Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (36 page)

“You will have a beautiful child," she told Yasmine. "Take care that it does not inherit your sadness."

Yasmine looked at her, this old woman who had kept nothing of her youth's beauty, who touched Yasmine with the tip of her dried fingers and spoke to her as if to an old friend. She would not trust Peacock. She would not hear her words. From the moment she found she was pregnant to the hour of her child's birth, Yasmine closed herself to the world and allowed no emotions.

It was her only defense, she told herself, the one chance she might have to save herself: once she had given him his child, Besharat the Bastard might agree to let her go. She could leave Iran, go back to Paris. But to do so, she would have to leave her child for Besharat. She must, therefore, keep herself from wanting it.

So she carried the infant without thinking about its existence, and concentrated instead on the single goal of regaining her freedom. From the room she had moved to, it was impossible to hear the sound of Mossadeq's radio, but Yasmine never stopped thinking of Paris. She saw her mother—alive in spite of what her father had written on the envelopes—standing in the cramped living room of their apartment, where Yasmine had last seen her. Her mother wore the olive silk dress, now faded and loose, which she had bought when Yasmine was a child. In those days she had been taller and fleshier, and she had worn the dress only on special occasions when she went dancing with her husband. She had left Yasmine alone with her dinner, and returned home at dawn—the child waking up to the sound of a key turning in the door, watching her mother walk in with a smile, smelling of perfume and humming the tunes she had danced to all night.

The day Yasmine left the apartment to go to Iran with Besharat, her mother had worn the olive silk dress and cried in the living room. Her father had stood at the window, his back turned to Yasmine, and never said a word in response to her pleas of forgiveness and her promises that she would come back, soon, to see them for a whole summer. In the end, Yasmine had left with her suitcase, descending the steps with quivering knees. At the top of the staircase her mother had cried, "My child, I will never see you again."

Outside, the sun had glared in Yasmine's eyes, blinding her temporarily so that when she looked for Besharat, she saw only a white spot where he had been standing, and for an instant she had felt relief—thank God he has vanished— till her eyes adjusted to the light and she saw him waving at her from the opposite sidewalk.

In the last month of Yasmine's pregnancy, Besharat the Bastard hired a doctor from the Russian hospital to assist with the birth, and brought in two midwives in case the doctor failed. When the labor began, he called Naiima and Assal, and allowed twenty-three other women—relatives and elders—to preside over the birth. They sat around Yasmine's room, watching her writhe in pain, questioning the doctors' methods, and insisting that the midwives should take charge of the delivery. As soon as the doctor had pulled the steaming infant out of Yasmine, Naiima ran forward and grabbed the baby before the doctor had even cut the cord.

"A son," she cried triumphantly, raising the boy for all to see. "We have a
son.”

Cyrus the Magnificent
wanted to be American. He wore American clothes, drove an American car. He read American novels, spoke English even to people who did not understand him. He memorized the map of the United States, the Preamble to the Constitution, the American national anthem. Cyrus the Magnificent had never stepped outside the borders of Iran, but he lived in dreams of Hollywood.

He was a handsome man—"American looking," he liked to describe himself to people who had never seen an American. He was tall, with fair skin and light hair. He had a straight nose, a perfect face. He spoke Persian with a foreign accent, used big words and grand gestures, tried to project his voice as if he were performing alone onstage.

Born in Tehran, the youngest son of Heshmat and Blue-Eyed Lotfi, he had spent his childhood listening to Lotfi talk about Europe.

"In Europe," Blue-Eyed Lotfi had always said, "men are civilized, and Jews are human."

Cyrus the Magnificent decided early on that he wanted to study in Europe. At school in Tehran, he studied French and English, and asked his father every year to enroll him at a university in Paris. He worked as an errand boy at the British embassy in Tehran, and saved all his money for the trip to France. But the year he turned twelve, with his plans made and his English money sewn to the inside of his pants pocket, Cyrus the Magnificent woke up one morning to find his dreams shattered: war had broken out in Europe, and the Germans were killing Jews.

Cyrus the Magnificent stayed in Tehran and watched the occupying soldiers on the streets. He saw the Americans, tall and handsome and confident, spending their dollars, buying women and food and the resentment of the mullahs. He saw them gathered in empty grocery shops, where they drank homemade arrack. They would stand in groups of three or four, and invariably one of them would take out a book of postcards, folded like an accordion, that he flipped open on the counter. There, Cyrus the Magnificent saw real-life
houris
—ghosts of beautiful women with painted eyes and revealing clothes, chests heaving and lips puckered as if in invitation to love. Cyrus the Magnificent would have paid with his life to meet one of those women.

He approached the soldiers, and impressed them with his English. He offered a deal: he would give them silk stockings and perfume stolen from his father's shop, in return for the postcards. By the end of the occupation, he would boast to his friends that he owned a picture of every woman in Hollywood.

He was in tenth grade and struggling through his math and physics courses when he learned that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, had been in Tehran for a conference with Churchill and Stalin. Cyrus the Magnificent was so enraptured by the news that he forgot to go to school for his semiannual science exams. Instead he went to the bazaar—always the source of the quickest and most complete news about the happenings in the city—and listened to the merchants talk about the Tehran Conference. The Allies, it was said, recognized that Iran's economy had been destroyed by the occupation, and had promised to help her as much as possible. More important, however, was that they also recognized her desire for independence, and had pledged to withdraw their forces from Iranian soil within six months after the war had officially ended.

"It's the Americans," the merchants all agreed among themselves. "The Americans are forcing Russia out. The British would stay, but they can't afford to."

By the time Heshmat discovered her son in the bazaar, the fall term had ended, and Cyrus the Magnificent had officially failed all the exams. Seething, Heshmat banned her son from the bazaar, and swore she would keep him at home till he had forgotten all his dreams of America. She was a strong woman, severe with her children, and she would have carried out her threat, but Cyrus managed to disarm her as always:

"I can't think about tiny molecules and petty multiplications, when right before my eyes the world is in the making."

Two days later, he was back in the bazaar and chattering with the merchants.

In the aftermath of the Tehran Conference, the United States and England withdrew their forces from Iran. The Soviet Union refused to leave. Throughout the war years, it had built a Communist Party—the Tudeh—inside Iran, and now planned to use it as an arm to gain access to the country's government. The year Cyrus the Magnificent graduated from high school, the Soviet Red Army established puppet governments in Kurdistan and Azerbaijan, and proclaimed their independence from the rest of the country. In his first act of leadership since he had been declared king four years earlier, Muhammad Reza Shah dispatched forces to recapture Azerbaijan from Stalin. The troops had only traveled a hundred and fifty kilometers from Tehran when they were confronted and stopped by Russian tanks.

"Reza Shah was right," Blue-Eyed Lotfi said as he paced the house in the days and weeks following the defeat in Azerbaijan. "He knew that if Hitler didn't win the war, Stalin would swallow Iran and act as if we never existed at all."

For a year the Tudeh reigned in Iran. Cyrus the Magnificent again lost sight of the demands of ordinary life, and spent his time following the news. It was the beginning of the Cold War. The Americans could not afford to lose Iran to Stalin. In 1946 the Shah asked the United Nations for protection against the Soviets. In response, the United States confronted Stalin, and at last forced the Red Army out of Iran.

It was only a partial victory. The Soviets took their tanks, but left in their stead a Communist Party that was the single most powerful political force in Iran—and the only organized party. Nevertheless, Cyrus the Magnificent hailed the outcome, and fell in love with America all over again.

He would have gone to America then, but Heshmat stopped him; he was to attend the University of Tehran, she dictated. He was to become a doctor, save lives, make his parents proud. Cyrus the Magnificent flunked out of his first semester at the university, and refused to go back. He was not willing to suffer the rigors of higher education. He was too concerned with the drama of life, he explained, too enamored of the world's greater pleasures, too much—he admitted with unrestrained pride—like Solomon the Man.

He left the university, and went into business instead. With money he had borrowed from Peacock—Blue-Eyed Lotfi had not forgiven Cyrus his failure in college, and so refused to trust him with money—he bought a piece of land and built the first two-story apartment building in Tehran. He moved into the top floor, and rented the other apartments. He walked around town dressed in a beige tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, a brown ascot, and brown leather gloves with holes in them, “like race-car drivers in Hollywood," he explained to his friends, who were baffled by the appearance of the gloves. He was waiting for Heshmat to forgive him, for Blue-Eyed Lotfi to offer his blessing, and then, he said, he would go to America.

The year after he had built the apartments, Cyrus the Magnificent met Laa-Laa. It was winter, and Cyrus was lying in bed, taking an afternoon nap, when he heard the first knocks on the door. He thought of answering, then decided against it. The hallways were cold. The building had no vacancies.

But ten minutes later the pounding had not stopped, and Cyrus went to the door. It was snowing again. The wind screeched through the hallway.

Laa-Laa walked in with a burst of cold air and a rush of snowflakes.

She was young, so beautiful that Cyrus thought she would vanish if he dared bat an eyelid. She had on a thin summer dress—yellow and pink chiffon, tight at the top and flared around the knees. She wore white shoes, a large summer hat. She put down her cardboard suitcase and leaned against the wall to catch her breath. Her eyes radiated warmth. Her skin was covered with moisture.

She had left home on a warm summer day, Cyrus thought, and on the street she had found winter.

She took off her hat. Her hair was the color of burnt sugar.

“I need a room,” she said in her best Persian.

Cyrus the Magnificent did not understand her.

"I need a room,” she repeated in Russian.

Cyrus the Magnificent recognized the language and cursed his own bad luck.

"Damn!" he exclaimed in Farsi. "She's the enemy."

"I have no vacancies," he told her in Persian, and turned around to leave. She took his hand.

"I have no vacancies," he said in French, then again in English.

She put his hand between her legs, where she was warm and bare, and then she kissed him till he thought he would melt from the heat of her skin. He tore off her top, lifted her with her legs hugging his waist, and by the time he noticed the neighbor gawking at them, Cyrus the Magnificent was deep in love and lost to Laa-Laa's magic.

He never married her—he could not marry his enemy— but they lived together for three years, and every month she threatened to leave. Cyrus the Magnificent was so infatuated with Laa-Laa that he did not sleep nights for fear she might not be there when he opened his eyes in the morning. To prove his love, he signed over to her ownership of his building. Soon after that, Laa-Laa found another lover.

She brought the man to live with her in Cyrus the Mag-nificent's apartment, and changed all the locks. It was winter again, and Cyrus the Magnificent banged his fists on the door till he was bruised and exhausted.

He had on his beige tweed jacket and his racing-car gloves. He crouched against the wind, and walked the streets till the pain of Laa-Laa's betrayal had sunk from his chest down into his stomach. He could not face his parents. He turned up at Peacock's door instead. He was pale, and he laughed too loud.

"Damn Russians!" he said as he walked in. "They get you
every
time."

Yasmine closed her eyes,
weak from the effort of the birth, and let the dread of Naiima's voice run through her like poison:

"We have a son," she had cried, as if she were the child's mother, and yet Yasmine told herself she must let it be.

"Call the nursemaid," Naiima ordered a cousin present at the birth. "Tell her to rush over and feed Besharat Khan's heir."

She had arranged for the nursemaid long before the birth, interviewed a dozen pregnant women due to give birth around the same time as Yasmine. She wanted a healthy woman, one with no prior children who had drained her strength, one who would agree to conspire with Naiima and keep the child from its natural mother. She had not told Besharat about the nursemaid; she was afraid he would oppose her, insist that Yasmine should feed her own child.

"But it's impossible," she now argued with him before all the witnesses. "This woman is
foreign.
If your son drinks her milk, he will become a stranger to you. He will be a Christ-worshiper, a Jew-hater. She will fill him with her poison and he will grow up to hate you and yours."

Feigning sleep, Yasmine heard Naiima and this time prayed she would convince Besharat. Then, all at once, she felt a warmth on her chest; Besharat the Bastard had taken the boy from Naiima, and placed him at her breast.