Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (26 page)

Armenian quarter. She was beautiful but frail, and after a few years in Tehran she took ill and died in the cold of winter. On the anniversary of her death, Salman the Coal Seller's father ate poison and committed suicide in bed.

Salman the Coal Seller would have died that first year, but Taraneh the Tulip took him in and raised him as if he were her own. She sent Salman to work, taught him to buy the coal, scoop it up with his hands at every house where he stopped, count his change, and haggle for each penny. At night, when he came home, she bathed him and changed his clothes, put him in a clean bed with sheets that smelled of fresh bleach. Salman the Coal Seller loved Taraneh more than his life—loved her more than he would ever have loved his own blood. He grew up thinking of her as his mother, believing she would always be there, but then, all at once, she met the son of Esfahan's governor, and told Salman he must manage alone. When she left, Salman the Coal Seller abandoned himself to darkness.

He began to store the coal in his room, and did not mind when the walls turned black, the rug became spoiled, and the water tasted of soot. He ate bread and cheese every night, never washed or changed his clothes, slept on the bare rug, and used the bag of coal as his pillow. He lived in this way for many years, and almost died twice of pneumonia, but when he was twenty years old, Taraneh the Tulip came back. She dragged him out of his house and forced him to marry a lame girl.

"Have a child," she commanded. "Live again."

They had Blue-Eyed Lotfi, a boy with white skin and crystal eyes, whose arrival changed Salman's life again: he was born in 1882, and because of him, Salman the Coal Seller thought he was blessed.

He had six more sons after Lotfi, raised them all in a clean house, sent them to Raab Yahya's Torah class, and refused to let them touch the coal that was killing him in his youth. In 1898 he heard that a school had opened for Jews in the Tehran ghetto. Salman the Coal Seller abandoned his house, gave away his coal, and moved to Tehran with his sons.

A man had come to the Pit—Monsieur Jean, a Frenchman with a graying goatee and a three-piece suit that he wore in the blazing heat of summer, and that never seemed to wrinkle in spite of the heat. He came as a guest to the court of Muzaffar-ed-Din Shah. He was a messenger, he said, from the Jews of Europe.

In 1878, Nasser-ed-Din Shah had journeyed to London, and met with the heads of the Alliance Israelite Universelle. They had confronted him with reports of massacred Jews, of unequal treatment before the law and disproportionate poverty, of the mullahs commanding greater power than the Shah and releasing their vengeance upon the Jews.

“Lies!'' Nasser-ed-Din Shah had exclaimed in fury. "All of my subjects are treated equally and with dignity."

The gentlemen from the Alliance inquired why Jews in Persia were not allowed to read and write the national language. Flustered, Nasser-ed-Din Shah and denied knowledge of the fact. They asked if His Majesty would allow the situation to be remedied—if he would permit a school to be opened for the Jews of Tehran.

"Of course!" Nasser-ed-Din Shah insisted. "We will even pay the teachers' salaries Ourself."

He had come back to Tehran and hoped to forget the entire incident. For two decades nothing was heard of the Alliance again. Shortly after Nasser-ed-Din Shah's assassination, Monsieur Jean arrived.

"Your Majesty," Monsieur Jean told Muzaffar-ed-Din Shah, "your father made a commitment to the people of Europe. It is upon you to honor his word."

Muzaffar-ed-Din Shah was trapped in an impasse: to refuse Monsieur Jean's wish would be to alienate Europe. To accept it would be to anger the mullahs of Persia. He weighed his choices and allowed the school.

"The Jews of Tehran," Monsieur Jean wrote in his first report to the Alliance in London, "have treated me as if I were a Messiah. 'Now that you have come,' they say, 'we can die in peace, and know that our children will be saved.'"

On opening day in the Pit, Monsieur Jean woke up in the dark and put on his suit, which he kept pressed under his mattress. He stepped into the courtyard to use the toilet, and suddenly thought himself under siege: hours before class time, the house was already filled with students—boys, mostly—standing with their shoes under their arms and their faces smeared with doubt, coming to him like a fallen tribe in search of salvation, as if waiting for the word that would break their spell and free them from their bondage.

Salman the Coal Seller walked up to Monsieur Jean. He had brought all seven of his sons.

Blue-Eyed Lotfi attended both sessions of Monsieur Jean's class: in the morning with the boys, at night with the girls and the adults. He completed every year with honors, and when he was eighteen, Monsieur Jean offered him the school's first scholarship to France.

Salman the Coal Seller was enthralled at news of Lotfi's success. He cried with his wife, boasted to all his friends, gave away a whole bag of coal in celebration. Then he found out that the boy had rejected the scholarship; he had fallen in love, Lotfi told his father without shame, and he intended to marry.

He knew a girl from school—Heshmat, daughter of Peacock the Esfahani, who peddled gold. She was two years older than Lotfi, but they had sat across from each other ever since the school first opened, and Blue-Eyed Lotfi had always known he would marry her as soon as he started to work and earned a living.

Against all of his parents' objections, Blue-Eyed Lotfi gave up his chance at Europe and married Heshmat instead. They held the wedding in Zilfa the Rosewoman's house, in her garden where she had planted only white for the season, on a day when the air sparkled and the world radiated color. They were so poor they lived in Salman's room and slept on a borrowed mattress for the first year. Then Blue-Eyed Lotfi accepted a job as assistant to Monsieur Jean, and became the school's first Jewish teacher. Salman the Coal Seller was so proud of his son's position that he forgave Lotfi. His other children grew up and went to Europe and became doctors, but among them all, Lotfi remained his father's favorite; he had been born in the darkest years of Salman's life, and the very light of his eyes had blazed a trail of hope through the Coal Seller's heart.

Arash the Rebel
was fifteen years old when he left the palace to live in the Cossack headquarters at Tehran. The year was 1903, and Muzaffar-ed-Din Shah had just acquired a handful of machine guns for his army. The guns were called Maxims, and they were placed in the care of a Cossack officer named Reza Khan. Himself trained by a group of European advisers, Reza Khan the Maxim in turn enlisted Arash and nine other Cossacks in the machine-gun division. Together they went through Persia—machine guns in tow—and trained other Cossacks in every town and province where they stopped. For the first time in his life, Arash the Rebel saw Persia as it really lived and suffered. Slowly, as he served Muzaffar-ed-Din Shah and Reza Khan, Arash understood that the Qajar dynasty was about to falter.

The year he became King, Muzaffar-ed-Din Shah had sold to Greece the exclusive right to exploit Persia's rich northern forests. A year and a half later he had bestowed upon the French the license to extract and own all of Persia's archaeological treasures. Then he decided that he needed a vacation—to Europe, of course, for he was the son of Nasser-ed-Din Shah and planned to keep alive his legacy. To raise money for the trip, he sold to Belgium all of Persia's customs revenues.

In Tehran, and especially around the bazaar, where the mullahs had the greatest influence, people spoke of limiting the Shah's powers. From Europe and Russia they had learned the idea of nationalism—of a people bound together not by religion or race, but by a common border; of the duty of kings to protect their country's soil and integrity. Secular-minded nationalists had joined forces with the clergy, and together they demanded the establishment of a parliament and the writing of a constitution. Each group had a distinct and opposing goal: the nationalists envisioned a law based upon modern secular thought; the mullahs planned a constitution drawn from the Qoran, one that placed the clergy above the Shah. Still, they joined forces against the Crown, each group believing it would overpower its ally once it had achieved victory.

Muzaffar-ed-Din Shah learned about the alliance of his opposition, but he was in no mood to address problems. He went to Europe and stayed for many months, returning only when he had spent the entire Belgian loan and run out of money. He came back sulking; it was not fair that he should be so limited, that money should be such an issue. He was entitled to greater extravagance than he was allowed. He should have been able to take more than the three hundred aides and wives who accompanied him on the last trip; he should have been able to stay longer, buy more toys for himself. He was, after all, the King.

He tried to console himself by building a palace—a magnificent structure high atop Hyssop Hill, just north of the capital. He would call it the Palace of Joy, make it a white, semicircular structure with tiers of open verandas, and around it he would build a royal menagerie in which to keep specimens of native lions, tigers, and leopards alongside imported fauna. To finance the venture, and to raise money for his next trip, he decided to secure more loans.

From Russia—his country's greatest enemy—he borrowed twenty-two and a half million rubles. In return, he promised never to build a railway in his own country. The British became jealous and wanted a concession as well. The Shah gave to D'Arcy exclusive license to extract and own all of Persia's oil.

In 1904 a plague came to Tehran. It was a small outbreak of short duration, and it took few victims, but in the atmosphere of anger and discontent that prevailed in Persia, it struck a special note of tragedy. Certain that they had once again become objects of God's vengeance, the people of Tehran screamed for help and ran to hide. They had no doctors, no place to take the sick, no one to administer guidelines for general hygiene. Annoyed by the vision of devastation he faced in his own capital, Muzaffar-ed-Din Shah took another loan, and went back to Europe.

Tehran's two greatest clerics, Seyyed Behbahani and Seyyed Tabataba'i, declared an alliance between themselves, and joined the nationalists: the Shah, they insisted, must allow the writing of a constitution based upon Shiite principles, the establishment of Islamic courts, and the appointment of Islamic judges who would wield ultimate authority even over the Crown.

Muzaffar-ed-Din Shah came back to Persia and listened to his Prime Minister report on the mullahs' demands. He found the entire matter too complicated for his attention. He was not about to strain his mind listening to rebels' requests, he said. But he did announce that he had just given another concession to the Russians: to build and operate a bank at the center of the Amir bazaar in Tehran. The site designated for the bank was a cemetery where victims of the recent plague had been buried.

The mullahs called for a Jihad. The Shah, they said, was selling the country to the enemy. Banks operated on the principle of usury—charging interest on borrowed money— which was in direct contradiction to Shiite law. To build their bank, the Russians would have to desecrate Muslims' graves, carry away believers' corpses, and bury them in unholy places and unmarked graves.

The day the Russians broke ground on the cemetery, the mullahs of Tehran ordered the Amir bazaar closed down in strike. Mobs walked the streets, wielding torches and demanding that the Shah expel the Russians. Believers occupied every mosque and listened to their clergy speak of the Qajars' treachery. Nationalists gathered in every district and joined the people on the street.

From his barracks in Tehran, where he had returned with Reza Khan the Maxim, Arash the Rebel watched the unrest and found himself rooting secretly for the resistance.

Muzaffar-ed-Din Shah was disgusted by the unrest in his capital. Wishing only to regain his peace of mind and return to his beloved Europe, he conceded immediately to the rebels' demands. He paid the Czar his damages, restored the cemetery in the Amir bazaar, and asked the mullahs if they would forget the entire incident.

It was too late, the mullahs responded. The rebellion had spread throughout the country. The Shah must agree to constitutional rule, or face war. One Friday, three thousand of Tehran's mullahs gathered in one place, and left the city. They went to Qom, staged a sit-in at a mosque, and swore they would not return unless the Shah conceded to their demands.

Tehran was paralyzed. The people were in a panic. The Shiite clergy were the believers' only link to God. To be abandoned by mullahs was to be damned by God. Even the dead could not be buried without a mullah's blessing. Once again, mobs returned to the streets, asking that the Shah bring back their holy men. Ein-al-Dulah, the Prime Minister, suggested sending Cossacks to bring back the mullahs by force. But Muzaffar-ed-Din Shah was afraid of confrontation.

“Send for them to Qom," he commanded Ein-al-Dulah. “Tell them they can have their damn parliament."

And so the mullahs returned triumphant, riding through Tehran in royal carriages sent by the palace, greeted by welcoming crowds. It was a spectacle of shame and mockery, the essence of what had always been the curse of Persia: the men with the turbans wishing to supplant the man with the crown.

Zilfa the Rosewoman
decided to learn French. She had embroidered a roomful of white handkerchiefs, reviewed all of her singing and painting lessons, stretched the time it took to apply her makeup beyond endurance, and still she found herself with long hours in which she did nothing but contemplate the ravages of time on her skin. She went to enroll in the adult section of the Alliance school.

"I have come to learn," she told Monsieur Jean with such confidence he had no choice but to overlook her age and accept her. “Assign me to your most difficult class. I will be your brightest pupil."

She went to class religiously, pored over her notes and asked questions long after the other students had gone home. She spent all her free time studying, even stopped painting and embroidering so as to devote more hours to her French. Every day she wore a new dress to school, and took special care painting her face. She bought new jewelry. After a while she denied her age and claimed she was not a day over forty. Then she invited Monsieur Jean to her house for lunch.