joseph the Winemaker, that she would have to stay in her new home and sleep "under” her husband. They carried her into Joseph's bedroom above the winery, told her to take her clothes off and wait for him to come calling on her. Khatoun had sobbed—terrified—and begged to leave.

Joseph the Winemaker had never slept with a woman before. He came into the room that night to see his wife, and found a child crying in his bed. Behind the door, a dozen people had gathered to see the marriage consummated. They were the bride and groom's parents, the rabbi who had married them, the elders who commanded authority solely by their age and their years of suffering. They would wait there until Joseph had conquered his bride and proven his manhood and her chastity. If he took too long to perform his task, they would accuse him of weakness. If he failed, they would know that he was impotent.

He tried to calm Khatoun and persuade her to give in to him peacefully. He took her hand, caressed her hair, promised not to hurt her if she did not resist him. He felt no desire for her—he remembered later—only fear that he would fail and be ridiculed by the ghetto. But he was running out of time, the people outside were becoming impatient, and little Khatoun screamed harder and cried more fiercely for her mother with every passing moment.

Joseph the Winemaker began to sweat. He forced Khatoun to the ground and lay on top of her. He would push himself in, he thought, and break the wall of her virginity. When the audience outside had left, he would deal with her fear.

But underneath him Khatoun struggled and gagged and kicked for life. Joseph the Winemaker became furious. He could hear people whispering, imagine their faces as they told one another that Joseph could not handle his wife, that he must be weak and unmanly and impotent. He felt his knees quiver, his penis become limp and useless in his fight to keep Khatoun quiet. He hit her across the face, making her bite her lip and cut it. She screamed, freed herself from under him, and ran to the door. Before the terrified eyes of Joseph the Winemaker she opened the door and threw herself into the arms of her mother outside.

It was all over. Joseph the Winemaker saw his name trampled and lost control. He took Khatoun from her mother and brought her in. He tore her white chador into strips, and with them tied her wrists behind her back. Then he took a longer strip of cloth and tied her knees up around her neck— so that she was folded in half, with her vagina exposed. And he entered her.

Afterward he wiped the blood of her virginity onto a white handkerchief and took it outside for everyone to examine. Assured of the bride's chastity and the groom's strength, the audience dispersed. Joseph the Winemaker decided to teach his wife a lesson. He left her tied all night, shut the door against her pleas, and in the morning he found her dead, with her spine broken and her veins dry.

He spent the next ten years trying to overcome Khatoun's memory. He told people that he had acted out of ignorance and not malice, that Khatoun's death had been accidental, that all Joseph had wanted in the world was to be master of his house and respected by his wife. He was not the first man ever to have caused his wife's death, he reminded everyone. Ruh-Allah the Cobbler had killed two wives by kicking them in the stomach when they were pregnant. Naiim the Blind had yelled at his wife so loudly her heart had stopped beating. But among all the men who had tortured their wives, Joseph the Winemaker was singled out as a criminal. His own family distanced themselves from him, his friends never came to call, and the winery was always empty but for the Muslims who took wine away to Esfahan. It was, more than anything, Khatoun's innocence that no one could forget.

Even after Muhammad the Jew's massacre, those who had survived would not forgive Joseph's past. In time, Joseph the Winemaker came to accept his predicament. He could live with the world's hatred, he decided, but he would not be cheated out of his future. Having lived through the pogrom, he set out to remarry.

He went to see all the matchmakers in the ghetto and promised them money if they brought him offers of marriage. He spread the word that he was not looking for a dowry, that he would pay his life's savings to the girl's parents as "the price of her mother's milk." He even inquired among travelers who came to Esfahan from other ghettos.

"Find me a girl in your town," he asked them, "and I will go there to take her away."

He would settle for an older girl, he decided, or even an ugly one. He would tolerate a small handicap, a bad name. He might even take a girl who was not a virgin—provided she was fertile and honorable. Three years after he had begun his quest, Joseph the Winemaker was still alone.

In 1854 he was thirty-three years old by his own estimation, and desperate for marriage. Having despaired of all the matchmakers he knew, he went to see Taraneh the Tulip, and threatened her for the last time:

"Find me a woman," he asked, "or I swear I will become Muslim and raise my children as Jew-haters."

Taraneh the Tulip smiled, and from the mischief in her eyes Joseph understood that she knew a girl.

"There
is
someone," she said. "The twin sister of Moshe, who sent the massacre. She will marry you because she is alone, eighteen years old, and because no one else will touch her."

On the night of his wedding,
Joseph the Winemaker sat in the winery drinking as he waited for his bride to come to his house. An hour after dark he heard Raab Yahya speak to the neighbors in the courtyard. The rabbi had brought Leyla. He took her into Joseph's room—into the bedroom where years ago Khatoun had died—and left her to wait. Descending the steps into the winery, he opened the door and saw Joseph—face glowing in the half-darkness, eyes slightly protruded, filled with doubt. Raab Yahya inhaled the smell of acid wine and closed the door.

When the rabbi had left, Joseph the Winemaker swallowed a final cup of wine and climbed out of the basement. In the courtyard, his head throbbing from the wine, he knelt by the pool and washed his face. The neighbors were watching him. He stopped outside the bedroom. The house was so quiet he could hear the rats move in the far corners of the yard.

He opened the door. He saw a woman standing up against the wall. Behind her on a shelf, an oil lamp burned a pale flame. In front of her on the floor, Joseph's old comforter was spread out and waiting. Joseph the Winemaker prayed to his bed for mercy.

"Well!” he said, forcing himself to walk in. Words escaped him. He saw Leyla shiver once, and prayed he would not frighten her. He wanted her to understand about Khatoun, wanted her—this stranger who was suddenly his wife—to forgive his past, overlook his mistake: "I was young then," he wanted to say, "and no one had taught me the ways of tenderness."

Joseph the Winemaker waited for Leyla to unveil herself. To encourage her, he began to undress himself.

He took off the canvas shoes that he wore like sandals, their backs pressed under his soles. He took off his robe, untied the prayer shawl from around his waist. Sweat ran down the sides of his neck.

He imagined Leyla pale and lifeless, aged beyond her years, reluctant. He imagined himself lying next to her, suffocating in her silence as he tried to make love.

He dropped his pants, then opened the strings on his underwear. He was naked, and she was still in her chador.

Joseph the Winemaker took the oil lamp from the shelf, and brought it up to Leyla's face.

"If you don't undress right now," he told her, "I will not harm you. But I
will
call Raab Yahya, say you were not a virgin, and annul the marriage."

She took off her veil: her eyes were the color of young pine.

She took off her chador: her skin was white, her hair long and shiny and as if dipped in the sun.

She took off her dress: her neck was long and smooth, her body perfect, her flesh glowing.

Joseph the Winemaker felt the lamp tremble in his hand, sending waves of yellow light up and down Leyla's body.

Muhammad the few
rode west, away from Mad Marushka, and when he reached Persia's opposite frontier, there on the border of the Ottoman Empire, he still did not dare stop. He went to Baghdad, found Prince Kazim the Boy-Lover, and presented himself for inspection. He would be the prince's lover, he had told himself, sleep with him for a year, and at the end of it, collect the customary reward of cash and jewels that would help him set up a trade. It was the only way he knew to become rich: he could never have sold the ruby. He needed it to remind him he had left Juyy Bar.

Prince Kazim the Boy-Lover was enthralled at the sight of Muhammad. He reached over and fingered the boy as if to taste his flesh. He asked if Muhammad was a virgin. Muhammad the Jew shivered in disgust and said yes.

He became the prince's lover, his most treasured companion, his greatest passion. He immersed himself in a new life, learned Arabic from the prince, English from the prince's doctors and advisers. He even tried to forget Mad Marushka, but every day and every night of his life, he heard her call his name.

He told himself that he must beat the fear, overcome it as he had overcome, he thought, the memory of Juyy Bar. He told himself that Marushka had died, that no one could have survived in the desert as he had left her. He tried to believe that even if she was alive, she had gone her own way, that she had forgotten him by now, cursed him and left his memory to oblivion. He kept his past a secret and lived without friends and never confided even in his lover. Still, every time he rode into the street, Muhammad the Jew expected to find Marushka among the crowd, and every time he heard his name, he thought Marushka was calling.

At the end of the first year of his friendship with the prince, Muhammad the Jew asked permission to leave. Ka-zim the Boy-Lover begged for more time. He offered Muhammad money and land, jewels and horses, and all the slaves in Baghdad. Muhammad the Jew stayed, and every year he became wealthier and more imprisoned. Slowly he watched the old prince dismiss his other lovers: he gave them to friends, released them, or had them poisoned by his eunuchs. He spent all his time with Muhammad, refused to eat unless Muhammad sat with him, could not sleep unless Muhammad stayed up for him. Afraid that Muhammad the Jew would escape, he assigned guards to watch him at all times, bought women to sleep with him lest he get bored with homosexuality. Then at last he promised his entire fortune if Muhammad would stay till Kazim's death.