Читать книгу The Ungrateful Refugee - Dina Nayeri - Страница 11

I

We became refugees. Somehow it felt more settled than what we had been for the past ten months, hiding out in the United Arab Emirates. There, we were illegal: all the same dizzying displacement, uncertainty, and need, but we had to find our own shelter. Without a state to say, “Yes, we will be responsible for you,” we were so unmoored it was hard to fathom a next step. Maybe that’s why every move had been last minute, someone’s kindness or a stroke of luck. Miracles. And so, when we landed in Rome in winter 1989, I bubbled with love for Italy and every Italian; it was unlike anything I had felt for Dubai or Sharjah. This airport was so European, so brimming with leisure; I wanted to run to every kiosk and smell the Western chocolate and touch the expensive fabrics. But a man in a black suit held a sign with Maman’s name, and we were led away to a car.

My mother, younger brother, and I bundled in the backseat, cold, and dirty from the long flight. I tried to stay awake for the ride through the Italian countryside. Finally, after an hour, we spotted a house on a hill, breaking up the rolling valleys in the distance. We had been told that we’d be taken to “a good refugee camp,” a temporary safe space for transients seeking asylum outside Italy. It was called Barba, and it had once been a hotel. The Italian government had leased this building to house the likes of us, political and religious asylum seekers and passers-through with particular need: elderly family, children. It was exciting to watch Barba appear, and to know that, even though our clothes and bedding and daily routines would be those of refugees, though we would be confined there, our house would be on a hilltop, in the husk of a pretty hotel.

We pulled up a winding hill road after dinnertime. Our room was small, perhaps even smaller than the cockroach hostel in Sharjah, and we had no fridge or hot plate this time. Only a bathroom and a bed. We sat on our bed and wondered where we’d get money, if we’d find friends among our neighbors. Would we meet Farsi speakers? How long would we stay? Which country would finally take us? We wondered about that night’s meal.

We considered walking to a store in Mentana. Then someone knocked. An Italian woman, young, with a punkish haircut gestured to us that we had missed the dinner call. That night, for the first time, I saw the canteen, a glass circle overlooking all that lush valley. Now empty and dark, in the morning it would fill up with displaced families like us, Iranians, Afghans, Russians, Romanians. It would buzz with many languages, many kinds of prayers. There would be children, mothers, grandmothers. But for now, the room was silent. We ate bowls of leftover pasta in semidark and heavy silence, and thanked God that meals were provided here.

Despite its grand skeleton, Hotel Barba was a refugee camp and we had to stay put, as we had no status in Italy. We were served soup, pasta, coffee, bread at precise times each day, and we sat in the winter chill, praying that by summer we’d be gone from there. Every day when the postman arrived, we would swell outside the mail cubbies, jostling for a good view. We wanted to know, “Who got his letter today?” When someone did, the crowd would hush as he opened the envelope, fingers trembling, eyes scanning, then either wept quietly into his palm, muttering curses, or loudly on his knees, thanking his god. Everyone was frantic for a letter from America or England or Australia or Canada (roomy anglophone countries). A letter would mean the wait was over; our lives could now begin.

In the absence of work or school, all we did was dream, a maddening state, and battle loneliness. We ate with people from our own countries; we prayed in our own ways, some before eating (sitting, heads bowed), and some after (standing, holding hands). On cool days, the children snuck into a neighboring orchard to steal unripe peaches and plums, because our tongues were itching for something sour, and there was nothing else to soothe the craving. I tried to teach some English words to a handful of burly Russian men, skipping around the yard in my pink skirt and pointing to a tree, a fence, a chador, a babushka (the men indulged me by taking notes).

We fought boredom in increasingly desperate ways: an Afghan grandmother collected bricks from a nearby construction site and carried them back to her room under her chador. Her daughter read our fortunes from the leftover sludge in mugs of instant coffee. A young Iranian soldier with his face half-bleached from a wartime chemical burn taught us how to play soccer. Despite his new kind of whiteness, he was as interesting to me as princes in my storybooks. Perhaps I sensed that he was attracted to Maman. And wasn’t she just me, in another body? Here was a man who wanted us, who wanted to play games with me, to make me laugh, and then to look out of the corner of his eye to see if Maman was watching.

We had left Baba behind in Isfahan. I began to understand, bit by bit, over years, that I would never live with my father again. I was beginning to understand other things, too, to peek out from inside my own skin. I spent time with loving grandmothers from many countries. I joined Maman for tea and oranges in the rooms of Russian Christians. I read English books and played hopscotch and became obsessed with having a home again, with ending the wander days, rooting, and with the mysteries of adulthood. I craved everyone’s stories—I was becoming some later version of myself.

In a refugee camp, stories are everything. Everyone has one, having just slipped out from the grip of a nightmare. Everyone is idle, without permission to work or run away, reckoning now with a new place in the world. Everyone is a stranger, in need of introduction. And tea is cheap (at Barba, we all came from tea-drinking countries). What better conditions than these to brew a pot, sit on pillows around a low table, and talk? At Barba, I learned to listen, and to savor startling details, byproducts of a strange confluence that may never recur: a grandmother hiding bricks in her chador, a splash of cream across a handsome face, a stampede for jam.

It wasn’t just a pastime. Our stories were drumming with power. Other people’s memories transported us out of our places of exile, to rich, vibrant lands, and to home. They reminded us of the long, unknowable road. We couldn’t see yet, fresh from our escape, but other sharp turns lay ahead. We had created our life’s great story; next would come the waiting time, camp, where we would tell it. Then struggle for asylum, when we would craft it. Then assimilation into new lives, when we would perform it for the entertainment of the native-born, and finally, maybe in our old age, we would return to it, face it without frenzy: a repatriation.

For two decades, our escape defined me. It dominated my personality and compelled my every decision. By college, half my life had led up to our escape and the other half was spent reliving it, in churches and retreats where my mother made it a hagiographic journey, on college applications where it was a plea, at sleepovers where it was entertainment, and in discussion groups after public viewings of xenophobic melodramas like China Cry and Not Without My Daughter, films about Christian women facing death and escaping to America. Our story was a sacred thread woven into my identity. Sometimes people asked, But don’t a lot of Christians live there? or Couldn’t your mother just say she was Muslim? It would take me a long time to get over those kinds of questions. They felt like a bad grade, like a criticism of my face and body, an unraveling of that sacred thread: I am rescued cargo; therefore, I am enchanted. I have purpose. With every good work, I repay the universe. If I didn’t have that, then I would be faceless, an ordinary person toiling for what? Soulless middle-class trifles?

Once in an Oklahoma church, a woman said, “Well, I sure do get it. You came for a better life.” I thought I’d pass out—a better life? In Isfahan, we had yellow spray roses, a pool. A glass enclosure shot up through our living room, and inside that was a tree. I had a tree inside my house; I had the papery hands of Morvarid, my friend and nanny, a ninety-year-old village woman; I had my grandmother’s fruit leather and Hotel Koorosh schnitzels and sour cherries and orchards and a farm—life in Iran was a fairytale. In Oklahoma, we lived in an apartment complex for the destitute and disenfranchised. Life was a big gray parking lot with cigarette butts baking in oil puddles, slick children idling in the beating sun, teachers who couldn’t do math. I dedicated my youth and every ounce of my magic to get out of there. A better life? The words lodged in my ear like grit.

Gradually, all those retellings felt like pandering. The skeptics drew their conclusions based on details that I had provided them: my childhood dreams of Kit Kats and flawless bananas. My academic ambitions. I thought of how my first retelling was in an asylum office in Italy: how merciless that with the sweat and dust of escape still on our brows, we had to turn our ordeal into a good, persuasive story or risk being sent back. Then, after asylum was secured, we had to relive that story again and again, to earn our place, to calm casual skeptics. Every day of her new life, the refugee is asked to differentiate herself from the opportunist, the economic migrant.

Like most refugees, after a life-threatening escape, my family and I were compliant, ecstatic, grateful. But we had sustained damage. If the rational mind is a clean road, ours had potholes, pockets of paranoia and fear. Yes, I could summon joy and logic and change. But a single triggering word could trip me up for a day, a week, make me doubt my worth, my new place in this world. Am I a real refugee? The implication burned.

Why do the native-born perpetuate this distinction? Why harm the vulnerable with the threat of this stigma? It took me decades to know: the instinct to protect against competition from a talented horde. To draw a line around a birthright, a privilege. Unlike economic migrants, refugees have no agency; they are no threat. Often, they are so broken, they beg to be remade into the image of the native. As recipients of magnanimity, they can be pitied. I was a palatable immigrant because I programmed myself with chants: I am rescued cargo. I will prove, repay, transform. But if you are born in the Third World, and you dare to make a move before you are shattered, your dreams are suspicious. You are a carpetbagger, an opportunist, a thief. You are reaching above your station.

There’s something unnatural and sinister going on here.

My mother didn’t think to question people’s hardwired distinctions. Were we really refugees? She fended off that question by telling our story: she was almost murdered by the regime, so she shouldn’t have to deal with people’s prejudices. She fumed at stories of religious asylum seekers who had lied, and she asked new arrivals about the Bible and their underground church—but unlike the native-born around us, she never asked anyone to prove their fear. A tortured mind, terror of a wasted future, is what enables you to abandon home; it’s a prerequisite for stepping into a dinghy, for braving militarized mountains. No one who has lived under a dictatorship, who has scooped up their children and run to a bomb shelter, doubts the fear. To my mother, Christianity is too sacred to lie about, and it’s hard to accept that a rigid, illogical system leaves some no other choice, but, at the same time, she knows that the reasons for escape are complex and muddled. They always include a fear and a tangible hope. It’s a reinvention that grows out of your nightmares, but also your drive and agency. And so, the bureaucratic parsing of dangers from opportunity is grating and absurd. Where is the humility? The compassion?

And what is a credible danger in a country that hangs apostates and homosexuals and adulterers, and where a hateful finger in your direction is enough to make you one? A country so corrupt that one mullah’s whim can send you to the firing squad or the crane, your gallows, and the sunrise after challenging a pasdar can find you framed for drugs? A country where record keeping is a farce, where in whispers the land’s riches are divided among a few, where young men languish without work, where young women wither with unspent ambition and desire, where the enchanting whisper of opium is always in your ear, and despair fills your lungs so thickly that your best chance is to be your own executioner?

What is escape in such circumstances, and what is just opportunistic migration? Who is a true refugee? It makes me chuckle, this notion that “refugee” is a sacred category, a people hallowed by evading hell. Thus, they can’t acknowledge a shred of joy left behind or they risk becoming migrants again. Modern Iran is a country of refugees making do with small joys, exiled from the prerevolutionary paradise we knew. With the Iraq war over, their plight is often considered insufficient. Syria is hell. Afghanistan, South Sudan, Eritrea are hell. Iraq is . . . a bit less so? And Iran? What is hell enough for the West to feel responsible, not just as perpetrators of much of the madness, but as primary beneficiaries of the planet’s bounty, who sit behind screens watching, suspicious and limp-fisted, as strangers suffer?

Meanwhile, we assign our least talented, most cynical bureaucrats to be the arbiters of complicated truth, not instructing them to save lives, or search out the weary and the hopeless, but to root out lies, to protect our fat entitlements, our space, at any moral cost—it is a failure of duty. More infuriating is the word “opportunism,” a lie created by the privileged to shame suffering strangers who crave a small taste of a decent life. The same hopes in their own children would be labeled “motivation” and “drive.”

And while we grumble over what we are owed and how much we get to keep, the displaced wait at the door. They are painters and surgeons and craftsmen and students. Children. Mothers. The neighbor who made the good sauce. The funny girl from science class. The boy who can really dance. The great-uncle who always turns down the wrong street. They endure painful transformation, rising from death, discarding their faces and bodies, their identities, without guarantee of new ones.

A Dutch officer asks an Iranian refugee, “Do you fear for your safety?”

He says, “Yes, my two friends and I were arrested as communists twenty years ago. Each week we check into the local police headquarters. Last week, both my friends disappeared after their check. I ran.”

“Have you become involved with underground communists again?”

“No,” says the petitioner. He isn’t a dissident. But he is hunted.

“Then you’re safe,” says the officer. “It seems your friends resumed their political activities. But you didn’t, so you have no reason to fear.”

The assumption of the office isn’t just thoroughness and justice on the part of the Iranian government (laughable), but also infallibility. How is one to honestly navigate such a dishonest, self-serving system? The savvy ones who have asked around know not to explain how the Islamic Republic works, how often innocent people disappear. They simply say, “Yes, I got involved again,” so that the officer can check a box.

Escape marks the first day of a refugee’s life. On the day we left home, I was told that I could live however I wished, that my gender would no longer limit my potential. And this was true. I was born out of Maman’s Three Miracles. But already a limit had been imposed. Until now, the world waited for me to define myself. Would I be artistic or analytical? Shy or bold? Religious or secular? But now, my first category had been assigned: refugee, not native-born. I didn’t realize it then, because escape is euphoric. It is a plunge into fog, a burning of an old life, a murder of a previous self.

Escape creates a chameleon, an alert creature always in disguise. What does that first blush feel like? An itch. For me, it was a daily, unrelenting discomfort in my mind and skin. It inflamed my OCD. I developed a tic in my neck. Changing color soothed those pains for a time.

Now, thirty years have passed; I have so much to say. The world no longer speaks of refugees as it did in my time. The talk has grown hostile, even unhinged, and I have a hard time spotting, amid the angry hordes, the kind souls we knew, the Americans and the English and the Italians who helped us, who held our hands. I know they’re still out there.

What has changed in three decades? A reframing is in order. I want to make sense of the world’s reaction to us, of a political and historical crisis that our misfortunes have caused. I feel a duty: I’ve lived as an American for years, read Western books. I’ve been both Muslim and Christian. There are secrets I can show the native-born that new arrivals don’t dare reveal. I’ve wished to say them for thirty years and found it terrifying till now.

In 2016, I began a journey to understand my own chaotic past. I was a new mother and confused about my purpose. I had changed my face and hair, my friends, my education, my country and job, so often that my skin felt raw. My memories had grown foggy, and I had combed them ragged for fiction. I had prided myself on being a chameleon, as many immigrant children do, but now I felt muddied by it—I felt like a liar.

I spent months traveling. I went to refugee camps in Greece, to communities of undocumented Dutch. I visited immigration lawyers and homes of new arrivals. I drank tea with refugees and asylum seekers and naturalized citizens. I spoke with mothers, lone travelers, schoolchildren. I was looking for stories, for whispers of stories hidden by shame or trauma, and for lies too. I searched for people from my own refugee hostel, Hotel Barba. I spoke to my parents, who reminded me of the many complications of point of view. During my travels, I came across dozens of stories; I have chosen a few to follow in these pages, tales all the more harrowing because they are commonplace now and, in the asylum office, often disbelieved.

And so, I’ve left out the story of the Syrian man I met in Berlin who floated with a child for seven hours then found himself cleaning a slave ship, or the jailed scholars or activists who are hit with public fatwas—even your everyday Trumpian admits that those guys deserve rescue. I’m interested in doubt, in the feared “swarms.” These are stories of uprooting and transformation without guarantees, of remaking the face and the body, those first murderous refugee steps—the annihilation of the self, then an ascent from the grave. Though their first lives were starkly different, these men and women were tossed onto the same road and judged together. Some of their stories are far from over, but they have already repeated them so often, practiced and recited them so much, that these dramatic few months (or years) have become their entire identity. Nothing else matters to their listeners, and all suffering seems petty after the miracle of escape. But did the miracle happen? Now their struggle isn’t to hang on to life, but to preserve their history, to rescue that life from the fiction pile.

Though the truth of these stories struck me hard, I know that I, a writer, was peeking in different corners than the authorities. I wasn’t looking for discrepancies. I abhor cynical traps that favor better translators and catch out trauma victims for their memory lapses. I don’t have accent-verifying software. I saw the truth of these stories in corroborating scars, in distinct lenses on a single event, one seeing the back as vividly as another sees the front—no flat cutouts. I saw truth in grieving, fearful eyes, in shaking hands, in the anxiety of children and the sorrow of the elderly.

And yet, to re-create these stories, I was forced to invent scenes and dialogue, like retouching a faded photograph. Writers and refugees often find themselves imagining their way to the truth. What choice is there? A reader, like an interviewer, wants specific itches scratched. You will see.

In the meantime, where is the lie? Every crisis of history begins with one story, the first drop in a gushing river. Consume these lives as entertainment, or education, or threats to your person. It is your choice how to hear their voices. Use all that you know to spot every false stroke of the brush. Be the asylum officer. Or, if you prefer, read as you would a box of letters from a ruin, dispatches from another time that we dust off and readily believe, because the dead want nothing from us.

II / Darius

Darius took a last drag from his cigarette and stamped it out on the tiles outside the tea shop. “Has she texted today?” his friend asked.

“No,” said Darius. They were standing under Isfahan’s famous Thirty-Three Arches after an evening coffee and water pipe. “Let’s hope this means . . .”

“Yes,” said his friend. “A shame though. Such a piece.”

Darius chuckled and said goodbye. On the way home, his pocket vibrated. Nowadays, each text sent an icy rivulet down his back. He glanced at his phone. It was her. Dariuuuuuus. What’s going on?

He stopped in the road to reply—quick disavowals. No games. Please, Miss, stop texting. I’ve had so much trouble.

She wrote again: It’s fine. I just want to say hello.

Please delete my number. You’ll get me killed.

He switched off his cell phone and quickened his pace. It was already past ten. He was three streets from his house, crossing a narrow alley, when they came. “Hey, Seamstress!” a voice called. Darius was a tailor, a good one. He didn’t care that they found it low. He was tall and handsome, and he knew how to make clothes that fit. One day he would have a chain of shops. One day he would make beautiful Western suits. Before he could turn, someone had punched him in the side of the neck. Then a baton bludgeoned his leg and he was down, holding his side to stay their kicks.

In the chaos, every detail detached from reality. The world narrowed to a series of sensations, and his aching brain could only make room for snippets: That they were Basijis, the pitiless volunteer militia. That they were four or five young men. That he was so close to home that his parents could probably hear his screams. That one of them said, “Leave Iran or die.”

He slept in the alley for an hour after they left. The last thing he heard was a distant echo down the alley, “Don’t let us see you again.”

Then he went home. The next day, the doctors stitched his face, arms, and legs. His mother cried in her room. “What a world these young people have inherited,” she wailed to his father. “Twenty-three and our boy has known no other life. Remember the days before the revolution? Remember 1978?” Darius was born in 1992. The paradise of old Iran gave him no nostalgia, only curiosity and some pride. Still, he wished for a chance. To make a business, a life, a family. He wanted to tell that girl that he liked her company, though he rejected her two or three times a week. He wanted to take her for coffee, to see the wind tangle her hair, to watch her laugh in a movie theater. Maybe they would fall in love. Maybe they wouldn’t. They’d never know, because her parents, both Sepâh, both militant and revolutionary with jobs in the ministry, had found out and decided to kill him.

They had no interest in questioning their daughter, telling her their plans for him, or hearing that she was the aggressor.

In a year, they returned for him. Darius’s wounds had healed, but he had scars on his arms and face. He hadn’t spoken to the girl again, though she tried. Now he sat at his mother’s sofreh cloth, eating dinner with his parents. They knocked hard and his father answered. They tore into the house, knocking a vase over and stepping on the sofreh with their shoes.

“Have you texted with the young lady again?” one of them barked.

“I swear, only to beg her not to text. I swear. You can look.” Darius tried to tell them that she didn’t understand; that she felt safe because of her parents and so she thought he was safe too.

“So now it’s the young lady’s fault?” said the most senior Sepâh. They lifted him off his feet by his shirt and dragged him to their headquarters. He waited for hours. The Sepâh opened the door. He didn’t ask questions, just lobbed accusations and waited for a reaction. Darius kept his gaze on the table. “You have disgraced the daughter of Mr. Mahmoodi.”

“No, sir. I didn’t,” he said to the table.

“You are a communist operative.”

“No, sir, I’m a tailor. I make shirts.”

“You have been drinking.”

“No, sir.” He was so tired. It didn’t matter what he said. A guard entered, whispered with the Sepâh about drug trafficking. They intended for Darius to hear. He wanted to weep—they would never let him go. He would die on a crane, or facing a firing squad, before he turned thirty.

“You’ve been drinking and you attacked Basiji officers in the street,” said the guard. When he shook his head, the Sepâh knocked him in the temple with the butt of a huge rifle. Darius toppled off his chair. He gripped the table leg and pulled his legs into his stomach, like a newborn. Before he lost consciousness, he felt another two blows to his head, then one to his back, just behind his heart. They were striking to kill.

He woke in the hospital with his parents standing over him. His body felt light, his mouth dry. He had been in a coma for three months.

“You can’t stay in Iran,” said his father. “They’ll kill you.”

His mother had explained that they had visited the house almost weekly. “Your son is antiregime. He has problems with Islam. He’s a drug dealer. An apostate. And underground operative. His blood is halal for us.”

It seemed that was all they wanted—to establish that Darius’s blood was halal. When his parents went to complain of harassment, every officer said that Darius had attacked Basijis in the street. “If they get you in the street again,” said his father, “you’ll be dead. Please, I have some money. Take it and get out and live some kind of life. You can make home anywhere if you try. Find happiness away from here.”

Darius spent two weeks letting his siblings feed him as he recovered some of the thirty pounds he had lost. He took his pills. Pockets of black formed in his memory. His body was covered in scars now—his arms, face, neck, legs. Every morning his parents begged him to leave.

When asked to describe his journey, Darius forgets things. He recalls details out of order. His head pounds. Once in a halfway house, all his muscles clenched and a tic twisted up half his body for hours. He is a single man; he looks fit and isn’t yet so jaded that he can’t laugh now and then. But he stumbles into dark patches; he loses details as a liar would. He is rarely believed. “Economic migrant,” they call him, seeing only his youth and potential. In newspapers and on his iPhone, Europeans are always debating how much refugees will contribute; they claim to want the economically beneficial kind, the “good” immigrants. And yet, they welcome only those with a foot in the grave. Show any agency or savvy or industry before you left your home, and you’re done. People begin imagining you scheming to get out just to get rich off an idea (or a surgery or an atelier). They consider the surgery or atelier that doesn’t yet exist as property stolen from them. The minute you arrive, though, even if you did have a foot in the grave, god help you if you need social services for a while.

Darius drove to Urmia, an Iranian city near the border with Turkey. From there, with the help of a smuggler, he crossed the mountain on foot. He wore running shoes, and the mountain crossing took him forty-five minutes. Every few steps he thought he felt the gunshot in his leg or back. If he fell, he knew, the smuggler would leave him. “Now you’re in Turkey,” said the smuggler somewhere on the mountain. “I turn back here. Good luck.”

In the Turkish village, he was driven to a mud hut and taken for twice the agreed fee. “Call your family and ask for more,” they said. “The journey was more treacherous than expected.” He recalled no hardship that hadn’t been explained before the trip, but single young men from Iran rarely stir up sympathy—economic migrants, exploiters, opportunists. He paid. He sat in the hut for four days, awaiting the next step, though this one was already disappearing into the dark patches, the spoiled, battered parts of his brain.

The first airboat was too full. Sixty, including many exhausted children watching Darius with shy eyes. A few meters in, it toppled, releasing its occupants into the Aegean. All luggage washed away. The strong swam back, not daring to imagine what had become of the others, those tired children. Darius ran into the woods, where Turkish officers picked him up and took him to jail.

He wasted away in a Turkish jail cell for two months. He had no papers, gave a false name, and spent his days in a delirium. Trapped in a fever dream, he remembers little—it is so easy to doubt him. He spent that time with his eyes closed. They released him when his brain medicines ran out. Too much trouble. “Get out of Turkey,” they said, and he tried to oblige.

On his next try, Darius’s boat made it to Lesbos. As joyful men jumped out and began pulling the boat ashore, a voice nearby whispered, “Don’t celebrate too soon. This is where the hardship really starts.”

“We’re in Europe,” said Darius, to the dark. “We’re on free soil.”

“But we’re not going into Europe. We’re going to Moria.”

III

I was born in 1979, a year of revolution, and grew up in wartime. The itch in my brain arrived as war was leaking into our everyday—sirens, rations, adults huddled around radios. It announced itself one lazy afternoon in our house in Isfahan, between the yellow spray roses and the empty swimming pool, whispering that I might take a moment to count my pencils. Then, that night, it grew bolder, suggesting that the weight of the blanket be distributed evenly along my arms. The itch became a part of me, like the freckle above my lip. It wasn’t the side effect of this blistering morning at the Abu Dhabi United Nations office or that aimless month in an Italian resettlement camp. Those days simply made it unbearable.

Even in Ardestoon, my father’s village, where I tiptoed with my cousins along a riverbank, picked green plums in leafy orchards, and hiked in mountains, the itch endured. It made me tuck my grandmother’s chestnut hair into her chador with the edges of my hands, circling her face and squeezing her cheeks until I was satisfied. It took up space in my personality, as the freckle did above my lip, so that now and then I tried to straighten the papery skin of my ninety-year-old nanny, Morvarid, pressing my palms across her forehead as one would an old letter. I picked everyone’s scabs. Zippers had to be forced past the end of the line. Sometimes when furious, the itch showed up as a tic in my neck. At other times, it helped me be better. It made me color inside the lines. It made my animals sit in a row. I didn’t miss any part of a story, because I triple-checked page numbers.

Now and then Maman joked that I was becoming fussy like Maman Masi and Morvarid, that I was becoming a tiny old lady. This was fine with me—I loved their floral chadors that smelled of henna, their ample laps and looping, gossipy stories, their dirty jokes. As a toddler, I marched around in an old flowery chador that Morvarid had sewn for me. I wore it so much it started to make my hair fall out. In a fit of anger, Maman tore it to pieces.

At school, my scarf was lopsided and my handwriting a disaster, but my math was perfect. The teachers in my Islamic Republic girls’ school were witchy creatures who glistened in brutal black chadors. They didn’t lean down and tuck in your stray hairs. They billowed past. They struck rulers against soft palms. They shouted surnames at six-year-old girls. Nayeri. Ardestani. Khalili. Shirinpour. The minute you turned your headscarf inside out to cool your damp neck, they appeared, swaddling your bare skin again with their own hot breath. The school was stifling, and militant women were empowered to steer girls away from Western values—this made them cruel. If they didn’t like your work, they tore it to shreds as you sat humiliated, picking splinters off your unsanded desk. They taped weekly class rankings to the gray cement wall outside the classroom window. Every week twenty girls rushed that wall. The schoolyard was a concrete block. Opposite the classrooms was a putrid cave of water fountains and dirty squat toilets, the ground a mess of wet Kleenexes and cherry pits and empty tamarind packets that oozed brown goo into the drain. I liked to keep my back to it. But that meant facing the rankings, and if you turned another way, you had the nightmarish Khomeini mural, and on the fourth wall, the enormous bloody martyr fist (and rose). The only way to have a safe place to look was to be number one on the rankings.

One morning, Khadijeh, whose name routinely appeared at the bottom of the list, released a quiet river of pee at her desk. She never moved. She sat still as her gray uniform slowly darkened below the waist, as drops of sweat released her bangs from her scarf, and she wept without a sound. She had fallen three sentences behind in the dictée and given up, not just on the test, but on the whole business of civilization. What a quick, uncomplicated solution, to go feral: to sit there, leaking, waiting to be dragged out by a murder of Islamic Republic schoolteachers, listening for the snap and swish of the principal’s chador down the hall.

On the day of Khadijeh’s quiet surrender, I was number one on the list, so I had a place to look.

At day’s end, I took the short way home, down alleyways lined with drainage gutters where live fish traveled the old city. I ran to my room and thought of Khadijeh, how she had just let go. I pitied and envied her. I knelt to examine my pencil tips, then checked the bookshelf for the seven books I had recently bought, and the four I had bought before that. It wouldn’t be right to count to eleven—I had to count the seven books, then the four. And the next time I bought books, say three of them, I would count the three, the seven, and if I still remembered them, the four, each time I left my room. When I was finished, I breathed deeply until the thing floating too high in my chest (I imagined a metal bar) had moved back down, away from my throat. Years later, when I heard the story of Sisyphus, I said, “Like pushing down the bar,” and tapped my chest; my teacher frowned.

The following week, during silent reading time, a present arrived for me. This was custom. If you ranked high, your parents could send a gift to be presented to you in front of the class. Ms. Yadolai, my first-grade teacher, an old woman I loved and whose name is the only one I remember, brought in the gift to my third-grade classroom. She was Baba’s dental patient, so he must have delivered the package to her. Baba never bothered with details; he entrusted everything to friends. It was a book of constellations. Everyone clapped. I lifted the lid of my desk and slipped the book inside next to my pencils and the tamarind packet I had squeezed from a corner and rolled shut, like toothpaste.

Khadijeh never came back.

I was instructed to work on my handwriting. I sat with Baba on the living room carpet, an elaborate red Nain knotted on Maman Masi’s own loom, and we ate sour cherries with salt and we practiced. I asked Baba about Khadijeh. He said that everyone was made for a certain kind of work, and maybe Khadijeh had realized early that school wasn’t for her. This is why I had to earn twenties in every subject, to distinguish myself from the Khadijehs of the world and to reach my great potential. “You are the smartest,” said Baba. “You can be a doctor or engineer or diplomat. You won’t have to do housework. You’ll marry another doctor. You’ll have your PhD.” His voice contained no doubt or worry. It was just how things were destined to be. “Your mother came in seventeenth for the Konkour. Not seventeenth percentile. Seventeenth person in the country.” If I had to make a list of mantras from my childhood, it would certainly include not seventeenth percentile, seventeenth person. My mother’s national university entrance exam result was legend. I came from test-taking stock.

We did such good work, Baba and I. He emptied his pockets of pistachio and chocolate and sour cherry, and we sat together on the floor, cross-legged and knee to knee, whispering secrets and jokes as we drew bold, stout-hearted Ks and Gs. I clicked our finished pages into my rawhide messenger bag and, the next day, I took them to show my teacher, a woman whom we called only by the honorific khanom.

Khanom scanned my pages as I straightened up in my chair, my hands tucked beneath my haunches. She frowned and exhaled heavily through her nose. Then she glanced at the girls watching us from the edges of their scarves, tapped the pages straight against my desktop, and tore them in half. She reached for my practice notebook and tore the used pages in that too, taking care not to destroy any unused ones. This was to show me that my work was worth less than those unfilled pages.

Tears burned in my nose. I imagined a metal storm-door shutting over my eyeballs, so that nothing could get out. I reminded myself of Khadijeh, her watery surrender. I imagined that under her chador, Khanom’s skin was dry and scaly and she needed girlish tears to soften her, as she couldn’t afford black-market Nivea Creme. I tried to pity her for that.

A few years before first grade, my family had spent three months in London. There, my mother had converted to Christianity. Since our return, teachers had been probing me for information. Maman and Baba were respected in Isfahan. They had medical offices and friends and degrees from Tehran University. Maman had round, melancholy eyes and Diana haircuts in jet-black. She wore elegant dresses and a stethoscope. Her briefcase was shiny polished leather. No schoolgirl rawhide and click-buckle for her. But Maman was an apostate now, handing out tracts to her patients, a huge cross dangling in her windshield. Baba may have remained respected and generous and Muslim, but that wasn’t enough to protect me from abuse when I declared myself Maman’s ally.

“What is your religion?” the teachers would ask, every day during recess. They would pull me aside, to a bench between the toilet cave and the nightmarish Khomeini mural, and they would ask this again and again.

“I’m Christian,” I would say. In those days, I thought Muslim literally meant “a bad person,” and no individual or event helped dispel that notion—not even Baba, or his mother, Maman Masi, who was devout. We lived under constant threat of Iraqi bombs. We endured random arrests, executions, morality police roving the streets for sinful women (Gashte-Ershad or “Guidance Patrol,” they now call it). Though they were picked off and dragged to gruesome fates, the underground Christians we had befriended seemed consumed with kindness. Meanwhile, my teachers pecked hungrily at us all day, looking for a chance to humiliate.

Later in life, far from Isfahan, I would meet kindhearted Muslims and learn that I had been shown half a picture: that all villainy starts on native soil, where rotten people can safely be rotten, where government exists for their protection. It is only among the outsiders—the rebels, foreigners, and dissidents—that welcome is easily found. Since our return from London, we had lost our native rights; we were exiles in our own city, eyes suddenly open to the magic and promise of the West, and to the villains we had been.

•

In 1985, when I was nearly six and hadn’t yet attended my Islamic girls’ school, we visited my beloved Maman Moti—Maman’s mother—in London. Years before, Maman Moti had run away to England, leaving all but one daughter behind. That spring, we went to watch my aunt Sepideh, Maman’s youngest sister, marry an Englishman. Our stay was temporary, a visit followed by a half-hearted stab at emigration. It only lasted a few months, but I was enrolled in school for the first time. I spoke only Farsi.

In the airport, the guards tore through our things. Baba seemed unbothered as he unzipped his suitcases and buttered up the guards. “Ei Vai, did I leave an open pack of Lucky Strikes with my shirts? Agha, you have them. The smell will ruin the fabric . . . I smoke Mehrs, but people give the strangest things to their dentist.”

We were surrounded by so much clamor and haste. A guard picked up Babaeejoon, a beloved stuffed sheep, and turned him over in his hand. He took out a knife and ripped open its belly, pulling out its stuffing while my brother, Khosrou, cried on Maman’s shoulder. “Be brave, Khosrou joon,” Baba said. “They have to check so bad people don’t smuggle things.”

Though Babaeejoon had been my gift after tonsil surgery, his death became my brother’s trauma, because at the time of his disembowelment, Babaeejoon was Khosrou’s sheep. I soothed myself by reciting everyone’s ages: Aunt Sepi was nineteen. Maman was twenty-eight. Maman Moti was forty-four. I was five, Khosrou two. The airline served saffron rice pudding.

That night, I slept beside Maman Moti, whom I called my city grandmother. With her rolled hair and silky blouses, she was the opposite of Maman Masi, whose henna hair I had never seen below her temples. I heard a noise. Maman Moti was praying. “Can I pray too?” I asked. She told me about Jesus and love and freedom, and I believed. Soon, Maman became a Christian too. Everything was a miracle after that. Maman’s metal allergy? Gone. Because of Jesus she could wear bangles again. Every night, I heard Baba shouting through the wall. What was this insanity? Didn’t she have enough sense to know that all religions were manipulative and irrational? Hadn’t she just watched her own country fall into religious madness?

My parents had a terrible marriage, screaming-throwing fights that lasted into the early hours. He was addicted to an unnamable demon something. She would stage detoxes for him, and he sat shaking for a day or two, until some animal part of him burst out and chased her for the keys. At first, these were medical rages. Later, they were rages of coming loss. I heard stories of their courtship when Baba used to hide raw almonds around the house and write clues in verse for her to decipher, because he knew she loved riddles. He was as addicted to poetry and riverside picnics as he was to his pipe. At family meals or parties, eyes flitted to the door until he arrived. And yet, I was afraid of him. When I was two he had pulled out my front teeth because the tonsil surgeon had broken them on his way into my mouth.

In London, Baba sensed a looming danger in Maman’s new calling. Devotion to a faraway god, too, can be a powerful addiction.

For many nights, Maman sat up with her distant mother, a woman young enough to be her peer and whose elusive love had been Maman’s lifelong grail. They drank tea and discussed purpose and belief. My mother, Sima, was Moti’s second daughter: she wasn’t the infallible, beautiful eldest, Soheila, after whom Moti pined most, or her only son, or the precious youngest she had scooped up on the day she ran away to England, the only person she hadn’t left behind, and in whom she had invested all her English hopes. Maman was only the dutiful second. The one who read her medical books and cooked for her broken family. The one who obeyed. No one had taught her that this is how you get overlooked. She married young and found herself tricked: he was an addict. Maman hated being a doctor. Seventeenth on the Konkour meant the family gave her no choice but medicine. If she had confessed that sometimes she dreamed of owning a farm, they would’ve laughed—her father was a mayor. She went to medical school, married Baba. She found kindness with Baba’s Maman Masi, a sweet farm woman with turmeric-stained fingers who hugged and kissed, fed and praised. Maman Masi was old enough to be a mother to grown-ups.

By the time we arrived in London, Maman was strung out and ready for life to start meaning something fast. Trapped in the Islamic Republic, she craved rebellion, freedom. Too conservative for feminism, she reached for the next best thing: Jesus. Now she shared something more vital with her mother than Soheila ever had. Now she stood for an ideal that even the Islamic Republic couldn’t take away, because she was willing to die for it.

Maman Moti boasted that she had the gift of prophecy. She had dreamed that, one day, her four children would gather around her in the West, and they would all be true believers. Having fulfilled her duty, Maman smiled and started on dinner.

What does it mean to believe truly? I don’t know anymore, though I did then. Maman believed in Jesus more than I had seen her believe in anything, and that made him real. Every night, we both spoke to him, either alone or together, with more passion than we’d spoken to anyone.

We celebrated my sixth birthday with strawberry cake in the park in Golders Green. We let ice cream drip onto our fingers. We saw ginger hair, platinum hair, dark coffee skin, and we bought bananas and wandered the city, without fear of bomb sirens or morality police. Maman and Maman Moti let their over-brushed curls fall onto their shoulders. I learned to write from the left side of the page and bought three new toys: a ballerina that danced on a podium, a Barbie doll, and a row of penguins that climbed some steps and slid down a curly slide. Baba had paid a tailor to sew and pad tins of Iranian caviar into the lining of his suitcase. He passed them out one night at a pre-wedding celebration.

When the suitcases were stashed away, I began to imagine a free life in England. I believed that we had moved to be with my dear, elegant Maman Moti and Gigi, her pompous cat. I was going to school. I would learn English. They let me believe this.

The children were welcoming at first, teaching me English words using toys and pictures, helping me figure out the cubbies and milk line. But after a few days, a group of boys began to meet me in the yard and, pretending to play, pummel me in the stomach. Each morning it seemed a little less like play. They followed me in the playground and shouted gibberish, laughing at my dumbfounded looks. Maman Moti told me to pray and imagine God protecting me.

One day, I was playing with some girls, pretending the door handle to the art studio was an ice cream dispenser. The art studio was a freestanding room (like a shed) in the middle of the blacktop, and we often ran in and out of it during playtime. As I pulled on the handle, a boy grabbed my hand and shoved it into the doorjamb. Another boy slammed it shut, and I heard a sickening crunch.

At first it didn’t hurt—just a prick at the base of my pinky nail and a numbness spreading up through my hand. But then there was blood—a lot of it—seeping out of the hinge and creeping down the doorframe. The teachers ran across the playground, shouting foreign sounds. I felt my breath changing and climbing to the top of my throat where it grew quick and shallow. When I pulled my hand away, a piece of my pinky dangled by a shred of skin and fell to the ground. The boy looked ill, all pasty and slack-jawed. He didn’t run away. I was sticky with blood up to my elbow, the red smears covering the front of my shirt and now my face, too. I had wiped at my tears without thinking. That’s when the fire sparked in the place of my missing nail and shot up my arm and down the side of my torso.

I howled.

If I had been seven, maybe I would have handled it better. Maybe I would have collected enough English words by then to keep that gang of blond boys from tormenting me every day, from punching me in the stomach, from grabbing my ponytail at lunch. Maybe if I was seven, I could understand the words the teachers were shouting at me now.

I soaked through the first napkin, then a second, until the springy blacktop under my feet was covered in red blossoms. Amid the chaos, one of the adults picked up the tiny piece of my finger. She wrapped it in another paper napkin and gave it to me, and that made sense. It was a piece of my body. I should keep it. I held my finger-bundle tightly against my chest as I was rushed to the hospital.

No one asked me about it, until it was my turn to be with the doctor, a broad-shouldered man my parents’ age. More blond hair, this time over a kind face. I held the napkin out to him. He examined the nub, and he smiled at me. I didn’t understand what he said, but my mother was there, and she said that it was very clever of me to save it. I closed my eyes as he sewed the tip of my finger back on. “The nail won’t grow back,” the doctor said to my mother, and I saw the grief in her face when she told me instead that it might not grow as fast as the others.

We drove home through the foggy streets, the same streets I had seen in cartoons and picture books back in Isfahan, with bananas sprouting from fruit stands, bunches of helium balloons, and ice cream with two sticks of chocolate Flake. What miracles England had offered me in just a month. Despite the ache in my hand, I still loved these streets. I wanted to walk up and down my grandmother’s road in West Hendon, looking for change so I could buy Maltesers and real Kit Kats (with the logo in the chocolate) and Hula-Hoops. I wanted to go to the park in Golders Green and visit the incredible Mothercare shop and the adjoining McDonald’s in Brent Cross. I wanted to keep collecting English words so I could ask my classmates all the questions I was storing up for the day my tongue adjusted and we could be friends.

Did you know it takes a week to eat through a pack of tamarind?

What is at the bottom of shepherd’s pie, and why does it resist so nicely when I put my fork in it?

Who is Wee Willie Winkie? Am I the only one who finds him sinister?

Where are your hammams? Why do you bathe next to the toilet?

How can you bring yourself to sit . . . on a toilet?

I love your yellow hair, your red freckles, your chocolate brown skin.

Do you want to come to Maman Moti’s and meet Gigi, her snooty cat?

But I didn’t do or ask any of those things. I didn’t know the words.

That night Maman Moti told me to pray. “Thank God he could sew it back on,” she said. I dreamed Jesus was sitting by my bed. Again, I believed.

In the chatter of grown-ups from my grandmother’s church and in my parents’ soothing whispers, I heard a steady refrain about gratefulness and my lucky finger. God had protected me. It was my moment to shine! But I was furious. Why isn’t anyone angry? Someone should punish that boy.

I never went back to that school. I kept wondering why those boys were so nice to me that first day, before they began stalking me in the yard. Years later, I figured that must have been how long it took them to tell their parents about the Iranian girl.

A few weeks later, we were back in Isfahan. I was sent to an Islamic school for girls and told that no cruel British boys would follow me. Here at home, I was safe. The school issued me a headscarf that obscured my neck and hair. They draped my body in a shapeless gray manteau. Nothing was simple or practical; nothing was as I liked. And so, one day in the first grade, I started counting things on my lucky fingers.

•

We returned altered. Now we were converts in the Islamic Republic, illegal Christians in an underground church. We endured three nightmare years before the day of our escape—three years of arrests and threats, of armed revolutionary guards (pasdars or Sepâh) slipping into the backseat of our car at traffic stops, bursting into Maman’s medical office. Three years of daily terrors and Maman’s excuses about faith and higher callings.

It was a daily whiplash. The idyllic village life of my father on Fridays, sitting in my sweet grandmother’s lap, kissing her henna hair, listening to her reedy voice, eating her plum chicken or barberry rice, then traveling back to the city, to another phase of Saddam Hussein’s War of the Cities (a series of missiles that killed thousands in 1987 alone) that waited at our doorstep. Every few days, sirens blared. We taped our windows and ran to basements, where we chatted in the dark with our neighbors.

That Maman chose this moment to become a religious activist out of her medical office baffled Baba—they fought night after night. Making a life after the revolution had been hard work. Baba had learned which patients to prioritize, which palms to grease, which tailor altered suitcases, who to smoke with in relative safety. But now Maman hurried down unsafe streets pulling two children along, her scarf falling back as she slipped into strange doors to meet Christians. She broadcast her story over an illegal Christian radio station, tucked brochures into women’s chadors under the nose of the morality police, and did everything a person could do to draw attention to her apostasy. Maybe she feels guilty, Baba thought. She had once been a devout Muslim, and though she was never political, preferring to make her strict, conservative father happy, Maman had joined other medical students in the streets to protest the Shah, willingly covering her hair.

Teachers began to pull me away at recess. When I tried to opt out of weekly Islam classes, they held me in the schoolyard and told me that Maman would be jailed, beaten, maybe killed.

When I told Baba that Khanom had torn our proud, far-reaching Ks and Gs, his eyes flashed. My Baba was known for his pleasure-seeking ways: his riotous humor, his sumptuous feasting, his devotion to poetry. We were kindred spirits in our secret excesses. His vices, though, weren’t all bright and merry. He loved the poppy, and it made him rage. His anger was slow to ignite, but God help you if you were the one to light him up.

The next day in the schoolyard, we lined up by grade and performed our required chants, straining our small lungs. An older girl, a fourth or fifth grader, pressed her lips to a bullhorn and led us in muffled pledges we didn’t understand: I am the daughter of the revolution. I am the flower of my country. Death to America. Death to Israel.

Then Baba stormed through the metal gate, striding in his Western shirt and tie past the Khomeini mural. In seconds the principal and two teachers were surrounding him, nodding, lifting and lowering hands. I could only hear snippets. “Yes, Dr. Nayeri . . .” “. . . I’ll speak with her . . .” “. . . Sir, we’re in the middle . . .” When old Ms. Yadolai arrived, he calmed, because she was sweet and harmless, like Maman Masi, his mother.

Then Khanom stepped out from in front of our line and started toward him. Suddenly she looked small, like one of us. Was she twenty? Twenty-five? She was trying to look strong, professional, but Baba was on a crusade. He wanted her heart. “She’s just a child!” he shouted across the blacktop as he approached her at twice her pace. “You’re a grown woman. She isn’t responsible . . . She’s not your enemy.” Khanom began muttering that this was only about the handwriting. Baba railed on. “She worked hard, and I checked the work. How dare you! Where did you go to university?”

I noted that the last question was germane to the proceedings. That it affected her credibility, her allotment of power against my father. Baba was no sexist. If she had lifted her shoulders, bellowed out “Tehran University,” and defended her actions, if she had said, “Dina is chatty, fussy, and odd. She has an itch in the brain and bad handwriting and one of her eyes is too small,” he would have shown some respect for her methods. I know this because Baba—though he smoked opium and beat my mother and was incapable of lifting a finger for himself—instructed me never to cower to men. If you flinch, they will hit harder. Show your fangs, not your throat. But this was 1987 Isfahan and most Babas didn’t teach their daughters these things. The poor woman didn’t have the training.

She cried. She leaked before a man who shook his head at her and walked away, stopping to wave to his daughter who stood spellbound in a row of muppety gray heads, quietly growing a coarse new skin.

That night we walked along the Thirty-Three Arches and Baba took us to Hotel Koorosh, my favorite restaurant, where Baba and other local doctors had a membership. We ate schnitzel and crème caramel on white tablecloths. We drank yogurt soda with three sprigs of mint. I knew now that my teacher wasn’t scaly or witchy or a demoness, and that it was important not to bend. And I knew that I was capable of rooting for someone who wasn’t totally on the right side of a thing. In war, villainy and good change hands all the time, like a football.

•

A few days later, Maman was stopped in the streets by the Gashte-Ershad. We were at a traffic stop and my younger brother, Khosrou, opened the back door and jumped out into the madness of Isfahani morning traffic. I was in the front seat beside Maman, so I didn’t see him do it. All I saw was Maman throwing the car into park and hurling her body out of the car, dashing across three lanes, and snatching him up. In the process, her scarf slipped back a few inches, revealing half a head of loose hair. Then we heard the shouting; a pasdar was pointing and ranting at Maman. “Watch your hijab, woman!” As he crossed the asphalt, his shouting grew louder, angrier. He began to curse, calling her vile names.

“My son ran into traffic,” she said. She had already fixed her hijab so that every strand was tucked away. But he towered over her, threatening, spitting. They stood by the open driver’s side door. If he had leaned in, he would have seen the huge cross hanging on her rearview mirror. Maybe he would have made an issue of it. He shouted a few more times, gave Maman a warning, and returned to the other officers watching us from their car.

When he was gone, Maman’s cheeks glistened with rage. I wonder if she imagined herself in a country where men are punished for such things, where women can defend themselves. I wonder if she ever fantasized about slapping some fool hard across the face. Khosrou and I sat in that car, conjuring violent scenes. My brother glared silently at the car roof. Later he told Maman stories of how he would protect her, build her a castle in a mountain far away, fill it with Smarties.

Maman dropped me off at Baba’s dental office while she ran errands with Khosrou—my chronic motion sickness made me a terrible passenger. I slipped into the surgery, sat in the nurse’s chair to watch Baba fill a tooth. Long reddish hair fell over the back of the chair. I leaned to get a better look. The patient wore a silky blouse and jeans. Her chador hung on a rack near my face—in Baba’s office, women could cover as they pleased if the door was closed. “Aren’t you going to say hello, Dina joon?” said Baba.

I mumbled hello. Baba frowned. “Since when are you shy?”

I glanced at the woman’s red lips and made-up eyes. She was a stranger. And anyway, who can recognize a face with the mouth pried open? But then Baba leaned back and she sat up and spit. “Hello, Dina joon,” she said. I knew that voice—it was my first-grade teacher, Ms. Yadolai. Old Ms. Yadolai, restored, it seemed, to twenty-five or thirty by some witch’s spell. “I saw you in the waiting room, telling everyone to shush,” she said. “Where did you get that sweet nurse’s costume?” She meant my photo hanging across an entire wall of Baba’s waiting room, my finger to my lips.

I shrugged. I was too transfixed by the miracle I was witnessing.

“Dina, don’t be rude,” said Baba.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Ms. Yadolai, what red hair you have.”

Little Red Riding Hood was one of few storybooks not banned by the clerics; that joke was well-worn. She laughed, thanked Baba, and gathered her things. “See you in school,” she said, whipping her black chador around her body, tucking at the temples. Despite makeup, she gained twenty years in one swing of her arm. A good scrub would cost her another twenty, and all her power, returning her by morning to old Ms. Yadolai.

Now, finally, I understood the function of hijab.

I started to believe that Christianity was feminism. Years later, my mother told me that when she had been a Muslim she was simply searching, and Islam fit only some of what she held sacred. In Christianity, she found her beliefs in their purest form. I now know that I was searching for feminism, and along the way, I shed every doctrine and institution that failed to live up to it. Islam went first. Later, all religion would follow.

Our church wasn’t underground; it was behind gates and thick curtains. A rotating schedule in the homes of Assyrians and Armenians, who, if they could prove their ancestry and refrained from proselytizing, were theoretically left alone. Only apostates and pied pipers risked arrest and death. By allowing us into their homes, the Christian-born who hosted us tied their fates to ours, and this bonded us beyond friendship.

News of pastors, even Armenian ones, being shot or disappearing into the notorious Evin Prison wasn’t rare. Political prisoners were routinely tortured and killed in Evin. We focused our attention elsewhere. Once we slipped past the front gate, headscarves came off and we sang songs, and planned Christmas celebrations, and heard funny sermons from our portly, heavily bearded Assyrian pastor, Brother Yusuf. The year we returned from England, Maman explained Christmas to us. She told us about Father Christmas and stockings by our beds, and it struck me that this character sounded like an older Brother Yusuf.

“If he visits all the children in the world,” I asked, “why didn’t he come to us before?” Maman told me that he only visited Christian children, and now we were Christians, wasn’t that exciting? “But I didn’t know about Jesus before,” I said. “You said Christianity is fair. If I didn’t know, why would he skip me? What about kids who are too young to have a religion? Does Father Christmas only visit houses with Christian parents?”

Maman blinked a few times. “Dina, it’s for fun. Maybe it’s Father Christmas. Maybe it’s Brother Yusuf in a costume. Do you want a stocking, or do you want to sit in protest for all the ones you didn’t get?”

“Yes, I want one,” I said, and immediately suspended disbelief.

“Good,” she said, then added (as she often did), “Keep asking these kinds of questions. You can think for yourself now; no more reciting.”

For a while I did this. I read my Bible, found inconsistencies, and presented them to Brother Yusuf. I often asked my questions over meals at our sofreh, or his sofreh, with several families sitting around a feast on the floor. Brother Yusuf was the slowest eater I had met. He delighted in every bite, relishing and savoring and licking his lips, his big bearded cheeks bouncing as he chewed, nodded slowly, and complimented the chef. He treated my questions as he would an adult’s, as if I were part of an important theological conversation. Though, he didn’t always solve my problem. Most contradictions were dispatched with one of two answers: “The rules were different under the Old Testament,” or “That reads differently in the original Hebrew.” It didn’t matter. The important thing was that he was impressed, that he called me clever.

When Brother Yusuf and the Christians visited, Baba disappeared to Ardestoon or stayed in his office—he despised Brother Yusuf, called him “that dirty Assyrian” or “that bearded charlatan.”

Sometime in 1987, while the war raged on, sirens shrieked, and the days thrummed endlessly with news of executions, Maman was arrested. I didn’t know the details, only that her office had been stormed, the patients sent home, and she had been questioned for hours. She had been given a choice: spy against the underground church or face arrest and execution.

Maman and Baba fought. Baba threatened to take Khosrou and me away. One night, Maman took us to a hotel, but they wouldn’t accept a woman alone with two children.

Having found her purpose, Maman intensified her efforts. She kept stacks of Christian brochures under a thin blanket in her backseat, passing them out to patients and acquaintances. She started studying braille and sign language, so she could reach out to the deaf and the blind.

Maman was arrested again, her office ransacked, her records stolen. She grew rigorous in her domesticity, sewing complicated, lifelike stuffed squirrels and cats. She found thin mattress foam and made a stuffed car for Khosrou. As the gaze of the morality police grew hotter and more unbearable, she leaned heavier on the church, and on Brother Yusuf. Sometimes when I spied on them talking in his home office, I detected an intimacy that felt like a betrayal to Baba—their talk was too playful. It was a strange habit of new Christians, these overly loving exchanges that were supposed to mimic brotherly or sisterly love. “My dear sweet” this or that. Each time Maman met with the pastor, his office door remained wide open.

One afternoon, a car screeched to a stop behind the high wall separating the street from Brother Yusuf’s front gate. His wife rushed out of the kitchen, scooping up her baby girl, Rhoda. His son, Yoonatan, and I stopped playing cards. Maman and Brother Yusuf stashed their Bibles away. Maman fixed her hijab. A hard knock shook the metal gate outside. “I’ll break it down!” a man shouted. And though his voice was angry, almost violent, all my fear dissolved. I knew that voice, and no matter how much he shouted and whom he threatened to hurt, it brought me only joy.

Khosrou was terrified, though. He screamed and jumped into Maman’s arms. He cried for a while, then his brow furrowed as if he were accepting new orders, a new role. “Don’t worry, Maman. I’ll protect you!”

Brother Yusuf had hardly opened the gate before Baba rushed in and grabbed him by the throat. He shouted terrible things. “You dirty Assyrian,” he spat into the man’s face as he hovered over him, his shirt collar still in his fists. “Don’t you have your own wife to corrupt? Do you know what trouble you’ve caused?” Why had Baba come today? Maybe he had been smoking, or had a visit from the moral police. Baba didn’t harm Brother Yusuf. He released his anger and, when the women managed to calm him, turned back toward the door, leaving Maman to apologize again and again.

The war made everything seem like the last of its kind. Every lazy afternoon, every family dinner, every drink of water. Some days at school, only a third of the students were present, the classroom eerily quiet and breezy, because parents had heard of a coming bomb raid.

My teachers reached in deep and planted gruesome images. They told me just enough to make me ask around and fill in the gaps. 1987 was a brutal year. For some, 1988 would be worse. Thousands of intellectuals, leftists, and political dissidents disappeared that year, massacred by firing squad and hung from cranes, dying slowly. Sliced feet and skinned backs, hot irons to the thighs, their deaths covered up—it was a purge unprecedented in Iranian history. These images competed in my nightmares with scenes from the Book of Revelation and movies about the rapture: horsemen and plagues and the Antichrist. Which was the worse fate? Did most eight-year-old girls have such choices?

I decided to talk to my teacher, to make peace. One day after class, I waited for the room to empty, straightened my scarf, checked my area, and meandered to her desk. “Khanom,” I said. She didn’t look up from her papers. “I’ve been practicing my handwriting.”

“Good,” she said, her head still down so that all I saw was the gray fabric lump of her head. “That’s why we’re here.”

“I didn’t tell Baba,” I said, trying not to let my dignity leak away. “He looks at my notebooks. I didn’t . . .”

Now she looked up with her stony eyes, folding her arms over her papers in a rehearsed, wooden sort of way. “Miss Nayeri, the world is brutal for women. It’s a thousand times harder than for men. Whatever our private conflicts, we don’t betray each other to men. Do you understand?”

I shook my head. “Baba isn’t one of those men. He was just angry . . .”

She rolled her eyes, capped her pen, and sat back. “Who’s your biggest rival in the class? Who do you hate more than me?”

“I don’t hate you, Khanom,” I said. What a terrible mess this was.

She waited. I didn’t want to answer, because Pooneh was also my best friend and a distant cousin. I loved her and craved to beat her so much that sometimes when we kissed hello, on both cheeks as our parents had taught us, I squeezed her face hard to calm my itching teeth. It was a painful, confused affection, like a Mafia boss kissing a rival brother goodbye.

Now Khanom smiled. Even though I came in first twice as often as Pooneh did, I was the one always chasing, because I was the one who publicly cared, while she shrugged and smiled and puffed her porcelain cheeks. That I would have to suffer another twenty years of sprinting alongside Pooneh exhausted and thrilled me. “Whatever you do to each other to win,” she said, “the minute you run to a man, you’re a traitor.”

Then she went back to her work. “I’m sorry,” I said, though I felt that the story had been unfairly rewritten. “I’ll do the work over. I do love you.”

She gave me a strange look. I had said the wrong thing. You don’t tell teachers you love them. Why had I said it?

For a moment, we both stood our ground, Khanom determined to ignore me, as I remained planted in her line of vision. I shifted onto my other foot, moved my messenger bag to my back.

She glanced up again, smiling kindly now. “It’s OK, Miss Nayeri,” she said. “I’m OK. I’m stronger than you think.” She made muscle arms under her chador, and we both laughed. “How would you like to do a very special job that only the top students can do?”

My fingertips went cold—I knew my school’s rituals and rewards, and yet I wanted so much to please her. She lifted herself off the chair with a weary sigh and opened the book cabinet behind her. She pulled out a piece of paper tucked beneath the red bullhorn. When I didn’t move, she waved it at me until I reached up and took it from her.

“You can lead tomorrow’s morning exercises,” she said. “Don’t be sad.” She leaned down to my height and touched my cheek. “We’re friends again.” Then she hugged me and muttered encouraging words in my ear. She smelled like my mother’s soap, and I wrapped my arm around her neck. Under her chador, a familiar lump comforted me; a ponytail, bound low, hanging down to the top of her shoulders. It made me trust her: yes, my teacher was a person. Her body wasn’t covered in scales. She had real hair tied up in a girlish ponytail. I didn’t want to stop touching it, but a moment later she pulled away.

I slogged home in cement shoes, feeling the breath of the four horsemen on my neck. Was there any way to escape hell if I led a schoolyard full of girls in chanting death to Israel, God’s own people? I might as well drive the nails into Jesus’ hands and feet. I pictured Rhoda and Yoonatan, Brother Yusuf savoring my mother’s Salad Olivieh and strapping on his Father Christmas belly. I would be betraying them all.

Alone in my bedroom, I agonized. I took off my uniform and dropped it in the laundry basket. I sat at my desk, tried to do math through tears. How would I survive tomorrow? Aside from damning myself to hell, it would be humiliating. I had been so brazen and boastful about my new faith. A few hours later, Maman burst in. “What is this?” she said. She was holding my manteau in one hand, the scrap of paper with the chants in the other. “Why is this garbage in your pocket?”

The metal bar was so far up my throat now that I could hardly take a breath. I confessed everything. “You cannot do it, Dina,” she said, then she went on to repeat the story of Peter denying Jesus three times, and Judas, and every other betrayer in the Bible and in history. “When the class lines up for chants, what do you normally do?”

“I don’t say them. I ask Jesus for strength, like you told me to.”

“You tell your teacher that your mother forbids you. Tell her that in our faith we don’t recite things. Don’t argue with her about the text. Then get back in the line and do as you always do, OK?” I nodded.

The next day, I dragged myself to school. I separated from my body with each step, and by the time I passed through the school gate, crossed the blacktop, and climbed the podium, I was numb and limp, hovering outside myself. I was already in Baba’s car speeding toward Ardestoon, toward my Morvarid’s withered henna arms. The stage was only inches from the ground. I read the words into the red bullhorn, barely waiting for the back chant. I conjured up the blond London boys who had punched me and severed my finger, and I thought, maybe viciousness is genetic; maybe some people, like British boys and Persian girls, are bred for it.

When my volume dropped, a teacher straightened my back and the bullhorn so that it touched my lips and I tasted plastic and metal. I said the final words, and started back down the podium to join my class, stopping as I passed to return the paper to Khanom. The moment the last syllable dropped like phlegm from my mouth, I began praying for forgiveness; I prayed all day. I never told Maman what I had done. Maybe she knew. It took months to escape the nausea of that morning, and even then, I was marked: long after the Islamic Republic, the war, and the refugee years had receded and I had become an ordinary American, I would still be someone who once stood on a podium in an Isfahani schoolyard and shouted “Death to America” into a bullhorn.

•

For a few weeks in the spring of 1988, everything was on apocalyptic pause—that’s how it felt when sirens warned of bombs already on the way. A pause as we looked up to the sky, waiting for word that our daily labors were worth continuing, that in an hour we would still have homes and schools. Or bodies. The television blared out insanity—was it propaganda, or had the producers succumbed to madness? I shiver at the memory of a drama in which two boys with shaved heads and long white robes, good Muslim boys from less sophisticated cities, walked through the bombed-out rubble of their neighborhood looking for the bodies of their parents. They passed a weeping man carrying his son’s limp body—their friend. When they stumbled upon a wreckage that had been their roof, they sat atop it and cried, caressing the ground, now a family gravesite, with the sacred touch of new orphans. This drama played at 3 p.m., during children’s hour.

I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t deserve to breathe. Nothing was mine to keep. “Maman,” I ran to her and cried into her skirt. “Tell me a riddle.”

School was a ghostly place, nearly empty now. The teachers didn’t bother with lessons. We sat in lonely silence and wrote. During breaks, we wandered the hallway and the blacktop one by one. No groups remained. Pooneh didn’t come. I missed her. I needed her to make me try my best.

“A worthy rival is a precious thing,” said Baba.

“You shouldn’t compete with anyone but yourself,” said Maman.

Had there been a day when these two agreed on one single thing?

Isfahan grew quiet and sad. People tiptoed, exchanging ration coupons for basics and rushing home, taking their tea to the bomb shelter. The New Year slowed things down. It brought smoked fish and spray roses and tiny pink buds, but little hope. We cocooned in the church and listened to news of our murdered brothers and sisters, and we prayed for rescue.

Meanwhile, in the Ministry of Intelligence, one man was making Maman’s case his pet project. She was arrested a third time in her office, thrown in jail for the night. Next time, the man said, if she didn’t agree to disclose church secrets, she would be executed. Baba paid them to release her into house arrest. As she was leaving, the man promised Maman that tomorrow she would have her final chance to accept his offer, or she wouldn’t return home again. That night, police cars surrounded our house.

Maman didn’t sleep. She packed. “We are leaving. I know we are. This is the moment when Jesus will perform miracles.”

Khosrou grew tense, his little brow always furrowed. It seemed he would have to act fast, if he were to build Maman that castle in time.

“Your Jesus is going to save you?” Baba bellowed. “At least admit that the person performing the miracles will be me. I’ve lost my family because of this lying, grifting, pied piper man. Please be sure to thank him for me.”

The arrival of this day struck Baba like a rock hurtling down a mountain; he had tried so hard to keep that boulder moving upward. But now Maman was taking his children, abandoning him, her country, her life.

Baba spent the night on the phone. Maman in prayer.

The next morning, to allay suspicion, Baba went to his office as usual, and I walked to school. A handful of teachers and girls in half-hearted hijab roamed the halls. In class, we read silently, and I left early. At home, I packed my things. The itch pawed and suffocated me. I stared at my animals and books all lined up, my solar system and the Victorian doll with folds in her dress for hiding secrets. I couldn’t bring the squirrel with its furry white belly, or my cat, elephant, or duckling. They would be safer here, Maman had told me. Remember Babaeejoon?

I clenched my fist around some dried sour cherries, warming and loosening there, staining my palm bright red. I stared into a drawer of dried berries and fruit leathers. I ate the hot cherries in my hand.

Despite everything, I was excited to go: beyond our borders lay every kind of possibility. If I could just pull myself away from my things . . .

We waited in the kitchen for my uncle Reza—my father’s younger brother. Baba had sent him to fetch us in a borrowed car. A few months before, we had moved from the house with the pool and the spray roses. Now we lived in a third-floor flat, and the plan must have been to climb down the fire escape and leave from the back.

Reza was thirteen when I was born. Now twenty-one, he had soft chestnut hair and a lazy smile, faded jeans, the kind of youth and freedom that Iran granted only to some men, and only briefly. I couldn’t imagine a more heroic person. On Fridays in Ardestoon, Reza would put me on the back of his motorcycle, and we would whiz through the countryside, past rivers with ducks and orchards full of sour cherries, mulberries, almonds, and green plums, to a mountain where sheep grazed. The back of that motorcycle was peace for me, a place of no worry. It was freedom, my hair flying as I clutched his stomach and screamed into his shoulder. How would I live without those afternoons? Who would be my new Uncle Reza? What if it took him years to follow us? What if he never did?

At the kitchen table, Maman underlined her Bible in a third or fourth color (one for each year). I began to panic about leaving. I had two months left of the third grade. I’d have to learn English. How long would that take? How could I be number one in school if I didn’t speak English?

“Maman,” I said. She continued to read. “Maman!”

She looked up. “What is it?”

“How do you say the word ‘write’ in English?”

She told me, then frowned and said, “Why?”

“Because,” I said, “math will be the same, but during dictée, the teacher always says, write this, write that. So if I just listen for ‘write’ and sound out what comes after . . .” After three years of Iranian dictée, after Khadijeh, I divided tests into two kinds: the easy kind, and the kind with a chadori teacher breathing down your neck, shouting sentences that must be written verbatim in calligraphy, with a fountain pen.

Maman laughed. “English spelling isn’t like that. You’ll see.”

Reza arrived just as sirens began screaming. We watched the surveillance cars from the kitchen window; they hesitated, then scattered. “Let’s go,” said Reza. A lucky crack had opened in Maman’s house arrest; I held my favorite uncle’s hand for the last time, and we ran through it.

We scrambled into the back of the car with our suitcases. The street was deserted, just a long sun-streaked hollow where I played with the neighborhood children. Blurred by rain and tires and shoeprints, our chalk hopscotch ladders still colored the street from top to bottom. We weren’t going far on this leg of the journey. We would fly to Tehran, then drive to Karaj, where we could hide in the home of Maman’s elderly grandmother (Moti’s mother). She had pillows lining a wall beside a small television, a bedridden husband, and cherry trees that would be blossoming now.

Earlier that morning, before he left for work, I had asked Baba, “When are you coming?”

“Soon,” he said. “I’ll come to Karaj.”

Uncle Reza drove us past Baba’s building; his office was on the third floor, his operating room facing the street.

“Wave goodbye to your Baba,” he said, his voice too quiet and low.

I squinted at the man in the window and waved. I knew the window, the big chair beyond, the desk with our photos scattered under glass. I couldn’t see his face. We were in a moving car, and he was three stories up.

In the front passenger seat, Maman stared at the streets with grieving eyes, taking in every shop sign and utility pole. Waving to Baba had unnerved me. Maman always told me the truth. She told me about her arrests, the death of church leaders. But now I understood that we were sealing a door even tighter than I liked, that I’d never again see this life from inside. I may never sit beside my cousins, glance for my name above Pooneh’s, or tuck in Maman Masi’s hair. Morvarid would die without me.

I made promises to myself. If we made it to the United States or England, I would work twenty times harder to avoid Khadijeh’s fate. I would learn English and become exceptional. In the West, the criminals wouldn’t be in charge. Teachers would be kind. Worthy rivals would abound.

From his office, Baba was making calls. I don’t know when they found the solution for sneaking out of Isfahan. I only know that it happened at the eleventh hour, because when we got in the car and headed to the airport, we had no tickets and no hope. Every flight was canceled because of the bomb alert. Somehow, though, either before we left or as we drove, Baba’s phone connected to a friend: maybe a village classmate, or a fellow prisoner, or a guest at his hookah, or, most likely, a patient relieved of pain.

A mile or two outside the terminal, our car broke down. The road to the airport was sandy and flat, like desert, and there was no traffic now that the airport was shut. Then Reza spotted a far-off Jeep. As it approached, the olive of a police vehicle stained the horizon and Maman began to pray.

Did Reza grow up with a booming personality like my father or brother? I remember him as a quiet person with a silent laugh, and I never saw him after that day. I have a photo of us at my eighth birthday party, running around the last of the musical chairs, my hair flying, Reza grinning. He was no showman like Baba, but at twenty-one, he was charming enough to befriend a police officer who hadn’t bothered to speak to any central authority that morning. The name on his ID matched my mother’s. His hair was tinted red like mine. Maybe the officer was bad at birthday math (Reza was far too young to be my father), or maybe he just didn’t bother. He gave us a jump and escorted us to the airport.

Minutes later, Baba’s friend (or classmate or patient), now an airport security agent, snuck us onto a cargo plane that had stopped only to refuel. We sat beside the merchandise, and we flew to Tehran undetected. For decades, I believed our escape was divined. In Karaj, we hid in the house of my great-grandmother, Aziz. There, Maman and Baba rushed to get us out of the country, and Maman’s Three Miracles, the foundation of our escape story and therefore our future identities, came to pass.

A few nights before we left the country, a man called Baba’s office at midnight, expecting to get an answering machine. He was in agony over an abscessed tooth. Baba was slumped behind his desk, puffing smoke into the darkness, thinking of how to get us out without exit visas or passports, in a country where even plane tickets took months to secure. In the midst of this fog, and for no apparent reason, he answered the telephone. The man begged for help, but Baba got calls like this all the time. He was one of the best dental surgeons in Isfahan. “I know Dr. Nayeri,” people would say. “He grew up in Ardestoon and he drives an American car. He must be good.”

Just before hanging up, Baba asked, “Where do you work, Agha?”

The man said he worked at the passport office. Baba laughed. Surely, this was a joke. But no, the man gave his credentials. Within hours, Baba had sobered up and was bent over the man’s mouth, performing a free root canal. The next morning, my mother, brother, and I had our passports.

We decided to try for Dubai. Baba had friends there. And the route through Turkey seemed more dangerous, more the fugitive’s way. We needed a visa and plane tickets, which were sold out for months. Back then, Iranians booked flights in advance and paid a fluctuating rate on departure day. One morning as we broke fast with bread, cheese, and sweet tea with Aziz, the radio announced that due to pressure from inflation, Iran Air was changing its pricing model. Many bookings were canceled in the transition. Maman clapped her hands and reached to the sky. “Another miracle!” When she said this to Baba, he raged. “Again . . . it was me. Not God. I’m God.”

Days later, Baba’s distant relative in Dubai, a stranger named Jahangir, agreed to sponsor us for tourist visas. His reasons are a mystery to me; Baba knows. Jahangir wasn’t privy to Maman’s troubles or her plan to stay past our visas and make us refugees, to throw us at the mercy of the United Nations. Within days, in spring 1988, we were on a plane out of Iran.

IV / Kaweh and Kambiz

Lately, I have become enraptured by a pair of stories. I came across each man in a newspaper article, years apart, and chased both stories last year. Sometime in the early 2000s, two promising young men left Iran through Kurdistan. They were strangers to each other, though they could be brothers. Their faces, their names, are eerily alike. Fate, though, spit them out at two ends of a long spectrum, two extremes so distant that one wonders how civilized societies allow a single hour, or day, to carry such consequences (where is our humility?). Both men ran from danger while harboring big dreams; one was labeled an opportunist, the other a survivor.

Kaweh and Kambiz each left Iran in early adulthood. Earnest and hardworking, they set off without family, money, or a change of clothes. I am drawn to the place where their stories diverge, the vital hinge where one man is believed and the other is not, this weighing station of human worth operated for profit by winners of a great lottery of birth.

•

Like many Iranian boys, Kaweh spent his mornings in a strict Islamic classroom, his afternoons kicking soccer balls and paddling Ping-Pong balls for the pride of his village, and his evenings reading all the Western books he could get his hands on. His older brother was studying math in university and brought him Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Around the World in Eighty Days. Journey to the Center of the Earth. At night, Kaweh raced through the books, inviting Verne to show him the vastness of the world. His three older siblings, clustered at around a decade older than Kaweh, and his baby sister, six years younger, shared bedrooms. Kaweh camped in the living room. Like an only child, he slept, did his work, and walked to school alone. He developed a rich inner life, his solitude interrupted only by his strict, military father—a man with few words and no desire to hike mountains or explore rivers—coming in to watch Poirot.

Born in 1981 in lush mountainous Kurdistan, the neck of “the cat” (the shape of modern Iran on a map), Kaweh had never known his country before the 1979 Revolution. Every day, his teachers checked the boys’ homework. If it wasn’t done, they cut tree branches and whipped the soft of the children’s hands. In winter, they made the boys bury their hands in snow until all feeling was lost. They squeezed pencils between tiny fingers.

Paveh was a relatively poor and tight-knit Kurdish town. Everyone knew one another, and the children competed for academic and athletic honors. And yet, the law required them to speak only in Farsi in school, at the bank, and at other places of business. “I don’t understand,” Kaweh told his mother one day as they picked eggplant and tomatoes from their garden. “Hozan can’t even speak proper Farsi. In town we speak in Kurdish, but when I go to the post office to give him a letter, I have to tell him in Farsi and hope he does it right? If I say a word in Kurdish he gets scared.”

“It’s the law,” said his mother, kicking a fallen walnut and stretching her back. “He doesn’t want trouble.”

When they had filled two baskets of ripe apples and autumn vegetables, Kaweh asked, “Daye, can I have some money?”

“What for?” she said, already reaching into her skirt pocket.

“There’s a new thing people are drinking in the square. It makes them burp and say that’s delicious.”

“Disgusting, Kaweh.” She laughed and gave him the money.

That afternoon Kaweh tasted his first Coca-Cola, a brief joy since most of it came out of his nose a few seconds later. “It’s like needles,” he said.

That was the year the family got their television and discovered Poirot and other dubbed shows on two channels. Every night, villagers knocked on their door to congratulate the family on their acquisition. The congratulations were heartier when there was a soccer match on. Soon the first washing machine came to the village, and fridges began to pop up through the town. The family acquired these things slowly and faithfully, and life became more varied and enjoyable. There was time for river hikes and snowy mountain games in their four-season village, and Kaweh began to travel to competitions for table tennis and soccer.

The prohibition on Kurdish continued to baffle him. He wanted to read the magazines his brothers read. He didn’t want to speak to his teachers in Farsi. Every morning he woke to his father listening to the BBC and Voice of America for the news. That’s how he learned of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), the progressive rebels operating just outside Iran, beyond the Iraqi border, who fought for Kurdish rights and self-rule, and whose leaders were regularly hanged in town squares. He had seen preparations of the crane and the gallows, the public announcement: “We have arrested so-and-so, a traitor. He will be executed today.” The regime had declared holy war on KDPI, and thousands were slaughtered. Once, a local man was hanged, his feet tied with a rope and his body dragged by a car through the town, as a warning against joining the party.

When Kaweh was eleven, KDPI leader Sadegh Sharafkandi was famously assassinated by Iranian operatives in the Mykonos Restaurant in Berlin. Sharafkandi’s predecessor, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, a hero for Kurdish autonomy, had been murdered in 1989 in Vienna. Both men were buried at Père Lachaise in Paris. This second assassination created much noise in Paveh and greater Kurdistan. Did the Iranian authorities carry it out? For years, the story sat heavily on Kurdish hearts until in 1997 a German court issued an international arrest warrant for the Iranian intelligence minister responsible.

By the time Kaweh was seventeen, his private anger at the treatment of the Kurds had peaked, and he found inspiration and purpose in the stories of his political heroes. One day, Kaweh’s cousin, Sattar, a studious boy his age and a known prodigy in math, physics, and the Koran, suggested that they run away to join the party and fight for Kurdish rights. “Let’s present ourselves. If we’re good, they will send us to Europe to study. We can fight for something good.” Kaweh agreed. At home, tensions were high. He told his parents he was going away for a week to compete in table tennis, and his cousin was going for an academic competition.

“Where is the competition?” his mother asked at dinner. The boys had agreed that they couldn’t cross into Iraq from Paveh, since everyone knew them there. They chose another border town.

“Marivan,” said Kaweh, thinking of how little he could carry in an overnight bag and what he’d have to leave behind. “I’ll be gone for a week.”

•

Kambiz lived in a northern Iranian province close to Kaweh’s. If Kaweh was in the front part of a west-facing cat’s neck, then Kambiz was on its back, due east, in Shomal, where people came to hike and ski the Alborz, or swim and eat fish from the Caspian Sea. His mother had spent her life competing with her sister-in-law. Every time that sister’s children brought home an honor or a good grade or a sports win, Kambiz’s mother said, “Kambiz jan, you must get into university and make your mother proud. Show us some talent. Don’t shame me in front of my sister-in-law.”

Kambiz thought maybe he’d become an electrical engineer. He sat in his room and tinkered with gadgets, old phones and radios. He was decent at math, physics. But his mother’s daily pleas exhausted him. Sometimes, he stared at his mother’s spices and thought, Why is it so low a calling to create pleasure out of chicken thighs and a basketful of ground-up roots?

•

At the border, a man told Kaweh and Sattar where to go, what Iraqi village to aim for, and where to find the KDPI (they were headquartered in Koy Sanjaq). “If you cross tomorrow,” he said, “I can meet you on the other side, in Penjwen.”

But later that day at the border, guards stopped and questioned them. Sattar told them that they were visiting family for a day. When they asked for “a sweet” to wave them through, Sattar pulled out their money. “We have to forget about our bags and cross now,” he whispered to Kaweh. “People on day visits don’t bring bags.”

They crossed into Penjwen. They had only enough to pay for one boy’s travel permits. Since Kaweh looked young, they bought one for Sattar. At the first stop their bus was boarded by Peshmerga officers, and Kaweh was arrested. Vowing to find each other, Sattar continued on to Koy Sanjaq. Kaweh spent the next hour convincing the officers that he was just a boy visiting his uncle. He had nothing with him, no money, no clothes. A young Peshmerga said, “Come on, he’s a poor kid going to see his family for Nowruz.”

Hours later, Kaweh arrived at the headquarters. “I’m here to join the party,” he said. Just as he was asking if Sattar had arrived, a car pulled up and out came his cousin. The boys rushed at each other, laughing and hugging. And the man in front said, “You are very welcome here.”

Their early days were spent in screenings and interviews—were these boys sent by Iranian intelligence? Had they thought this decision through? The party members were surprised by Kaweh’s knowledge of Kurdish literature and history, despite his near illiteracy in Kurdish. When the party members were satisfied, the boys spent a month in Acceptance, a room of beds for forty men waiting to enter a two-month course.

One day, during the waiting period, their mothers arrived and were given ten minutes in a visitor’s room with their sons. They wore black chadors, their faces tear-streaked and flushed. They kissed both boys and listened as two young party members, accustomed to the arrival of frantic mothers, gave instructions and sat in the corner of the room. “We are only present to ensure no party information is exchanged,” they said—but the boys could decide for themselves. No one was forcing them to leave or stay.

“We looked in all the hospitals in Iran,” said Kaweh’s mother, wiping her face with her chador. “Someone saw you at the border and told us you had probably done this. Just tell them you’re going home.”

Kaweh shook his head. “I’m not going home.”

Hands shaking, she pinched his leg, squeezing so hard, he bruised. No one spoke for a while; they listened as Kaweh’s mother cried, as Sattar’s mother made rational speeches about the good they could do for the party if they had university degrees. After ten minutes, the mothers were escorted out. They telephoned again, demanding to speak to the boys since they were underage. When Sattar took a long call from his father, Kaweh knew his cousin’s resolve was weakening, but he couldn’t go with him. He had political dreams, a drive to be part of something important.

Sattar returned with the family, crying all the way home. He was accepted for physics at Kermanshah University. He finished his degree, began his master’s, then gave up science to start a chicken factory. He blamed the rigor, claimed he couldn’t keep up, but rumors spread that he had been frightened by assassinations of top scientists working on Iran’s nuclear program. Iranian physicists were targets for Israeli assassins and Iranian intelligence; how long would a top scientist with a history of joining a dissident group last? In the end, Sattar chose peace, safety, and family.

•

Kambiz met a woman. He met her for tea and thought, maybe some good will come of this. He had no desire to compete with his cousins. He would start a business, have a family, make his own happiness. He hated the war and the excesses of the revolution. He wrote two articles under an assumed name, both for small local publications. His mother kept digging in about his cousins’ accomplishments, asking about Kambiz’s plans. The only way to quiet her was distraction. “Maman, will you teach me to cook ghorme sabzi?” “Why should you need that?” she’d say. “You’ll marry and your wife will cook for you.” “But till then . . .” Slowly Kambiz found he had a delicious hand. He learned all the best recipes—lamb and fenugreek. Eggplant and whey. Walnut and pomegranate with chicken. One day as he cooked, plainclothes Basijis arrived at his door, accusing him of adultery.

•

After a year as errand-boy, Kaweh became a party teacher. His Kurdish improving, he wrote for a newspaper. His first publication, a Chekov story, was a translation from Farsi to Kurdish. Then he was assigned to a big project, the immortalization of the people’s hero, KDPI founder Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou. He was to collect every speech, article, and transcript written or recorded by the great man into an archive. Kaweh was transported—how visionary and good-hearted Ghassemlou was. How hard he fought for democracy, rule of law, and self-determination for Kurdistan, growing a tiny opposition party into a true political threat to the establishment. Those hours with Ghassemlou ushered Kaweh into adulthood, teaching him how to speak and to reason and to persuade.

It didn’t take long for the Iranian authorities to find Kaweh and to discover that he worked within party archives. They visited his family, making strange threats and promises: “We can cut your pension. You must see the futility of his cause. He has only two choices: return or provide information. If he works with us, we can send him to Europe to study.”

One day, an older cousin called to invite Kaweh to lunch at a restaurant in nearby Arbil. He sounded nervous. “I’m visiting a friend,” he said. When Kaweh arrived, two men were waiting with his cousin. They claimed to be friends from Halabja, but they spoke with Kermanshah accents. “These friends want to help you,” said the cousin, “They want you to go to Europe and study. You’re so bright.”

“You bloody are not from Halabja,” said Kaweh. “I have ears.”

His cousin took Kaweh’s hand. Finally he said, “These are Iranian intelligence officers. They just want to have a friendly talk with you.”

“We could have killed you on a number of occasions,” said one of the men, “if that’s what we wanted. Your father worked for the revolutionary army. Your brothers are civil servants. You belong to the revolution, and we want to help you.” The men went on to explain the kinds of information they wanted, how Kaweh could get it to them. One of them took out two hundred American dollars, more than three years of salary from the party.

Kaweh took it, thinking, The Islamic Republic has given me nothing. He recalled Ghassemlou’s calmness under pressure, his resolve. Kaweh wanted to be like him. “You can’t expect me to make this decision now.”

“How about a month?” said one of the men. As he put his wallet away, Kaweh glimpsed a gun in a holster. “Is that good enough?”

Kaweh agreed, refused a ride back, and left the restaurant.

A month later, they called. “Have you thought about it?” Kaweh said he had decided against it. The conversation took less than thirty seconds.

The pressure increased. Now and then they threw his mother in a car and dropped her off outside the compound. “Go get your son,” they’d say, and they’d abandon her in the street like a living symbol. Someone would let her in and arrange for her to be taken back. How she had aged, Kaweh thought.

In 2002, with the pressure peaking and America’s war with Iraq inevitable, Kaweh decided to confess to the party and escape. He returned his card, shook the leaders’ hands, and set off. He walked to Turkey with a fellow defector. It took them seven days through mountains, past rivers, from the Iraqi border to reach Turkey. Some days they walked fifteen hours. Some days they had a guide. They carried packs and slept in the mountains. Smugglers brought food—tea for breakfast, a cucumber for lunch, a piece of bread and cheese for dinner.

The mountain was a dangerous route. PKK fighters (the Kurdish workers’ party based in Turkey) were stationed there, along with the Iranian army and south Iraqi Peshmerga. It was entirely possible to be shot dead in the night. And yet, staying in Iraq was riskier.

Once in Turkey, they walked to a city called Van and claimed asylum. Kaweh had collected his writings, legal papers, photos, and letters from his years at KDPI. He was granted refugee status by UNHCR, who believed that, while Iraqi Kurdistan was safe, Iranian authorities wanted Kaweh. But the Turkish authority refused to recognize him or to honor UNHCR’s decision. So, when UNHCR arranged an interview at the Finnish embassy, Kaweh had no permits to pass the checkpoints to Ankara and he missed his chance.

Then one day, the Iranian authorities called him in Turkey. “We know where you are,” they said. He began to fear kidnapping, or deportation. Police often arrested asylum seekers on the streets and handed them to Iranian authorities, or they left them on the mountain at the mercy of smugglers, stray bullets, and the elements. Waiting to be captured or freed was torture on the mind. Kaweh ate only twice a day, and he tried to sleep away the days. After two years of agonizing limbo, teaching himself Turkish in a mud hut, Kaweh packed his letter from UNHCR and left.

Days later, he found himself in a smuggler’s boat to Greece. Before setting foot on the boat, he thought, This is like admitting I’ve decided to die. But the boat looked efficient and new and the smugglers made such lofty promises. They pointed to the horizon and said, “You see that light? That’s Greece. You’ll be there in half an hour in this modern boat. It was so expensive. Have trust.” One smuggler controlled the main boat and the other followed in a dilapidated dinghy, promising to follow the fifteen refugees (including two children) the entire way as a safety measure.

Halfway to the island, the boat stopped. “Something is wrong with it,” said the driver. He made a half-hearted attempt to check the controls. Then he said, “Everybody in the other boat. Hurry, we don’t want to get caught.” The rest was so efficient, it was obviously rehearsed. The refugees were loaded into the old dinghy and shown the controls; then both smugglers jumped into the nice boat (now working again) and sped back to Turkey.

Alone on the waters, the refugees tried to head for Greece. It was dark and heavy rains were looming. It didn’t take long for the old boat to sway and fill with water. If the Turkish police hadn’t come to arrest them, they would have died. And yet, it felt like no blessing at the time. The officers took their money, their phones, anything of value. They drove Kaweh to the border and left him there. But Kaweh had clung tightly to his UNHCR letter, the paper verifying that a respected humanitarian watchman believed his story. Now he entrusted it and his other papers to a friend; he would send for it after the journey. He knew that his greatest challenge wasn’t the mountain or the sea or corrupt smugglers or hours of tedium and worry. It was the likelihood that the gatekeepers to safety wouldn’t believe.

The next smuggler said, “I don’t send people to die at sea. I use trucks. You won’t know the driver’s destination, maybe Bulgaria, maybe Greece, or Italy. Then I’ll call my local contact to do the next leg. You will advance into Europe. For you, I want England.” England, of course, was more expensive. Kaweh didn’t care. He would request asylum as soon as his foot hit European soil. Whether he became a Bulgarian or Italian or French, he would learn the language and find his way into public service; he would be a scholar and activist for ordinary people, like his hero Ghassemlou.

•

Kambiz ran. His studies would wait. One day, maybe he’d be an electrical engineer. He was good with his hands, and this wouldn’t change in a year or two. But for now, he’d be damned if he let them hang him from a crane to soothe a vengeful husband. In the early 2000s, crossing into Turkey was simple enough. A few nights in the mountains, or, if you’re lucky, a tourist visa. You didn’t take your life truly in your hands until you made that second choice: enter Europe by land or sea?

•

At night, the smuggler packed twenty-one adults into the first truck. The driver gave them instructions for the road: “Remain silent. At stops, don’t breathe unless I open the door to give you food.” Toilet stops were thirty seconds on the side of the road every ten or twelve hours. Nights passed in silence. Now and then, when they were on a quiet stretch of highway, they could hear the driver talking on the phone with a smuggler.

They slept for two nights in a destroyed factory, a big, musty ramshackle space. A smuggler brought food enough to survive, and new refugees. After two days, the original group walked to a caravan. They rode for a long time, twenty-one squeezing in, filling every foot-space and armrest with their bodies. It was risky riding in a van, and they had no idea where they were now—but they were on a quiet road and had no other option. By the next stop, they had been traveling for six days. They hadn’t bathed or changed their clothes, and they had only been outside at nighttime. They had no papers, and they still had no idea where they were.

Another truck unloaded them on a road in a wooded area behind a gas station. They hid among tall, thin trees that would have given them away in daytime, and they waited for the smuggler to call them. They were Iranians, Afghans, Kurds, Pakistanis, even African refugees. Kaweh heard the chatter of other drivers going in and out of the station, saw the signs and the advertisements, and decided they were in France or Belgium. Before this stop, the smuggler had always spoken to the driver, and the driver always offered his own instructions. “You must be silent,” he would say. “If you say anything, we could be discovered.” But this time, the smugglers were watching the station from a distance, sneaking between vehicles and waiting for the drivers to leave their trucks. They signaled each other from the truck stop and the trees, but neither entered the station. Now Kaweh realized that they would attempt this final leg of the journey without the knowledge of the drivers. A single word could give them away.

A smuggler called seven names (all Kurdish), including Kaweh’s and a child’s. None had traveled with him so far. In two or three minutes, they were swept into the back of a truck, the doors were shut, and silence and dark swallowed them. Kaweh worried about the child. Could he keep silent? Could he hold in his tears long enough for them to reach England?

At one or two in the morning, everyone sat shivering and red-eyed. The truck was reinforced in metal, a frightening shiny gray space. The passengers remained watchful and listened, though none dared to look out the small window in a high corner. “When do we make ourselves known to the driver?” whispered one man. “Or should we go with him to the end?”

“We’ll sense the ferry to England,” said another. “After that.”

“Long after that,” said another. “It’s risky to get out near the border.”

“And we can’t wait till the final stop either, when they unload the cargo. If we make ourselves known somewhere remote, the driver will let us go. He won’t want hassles, and then we have a few hours to think before we present ourselves.” It turned out that some had families in England that they wanted to telephone before being arrested. So, it was agreed. They spent the night interpreting the motions of the truck.

These long nights in trucks didn’t bother Kaweh—they were physically brutal but they would end. He relished the forward motion, the assurance that nobody knew his whereabouts. Every minute spent in a rest stop or in that hut in Turkey, waiting to be kidnapped, killed, or rescued, was like five hours in the truck. There is nothing worse than waiting for someone else to act. Tonight, though, they were only vulnerable when the truck stopped. As long as it was moving, they were safe.

Still, the metal box took its toll on the mind. “What if the traffickers try to kill us,” whispered a younger man, choking on his anxiety.

“We’ll overtake him,” a man said, as he shivered inside his thin jacket.

The ferry was easy to recognize—locked wheels, the roll of the water. An hour after the wheels began moving again, someone stood up and peeked from the window. “The cars are driving on the left.”

Tiny gasps rang out inside the metal box like musical notes. Every lip was quivering, everyone smiling madly. Tears were shed, hands squeezed.

“We’re here,” whispered someone’s hoarse voice.

Kaweh arrived in England on November 24, 2004, with epic dreams. He had been traveling for over a week. He was unshaven and dirty; his body itched. He was freezing and hungry—without a complicit driver the final leg included no food. His mouth tasted like iron. I’ll be English then, he thought. How comforting finally to know into what life he had been reborn, to glimpse the version of himself that waited down the road. What is the people’s party here? How long will it take to perfect this language? Briefly he wondered at his own gall, and yet, why should he shy away? Why should anything be impossible? The intelligence service of a brutal dictatorship, one of the most brutal in the world, wanted him. He must have some value. I have talent, he thought. I have ideas. They can call it what they want—opportunism or undeserved ambition—but I will make something good of it. I will go to university. I will help them be better.

Six hours after Dover, they began knocking and shouting. After days of devoted silence, they thought the smallest noise would give them away. But their cries were muffled by the reinforced walls, and it took an hour for the driver to hear them. Then the truck slowed and pulled onto a quiet road. The driver flung open a street-side door and said, “Just get out.”

It was daytime now and they could see a town in the distance. They set off toward it on foot, arriving in the city center twenty minutes later. Some went to call their families, asking passersby, “Hello, telephone please?” Within minutes someone called the police, and they were arrested.

Kaweh exhaled as an officer approached him. He spoke almost no English, but he knew the words for this moment: “I am refugee,” he said.

•

Kambiz crossed Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and Belgium, but his truck didn’t head west toward Calais as Kaweh’s did. It took him north to Holland. On the journey, a kind Iranian gave him the name of a man in Almere who had work for any Iranian with a skill, papers or not. All his tinkering meant he could do basic electrical work. He tucked the number into his pocket. He would need Iranian friends, a community.

Once safely off the truck, he broke from the group. He cleaned his body with a bottle of water in a hidden patch of wood. He had a little money. He bought a ticket and rode a train to Amsterdam. There, he wandered past flower-lined canals. He stared at the ancient gabled homes, like cookie houses in a storybook, and at the happy blondes on bicycles, and he thought, I’m here. Iran is over and the journey is over and I’m in Europe—only good things lie ahead. I’m young. I have talent and a good mind. I will make it here. I’ll find my family. I’ll find my work.

He went to asylum offices in the village of Ter Apel, to which all asylum seekers are required to report, and said, “I am a refugee.”