Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (40 page)

Nargess the Washing-Woman became fascinated with Peacock. She could not help thinking of the jewels in the open trunk, serving no purpose, stolen—Nargess assumed—from helpless believers like herself. She could not help her anger every time she saw Peacock in the Pit, walking around in her masquerade clothes with the glaring colors and the rows of gold, smiling at the Muslims who knew her from the street, who went to her—this Jew whose life, some mullahs still claimed, was worth less than a dog's—asking her to use her influence in their favor, speak to her friend, the wife of the Minister of Housing, to help place their name on a waiting list for apartments, or to call the Minister of the Interior and try to get him to issue a telephone after the applicants had waited four years.

The next time Peacock came to the Pit, Nargess the Washing-Woman stopped her.

“What do you want here?" she asked Peacock outside her house. “Why do you come here?"

“I used to live in this house." Peacock smiled with her toothless gums. “I lived in the same room you live in. I come back so I won't forget."

Nargess the Washing-Woman was a good Muslim and an honest maid. But in the face of all the riches she saw, she could no longer accept her own poverty or justify another's wealth. One morning she followed Peacock out of the Pit, and all the way up to her house in Niavaran. She waited outside till Peacock had had her tea and left for work. Then she forced the lock on the door and went inside.

The house was small, built in a European style, without a courtyard. There was a garden in front, where Peacock grew mint and jasmine, a long and narrow hallway covered with a Persian rug, a small kitchen empty but for a gas stove and a refrigerator. There were two bedrooms—one bare, the other decorated only with a bed and a radio. Next to the bed, there was a wooden chest without a lock.

"There!" Nargess the Washing-Woman felt her heart about to burst. She grabbed the top of the chest, and flung it open.

She stared at the contents. She reached inside, felt with her hands what her eyes did not believe. She picked up a fistful, held it to the light, then grabbed more. She emptied the trunk, but still she remained baffled.

There were clothes, tattered and worthless and old— men's trousers and shirts and coats, a dozen hats, a few handkerchiefs. There was a bottle of perfume never opened, silk scarves that came apart at the touch, sheer stockings still wrapped, a white linen gown. There were combs with blue enameled handles, a small vinyl record with the picture of a gigantic white dome in the center, bottles of nail polish, powder, and a yellow wind-up bird that sang in a cage. There were old schoolbooks and pictures of women in outdated clothes, lace veils and silver brushes, music boxes that whispered soft, foreign tunes, china dolls with long painted lashes, and mirrors so beautiful they could lie.

Nargess the Washing-Woman stared at the junk before her and, for the first time in her life, was ashamed of her own hatred.

Tehran's days
were long and noisy and filled with the sounds of traffic. There was no dawn, no moment of beauty and peace when darkness faded and the sun came up and the air, as in Esfahan, emitted the scent of blossoming jasmine. In Tehran the sun was brutal and impatient and without grace. Night erupted into daylight, and then there was no refuge from the noise and the crowds and the mad rush of lives in hot pursuit. Hours passed and still the day was young. The crowd thickened on the streets, and cars were ensnared in the never-ending congestion. The shops did not close until midnight. Phone lines were always jammed. Peddlers harassed every household. Beggars pulled on the sleeves of pedestrians, only to curse them if the offering was small. Children climbed onto the windshields of cars and begged to sell American cigarettes. Then at last it was dark, but the streets still buzzed, and the traffic remained knotted. People slept from exhaustion only to awaken with a start, and realize it was day again.

Cyrus the Magnificent wrote urgent letters from Hollywood:

“You must leave Iran," he pleaded with Heshmat and Peacock. “Sooner or later the Shah is going to fall. You must leave before the mullahs take over."

He had never forgotten the incident with the movies: one mullah's ban against films having led to a city-wide opposition that would take years to undo. It was then, Cyrus the Magnificent would later realize, that he had come to understand the awesome power of the clergy in Iran: one mullah's claim that watching movies would lead to death— baseless as it seemed to all the graduates of Tehran University's Faculty of Medicine—had indeed come true before the eyes of the skeptics gathered that afternoon at the theater on the Avenue of the Tulips. Cyrus the Magnificent remembered standing there that afternoon in the alley, caught in the uproar that erupted as soon as word of the death had spread among the crowd, and the moment someone called, "Dead man! Dead man in the theater!" the entire southern part of Tehran had boiled to life. A mob had attacked the theater, raised the corpse—already stiff in the chair—above their heads, and walked the length of the Avenue of the Tulips, screaming, "Dead man in the theater!"

After that, it was as if an ill wind had begun to blow inside Cyrus's head, nudging him at first, making him hot and ill at ease and always seeking respite. The air in Tehran had begun to feel heavy in his lungs. The night had lost its glory. The streets, painted with familiar scenes, had begun to seem overcrowded and ugly. Cyrus the Magnificent was no longer the child he had been when he first dreamed of living in the "Civilized West." Laa-Laa had destroyed his innocence and made him bitter. Hollywood was no longer a child's dream. It had become a safe haven for escape.

It was because of the wind that he had married Miss Jansen from Hollywood—though she was not pretty, or Jewish, and he had no passion for her. It was the wind that had helped him resist Laa-Laa when she came back promising eternal faithfulness. He had left Iran, but even now, as he heard news of the country's astonishing progress and unprecedented accomplishments, Cyrus the Magnificent felt the wind, and could not shake the nauseating smell of corpses in theater chairs.

In 1971 the Shah celebrated twenty-five hundred years of continuous monarchy in Iran. He invited heads of state from sixty-nine nations, received them in royal style at Per-sepolis, and spent $200 million in one week. Meanwhile, in the province of Fars where the celebrations were held, and in neighboring Sistan and Baluchistan, famine took scores of Iranian lives.

From Iraq, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a message in response to the celebrations:

"Anyone who studies the manner in which the Prophet established the government of Islam will realize that Islam came in order to destroy these palaces of tyranny. . . . Are millions of the people's wealth to be spent on these absurd celebrations?"

The message, reproduced by dissident Iranian students in the United States, had also been distributed among believers inside Iran.

In 1973 the Shah led the OPEC oil cartel in a demand for higher prices from the West. ITe spoke of building a petrochemical plant in Iran, becoming independent of the West, producing finished petroleum products in Iran instead of buying them abroad.

At home, he cut off Savak's "donations" to the clergy that kept them from speaking out against the Shah, denounced the mullahs as "medieval black reactionaries," and welcomed Jews, Christians, and Baha'is into ever-higher echelons of public life. He talked of uprooting the bazaars, building highways through the old city centers, eradicating "worm-ridden shops" to replace them with supermarkets. He even replaced Iran's Islamic calendar with a new Persian one. He was the Light of the Aryan Race, Iran's political as well as spiritual leader.

Cyrus the Magnificent read a quote from His Majesty in
The Guardian
: "It is true hegemony that We have in Our country. Everyone is behind their monarch, with their souls, and their hearts."

Afterward,
Peacock would remember, everyone said that the Shah should have acted differently. He should have known the ills of his nation and responded before it was too late. He should have taken the threats against his regime more seriously, and eliminated the opposition before it had gained momentum. He should have been more fair, less corrupt, more democratic, less eager to westernize Iran. Afterward, everyone looked back and saw the footprints of doom, but up to the days and weeks before the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty, few Iranians believed its demise possible.

In 1977, Jimmy Carter was elected to the United States presidency on a ticket of democracy and human rights. He reviewed Iran's human-rights record and found reports of repression and torture. The repression had been done with the direct consent and clear support of the United States and the West. The torture had been institutionalized under the aegis of the American CIA. Now, suddenly, Carter asked the Shah to loosen his grip upon his nation and restore his subjects' human rights.

Muhammad Reza Shah had never liked Carter. He did not believe the man capable of understanding the principles of government in the Third World. He explained to Carter that he faced a grave danger from the mullahs. He told him about the Russian desire to take over Iran, about the threat of war from Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

''My people,” he said, "do not
want
democracy. They do not
understand
democracy."

The most vital issue, he said, was to modernize as fast as possible. The only way to do so, he maintained, was through dictatorial rule. Later, when Iran had achieved universal literacy and people had gained the tools with which to inform themselves about politics, then the Shah would give them the right to choose.

Carter brought more pressure, and placed the Shah in an impasse: the Shah had ruled Iran singlehandedly for twenty-five years, and knew he could not change the system overnight. But he did not wish to alienate the United States, and he thought—in those mad, feverish years of the late seventies when anything seemed possible—that his throne might withstand the force of opposition, that his people loved him and would fight for him, that his army was loyal. Suddenly, to the horror of his closest friends, the Shah dismantled the barriers to speech and action.

He released a number of political prisoners from jail. He let them publish and tell accounts of the horrors they had suffered, let the press print criticism of his regime and even of the Shah himself. He let the Red Cross into his prisons, and dismissed Hoveyda—his Prime Minister of twelve years and one of his fiercest allies—to replace him with a more liberal-minded man. Through the summer of 1977 he let political organizations form and operate in the open. The nationalists joined the Communists, who joined the Islamic Marxists, all in the quest to overthrow the Shah. Aware of the power of religion, they agreed to use a clergyman as a symbol to unite the people: Ayatollah Khomeini was the obvious choice. Everyone lent support to his name, and let him walk in the forefront of the struggle.

And so the ill wind blew and blew and at last culminated in the tragedy that Cyrus the Magnificent had always expected. In 1977, just when the Shah had begun to discover the true scope of the opposition to his regime, a movie theater filled above capacity burned in Abadan. In it, trapped behind doors that had been locked from outside sometime after the start of the film, were four hundred men and women whose souls were spirited away by the images on the screen. Unaware, the authorities put out the fire and opened the locked doors—releasing into the world hundreds of painted effigies now granted eternal life and given the mission to restore to Iran its long-exiled Prophet.

In January of 1978, Khomeini ordered the bazaars closed down, and sent theology students to march down the streets of Tehran, demanding his return. All through that year, demonstrations continued. Khomeini, it was common knowledge, had become Imam, had achieved sainthood. His profile was etched into the moon, a lock of his hair had been found among the pages of the Qoran.

"It's time to go," Peacock echoed Cyrus the Magnificent the next time she went to see Heshmat. "It's too late for me, but
you
must leave while you still can."

They spoke in private, away from the ears of the servants, who mostly supported the upheaval.

"Pack what you can, and don't ever think you will come back."

The next day the women of Iran—women who had been freed of the veil, given permission to divorce their husbands, granted protection from their fathers, even allowed to vote— these women donned black chadors and marched by the tens of thousands to demand the return of the veil.

"It's the Americans," Heshmat's oldest son fumed as he abandoned home and business for what he insisted would be only a temporary exile. "The Americans want to see the Shah go. He's become too independent, too cocky, and they never like that.
They're
putting the mullahs up to this."

Perhaps, Peacock thought. But all across Iran there were women marching who had
opted
to wear their chadors, who held on to the corners of their veils and chanted Khomeini's name.

The demonstrations grew larger and more violent. The police began to shoot. To mourn the dead, Khomeini called for more demonstrations, and every time, the casualties rose. The Shah's generals were begging for action; the time to stop Khomeini, they said, was now.

But the Shah could not decide.

Drawn and gaunt and already defeated, he called the American and British ambassadors to his palace almost every day. He asked them for directives.

“What am I to do?" he pleaded. “What do your governments want me to do?"

The ambassadors gave him conflicting and unclear advice. The Shah realized that both governments had already dismissed him as a viable leader for Iran, and were searching for allies among the opposition. His generals knelt before him, swore allegiance, and promised they could save the Pahlavi throne in spite of the Americans; all that was needed was to eliminate a few thousand men in charge of the revolution. It was a sacrifice well worth making. Without the Shah, the mullahs or the Communists would kill millions. Iran's enemy, Saddam Hussein, would invade and show no mercy.