Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (28 page)

Running from the palace on the sixteenth of July, Muhammad Ali Shah had taken his own family treasures, enormous cash reserves, and what he could carry of Persia's crown jewels. Among the crown jewels was the famous Darya-ye-Nur—Sea of Light—a one-hundred-eighty-two-carat diamond, which the Shah claimed was his. He had also incurred exorbitant debts to the Russian and British governments, as collateral for which he had pledged hundreds of acres of Persian territory in the north.

Arash the Rebel demanded that the Shah return the crown jewels, sign over to Persia ownership of the territories in pawn to Russia and Britain, and leave his Crown Prince, Ahmad—who was twelve years old and crying in his mother's lap—as a hostage in Tehran. In return, he said, the National Council would grant the Shah safety in exile, a palace at Crimea, and five thousand pounds sterling a year.

Muhammad Ali Shah refused the offer. Five thousand pounds, he said, was a slave's salary. Crimea was not a suitable destination for a king. Crown Prince Ahmad was too young to rule, and must accompany his father to exile. The crown jewels belonged to him and should not be returned.

Weeks passed and the negotiations failed. By September the National Council had raised the Shah's salary to 16,666 pounds sterling a year, and changed the location of his palace from Crimea to Odessa. It was agreed that Ahmad would be left in Tehran—to serve as a figurehead monarch for the new constitutional government, and ensure that his father would never stage a return coup against the rebels. But Muhammad Ali Shah would not surrender the crown jewels. Feeling that the Russian ambassador had sided with the rebels against him, he telegraphed the Czar and asked that his rights be protected. The Czar answered promptly: Muhammad Ali Shah, he said, should accept an immediate settlement.

Two days after receiving the telegram, Muhammad Ali Shah left Tehran for Odessa. He took along his Minister of War, five hundred loyal soldiers, and Solomon the Man's wife.

Arash the Rebel watched Tala board the carriage that would take her out of Tehran. She was flanked by her children—all eleven of them—and as she sat in the carriage and pulled the drapes closed, she did not even turn to look in the direction of Arash. He wondered how she would live without Solomon the Man. He wondered if he had really wanted to destroy his father's life.

On the morning
of Ahmad Shah's coronation, Arash the Rebel rode to the Russian embassy to escort the new Shah to his palace.

He was told by the embassy guards that he should wait outside for the crown prince. An hour went by. Then another. Then at last the embassy gates swung open:

Far in the distance, up the cobblestoned pathway that led through the garden, Arash the Rebel saw a parade of molten light move toward him.

It was a child, a boy with black hair and a round face, dressed in a thick military uniform and a Turkish fez. His jacket was covered with diamonds cut in different shapes and each as big as a walnut. His eyes were swollen and red from tears.

He had been crying for days—ever since his father was driven from the throne and Ahmad was chosen King. He was twelve years old, and all he wanted in the world was to be at home with his mother.

Arash the Rebel was stunned at the sight of the child. He had known Ahmad all his life. He had known, all the time he negotiated with Muhammad Ali Shah, that Ahmad was only a boy. Still, he saw him walk out toward the gates, recognized the glimmer of tears in his eyes, and suddenly remembered himself—small and feverish, lying in a basement and staring at his mother's picture as he sobbed into his pillow.

In Saltanatabad—the Palace of Kings—a deputation of the National Council greeted Ahmad Shah.

''We pray, under God's shadow, that Your Majesty will serve his nation with justice and honor," the head of the delegation announced to the new King.

"Please God," Ahmad Shah replied bravely, but his chin trembled and he fought to keep his voice, "I will."

Tehran was in chaos.
The government that had replaced the monarchy had no clear leadership and no plan of action. Having reached Tehran victorious, Sattar Khan and his army of rebels now found themselves without a war to fight. Parliament asked that they surrender their weapons, but they refused. Weeks of stalemate ensued. Yesterday's allies became enemies. In the end, the National Council dispatched troops to bring Sattar's forces under siege and confiscate their weapons. The rebels fought back. In the battle that followed, Sattar Khan— hero of the revolution and the man who had saved Persia from the Qajars—was shot and severely wounded. He died soon after—of injuries, and a broken heart.

But even with Sattar Khan dead, the new government faced grave threats: the mullahs were fighting the nationalists, and the British government was undermining Parliament. There was no army, no police, no one to restore calm. In the palace, Ahmad Shah cried day and night for his parents. Once, when he could no longer stand the pain of separation, Ahmad Shah would steal a horse from his own stables, and ride in the dark toward the northern gates of his capital. Alerted by spies, the Shah's Russian house-tutor would send Arash to bring Ahmad back. He had been headed for the border, the Shah would confess to Arash, toward Odessa, where his father lived with his ten wives.

Arash the Rebel cried with the Shah that night. He realized that to avenge himself, he had repeated Solomon and Tala's crime. He knew his revolution had failed. In 1910 he left his post at the National Council and disappeared from Persia forever. Fearing that they had been betrayed by their young ally, the Council searched Tehran and every other province, but came up empty-handed. They whispered tales of intrigue and treason, of mortal death and ghostly departure, but in the end, they never managed to solve the mystery of Arash the Rebel: that he had given all to battle, and realized he wanted none of the spoils.

In Saltanataband, Ahmad Shah wrote every day to his father—loving pages full of sorrow, in which he confessed his most private thoughts. He entrusted the letters to his closest friend. He waited for an answer. He waited years for an answer. The letters, he would later learn, were taken to the Russian embassy, where they were opened, scrutinized, and left to become matters of public record.

Reza Khan the Maxim
watched the revolution of 1908, then he watched it fail. He saw the destruction of the old system, saw it replaced by anarchy, and wondered if Persia would survive.

The Tripartite Agreement of 1907 had resulted in a virtual occupation of Persia by foreign powers. They ruled each province through their own embassies, and refused to cooperate with Tehran. Twice in two years, Parliament appointed prime ministers only to see them abdicate in the all-pervasive atmosphere of confusion and impotence. Everywhere, bandits and highway robbers held the population in terror. Self-proclaimed governors defied orders from Tehran. Persia needed an army—a single, unified force to battle the enemies outside and within, to restore calm and allow Parliament to rule. Under the Qajars, her security had been entrusted to independent police detachments: the Russian Cossack brigade, the Swedish-led gendarmerie, the British-organized South Persia Rifles—each of which took orders from a foreign government. Now, without money or leadership, she was farther than ever from creating an efficient fighting force.

In 1914 the First World War broke in Europe. British and Russian forces, already occupying Persia, closed Parliament and took over the rule of the country. Soon thereafter, Germany found its way into Persia. Seeking to weaken the British stronghold, the legendary German spy Wassmus crept into the south and enlisted ethnic tribes seeking independence. He hired them to fight the British, creating civil war in a country already destroyed by occupation, disorder, and poverty.

Reza Khan the Maxim was thirty-six years old. His first wife, Hamdam, had been a woman of low origin who did not understand his ambition, and who had given him only a girl. He had abandoned Hamdam and their daughter and married again—this time to a wife of higher birth. He had no friends, not even among the Cossacks, but all his life he had cherished his acquaintance with Peacock. In the days of Persia's greatest tumult, when he felt himself standing on the brink of disaster, Reza Khan the Maxim went back and found the Jew from Esfahan.

"You said once I could be King," he told her in her windowless room in the Pit. He had been struck by those words, had felt his insides boil with excitement every time he remembered that encounter. Amir Tuman Kazim Khan had told him of a Jew who foresaw the death of kings. Reza Khan wondered if Peacock had the same powers.

"You must tell me what you know," he insisted. "Tell me my future."

Peacock smiled. All through her childhood, in times of hardship and disappointment, her mother had whispered to her Esther the Soothsayer's prophecy made on the day Peacock was born. Now Peacock repeated the words for Reza Khan:

"A man shall come, riding from the north, with blood on his hands, and the wrath of God in his eyes.

"He shall sit on the Throne of the Sun, and with a sweep of his hand he shall reach across this empire to free our people."

Reza Khan the Maxim felt the veins in his temples about to burst.

"How do you know I am that man?" he asked.

Peacock put her fingertips to his forehead.

"It says so right here—where Cain bore his mark."

It was the winter of 1914. Leaving Peacock's house, Reza Khan inhaled the stench of rot rising from the Pit, and watched the children running barefoot in the snow. He went home. He had found his destiny.

He climbed in the ranks of the Cossacks, and inspired great loyalty among the troops. He was conscious of his lowly status in society, aware that nothing in his past and lineage fit the mold of the traditional nobleman-turned-savior. He could not yet alter his dead father's rank in history, but he knew he could improve his station through marriage.

In 1915, he took a third wife—the daughter of an army commander—and at last felt he had achieved a suitable status in society. He gave his wife a title, Taj-Malek, the Crown Lady, and told her she would soon be Queen.

Solomon the Matt
was fifty-three years old when Tala left Persia. He let her go and tried to salvage his own life, to start over in a country now hostile and unwelcoming to the vestiges of the Qajars. He tried to forget Tala; she had left as easily as she came to him, blamed Solomon the Man for Arash's treason, and abandoned him without a word of explanation. Still, every time he remembered Tala's smile, Solomon the Man trembled with desire. He sent a letter to Odessa:

''Come back, my passion," he told her. "You have been away too long."

He wrote another note, this time entrusted to a messenger with clear orders to bring back an answer. He suspected that Tala was ill, or imprisoned in the castle at Odessa. He imagined Tala crying through the night into her pillow, calling Solomon's name, digging her nails into the walls of the room she could not leave—how else could she have stayed away so long?—and praying that Solomon would arrive, at dawn when the sky was new, to save her in his arms. Before the messenger had come back—bringing, Solomon felt in his heart, no word of Tala—he left Tehran and embarked for Russia.

In Odessa he rented a room, unfurnished and cold, and sent word to Muhammad Ali Shah's castle.

He waited for Tala through days and nights of agony, never leaving the room for fear that she might come while he was gone, tortured at the thought that she would not arrive. He imagined her running to him in the dark, her breath cold and anxious, tearing at her clothes as she fell into his arms and he took her back into the farthest corner of his room, there against a stone wall, and loved her with his hands and his eyes, taking her into his bed and spreading her pale body onto the sheets—surprised, as always, at the contrast in the color of their skin—touching her so gently that her eyes never moved, and when at last it was over she would stay in his bed, her face radiating their passion, and say she forgave him Arash's betrayal.

She never came.

Solomon the Man stayed in Odessa—alone, without work or money or a goal. When his money ran out, he tried to sing at cabarets and teahouses, and found that his music was unknown and unpopular. He sought love from strange women, paid prostitutes just to come and sit with him for a night, but in the end he felt he had disappointed everyone. He went to the palace of Muhammad Ali Shah and came back dejected and ashamed. He drank and drank, and by the time he realized he could not stop, he was old and sick and could find no reason to save himself.

He developed an illness, a gnawing ache that spread from his stomach into his chest and arms. He became weak and yellow, unable to eat, haunted by insomnia. He lay on the floor of his rented room, barely surviving on the money he made by singing in tearooms, and thought about the life he had left in Persia.

He thought of the women he had loved, the children, all grown, that he had abandoned or lost. He thought of the strangers he had befriended, the voice that had come to him like a gift from the angels, but which he could no longer command. In the end, when he began to vomit blood, he thought of Peacock.

He remembered the child he had married—dark and shy and cold as the sparrows in winter. He remembered her magnificent eyes on the night of their wedding, when he had hoped, until the moment he lifted Peacock's veil, that he would find in her Zil-el-Sultan's Hannah. He remembered his daughters. He knew Sabrina had died.

Solomon the Man sat up in bed, surrounded by shadows and the sound of his neighbors' poverty, and for the first time in six years he understood the cause of his fall: he had lost his luck, abandoned his daughters, and sinned against his wife. He had destroyed Peacock and taken away her son. For this, Solomon the Man was certain, he had been cursed.

He summoned all his strength, and counted his money; he would go back to Persia, he decided, to Juyy Bar, where Sabrina was buried. He would find his daughter's grave, throw himself on her corpse, and demand forgiveness before he died.