Refuge--A Novel

by Dina Nayeri

  Baba turned to Maman. “Salam, Pari joon,” he said, his voice kind and low, as if greeting a fellow mourner at a funeral. They hugged silently as Kian and I shifted our weight, fiddled with our backpacks, pulled strings from our fraying shorts. Baba shook Kian’s hand, a proud half smile frozen on his face, and we walked to the car.

  Without thinking, Baba went to the driver’s seat, and then there was an awkward moment when they switched. “My turn to sit in front,” said Kian.

  “Your Baba is sitting in front,” said Maman, her voice flat and stripped of all emotion so expertly you’d think she were corralling children onto a bus.

  “I’ll sit with Niloo in the back,” said Baba. At first I was uneasy. So, to cut the tension, I asked about Uncle Ali—how was he? Did he have a girlfriend? Did he ask about me? Did he know that I have front teeth now? Baba laughed. “He misses you very much,” he said. “And he’s seen all your photos. I made sure he saw.”

  The rest of the way home, he asked me questions. About school, about my teeth, my favorite subjects, how much science I had learned. I was happy to drone on about science, since it was safe and concrete. “Pari.” Baba looked up at Maman in the middle of my summary of igneous rocks. “Why does Niloo have an accent?”

  “I don’t have an accent!” I shot back, because again they were discussing details of me as if I were a defective blender.

  “Do you speak Farsi with them?” he asked her.

  “Yes, we speak Farsi,” she said, “but they speak English all day at school.”

  He grunted and looked at me, his childlike grin breaking out again like a fast-moving rash. “Do you read poetry?” he asked. I shrugged. He began talking about the importance of poetry, about all the hidden meanings of his favorite poems. As he spoke, he sometimes touched my arm or my shoulder or my cheek, as if I were a piece of silk he was sure he was going to buy. Once, he pulled me to him and gave me a hug that lasted almost a minute, patting my back until I had to push on his chest and free myself. He didn’t seem to mind. He blathered on and on, and I thought, did he always talk this much?

  Halfway through his speech, which was animated and fiery, he rested a hand on my knee. I swept it away with a swift motion, like batting away a spider. He gasped, but he didn’t say anything. I’m sure he took it as some kind of weak and misguided fear of men that I must be developing, which he would discuss with Maman later. “Why are you making her this way?” he would say. “Is it your church?”

  Despite my fading memories, I remembered that Baba was a hugger, a kisser, a patter of backs and squeezer of cheeks. But no man had hugged or kissed me in more than five years. The most affection I got from Nader was an occasional high five. Now, Baba squirmed on the sweaty plastic seat beside me, tucking his hands in his lap, projecting his distress—something invisible seemed to be slipping from his grasp in dramatic fashion, and my only clues to his private struggle during that forty-minute car ride were his clenched jaw and his pale knuckles pressing into the seat cushion. He looked straight ahead, hungrily chewing his mustache, as if trying to calculate his real daughter’s coordinates. He looked like a man who, given a modicum of magic, would travel through time and take back those six years apart, and the careless tooth extraction before that, and whatever else may have caused his daughter to swipe away his hand. I was old enough to see the pain in Baba’s eyes, and if the moment hadn’t passed so quickly, I would have said that it wasn’t him, that I just needed air-conditioning and some water and a quiet moment alone.

  But I didn’t say anything to assuage his sadness. There are creatures a person can see at thirty to which she has no access at fourteen. In youth, she can see only the end of the creature’s tail or the line of its back as it passes in the dark. I know now that Baba wanted to pick me up and wave me around like he used to do, to squeeze my face and check my teeth. I barely said hello, arms crossed over my T-shirt. All I wanted at that age was to disappear, but this stocky red-mustachioed man had showed up ready to experience America loudly. Over those weeks, he ate ice cream twice a day and counted the price of everything by the number of root canals it took to earn it, and his addictions endangered us more than once. We took him for Mexican food; he took one bite of guacamole and said, “Is taste like Nivea cream.” He asked me if I had learned to hold a cigarette like a lady, and he offered pistachios to the plumber.

  At home, Baba looked around and nodded at the couch, grunting under his breath. “I’ll sleep here,” he said. “No need to trouble yourselves.” The apartment contained no notable signs of Nader, but it was tiny, with a half kitchen jutting into the living room and no dining room or foyer. The shared space consisted simply of a couch pushed up against a small window, a round Turkish coffee table, a television on a chipped cabinet with the glass missing, and two metal chairs with thin green cushions. All of this sat atop a horrid blue carpet that came with the apartment. The kitchen, though, was fully stocked with knives and woks and pots of many sizes because of stupid Nader and his obsession with frying and sautéing and marinating everything, always wearing his stupid headphones. A part of me wished he would show up here all shirtless and chain-smoking and blasting U2, so Baba could tell him he was a doofus and throw him out. Imagining that scene made me giggle and when Baba whipped around at the smallest happy sound, I fixed my face into a frown again.

  He placed his suitcase beside the couch and did a quarter turn, first one way, then the next. Then he turned back to Maman, and said in a voice that didn’t sound casual even to me, “Pari joon, can I use your phone?”

  Maman stood behind the counter in the open kitchen, piling homemade cream puffs on a plate. “Why?” she said. A look of alarm passed over her face as she spoke. “Do you want to call Iran? It’s late there.”

  “No,” he said, rummaging through his pocket. He stared at a scrap of paper for a moment and plunged his hand back into his pocket.

  “Oh no, no, no, Bahman,” said Maman, dropping a teaspoon and bursting into the living area. She spoke in a loud whisper, pushing the words out as if through a gap in her front teeth. “You won’t call any friends here. No friends, do you hear me? How did you even find someone?” He started to speak, but Maman interrupted. “That’s the end of it. No socializing.” She stormed back into the kitchen and started rewrapping the cream puffs as if she were punishing him with no dessert. Her fingers shook as she worked, cream splattering, her pretty blouse staining. “We just got our green cards,” she muttered. “How can you be so foolish?”

  Everything seemed weary and intense with Baba in the room. Even the harsh light through our single window drained me, though I had felt it and sat in it and used it to warm my legs every day for years. Sometimes in our earliest days, I used to sneak out of bed when Kian and Maman were asleep and stick my bare stomach against the glass. The heat was such a luxury. I pretended I was on a tropical island.

  “Calm down, Pari joon. Everything is fine,” said Baba. “No need to put those away.” He smiled wide at her, and at her pastries, with boyish contentment.

  Maman stopped, her shoulders dropping, a small breath escaping. She looked at her hands, only now realizing that she was putting away the sweets she had spent all week baking. She unwrapped them again and placed them on the coffee table.

  I didn’t know what had happened between them, of course. I was young and had no idea whom he wanted to call and why. Now I know many Iranians flung far from home, strangers turned friends by virtue of a single common trait. In their adopted cities, exiled Iranians have no more caretakers or errand boys to deliver their illegal indulgences. They learn how to make friends fast.

  Late that night, after Kian and Maman had gone to bed, I found Baba on the phone. He sat cross-legged in his undershirt and pajama bottoms atop a bright orange sleeping bag on a row of couch cushions that Maman had set up on the floor. Holding his glass of hot cardamom tea, his knees pulled in tight, he looked like a person sitting on a life ra
ft, crouching low, trying to keep all his limbs in. He whispered in Farsi, and so my first thought was that he was making an expensive call to Iran against Maman’s wishes.

  But after some nodding and a few approving grunts, he said, his accent thickening to the village drawl, “It’s an honor, agha . . . What luck to have friends in faraway places . . . No, don’t speak of it. I’m your servant. Until tomorrow.” With that he hung up. When he saw me watching, he called me to him. “Come here, khanom who looks like my daughter. Do you have any pictures to show your Baba? New ones?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t move toward him, a comfortable old fear returning.

  He said, “How is that possible?” and he threw up his hand in that single dismissive gesture that our people share with Italians and Spanish and all fiery people—not the Dutch. “In Iran, girls your age are addicted to photos. Your cousins, do you remember them? Your cousins sit around your grandmother’s living room and play with their Polaroid all afternoon. I brought some. Do you want to see?”

  “I hate photos,” I said. Recently my Iranian nose had started to bloom, and my skin was oily and dark. Worse, my front teeth had come in crooked. The idea of Baba suggesting orthodontics terrified me. So, I added, “It’s vain and un-Christ-like.”

  “Khak too saram,” he said, dirt on my head. His eyes bulged like the science class hamster after a long squeeze. “What the hell are you talking about, Niloo joon?”

  I shrugged. He hauled himself off his haunches and turned on the television. Sitting beside the monitor, he changed the channels manually until he came to a trashy soap opera. He craned his neck toward Maman’s bedroom and, hearing no sign of wakefulness, he said, “See that woman there?” He pointed to a heavily made up, coiffed, and sprayed woman in a halter top having an animated argument with a similarly adorned rival. I blushed at the sight of so much exposed American breast in Baba’s presence. But he didn’t seem to notice. He said, “I’d rather you grow up to be this useless to the universe than to become a religion pusher. If this disaster”—he pointed to the lady, his fleshy finger in her face—“is absolute zero in value, then Jesus and Allah pushers are deep in the negatives. All this god business will mess you up, Niloo joon, and then it will kill you. And you won’t go anywhere after. Understand?”

  I nodded, unaware of a profound confusion taking root. To Maman, Jesus was our family’s only remaining identity. He was our way out of Iran and the reason Kian and I would go to top American universities. Little else had mattered in Iran, but she was even more fervent here. Having lost her profession, her volunteer work, and her community, exiled in remotest Oklahoma, she lived only for Him. Her every decision had to be seen to serve her God—even the choice to partner with Nader, who was peripherally tied to the church, and, if you ask me, mostly in it for the community outings and sanctioned access to multicultural divorcées.

  “If you want to find God,” said Baba as he turned off the TV, “study the natural sciences. Earth, the human body, anything you can touch, or see traces of, or watch through a microscope. Then, if your spirit is still hungry, memorize poetry. That’s the only immortality available, Niloo joon, those voices from another time.” I didn’t argue since his instructions didn’t seem to interfere with Maman’s faith. I could easily satisfy them both, so why bother trying to figure out who was right? “Did you know that in the old days, every Persian scholar was expected to write in verse? Half of Avicenna’s medical writings are in verse. There’s so much mystery and beauty in the physical world without resorting to fantasy and god worship.”

  Rearranging himself on his raft, Baba said, “Go find some photos.” He picked up the receiver again and dialed from a number in his cupped palm. I hadn’t noticed the paper scrap nestled there. I asked whom he was calling, but he waved me away, muttering something about having to ask a hundred times for photos. I counted the number of digits he dialed—only seven. He wasn’t calling Iran. He wasn’t even calling Oklahoma City. Whoever his friend was, he was right here in our tiny suburb.

  I went in search of my eighth-grade album. Maman had helped me cut photos of my friends and activities into fun shapes and paste them into a book along with colorful images from magazine ads (fruits and candies and things; no cosmetic or alcohol ads, even though they had the best graphics. I begged her to let me include a gorgeous lime wedge hanging off a dewy, crystalline vodka bottle. She scowled, horrified). My search must have taken a while, because when I returned to the living room, the strangest scene was unfolding. Baba was answering the front door in his pajamas, shaking hands with Nader.

  I lingered in the hall, waiting for something to happen. Maman was in the deepest sleep. With two jobs and church, she slept every minute that didn’t lead directly to someone’s physical or spiritual feeding. Even if she had known that Nader and Baba were meeting now, she wouldn’t have wanted to be woken. The poor don’t get the luxury of fussing over awkwardness. They deal. So I stood in my turquoise socks, one foot on my thigh like an ostrich, my album tucked under my arm, waiting for someone to punch someone like in the movies.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Nader greeted me, slapping Baba’s back as he entered. I held my breath. Surely Baba would explode at this rude gesture from a man a hundred years younger than him. “Been practicing?” He was looking at the foot on my thigh. Sometimes while at the stove, Nader taught me yoga moves from his travels. We would raise our arms and sun salute as we sautéed. Spatulas in our teeth, we would downward dog. I had good balance and flexibility and I liked practicing the poses on my own. But now, I dropped my foot and said, “Don’t call me kiddo.” I added, glaring, “Baba, this is Maman’s friend, Nader.”

  Nader wasn’t bothered. “Finally,” he said, “I meet the famous Dr. Hamidi. It’s an honor. Do you want a smoke, Doctor?”

  “I don’t smoke tobacco,” said Baba coldly. Though he did; of course, he did.

  “Neither do I,” said Nader. Though he did too. The man smoked for breakfast; what was he talking about?

  “Oh yes?” said Baba. “Fine then. Much obliged, Nader joon.” He reached for his shirt. Why was he joon-ing Nader? They were out the door in three minutes, Nader’s lanky body in a graying T-shirt gliding out after Baba’s lumpier, buttoned-up one.

  Hours later, the men returned, all backslaps and darting eyeballs and dancing fingers. They didn’t come in, but circled the apartment and stood on the shared terrace out back, talking quietly. I watched them through the glass and once in a while caught a word here or there, nothing meaningful. What could they have to say to each other? I retrieved my picture album from the cushionless couch where I had left it, and I slipped out to the back. They didn’t notice me, and so I lingered, thinking that if I was caught I could use the album as an excuse—Oh this? I’m not spying. Just wanting some father-daughter time.

  An aside: Over the years in Amsterdam, I’ve studied Iranian fathers and daughters. Persian men belittle and abuse their wives, demanding total subservience. They insist on delectable suppers, sparkling floors, and clothes that smell of jasmine, all without fuss or complaint. Their mothers served them, after all, and they need it to survive, but they suffer an unconscious guilt over it. So, when chance gives them daughters, a fear sets in. What if someone treats their hatchling the way they’ve treated their wives? So, they sacrifice themselves to this precious creature. They become her practice field. They offer themselves as the ground holding her up, the shifting plates of their backs the terrain for her small feet. They teach their girls to be aggressive and cunning and to rule over them, to trick their fathers into buying presents, to bat their eyelashes and stomp on hearts, never to tell their own husbands “I love you” because that’s giving up too much power. Forced to witness this spectacle, frustrated wives (having once been someone’s muse and Machiavelli) spoil their sons, lavishing them with all the attention they lack from their husbands, teaching the next generation that a woman’s love is delivered never in words, only th
rough service. The result of all this is generation after generation of entitled boy-men and brick-fisted, manipulative women, a dynamic that may offend the civilized, but is sustainable and self-propagating.

  My Baba didn’t spoil me as other Babas did, but even he couldn’t escape this twisted kind of father-daughter love that garroted our social world. We saw it everywhere and it snared us too—a little. So, I waited by the door, eavesdropping for ten minutes before announcing myself. They were talking about Maman, the story about Baba’s last days in Tehran University when he would bring her berries and almonds from Ardestoon and hide them in her apartment with clues of their whereabouts, written entirely in verse. I knew this story.

  “You were in love,” said Nader. “It’s a blessing.”

  Baba scoffed. “Blessing,” he said. “A pretentious word. I was just lucky, like you. And I was open to it. In my gut, I was open to the thing.” Nader nodded; he never looked uncomfortable. Baba shrugged. “You’re a churchgoing man. You can call things blessings if you want. But I think everything is random, and I’m right.”

  “You should come to church with us,” said Nader, taking three short drags of his cigarette. “I’ll make ribs after. We can have it with real rice, no sticky garbage.”

  “Thank you,” said Baba. Nothing more. They puffed in silence for a long while. Then Baba peered into the dark. “I imagine things aren’t so lonesome here,” he said, his back bent, his gaze on his shoe, “when you’re in a church.”

  Nader nodded. “That’s true,” he said, “for the kids too.”

  Baba scoffed, his voice straining. “But they’ve forgotten their home. I tried to talk about Ardestoon. No interest. And Niloo’s becoming a damn ascetic. She says she’s given up ice cream; did you know this?” I could see the annoyance in Baba’s eyes. As a child, I had seen him become violent, but the monster was so deeply buried now—what would cause it to emerge? Not Nader. Nader wasn’t enough.