Refuge--A Novel

by Dina Nayeri

  “It’s not fair to Gui,” said Niloo. “The person he loves is a stranger. She got adopted by the French, you know.” She tried for playful, but her voice cracked.

  “We’re all strangers to ourselves,” said Bahman. “More so as we age. So, it’s good to remember what you loved as a child.” From his pocket, he poured a fistful of sour cherry into Niloo’s hand. She burst out in her special laugh, an elated gush that he hadn’t seen in years.

  They ate. Niloo devoured the olivieh and joked about her plans. “It’s dumb, but I kept thinking, I can do this with my own hands. I’m not some Iranian villager.”

  “If you were some Iranian villager, khanom,” said Bahman, “you wouldn’t be sitting in rubble. You’d respect suffering enough not to needlessly impose it on yourself . . . you’d plug your wounds long before this craziness.” He mumbled, almost to himself, “What am I saying . . . even villagers are blind to their wounds. You should see the bared fangs in divorce courts. Madness.”

  Niloo speared an eggplant with her fork, and Bahman said, “Ei Baba, you have to do it with the bread. It’s more delicious.” He brandished his greasy fingers and grinned. Niloo dropped her fork and tore into a piece of bread, scooping too much and spilling half onto her lap.

  “You two always had the worst manners,” said Pari, reaching for napkins as he packed another morsel with his thumb and held it to Niloo’s mouth, surprised (though what had he expected?) when she ate unthinkingly from his fingers.

  “Me?” said Niloo, her hands and lips covered in oil.

  Later, when Pari went to look for another box of Dutch sweets, Bahman overheard Niloo on the landing. She was whispering to Guillaume on her mobile; it seemed the Hamidis’ stay in this half-formed wonderland would continue a bit longer. Partway through his eavesdrop, Pari appeared behind him to listen along, chewing her lips, watching their daughter with sad eyes. Niloo said, “It’s like camping. I just want to be here a while, hang out with my parents . . . help Baba figure out Amsterdam without losing his mind.” She laughed. Gui’s voice carried over in patches. Bahman hoped he was telling her to be gentler on herself.

  “I thought maybe the pastry place on Spiegelstraat,” said Niloo, her tone soft, relaxed. “How many pancakes do you think it’ll take to keep his soul from floating off to join the ball of brown souls Wilders keeps in his basement?” Gui’s crisp laugh carried over in muffled bursts. “I would’ve liked to introduce him to Mam’mad. They would’ve liked each other.” Then, a long silence. Maybe Gui was talking. Finally, she said, a sad undertow surfacing, “It was so good being married to you for a while . . .”

  Pari exhaled, wiped her face with the back of her hand. “She’ll find her feet,” she said. Then she whispered in English, “I think our daughter is a late bloom.”

  The image moved him and he repeated in English, “A late bloom . . . Very nice.”

  Bahman returned to the half kitchen. He thought of his daughter’s work—the examination of the primate. He too had always gravitated toward the natural, toward the roots of things, and yet here was something inexplicable: the human capacity for good, baffling quantities of good. It was irrational. He had never been a religious man, and didn’t want to be, but what science explains this poetic drive in every person, however humble; the awesome feats of the heart? What was the mysterious ingredient that mixed with flesh and instinct to spark love? Maybe he was entering a new era of life, an era of awe. He lived in awe of every new city, of the generous travelers he had met, and of his own deteriorating body, the way, even as it aged and shrank, it could summon the strength to shake off opium’s dark hand. He gave thanks for the women he had married. Pari’s passion for her beliefs, Fatimeh’s quiet, nurturing soul, Sanaz’s bravery. He marveled too at humble, steady Gui, who was now finding his footing. Falling in pace with the changing road, Gui would learn, doesn’t alter your deep tissue, which is made of tougher stuff. He wished the boy great happiness, and for his feet always to fall on gentle ground.

  Back in his sickbed in Isfahan, he had imagined his own Baba whispering, “How is the atmosphere of your heart?”

  In his delirium, he had responded, “I’m a barbarian. An animal.”

  His Baba said nothing. He wouldn’t have reacted to such vanity. He was busy with the work of his farm. Bahman was no scientist, but his understanding of his daughter’s universe amounted to this: Early primates evolved through changing teeth, ankles, feet. Barbarians advanced when they built communities, fashioned tools, shared the fruits of each other’s work. They cleaved together, rejecting the instinct to set off alone, to scatter. They huddled in caves, then ventured out and built hovels and huts and houses, some communities surviving and some dying. One village grew into another, again and again for millennia, until a young doctor went to India and cured a sick girl and bought land outside Isfahan. Now that doctor’s children had taken a step backward; they had scattered, a failed village. After so much evolving, building, learning, they had fallen back into solitary living. Bahman wondered if he might be able to stay, to live here in this watery city. Tomorrow, they would explore the city and they might also stop and hire an asylum lawyer for him. Maybe they would find a bank and tour some dental offices so he might work again. But first he wanted to drop in on this Iranian community that Niloo had found, to eat some lentil stew, to recite old poetry with new friends, maybe to perform a story of his own, adding his usual fibs and flourishes. As they ate, Pari had asked Niloo about Zakhmeh; why had she sought it out? Bahman knew. When you’ve lost something, you return to the place you last saw it and you search, turning that room upside down. Where else would Niloo search for her lost joy, her wild, childish heart, when last she saw it in a refugee shelter?

  Later Bahman secured more sheets to the windows as Pari prepared tea. When they sat down, Pari said, almost to herself, “Do you remember driving to Ardestoon through that long desert?” He folded leftover fabric over his forearms and set it aside. “I was always surprised at the way the orchards and the river and the trees didn’t come gradually. They happened in one left turn. Everything different.”

  He smiled at his first wife. “Yes,” he said. “I used to hold my breath for it. A lifetime driving back and forth and it struck me in the ribs every time.”

  One day, later on, he wanted to ask Niloo some things. What quenched the primitive soul before science and poetry? Why do animals so often stray, choosing solitude? Do you think that a strong village needs an anthropologist or a dental surgeon, a scholar of jaws and a straightener of teeth, both fiddling with calcified nothings in search of some elusive beauty? Shall we phone Kian? And do you think, from your scientific perspective, that the village, every village, is destined to die?

  Maybe so. And yet, of that old Dr. Hamidi’s dispersed lot, here sat three, far from all they had known, around a familiar sofreh as if drawn together by magnets in their shoes. They might one day lose one another again. Over the years, their numbers had dwindled and swollen and dwindled again, so who could predict? But now they were three. He trembled with gratitude, with the urge to kneel and kiss the ground. They were three and three was enough. They were a village.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Kambiz Roustayi set himself on fire in Dam Square on April 6, 2011, and died the next day. He was an Iranian asylum seeker who, after eleven years of uncertain living in Holland, was about to be deported. Though he talked openly about suicide, Dutch officials did nothing to help him. The news clippings in my story are adapted from the real ones about Mr. Roustayi, and the quotes to RNW include portions of actual quotes given by Parvis Noshirrani and Roustayi’s lawyer, Frank Van Haren. I set my character’s death in 2009 to suit my story, and his features and personality are entirely invented. Though Karim and Mam’mad are fictional, the collective situation of refugees waiting in the Netherlands and across Europe isn’t far from what I’ve imagined. My own story is similar to Niloo’s; the enormity of my good luck still fr
ightens me. Kambiz’s death came at a time when I was leaving the life I had built in Amsterdam. His story stuck with me and inspired me to try to show the desperation of the many refugees living in limbo across Europe.

  The quotes attributed to Geert Wilders are all real, though one of them (“you will not make The Netherlands home”) is from 2015.

  I’m grateful to the following for their help and support in writing this book: Thank you to The MacDowell Colony and the Bogliasco Foundation, where I began and finished this novel in a cabin in the woods and a villa by the sea. Thank you to the National Endowment for the Arts for the funding and the confidence to continue. The same big thanks to Laura Furman and the O. Henry Prize Stories (your encouragement has meant so much). Thank you to those who provided research, read drafts, and saw me through the long days: my family, my mom for unfailing support and my dad for inspiration from afar, the Leader family, especially Anna Leader, Tara Lubonovich, Boris Fishman, Tori Egherman, Matthew Steinfeld, Casey Walker, Karen Thompson-Walker, Lisa Sun, Hanna Chang, Tekla Back, Titi Ruiz, Alice Dark, Charles Baxter, Marilynne Robinson, Samantha Chang, Michelle Huneven, Connie Brothers, Deborah West, Jan Zenisek, Jen Percy, Elizabeth Weiss, Mario Zambrano, Christa Fraser. To Nordmanns: Elliott Holt, Chris Castiliani, Basil Gitman, Amos Kamil, E. J. Koh, Vladimir de Fontenay, Lee Maida, Jessica Oreck, Matthew Northridge, Ted Thompson, Amity Gaige. To my Bogliasco family: Alessandra Natale, Cathy Davidson, Kia Corthron, Ramona Diaz, Helen Lochhead, Alberto Caruso, Renata Sheppard, Julia Jacquette, and Ken Wissoker. To Julia Fierro, who gave me work while I wrote. To Gerosha Nolte and Radha Ahlstrom-Vij for daily encouragement. Thank you to my teachers and friends at the Iowa Writers Workshop, whose help with my previous (deservedly abandoned) manuscript continues to bear fruit: thank you for reading all the worst versions of everything.

  To my patient and wise editor, Sarah McGrath. You’ve made me a better writer and your advice has saved me from so many bad choices. Thank you for believing in me. To my other editor, Danya Kukafka, you’re brilliant! Thank you to Sarah Stein, Jynne Dilling Martin, Glory Plata, Geoff Kloske, and every passionate soul at Riverhead Books, and to my tireless agent, Kathleen Anderson, and her team.

  Lastly, to Samuel Leader and to my Elena Nushin, you make every place home. This book is for you.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dina Nayeri is the author of A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, which was translated into fourteen languages. A graduate of Princeton, Harvard, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the O. Henry Award, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation, and several other artist residencies.

  dinanayeri.com/

  Twitter: @DinaNayeri

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