Refuge--A Novel

by Dina Nayeri

  A woman in the back shouts at the moderator, “Read the first one again.” No one has to explain the differences. Though over the next few days, many liberal Dutch sources too will highlight the problem. Radio Netherlands Worldwide will disperse damning truths to the Dutch- and English-speaking public. They will say that Mam’mad talked of suicide in interviews and wasn’t taken seriously, that the Dutch authorities offered no help, that they deport many doomed men and women without mercy. Dutch television programs like Nieuwsuur will interview some of the people in this very room. The moderator will be quoted: “He was fed up, like a lot of people here. Roaming the city at night. No status, no travel documents, no future. He smiled and pretended he was an invited professor, but that ran out long ago. His money too. Almost sixty with a lapsed visa? You can’t even get dishwashing work with that. If he had returned to Iran, he probably faced the same fate. He was scared of being arrested and executed.” Siavash’s comments will be moving, powerful, expertly condemning. “There were all kinds of signs . . . The authorities may be right to reject a request and deport the asylum seeker, but if he’s still here after years and you see him deteriorating, becoming mentally finished, there comes a time when you have to take responsibility. You cannot just show someone the door.”

  The Dutch immigration authorities will respond that all procedures were followed without error. They will offer up the word tragic and drop the matter.

  After the evening’s mourning, Niloo lifts her tingling legs off the cushions. “I’m going home,” she says. Is it her home, this place she’s headed? For decades she’s tried to make homes for herself, but she is always a foreigner, always a guest—that forever refugee feeling, that constant need for a meter of space, the Perimeter she carries on her back. Over the years, she has learned to adapt, to start over in each new place and live as if she belongs there. It feels like lying, even more so now.

  Pedaling eastward, she thinks of her spice jar, its heady scent and golden hue, and a years-ago conversation with Gui about tarragon and turmeric. Adding turmeric makes a thing Persian. That ripped-up root that bleeds when crushed, staining kitchen counters, oven mitts, even the soil, a dark yellow. The soft, papery fingers of grandmothers back home, jaundiced to the last—did Mam’mad once have an Aziz joon with henna hair and yellow thumbs? Oh, Aziz joon, how I miss your hands. The warped stem gets in the blood, leaking up from the loam. As a child, Niloo walked bare-toed on that warm soil, on the tired backs of those who loved her, and she sank down until her feet planted. Here the ice-hard ground doesn’t yield to strangers’ feet, and her friends wander, a scattered village of poets and pleasure-seekers, burning to be seen. “I am here!” Mam’mad cried out in his final act. We are all here, still waiting, addicts clustered together in a squat, broken from the earth like turmeric root, staining everything.

  THE THIRD VISIT

  MADRID, 2006

  Sit, be still, and listen, because you’re drunk and we’re at the edge of the roof.

  —JALAL AD-DIN RUMI

  In late December 2006, I arrived in Madrid for our third visit, unhappy down to my toes. In the privacy of memory, it’s easier to admit: nothing good could have come of that trip, and it started like a farce. After years spent apart, Kian and I sat beside our parents in a rented apartment in Plaza Major, watching footage of Saddam Hussein’s hanging. Just below our living room window, costumed Spaniards in colorful wigs were buying churros and beer and sparklers in the sunny square. We fidgeted on a bright red couch, silent, hungry, a little musty and jet-lagged, but unable to look away. First we watched the official video released by Iraqi television, then the shaky cell phone footage, the men shouting, taunting him. “Go to hell,” one said. Another begged, “Please, the man is facing execution.” Then the dictator reciting some prayers and a sickening thump. Baba lit a cigarette and walked away, mumbling. “That wicked man is finally gone,” said Maman. “Praise Jesus.”

  “Your Jesus did this then?” said Baba, turning in the doorway. Maman didn’t respond, just closed her eyes and breathed. “Everything has turned so ugly. This filth was once the Persia of Rumi and Hafez and Avicenna. This muck is us now.”

  “Baba, take it outside,” said Kian when Baba’s cigarette started to fill the room with smoke. Kian followed him out, opening the cherry red latches on the windows. “I don’t want to live in an ashtray for a week.”

  Maman had recently gone blonde—a bad decision for an Iranian no matter how old you are, but particularly gruesome for a darkly complexioned fifty-year-old who has studied and traveled and lived. You’re supposed to be able to see yourself more clearly than the nadid-badid, the riffraff, I often told her, but on this trip I held my tongue. It had been a trial to get her to come to Madrid in the first place, on our third reunion with Baba since we left Iran. “Why do I want to see that man? He was the ruination and the torment of my life.” Maman has never shied from the dramatic.

  “You’re not going to see Baba,” I said. “You’re going to see Madrid and get to know your son-in-law. You’ll have your own room.” A year before, Gui and I had married in private and moved to Amsterdam. Neither of us wanted a wedding.

  We hadn’t yet slept in our colorful Spanish apartment. We arrived on four separate flights that morning, said polite hellos, marveled at the reds and the blues, and dropped onto the couch. Now we were watching the news and taking out our exhaustion on one another. “I’m going out for groceries,” said Maman. “Put my things where you like.” She heaved herself up and threw her shawl around her shoulders.

  She was punishing me because Gui hadn’t come. Less than a year of marriage, and I was in Madrid with my parents and brother, about to celebrate the New Year without my husband. “This is a bad sign, Nil,” said Kian. I told him to mind his own business. Baba turned away, hardly veiling his shock that we hadn’t improved since London. Gui had canceled because he was assigned to a case that promised all-nighters through February. I missed his scratchy morning stubble, his smooth, warm shoulders, but I was relieved to delay introducing him to Baba. So, Kian had taken Guillaume’s place and we were four again, for the first time in thirteen years.

  “If only they had killed him before he murdered and pillaged thousands of people, and bombed our best cities, and decimated our economy, and basically took a shit on the whole region for decades,” Maman said as she put on her coat.

  Baba looked at her, his nose wrinkling. He shook his head. “Why do you say such things? The man just died in the ugliest way. Why do you say this?”

  “And of course you’re feeling sympathy,” she said. “Nice.”

  “Guys, don’t start,” shouted Kian from the kitchen, where he was surveying the fridge, examining the cooking knives. I heard the hard chop-chop of a sharp knife cutting through a cucumber or a carrot he must have found.

  “That’s not the ugliest way,” said Maman, spitting rage, hands flying. I wished she hadn’t come. “If you watched the news instead of memorizing old Sufi garbage a hundred different ways, you would know. The worst way to die is after torture, or amputation, or with mustard gas like those poor Kurds. The worst is a mass grave. That man died in an instant, called himself a martyr, and is buried with his family.”

  “He was a monster and he paid,” said Baba, rubbing his face in his hand and trying to walk away, but somehow failing, as if Maman’s admonishing voice was a leash around his neck. “Stop dancing in the blood. Please, respect for death isn’t the same as respect for the man.”

  “That man you feel sympathy for,” she muttered as she slammed the door.

  After Maman left, I assigned bedrooms, giving the one with big windows to Baba, since he’s hairy and gets hot at night, and the one with the philosophy and cookbooks to Kian, since he’s a moody insomniac with a taste for the unknowable and the delicious. I dragged the bags into the rooms and returned to find my brother and father eating slices of cucumber and salt, not talking to each other.

/>   They were chewing in the same rhythm, like two cartoon mice. “You two look like the same person thirty years apart,” I said. Baba beamed. Kian rolled his eyes. Baba got up and sliced a cucumber in half from top to bottom. He salted it lovingly, as if dusting an artifact, and he held it out to me, his dark, hashish-stained fingers cradling it on the sides like a splint.

  I joined them at the table, the three of us crunching for a while. Baba mumbled, “I can’t stop hearing that thud. That noise . . .” He rubbed his temple.

  “All right, stop,” said Kian. “Don’t mention it again in front of Mom, okay?”

  “Why you call him Mom?” Baba said in his crappy English, a little accusingly.

  “You mean her,” I said. “You should take a refresher course every few years.”

  Kian looked confused. “Where the hell have you been?” And he was right of course; we had long since become Americans. Kian jumped up from the table, dropping a cucumber spear onto a plate. “I don’t even know why we’re here.”

  He stalked off to his room to read cookbooks and brood.

  “He grows up so . . . sour,” said Baba, still in English. “He reads more poetry . . . or these Bibles like your mother? I prefer when he reads poetry . . .”

  I shrugged. “It’s not one or the other, Baba joon.”

  He changed back to Farsi. “It is if you don’t want to make yourself crazy.”

  “Part of the Bible is poetry,” I said. And because I knew he was about to start on Rumi’s love of wine and the Bible’s pointless teachings about self-deprivation, I added, “Jesus drank wine. It’s an interesting historical document, at least.”

  “All right, azizam,” he whispered, clearing his throat with difficulty. He had unbuttoned his shirt down to his navel and his white undershirt was spotted with sweat, thickets of gray chest hair sprouting from every side. “All religion is evil.”

  I noticed a bead of sweat on his brow. “Are you hot?” I asked. We had yet to figure out the heater, and the rest of us had kept on our sweaters and shawls.

  “I’m fine, my sweet Niloo.” On these trips, Baba tended to get uncomfortably nostalgic at the smallest kindness. It made me want to go watch TV.

  Later, Maman returned with three bags of groceries, each one of which would have had me wheezing up the six flights of stairs to the apartment.

  “The packaged things were in Spanish.” She unpacked cherry tomatoes, pomegranates, lamb. She had picked up skim milk instead of full, and buttermilk instead of heavy cream. Baba joked that we could mix them and have something almost usable. When he sniffed the buttermilk, putting it to his ear as if it would identify itself, she laughed, but caught herself. She wanted to keep her anger.

  The real reason for Maman’s anger was that Nader had just died, and she had no one to whom to confess her grief, because, after all, if she confided in her children the world would turn on its head and we would all stumble around in white blind confusion before being sucked into a black hole. Still, we knew. Maman had cared for this man and now he was gone, disappearing first to adventures in Turkey and Greece, then vanishing from email and telephone, ashamed to reveal himself in such a state, then deteriorating into a skeletal version of himself and dying young and alone in a Thai hospital. The news of his death had reached us three weeks earlier.

  Over a dinner of stewed eggplant and lamb shanks, Maman sighed and spoke vaguely of her travels to Asia. Baba looked around as if missing something. “What’s the trouble?” he said. He wiped his brow again and blinked four or five times.

  Kian gave him a puzzled look. Baba made an exaggerated clownish version of Kian’s face back at him, and Kian tried not to laugh. He turned to Maman. “Did you add more cumin to this? After I browned the lamb?”

  Maman looked up from her plate. “Of course,” she said, as if she had been asked if she believed in democracy and God and the villainy of the Islamic Republic.

  Kian took a weary bite. “I’ll be happy to cook here, Maman joon. You relax.” He ate carefully, as if the extra cumin might damage his taste buds. He was right, though. Kian scowled over his plate until Baba took one bite of my kale salad and said, “What this is? Is like lettuce fell in love with piece of fabric.” Kian snorted into his hand. “Try it,” Baba said, encouraged. He made a lump of kale with his fingers and thrust it at Kian’s face, but Kian pushed away his hand.

  Long after our plates were empty, Baba’s quick chatter continued in many directions. Now and then he wiped a corner of the serving plate with an idle finger and licked the sauce or dabbed a grain of rice and placed it on his tongue. Halfway through a story about his mother’s latest venture in Ardestoon, teaching teenage girls artistic carpet designs, he stuck a pinky in the bare lamb bone, already picked clean of its meat, and dug around for leftover marrow. He continued with his story as if his fingers belonged to another creature, as if he didn’t even see them there. “She misses you kids,” he said of our grandmother. “She’s very old. Did you know that Ardestoon is on the Internet now? Would you like to see? They have a page about the aqueduct. It’s just as I told you—an engineering marvel.”

  “Baba, stop that,” I said, unable to watch his coarse fingers anymore.

  He looked down at his greasy hands. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, then seemed to think better of it. “Why does everything embarrass you? Who is here to impress?”

  What Baba knew, and what I have come to know, is that I was embarrassed in front of myself—the new Niloo, the Niloo I was trying to build. He was tainting me with every flick of his yellowing fingers, as Maman was doing with her yellow hair. They were stained, the two of them, and I didn’t want to get too close.

  He wiped his hands and muttered, “Next time, what if I stop over in Dubai and have all traces of Iran professionally cleansed from my body? Like a car wash for the poor fools who aren’t as refined as yourselves—would that satisfy you?”

  True to form, he grumbled for exactly two minutes before forgetting his unhappiness in one unbroken lump, tossed away like the discarded lamb carcass. It happened the instant Kian brought out the games and the chocolate.

  We sat beside the window watching the early revelers in Plaza Major and playing cards for candy pieces. Maman said, “Niloo, now that we’re all settled, where are the photos of your big day? You must have something. One photo.”

  Baba sat up in the fuzzy armchair he had come to like (two minutes after arrival, Baba in English: “Why this chair is hairy?”), dropping the cards he had been sorting on the table. “Yes, where are the photos? Let’s see them.”

  I sighed—this again. “We’ve discussed this,” I said to Maman.

  “How can there be no photos?” said Maman, running her fingers through her insanely blonde hair. “It makes no sense. Who gets married without photos?”

  “Leave her alone, you guys,” said Kian. “Niloo’s not into artifacts like you two.” He chuckled at his own wit. Lately Kian had stopped mocking my profession. I think he even respected it. Baba nodded vigorously, his nose back in his cards.

  “We had no wedding to photograph,” I said. Then, feeling vicious, I said to Baba, “I never saw photos of your wedding. Where are those?”

  “Ouch,” Kian whispered. Sensing the end of the game, he ate a poker chip.

  “Vai, Niloo.” Baba gave a weak gasp. “That is very unkind.”

  Maman put on her glasses, as if they would amplify her cold gaze. “You know those situations are different. First weddings matter in different ways.”

  Baba shifted in his fuzzy chair. He was chewing the inside of his cheek and looking generally uncomfortable, his cards now discarded faceup, telling us that the game was, in fact, over. “I should tell you all,” he said. “I’m making a small change.”

  Maman got up from her chair. “I’ll make tea,” she said. Baba’s hands folded, and he started nibbling on his mustache. After a moment’s thoug
ht, he dropped the subject. Later, after Maman had gone to bed, Kian and I sat up drinking with Baba. He told us that his marriage was ending, that he felt drained of energy, stuck in a dying country and useless with age. He said he was in the process of marrying a third woman, someone much younger who was loosely related to the family we had visited outside London five years before. He hoped that in this marriage, he could be healthier, feel younger, live more openly to the demands of the universe. After two whiskeys, he talked about dyeing his mustache. “Your mother seems to have taken up the boxed dye. I think at our age, it can’t be avoided, yes?”

  • • •

  I woke up at three in the morning to the smell of Turkish coffee and the trill of hushed laughter from the living room. My parents were talking politics and making fun of Spanish foods. They had eaten half a plate of boxed churros that Maman had bought and, instead of chocolate, they were dipping them in honeycomb Baba had smuggled from Ardestoon in his suitcase. Baba was animated, sitting forward in his chair, hands flailing as he spoke. Maman looked tired, her legs tucked under her on the couch as she let the steam from her coffee warm her face. She had tied a large black headband behind her neck and over her head, so that the blonde peeking through looked almost elegant. She hushed Baba now and then. “You’ll wake the children,” she said, her voice throaty and relaxed. It might have been 1985.

  Baba was talking about Saddam Hussein again. “Well, Pari joon, he did win two elections with over a hundred percent of the vote. You can’t argue with the will of the people. Especially not the will of more than all of them. That would be madness.” Maman’s laughter, a deep clear echo like a note from the belly of a violin, drifted into the hall where I stood.

  “Ai, Pari joon, Ahmadinejad is the same kind of garbage,” Baba continued, rocking back and forth. It was a subtle but unnatural movement of which Maman seemed unaware. “This year alone this simian has shamed us in a hundred ways. He tells the international community the holocaust was invented, he hangs teenage boys for what? A round of adolescent horseplay! He makes the most puffed-up statements on camera. Did you know there are claims floating around that Iranians cured AIDS? Tell me, is this not a wonderland of foolishness that we’re living in?” His hands were flying over his head and even from the hallway I could see them shaking, the green beads coiled around his swollen fingers rattling. He reached for his cup again and as he sipped, he panted, his breath heavy and quick with energy, his tongue dipping into the coffee before he sipped, like a toe testing frigid lake water. Baba loved animated talks, stories, debates. He even loved being contradicted if it meant a chance to release. But this behavior seemed intense even for him.