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

Mirza realized that greatness and wealth would forever evade him.
    "It is not my mind that fails me," he raged in the loneliness of his laboratory late at night when he faced yet another unyielding formula, "it is my fortune. I am not blessed enough."
    At first he prayed to God.
    "Give me a clue, a single hint," he would plead. "Show me one answer for everything that you have denied me."
    Then he cursed all that was holy, and declared war on the heavens and the earth.
    "I damn your pettiness," he screamed. "I spit on your stinginess. I curse your jealousy that keeps you from giving to me that which would make me greater than yourself."
    He noticed that people were avoiding him in favor of more ignorant but less threatening doctors. He was enraged—that anyone dared doubt his work or question his methods; that they would allow their fears and their ignorance to stand in the way of "science," and revert to old and useless ways of other doctors for fear of Mullah Mirza's progressive—and therefore, he admitted, risky—methods; that they would desert him now —now that he was on the brink of failure and about to lose hope.
    One morning he climbed upstairs into the butcher's shop and called David's customers to attention. He stood there in his long black robe and his torn canvas shoes—the customers staring at him—fixed his eyes on the bloody knife that David held in his hand, and made a simple announcement:
    “Let it be known that Mullah Mirza is the master physician of this damned ghetto," he said. "From now on anyone who seeks the advice of a doctor other than me will be cursed straight into his grave."
    No one said a word. Mullah Mirza had betrayed his weakness. He was desperate, at last aware of his limitations.
    Years went by, and Mullah Mirza did not recover from that moment in David the Butcher's shop. Slowly he abandoned his experiments and stopped reading his books. After a while he even found himself preoccupied with the same concerns as ordinary people. He suffered his rheumatism, his ulcers. His eyes failed him. He was lonely, disappointed, poor. He had believed he could make a miracle—he could not live with the truth of his failure. He was about to give up hope, when Thick Pissing Isaac died and Yehuda the Just sealed the teahouse shut; since Noah was not Isaac's child, the rabbi said, he could not inherit the property. Fifteen years old and alone, Noah the Gold went looking for work.
    One early morning in the summer of 1811, he knocked on Mullah Mirza's door and offered his services to the "Great Master." He had come to work, he said, in return for food.
    Mullah Mirza stared at the boy on his doorstep that day, and, like Mama the Midwife a decade and a half earlier, thought he had been sent an angel. He dragged Noah into the lab, put him before a pot of his most advanced formula, and gave him a piece of rusted metal.
    "Make gold," he commanded like God. "Turn the world into gold."
    In Mullah Mirza's laboratory the walls shone. The floor was paved with gold. The chests were stuffed, the ceiling was about to drop from the weight of the treasure that hung from it. Every day Mullah Mirza brought in new loads of tin and metal for Noah to make gold. Every day he laughed like a madman and embraced Noah in gratitude.
    "At last," he cried. "At last."
    Noah the Gold looked at the piles of junk about him and gasped at the Mirza's madness.
    "But it's just like before," he insisted in vain. Afraid that the Jews would come to steal his wealth, Mullah Mirza had put eleven locks on the basement door, and refused to let Noah out even for an hour. He wanted to keep the discovery a secret, to duplicate the formula, learn Noah's method.
    "You work for me," he warned Noah every day. "You make gold only for me."
    He bought out all the tinsmiths, emptied his neighbor's basements. He raided strangers' kitchens, fought the owners, took away cooking utensils and gardening tools. The Jews had never seen Mullah Mirza so excited. When