Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (34 page)

“Imagine that," the merchants exclaimed, “biting the hand that fed him. Without the support of the British, Reza Shah would never have been King. He negotiated with them, got their permission to make a coup against Ahmad Shah. Now he sides with the Germans to get rid of the English."

It was a mad idea, Peacock recognized—the assumption that Reza Shah could become independent of the English. Ever since the reign of Nasser-ed-Din Shah, everyone knew, nothing happened in Iran without direct involvement on the part of His or Her Majesty's spies. Peacock did not place much stock in the stories she heard. She did not believe the rumors about Germany introducing laws against its Jewish population.

The merchants claimed that Reza Shah was allying himself with Hitler against Britain. Reza Shah had
freed
the Jews, Peacock reminded everyone. He would not side with a country that persecuted them.

But the rumors persisted, and because of them, Peacock wished more and more she could read. The papers, she thought, held the key to the truth.

In 1937, electricity came to Peacock's street. One night, Blue-Eyed Lotfi came to her house and screwed a glass bulb into the ceiling of her room. Lotfi pulled at a string. Light burst into Peacock's eyes and blinded her.

She was so excited by the new invention that she could barely sleep at night. She walked into her room after dark, pulled at the string, and stood smiling at her surroundings as if she had discovered them for the first time.

“Things look different at night,” she confided shyly in Heshmat. “I like watching them when that light shines."

It was all Reza Shah's doing, Peacock thought gratefully: the electricity that lit her nights, the water that flew in the pipes of Heshmat's new house on Simorgh Street, the hospital where Heshmat's daughter went to give birth.

"On
sheets'.''
Peacock had rejoiced when she saw the girl rolled out of the delivery room. “My God, you delivered on
sheets'.”

Reza Shah was her hero—the boy she had recognized as chosen and who had gone on to fulfill her ancestor's prophecy. Peacock could never believe that he would betray the Jews.

Blue-Eyed Lotfi went to France to buy stock for his new shop, and came back with a gift for Peacock. It was a radio— a large piece of furniture made of wood and glass that lit up with the turn of a knob, and that Lotfi claimed could talk. “That's heresy," Peacock laughed, but Lotfi attached a cord to the outlet in the wall and turned a knob.

A man spoke at Peacock. His voice was deep and husky, and he used the formal language one used to address important people. He was about to tell the news, he announced as if he were blessed with knowledge unknown to others. He was going to relay everything that had happened in the world that day.

“In the Name of God," he began, "His Majesty Reza Shah Pahlavi, King of Kings, today signed a treaty of friendship with Germany."

He went on to explain about the treaty. He spoke of Germany's leader—a man called Hitler who believed in the superiority of the Aryan race. Iranians, except the Jews among them, were also Aryans. There would be a war soon, the announcer promised, a war greater than the First World War, but this time Iran would not be occupied. Her economy would not be destroyed, her people would not starve. This time, thanks to Reza Shah, Iran had taken the side of the mighty and would be rewarded for her foresight. Germany would defeat the English and the Russians. As a token of appreciation, Hitler had promised to give back to Iran provinces stolen from her by the imperialist Czars.

Blue-Eyed Lotfi would always cry when he remembered Peacock's face that night before the radio.

Peacock
demanded an audience with Reza Shah. She went to his office in the Palace of Joy, and found him screaming at his Prime Minister: Reza Shah always screamed at his servants. The man stood before him, head bent and eyes on his boots, and never once made a sound until he was dismissed.

“Go," His Majesty yelled at last. "You are not a man of action. You are not a man at all."

The Prime Minister walked past Peacock with his lips pale and his face chalk white. His hands trembled as he left the room.

Reza Shah paced up and down his office in the military boots he still shined as in the days of his service with the Cossacks. He did not greet Peacock; he never acknowledged that he had known her before. She was a reminder of the days of his humility, and the very sight of her made the Shah feel as if he were still no more than the orphan boy from Alasht. But he did grant her an immediate audience when thousands of others waited a lifetime for a chance to see the Shah, and were never received.

"Make it quick," he said as he stopped behind his desk and faced Peacock.

"Your Majesty—" Peacock stepped forward. She had spent agonizing days trying to solve the riddle of Reza Shah's alliance with Hitler. She would not waste time with her question: "What if there is a war? What if the Germans win the war?"

Reza Shah pretended he had not understood.

“What of the Jews you saved?" Peacock insisted.

Then his eyes softened. He looked at Peacock, and for an instant she saw a man trapped and embittered by the harshness of choices he was forced to make.

“I will renounce the Jews," he said. "I will renounce anyone to save Iran from her enemies."

Reza Shah
had saved Iran from disintegration. He had conquered the mullahs, built an army to defend the borders and a police to overcome the internal chaos of the last three centuries. He had kept the Russians at bay and the British at arm's length. He had built the first trans-Iranian railway, brought schools and hospitals and vaccines. Tehran's water supply was still contaminated by the sewage that poured into the river and seeped into the wells, but malaria and trachoma and intestinal disease, always endemic, had begun to diminish. Ten years after he had become King, Peacock thought, he looked at his accomplishments and believed himself infallible.

He was an infantryman from a nonexistent army, and overnight he had become King. He was a soldier trained under foreign occupation, and he had become independent. He was a poor boy, born in a hovel at the end of a village dirt road, who now lived in a palace with halls of mirror and rooms full of treasure. He had become vain and intolerant and corrupt.

He lived simply, in a bare room in the Palace of Joy, with his mattress on the floor and no luxuries. But he went around confiscating the best of Iran's lands—the most populous villages, the greenest valleys, the lushest forests—to register them in the names of his children. He had a son— the Crown Prince Muhammad Reza, who was so shy he never dared speak in his father's presence. Peacock had seen Muhammad Reza as a boy, riding his Arabian mare around the Square of the Cannons, raising a storm of dust that almost hid him from view. Even then, Peacock remembered, the boy's eyes were languid, and his voice as he commanded the mare, shook with indecision. He was not—he could not have been—the son Reza Shah had wanted.

Reza Shah had sent the boy to Europe, to a Swiss boarding school designed to educate young aristocracy. Muhammad Reza learned to ski, fly airplanes, drive fast cars. In 1938, at the age of nineteen, he returned to Iran to take his place next to his father.

He found Reza Shah beleaguered and preoccupied: nothing worked fast enough in Iran, the Shah complained; no one was dedicated enough. The Minister of Finance, Da-var, had recently failed to come up with funds necessary for a public works project. Victim to Reza Shah's wrath, Davar had worked late into the night at his office, then killed himself. He had left a note:

"I am committing suicide," he had written, "because I am exhausted."

Reza Shah had no time for failure. He did not attend Davar's funeral.

But there was a bigger problem: a man by the name of Mossadeq—a rich landowner turned nationalist who had been Reza Shah's enemy for decades. Reza Shah had imprisoned Mossadeq, but the man was old, and doctors had warned His Majesty that Mossadeq would die in jail.

"Release him, then," the Crown Prince advised his father. "If he dies, he will become a martyr, and we will never escape his legacy."

Reza Shah was tired and frustrated and dismayed. For the first time ever, he did as Muhammad Reza suggested.

Then he told the boy that he had arranged a wife for him—Princess Foziyeh, daughter of Egypt's King Farouk and Queen Nazli. Muhammad Reza had never seen Foziyeh, but his older sister, Shams, assured him that he would be pleased with the find. In 1939 he went to Cairo to fetch the bride for the wedding.

It was going to be the affair of the century, a gala like no other in the East, so sumptuous it would dazzle the royal family of Egypt and prove to all of Iran's neighbors the great progress Reza Shah had brought to Iran.

At the palace, Reza Shah hired an enormous staff just to see to the details of every arrangement. He assigned Peacock to a team of jewelers—young men dispatched to Europe earlier that year for a crash course in gemology and jewelry design, and entrusted to them the job of preparing stones for each female member of the family.

The bride and groom, it was decided, would sail from Egypt to the port of Khorramshahr, on the Persian Gulf, then travel to Tehran aboard a special train built especially for the wedding, and equipped with every conceivable luxury. In Tehran they would first attend a gala reception, European style, hosted by Reza Shah to welcome Queen Nazli. The wedding would take place the following evening.

Suddenly, Peacock heard that a great disaster had taken place: the bride and groom, Reza Shah had been told by a trembling Director of the Railroads, were indeed aboard the special train. They were accompanied by her mother, a suite of personal maids and nannies, half a dozen ladies-in-waiting. But they were in the middle of the Great Persian Desert—in a place where no man or beast could survive— and their train had stopped: it had run out of food, and water, and electricity.

Reza Shah imprisoned his Director of the Railroads, and fired every other man in charge of his son's journey. He sent for the travelers on another train, and received them personally when they arrived at the palace. Muhammad Reza was still mortified by the fiasco. Foziyeh was crying to her mother that she wanted to go home. Queen Nazli told Reza Shah that his country was uncivilized.

They spent the day bickering over Foziyeh's income and inheritance. Since she was to be married to the Crown Prince of Iran, Reza Shah insisted, all of Foziyeh's income from the court of Egypt should automatically be sent to Iran. Queen Nazli refused categorically, and would not negotiate. By the time the arguments ended, the marriage had already been poisoned.

That night, at the European-style gala, seating arrangements were mixed up, and guests began to bicker with one another over their places at dinner. Reza Shah fired his Grand Master of Ceremonies and the Grand Master of the Court on the spot. But Queen Nazli was not satisfied. She told Reza Shah she was disappointed with the welcoming ceremony. The Shah ordered the palace maids to pack Nazli's bags without her knowledge. The morning after the wedding, he would ship her out of Iran along with all of Foziyeh's ladies-in-waiting.

He sat back that night, and watched the religious ceremony without emotion. Halfway through the prayer that would bind his son to the princess of Egypt, Reza Shah looked up and saw Peacock next to him. He shook his head. The look in his eyes augured disaster.

“Things,'' he said, “are not as they should be."

In 1939 the Second World War began in Europe. Officially, Iran declared her neutrality in the war. In fact, Reza Shah harbored German agents on Iranian soil, and later refused to allow the British access through Iran to Russia. The German Minister, Dr. Schacht, visited the country, and asserted once again that Iranians were “pure Aryans, exempt from the provisions of the Nuremberg race laws."

"It's the end of you all," the merchants in the bazaar told Peacock, without bothering to hide their excitement. “Hitler's taking over the world, and the Jews are as good as dead."

They were all her friends. They would have mourned her, even, but all their lives they had heard their mullahs speak against infidels, and now they could not help but succumb to joy at the prospect of seeing Jews eliminated once and for all.

In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Needing a route through which he could dispatch much-needed supplies to the Russians, Churchill looked once again toward Iran. He asked Reza Shah to expel the Germans from Iran, and to provide free access to Allied troops and transport trucks.

Reza Shah refused; he never imagined that Hitler might lose the war. Churchill threatened an invasion. Reza Shah ignored him. By the time he realized the scope of the danger he was courting, Allied troops were already descending on Iran.

On August 24, 1941, Indian forces under British command entered Iran through the south. The next day, Peacock watched Allied planes fly over Tehran, dropping leaflets: Iran, they said, was an occupied country. Reza Shah had been deposed, whisked from the throne and shipped away to exile in South Africa. His son, Muhammad Reza, was placed on the throne by the Allies, then locked up in his palace.

Peacock had come to believe the voice on the radio.

"In close concert with our Russian ally," the announcer interpreted Churchill's speech before the House of Commons, "we have rooted out the malignant elements in Teh-ran.

A woman came to Besharat
the Bastard's house, in the days of the Allied occupation when the farms could not produce and the factories had stopped working, when imports had disappeared and the poor starved, when the Russians diverted the rice and wheat of the northern provinces for their own use, and American soldiers spent their dollars buying whores and whiskey. The roads were occupied by Allied troops transporting military supplies—endless lines of military vehicles loaded with food and guns and medicine, traveling painfully through the unpaved roads of Reza Shah's fallen kingdom—while Iranian peasants, their lives bundled on the backs of mules and donkeys as they escaped their ravaged farms in search of food they would not find in the city, waited all day for the right of passage. The Allies required each Iranian to obtain a visa in order to travel within his own country. At inspection points, the peasants arrived exhausted and half-starved, children strapped onto their backs or asleep in women's arms, faces covered with thick dust that made one indistinguishable from the other. They held out their visas and spoke too loudly to the soldiers, who did not understand their language: "Looking for work," they said, smiling optimistically.