Cry of the Peacock: A Novel

CRY OF THE PEACOCK

GINA BARKHORDAR NAHAI

CROWN PUBLISHERS INC., NEW YORK

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Published by Crown Publishers, Inc.,

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New York, New York 10022.

Member of the Crown Publishing Group..

CROWN is a trademark of Crown Publishers, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barkhordar Nahai, Gina.

Cry of the peacock / Gina Barkhordar Nahai.

p. cm.

1. Jews—Iran—History—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3552. A6713C79 1991

813'.54—dc20                                                        90-20311

CIP

ISBN 0-517-57479-9

Book Design by Shari de Miskey

10 987654321

First Edition

Fo my
parents,

who gave mi courage

My husband, who said J should write

My children,

who have not seen the Persian sky

For the memory of my grandmother,

H
eshmat Nik-Fahm Meraj,

Who died
in
America dreaming of Jran

Prologue

1982

In the women's prison
where the Guards had taken Peacock, six people slept in a cell designed for one. They sat on the floor, occupying every rat-infested inch, blindfolded and handcuffed for weeks in a row until they developed an infection and were executed or released. They ate twice a day—bread and walnuts thrown before them on the floor that was soiled with feces. Every morning the Guards took a number of prisoners outside before a firing squad. They removed the prisoners' blindfolds and lined them up against a concrete wall thickened with blood. They shot them—sometimes with real bullets, sometimes with blanks.

The mullahs used fake executions to extract a confession, or raise the amount of bribe each prisoner would offer for his release. The regime of God was avaricious and without mercy. It often arrested people not for any crimes they may have committed in the past, but for the single purpose of forcing them to pay the money they had hidden away or invested abroad. When all the money had been paid and all the confessions were made, the guns would be loaded and the prisoner would fall.

Blindfolded and bound in her cell, Peacock could hear the executions and count the number of prisoners who came back alive. She had been in jail for three weeks, and still no one had decided her fate. She had arrived one summer afternoon surrounded by Guards, sitting in the back of a military jeep with her face unveiled and her hair uncovered. She had sat there in her clothes that shocked the eye and defied all Islamic codes, in layers of bright chiffon and fiery silk, yellow scarves and sequined shirts and a gold-embroidered belt above a crushed velvet skirt.

She wore white schoolgirl stockings and satin shoes decorated with rhinestones and beads, a dozen gold bracelets, countless strands of pearls, rings on every finger. Her pockets were stuffed with gold and precious stones. In her shoes she had thousand-rial bills. Still, it was not her clothes that so shocked the mullahs, it was her age. Peacock the Jew was so old, they said, she remembered God when he was a child.

The mullahs had prisoners as young as six, and as old as ninety. They arrested women who had tried to stage a counterrevolution, and those who had worn nail polish and makeup. They imprisoned communists and nationalists, Jews and Baha'is, and, most of all, Muslims who refused to abide by the mullahs' rules. But they had never arrested someone as old as Peacock, and they were at a loss as to what to do with her.

The Guards took her into a detention cell. A woman in a full-length dress with long sleeves, and wearing a scarf to hide her hair, strip-searched Peacock and took all her jewels and money. She sent Peacock for interrogation.

''How old are you?” a young mullah asked Peacock without looking at her.

She stared at him.

"Answer!” he commanded.

He still had not looked at her.

"How old are you?"

"I was born the year of the Plague."

He looked up.

"What
plague?"

He knew nothing of the past.

"What
plague?" He stood up, breathing on her.

"Answer." He smelled of sweat and American whiskey.

I was born the year of the Plague,
Peacock wanted to say,
and raised in a cave underground, with lice crawling the

walls and scorpions in the dark and worms in every gulp of water I drank.

"What
plague?”

The Guards took her into a cell. Weeks went by. She listened to executions every day. Her cellmates asked her the same questions.

"How
old
are you?"

The woman to Peacock's right was a Communist who said she believed in genocide. The one to her left was a housewife who never knew why she was arrested. Mehr-Allah the Guard, who stood in the corridor outside, was a father who had sent his children to war only because he believed they would die and go to heaven.

"Peacock!" he cried one morning as bullets exploded in the courtyard. He had come for her. They had decided her fate.

"Peacock!" he cried again, and she stumbled to her feet. The door opened. Mehr-Allah the Guard removed Peacock's blindfold. Light burned through to the back of her head. She stood up, dizzy, and held on to the wall for balance. When she could see through the light, she realized that Mehr-Allah was scrutinizing her.

"So how old
were
you?" he asked as if her life were over.

Peacock let go of the wall.

"I am a hundred and sixteen years old," she said, "and still, I intend to live."

Inside the cell on the floor, the Communist who said she believed in genocide wet her pants with laughter.

1796

Esther the Soothsayer
was tall and wideshouldered, her skin dark and shiny as the oil she rubbed on her stomach and hands to make them soft. Her eyes, black as the waters of the Gulf, were always dusted with a glossy powder made of silver nitrate. Her lips were thick, and red like the heart of a young bird. Her hair was long and wild and as dark as her eyes, her voice deep and throbbing and filled with mystery.

She had been born in the south, in the port city of Bandar 'Abbas, on the Persian Gulf. Like many Jewish women in the area, she had grown up working as a harem maid to the wives of wealthy Arab and Persian men. She sewed the women's clothes, braided their hair, delivered them of their children. And she practiced sorcery and witchcraft.

She said that she could look in the palm of a newborn child and tell of its destiny, make potions and write spells that made barren women pregnant, kept fear out of the hearts of old men, returned husbands gone astray. She went around collecting tools—pieces of cloth, skeletons of animals, lizards' and cats' tails, and strands of hair from dead virgins. She kept them all together in a locked chest for the day when one of her ladies came to her asking to poison a rival wife, or rot an in-law with smallpox.

''I bring you magic and good fortune and the knowledge of the dead," she whispered to the ladies of the harem in the Muslim accent she had learned to substitute for her own ghetto language.

"I can reach into your past, unveil the secrets of your sorrow. I know your sins and your longings. I can make your wishes come true."

Esther the Soothsayer could see the future in her dreams.

Long ago, when she was still a child, she had foretold the death of sailors lost in the furious waters of the Persian Gulf. Later, before the first British ships had ever docked at Bandar 'Abbas, she had spent entire nights describing them to the women of the harem.

“They will come floating across the Gulf—giant mountains of wood—and aboard them will be men with eyes the color of the sea and skin that glistens like the moon."

Breathless, the women had listened to her tales of the future.

“The men will leave the ships and come into the city. They will seek our women, give them children with mist in their eyes and faraway mountains in their dreams. They will rob the rich of their wealth and the poor of their honor. But in return they will leave us with a gift far more precious than what they took: the knowledge," her voice had throbbed inside the harem walls, “of the world beyond."

She knew more than she said—tales so strange and unlikely that no one would have believed them, secrets so dark and frightening she held them to herself. She knew how to read people's eyes, walk into their dreams when they were asleep, and probe their minds.

But with all of her powers, Esther the Soothsayer was trapped in a life of loneliness and bondage. She was a Jew, born of a mother who had worked and died in the service of the Sheikh's family, inherited by him and doomed to spend her youth and desire as a slave without a face, until she was too old to work and they sent her back to die in the ghetto outside Bandar 'Abbas. She could never marry: no one but a Jew would marry her; no Jew would marry a girl who had been raised in a harem. She could have no children, no home of her own, no freedom.

Every night in the harem, she watched the wives paint their faces and color their lips, perfume their skin, wait for their husband to come and choose from among them. Afterward she lay in bed and imagined the wife in the folds of the Sheikh's arms, their bodies clinging like snakes, the sound of their breath marking the passage of time. She thought of the world outside the harem, outside Bandar 'Abbas. She thought of places she had seen in her dreams. She was fifteen years old and her flesh burned with the call of desire.

She began to leave the harem at night. She would wait till the wives had sunk into their beds and the eunuchs were asleep. Then she crept out across the vast, dry gardens of the Sheikh's house into the streets of Bandar 'Abbas. She wore a thin white veil reserved for Muslim women, took off the patch of yellow cloth that all Jews sewed on their clothes. She went to the harbor, breathing the air that smelled of burnt wood and the cries of fishermen lost in the waves, and watched the shadows of fishing boats and palm trees, as transparent as ghosts, reflected on the dark waters. She waited, her body moist with the unrelenting heat of the south, her hair damp and salty, her ears scratching with the sound of rats' feet running up and down trees. Sometimes a man would approach her.

''Take me away." She would smile at him with eyes darker than the night. "Love me till I'm old."

He would take her to his wooden shack by the sea and lay her naked on his rug. Esther the Soothsayer would close her eyes and pray for love. She smelled the vodka in her lover's sweat, the fear of the sea on his breath. At dawn she walked back with him to the harbor and watched him row slowly toward the sharks.

She went back every night, waiting, hoping for the man who would open his heart and feel her warmth, hold her in the morning and ask that she stay. She used all of her powers to convince the men, wrote spells and hid them in their hair, hung talismans above their beds. She walked into their dreams when they slept, conjured up the love they would never feel for her on their own. But all of the spells failed and all of her powers came short and still, Esther the Soothsayer was alone.

For three years she looked in Bandar 'Abbas. In the end, she came back empty-handed and more alone. One night she cried and prayed to the darkness for escape: “Save me," she asked the ghosts she knew so well. “Help me change my fate."

She fell asleep and dreamt of a land she had never before seen or heard of: a world of calm and plenty, a place where men loomed bigger than God, and gold blossomed in every field. She saw a palace, a structure built entirely of glass, where a king slept unafraid of the daggers of assassins. She saw men who commanded the power of God; women who walked the earth with pride; money and jewels and beauty such as she had never dared imagine.

“I will go there," she swore to the darkness. "I will walk there and never stop till I die."