Refuge--A Novel

by Dina Nayeri

  “But he’s not below me,” I said. “He goes to my school.” Baba had told me that no one is below anyone else if they have the same education.

  “Never say that, though. Treat him like he’s a fat fly in your cherry rice. Understood?”

  “Understood,” I said and grabbed his ears in both fists and kissed him on the nose. The next day, I followed Ali Mansoori around as usual, gave him my lunch, and watched him eat it with a big goofy grin on my face.

  You can’t fight instinct. You can’t teach genuine restraint. I got my instincts from a man whose supply of restraint was as limited and unpredictable as the supply of black market music tapes or the last stash of sour cherries in the freezer.

  When, later that afternoon, my teacher called Baba’s office and told him that I had not eaten, she was vague on the details, probably afraid that he would chastise her for letting another kid eat my lunch. An hour later, a waiter from the local fancy kabob place that served diplomats and doctors and my father walked into the kindergarten, still wearing his white button-up shirt and his black bow tie, and delivered a full lamb shank dinner for me. He made a show of laying it out on my low desk and pouring the yogurt drink and arranging the bread in a basket as the teacher protested, her deep discomfort showing in the way she held herself around the middle. And yet, she couldn’t argue. She was the one who had called the eccentric Dr. Hamidi. “For the little Khanom Hamidi,” said the waiter, bowing.

  The other kids watched this spectacle, the weird adult feast, while chomping on apple slices and fruit leathers. It seemed there was no predicting or changing Baba’s large ways; he was rash, oblivious to other people’s reactions. Already, I felt the divide between us and everyone else, even Uncle Ali: Baba and I had bad instincts. We had our secret other world of spatula ice creams, hunting foreign candy, birthday pranks on neighbors, and disappearing in the Ardestoon orchards to pick mulberries and raw almond buds while the others sat around hookahs and wondered where we were. They said, “Niloo and the doctor are off slaying djinns.”

  • • •

  The last thing Maman wanted was to leave Iran—Baba’s village had saved her. She came from a somber, determined family in Tehran. Her father, a small-town mayor, wore suits and had his head permanently buried in matters that seemed criminal to interrupt. Not like Baba, who was constantly begging for interruption, always a foot tapping, mustache twitching, a furtive hand in a pocket digging for pistachios. At twenty, Maman was happy to leave Tehran and become a part of the warm village full of roving chickens and untamed rabbits and pheasants, where her mother-in-law kissed her every morning, and made delicious stews with cilantro from the garden, and whispered all of Baba’s hiding spots.

  Soon she grew from the serious daughter of a serious man into someone who could stop and take a breath, a woman who loved planting herbs, mending wounds, and otherwise working with her hands. But in less than a decade, her medical career and Christian faith had made her a target. In the winter and spring of 1987, the moral police began stalking her office. Twice at red lights, they climbed into her car and took her for questioning. All of this she hid from us, thinking it would go away.

  For months she lived in fear, until finally, she had no choice but to tell Baba. In the time that followed, I heard a lot of fighting at night, muffled voices raised in fear and anger and sadness. In late spring when I was eight and the orchards were in full bloom, Baba took me aside and said that I should make a list of everything I love best about Ardestoon. We would check them all off one by one.

  Elated, I made a list of seventeen things: Hearing my grandfather tell a story by a fire. Doing riddles while we pick mulberries. Playing nighttime hide-and-seek in the garden. Adopting my second baby chicken. Cooking bread in the tanoor. Eating sour green plums with salt by the river. Climbing the mountain. Making a cooking hole like the nomads in the desert and actually cooking a pot of real rice. Swimming in the duck pond. Going for a walk with walking sticks, just me and Baba, no Kian. That we then did all those things, as if checking them off a list, didn’t strike me as suspicious. My parents didn’t tell anyone in the village, not even Baba’s mother, that we were leaving. Maman said her goodbyes silently, to herself, and, like Baba, tried to create good final memories. No one but the two of them knew this was goodbye.

  Later in the visit, I saw Maman crying in the kitchen. When I approached her, she gave me one of my grandmother’s shawls. It smelled like her sweaty henna hair, and sweet mix of fenugreek and spray roses. “Hide this in your bag.”

  I took the shawl and went. I found Baba drinking tea in the sitting room. I hesitated before crawling onto his lap, but he coaxed a finger into my mouth, prodding it open. “Can I just take one small look?” he said. I jumped up, ready to run away. “Come back. No checking teeth. I’ll tell you a story.” I sat on the carpet beside him, crossing my ankles as he had done, leaving an inch between our knees.

  “What’s happening?” I asked. “Next week are we coming back to Ardestoon?”

  He was silent for a while, then, in a rare moment of honesty, said, “You and Kian get to go on a big trip with your mother. And, later, we’ll all come back here.”

  “You’re not coming on the trip?” I asked, panicking.

  “No,” he said. “Someone has to stay and take care of the house.” He hesitated. “Later, I’ll join you,” he said, and that may or may not have been a purposeful lie. At the time, I believed it and it was crucial. He sucked some tea out of his mustache.

  “So we’ll be on the trip together,” I said. It seemed like an exciting idea.

  “I’ll visit, yes,” he said. I must have looked stricken, and I remember the uncertainty in his voice pushing me toward a meltdown. But quickly Baba corrected himself. “I didn’t mean visit. Yes, I’ll join you. Go play now, azizam. Baba is tired.”

  Before I was at the door, he called me back. “Niloo joon, take care of these for me,” he said, and gave me two photos he had removed from his waiting room. Baba had dozens of framed photos in mismatched settings covering an entire wall in his office. The images were old and new, natural, black-and-white, sepia, some tattered and fraying or burned at the edges. The biggest photo overlooking the waiting area showed me in a nurse’s hat, baby-red hair blazing, a silencing finger to my lips.

  “When I was a boy, every time the urge to sprout wings came on, my photos made me happy.” He sipped his tea and wiped his face, trying to hide his sadness. “When you’re older, you’ll grow big beautiful wings. You’ll know many sophisticated people, and you’ll do things and see things. But every time you see your Baba, I’ll bring you a picture and a story from here, so you don’t fly off into oblivion.”

  He straightened the photos in my hand, the Farsi Kodak stamp long faded off the stained yellowish paper. The first was an old black-and-white of a man at the head of a line of men, all in black suits. The man was holding a cane and bowing slightly to a foreigner in a gray tunic and white hat shaped like a capsized boat. The foreigner was extending his hand importantly. Baba pointed out some scribbled marks on the back, written in light pencil. “Three great men have visited Ardestoon in the last hundred years,” he said. Baba’s stories always begin with lists. Seven accidents that happened on our honeymoon. Five signs that I was going to fall in love with your mother. Twelve natural disasters that led to the birth of your grandfather. “This is your great-great-uncle with Nehru, the first prime minister of India, the second great man who visited. It was a very important moment for Ardestoon.” One of the gas burners died out and Baba reached for his matches. “This other photo is your great-grandfather Hamidi surrounded by your relations. Keep them for later.”

  I tapped the photos against my leg to make a neat stack. Baba took the more frayed one from me and filed the edges with his fingernail. He put it back in a way that made me understand these photos were very special.

  “Have you brushed your teeth?” he asked, remin
ding me of my ever-growing list of fears. I ran off before he could try to steal another look inside my mouth.

  I never visited his office again. Two nights later, Uncle Ali came for us in a brown Jeep. He parked behind the house, in a walled alley too narrow for driving. He wedged the car in somehow and signaled for us to run out. We squeezed past the high wall of spray roses and honeysuckles, the backs of our shirts stained yellow, and piled in the backseat, hiding our one suitcase with us under a scratchy blanket.

  Though it was a detour from the airport, Uncle Ali drove us past Baba’s office. I spotted his shadow in the window, and thinking we were just going away for a short vacation, I waved happily at him. He waved too, or rather, just raised a hand to the glass. He must have worried about who would be watching, and in any case, Ali didn’t stop the Jeep. He paused only briefly and told us to wave goodbye to our Baba. His voice was different, rougher, not so young, and he didn’t look at me or at Maman.

  The next time I saw Baba, I was fourteen years old.

  • • •

  The mystic Al-Ghazali said that the inhabitants of heaven remain forever thirty-three. It reminds me of Iran, stuck in 1976 in the imagination of every exile. Iranians often say that when they visit Tehran or Shiraz or Isfahan, they find even the smallest changes confusing and painful—a beloved corner shop gone to dust, the smell of bread that once filled a street, a rose garden neglected. In their memories, they always change it back. Iran is like an aging parent, they say.

  My Baba at thirty-three was Iran from a time. And now . . . his decline and Iran’s are the same for me. On the rare occasions when he phones, he complains that I never visit: Come and see your grandmother, Niloo joon. But I ask him to meet me in other cities in foreign countries, wherever he can get a visa. We have had four visits.

  What I don’t tell him is that I don’t want to see him. My real Baba is a thirty-three-year-old storybook hero: untouchable, unquenchable, a star. When we meet, a weight drags down my shoulders, like the time a shelf broke and a row of books crashed into my arms. My fingers tremble and my mouth fills with sour. All I see are more details erased from my original Baba, replaced with slackening cheeks and rotting teeth. And then I’m a different Niloo, not a sensible academic who toils and believes that she’s made herself over into something great, but a kid who just saw her father age twenty years in a second. That other Niloo, the one with the plaque on her door, would never admit these things. She’d never say: I don’t want to see Baba because I’m afraid of decaying too.

  THE OTHER DR. HAMIDI

  AUGUST 2009

  Amsterdam, Netherlands

  Niloo realizes her mistake the instant the latch clicks shut behind her, the front door pressing against her stiff back as she kicks off her loafers, her toes touching cold hardwood—she should have been home an hour ago. Guillaume is crashing about the kitchen island, piling pots onto the counter. Now and then he runs a hand through his hair, cut shaggy and long like that of many Frenchmen his age. A tube of tomato paste bleeds on a chopping board beside a bunch of crushed garlic bulbs. Her basil plant has been stripped. At the edge of the island, beside an enormous vase stuffed with budding cotton branches, sits Gui’s tablet, unobtrusive at first, then alive with instructions blaring out in her mother’s accented English.

  Maman Pari has helped Guillaume cook via video chat a handful of times over the years—cooking is his one skill that doesn’t improve under pressure—and now her hairs, dyed toffee brown, are kissing the lens, her big dramatic eyes filling the screen. “Gay, you are listen?” she says. “Is burn, the sauce. Turn off! Off!”

  Gui rushes to the back burner. When he sees Niloo, he stops amid the chaos just to glare. “I’m so sorry,” she says, wriggling out of her backpack and wiping the rainwater off it with the hem of her T-shirt. “I can be ready in ten minutes.”

  Gui’s law school mentor, a Dutch professor named Dr. Heldring, is eating with them tonight. He is the person who first suggested Amsterdam to Guillaume, then made the calls and the recommendations that led to his current job.

  Remembering their plans, she feels robbed of the evening. She had looked forward to sorting through a mountain of printouts tonight—articles and data and copies of chapters from textbooks. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, Niloo teaches anthropology classes at the University of Amsterdam—a first-year lecture and a seminar in dental anthropology (her favorite course, which she designed, on how archaeologists study buried teeth and jaws). On Fridays, like today, she has a full day for research—Niloo’s research interests cluster around all that can be known just from the evolution of our teeth and jaws. She spends Fridays alone in her windowless office, often staying late to organize materials and clean out her inbox.

  Maman scolds from beside the vase of cotton buds. “Gay is wait all day for you. Niloofar? Niloofar, get into screen right now.” Craning her neck as if she can see farther into their kitchen, Maman mourns the lamb. “We make roast but is burn now—” Niloo says goodbye to her mother and switches off the tablet. She turns to Gui, but he refuses to speak. Instead, he starts dialing Pari on his mobile.

  Niloo heads for the bedroom, peeling off her T-shirt, a ragged thing with a flaking Yale logo that she wears with old jeans on research days. If she cuts corners on hair and makeup, she’ll be able to scrape together fifteen or twenty minutes of cathartic sorting—enough to wrap up a few things so she doesn’t spend the entire dinner suffering that awful incomplete feeling. Before getting in the shower, she sits on the closet floor in her bra and jeans, pulls three folders out of her backpack, and begins to rifle through the papers, making piles to toss, to review, to file away. She wonders if Gui expects her to dress up—she’s uncomfortable wasting nice clothes on ordinary days.

  Working through her to-do pile on the closet floor, she doesn’t notice the thirty minutes pass until Guillaume is standing over her, looking bewildered and furious. “What the fuck, Niloo? Heldring will be here in ten minutes!”

  Usually Guillaume indulges her eccentricities—the absentmindedness, the possessiveness, the Perimeter. “Niloo Face, you’re kind of mental,” he used to tease, years ago. The day they met outside Old Campus, she had scribbled Niloofar and her phone number sloppily on half a page of lecture notes, then asked for it back so she could fix it (“It looks like Nilooface”) and because she realized she needed the notes. If this guy wanted her number so badly, he should use his notes.

  But now he’s livid, his face flushing, and she jumps up, scattering the pages on her lap. “I’ll be ready in ten,” she says, a stray breath catching in her throat. The doorbell rings. “Where’s my green blouse?” She kicks some laundry on the floor.

  “The faded one?” says Gui, heading to the door. “Niloo, please make an effort. I’ll make him a cocktail, but you be out there in twenty minutes dressed for a nice dinner. I swear, I’d never do this shit to you.”

  Sometimes when she’s distracted, Gui rummages through her clothes, tossing the old and familiar, worn-out things. She rarely mentions it, because clothes don’t matter and, besides, he bought most of them for her. Still, it feels like a violation.

  Minutes later, she emerges from the bedroom, her wet hair pinned. Guillaume busies himself with a bowl of olives and cornichons, glancing only once at her sky blue cotton skirt and clean white T-shirt. She greets Dr. Heldring, a smiley, beady-eyed man with white curls. He pats her cheeks, his breath reeking of gin. “How lovely you are, dear Neely.”

  They uncork the first bottle and fall into comfortable chatter. The roast lamb is charred. Niloo salvages a hefty nugget from the center of it with a sharp knife. They eat it at their wooden table overlooking a small canal, smothering it with Gui’s buttery mashed potatoes and drowning it in a heavy Cabernet. “This is just terrific lamb,” Dr. Heldring croons to himself. “Wonderful lamb.”

  “Niloo’s mother’s recipe,” says Gui, barely glancing at her. Neither of them eats ver
y much. When he’s upset, Gui says irrelevant things. “Maman Pari is the best,” he says, refilling his mentor’s glass. “Every time she opens her mouth, some fantastic mangled thing comes out.”

  This angers Niloo but it’s too late to change the subject. “Ah yes, I remember,” says the old man. “You came from Tehran as a girl, didn’t you?”

  “Isfahan,” she says, wiping a clump of potato from her shirt with her napkin.

  “Niloo has a third passport now,” says Gui, a hint of pride in his voice. “I finally added her to my livret de famille.”

  “Congratulations, dear,” says Dr. Helding. “What a worldly woman you are. And where is your father? Back home?”

  Briefly she’s confused by the word home. “Yes, he’s in Isfahan. A dentist.”

  Her father, at every age, laughs like a feral child, the kind you find toddling on Isfahan streets, roaming, no social education. He is all silliness and pleasure-seeking. Though she’s inherited his unseemly laugh, Niloo takes care to hide it, in case her colleagues should take her less seriously.

  Niloo’s choices, since Iran, have always been deliberate. Case study: the day she decided on Gui. In her third year at Yale, she needed a boyfriend, so she began to accept dates. Twelve in fourteen nights. Men liked her, she soon realized, for all the wrong reasons. It seemed that her attempts to appear serious about the project, to be more like them, these American men with goals, were considered cute. “Can I bite your cheek?” one said. Another stuck his pinky in her dimple, a startling gesture. Didn’t these boys sense the gravity of the process? They spent months preparing for job interviews and polishing resumes; surely finding the right partner was equally important. She glared when they teased her, pleating her eyebrows tighter.