Refuge--A Novel

by Dina Nayeri

  She accompanies Siavash to three outdoor speeches, and the crackling tension among the students, the young immigrant families, often illegals and squatters, exhilarates her, fueling her passion for this new phase. She is part of an important movement; she has friends linked to her by blood, culture, and native words; she feels something like purpose. It seems that for years she has lived under a mild, teetering sedation, waiting for a spell to break, for something to puncture her skin, releasing the weariness and bringing her back to the waking world.

  For a while, she stops making lists. Reading over the rules she made for Gui months before, she blushes. She doesn’t mention them again, and stops interrupting him at work. One day, in a fit of nostalgia, she sends him a message. I love you, Gui. I’m thankful for that frantic, naive Niloo who chose you. His reply, touched and surprised and solicitous, saddens her. Has she been so neglectful of his heart?

  Then, one night, a treasure arrives. The doorbell rings and Niloo unwraps herself from under a shawl, letting a pile of printouts and notes flutter to the ground as she stands. The wood-beamed flat is cold in late fall, and Niloo has grown eager to move into her new apartment. Outside, a sweaty teenager shaped like an oil drum holds a package out to her, keeping his foot on the top stair as if taking that last step might cost him his tram home. With each breath, his belly spills out of his red jeans like soufflé batter rising from a red ramekin, then recedes as if someone has opened the oven door. He grunts dank je wel for her five euros and leaves without goodbye.

  The box is unlabeled and unsealed, the flaps folded in a crosshatch as if to flaunt the sender’s trust in the carrier. A faded logo in Farsi contains a single familiar word. Ardestoon. It’s enough to make Niloo recoil from the box. She wants to make tea first, to prepare herself for exposure to its contents, last revealed in Iranian light. But she doesn’t. She sits in her chair, kicking away the papers, and tears through the brown cardboard. Her grandmother has tucked a photo of herself inside, atop a mason jar of advieh—mixed spices. The jar is wrapped first in a torn piece of blue fabric, then a plastic bag, then a page from an Iranian newspaper. Unwrapping it is archeology, and it thrills her to dig down to the jar. Through the murky glass, the spice shines a deep sunflower yellow, with flecks of browns and oranges scattered in. More blue fabric peeks out from under the sharp metal lid.

  For a seventy-year-old Iranian villager to send a package of unlabeled herbs from her tiny riverside farm to Amsterdam is an unreliable and expensive feat, and so it makes sense that she skipped the post and enlisted some Europe-bound relative—like her granddaughter Niloo, Aziz joon is a logical, precise woman, weighing every option. That relative likely landed in London and sent the package to a cousin in Holland, and the cousin gave it to a neighbor or courier and so forth.

  To Niloo the worth of the package is incalculable, the smell of it transporting her to her grandmother’s kitchen. Then she spots the letter at the bottom of the package, its telltale handwriting, its dingy, smudged paper, a bureaucratic pastel blue, infecting the entire box. So it seems that the spice jar isn’t a kind gesture, after all. And maybe it isn’t such a treasure either, just a cheap trinket to disguise and transport the letter, which must have already failed to reach Niloo once or twice. The logic of grandmothers is practical and sharp. The hand-stamped postmark in the corner of the letter reads airmail, but then over the mangled attempt at Nederland, someone has written in Farsi undeliverable. The return address has been scratched out. But who could miss the signs? Everything that her Baba touches smells the same way, that earthy stench of hashish and opium that still lingers on Niloo’s birth certificate and on an old copy of Rumi’s poems that he once sent.

  She stares at the envelope for a while, then stuffs it unopened into a kitchen drawer that Guillaume is unlikely to check, the one with can openers and carrot peelers. Why does he insist? Doesn’t he know that there is no paradise to be found here? The smell of Baba’s drugs on her fingers makes her sick, so she washes her hands and throws away the box. She wants to cook with the spices right away, to powder some chicken thighs with them, or mix the pretty yellow concoction with some bread crumbs and sauté some mushrooms in it. The idea of waiting suddenly seems impossible. She finds a pot and starts warming olive oil. She chops the ends off an onion and peels the skin with one practiced motion, anticipating that soothing sizzle.

  Working with that jar, she forgets her meticulous habits—Gui often teases her for measuring everything with laboratory precision, scraping the excess sugar from tablespoons with a sharp knife, displacing water with a chunk of butter to know the butter’s exact volume. But the jar makes magic of her fingers, and she sprinkles and pinches and tosses with Ardestooni abandon. The yellow turmeric stain on her fingers delights her. It conjures Nader, the young lover of her mother’s haunted, heart-skinned first years as an immigrant. He is dead now. He used to stand around shirtless with giant earphones on, whipping eggs, and as a pitiless child, Niloo hated him. It also brings back memories of her grandmother, and the grandmothers of her school friends—every old woman in Iran has fingers stained by turmeric root.

  Every night for a week, Niloo cooks with her grandmother’s spices. She wonders, will Gui notice the change in his food? Every year Ardestooni women mix an enormous batch of advieh. They fill a hundred mason jars and give one to each family so that everyone’s food tastes similar that year (except maybe the rebellious grandmothers who use the jar to hide their opium balls; their food is, of course, the best). Usually they grind over thirty spices in the mix, all from leaves and roots and nuts, nothing preserved or bought—turmeric root and cumin seeds, naturally, but also coriander, ground teas and flower petals, onion, garlic, maybe ginger, a fistful of fenugreek and pinches of peppers. Each year the quality and the ratios change, maybe even one or two key ingredients, so that over a decade the taste and smell transform, but year by year they only adjust, like a lover aging.

  But Gui doesn’t notice, and she begins packing up her creations in plastic tubs to take to Mam’mad, whose all-egg diet can’t possibly be healthy.

  Fueled by a constant hunger, she returns to the squat. She searches out protests and shouts slogans at cameras. She watches the BBC, hoping for more coverage. She listens to Siavash discuss racism and Zwarte Piets (November will bring this Dutch horror into full view again; children and adults in blackface, playing the Dutch Santa’s gold-hooped “helpers”), immigration policy, the fate of amateur arts in Holland, and Wilders, whose subtlest rise in power threatens the lives so many have built here, on the cold, hard soil of this unwelcoming country.

  In late fall, an Iranian illegal threatens to burn himself. They lose days trying to track his family, bringing him stews over basmati rice so he might feel at home, trying to find a trustworthy psychologist who might speak to him. He never eats a bite and his family can’t be reached. The psychologist starts coming to the squat, but they never call any Dutch agency. The Dutch, Mam’mad reminds them wearily, wouldn’t try to understand the man; their solution would be cold and swift.

  Mam’mad, who has grown gaunt and pale and has stopped harassing Sy about his papers, visits the man one night, asking to speak with him alone. The man finally eats. Niloo stays awake wondering what was said between them.

  A few days later, one of their Dutch friends, a painter named Wouter, goes missing. Siavash says, without even a moment’s hesitation, “Call the police.”

  “You trust the Dutch police now?” Niloo says, eyebrow raised. Mala is already pulling out her phone. “You won’t even call a hotline when a guy screams suicide.”

  “For a Guillaume or a Robbert or a Wouter?” he says. “I trust them implicitly.”

  He seems unmoved; it is simply a thing he’s come to believe after years working with refugees in Holland. But with Siavash, it isn’t just Guillaume or Wouter and their European privilege in this country of immigrant haters. Or Wilders and the doom he’ll bring on artists and immig
rants and squatters. Sy might be praising his dinner and he’ll turn it political: I’m loving this so much right now; I wonder if Ahmadinejad knows there’s an Iranian out there left unfucked for a few minutes. And he considers everything about the Western world dull and lifeless: Don’t you see how gray everything is compared to Iran? Have you forgotten the lemons like candy and the grasses that whistle and lamb kabobs and salty corn on the roadside on the way to the Caspian Sea? Have you forgotten the music? Oh, Niloo joon, the music . . .

  Often he speaks in many directions: his childhood in New York, Mousavi’s moderate policies but lack of charisma, the World Cup, the shady way Iranian elections are run. At the microphone on story nights, he talks about falling in love in troubled times, from a jail cell, across class and religion. “Glorious,” he says. He calls everything glorious, cheapening the word. It’s like a deep breath for him. When he speaks, Mala devours his words. Late at night in bars, she pulls the rubber band out of his topknot, so that his greasy black hair falls onto his shoulders. She works her fingers through the tangles as if his body is on loan to her. Her hunger announces itself, interrupting casual talk. Mam’mad and Karim seem to dislike her.

  What Niloo loves about Guillaume, she thinks, is that he doesn’t need her, and she doesn’t need him. Not the way Sy and Mala need each other, like two sides of a shameful transaction—their relationship feels like one long bank card refusal, petty amounts of cash the chief question and a line of people watching and waiting.

  The next night after work, she calls Gui and tells him she won’t be home for dinner. At the squat, she sits beside Mala, eating barley soup on faded floor pillows and talking about the Green Movement, about Mousavi and Karoubi and Neda Agha-Soltan. They discuss the upcoming trial of Geert Wilders; will he be held responsible for hate speech? Mam’mad grows animated in his anger and smokes an entire joint by himself, his lisp so pronounced he is barely intelligible. “He’s a racist in charge of a major party. If he becomes prime minister, we have maybe two years of Erotic Republic and shitty music and waiting around for asylum. Then he’ll kick most of us out. You wait and see. You find the smallest thing to love in purgatory and they take that too.” Mam’mad meanders home, refusing company. He mutters, “It’s hopeless,” and disappears down the road in sweatpants and sandals, his head hung low.

  Afterward, Sy walks his bike beside hers along Prinsengracht, the reflection of the moon and the street lamps lighting their path, the canal black and bottomless, turning endlessly away. They talk about Gui and Mala and the arc of love, and about Mam’mad and Karim and their lonely wives in Tehran waiting month after month, the many impossible expectations and the strange inevitability of goodbyes.

  “Both those guys will find someone new,” says Siavash, guiding his bike with one hand. With the other he lights three matches still attached to his matchbook so that the whole thing catches on fire. He tosses it into the canal and takes a drag. “New love is cocaine. It’s exciting and it quickens your heart and makes you want to leap into a canal. Old love, established love, that’s opium. It makes you warm and relaxed and content in your skin. The problem is, cocaine is so much harder to kick.”

  “No it’s not,” she says, one hand in her bike basket, trying to keep it from leaning and dropping her purse. “There’s nothing more addictive than opium.”

  He shakes his head. “Highs are better.”

  “You’ve never seen an addict try to recover,” she says, refusing to allow Baba to invade her thoughts again. Siavash gives her a look that says, I’ve seen a hundred.

  Soon they approach the turn in the horseshoe and Siavash starts talking about the buildings and the architecture, the great hidden stories of Amsterdam. A damp chill hangs in the air, nighttime dew covering all the railings and lampposts so that their hands and jeans and bike seats are perpetually wet and she has to continually retrieve the towel she keeps in a compartment in her bike seat. Yellow light from the closed bookshops and chocolatiers and antiques shops paint the cobblestones and the bridges in soft faded hues, like a photo from a dusty stack. A few feet away, a young couple is kissing hungrily against the wall of a closed café.

  “See? The cocaine,” says Siavash, smiling and flicking his cigarette butt in their direction. “They don’t even know the rest of the city exists. Try offering them warmth and peace and oneness with the universe right now and see what they say.”

  She laughs, though the truth of it pains her. “It’s not like that for everyone. Mam’mad will go back to his wife. You’re just angsty about Mala.”

  “Says the biggest cokehead of all of us,” he says, pulling out his phone. His brow furrows as he reads a text message. He stops walking.

  “Oh please,” she says, “I’ve been married for years.”

  “I don’t mean him,” says Sy, waving a hand in her direction. He types as he speaks to her. “He’s the opium. Now you’re in love with you. The original you. Not this boring American lady who makes lists and—”

  He stops talking and is silent for a long time. Another text pings and he mutters, “Holy shit,” and lets his bike fall to the pavement, though in Amsterdam, you hold on to your bike like a child always threatening to leap into the water. “Oh fuck fuck fuck.” He fumbles to pick up his bike, clanging and cursing as he jumps on. “Mam’mad is losing his shit in Dam Square.”

  Niloo’s fingers are numb, but she pedals after him, dewy Amsterdam air condensing on her neck and hands. If old love is opium, then it must be more dangerous than new. Withdrawal from it drives the addict to the edge of a roof. It distorts his thinking, reducing life to the basest needs. It makes him moan and beg and collapse and rave for release. Nothing compares to knowing there is no more.

  When they arrive in Dam Square, people are already hurtling toward him, trying to quench the flames with jackets and sweaters, with water from bottles. They beat him with fabric, and he falls to the pavement, still aflame. Some people gather and watch, hands clasped to mouths. They pull out phones, trying to decide what to do. They’re like hens scattering. Has someone called the police? Siavash stumbles off his bike and joins the throng throwing their outer garments over Mam’mad. Off to the side, a man smothers his fiery jacket before returning to flog Mam’mad with its scorched remnants. Out of instinct, Niloo grabs the soaked towel in her bike seat. It’s full of rainwater, but what can a hand towel do? The flames are too high to place it on his face and she’s afraid. By the time the fire is out, only seconds before an ambulance arrives, Mam’mad is still, no more thrashing, his arms loose over the pavement. Niloo watches Siavash hover over him with trembling fingers, trying to decide what he can touch. He waves away the crowd, pours a little water carefully over Mam’mad’s mouth.

  Now she approaches and gives him the towel, which he places over his friend’s disfigured forehead. Drawing closer, she lets out a guttural noise, like a mangled wail. She recoils from her friend, wiping the tears and mucus from her mouth. Mam’mad’s face is a ruin of soot and blood and charred flesh, his eyebrows and eyelashes gone. She thinks of Siavash’s burns, the violence of acquiring such scars, and she imagines that maybe Mam’mad too can survive. A tuft of scorched hair, still white, by his ear reminds her of the first night, when he gave her soup and called her Khanom Cosmonaut, when she told him her four categories of Iranians and he laughed, because people are more complicated than that.

  Though he’s clearly gone, his face unrecognizable, she wants to shake him awake, to say: Mam’mad agha, this is all wrong. You’re not a reckless young man. You’re a professor. You deserve to be a knowledge worker. Now her knees buckle and she crumbles to the pavement. She tries to trample the regret already blooming, but flashes of their days together return quickly, one after another: the many humble egg dishes, the longing for an invitation from his neighbors, the days when he disappeared with Karim, the two feeding off each other’s misery—she should have known. She turns away. The police section off the area a
round the fallen man. Siavash and Niloo are pushed away with the crowd.

  Afterward, they rush to the squat to check for news. What drove Mam’mad to set himself alight? Did he speak to anyone? Though the entire community is gathered in the tiny room, fogging up windows, emptying glasses and piling them in the sink as they release their grief with endless talk, a sickening truth goes unspoken. Mam’mad got the idea from another man they knew, a man who, like Mam’mad and Karim and many others here, was desperate for help and didn’t get it.

  Their usual story night moderator reads the news aloud from a laptop. The Dutch outlets sound so different from the Persian ones. He reads first from the BBC:

  “. . . According to reports in the Dutch media, the man had an argument with a group before setting himself alight. He soaked his clothes in a highly flammable liquid and is reported to have stood motionless and silent as bystanders and shopkeepers attempted to extinguish the flames using coats and buckets of water. Police said there was no immediate explanation for his act and that an investigation into the case was under way.”

  “No explanation,” someone shouts. “Argument with a group. Lying bastards.”

  The moderator nods, wipes his forehead with a handkerchief—the bodies crammed into the squat have soured the air, making it humid and stifling despite open doors. Now he reads from Payvand News. After the first line, a loud groan rises. Some say prayers. Others mutter into each other’s necks and shoulders:

  “An Iranian man who set himself on fire in Amsterdam has died of his injuries. The unidentified man was aflame for more than two minutes, and all efforts by passersby to douse the fire were unsuccessful. His reported motive for the self-immolation was the Dutch government’s denial of his plea for asylum. According to Associated Press, the Dutch government has tightened restrictions on immigration over the past decade due to growth of anti-Muslim sentiments.”