Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (39 page)

The royal family—with its sixty-three princes, princesses, and cousins—was Iran's wealthiest. The Pahlavi

Foundation, headed by Princess Ashraf, owned shares in all of the most profitable companies, and allowed access only to those it favored. The Shah's relatives were in charge of every aspect of financial life in Iran. They acted arbitrarily, took anything they wanted without even bothering to write a law to that effect. They went hunting in the northern forests, and discovered a beautiful new region upon which to build a villa. They did not buy the land. They confiscated hundreds of acres—to assure privacy.

"Look around you."

In 1958 the Shah had divorced Sorraya after a childless marriage, taken his third wife—Farah—and fathered a son. Confident of his power, he had moved with greater strength against the clergy, taking away their lands to give to the peasants. He had formed a closer relationship with the United States, and gave women the right to vote.

In 1964, Ruhollah the Soul of God called for demonstrations against the Shah. Overnight, the streets filled with his disciples. Khomeini addressed the crowd and let his rage erupt:

"I beseech you," he warned the Shah,
"respect
the religious authorities."

The Shah quelled Khomeini
and sent him to exile in Turkey. But Khomeini went to Iraq and, from there, reestablished contact with his disciples in Iran. Throughout the sixties and the seventies, they would spread his message inside the country. They worked through a network of mosques and religious meetings, and later began to distribute the Imam's sermons recorded on cassette tape. The Shah, Khomeini insisted, must be overthrown.

"Sooner or later," Cyrus the Magnificent warned his relatives in the privacy of a quiet room away from the ears of the Shah's spies, "sooner or later, the mullahs will defeat the Shah. It has always been that way, and when it happens, God help the Jews."

He told his wife they were leaving for America, and bought two tickets for Hollywood. They were all packed and ready to leave when Laa-Laa returned.

It was winter 1965, and Miss Jansen from Hollywood had spent the day shopping for souvenirs to take back to America. She came home and smelled a light perfume. She went through the corridor feeling a heavy silence, sensing she had walked uninvited into a stranger's home. The door to the living room was made of carved oak, with a large inset of etched glass. Through it, Miss Jansen from Hollywood saw the end of her life.

Cyrus the Magnificent stood pale and immobile, facing a woman in a summer dress, with intoxicating eyes and scarlet lips. Miss Jansen from Hollywood had never seen Laa-Laa. She saw the terror in her husband's face, and recognized the enemy.

She remained petrified in the hallway. She felt a strange heat—as if the air had suddenly run out, as if she were standing next to a flaming stove in the dead of summer. Sweat ran from her scalp onto her face and down her chin. She took off her lambskin coat, but her dress was stuck to her, and her shoes had become small tubs of water.

Cyrus the Magnificent went up to Laa-Laa and stood so close to her that their foreheads almost touched. He raised a hand to touch her. She closed her eyes. He was about to kiss them, but then he stopped.

Abruptly, he left the room. He did not even see Miss Jansen as he walked by her. Behind him, Laa-Laa remained immobile, shocked from the rejection she never thought possible, and when at last she had gathered her strength enough to leave, her face had lost its beauty. She marched slowly past Miss Jansen, opened the door, and stepped out. It was cold. Laa-Laa shivered in her summer dress.

In the days and weeks that followed the encounter with Laa-Laa, Cyrus the Magnificent became ill and impatient. He stayed in the house all the time, as if afraid to step out and find Laa-Laa on the street, as if certain he would not have the power to resist her a second time. The morning of his scheduled departure for America, he sent for his family to come to the house and say farewell. He hugged his brothers and sisters, everyone's children. He cried on Peacock's shoulder. Then he sat in a taxi next to his American wife, rode away to the airport, and never even looked down to see his home and his country fade under the wings of the airplane. The year was 1965—the beginning of Iran's decade of glory— but Cyrus the Magnificent knew he would never come back.

Besharat the Bastard
became rich in the oil boom— so rich he hired six accountants just to keep track of his income. He had started by selling imported cigarettes, but after Mossadeq, he expanded into household electronics, automobiles, and industrial machinery. For everything he sold, the market in Iran was vast and voracious. Besharat the Bastard occupied a twelve-story building as his headquarters, kept three hundred families on his payroll, bribed countless officials, and reserved an entire dock at Iran's southern customs just for his products. Still, every night when he left the office, sitting in the back of his chauffeur-driven Mercedes with the tigerskin rugs, Besharat the Bastard prayed aloud he would die that night in his sleep.

In 1953, Yasmine had returned home and begun to fight once again with Naiima. She never won, but she managed to poison the house with her anger, and in the end she deprived Besharat of any pleasure his children may have brought to him. They grew up in an atmosphere of enmity and intrigue—objects of everyone's rivalries, witnesses to everyone's cruelty. The girls married as soon as they could. The boys stayed—Naiima made them stay—but they drew away from the two women, cut themselves off from their father, and bore his name in shame. Yasmine watched them, clenched her jaws in anger, and, one by one, lost her teeth— so that by the age of forty—this woman who had embarrassed men with her beauty was toothless and old.

Naiima, on her part, swallowed her hatred and became fat—so bloated she could no longer climb up and down the steps of the house on Palace Street. She served Besharat with everlasting devotion, obeyed his every wish, accepted his every insult. She observed the rites of purity as religiously as in the past, lay in his bed even as he belittled her. Up to the time of her menopause she tried to become pregnant— drinking potions and buying spells, even visiting the Russian hospital without asking permission from Besharat the Bastard.

Yasmine found out about the visits to the hospital. She tried to betray Naiima, told Besharat she had heard Naiima talking on the phone with doctors, had seen her leave early in the morning just after her husband stepped out of the house, and come back in the afternoon, drained and pale and full of tears. Besharat the Bastard believed Yasmine, but he did not become angry. He felt pity for Naiima, and called her to his room that night and told her it was over, that he had accepted her as she was: a woman, though she could not have children; a friend, though she lied to him; a wife, though she had destroyed his passion for Yasmine. They had grown old together. She was his lover and his warden.

But of all the tragedies of his life, Besharat the Bastard suffered most from the dust: it had begun to attack him first in the house on the Avenue of the Tulips, and every year it had become thicker and more pervasive. It lingered in every corner and on every shelf, in the fringes of all the rugs, in the folds of the drapery, between the sheets. The maids cleaned morning and night, but the house was always dirty. They left the furniture perfectly arranged, and came back to find it in disarray. They swept the floors, and saw grime return as soon as they put away their brooms. Naiima yelled at the maids, and Besharat screamed at his mother, but no one could chase away the dust. Yasmine washed herself four times a day—standing naked in her bathroom, where she rubbed her skin with a wet sponge—but the moment she stepped out, she tasted grit between her teeth again.

"It's from the street," Naiima declared. The Avenue of the Tulips had become crowded with heavy pedestrian traffic, vendors and beggars, and increasing numbers of cars. Tehran had grown northward, and the houses in Besharat's neighborhood were replaced by stores and garages and cabarets. In Besharat's house, flowers refused to bloom, trees never grew, and the statues he had once commissioned with such pride were pitted and crumbling. The pools were filled with moss, and all the poison in the world would not kill the frogs. Besharat the Bastard moved, but the dust followed him.

On Palace Street, his neighbors lived in immaculate rooms and bathed in sparkling pools, but every time Besharat opened a faucet, water poured out gray. In Vanak, Blue-Eyed Lotfi raised orchids and exotic plants in his garden, while Besharat the Bastard fired one gardener after another, and never managed to grow a twig. Even as he moved to the very north of Tehran, to Zafaraniyeh, he found the windows so clouded by dust that the house was in permanent darkness.

Terrified of the entropy he could not stop, lost in the bitterness he could not overcome, Besharat the Bastard retired in 1965, and never came out in public again. He closed the doors of his house on visitors, shut the windows on the dust, and sat alone at the table where, years ago, the Boys' Mother had come begging for food.

Nargess the Washing-Woman
had come to Tehran in the early years of the 1960s. She had come with her husband, who was a bricklayer, and with their three young sons. In Tehran she gave birth to a fourth and last boy that she named Mehr-Allah—God's love—because she had been close to forty when he was conceived, and she believed he was a miracle.

Nargess the Washing-Woman had set out for Tehran with great expectations. She would put her husband to work, and send her sons to clerical school. She would buy a house, become rich, hire maids to wash
her
clothes for a change. She would stop working, sit in the sun every day and bask in the world's envy. Instead, Nargess the Washing-Woman was forced to live in the Pit, in an abandoned hovel that had once belonged to a Jew. From the moment she arrived until she left the Pit twenty years later, Nargess the Washing-Woman was convinced she would burn in hell for the crime of living in a house once inhabited by infidels. The walls, she believed, were infected with the odor of Jews. The floor was soiled no matter how often it was scrubbed. The air was cursed, and it was all the Shah's fault.

She blamed the Shah for not making her rich enough to live elsewhere, blamed his father for letting Jews out of the ghetto and allowing Muslims to replace them. It was true that her life had improved in Tehran. But there were others from her background who had become rich beyond reason: there was a shepherd who now owned factories, a truck-driver who was head of Iran's television. There were Jews—
Jews
—who lived in the hills of Shemiran, in homes with cast-iron gates and seven-car garages, while God-fearing Muslims worked for them and remained invisible.

Nargess the Washing-Woman was convinced that the Shah had set out to destroy the institution of Islam. It was not only what he did for the Jews—allowing them to become rich, send money made in Iran, by the sweat of Iranians, abroad to Israel where it supported the Zionist empire that was bent on destroying Islam. It was not his offensive treatment of the clergy, or simply the fact that he lived a corrupt and unholy life—gambling in foreign casinos or in his palace, sleeping with infidel women when he went on skiing vacations to France. It was not just the shameful manner in which he allowed his sister, Ashraf, to conduct herself— changing husbands like underwear, whoring around with every young boy she could get her hands on, and later rewarding the good ones with American Corvettes, taking over every profitable business in the country, and all the while boasting of her "humanitarian efforts on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden." It was not even that he allowed the importation of washing machines—pieces of metal, Nargess had been told by her sons, that replaced people in the task of cleaning clothes. She had not seen the machines, and she could not imagine they were real. The Shah, Nargess believed, had transgressed much further and more irreversibly than that: he had allowed television.

Nargess the Washing-Woman had seen television when she first came to Tehran—before she learned that it was unholy—and she had been so intrigued by the invention, she had actually stood and watched the man who sat inside the box talking at her. Then all of a sudden she had realized she was unveiled—there in the middle of the living room of the house where she had been washing clothes—that her hair was exposed and her sleeves were rolled up, showing the flesh of her arms, and then she had screamed and run away and wept the whole night for her tarnished honor.

Her husband had forbidden her to work in the house with the television set, but everywhere else, Nargess would soon discover, the same problem persisted. The other maids confirmed her suspicions:

"The man in the box," they said, "looks at you like a dog in heat."

Nargess the Washing-Woman never laid eyes on another television set again, but she did learn later on, when even believing Muslims had been charmed into allowing evil-eyed strangers into their privacy, that the Shah had put unveiled women into television boxes and in everyone's home.

In almost every house she worked, Nargess the Washing-Woman ran into Peacock. She had noticed Peacock first at the Pit—this old, old woman with the crumpled skin and the hardened joints, dressed in all the colors of the devil, as she had stood one early dawn in the street outside Nargess's house. Nargess the Washing-Woman had not known many Jews in her life, but she recognized them all by their smell.

"Get lost, you old bitch," she had screamed at Peacock through the half-open door of the courtyard where she sat to have tea with her sons. Later that morning, washing clothes in a house at Shemiran, she had looked up and seen Peacock walk past her in the yard.

"God help me," she had exclaimed. "That thing is a ghost."

She saw Peacock in other homes, on the street, back in the Pit. She asked the other maids. They confirmed that Peacock was a Jew, that she worked for the Shah and his relatives, that she owned enormous wealth.

"In her house at Niavaran," they told Nargess, "she has a trunkful of jewels she doesn't even lock."