Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (12 page)

For a year, Esfahan roared in calumny. Then at last Taraneh the Tulip married the governor's son, left Juyy Bar, and went to live in a house with rooms full of music.

When he first returned to Esfahan,
Muhammad the Jew built himself a house on Char Bagh Street and hired servants and maids and gardeners. He rented five connecting shops in the Shah's bazaar and filled them with antiques and Persian carpets and silverwork. Dressed in silks and velvet, he rode around town on an Arabian horse, and wore a long top hat embroidered with gold threads and a ruby so stunning that people stopped on the street to stare at him long after he had stormed by.

He had come from nowhere—a stranger with a legendary fortune, with a face as beautiful as a dream, and eyes so bitter few were those who dared engage them. He traveled alone most of the year, traded in antiques and rugs and precious stones. And he lived alone, surrounded by the tall brick walls of his house and the ancient trees that shielded it from sunlight. He never received anyone, never spoke with his neighbors in the bazaar. At night, the maids swore, he never slept.

They heard him pace up and down his room from dark until dawn, looking out the window into the garden that was filled with shadows and the spirits of the evil dead, falling asleep at last with the morning breeze on his face, only to awaken in the twilight to the sound of peddlers screaming their trade. During the day he was watchful and alert and suspicious, always ready to question a servant or an employee about his intentions on any one matter, forever about to engage in an argument with clients or neighbors or even visitors. Muhammad the Jew, everyone said, was a man on the run.

In 1871, Muhammad the Jew traveled to Kurdistan to meet with a tribal chief—Firooz Khan—who had sent for him a year earlier, asking for jewels. Muhammad the Jew rode through bare mountains scorched by the unrelenting sun, across steep valleys strewn with dust and carved with the beds of dried streams and waterways. He found a desolate plain spotted with the black tents of the nomads, made his way through thirsty flocks of sheep and camels searching vainly for a grassy patch. Around the campground, dogs barked at him and blocked his way. A young woman sat unveiled by her tent, weaving a canvas rug as her father slept close by. Kurdish women did not wear chadors. She saw Muhammad the Jew and understood he was the guest her chief had been expecting. She called the dogs away.

Firooz Khan received Muhammad with disappointment. He had wanted to buy jewels, he said, but only weeks before, locusts had ravaged the plain where the tribe camped every year, and now the Khan's cattle were starving in the heat. He had no cash for the stones, no cattle to offer in exchange.

Muhammad the Jew dined with the chief, then went into his own tent to sleep. After midnight he stepped out, compelled as always by a sense of danger, and walked to a clearing behind the campgrounds. He saw a girl with dark skin and black hair, riding naked on a horse. She galloped up and down the foot of the mountain, her horse panting, her own skin covered with moisture. A long time later she felt Muhammad's glare, turned around and saw him, then rode off. Muhammad the Jew recognized the girl who had greeted him that morning.

"Give me
her,"
he asked Firooz Khan the next day. "She will be payment enough for all the jewels you want."

Her name was Afagh. She was fourteen years old and filled with such kindness she charmed even the most hostile of her enemies. Muhammad the Jew loved her so much, people said, that he became kind and accepting and even friendly toward the world. He hired seven maids to serve Afagh, decorated her bedroom with silk curtains and pearl-studded cushions, planted a garden of jasmine on the balcony outside her window. He brought her French perfume smuggled into Bandar 'Abbas aboard European ships, paid artists from Tehran to come and draw her portrait. He threw feasts and invited all the dignitaries in Esfahan, served them wine in golden cups and lamb on jewel-studded plates, then sat back and watched them admire the girl he had found in the mountains of Kurdistan.

Then she became pregnant.

Muhammad the Jew went pale at the news, and begged Afagh to kill the fetus.

"I want no heirs,” he pleaded with her. "I want no trace of me left behind.”

For months they fought. In the end she bore a son. Muhammad the Jew saw the boy and damned him publicly.

Afagh asked that he name his child. He chose the name Ezraeel—Angel of Death—and never touched the boy in his life.

In 1871 famine came to Persia.
It lasted longer than anyone could count, and by the time it was over, one-third of the country's population had perished. At first the people ate the carcasses of animals. They hunted for snakes, they fried grasshoppers and flies, even scorpions. They ate the leaves and roots and dried branches of trees. Children stuffed mud down their throats to choke the constant hunger. Pregnant women dug the walls with their nails and chewed on clay. When there was nothing else to eat, they ate the dead.

Decades would go by before anyone who had survived the Great Famine of 1871 dared admit to cannibalism. In ordinary times, Muslims had eaten neither pork nor anything that had been touched by an infidel. Armenians had had only fish on Fridays, and Jews had gone completely without meat unless it was kosher. Now they all fried thin strips of human flesh and swallowed it in order to live.

They waited every day in the cemeteries—scavengers hiding behind gravestones to watch people bury their relatives dead from hunger. When the burial was over, they would dig up the bodies and carve out the cheeks, the biceps, and the buttocks. If the body was too thin and had no flesh on the outside, they would open its stomach and take out the intestines and the liver. Most buried the bodies again, but many left them exposed for the vultures to attack.

In the second year of the famine, the Jews of the Tehran ghetto wrote a letter, composed in Hebrew, in which they asked the Jewish leaders of Europe for help.

“In some way or another, if possible," they prayed, “bring us forth out of this burning furnace of Persia to the Holy Land, or place us under your protective wings, or help us emigrate to other countries."

A year passed before the letter, entrusted to a messenger traveling out of Persia, reached its destination. In time, European and American Jewry would collect nineteen thousand British pounds to send to Persia, “to be distributed among Jews and non-Jews alike." The government of Nasser-ed-Din Shah, seeking to finance his next trip to Europe, fought hard to tax the money, and relented only under great pressure from Europe.

In Esfahan, news of the money brought hope. Food would arrive in caravans, people thought—enough food to save everyone. The mullahs who had always warned against infidels now found themselves hard-pressed to explain Europe's generosity. They said that the food was sent by God— at the direct request of His Holiness the Friday Imam of Esfahan—and that Europeans had taken credit for it unjustly. Members of the royal family who had done nothing to help their own subjects were also embarrassed. They claimed that the food was sent from the Shah's own kitchens, and the funds released from His Majesty's personal treasury. The Jews, who knew the truth, only believed that their suffering had come to an end.

But months went by, many more starved, and the caravan of food never appeared in Esfahan. Slowly the Jews realized that there was no food left in Persia to buy, that what little was imported remained in the hands of the very rich, that the money sent from Europe had circulated among Persian officials and corrupt mullahs until it disappeared into their pockets. Still, they did not dare give up hope. For years after they had discovered the futility of their belief, mothers in Juyy Bar put their children to sleep with the promise that when morning came a caravan of food would arrive at the gates of their city.

In the house of Joseph the Winemaker, little Peacock had waited for the caravan so long she woke up every morning insisting that they go look for it.

"It has lost its way," she would cry to Leyla with such conviction that nothing would have made her believe otherwise.

"If we don't find it soon, it will turn back and go to Tehran and we will never see it until we die."

She was seven years old, small and thin and so bony Leyla was always amazed that she could walk. Her skin was dark and aged from lack of nutrition. Her teeth had decayed before they had ever grown. Her body was small and undeveloped. But she had Leyla's eyes—those green eyes that brought a tremor to the hearts of men—and her spirit was hard and raw and unconquered. Sometimes, when they were alone together and Peacock had fallen asleep in her arms, Leyla would look at her child and believe that she was meant to have been beautiful—that in another day and age she would have grown to resemble Leyla herself, that she would have been strong and confident—that destiny, as Esther the Soothsayer had said, would have elevated her to a place of happiness and pride.

Joseph the Winemaker
took Peacock begging in Esfahan. He walked into the city, carrying her most of the way because she was weak from hunger and could not walk a great distance. She was eight years old. All the way there, she fought and screamed and swore she would not go.

“They won't feed us," she said. "They don't feed Jews."

Joseph the Winemaker swallowed his bile and prayed for luck. Ever since Muhammad the Jew had returned to Esfahan, rumors had circulated in Juyy Bar that he was the son of Noah the Gold, Leyla's twin brother who had sent the massacre of 1853. People had even traveled into the city, lurked outside Muhammad's home and his shop in the bazaar, waiting to steal a glance at him, and then they had all returned to say Yes, Muhammad the Jew was indeed the son of Noah the Gold. In all that time, Muhammad never sent word to the ghetto for his sister. When the famine started, he bought food from abroad, hired armed men to fight bandits and thieves who raided the caravans, and gave away what he and his servants did not eat. For two years his kitchen fed dozens of people every day—Muslims only, for Muhammad the Jew had left strict orders to reject Jews. Still, Joseph the Winemaker insisted that Leyla go to him for help.

"You are his
sister,”
he would scream. "You were born of the same seed, raised in the same womb. A man cannot despise his own blood."

Leyla never went. Muhammad the Jew never sent for

her.

They survived the first two years of the famine only through the kindness of Taraneh the Tulip. She came to Juyy Bar once a month, dressed in fine clothes, riding an Arabian mare with its tail painted red. She brought Leyla a bag of rice, a keg of oil, a gourd of water. She sang to the children. She played the
santour
in Joseph's winery. But in 1873, Taraneh the Tulip left Esfahan; her husband's father had lost the governorship of the city. He moved to Tehran, and summoned all his children to live with him in the capital. Taraneh the Tulip came to Juyy Bar to say farewell. Joseph the Winemaker cried when he saw her leave. He knew that without her they would all starve. Once again he thought of Muhammad the Jew.

Outside the house of Muhammad the Jew in Esfahan, Joseph saw a crowd waiting, and joined them. It was the middle of the morning, and Muhammad's kitchen had not yet opened to beggars. He found a place near the main gates and put Peacock down.

"When the gates open," he told her slowly so she would remember, "push your way in and don't stop until you find the kitchen."

He gave her an empty canvas bag.

"Give this bag to a servant and ask that they fill it. Tell them you are Muhammad the Jew's niece, Leyla's daughter, and that you will
die
if they don't feed you."

Around noon the gates swung open and all the beggars rushed inside. Joseph nudged Peacock forward.

"Go," he said, but his voice almost broke. "Come back with food."

Peacock held the bag against the yellow patch on her chest and walked quickly. She followed the other beggars through a barren garden and into a courtyard as large as the main square in Juyy Bar. She saw the kitchen; the beggars had already lined up outside. She took a place and waited. She did not look up until her turn had come. Just as she opened her bag to the maid who handed out the rations, someone pdshed her:

"No Jews."

It was a boy, Ezraeel, Muhammad the Jew's son. He was younger than Peacock, but she was weak and hungry and trapped, and he terrified her.

"I said no Jews."

He pushed her again and she fell. He dragged her bag out of her fist and threw it on the ground. Peacock wanted to reach for it, but he blocked her way. "Go away." He kicked her. She looked up at him. His eyes were yellow. She saw them, and all at once she knew he was sad and afraid and unwanted.

She got up and charged the boy, hit him so hard across the chest he gasped for air and fell to the ground. The servants ran toward them, but she grabbed her chador and was about to escape when someone caught her.

"She hit me," the boy moped. "That Jew-girl
hit
me."

A woman knelt down and looked in Peacock's face.

"This child is hungry," she said, and Peacock felt her rage dissipate. "We must feed her before Muhammad comes home."

The boy began to protest. The woman took Peacock's hand and led her around the kitchen, away from the envious stares of the other beggars and the threatening glares of the maids.

The boy ran behind them. "But Father said no Jews."

They went into a house full of sunlight and the smell of life, through rooms filled with silk and lace and velvet, Persian rugs and locked oak closets into which, Peacock imagined, someone had packed all the treasures of the world. They stopped in a storage room.

The woman bent down and eased the bag out of Peacock's hand.

"Come back whenever you want," she whispered as she opened a door in the wall.

There were sacks full of rice and flour, trays of almonds and sweetbreads and dates, baskets of dried vegetables and fruit. The woman was filling Peacock's bag. She took a date from a tray and offered it to Peacock.