Refuge--A Novel

by Dina Nayeri

  • • •

  It’s still light when Dr. Heldring says goodnight—summers in Holland mean endless, hazy dusks, hours of bashful night. Gui listens to Charles Aznavour and Yves Montand as they clean the kitchen. She thinks of the evening’s conversation. A hot shame washes over her—why did Gui bring up all those things? She wonders why they never listen to Iranian music, why she has never bothered to acquire any (maybe she should start), though a few fading tunes linger in her memory. She thinks of Baba, his music, photos, poetry. Gui suggests they go to Marqt to restock—neither ate much, though their guest politely devoured his lamb. “The old man has no taste buds left,” he says. “I don’t know why I worried so much about the cooking.”

  An hour later, they stand at the self-serve checkout, bagging their easy-peel oranges, beet salad, muesli, and avocados. Gui is gnawing on the Old Amsterdam; she grabs it from him and scans it, trying not to smile at the wounded pout and empty hand cupped near his mouth. She gives it back, swipes her credit card, and waits, counting tomorrow’s tasks on her fingers. “I’m turning you in for stealing that cheese,” she mutters, and swipes again when the machine flashes an error message. Declined, the screen reads in an accusatory Dutch font. Please wait for assistance.

  “Try mine,” says Gui, tossing the remaining cheese into Niloo’s canvas tote.

  They share an account, a fat one, so she should give no thought to this. But something about the clerk approaching, her brisk gait and sleepy eyes, scratches at the wall of her chest. She thinks of dinner, the talk of visas and Baba, of her French passport. Then the dull green letters on the screen, that hateful word, declined. “I’m calling the bank,” she says, dialing the numbers on the back of the card.

  “Chicken, please,” Gui whines, reaching for his wallet. “Let’s go.”

  Niloo bats his hand away each time he tries to get past her with his card. She continues to swipe, only half aware that she is angering the line of customers, but something prevents her from letting them get away with this accusation. Her card is fine. It should work. Someone should apologize and make amends. They should see that she’s a high-functioning, honorable member of society.

  The bank rep on the phone tells her that the charges are going through, but not sticking. “Don’t worry, madam,” she says, her Amsterdam accent chopped and singsong and questioning all at once. “There is no fraud on your card. Perhaps just pay cash today and try the card again elsewhere.”

  “No!” Niloo’s voice rises. She glimpses herself through Gui’s eyes, of course, but she looks away. She longs for her own card to go through, for the screen to say, PIN OK, as it has hundreds of times before, as it does for every ordinary person.

  “This card has been declined,” says the clerk after a cursory swipe of her key card. She’s chewing the inside of her cheek. “Maybe try another?”

  “Yes,” says Gui, holding out his. “Great idea!”

  Niloo snatches and pockets it. “I want to find out what’s wrong.” She speaks half into her phone, half at the sales clerk, struggling not to turn and glance at the line of furious customers. “Van Lanschot says it’s not them. It’s your machine.”

  The clerk rolls her black-lined eyes and takes a loud breath. Niloo keeps her eyes fixed on a spot on the wall as a manager is called, as he approaches, a smiling rosy man with legs like stilts in cheap red jeans. She stares into that wall, taking comfort in his Friesland accent, his crooked teeth, his milk-guzzling Dutch height. He exchanges a glance with the clerk, checks the machine, and chuckles, relieved. “Ahhh, yes, try again now.”

  The card fails again, this time because she has swiped too often and has, in fact, triggered the fraud system at Van Lanschot. Gui pleads for her to let it go.

  When her mother’s debit card failed at that Food for Less in Oklahoma, her account was overdrawn by two dollars. She watched Maman wander the aisles, demurely replacing a box of Cheerios, a loaf of wheat bread, until she had only what she could pay for in cash—Niloo chipped in two dollars, and Kian parted with a dime and three quarters he had saved. Maman didn’t mind (“At home, remind me to deposit my paycheck and pay you back,” she said in Farsi, her tone cheery)—she moved on.

  The crimson-legged manager raises both hands in defeat. “Mevrouw, why not listen to the gentleman?” Then he looks at the declined receipt, weighing their twenty euros of food against some unknown metric, and says in mellow tones, “Thinking again, so often we see you here. Better you have it on us.” A gesture so un-Dutch that Niloo would suspect it even if she weren’t in the middle of a hysterical episode. Such an offer is Iranian—does he detect her roots? If so, he would also know that she can’t accept.

  Guillaume beams. “Great!” he says, feeling no shame, no need even to say thank you. “Let’s go eat something unburned.”

  But what Niloo feels is animal panic, the sensation of a world spitting her into another tier, one she has occupied before and that awaits her, that has missed her and knows she will be back. She says, “No, absolutely not. I’ll go to the ATM,” and walks away before anyone can contradict her.

  • • •

  At home, Gui loses every ounce of his shit the second the door is closed. She tries to explain about charity, about how she has vowed never to accept it in her adulthood. “Fuck all your weird shame,” he says. “I don’t deserve so much pathological bullshit.” He storms off toward their bedroom with the beet salad, probably hoping the relocation of her favorite dish will force Niloo to come and apologize. How little he knows about the workings of the Iranian stomach.

  Niloo and Gui don’t speak again until morning. Over breakfast, they reach another unsatisfying truce. Trying to sift the misery out of her voice, she offers a solution. “What if we make a new set of rules and stick to it this time?”

  He sighs. “Good idea, Niloo Face.” He drops his spoon into his bowl, slips into his suit jacket. “You write the first draft.” He kisses her nose goodbye, another weary amends, and rushes to the door, taking along a piece of seven-grain bread tearing around a mash of avocado and a hunk of melted Old Amsterdam.

  “We’re too old for Niloo Face,” she mutters and immediately regrets it. Why can’t she just leave things alone? But she gets these itches. It’s an illness.

  “Don’t worry. I got this,” she says to the shutting door. Alone, she scratches her calf with a big toe then does the other calf. She putters around the kitchen making mental lists while her tea brews, then sits at the small oval end of the wooden dining table. She will handle this. She’s handled things since her first days in Oklahoma, when she was no longer Niloo, but “that Middle Eastern kid,” and her teachers noticed a tic in her neck. When she heard them discussing trauma and therapy and special classes, she rid herself of the tic through sheer will—she vowed to sit still and suffer and not move her neck, not even once, not as long as the American teachers watched. After three months of discipline, the tic was gone.

  But Gui doesn’t need that kind of control. When something goes wrong, someone fixes it and apologizes for the inconvenience. His opinion matters, even to strangers. Early in their courtship, Niloo adopted a habit of asking Gui after every party or meal, “Did I behave well?” She stopped as soon as her brain turned twenty-three.

  She goes to the bedroom, to the corner of the walk-in closet, and sits in the Perimeter. She flips through the file folder with her passport and naturalization certificates, her marriage license, her Yale degree, the deed to the new apartment in the Pijp, and the construction contracts. She counts them again: nine documents that entitle her to her life. She gathers her backpack to her chest and hugs it tight, takes a breath until her lungs ache, holds it for a beat and forces it out. When she opens her eyes, the atmosphere is no longer weighing down on her arms and chest. She recalls the day she made up this trick; she was ten and trying to vanquish the tic alone—no one, she promised, would see her that weak again. The memory is a relief, a t
estament to an inborn ability to govern her fate, to the iron will of child Niloo.

  But before that, in Ardestoon, she had another trick. At night she hid under a musty woolen blanket and she returned to the day’s events, to an earlier, separate Niloo—This is how it happened, she’d say, analyzing lost books or skinned arms. She didn’t change any outcomes. She only watched, like a home video, and the more she looked the more it seemed that she was deciding what came next. In time, events became memories that became stories that she’s conjured in every bed since. And, though the habit is unbefitting a scientist, this is how she visits her cousins, her grandmother. She visits Baba, whom, in life, she has avoided; they drink good tea and talk all night, solving the riddles of family, understanding each other instinctively. In her memories, she is willing to know things that in life would make her turn away.

  She kicks the closet door, shutting herself in, opens her laptop, and begins to write new rules for her young marriage. Halfway through, she pauses, lies back on the carpet, and thinks instead of Baba and of home and of that last mulberry hunt in Ardestoon.

  THE VILLAGE CRUMBLES

  JUNE 2009

  Isfahan, Iran

  The next case was a cement block to the ribs, a sorrowful situation from which Bahman tried twice to avert his gaze: a mother desperate to keep her child. She kept saying, “Your Honor, she needs me. Your Honor, we’re in the middle of a long story, a little each night. Please just delay for a week.” The child cried openly, no one bothering to protect her future psyche from the memory of this day. The judge sent them away, ordering over the mother’s wails that the stolen child be returned. “A child belongs to her father,” he said. “You have no right taking her like this.”

  Over an hour or two, Bahman worked his way through three glasses of tea and six more divorces.

  The eighth: a sterile woman of only twenty, unsure how she became sterile or even that she was sterile at all, except for the testimony of a previous husband who claimed that it was so. According to documents only recently uncovered by the unhappy new husband, this other man attempted to impregnate her “every morning for a year!” The man looked disgusted as he read this to the judge. “I didn’t even know she was married before!” he yelled.

  “She’s not sterile,” Bahman mumbled to himself (and maybe to his tired lawyer), his interest rising with every drop of angry sweat the husband wiped from his brow. From the flash in the woman’s eye, Bahman suspected secret stashes of birth control, homemade lady condoms and vinegar, and maybe even proper hormones. “Good for you, child,” he whispered over his counting beads.

  The ninth was simple: a man who had taken a second wife without consent. He was chastised and consent pried from his first wife’s clenched fist.

  The tenth: the teenage children of two families that had wanted to cement their bonds through marriage. The young couple hated each other too much to consummate, and they had dragged their parents here to secure a divorce for them.

  “Too soon,” said the judge. “Someone must teach them the ins and outs of it.”

  “It’s not a matter of teaching, Your Honor,” said one of the fathers, hinting with his lecherous eyes that his son had much experience. “He refuses to touch her! What about our family? Our line? Mistakes were made by us all.”

  The eleventh was a charade: a couple in love who were each making a spectacle in family court to get the other to admit fault. The judge saw them stare at each other for too long, gave them a lecture, kicked them out, and marked their files.

  Bahman got up during the twelfth to stretch his back. Once it had been strong enough to carry his children. Now he bent side to side, then bent forward at the waist, letting his arms hang, before realizing he looked foolish. This wasn’t his peaceful dental office with its blue walls and soothing fountain, its tranquil old-world music lulling his patients away from fears of pain and toothlessness. He was about to turn to the restroom when the court secretary called in an old man two chairs away. He hobbled past Bahman into the chambers, and something in his sad gait made Bahman want to watch and witness whatever was about to happen.

  When the judge asked his purpose in the court, the man trembled and shuffled from foot to foot, his gaze always on the edge of the judge’s desk. It seemed he had never been in a courtroom. He wore a skullcap and loose gray trousers, the kind village men and Tehrani gardeners wore; they reminded Bahman of his favorite blue pajamas. The man’s deeply grooved face was covered in white stubble.

  Bahman moved toward the door. He lit a cigarette and watched the man’s fingers shake. “Please, Hajj Agha,” said the judge. “Tell me how I can help. Don’t worry about the assistants and documents and things.”

  Bahman scoffed. This was a lot of exaggerated politeness for a mullah. The old man cleared his throat and pulled a thin sheet of paper from his pocket. From the sound of it, the soft weathered rustling, it seemed that he had folded and unfolded this paper ten thousand and one times. Without answering the judge, the old man began to read. “I request the honor of your interference in a situation that has been a scab on my heart . . .” His wiry voice broke twice.

  The judge stopped him. “Grandfather,” he said, his brow pained. Maybe, thought Bahman, this mullah wasn’t a soulless reptile like all the others. Yes, he had sent several women back to their unhappy marriages, and he had taken a child from her mother, and upheld only about half the marriage gifts today, but he didn’t write all those vile laws, did he? The judge continued, “Let us talk, you and I. Do you want Khanom Jamshiri here to get you a cup of chai? Khanom, if you don’t mind . . .”

  The secretary clutched her black chador and shuffled out to the samovar. As she passed by, Bahman called after her, “It’s cold and sludgy, khanom.”

  She shot him a look. The old man collected himself and said, in a near whisper, “It’s very difficult. Very difficult. I wrote it all down.”

  “Just state the trouble,” said the cleric. “I can see you’re a wise, literate man.”

  The man straightened. “I learned to read so I could search for her.”

  “Start at the beginning, agha,” said the weary judge, adjusting his robes. “Ahh, here is Khanom Jamshiri with the tea. Thank you, sister.”

  The judge sipped from the cup that the court secretary placed in his hands, but the old man didn’t touch his. He took it with a little bow and placed it carefully on the edge of the judge’s desk. He shuffled again in his shalwar, adjusting the waist as he spoke. Then he said, “Sir, I need a divorce. My Marzieh seems to be finished with me . . . and I think it’s only right that I set her free now.”

  “Where is the lady?” asked the judge. “May I ask how old she is?”

  The man cleared his throat again, straightened his cap, and kept his eyes on the edge of the judge’s desk as he spoke. “She is in her fifties. We’re not sure of the details, Mullah Agha.” Both the judge and Bahman chuckled at Mullah Agha, a strange double title that flogged itself from both sides. “It always seemed like twenty years’ difference, give or take. I bought her a cake every year in late summer.”

  “Akh, for Rumi’s sake,” said Bahman to his lawyer. The lawyer nodded and checked his watch while Bahman said a quick word to four other dead poets on behalf of the withered husband. The man had begun speaking again.

  “We had our time,” he said. “She’s too young to be burdened by an old man.”

  “Don’t despair, grandfather,” said the judge. “Maybe we can convince her to come back. Where might she have gone?”

  “I don’t know,” said the man. “Her family is all dead or scattered. We only had each other from the start. But now I think, maybe she found another man.”

  “Are you certain of this? If so, she can be made to answer for her actions.”

  “No, no, no, Agha Judge, I must be mistaken,” said the old man, his color fleeing, his voice and fingers shaking in some kind of bizarre fe
arful unison. “No, she’s a good woman. I just think . . . I hope she has someone to watch over her.”

  The judge asked to see the paper in the man’s hand. He looked through his files, and massaged his temple with two fingers. He mumbled some suggestions for how to bring her back. “A kind man like you should have someone to care for him.” Finally, as an afterthought, he asked, “When did the lady leave? Did she leave any kind of message? Maybe in a letter or on the telephone?”

  The man counted on his fingers, then he said, his eyes all earnestness and concern, “It will be sixteen years ago this month that I saw her. We had breakfast.”

  “Eiii baba,” moaned the judge, his color draining. Khanom Jamshiri too sighed and muttered some similar thing. They exchanged a glance and went silent.

  “We’re not the sort for ceremony,” the old man continued. “I haven’t heard her voice since she left. But now I can read, so I gathered some leftover documents and went to three villages around Isfahan showing her name. I told the story.”

  The judge motioned for Khanom Jamshiri to approach him. He whispered something in her ear. Bahman didn’t need to hear it. Khanom Jamshiri hurried away down the hall, to another office. Bahman watched her disappear behind a door past the long corridor, and he knew she was checking death records.

  When she returned, she whispered to the judge, her face stark white against his pockmarked brown skin. He massaged his temple again, as he read a single sheet of paper that the secretary had given him. Bahman had no doubt the woman in question was long dead. Maybe at some point, her husband had known this and old age was offering him a convenient lapse in memory. The judge looked up, ready to give the man the news in the records. But then, the old man lifted his gaze from the edge of the desk. A soft smile smoothed the lines on his face. He said, “What I want, agha, is for my dear Marzieh to move forward, to live out her young life happy and well-fed, in a big, big room full of family. We had our love. No sense to be missing each other all this time, haunting each other’s nights this way. It’s not healthy.”