Refuge--A Novel

by Dina Nayeri

  When, on the third night (tacos with an unwashed film buff), she realized that she was forgetting details, she created a chart of the boys and scored them on a range of essential qualities: looks, manners, intelligence, drive, size of family (does he have dozens of aunts and uncles waiting for him somewhere, wanting to meet his friends and lovers over rowdy family meals?). Gui scored three standard deviations above the mean and so she threw away the list of others and became his girlfriend. They ate dinners together and took turns sleeping in each other’s dorm rooms, but they both had research papers to write and post-graduation plans to make. What they found in each other was balance: Gui sat with her for hours while she worked. He gave her long hugs without forcing her to ask. His youth displayed itself in his warmth and indiscriminating kindness and he seemed unaware that he needed her protection. At the same time, his sheltered upbringing in New York and Provence promised respite from her own story, her ripped-up roots. She learned that Gui’s parents still lived in the house where his father was born. And they traveled to the same French village every summer.

  Now, after years, she has collected many more details to love. The best thing about Gui is the oblivious way he dances. Big grin, two fists in front of his chest, like a happy teenager, head rolling, eyebrows summoning. Or, when the rhythm eludes him, like an old man trying not to lose his balance while slowly grinding an insect or a cigarette butt under each foot. He doesn’t care—shame is not a concept he knows. This, to Niloo, the architect of at least a dozen new kinds of shame, is superhuman.

  Early in their first attempt at cohabitation, when they had just graduated from Yale and moved to New York, they cooked chicken thighs together. Gui reached for the bottle of green herbs. “Can you please not Provençal everything?” she said.

  “It’s just a bit of tarragon,” he said as he brought the bottle to his nose. “That’s like saying you Persian something just because you add turmeric.”

  “Exactly,” she said, happy that he understood this detail from her history.

  “Exactly,” he hummed, and kissed her cheek, as if he had won the point. He added more bitter green herbs.

  And that’s how they understood each other, in conflicting conclusions drawn from thousands of tiny details that they observed together, all those French and Farsi things, Persian and Provençal things, for the next decade. They built their hybrid world in harmonious hues, bunches of dried lavender in antique copper tumblers tastefully balanced beside the blue Isfahani ostrich egg painted with scenes from the Shahnameh, a long-ago gift from Bahman. What they share is America, the television characters and the jokes and the lunch meats their mothers put in their lunchboxes (Gui’s as a cultural novelty, Niloo’s as a financial necessity).

  At the mention of Baba, Gui’s tone grows soft and resigned, as if confiding a family secret. “Niloo’s father has had trouble getting visas. We saw him in Istanbul last year. He’s a good man.” Dr. Heldring nods in sympathy and this too angers Niloo.

  “You know,” says Gui, reaching for Niloo’s hand across the table. He gives her a playful look, like he’s about to have his revenge for earlier. “In college, I had no idea Niloo had gone through this whole fantastic refugee saga; I thought she was just into vintage clothes and really liked the dining hall mini muffins.” Niloo laughs. She enjoys it when Gui mocks her outright; it makes her seem strong, unlike the way she feels when he’s all sad eyes and folded hands, conjuring images of fathers knocking at border gates for the benefit of some stranger.

  As the evening drifts on, they talk of life in Amsterdam, their work, and the apartment in the Pijp that they’ve recently bought and are now renovating. “It’s a wreck,” says Gui. “The contractors keep extending the finish date.”

  “I tried to tell you. Their estimates don’t correlate with the plans. I did the math,” says Niloo. She’s misplaced hours at the office studying the renovation plans, making small edits, imagining the curtains, the tiles, the wood floors. Sometimes she loses an entire day sitting at her computer with red eyes and slumped shoulders.

  “Okay, Rain Man.” He throws up both hands and turns to Heldring. “My wife is so intense. It’s part of her charm.” He reclaims Niloo’s hand as he speaks.

  “Intense women are the best kind,” says the professor, enjoying their chaos.

  “I’m just trying to prevent waste,” she says. She chews her other thumbnail.

  “She doesn’t like waste,” Gui drones. He glances at her watch, a Seiko she wears every day, though he bought her one from Hermès. He drains his glass, his cheeks flushing. Dr. Heldring clears his throat, eager for more. Gui doesn’t mind—the old man is like a father to him. “Heldring,” he says, “did I ever tell you that the first time Niloo spent the night, she wore polyester pajamas so shiny they lit the whole room lime green? I was barely twenty. I didn’t know what women wore to bed, but it was like she landed on earth five minutes before, saw Yale on a T-shirt, and said why the hell not. I thought, I love this girl.”

  Heldring beams at the couple. “Well, and look at you now.” He raises his glass. “Four years married, a decade of adventures, an apartment, and a livret de famille.”

  “Hear! Hear!” Guillaume beams and clinks his professor’s glass.

  And here is something they have in common: licenses and certificates and official ties; they hold weight. She recalls that on the day she got her French passport, Guillaume watched her place it inside the Perimeter—a space forbidden to him. He pretended to be too busy to notice, his gaze focused elsewhere as he loosened his necktie. But he couldn’t veil the pride in his eyes as he watched that little red booklet disappear into a file folder she had marked Important.

  • • •

  Gui has never asked her for an explanation. He accepts whatever borders she draws, making sense of them in his own quiet way, without much discussion. He doesn’t ask, for example, why she hates his hunting jacket. At Yale, it took Niloo two winters to believe that hunting jackets are attire intended for the rich, not the homeless. She had seen only one other before her classmates began appearing all over New Haven in them during that freshman November. On her first night in America, after two years as refugees, Niloo, age ten, her mother, and her brother, Kian, had slept at Jesus House, a homeless shelter behind a busy bus stop in the concrete belly of Oklahoma City. It had lasted only one night, a logistical oversight by their sponsor family. If you asked her now, she would say it was a week, because how can the senses retain so much from a single night twenty years ago? The thirst for sleep and the shared bed with sheets that crawled and bit. Her mother’s warm breath on her neck. Her brother’s icy legs wrapped around hers for comfort. Her backpack, the lifetime of treasures she wanted to keep close, blistering her shoulder blades all night long like new wings taking root. The mad-eyed woman watching them from a corner, urine stench wafting from her bed now and then, and the lonely shouts that rose with the sun from the corners of the empty street. Then, early morning hunger pangs and glazed donuts from the neighboring church, the homeless man in the heavy olive jacket that swallowed his skeletal frame, pumping the last of the instant coffee from the dispenser.

  It was a single sleep, a hiccup, that came and went between two good lives: the years of idling among mulberry trees in her own village, sitting barefoot with Baba on the cool stone floor of his childhood home, of sated calm, followed by the years of academic rise and financial gain, American prosperity. If one were to write Niloo’s story, one shouldn’t dwell on that black interlude night. Except that it returns every time she wastes an hour, a dollar, an opportunity. It returns when life offers a break from the striving. The very fact of that night (and the two wandering years that led to it) warns her that she can never be too vigilant.

  Years later, after graduation, on their first night living together in New York, Gui discovered and named the Perimeter. They had finished moving their boxes and were giddy with the realness of their shared spa
ce, a first for them both. Their boxes were scattered everywhere, some open, leaking contents, others still taped shut. Every room was a jumble of items, clothes and shampoo bottles and colanders and coffee cups and photo albums all strewn together on a bath mat in the living room, kitchen floor carpeted with books and plates, the couch that came with their apartment draped in winter coats.

  And, in one corner of their bedroom, apart from the clutter, Niloo had arranged a neat little rectangle of items—two long umbrellas and two walls forming a border around Niloo’s backpack; her mother-of-pearl jewelry box; a small folder containing her passport, naturalization papers, and diplomas; and a box of sentimental books, her father’s photos, some rocks and trinkets from Iran.

  Gui stripped off his shirt and tossed it away. He sighed contentedly and dove onto the mattress on the floor. “We’re here, Niloo Face! Come and spoon me.”

  But Niloo had stiffened, was staring at his discarded shirt. “Can you move your shirt from that corner, please?” she asked.

  “Hmm?” he murmured into his pillow. He was drifting off, his words muffled. “Okay, I’ll be the outer spoon again. You’re such a slave to archaic gender roles.”

  “No, seriously,” she said, eyes trained on the offending shirt. “That’s my corner. Move your shirt.” She tapped Gui on the shoulder. “Move your shirt, Gui!”

  Yes, she could have moved it herself. But they lived together now and she needed Gui to understand: Niloo could adjust to any living condition. She had shared a tiny Oklahoma bedroom with her brother, a verminous homeless shelter bed with her mother, an Ardestooni mountain house with twenty cousins. She could shower or not shower, eat or not eat. She could get as excited about seared scallops on a glistening seaside terrace as a two-dollar pizza slice in a moldy dive. But all that adjusting depended on one thing: in every new place she had a corner, just a corner, that was hers only. She couldn’t compromise that corner.

  Finally, Niloo jumped up from the mattress, picked up Gui’s sweaty shirt, and hurled it back at him. “Not on my stuff,” she said.

  He woke, startled. “What the fuck,” he said, tossing the shirt aside. “What stuff? There’s stuff everywhere!” He had a disappointed look. It lasted only a second.

  “No,” she said, trying to regulate her breathing, “I mean this stuff.” She lifted the backpack, pointed to the umbrellas. “See?” Please see, she begged silently. I don’t need much. You can change up and move around and take away everything else.

  And then he had come through for her, this man she had chosen to love for exactly this reason: he could understand much more than his experience should allow. “Oh, Chicken, did you make yourself a little perimeter with the umbrellas?” he said, a slow smile warming his face. “You know, you’re kind of a special case.” Though he meant it kindly, he placed the emphasis on case, not on special, and she knew that this time it wasn’t an admiring nod to her uniqueness. “Come, you crazy.” And he opened his arms and she dove into them and it was over. Though, she wanted to ask, since when is crazy a term of endearment? Later she argued that everyone should prepare the items they’d rescue in a fire or flood. But by the time he changed her name in his contacts to “Crazy Chicken,” it was too late to say more.

  After that, he spoke of the Perimeter with a kind of everyday reverence, acknowledging it, respecting it, like a home medical device or a movable temple that lived in a corner of their every home, every hotel room, even his parents’ guest room in Provence. “I’ll put the suitcases here,” he would say casually. “Let’s do the Perimeter with the side table and that chair.” He spoke of it as if it were their thing, not only hers, and the constancy of this effort made her want to give him what he wanted most: to be included. Once or twice she didn’t speak when he left his keys or wallet inside the Perimeter, but they both felt her discomfort, and he removed the items without further discussion. Once, in an Amsterdam hotel room on their first scouting trip, when they were sizing up the city, he set up the Perimeter using shoe trees from the closet, and she took his hand and pulled him into the rectangle of her precious things. Then she stepped outside of it and looked on. “Now it’s done,” she said. “You’ll have to sleep standing up, though.” He was happy for a week.

  Before their move to Amsterdam, at a sunny Gramercy restaurant with napkin rings made of red rowan berries, Guillaume finally met Maman. Niloo squirmed, trying to unthink the treacherous thought that her mother might embarrass her. For as long as she remembered, Niloo had worshipped her mother, but after Yale and graduate school and decades among savvy nomadic second-generation peers (not friends—of those, Niloo has almost none), she understood that the scent of home would never fade from her parents as it had faded from her.

  Gui asked Maman about the Hamidis and she told him stories from Iran: how Bahman ranted for months when she became involved with an underground church, but drove to Tehran and back in one long stretch just to stand in a doorway and watch his wife, clad in white, gripping an Armenian man’s hands as he dipped her in a plastic tub decorated with cartoon fishes; the time Niloo and Kian didn’t speak for two weeks, but Kian saved all his rocks and sticks and old photographs for her because she liked to dig in the ground and in basements and attics for treasures. “In our family,” Maman explained, in her pretty broken English, as she brandished the soup spoon she was using to cut her beets and scoop her goat cheese, “they are appreciate behind your back. But they resist to appreciate in front of you.”

  Gui chuckled and nodded and took a bite of his bloody cheeseburger.

  “Maman, stop,” Niloo whispered through her teeth, alarmed at so much sharing, an act that looks very much like begging. Then she chided Maman in clipped Farsi for using her spoon to eat salad. Her mother told her in Farsi to kindly mind her own plate. And Niloo told her that, by the way, Gui is an atheist. She wasn’t sure why she said that. It was just a cruel instinct, an itch that required a long witchy nail.

  Maman flushed. Gui listened to their quarrelsome Farsi. He cleared the back of his mouth with his tongue, swallowed hard, then shot her that look again—it lasted only a second, but Gui made it count. They moved on to explaining to Maman why they didn’t want a wedding. Later, watching the waiter remove Gui’s half-eaten burger, Maman talked pointedly of Ardestoon, of the baskets of greens at every doorstep and the wreaths of garlic in every kitchen, the inspiring lack of waste. “Is never too much or too little,” she said. She glanced after the waiter and smiled.

  That night in bed, Guillaume mentioned her mother’s remark about the Hamidis’ veiled affection for each other. But Niloo wanted no part of it, because wasn’t it a common trait among families to put on many faces for one another? Certainly, it was nothing to gawk at. “I’m exhausted,” Niloo said and went to sleep.

  “I don’t like that you’re cruel to your mother,” she heard him mutter as she drifted off. If she’d had the energy, she would’ve explained that what sounds in Farsi like bickering is only comfortable banter, that her mother had no greater defender than Niloo, and how dare he presume to know her relationship with her parents. For all his fascination, had he even listened to the point Maman was making? But Niloo didn’t say any of that because it’s important not to care what men think. She saw him sizing up her family as he ate his embarrassingly overpriced burger, thinking they were so Iranian, so provincial. She wished she could show Gui their houses in Isfahan and Ardestoon, their fruit orchards and vast lands. But Gui had met her when she was a financial aid kid. Once, in their first month, she dumped him because he threw away a pocketful of loose change. Despite their similar stations at birth, Gui had grown up richly sheltered and she had been a poor refugee. And so Niloo had only one hand to play, over and over, against all of Gui’s silent judgments: that he cared openly and loudly, loved her openly and loudly (saw no reason not to trust and trust), as reckless with his heart as he was with his pocket change; and that, despite all their hours of fun together, it was li
kely that Niloo didn’t have quite as large a store of love and need to spend on him as he had for her.

  Or maybe that was a dishonest thought. Her mother, in her adoration of Gui, would claim that it was just an empty thing Niloo liked to say to his face, a very Hamidi trick, to save face, while “appreciating” behind his back. In truth she had never tried to live without Gui. And that’s the only way you know for real, isn’t it?

  Over years, Gui and Maman grew close, whispering and hatching plots. She taught him how to bake rice with saffron yogurt. She poured the bright yellow liquid from a big bowl, wiped the residue with two fingers, and said, as if it were part of the instruction, “In old times, there were no spatulas, only fingers.” Delighted, Gui spent the rest of the lesson chasing after her, wiping and tidying as she tossed onion skins and dropped puddles of goop and lectured about wasting ingredients.

  She said, “Gay, why you water potted plants? Put ice cube.” And Gui obeyed.

  She said, “Gay, wash all meat there . . . except than fish. Fish retains water.” Niloo caught Gui playing a game where he tried to make her say “except than” again and again. (“Should I pepper all the dishes . . . ?” “Should I whisk all the sauces . . . ?) When she responded as expected (“Except than raisin rice!”), he strained not to laugh, but Maman’s sidelong glances assured Niloo that she was just playing along.

  After Maman left, Gui texted her to say that they missed her and that they loved the food she had left in the freezer. Maman replied: Me too, Gay joon. I have my own blue time that I have after each leave. For an hour Niloo nursed an ache in her chest, guilt and sadness for her mother, for her parents, who had slowly become foreigners to her, the music of their talks no longer natural to her ears. She remembered that during visits, Kian wrote down funny things Baba said. So she took out a notebook and wrote, My own blue time after each leave.