Refuge--A Novel

by Dina Nayeri

  Or maybe she’ll talk about work instead, her research on early primate families, the procuring and sharing of food. Safe topics, millennia in the past. Sometimes she daydreams of showing her published papers to her cousins in Ardestoon, climbing the nearby mountain together, digging for artifacts.

  Shuffling quickly along the canal, head weighed down with thoughts of Mam’mad and the squat, she tries to plan her morning, but her mind wanders. Baba would have relished tonight’s poetry reading. But if he were to relocate to Europe, as he’s hinted wishing to do, he’d fall squarely into group three. He would drive a taxi and lose his medical credentials. He would wither and every ounce of his childish joy would drain out of him, leaving his cheeks slack. He would die cracking sunflower seeds in a parked cab, atop a fading Nain seat cover, coarsely woven in reds and blues, rolling his prayer beads under his thumb and remembering.

  The absolute value of the universe would plummet, leaving every seaside and orchard and city center, every morsel and melody, inexplicably blander.

  Someone behind her rings a bike bell, but Niloo doesn’t turn. She thinks, I’ll tell Mam’mad about the time Baba came to Oklahoma. The bike bell rings again. For the past twenty years, whether in New Haven or New York or Amsterdam, anyone who passes Niloofar Hamidi on her long night walks slows to look, having seen, for a moment, only a backpack with legs.

  • • •

  Twenty minutes later, as Prinsengracht curves eastward and her head clears, she begins to wonder about Mam’mad’s legal situation. How did he come to live here? She knows that the EU rules require refugees to seek asylum from the first member country on whose soil they land. In the case of fleeing refugees, or ones without connections, that country is almost never the Netherlands, since it requires flying over water, an exit visa, an entry visa. The most desperate flee to Turkey and make their way into the EU by land. Or they try their luck in Greece or Cyprus. And yet many Iranian immigrants have settled here: some are knowledge workers; more have family to sponsor them. Money, a foreign degree, or a European partner doesn’t hurt (Niloo, an American scholar, might figure in their numbers, but that seems like a lie). A man like Mam’mad, a professor, would have come to Amsterdam for a conference or a research trip or at the behest of a university. Then he would have blown through his visa limit, found a community, and requested asylum.

  He wouldn’t have bribed anyone, as Baba would if he were to come here. He wouldn’t phone up nefarious friends in the drug trade to grease his path.

  Turning her key in the door, she hears Gui move in the kitchen. He sits in the dark, eating muesli in his pajamas. Bent over his cereal bowl, legs extending far under the table, he looks exposed. At six-two, a foot above Niloo, he seems all the more vulnerable, like a collapsible hiking pole she might take on a dig and fold in half after each use. “Did you wait up?” she asks. He nods and extends an arm. She drops her backpack and curls into a ball on his lap. Sometimes she forgets how much bigger her husband is until she’s wrapped up in his limbs like a nugget. The hashish fog is wearing off. “That fight was awful,” she says. “I’m sorry for my part.”

  He watches as she stirs his muesli, picking out a walnut and a raisin. “You don’t have to try so hard,” he says. She looks up at him, puzzled, and searches his bowl for another walnut. He pulls her closer, kissing her head. “Some things can be easy. The grocery store, for instance.” The way he says it, it sounds very much like the truth. This is how he wins cases, she marvels.

  But she doesn’t tell him that she’s proud. Instead, she talks about her lunch with Mam’mad. See? She has found a hobby, like he wanted—refugees.

  “Did you go to that guitar-pick . . . poetry place?”

  “Zakhmeh,” she says into his neck. “Yep.”

  “Don’t take on their problems, okay?” he says, all worried eyebrows and chewed-up lips. “Isn’t there something more low stress? It was just poetry, right?”

  “It’s not work related,” she says. “I’ve made a friend. Isn’t that exactly what you were getting at?” He brushes sandy brown hair out of his eyes with a cupped palm, as if pulling a floppy strand through an invisible cylinder, a gesture whose origins Niloo has often wondered about—did he, as a child, watch his beloved mother pull out curlers? He stares at her with sad eyes. She puts on what she hopes is a playful tone. “And, by the way, I don’t need adopting,” she says. “You didn’t find me on the side of a road selling peaches. We met at Yale.”

  He loosens his arms around her shoulders. “This is exactly what I’m talking about,” he says. “You say shit like that and freak out over bank cards and you think you’re fooling everyone with that glare, but, Chicken, you come off like the girl at the party acting cool while her skirt is tucked into her panties.”

  She laughs, open mouth full of walnuts, and wipes milk off her lips. Then, catching Gui’s craving for something true, “I feel like our fights are getting so much worse. The things we say.” He nods, resting his chin atop her head. He doesn’t speak, so she whispers to his neck, “Can we not fight anymore?”

  “Okay, no fighting,” he says. A corner of the Zakhmeh flyer peeks out of Niloo’s pocket. He pulls it out. “I was thinking, let’s make a space where we put our important things. We could tape this to the fridge and go together next time.”

  She glances at the fridge, where Gui has taped her list of rules. “You want to listen to Persian poetry?” she asks, moved though she hopes he’ll say no.

  “Of course,” he says. “If it’s your thing, it’s my thing.”

  She smiles, thinking of Mr. Sun, but she doesn’t remind him. She shrugs and takes the flyer from him, crumples it in her fist. Later she will tuck it into one of the folders in her own private corner of the closet, where it will be safely hers. “This one is just for tonight though, and tonight’s over. Next time.”

  She gets up and starts toward the bedroom. The temptation to tell Mam’mad about Baba’s Oklahoma visit has passed. But having recalled the memory, she wants to sit with it for a while, to turn it over alone. In another life, Mam’mad might have been Baba’s friend. She can imagine them matching wits, smoking hookah and cracking seeds, discussing literature and politics.

  Gui takes her hand and pulls her back. “Okay, next time,” he says. He kisses her face, chewing the fleshiest parts, a habit since their first date when he asked, Can I bite your cheek? He rubs her chin with one finger. “I’m glad you have a new friend.”

  THE FIRST VISIT

  OKLAHOMA CITY, 1993

  No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.

  —ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

  Our first visit was in 1993. I believed Baba was coming to Oklahoma to stay. We drove to the airport around noon on a blistering Oklahoma Sunday. Maman allowed us to miss church for it and we took pleasure in putting on casual clothes, packing bottles of ice water. Kian brought an old Game Boy. The sun blazed through the windows and within five minutes we were sweat-stained and nauseated. Kian and I wore thrift store shorts and T-shirts with faded brand names; Maman wore jeans and a nice blouse from Iran. She was trying to strike a balance. Iranian women fret constantly over their looks, but she didn’t want Baba to think she missed him.

  She fired questions at us, oblivious to the answers. “Are you excited to see your Baba?” “Kian, do you have your poem?” “Niloo, I told you, no shorts. Do you want your Baba to think you’ve become some kind of American dokhtare kharab?”

  Maman’s biggest fear for me since the day I turned thirteen (a year earlier) was that I would become a dokhtare kharab, a “broken girl,” which is the Iranian way of describing a sexually free person who happens to be female—she thought I was more prone to it than average, because of my shared DNA with Baba. The male version of the word, as in most cultures, is something along the lines of playful.

  Kian nudged me in the ribs and started s
inging an annoying song he had made up that made Maman giggle. Sometimes she would tease him by humming his toddler revolution song. “The caged bird is heartsick of walls,” she would croon in a baby lisp. Kian would sing the rest and they carried on their mother-son infatuation. I hated it. I didn’t know to miss Baba in those moments.

  Maybe because I was a daughter, or because I was Baba’s daughter, Maman reserved all her austerity for me. She forbade me from wearing a drop of makeup and gave in to my demand to shave my legs only when she saw that my hairiness defied modesty and she could neither let me out looking like that nor force me to wear long pants in the stifling Oklahoma heat. Always crammed in tiny rooms with Maman and Kian, I craved the smallest privacy.

  Sometime during our years as asylum seekers, I stopped playing children’s games. I forgot books I had loved and lyrics to Farsi songs, and started to dream about having my own apartment in a big city. In Oklahoma, I made secret plans, borrowing college admissions guides from the public library, readying myself for my second escape—this sleepy flatland was no home to me, and it would be worth any hard work and indignity now if I could just find my own. The other children had never met someone from the Middle East, never considered dreams or demons other than their own, and they didn’t invite me into their narrow universe. They didn’t explain their song lyrics, the rules for dodgeball, or how to pronounce the many words I mangled. Left to entertain myself, I lived inside my imagination. Soon I decided that to find safety here and to re-create the sense of home, I needed two things: money and the air of being a real American (an elusive formula that brought me daily shame). In order to prepare for my excellent future in a big city, I lived off pita bread and egg whites, swam a thousand meters daily, and never stopped moisturizing my legs. I studied twelfth-grade calculus seven hours a day.

  “He won’t think I’m kharab,” I said to Maman. “He’s seen my grades.”

  “Grades have nothing to do with it,” said Maman.

  I scoffed. “Are you new to Baba? With enough As, I could go to school naked.”

  “Niloo!” She slammed her hands on the wheel. “Don’t start.” She took two breaths. “Please remember that, to your Baba, you will seem so changed. He might have a hard time. Just try to be the sweet Niloo and Kian I know are still in there.”

  I started having nightmares around the time we arrived in the first refugee hostel. The dreams changed over the years, but never disappeared, and I came to think that missing limbs and phantom stranglers and dying parents were simply the price of sleep. At fourteen, most of my nightmares involved my classmates exposing me for this or that. I was afraid they would find out that I had missed an entire decade of American music, that I was from that country that forces women into drabness, that I knew only about a quarter of their slang. I was afraid they’d find out I was afraid. My only antidote to the fear was math and science, concrete pursuits Baba had taught me to trust (a purer love of study didn’t kick in till years later).

  Some nights I dreamed about Baba kidnapping me and, in those dreams, his eyes were dead and I knew it was the other Baba, the opium Baba, the tooth-hunting Baba, and that I had to get away.

  “Where will he sleep?” I asked, though we had been through this.

  Our apartment was nothing remarkable as immigrant situations go, but to me it was a nightmare. Some time spent in typical pass-through countries, Italy and the United Arab Emirates, had depleted the funds. We had Maman’s small income and a dark, two-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a two-story complex. At first, Maman and I shared a room. Then Kian and I. And soon, we would probably switch back. It depended on who she thought needed more privacy at the time, herself or Kian. Never me, because privacy was the sole missing ingredient between me and dokhtare kharab. She kept it from me like the accidental drop of egg yolk that might turn a bowl of fluffy meringue peaks into a flat, sloppy sugar soup.

  We agreed that Baba would sleep in one bedroom with Kian, and I would share with Maman again. We also agreed that Maman’s “friend,” Nader, who had come from Kermanshah before the revolution, would not stop by during Baba’s stay. On most nights, Nader would appear around six or seven and cook various delicious meats for us. He always had pungent things marinating and sloshing in clear bowls in the fridge—goopy red and yellow mixtures full of fleshy raw chunks that became exquisite after a quick bake or sauté or barbecue. Nader could stand shirtless in headphones, cigarette dangling from his lips, holding a skillet of broccoli and looking like a doofus, then flick his wrist and somehow land every single piece on its other side, not a spear burned. Sometimes he’d ask me to add a pinch of turmeric and when I did, he would wince. “A pinch, kiddo, a pinch!” As if a pinch means anything.

  “Don’t call me kiddo,” I said, “and pinches aren’t really a scientific measure.”

  I wished Nader would go away. I vaguely knew that Maman and Baba had divorced—Baba had been unwilling to leave his village, his respectable job, his roots, and his opium. After Maman fell into great danger in Iran, they had no choice but to go their separate ways. Besides, Baba had helped her escape, and if they had stayed married, how could he deny involvement during the hours of questioning that followed? I understood the situation, however begrudgingly. It wasn’t loyalty to Baba that made me dislike this new man—Nader was just annoying.

  On the phone, as I grew up, Baba always asked for stories and photos, especially photos. “Send a stack of the doubles. Anything you’ve taken, not just the special ones.” And when we were too distracted, he would find excuses: a document he needed or a magazine he wished to read or a bottle of special American moisturizer. Maman made time to send these items, and so he would say as he gave her his lists, “Please include a stack of the kids’ photos. Don’t forget.”

  Eventually, when Maman became busier with two jobs and church and night school, when I started high school and swimming and more college prep, the only thing that would get us to the post office was requests for therapeutic socks, because we knew Baba wasn’t lying about the dangerous varicose veins on his legs. We imagined him aging in that difficult country where these things aren’t so freely available and people learn simply to suffer. So, every few weeks Baba would call. “Please send more of the special tight socks,” he would say, then add, “Maybe throw in a stack of your doubles. Where was the last roll you shot? Is it a good story?”

  It would be unfair to say that by fourteen, I had forgotten my Baba. I thought of him often. But I stopped missing him and, before this trip was announced, I had stopped actively hoping that he would join us. It began to feel likely that he never would, and that my parents’ promises of those first months out of Iran were mostly lies. I became a teenager. I worried about my future constantly. I was desperate to fall in love, and I was desperate to keep from falling in love, because I knew that I had to flee Oklahoma, as my mother had fled Iran.

  Now, by some miracle Baba had secured a tourist visa to visit us, and I cradled the secret hope that he was joining us for good—Baba and I would have to scheme, of course, as in the old days when we snuck cream puffs into the house; Maman had said nothing of it. We arrived at Will Rogers World Airport a few minutes early, feeling awkward in our skins, in our haircuts and clothes. We waited at the terminal for him to disembark the plane from JFK Airport. As the passengers filed out, some of them fresh from a short trip, others ragged after long international flights, I felt a shiver in my leg. I wanted so much for every next passenger to be him. Each time I saw the shadow of a grown man turn the corner, or a familiar gait, or a person laden with bags, I was certain it was him and my right hand flew to my right ear. If there’s a gesture more soothing than pulling on one’s own earlobe, I have yet to find it, and in those first immigrant years this habit became a second tic for me—I had rid myself of the one in my neck shortly after our arrival. Maman took my hand and held it to her chest, and we continued to wait.

  In the end, he surprised us, walk
ing out last, with the flight attendants, smiling his big, hairy Cheshire grin as they handed him his four cigarette lighters and book of matches. “He’s shorter,” I whispered to Maman. She didn’t hush me or tell me to watch my manners. She looked at Baba in a daze and said, “You’re taller.”

  When he saw us, he burst into an exhausted guffaw, laughing as he spread out his arms and tried to scoop up all three of us at once. It was an awkward motion, and passersby kept glancing at us, but there was no stopping it. Baba’s joy was like a piece of luggage tumbling down a steep escalator. You don’t try to stop a thing with that much mass and momentum. You get out of the way. He was laughing and crying, swiping at his eyes with a big hairy hand, making such a show. I don’t remember my Baba having ever been so loud, so graceless. Red tufts burst from his shirt, which was unbuttoned to his chest. His hair was a mess, and now that I was taller, I could see the spot of bald in the back, among the baby-soft wisps that were still cut in a long, youthful style.

  “Is this my Niloo?” he whispered, putting a sweaty palm to my cheek. Somehow my words flew away and I stood there dumbly, not saying hello, not saying it’s good to see you, Babajoon, as I had practiced. When he touched my cheek, I wanted to jump back, not because of the wetness of his hand but out of some forgotten instinct, an old fear. But I smiled. He said, “Niloo khanom, you’re so tall.” He looked at me for a long time and when I tried to cut the silence by saying hello, he burst out again, “Oh, you have your incisors back! Let me see.” He was about to put a finger in my mouth but I recoiled. My expression must have revealed my horror because his eyes darted to his shoes, he pulled back his hand, and he said, “You’re very grown-up, Niloo joon.” He sounded hurt, but I told myself that I had my boundaries, and I had no interest in overhearing nighttime whispers about how I need orthodontics or how I should have my wisdom teeth extracted early. No. I was fourteen. I wanted both of them to leave my body to me.