Refuge--A Novel

by Dina Nayeri

  A shapeless anger boils up to her throat—she had wanted so much to make the lamb for him and he’s ruined it—and she yanks the highlighter from him. “You threw out my jar,” she blurts. He looks up, brow gathering. “The mason jar in the plastic and blue cloth? How could you do that?”

  “Did I?” he says. “I’ll buy you another one.” He turns back to his printouts.

  “It was mine,” she says. “This is why I don’t want your hands in my stuff. Couldn’t you let it just be mine?”

  He winces, gray eyes hurt. She slumps into a dining chair, resting her head on the table for a few moments, listening to him shuffle papers. “You were at the guitar-pick place and I had some free time, so I cleaned the pantry. I only threw away a few expired, garbagy things. Or, I thought they were . . . I’m sorry.”

  “It’s called Zakhmeh,” she snaps, “Zakh-MEH. It’s not hard to learn. And you didn’t have to get revenge just because I had one thing of my own.”

  She knows the accusation is unfair—Gui isn’t vengeful. She’s known what happened since noticing the last vestiges of yellow dust wiped from the shelves. He saw the blue cloth wrapped in cheap plastic wrapped in newspaper, tucked all the way in the back, and he thought it was trash, so he tossed it. This is Guillaume’s approach to life, to possessions. Unless a thing looks pricey, it’s worthless. Niloo wants to tell him that the jar would cost a few hundred euros at the organic market on Albert Cuypstraat, but that seems like the wrong point; that batch will never exist again. Her grandmother’s fingers have been in that jar. They tore the blue cloth, crushed the petals. And doesn’t he know her well enough to realize that when he stumbles on a bundle tucked away in a secret corner, it might be precious?

  Now some uncultivated part of her, some irrational instinct she hasn’t scrubbed out, wants to goad him until he bursts out. She doesn’t remember the last time either of them released anger, or pleasure, or joy. Even at the squat she’s tame, always listening though she has so much to say. Her father used to joke that one cannot ignore the ravings of the flesh. Lately Niloo has become curious about the urges she routinely restrains, all that misspent will. “Sometimes I wonder,” she says, “if I put on my shittiest T-shirt for long enough, would you throw me away?”

  His eyes, hazel under closer light, grow cold. He gets up and disappears into the bedroom, emerging twenty minutes later in sky blue pajama pants, his face washed, his hair wet and combed back. He watches her; Gui’s eyes are always so sad. “So you plan to ignore the letter in the drawer?” he says.

  “I’ll open it later,” she mutters, her head still resting on the kitchen table.

  “I think you’ve had a shock and you feel guilty and you need to deal with your own family. Don’t you care what your father wants?” Gui sits one chair away with a corkscrew and bottle. A glass of Valpolicella comes sliding under her nose.

  “Thanks,” she says. She takes a sip. A strangely Iranian flavor, this wine, like cherries from her family’s orchard. Baba would like it. “I know what he wants.”

  “Okay, so give him what he wants,” says Gui, sniffing his wine a second time.

  “You don’t know this man.” She softens. “He’s an opium addict. He’s devoted to whatever pleasure he’s onto lately. And he lies. A lot. He would ruin us.”

  Gui swallows loudly. He smells fresh, like shampoo and menthol aftershave. His voice drops, reaching a sorrowful place. “You’re not Karim or Mam’mad.” He says, “Why are you still so scared of losing your spot?” That name sends a hot ache through her belly. Gui stares into his glass. “For ages I thought we were making a home, but you’re still waiting with your backpack all packed and ready to go.”

  “That’s not even—” She wants to ask, What does one thing have to do with the other? But before she can finish, he’s back on the letter. “Family is family. Have you seen the news out of Iran? All that burning and looting. People getting killed in the streets. Moral police cracking down everywhere . . . Doesn’t that worry you?”

  “I know exactly what’s going on,” she says. “You’re the one who doesn’t get it. You think it’s better for them here? You think they’ll have any kind of a life? And what about his addiction? You just want the world to see you feeling bad about it, like every other happy European, but your life is nothing but safety nets. Please don’t lecture me on the pros and cons of turning my father into a damn refugee.”

  He groans. “I won’t respond to that since you just lost your friend,” he says, “but wow.” He sucks his lip and rises, anger swelling his eyes. “Goodnight.”

  Her head feels heavy and she drops it onto the table again, breathing stale red wine onto Gui’s fresh pages. Maybe she’ll sleep here. She hears some banging in the bedroom, and then a few minutes later, Guillaume reappears. He’s dressed in pressed jeans and a thin wool sweater, his favorite light gray one.

  “Where are you going?” she asks, cataloging the possibilities. He doesn’t answer. He clatters around in the pantry, gives up the search, finds an apple in the fridge, and heads to the door. She can see that she’s hurt him, likely on purpose. They say your loved ones know just where to find your buttons; maybe that’s because they installed them there. “He could’ve come with us twenty years ago,” she says, aware of her shrillness the way a drunk person becomes aware of their bad breath, disgusted but too exhausted to change it. “Who needs him now? Nobody.”

  “I don’t care anymore,” says Gui. “Have fun playing alone in your Perimeter.” He starts to leave. She is about to apologize. Gui is right. She’s been unforgivably cruel. She’s always cruelest to the most vital people. But then he says, turning at the threshold, “Maybe if instead of hoarding your precious squat, you had let me get those guys some real, professional legal help . . .”

  She doesn’t recall what she says next; the room has gone white hot and her toes are burning and she feels ready to collapse. She has spent weeks beating back this thought, battling it each time it visits her in her sleep. Can she deny that she refused Gui’s help because she wanted the group to be hers only, that she wanted Zakhmeh to be a part of her Perimeter? She was so preoccupied with her husband’s motives that she didn’t think of how much it would mean for her friends. Gui leaves, not slamming the door but closing it quietly behind him like a guest.

  An hour passes. She sleeps. Later, clearing up Gui’s papers from the kitchen table, she thinks of the squat. She misses the crackling talk with its random political and literary turns, the cauldrons of soup, the dim, unkempt canal-side room furnished with aging pillows, men with blond dreadlocks, women in hijab, White Widow joints, and paperback Korans discarded on the same rickety folding table. She delights in knowing that her new friends are the sort of immigrant congregation that makes Dutch neighbors nervous.

  Then she thinks of Mam’mad, ravenous for the respect he once had, diminishing, forever expecting to change back into another self, like a child waiting to fit into an animal costume, puffing up and receding again so that the skin of the beast collapses on itself, its head hanging, inanimate. And Karim, hunched like a collared dog, roaming the waterlogged streets, alone in a city where the most hospitable native might offer him a single cookie and a suspicious glance.

  She sits for a long time. Niloo has always found sensible solutions, needing only a long quiet think to drag herself out of the stickiest bogs. Now she just stares, her thoughts turning to Baba. As a child, she believed he was the kindest man she knew. But slowly over the years, Baba became a stranger and she feels nothing but a dull ache for the energetic, gleeful father she once knew. People change. Everyone. And all love ends. She knows this now. Only hardened exiles refuse to change; they dig their feet in and try to root everywhere they land, even if the soil poisons them. They hang on and on, afraid to move forward. They don’t let go of dead things. They don’t toss the lime juice. They hoard trinkets in ragged suitcases. They pile up photographs of long-ago days, beg
ging their children for doubles. They build a fortress in the corner of a closet. Maybe Gui was right. You’re still waiting, he said—it’s true. She’s so terrified of losing her every small advantage that now her own Baba poses a threat. If she had accepted Gui as her home, would she shield herself so zealously? Would she be a secure kind of woman with a dozen purses strewn everywhere, each containing an old ID or a document she once thought important—none of it vital enough to save, because her entitlement to her life isn’t granted by these things, but intrinsic? No one can snatch it away. Maybe that’s the difference between refugees and expats. The difference isn’t Yale or naturalization papers, a fat bank account or invitations to native homes. In that way, she is the same as Mam’mad and Karim. When you learn to release that first great windfall after the long migration, when you trust that you’ll still be you in a year or a decade, even without the treasures you’ve picked up along the way, always capable of more—when you stop carrying it all on your back—maybe that’s when the refugee years end.

  She calls Kian. “Did you get a letter from Dad?” Kian asks.

  She tells him that she has and stops there. “Hey,” she says, because her brother works in the chaos of a restaurant kitchen and never uses fewer than twenty ingredients in his signature sauces. “Think you could replicate the stuff in the jar?”

  “What jar?” he says. Then, after a beat of silence, he gasps. “He sent you food? That’s so unfair. Was it torshi? Saffron?” She tells him the jar was lost.

  “How do you lose something like that?” asks Kian.

  Niloo takes a tired breath. “Gui threw it away.” Before hanging up, Kian promises to try to call Baba, to see if he can get through. She warns him that the new wife is answering his emails.

  Now that she’s calm, she realizes how many hours it’s been. She can’t leave Gui outside, whatever ugly things they might have said to each other. The Hamidi clan forgives ugly outbursts. What matters, Maman has always said, is if you’re watching over your family, appreciating them behind their backs.

  She puts on a light jacket, steps out into the drizzly evening haze, and unlocks her bicycle. Often Gui goes to the apartment at night to check on the progress of the construction work, to fret about paint colors or to see if the new kitchen island, designed after their current one, matches the cabinets.

  She wipes the layer of rainwater off her bike seat with the towel in the compartment below, tightens her sweaty bun, snaps on her forehead light, and pedals into the fog, past the museum quarter and a public park, some student housing and a brewery, to the Pijp, where they’re building their new home. There’s a bar here she loves. On Fridays when they first arrived in Amsterdam, she and Gui dressed in worn jeans and drank three-euro whiskeys there. Now, she comes here alone to smoke with refugees and Dutch musicians on the terrace. The terrace leads out to a canal and some boats; she checks there first. But Gui isn’t here—she can’t recall the last time he was. The bar is hers now. The bartender, a wolfish old man who’s always slicing limes and whose knuckle tattoos read from pinky to thumb l-i-e-f-de (love), knows her name. He’s familiar now with the sound of Farsi.

  Untying her bike from beside the Ganesha mural on the back wall of the bar, she considers giving up, avoiding the spectacle of the construction site altogether. But something about this act of retrieval feels like her job. For years they’ve fought like two gerbils in a grocery bag, but they’ve never left each other outside. She pedals the final two blocks, the wind spitting flecks of dust into her eyes. The street is eerily lit and nearly empty, only service workers and stoned tourists on their way home. The night air leaves a wet residue on her arms. She shivers and pedals faster. Now and then a waiter or bellhop passes with bags of restaurant leftovers hanging off their handlebars. She turns down the long road toward the new apartment.

  She drops her bike on the cobblestones, noting the beauty of her new street at night. The slender streetlights bowing, potted plants blushing in windows, curtains thrown open to reveal colorful light fixtures hanging over big wooden tables. Around the corner, the canal burps and sloshes.

  The downstairs corridor is dark and smells like basement dust and new brick. An enormous piece of opaque plastic from the delivery of their kitchen island is crumpled in a corner near the mailboxes. She climbs four floors and stops at the door, turning the key as quietly as possible. She recalls that the best part of her day used to be hearing a key turn in the door. She would wait behind the door and peek out at him as he came in. His slow smile would bloom, the wrinkles around his eyes would appear, and he would lift her up, kiss her mouth, and say, “You bring the joy.”

  Opening the door, she whispers. “Gui?” The apartment smells strongly of drying paint and industrial glue. A white powder dusts the edges of her black slippers as she enters. They haven’t yet installed blinds and the streetlights infect the living room in patches. Even when it’s covered in soot and concrete and dirt, she loves this place. It is a sparkling, peaceful nook cut through by wooden beams, hovering over a canal lit by moonlight and those reverent streetlamps. The lone piece of furniture is a cracked cherrywood dining table atop crisscross legs that the carpenters have built and are leaving until the end to gloss and finish. A pile of discarded mail waits on the dusty tabletop, junk from agencies, alumni organizations, and others to whom they’ve remembered to give their new address.

  “Gui?” she says again. This time her voice echoes through the bare space.

  She goes from room to room. The master bedroom is rubble. She moves through it quickly and heads to the kitchen, guest room, balcony, then down to the basement. Finally, she hears a cough from the far end of the apartment. She hasn’t checked the bathroom because they have no plumbing. Why would he go there?

  Guillaume is tucked inside the bathtub, his socks and shoes stowed neatly in a corner, his jeans folded on top. He has arranged two blankets under him and one on top. She recognizes the utility blankets they used to move the wood for the dining table. He looks exhausted, sitting in the tub, playing on his phone. He looks up at her like a caught bird. His eyes plead, leave me alone. After having strained all night to handle things sanely, Niloo is overcome by a rushing grief. “I’m so sorry,” she says.

  The air is full of dust, stinging the eyes, but he’s made an attempt to clean up, to make the space nice. In the corner, he’s flung some used paper towels covered with soot. The rims of the bathtub are wiped clean, though the sides are caked with dirt. He has a roll of toilet paper, three bottles of water, an open jar of Nutella with a plastic spoon sticking out, and a premade lentil salad from Marqt. The lentil salad makes Niloo’s throat close—they fought instead of eating dinner.

  He stares at her with bloodshot eyes, searching for words. Often he speaks around things. When they were twenty-two, instead of saying he loved her, Guillaume pulled her close and twisted the sentiment into a question instead, forcing her to confess it first. “If I lived under a bridge,” he asked, “would you come see me?” She told him that she would fill a backpack with gummy bears and olive oil and woolen socks and move under the bridge with him. He said, “I promise if we have to live under a bridge, it’ll be the Pont Alexandre III.” Over a decade, Niloo and Guillaume have learned each other’s signals, how to be kind to each other. Though it struck Niloo once, while reading an essay on early primates, that animals aren’t gentle or generous with their mates; nature’s way is selfish and cruel and hungry.

  Now, watching Gui try to find his words in the bathtub, she expects more caveats and placeholders, more phrases that circle the issue but don’t venture too close. Instead he says, every syllable swollen with such misery that her stomach clamps into a painful knot, “Why don’t you know that I love you?”

  When she hears “I can’t do this anymore,” it takes a second to realize that these dreaded words have tumbled from her own mouth. And all her many small muscles engage again, the four bites of pear she ate earlier roll
ing around inside her stomach. “It’s not enough just to laugh at the same twisted jokes and to say we love each other enough to live under a bridge. We have no roots.”

  “So we build roots,” he says.

  “Do you know what songs I loved as a kid?” she says. “Or what poem my dad read to my mom? If you heard them, you wouldn’t even understand the words. Same goes for me. Don’t you care about that?”

  “Go away.” He turns to face the wall. “You’re not the only one who needs personal space.” She spies a stack of highlighted depositions in the tub at his feet.

  Now, out of Gui’s bitter request springs a possible solution. She taps him on the shoulder. “Gui? Please listen. What if I move in here and finish this house by myself . . . just for a few months?” When he winces, she adds, “So I’m a permanent part of it . . . the whole thing, not just a portable little corner. And then we can sell it or you can have it, I don’t care . . . I’ll do a good job.” She waits, then realizes how silly she sounds, talking of houses in the final slow beats of a decade together.

  She takes off her shoes, lifts the blanket, and says, “If you’re not getting out, then I’m getting in.” His body is still, like he’s waiting for the roof to collapse on his head. She feels renewed sadness bubbling up but pushes it back to the pit of her stomach. She says, “Fine, I’ll be the outer spoon. Get ready to have your Perimeter breached.” His shoulders twitch; she wants so much for Gui to laugh. And he does.

  • • •

  An hour later, she leaves Gui in the bathtub, sleeping off the fraught night. She finds Siavash and Karim eating a bag of pistachios on the curb in front of the squat, breaking them open with their thumbnails. She has never met an Iranian who isn’t a serious stress eater, and since Mam’mad’s death none of her friends have stopped eating, as if trying to protect themselves against the ugly world with a layer of fat. She joins them on the low step. Siavash pulls out his earbuds and offers her a listen. Wake up, wake up, little sparrow, the grainy song implores.