Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (22 page)

The carriage went past the Shrine of the Seven Daughters, crossed Emamzadeh Ismael—the city's oldest quarter— and stopped just outside the Tchar-Sou, the meeting place of Tehran's four greatest bazaars, and the home of the Imperial Prison. In ancient times, Zilfa the Rosewoman told Peacock as they dismounted the carriage, heroes had sat in the Tchar-Sou, on a balcony higher than all the other structures in Tehran, from which they had kept watch over the people. Now the balcony was occupied by the Dorougheh— the head of the city's guards. All day long, the Dorougheh sent his men to roam the city, looking for thieves and outlaws and, most of all, suspects against the crown. At night he sat on the Balcony of Justice, received the prisoners arrested that day, and pronounced sentence. He sent the men into the Imperial Prison just below his balcony.

"Look!" Zilfa the Rosewoman exclaimed in horror as they approached the Balcony of Justice. "That's the prison."

Peacock saw a trapdoor in the ground, fortified with iron bars. The Imperial Prison was an underground cave with no windows and no access to the outside except this door, through which prisoners entered. It was infested with rats and vermin, immersed in darkness, full of corpses. Prisoners whose families did not bring them food every day died of starvation. Those who were perceived as a threat to the monarchy were quickly executed. The rest lingered in darkness until they succumbed to disease or suffocated in large groups from lack of air. Few men had ever left the Imperial Prison alive.

"Quick!" Zilfa the Rosewoman trembled in disgust as she circled around the trapdoor to avoid the prison. "Don't go near there."

Peacock began to follow Zilfa, hesitated, then gave in to curiosity and moved closer to the prison door. She approached the trapdoor, leaned over, and looked through the iron bars into the darkness. Seeing nothing, she moved closer, put one knee on the ground, and peered in. A hand grabbed her. She screamed and struggled, but the hand was insistent. Through the bars of the trapdoor, a man with a black face and long hair was begging Peacock for money with which to bribe the guards and buy food.

He was covered with grime and smelled like a corpse, his eyes hollow, his mouth black and toothless. His ankles were chained to the ground, but he had pulled himself up with one hand, and he did not release Peacock until one of the Dorougheh's men came up and beat the prisoner's wrist with a club. He let go, fell to the ground, and began to sob.

"Get up!" Zilfa the Rosewoman stood above Peacock without attempting to help her. She was angry, embarrassed by the incident, ashamed to be associated with Peacock. "I told you not to go close. Now get up."

Away from the prison, the Tchar-Sou was crowded with vendors and shoppers and animals. Trains of mules and donkeys shouldered horses and sheep. Housewives bargained with peddlers. Vendors sold cows' intestines and sheeps' brains, lambs' testicles, chicken entrails, and fried grasshoppers.

The bazaar was a network of narrow, unpaved corridors covered with domed roofs. Every few meters a shaft of light fell through the openings in the tops of the domes, cutting the darkness and striking the people as they passed through it. In the weavers' court, vendors sat smoking their Kalyans next to piles of cotton goods imported from Manchester. In the booksellers' court, old men sold handwritten manuscripts painted on deerskin. In the metalworkers' gallery, half-naked youths—their bodies lighted by fire—bent over hot anvils. Zilfa the Rosewoman maneuvered herself through the crowd, and entered the jewelers' bazaar with regained confidence. She greeted a few shopowners who barely noticed her, then stopped half a meter outside the arched entrance of Ezraeel the Avenger's shop; Jews were not allowed inside believers' shops. Their very presence, their touch defiled the premises permanently. A young boy sat in the shop, ready to greet customers.

"Zilfa of Davood," the Rosewoman called out to the servant boy from her place in the corridor. "I have business with Ezraeel Khan."

The boy threw a disdainful glance at the visitors, then looked away. He did not get up to call his master. Ezraeel the Avenger, he knew, did not receive Jews.

Peacock looked at the servant, then at Zilfa, and wondered what the next move could be. Inside the shop, silk rugs decorated the floor and the walls; heavy velour drapery hung from the arches; a large, gold-plated samovar steamed next to a display of dates and sweets.

"Call your master," Zilfa asked politely when it became obvious that the boy was ignoring them. "Tell him it's the Rosewoman who bought the pearls."

The boy spat in her direction.

"Get lost, Jew."

Zilfa the Rosewoman grasped her pearls as if for balance. She was trembling, so pale her lips had become blue, so flustered Peacock could feel the tears in her voice. She had come in her best clothes, dressed up like a queen and made up with all her skill and art, and here, at the door, she was being shunned by a peasant in canvas shoes. A thousand pairs of eyes, she felt, were watching her.

“Call him," she tried to command, but she sounded as if she were pleading. At the back of the shop a curtain opened, and a man stepped out holding a whip. At his sight, Peacock felt weak, and trapped.

“You're impatient, Jew." Ezraeel the Avenger slapped the whip handle into the palm of his left hand as he approached Zilfa and Peacock. He came to the door of the shop and stopped. He was tall, forbidding, his face pale and hostile, his eyes the color of golden agates. His lips hardly moved when he spoke.

Zilfa the Rosewoman touched the edge of her face with her fingertips, as if to make certain she was not falling apart. She lifted the sides of her skirt, took a step forward in her satin shoes, and summoned her most confident voice.

“Greetings." Her hands trembled on the skirt. "It is nice of you to receive us."

Ezraeel the Avenger stared her down.

"I am Zilfa," she tried again. "I bought these pearls from you."

Ezraeel the Avenger had remembered Zilfa the moment he saw her. She had come to him with a bag full of small change, and said she wanted his best diamond. She had poured all her money on the rug in front of the store, and insisted she wanted to buy only from Ezraeel—"Nothing but the best for me." After much pleading, she had settled for the cheapest of his pearls.

"I told you not to come back," Ezraeel said. Zilfa the Rosewoman blushed the color of her lipstick.

"I have brought a friend to you." She pointed to Peacock, suddenly anxious to remove herself from Ezraeel's attention. “She is from Esfahan—like yourself, I believe—and she has quite a reputation—among Jews, that is—for salesmanship.

I thought she may be of help to you—somehow."

Ezraeel the Avenger looked at Zilfa, then slowly turned to Peacock. His eyes burned her. She stepped forward, next to Zilfa, and tried to look Ezraeel in the eye.

“I am a peddler," she said. "I can sell anything. Give me some gold—a chain or a bracelet. I will sell it on commission."

Ezraeel the Avenger looked as if he were suddenly stunned. He tried to peer through Peacock's veil. She realized she had gained his interest, and went on.

"I know you do well here," she insisted. "But you could do better. I will sell what none of your customers want."

He gazed at her, then motioned with his head that she should come inside the shop. Excited, Zilfa the Rosewoman also tried to enter.

"Not
you,"
Ezraeel told her, and Zilfa almost dissolved on the spot.

Inside the shop, Peacock stood before Ezraeel and waited for him to speak. He stared at her. He stared for so long she felt drops of perspiration bead on her skin under the chador, then slide down her body.

"Open your veil."

Even the servant boy was shocked. He looked up at his master, uttered a prayer to guard against evil, and hurried to the back of the shop where he would not be seen. Peacock turned to Zilfa for help, and saw that she was gone—unable to bear Ezraeel's treatment of her.

Ezraeel the Avenger came closer to Peacock.

"Let me see your face," he commanded.

Peacock stepped backward, aiming for the door, but Ezraeel grabbed her by the arm, and yanked at her veil. The buckle snapped behind her head, the veil came away, and Ezraeel the Avenger saw a young woman with a face he would adore.

Ezraeel the Avenger
had come to Tehran with a box of jewels, and the ruby that Muhammad the Jew had stolen from Honest the Antiquarian half a century before. In his heart, Ezraeel carried the image of his mother—Afagh, who had come from the mountains of Kurdistan to die in the house of Muhammad the Jew— and of his father, wrapped around the body of Sanam as they became engulfed by a single flame.

He rented the largest shop in the bazaar and established a jewel trade. He found himself a wife—a woman so pale and insipid he could never remember her name, and so called her, conveniently, “the Boys' Mother." He also found a mistress, a Jew from the Pit called Assal, with skin so white Ezraeel always ran his finger along the side of her cheek to search for powder. Assal had been married once, for seven weeks, and robbed of her virginity before her husband had succumbed to malaria. Now she slept with Ezraeel, hoping that in time he would fall in love and marry her. He was rich, and Assal did not mind that he was Muslim. He came to her once a week—on the eve of the Sabbath, as if to defile the holiness of the day—and in all the time she knew him, he never once gave her money or food.

Of the Boys' Mother, Ezraeel the Avenger would have five sons. Of Assal, only one—Besharat the Bastard, who was born in the third year of their relationship, and whose arrival marked the end of Ezraeel's interest in Assal. When he found out she was pregnant, Ezraeel married Assal. When her son was born, he left her and never looked back.

But even at home, surrounded by his children and his wife's relatives, Ezraeel the Avenger could not find peace. His sons came to him for love, and found only his anger. The Boys' Mother tried to please him, but instead aroused his contempt. It was not, as some believed, a question of understanding him, of recognizing his love beneath the anger, of responding to his moods. It was much simpler than that: Ezraeel the Avenger hated his offspring for no reason and with no reserve.

He was a young man, twenty-five years old and handsome, but his life had long since been marred by hatred and revenge. He had burned his father's house, stolen Marush-ka's jewels and then pursued and tortured her until slowly she had gone mad with fear, and then he had killed her— there in the desert, where he left her to rot.

The day Zilfa the Rosewoman brought him Peacock, Ezraeel the Avenger despised the woman as soon as he saw her. He would have turned Peacock away, slapped her face with his whip and kicked her out of the bazaar she had come to soil with her presence. It was true he slept with a Jew, but he did so more out of hatred than lust—to denounce Assal, he told himself, for the whore that she was. He hated Jews and hated Peacock's Esfahani accent, which reminded him of the past, but then she had spoken, and her voice had aroused in him desire he had never felt before. He tore off her veil and saw her—dark and stunning, black hair and green eyes and skin that was unctuous and strong and maddening. He reached for her, and ran his finger along the side of her cheek. Before him, Peacock had trembled like a trapped sparrow. Ezraeel the Avenger looked at her for a moment longer; then, softly, he turned away and gave her back her veil. He went to an alcove in the wall, and took out a chest full of gold. He gave Peacock a dozen gold bracelets.

She stood looking at the gold, afraid to touch it, unable to refuse. A long time later, she took the bracelets and ran out of the shop. Ezraeel the Avenger recognized her footsteps amid the thousand sounds of the bazaar.

Walking home that day, lost in the unfamiliar neighborhoods and the overwhelming crowds of Tehran's streets, Peacock thought about the Avenger and wondered if she would ever dare go back to him again. She showed Zilfa the bracelets, but said nothing more of the encounter.

That night, asleep in Zilfa the Rosewoman's basement,

Peacock dreamt she was a girl, running through a strange garden with dried trees and a mansion in the background, chased by a vengeful child who grabbed her—Peacock screamed and woke up—and forced her out into the barren world of her hunger.

"Watch out for the dogs,"
Zilfa the Rosewoman cried behind Peacock as she saw her leave for the bazaar. Three weeks had passed since the meeting with Ezraeel. Peacock was still living with Zilfa, but she had sold all of the bracelets, and was eager to collect her commission. She was going to the bazaar to find the Avenger.

"It's almost closing time," Zilfa cried as Peacock faded down the alley. "Watch out for the dogs."

The bazaars of Tehran were guarded by a pack of wild dogs. During the day, the dogs roamed the bazaar's roofs. At night, four hours past sunset, a bugle sounded for the closing of all the shops and streets. Only the city's night-watchmen, and the privileged few who had access to the night's password, were allowed to remain outside. Then the dogs, as savage as wolves and trained to kill, were let loose in the bazaar to guard against thieves.

Peacock arrived just as the night bugle sounded. She thought about turning back, but she realized she would never reach home in time for the closing of the streets, and decided she was safer in the bazaar. She ran through the Tchar-Sou into the jewelers' bazaar. Outside Ezraeel's shop, she stopped and listened for the dogs. She went in. He recognized her instantly.

"I brought your money." She extended a pouch of coins at him. He saw her hand—small but strong, dark and chapped but fine. He could already guess, by the size of the pouch, that he had taken a loss—that Peacock had sold the bracelets for much below their cost. He reached for the bag, and then, without intending to, he closed his fist around her hand.

She did not tremble this time. She only eased her hand free, and remained before Ezraeel with her face still veiled. She was not afraid of him anymore; she had recognized the boy in her dream.

She unveiled herself. This time he saw the eyes of Muhammad the Jew.