Cry of the Peacock: A Novel Read Online Free

into a bag on the ground and took out a lamb's stomach—white, slithery, glistening with moisture. He pulled the stomach over Esther's shaved head. Then he lifted her by the waist and placed her on the back of a mule.
    He guided the mule out of the square. The crowd stepped back reluctantly. At the end of the street that led away from the square, Parvaneh the Professional Mourner made her way toward them. For thirty-seven years she had been married to a man who dragged himself on two stumps that had never grown into legs. She came forward, looking into Esther's face, the corners of her mouth twitching with disdain, and spat at Esther.
    "7 remained chaste."
    All of that day, David the Butcher's son paraded Esther in Juyy Bar. He banged a wooden stick on the outside of a tin can and sang as he walked.
    "Come one, come all, and see the whore of Juyy Bar."
    His voice became hoarse and his arms ached and his feet grew blistered, but still he went on. Long into the night, the punishment completed, he stopped. He untied Esther's hands and gave her back her chador.
    “Go," he said without looking at her.
    For a long time after she had left Juyy Bar, Esther the Soothsayer had the sensation of traveling through the familiar. Once or twice she even turned around to look back at the ghetto. Behind her, Juyy Bar shrank under the sun, its gates and many arched roofs getting smaller as Esther walked away from them into the city that had been the pride of Persia for so many centuries.
    But here, too, the houses were dirty and crowded and half-ruined. The streets were narrow and dark, the children hungry and haggard. The old men who sat smoking opium on their doorsteps were yellow-skinned and toothless, their eyes eaten by trachoma, their faces marked by the smallpox that had plagued their childhoods.
    She came to a long and very narrow street with quiet houses where the doors were closed and the air was heavy with an uneasy silence. There were no people here, no one walking on the street, no children playing. The doors were all painted the same faded gray. From behind some of them Esther thought she heard the hushed whispers of women and the muffled cries of infants. She stopped, overcome by the fear she had carried from Juyy Bar, the instinctive warning of a danger she could not identify: beyond the veil of silence that spread over the street and its houses, she heard the rhythmic, metallic sound of camel bells approaching.
    Suddenly she realized there were eyes staring at her, peering through the doors on both sides of the alley. She imagined faces watching her, imagined she heard the sound of breathing and whispers. She had come to the Castle.
    This was the street where all of Esfahan's prostitutes lived with their “keepers" and their many bastard children. They stayed inside most of the time, waiting, with their faces veiled and their bodies covered, for night to fall and Muslim men hiding in the darkness to call on them. The men would slip through unmarked doors and into small rooms where they waited, along with a dozen others, for their turn. One by one they would crawl into beds that smelled of sweat and dirt and the bodies of other men. They took from the women's bodies their many diseases and left in them the seeds of children who would grow up fatherless, doomed to watch their mothers lie with strangers every night until the boys were old enough to leave home, and the girls ripe enough to be sold as virgins.
    But the Castle was forbidden to Jewish men. The prostitute who held a Jew's body with her own would forever become soiled, and in turn contaminate the Muslims who came to her afterward. Thick Pissing Isaac had told Esther about the Castle. Years ago a Jewish man had taken off the yellow patch on his robe and slept with a prostitute here. His body had not betrayed him, for Muslims, like Jews, circumcised their boys. But in the euphoria of his first experience with love he had forgotten himself, and dared to speak to the