Cry of the Peacock: A Novel by Gina nahai Read Free Book Online Page A

home, rented the basement of David the Butcher's shop on credit, and launched his career as a scientist.
    From that time on, Juyy Bar had watched Mullah Mirza become slowly consumed by his obsession. He locked himself forever in the basement, poring over steaming pots, studying Razi's book until he had learned every line by memory, repeating every failed experiment until he had run out of metals and fuel and acid. Then suddenly he would resurface again. David the Butcher would approach him and ask for his rent: Mullah Mirza had not paid a penny since the day he first occupied the basement.
    “Get away from me," he would attack David with unbeatable righteousness. "How dare you —how Dare you — speak of money when I am about to re-create the world!"
    For a while he would rummage through the antique shops of Esfahan in search of books by other alchemists. He intimidated shopkeepers and housewives into "donating" the ingredients he needed for his experiments, traveled to distant cities and villages where he had heard other scientists were engaged in similar pursuits. Then he rushed back to the basement—armed, he thought, with decisive knowledge—and started again.
    Over time his body began to exhibit signs of exhaustion. His hands became covered with warts and lesions and scars. The mud walls of his basement laboratory baked with the heat and were permeated with the smell of his potions, and the metal safe he had built became stuffed with tiny pieces of paper on which he furiously scribbled his findings. He guarded the safe jealously, always fearing that a rival scientist would try to steal his secrets, accusing people who could not read of spying on him while he wrote notes to himself. Once, when the roof of the basement crumbled under David the Butcher's feet, bringing him down with a pile of rubble into the laboratory, Mullah Mirza greeted him with a sharp skewer aimed at his eyes.
    "Thief!" he screamed. "I will drive this metal through your eyeballs and feed them to the dogs before I let you take my safe."
    From then on, Mullah Mirza slept with one hand chained to the safe.
    He was so engrossed in his quest for gold that he missed the time he should have married. He worked through his adolescence, his youth, his parents' death. He never paid the butcher any rent. He never bought himself a new pair of canvas shoes or a new shirt. People went to him for advice and medical treatment, trusting that he had access to cures unknown to ordinary doctors, intrigued by his extravagant ways, his grand designs, the confidence with which he pronounced himself "master of my environment, conqueror of earthly ills."
    The Mirza in turn had never disappointed an audience. He charged exorbitant sums and delivered exotic, spectacular cures designed more to display his knowledge than to relieve the patient of his suffering. When he made a house call, people in the neighborhood dropped what they had to do and came to watch the old master at work. He spent all his income on books and metal, and yet he was not content. In all the years of his suffering, Mullah Mirza knew, he had come no closer to creating gold than when he first started.
    As he grew older and more frustrated in his quest, Mullah Mirza's treatments became increasingly unorthodox. He no longer limited himself to harmless displays of extravagance—to curing diarrhea with bubbling potions that resuited in terminal constipation, or inserting a long metal rod through the patient's throat into his stomach so as to "rearrange his insides." Now he tested new formulas that he had conceived during torturous nights of experimentation, proposed cruel and unheard-of operations that had left at least three of his patients permanently handicapped, or simply gave himself to displays of such burning rage while treating a simple fracture that his hand became shaky, his mind fogged, and his patient temporarily frightened out of his pain.
    Still, though he would never accept it openly, Mullah