Cry of the Peacock: A Novel Read Free Page A

could not stop himself. He loved Esther, loved her smell, the echo of her voice. He wanted her and wanted the son she had promised him and he would have been content if only the ghetto had let him. But after a few weeks he could not help looking at Esther differently. He went to see Yehuda the Just.
    "You must wait before you judge," the rabbi advised. He was trying to appear calm, but his eyes, Isaac would remember later, gleamed with excitement. "Count the weeks of your wife's pregnancy and mark the day she delivers. If she comes short of nine months and nine days, she is carrying a bastard. Then come see me and we will return just punishment."
    A month went by, then another. Every night when he lay down, Thick Pissing Isaac put his hands on his wife's stomach and prayed that the child she carried was his. Then he went to sleep, leaving Esther terrified, awake, trapped. She knew the rumors about herself and the child. She knew the fate of adulterous wives. She had named her son Noah. She begged him to wait a full nine months before he claimed his place in the world.
    But in the seventh month of their marriage, Esther the Soothsayer woke up one night to find her bed full of blood. She ran to the basement and locked the door.
    She endured the labor alone, without a whisper, and for three days she did not leave the basement. She sat crouched above a tray full of ashes, dug her nails into the hard ground, and vomited with the force of every contraction until all the darkness had been jolted out of her and all her fears were purged and she felt nothing but the warmth of the child sliding out between her thighs.
    Esther the Soothsayer wrapped her son in her chador, then buried the placenta. Outside, Yehuda the Just waited. She opened the basement door and walked toward her fate.
    They had come since dawn, standing in huddles around the main square, in the doorways of houses and shops along the street, on top of the roofs overlooking the square. An hour before noon the heat became nauseating. Sweating under their black chadors and thick veils, women pressed their children against themselves and sighed expectantly. Men stood together, spitting on the ground every once in a while as they talked to one another about unrelated things. Their attention was elsewhere, their minds preoccupied with the anticipation of the event they had come to watch. Not since the death of Sabyah the Adulteress fifty years ago had a woman been punished in Juyy Bar.
    At noon the wailing sound of the Muslim namaz rose from the minarets of Esfahan. Minutes later they brought Esther the Soothsayer—her face unveiled, her body uncovered, her legs bare. A woman who had lost her honor, Rabbi Yehuda the Just had ordained, must not appear in honest garb.
    She walked to the center of the square and sat on the ground, crossing her legs under her skirt so as to cover them. She was still pale from the birth, bleeding so hard she had to keep herself wrapped in layers of cloth. Her breasts secreted a clear liquid that was bitter and tangy and without nutrition. The child she had borne—Noah the Gold—had to be nursed by strangers. Esther the Soothsayer had lost the will to fight, lost even the memory of what she had come to
    Esfahan to seek. Her eyes were devoid of fire, her voice was no longer full of echoes.
    Yehuda the Just allowed for an appropriate interval, then made his own entrance. In spite of the heat, he wore a long black coat, a white shirt buttoned to the top, a black hat. His red hair glowed in the sun and made his freckled skin look even more jaundiced. He stopped next to Esther the Soothsayer, looked at the audience, drew a breath. This was, he knew, his greatest moment.
    He began his sermon.
    “It is said in the Torah that an evil woman is like a snake," he started calmly, then turned away from the audience to face Esther herself. "She poisons the lives of her husband and children, and casts her seeds for generations after she is gone—so that the