Читать книгу The Ungrateful Refugee - Dina Nayeri - Страница 13

I

On the plane out of Iran, all we did was marvel in whispers about what we had just done. I kept verifying it with Maman. “Is it over now? They won’t follow us? How do we know those things were miracles?”

For years Maman’s Three Miracles became our identity, the story of our resettlement and therefore the story of our lives. Long after I shed that narrative, my mother held on; she still defines her life by it.

“Because they were very unlikely,” Maman said.

“Will there be Smarties there?” Khosrou asked. For three years since London, my brother had held on to the promise of more Smarties, and also Divist-jib, or “Two hundred pockets,” which was how his toddler ears had heard “Digestives.” I imagined a portly Briton with a chef hat and a small fork tapping exactly two hundred dents onto the chocolate side of each cookie.

“How unlikely?” I asked—I wanted to know the numbers. How often did stories like ours end badly? I knew I shouldn’t doubt, that doubting would show the frailty of my belief and dry up my future blessings. And I did believe. But I was also a mathematical kid and I had questions that, for lack of a statistical vocabulary, I couldn’t articulate then. Instead I asked about my toys and books again. “You promise no one will go in my room?”

Miraculous or not, the manner of our escape meant that we didn’t land in the United Arab Emirates as refugees. We had a three-month sponsored visa courtesy of Baba’s wealthy relative, Mr. Jahangir, miracle number three, the man who had surfaced during our weeks in hiding. But Maman knew that soon we would become refugees. Or worse, illegal immigrants. We had no intention of returning to Iran when our visas expired. The day after we landed, Maman requested European asylum from the United Nations office in Abu Dhabi and hoped for a response before our visas ran out and the Emirati immigration authorities found out we had blown through our welcome. We told Mr. Jahangir nothing of our plans.

“It smells,” I moaned into Maman’s lap in the hot, sweaty car ride to Sharjah, the city outside Dubai where we were to settle. “I can’t breathe with this smell.” She held my head in her long denim skirt as she had done hundreds of times before, on desert trips to our village house in Ardestoon, through a fussy, motion-sick, chafe of a childhood. Unfamiliar smells made me crazy, but I was learning how to alter them with pleasant mental associations, an early hint of how much I could change, if I really focused, inside my faulty, itchy mind, which Maman playfully compared to Morvarid and other grumbling old village women I had loved. Smells of other humans, though—never. They made me want to scratch off my skin.

Maman rented a single room in a hostel populated by other runaways who didn’t qualify as refugees. I hated our building, a smoky industrial stack of studio apartments with paper-thin walls, a lobby encased in glass like a holding cell, where the manager, a Korean student, sat watching television all day. We paid by the month from Maman’s life-and-death satchel (the cash, the passports), shared one bed, and tried to ignore the cockroaches and mice. The night I saw the first cockroach I jumped on the bed and held my arms and legs and rocked until I stopped imagining it crawling all over my body. Maman jumped onto the bed too, and the three of us held each other, until it became a game. Now we were in a boat. Now the seas were churning and sloshing. “Keep your legs in!” Maman warned, and we squealed, delighting in the fear. “Don’t let the sharks get your toes! Here comes a big wave!”

“Oh no! Shark!” I shrieked and burrowed under my mother’s arms and torso. “It’s under the boat! We’re going to die! We’re dead!”

“Who’s the strongest rower?” said Maman, as Khosrou jumped up and down, panting and puffing out his chest. “Don’t overturn the boat!”

“We may have to sacrifice one of us to the shark,” I said, eyeing my baby brother and his juicy limbs.

“Dina!” said Maman. She pulled us close to her, under the covers, so that soon we were breathing in her soft powdery daffodil smell and we quieted down. We were finally alone, Khosrou, Maman, and I. We had a small bathroom, a mini fridge, a hot plate, and bare walls; and we were safe.

“What do you think Baba is doing now?” I asked, burying my face in the soft spot under her arm. I imagined my playful baba with no one to play with, or sneak ice cream with, or read poetry to. Baba had no sense of proportion or appropriateness or any of the parental senses at all. When I was two, he would routinely wake me from my bed at midnight to eat ice cream with him. When we were alone, he would ask me things I couldn’t fathom, like “Where’s the olive oil?” or “Was there mail today?” I was three.

“I don’t know,” said Maman. “Maybe he’s pulling a tooth or doing a root canal? Maybe he’s gone to Ardestoon and is having some nice ghorme sabzi right now . . . Ouch, don’t do that!” I had picked a scab off her arm.

“It was ready!” I said as Maman rubbed the raw skinless flesh I had exposed. I nuzzled back under her arm again. “I want ghorme sabzi.”

“I want Smarties,” said Khosrou from under Maman’s other arm. “And chicken schnitzel!” We pronounced it sheh-nee-sell.

“We’ll never eat chicken schnitzel again,” I said, “Only Hotel Koorosh makes that, and Hotel Koorosh is in Isfahan.” I thought of our special-occasion dish, so tasty with its lemony skin separating from the slim chop.

“They have chicken schnitzel in other places,” said Maman.

“No, they don’t,” I said. “Only Hotel Koorosh has schnitzel. Everyone knows that. I miss Hotel Koorosh. Do you think Baba is there tonight?”

“I miss Babaeejoon,” said Khosrou—years later he still mourned that toy sheep, disemboweled by airport guards looking for contraband.

“Tomorrow,” said Maman, “maybe we’ll find Smarties and schnitzel and you can write Baba a letter.” She yawned, and we fell asleep in each other’s arms, where we would sleep every night for sixteen months.

The UAE was a strange country where Middle Eastern unrest collided with Western decadence. The Persian Gulf beaches were dotted with fancy resorts, but if you dared wade past their beachside pools into the waters of the gulf, crude oil stuck like black tar to your legs, suggesting some nearby oil spill, or a bombed-down plane. In Dubai, an entire mall was devoted only to gold, and secular and religious alike spent obscene sums on trinkets. Burkas, chadors, and headscarves glided up and down streets, while Western women sat bareheaded in cafés beside Arab millionaires in crisp white robes that added bridal grace to their movements.

Maman and I threw away our headscarves like so much dirty tissue paper. I wore my hair in ponytails or loose, even in the streets, and she cycled through a tiny wardrobe of Western staples. After three years sweating and itching under Islamic school uniforms and the extra-tight academic hijab, the Emirati heat was nothing—I had never felt so free.

And yet, for the first time, the management of money became urgent and visible for us. We didn’t have much, and Dubai was expensive. Any Iranian we might find there would be obscenely wealthy. Iranian refugees rarely go through Dubai; Turkey requires no visa, and they can get there in the back of a truck. But Maman had, more or less, panicked into Dubai, and we would soon know if straying from the herd was foolish or wise.

Most mornings we sat inside our gray boxy room to avoid the suffocating heat (you could cook an egg on the sidewalk) and tried to utter the new sounds and syllables Maman remembered from university English classes. We found a beachside public pool, but evening admission prices were too high; everyone wanted to swim at night. During the day, the water was near bubbling, but the prices were low and the pool was entirely ours. Maman wore tights under her one-piece suit, out of modesty and as protection against the relentless sun, and taught us how to float.

One day we wandered away from the pool, toward the gulf—it was only a few steps away. And Maman didn’t say no. Despite her conservatism and piety, she liked to instigate adventures with us—she had only just turned thirty-two and escaped a bad marriage, and she wanted to live. We ran in heedlessly, stupidly, considering the beach was deserted and mottled by something black and gluey. In the water, our toes sank in and we wriggled them and laughed. When we emerged, our legs and feet were streaked with sticky black tar. Our toes were stuck together. We peeled and scrubbed, but the stuff refused to come off. The pool staff scowled and pointed to the gas station, where the attendant showed us how to wash our legs and feet with gasoline. That night we slept in a fog of gasoline fumes.

On evenings and cooler days, we explored Dubai. We window-shopped, imagining the items we might buy once we had our new home, wherever that might be. I would buy a My Little Pony bedspread. Khosrou wanted a set of Transformers. Dubai was alluring in its Westernness, and I still associate certain items with those first fugitive days. Playgrounds featured giant exotic fruit—banana slides, pineapple swing sets, seesaws like a pair of cherries. I liked the alligator slide, the way you emerged from its open jaws, uneaten. Rotisserie chickens turned behind foggy glass doors, the birds on the top rows red and juicy, dripping onto the paler ones below. Maltesers and bananas constantly beckoned. Dubai had supermarkets with long aisles, shopping carts on wheels, mountains of Western snacks. Nilla Wafers. Cornettos. The deceitful promises of a tin of Spam. Kentucky Fried Chicken with salty, minty yogurt soda (a magic pairing). And Corn Flakes: in a city that drew out your sweat within minutes of waking, crushed corn soaked in ice-cold milk was a revelation. It cooled your mouth like a summer dip in the Caspian. And yet, it wasn’t sweet enough to satisfy us.

Then, we found Frosted Flakes and were busy for weeks—eating it, waiting to eat it, walking around remembering the taste of it.

“Why don’t they crumble in the milk?” I asked one day, randomly, as we walked. “Why do cookies crumble and not Frosted Flakes?”

“Don’t talk about food all the time, Dina,” Maman said. She wiped her brow. “Do you want people to think you’re some nadid-badid?” This was a primary concern, it seemed, after the loss of one’s entire life: to be recognized as someone who has seen, done, eaten as much as the next person. Nonchalance in the face of displacement—that was our strategy.

Those first days in the hostel thrilled us because we were alone in a wonderland. Nothing seemed real here; we were only passing through, or acting in a play, and for a while, we let the days slip away. Briefly, life narrowed to three in a bed (or a capsizing boat, a desert island, an enchanted castle), on the run, having broken free. However briefly, we lived in a land of Smarties and real Kit Kats and Big Macs. We had no school. Maman never had to leave for work. We walked a lot, trying to tag each day with a marker for future memories. The days blurred anyway.

Then we had an invitation from Mr. Jahangir, our sponsor. We took care with our hair and clothes. “It’s impossible to stay clean in this heat!” Maman said as she dressed us. “You step out looking like doctors’ children and by the time you arrive, you look like you’ve crossed the Sahara.”

“We can take our clothes and change there,” said Khosrou, big sincere eyes on Maman. He lived to protect her, and his plans were always serious.

“We’ll just change in their front yard,” I teased. “No problem.”

Maman tossed her head back and laughed—a triumph for me every time. “Excuse me, Sir,” she said, “if you just give us a minute with our plastic bags, you’ll see we’re very respectable people, not dehati at all.”

“May we just use your shower please?” I said, giggling.

“Can we play your Nintendo?” said Khosrou, jumping up and down.

“You can ask that,” said Maman, stroking his cheek. “That one’s OK.”

We played this game all the way to the Jahangirs’ house.

Mr. Jahangir lived in a huge house with his beautiful wife and a preteen son and daughter who I assumed were twins. When we arrived, they eyed us like defective merchandise. The girl’s sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes gave the impression of simultaneous boredom and a kind of patient, blueprinted treachery. They were beautiful people, all four of them. And the first time we stood in their foyer, waiting to be invited in, Khosrou and I shuffled around, speechless, graceless, like children of the help.

Outside their enormous door, the jokes we had made mortified me.

The twins spoke three languages, listened to Michael Jackson, and drank Pepsi. Each had a bedroom draped in music posters. The girl wore rock star pins on her jean jackets and a tight Speedo racing suit. She knotted her T-shirt at the waist and undid it theatrically as she prepared to dive into their private pool. Then she swam laps as her father kept time. We paid them a handful of visits over ten months; each time the girl eyed me with a disdain I had associated, until then, only with the British. How did she learn to make that face, I wondered, when she isn’t even blonde?

“Your swimsuit doesn’t fit,” she said one day, pointing to the folds in my straps and the creases just below my belly. Nothing ever fit back then. I had no hips, and my underwear routinely fell to my ankles when I ran fast.

It took two months away from my girls’ school in Isfahan, where my grades had earned me respect, to realize that I was nothing special. This family was better than us. They knew how to seem British, or American.

One morning, after a visit to the Jahangirs, I woke to find Maman at the folding table by the hot plate, picking at her lips. Her eyebrows were gathered tight and low, like she had decided something. “We’re not going to sit here and wait,” she said. “As long as we’re here, we can get two things done: you can learn swimming and good English.” I understood that those were the skills that separated us from the Jahangirs. Educated, respected people spoke English. And they swam.

Maman found a local grammar school for us to visit—maybe they could help. The principal, a kind, slim woman with a long braid and a sari, greeted us. She explained that the semester was long underway, that they charged tuition, that we weren’t the usual candidates. She seemed resolved that we wouldn’t enroll there, and I don’t think Maman had hoped for that; it was almost May. The bell rang and the halls filled with children in uniform—the principal explained that the school was English-Hindi, and so even the language courses wouldn’t do us much good. She offered us some used workbooks, free of charge (those too were populated by South Asian school children and their grown-ups), and Maman happily accepted.

Back in our room, Maman erased the answers in our workbooks, making sure she left no trace to cheat by. We weren’t getting school credit for this; we would be judged by each syllable that came out of our mouths. Would we sound refined in our next life, or would we fall into the uneducated class? This seemed of vital importance, now that we had nothing. The thought of a fall in station frightened me. In my three years in my girls’ school in Isfahan, I had learned that only two things made me special: my place at the top of the class, and my parents’ medical degrees from Tehran. How shameful to lose that, to sound like a villager in front of the other children, and to have the most ordinary of them pity my luck.

I wrote my name inside my freshly rubbed-out English vocabulary book and got to work.

A few mornings later, shortly after another brutal Jahangir visit, when Khosrou was still five and I was just about to turn nine, we woke to find Maman already up, reading her Bible, underlining it in a fourth or fifth color. “Good morning!” she beamed. I sensed a scheme.

She got up and turned on the faucet in the bathroom. “Come on, you two, let’s wash up and go out.” Then she stopped, hesitated only briefly as she pulled out underpants and T-shirts for us. Something was happening; I knew it in that second before she spoke. “Dina,” she said, “Daniel, come now, get dressed. Let’s go to the park.”

Who the hell was Daniel?

Khosrou’s coin-shaped eyes grew rounder. He was a chubby kid, and prone to masculine posturing—especially when it came to Maman and the business of her daily protection. Every day, he held her hand in his (not the other way around) and pretended he knew just what was going on, that he was in charge of it.

Now he looked up at me for an answer, and I was still working it out.

“Dina, Daniel,” Maman repeated. “Come on. We have work to do.”

“Who’s Daniel?” I asked, tentative, but also feeling the excitement. I loved it when Maman got up to stuff. I thought she was a warrior. And I was starting to catch on: this was no petty betrayal; it was a strategy. Maman wasn’t going to let us be any less dignified than the stupid Jahangirs.

She smiled. I don’t remember if she explained: This will be your brother’s name from now on because Westerners can’t pronounce Khosrou. She said this later, many times. But did she say it in that moment? I remember a rushed morning, and a dedication to the game—she had to see it through, like sleep training a baby or finishing a bottle of antibiotics. When the realization hit him, my brother’s eyes welled up. It was time for sweet Khosrou to bid us farewell, to make room for Daniel, his American counterpart. He was five. Until around that year, each time he felt the sting of welling tears he would roll his eyes back into his head, stare at the ceiling, and wait for the feeling to pass. He thought if he couldn’t see anyone, then no one could see him. He could hide in the cracks of the ceiling and return to us strong and brave, never having cried at all. But, though I disappeared from his sight each time his gaze drifted upward, I was still standing there. I saw his quivering chin and his wobbling cheeks, his angry eyebrows, all those very private things.

The fact that Maman held strong meant something to us—she adored Khosrou; his tears turned her to putty. Not this time, though. She helped us dress and gather our things. She promised a day of fun, maybe a rotisserie chicken for dinner. My brother was confused for a few days, burst into tears now and then, but eventually he accepted it. And by the third morning, Daniel was Daniel just as easily as I was Dina. (And it has felt strange writing his name as Khosrou until now. I’m glad to be past it.)