Refuge--A Novel

by Dina Nayeri

  Add to this one large side order of Christian right-wing nuttery, and you have Kian Hamidi, future respected chef, son of Dr. Bahman Hamidi, bon vivant and opium-slash-waterslide enthusiast who has never nodded at anything unless he felt like nodding at it, doesn’t take well to being judged, analyzed, or told what to do, and thinks every Christian and Muslim should find a deep well of shit and jump into it.

  At least they both had a temper.

  Baba rented a hotel room near Leicester Square for Kian and me. He would stay with relatives just outside town. Had I been older, I might have asked where he was going and with whom. But the memory of that night when I had found him slumped in the Red Carpet Motel was so raw and seething that I didn’t linger on it. I didn’t ask if he was staying outside town to feed his habit, or maybe he couldn’t afford two hotel rooms on his black market sterling, a wad of cash that looked decidedly more modest than the one he had carried in Oklahoma.

  Kian and I fell asleep the moment we settled into the hotel room, a little past noon. We weren’t meeting Baba till the next day, and we thought we had earned a short nap. Later, we ordered cheeseburgers and fries to the room and stayed up watching BBC Two dramas and trying to fall asleep at the correct hour. When we failed to summon sleep, we fought. Because it was a long time ago and because of our fatigue and anxiety, we said much that I don’t recall. I remember the worst things:

  Two a.m. Kian, on my vocational choices: “You don’t get art. You have no respect for what I do. You only respect data and grants and your name in soulless journals.”

  Three a.m. Me, on Kian’s religious leanings: “Want to know something? There’s no truth or beauty like holding a Neanderthal jaw in your hand, and knowing with absolute certainty that your Bible and Koran, and every serotonin-high nut lost in nirvana or ecstasy or Pentecost or whatever are all fucking confused.”

  At around dawn, Kian, voice hoarse with exhaustion, ended the fight on the sourest note: “You’re dating a vanilla white boy who will politely drive you to misery and then in five years he’ll leave you . . . quietly though. So quietly; don’t worry.”

  We didn’t say another kind word to each other for four days.

  We met Baba for breakfast in a café in Covent Garden. From far away it was easy to spot him, sitting at an outdoor table, arms folded on his lap as if listening to a Sufi prayer, a cane resting against the wall beside him, sipping a very tall, very dark beer at eleven a.m., the foam in his mustache visible from across the square. He was older. I felt it in the space between my rib cage and my heart, the way it was closing up with each step. Kian whispered, mostly to himself, “God, I don’t want to see him.”

  And because I hated Kian just then, I didn’t reassure him, though the same fear and doubt afflicted me. Was Baba smaller? I wanted to turn back and run all the way to Connecticut and get into my senior year dormitory bed, where Gui’s arms had cradled my head for so many nights that it had started to become home. Instead I said, “I’m excited to see my Baba.” I wanted to remind Kian that I had been the favorite, that I was the beloved older child, that Baba and I had three precious years alone together, a luxury Kian couldn’t fathom, years when I dripped ice cream on his neck and he howled from below my feet, when he kissed my face and said I was the sweetest creature, the tickle of his mustache on my cheek a lingering reminder of the constancy and firmness of the earth beneath my toes. Silently I thanked whatever gods exist for Gui, who had taken this fading, withering man’s place.

  Kian’s shoulders collapsed a little as we approached the table. Baba didn’t recognize us until we had almost reached him. He stumbled out of his chair, knocking it back and grinning and maybe crying beneath his outdated sunglasses. His hair was still red, salted now, and his mustache was thinner and fully gray. His back arched dramatically; he looked older than forty-seven. His body was smaller, softer, more splayed out. Then again, Kian and I were taller, fitter. At twenty-two and nineteen, we judged our Baba with the eyes we had. I gaped at his cane.

  “Niloo joon,” he said, his voice breaking. “Oh, Kian. Oh my boy, you’re so tall.” He dabbed his eyes, a little foggier and grayer than I remembered, and reached for his cane, then decided against it. He hobbled toward us and threw himself with absolute familiarity into Kian’s arms. Kian looked at me over Baba’s shoulder, his eyes flinching. But Baba kept squeezing him, gripping his own forearms around Kian’s body, his green beads hanging off his fingers, as if Kian might run away, and something beyond our untouchable young souls leaked through Kian’s skin and a change like gentleness came over him, brightening his eyes. He stood still for a long time, letting Baba hug him and weep onto his shoulder, to run his arms up his back as if to recognize this adult body his son now occupied, so much like his own, from a time.

  We sat down and Baba ordered two more beers, tipping the waitress twenty pounds to overlook the breakfast rules. Immediately he started calculating. “Last time I saw you, Kian joon, it was eight years ago. How old were you? Ten? Eleven?”

  “Eleven,” said Kian, and turned to the waitress who was gathering our menus. “Can you make mine a coffee? Lots of milk and sugar?” He flashed the waitress a charming smile as if they were allied in some battle against the inconsiderate restaurant patrons of the world. “Whatever you have brewing. Thank you.”

  I ordered a cappuccino and took a breakfast menu from the stack under her arm. Kian glared at me and apologized to the waitress for my rudeness. She looked curiously at us, her weak chin dimpling as she repeated our drink order and walked away. “Don’t apologize for me,” I said. “You’re not my PR rep.”

  “Shut up, Niloo,” said Kian. “She’s a human being.”

  Baba slapped the back of one hand with the other, an Iranian gesture of shock and discomfort. “Ei vai, what is this?” he said in a horrified half whisper. “What am I hearing? Kian, that’s your sister. Save the venom for your wife.”

  I snorted, recalling this old Persian joke. Women in Ardestoon teased their sons with it and the joke had dulled, losing meaning. It simply meant Be nice. But Kian, unaware of this, muttered in English, “If I get married, I plan not to suck at it.”

  Baba turned to me. “What did he just say?” He pointed his cane at Kian, anger darkening his eyes. I know he understood some of it, but he demanded a translation. I offered something close to Kian’s comment, sparing Baba the exact words. Kian shifted in his chair. Baba’s face was reddening, his reaction so out of proportion with what had been said that Kian and I forgot our fight and exchanged a confused glance. “What do you know about marriage?” Baba said, spit flying out of his mouth. “What do you know about anything? You have no judgment for what is truly insulting.”

  I said in Farsi, “Can we just eat? No Hamidi should be allowed to utter a word on anything less than a full stomach. We’re like animals.”

  “That is the truest thing I’ve heard today,” said Baba, and ordered a full English breakfast with two extra roasted tomatoes and one extra egg and a side of sliced cucumber. For the bread he wanted barbari, which, of course, they didn’t have, so he turned to me and asked what’s the closest Western thing. I ordered him a toasted English muffin, a crumpet, and half a baguette—one of those should satisfy. Kian ordered a mushroom omelet and another pot of coffee. I asked for my next cappuccino with an extra shot and two hard-boiled eggs with butter. I had recently adopted Gui’s breakfast habits. On Sunday mornings, he took great pleasure in choosing a seat directly in the sunlight, cracking eggs with a tiny spoon, mixing the insides with salt and butter, and remembering his childhood in Provence.

  I looked at the cane again. Baba gave a wet, coughing chuckle. He said, “Don’t worry, my girl. It’s only the varicosis. I had a vein removed.” He lifted his trouser leg and showed us the layers of white bandage from his ankle to his calf. Somehow this made me feel better—maybe because it was an ailment for any age, for former athletes, and in fact, Baba had suffered from it s
ince he was in his thirties.

  When the food arrived, Baba declared the baguette a sin against humanity. The crumpet delighted him though, and he called back the waitress. He shouted over the heads of three tables of baffled English customers. “Miss, please come with the quickness.” He spoke in a kind of schizophrenic English whose shameful memory we must have repressed but was returning now, with all the quickness. “What this is, dear? This hard bread?” he said, waving the baguette. “Is rock. I break molar. But is no worry. Is no worry, miss, we fix. You must bring this England muffin”—he was pointing to the crumpet—“three England muffin, toasted browner. Is possible?”

  “Three toasted crumpets,” she repeated, unamused. “Yes, sir.”

  Kian, mortified at this ingratitude toward a service worker, said, “Everything was very good. The omelet was excellent. Cooked evenly throughout, onions seared just right.” The waitress gave him a strange look—we were a sideshow act.

  “And another darkest, darkest barley water,” Baba said. “With the quickness, because I suffer these children.” He leaned in on the second “darkest” as if to say that the previous beer hadn’t been dark enough. As he spoke, he mashed bites of bread into the butter and floated them near Kian’s mouth, then mine, then Kian’s again, until Kian patted his hand away and flashed his sternest this isn’t Iran look.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, “Guinness coming up.” Baba nodded briskly at the word, his feline smile, that long pleasure grin, unchanged after decades, resurfacing.

  When the beer came, Baba took one sip from his foaming glass and summoned the waitress again, this time motioning her over with his finger as he wiped his mouth. Kian slapped his face, burying himself up to his ears in his summer jacket. Baba said, “Is not Extra Stout, the Guinness.” He wasn’t asking.

  “Right. Sorry, sir,” she said. “We only have Guinness draft on tap.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Baba, frustrated with his children and desperate for his morning beer. “Is not taps, the Extra Stout. Is bottle. Is too dark for general tastes.” And he waved his hand outward as if at the legion of swill guzzlers all around.

  Was there any question that the staff was talking about us in the back? Maybe spitting in our coffees? Who was this foreign clod and why was he so fluent in Irish beer? My head and neck ached and I wished this trip would end—it was a feeling so much like those days in Oklahoma that for a moment I was ashamed of myself. I was no teenager, after all. I was a worldly twenty-two. Shouldn’t I be able to handle a man from another culture, a culture that I too had somewhere in my blood? I opened my Michelin Green Guide to a list of museums. “Where to first then?” I said. “I think Baba would like the Tate Modern, and the Portrait Gallery, there’s a painting of Jane Grey’s beheading and the light on her dress looks just—”

  A smile crept across Kian’s face. Clearly he thought I was feigning interest in art because of our fight earlier. So I said, to spite him, “We discussed it in my art history class at Yale.” Kian hated it when I mentioned Yale. He thought I was becoming an elitist snob. So I added, “Oh, and Gui gave us a list of restaurants to try.”

  “I have a list of restaurants,” said Kian with complete authority.

  I decided to make a stab at peace. “Babajoon, Kian is going to become a chef. Everyone loves his food.”

  Kian didn’t respond—he looked away from Baba as if expecting a reproach, and when he turned back, they exchanged an uncomfortable smile. Maybe Kian would have preferred that I keep quiet on the issue. Baba said, “Oh yes? I assumed you were studying real estate or medicine like all the other Iranians in America.”

  “Babajoon, real estate isn’t something you study,” I said. “It’s something you do after you realize you’re forty and you’ve spent the last ten years partying. Or if you’re a failed novelist or dropped out of med school or something. It’s the savvy mediocrity’s quick backup plan.”

  Kian cackled at this, which gratified me.

  Baba seemed puzzled. “Is this true? But there are all those Iranians . . . ?” I shrugged. Baba shook his head, and, of course, I saw his disappointment. At that age, Kian and I were the worst humans ever to roam this earth, and our loathsomeness had crystallized in universities filled with equally vile classmates. He said, in English now, “Is wrong, talking this way. Judging in this way. Is too much pride, both of you.”

  “He’s right,” said Kian. He must have been having Jesus thoughts again. “I’m sorry.” I didn’t respond because I wasn’t sorry. I believed that the real estate business was useless, designed for garish people who planned to have zero impact on the world. These were the same people who filled wall cracks with toothpaste and pumped in fake apple pie smell just so they could squeeze a few extra dollars from young couples like Gui and me. Fuck them. “Sorry to disappoint on the med school hopes,” Kian added, “but I like to cook. And it’s creative. So that’s what I’ll do.”

  “Disappoint?” said Baba in the slow, easy English of the buzzed foreigner. He was half finished with his crazy dark beer. When he saw me looking, he pushed it toward me and I tasted it. It was crude oil. He said to Kian, “My son, cooking is art. And it is art from our own village and family. Is proudable, this choice.”

  We decided on the Portrait Gallery. Baba bought two packs of chocolate Maltesers “for the way.” His cane clicked on the hard floors of the gallery in slow twos and threes, like code from a dying ship. He walked from room to room, arching his back and adjusting his weight to his good leg. “Why are these paintings uncovered?” he said. “Are they real? They just leave them here for people to touch?”

  “People know not to touch them,” said Kian.

  Baba nodded and said, eyes and tone fully sincere, “So there are no Iranians?”

  Kian burst out laughing. “There’s a floor sign somewhere,” he said.

  Baba scoffed, shuffling along on his cane like a much older man, leaning back to examine each portrait from top to bottom. “I won’t touch, in any case,” he muttered, approaching a Holbein that pleased him so much that for five minutes he stood nose to nose with the unhappy subject, a minor courtier or statesman of the sixteenth century. “But I must tell you that I’m deeply tempted. Deeply.”

  Later he took my hand and tapped some Maltesers into it, his round cheeks moving behind his mustache, like a machine whose many pieces come to life at once. “Baba, put those away,” I said, tucking the candy into his jacket. “It’s not allowed.”

  “It doesn’t say,” he said, glancing around. “There’s no sign.”

  Kian, his fatigue returning and desperate for an espresso stop, said, “It also doesn’t say ‘Don’t take a piss on the floor.’ People know.”

  “My son is very rude,” Baba grumbled to himself, falling in step behind Kian, shaking his head to no one. “It’s a lucky thing he can cook.”

  At a coffee shop outside the museum, Baba spun his green counting beads and asked questions about our lives. We spoke about Gui. “Is this the man you want to marry?” he asked. I said that he was, needlessly adding that we might marry by the time I began my dissertation. He asked about Kian’s work and my grad school plans. After a long pause, he asked about Maman. We told him she had gone to Bangkok for some mysterious reason. She wouldn’t tell us why, and we didn’t press the issue. “I don’t understand,” said Baba. “What business could she have there?”

  Between sips of his latte, which he kept sugaring and tasting, he took a folded photo out of his brown leather wallet and laid both items on the table. He had owned the wallet since I was born and it still smelled faintly of hashish. The photo was an image of some grayscale ancestor, an Ardestooni in a black suit, staring directly at the camera. I lifted it and stared in the light. It was the same man (or maybe that man’s father) who had appeared in a picture he had given me years before, on our last visit to Ardestoon, when Baba gave me two photos to guard. I still had them in a box of trea
sures in my closet. He started to tell us a story as he sucked foam from the top of his latte and added another scoop of sugar.

  He told us about our great-great-grandfather Hamidi, a doctor so skilled, people called him from all over the country to heal their sick. One day, some sultan or shah or vizier from India or Pakistan or Bangladesh (in Baba’s stories, the most verifiable details are always the vaguest) sent for this doctor because his daughter was on her deathbed and in a constant state of agony. No one could fix her mysterious disease. By the time Dr. Hamidi arrived, the sultan (or shah or vizier) had lost all hope for his child. But Dr. Hamidi got right to work, mixing his herbs and the chemical combinations he had invented himself (doubtful), and within weeks, the doctor had cured the girl. Elated, her father threw a massive feast. He stuffed the doctor full of Indian (or Pakistani or Bangladeshi) delicacies for three nights, and when he was very fat, his servants put the doctor on a scale. He thought, Well, they’re going to butcher me now, the savages. But they gave him his weight in gold and a caravan back home. And that is how most of Ardestoon was purchased.

  “I tell you that story because your very existence is owed to the excellence of someone’s work,” he said. I had heard the excellence speech only about a thousand times and so I busied myself with my coffee. He was speaking mostly to Kian anyway. “When you make food for strangers,” he said. “It must be the best. You can’t dig in your freezer for leftovers or fill your stew with potatoes. You can’t serve yesterday’s hard bread. You must take pride! Food is joy. Joy is everything.”

  Kian’s expression opened and he shifted forward in his chair. He didn’t smile, only nodded, as if conferring on the gravest topic. Then, as Baba reached for more sugar, he took Baba’s spoon from him, and sunk the grains to the bottom of the cup, sweetening the espresso instead of the foam. He discarded three scoops of sugary foam onto a plate and drenched the rest with two spoonsful of espresso, making Baba’s latte softer and smoother, a delicious hazelnut brown. Baba shook his head, letting his beads dangle from his finger. He tasted his drink and smiled with his eyes.