Refuge--A Novel

by Dina Nayeri

  “There was sleep, there was wakefulness / There was desire, there was repulsion / In conflict and union, like a hand grasping a collar.”

  When the reader finishes, the crowd is generous with applause, whistles, and shouts, and she lingers at the microphone for an instant, then rushes off, keeping careful watch on her shoes. The host, a thin man with a soft middle and a European nose, dressed in sandals and high-waist jeans, approaches the microphone slowly, as if the air has turned to pudding. Niloo tries to shake it off, but a foggy stiffness is taking hold. Touching her head feels like waving a hand through paint. Mam’mad’s joint must have been full of hashish. Turning to him, she catches a few words of complaint: “Too easy a choice, that poem . . . for a night called ‘Erotic Republic’ . . .”

  Someone responds, “You want erotic, turn on Dutch television at midnight.”

  Mam’mad clicks his tongue and brandishes the back of his hand. “Inane comparison. You obviously haven’t read a word of modern Iranian poetry.” The back and forth delights her, these adults exchanging jabs she doesn’t understand while sharing a pillow, eating from the same cauldron of soup. The intimacy is familiar and intoxicating, something she hasn’t experienced for herself, because in Ardestoon she was only a child watching from a corner of the sofreh.

  As the night unfurls, the women tell stories. Most of the men are too high or drunk and prefer to listen. The stories range in detail and in tone, from the tragic to the hilarious, but they are connected. Everyone wants to unburden about their days away from Iran, trying to create a life, failing, succeeding, fumbling, finding unlikely allies. As the women speak, voices from the floor rise up to interject, asking questions, bantering with the storyteller, mocking a character or an event.

  “This is the story,” says a large, throaty woman, a saucy auntie type with heavy breasts squeezed into a bright red wrap shirt, “of the famous spotted banana.”

  The crowd hoots and Niloo is certain a lewd story is coming. But the woman talks of shortages in Iran, of trade restrictions and scuffles in the streets, of vendors who sell the rare fruit for ten times its value. Sometimes in the whole of Isfahan or Tehran, she says, finding even a single small banana is impossible. Then she talks of her cousin, the shady entrepreneur who, when they were children, marched up to his unsmiling father and demanded that they sell the rainwater in their yard for profit. When he grew up, this cousin found that by the time he smuggled in his bananas from Istanbul or Dubai, they were always rotten, black spots covering their outer skin. To get them fresher would have been too expensive, so instead he informed the South Tehrani public that he was the only vendor in town with extra-rare, extra-delicious Thai spotted bananas, which he would graciously sell at thrice the price of an ordinary, plain-skinned banana. “That part of the story is hardly worth telling,” she says. “He was a good salesman and he made his money. The interesting part comes when I moved to London last year. So I arrive. I poke around for some Iranians, thinking I’ll need friends. I find some. I go to their house. We eat. We talk. This family has lived in London for a decade and the wife is fancy and always dressed up and speaks English like a bolbol. She takes me to the market, and she marches (in her fancy shoes) right up to the boy in the fruit aisle and she says, ‘Where are your spotted bananas? I only see the ordinary kind.’”

  The crowd erupts. The woman laughs into her plump, delicate hands. Her nails are painted crimson. She goes on a bit longer about Iranians who land in Heathrow and go looking for spotted bananas first thing, buying up the garbage at every produce stand and pretending to love the mush inside the rotten peel. “Dirt on all our heads, we’re so stupid.” The crowd hushes, someone tosses a napkin at her, but mostly they nod. The timbre of her laugh changes. She whispers, almost moans, into the microphone. “Oh humans, humans, we are all so stupid.”

  Niloo thinks, Maman will love this story. Kian will hate it. And Baba probably knows the cousin, or someone exactly like him. What would Gui think, if she were to include him in the telling? He would laugh, kiss her, and feel bad for a minute or two.

  During a lull, Mam’mad nudges her. “I’d like to hear you tell one,” he says, as if they’ve known each other for years. “Go on. Get up now, khanom.”

  “I can’t,” she says, but her feet are itching to move. She feels bold and craves to participate. She wonders what story they would like. Should she tell them about Maman at Food for Less? About trying to learn sixth-grade slang? About the tic in her neck? No, she decides, she should describe the day at the dry cleaners two months ago. On that day, as after the incident at Marqt, she didn’t try to explain herself to a baffled Guillaume. She didn’t know how. But here no storyteller is doing any explaining; it seems unnecessary. The stories unfold detail by detail, and the heads in the crowd nod and bow, their understanding palpable in their expressions, in the quiet way they bring their cigarettes to their lips, the way they rest their chins on their knees and let their soup congeal beside their bare feet.

  At the microphone, she clears her throat twice and launches in, trying to mimic the tone of the seasoned performers. The crowd is welcoming and warm, and they don’t interrupt her as much as they do the regulars (they are real Iranians, she tells herself, and are taking it easy on the American). “A few months ago, the dry cleaner, a Chinese man around fifty, rips my favorite jacket.” Mr. Sun had ripped her jacket and Niloo had flipped out. She had owned that jacket for six years, the only clothing she kept in her corner with her treasures, the only purely aesthetic, nonfunctional item to earn a spot in the Perimeter. How was a person to feel safe if a thing that important could just be thrown around and torn up by a professional hired specifically to protect it? What kind of order was that? If Mr. Sun could tear her jacket, then the embassy could confiscate her passport, and the bank manager could leave her credit card number on a scrap of paper on his desk, and what’s to keep the whole world from falling into chaos? She doesn’t go to much trouble to explain the Perimeter. “The square meter of space I take with me from country to country,” she says and nudges her backpack, which she’s tucked under the stool, with her foot. Everyone in the room chuckles or nods—each has his own movable bounty.

  That afternoon, Gui was working late and she had gone to the dry cleaner in his place. She didn’t know Mr. Sun or his meticulous ways. And so she yelled. He yelled back. She accused him of shoddy work. He accused her of lying about the rip. They kept upping the ante, until Mr. Sun muttered something about a spoiled American not knowing anything about his life, his children’s lives. An inexplicable ball formed in her throat and she ran out with her torn coat. She sat in a café for twenty minutes, trying to decide what to do. But eventually she went back, stopping first at the Middle Eastern grocery store nearby. She apologized. She told Mr. Sun that she wasn’t American and if her character had spoiled, it wasn’t in the way he thought. She gave him baghlava. Mr. Sun’s eyes clouded over. He said only, “Your clothes are my clothes.” A sentiment made powerful by its gentleness, it would be familiar to Eastern ears, but the Dutch would struggle with it and quickly forget.

  The crowd laughs gently, they send warm encouragements to the front, and she sits. She leaves out her teary bike ride home, her torn jacket draped over her handlebars. She had hoped Gui would hear the story and know why the ball grew in her throat, why it was vital that Mr. Sun accept her as one of his own, another person far from home, and not classify her as one of the comfortable locals who have never suffered. But Gui said, “Oh, Niloo, he’s just an old man.” Then he sent a large tip and made everything worse, because the baghlava and Mr. Sun’s comment had made them like family, and Gui’s gesture returned him to his role as their help.

  A few hours later, the charged crowd whirrs and buzzes out of the squat, back to their private spaces—maybe some of them in that very building—and she lets their current carry her into the cool, watery Amsterdam night. The couple, the man with the scar and the woman with black curls, pass
by Niloo and disappear into a brown café a few doors down, her arm wrapped around his waist as he smokes. Niloo notices in the streetlight that his scar is white, a creamy blotch traveling down his forehead past his brow, like milk dripping onto his face.

  Agha Mam’mad stumbles out in broken sandals. “Are you okay, khanom?” The streetlights reflect off the canals and the starch of crafted beers hangs in the air. “This city,” he says in Farsi, lighting a smoke and shaking his head as if seeing it for the first time, “it feels like the first page of a children’s book . . . after the cookie house is found and everything is lit up and smelling like sugar” (he speaks with his hands), “before the black wind comes and the branches start clawing at your face.”

  He tells her that he arrived four years ago from Tehran, where he left his wife and two daughters. He was a professor there, but here, he is only a refugee. He hopes to find a job, to send for his family. Sometimes he cooks pomegranate stew in the communal kitchen of the squat. But mostly he likes to sit on the cushions and listen to stories from the other refugees, and to talk to activists who come to have fiery conversations late into the night. He tells her about a young man named Karim, who after ten years of illegal residence in Holland and several petitions for asylum, is homeless on most nights and wanders into Zakhmeh for the occasional meal. “And did you see Siavash? The arrogant boy with scars? He’s spoiled, all his life American freedom. He’s not trapped here. But he stays as a part of a human rights group. Right now, all their talk is the election.”

  “The election in Iran?” she says, still a little hazy from the joint.

  “Where else?” Then he seems to remember the dangerous mood here in Holland, the fact that even in Europe he hasn’t escaped hostility. He mutters into his hand, “Oh yes, well . . . fuck Wilders,” as he breathes onto his icy fingers.

  She giggles despite her best efforts. Thoughts tumble around in sequence, disappearing and reappearing and making her dizzy. Mam’mad takes her hand and pats it like he’s shaping cutlet batter. He examines her face and says, “Don’t worry, khanom. Trying to hold on to a thought after two puffs of hashish is like drifting away on a boat while trying to grab for one specific twig onshore. Impossible.”

  Later she will find that Mam’mad, when high, is all about the similes. But he’s right about the boat and the twig—what was she about to say? Out of nowhere she blurts, “You have nice teeth.” She is remembering her own Baba, who is this man’s age and for whom a person’s teeth contain every clue. “I see you don’t grind.”

  He releases a phlegmy coughing chuckle, his eyes and mouth bracketed by three distinct sets of parentheses. Soon she will learn that when Mam’mad fakes a smile, the eye brackets go missing while the mouth ones remain, unnerving since she will come to watch for them. “Odd little lady in a big jetpack,” he hums. “You must visit me tomorrow. I’ll make you a good lunch with torshi.” Persian pickles.

  She breaks into unexpected laughter again. “Group three,” she croons to herself. Mam’mad stares, the brackets around his eyes deepening as he awaits an explanation. She thinks, why not let him into this wonderland she inhabits all alone, inside her imagination, this ordered universe of charts and categories and comforting rules? If she could color-code the world, she would. It’s how she discovered anthropology—at seventeen, she found herself always lingering in fast-food restaurants and cafés, her stillness trance-like, watching people come together and disband for hours. Their rituals enthralled her even then. Now, putting them in neat boxes is her favorite pastime and her casual taxonomies are flawless.

  “I’ve figured out,” she says to Mam’mad, “that Iranian exiles in the West can be divided into four mutually-exclusive-collectively-exhaustive groups.” She counts on her fingers as she explains the concept of MECE. “You ready?”

  “Go on, strange lady,” says Mam’mad, sleepy eyes dancing. Somewhere in her notes, she still has her classification of exiled Persians. She lectures from memory, leaving out the more insulting details. But in her notebook, she’s written it like this:

  Group One: Money Persians. These took their money out before the fall of the shah. They settled mostly in California, mostly in real estate. They built Tehrangeles and seem unashamed of that, as they are unashamed of their blue velvet furniture and hefty indoor columns. Draped in gold and bathed in perfume, they do cleanses and flash about in packs, spilling out of their red Mercedeses, designer labels blazing off their bodies two or three at a time. When Money Persians have Western guests, they serve beluga caviar or honey pastries, fresh pistachios, champagne.

  “The worst ones,” says Mam’mad. “These idiots give us all a bad name!”

  Of group two—the best one—she allows her new friend to know every detail.

  Group Two: Academic Persians. Scattered in small colleges and university towns, they read fat, dusty books. If they didn’t get out before the revolution, they don’t have much money and seem fine with that. Money Persians embarrass them. They’ve fled westward because they value their freedom to think and create, to study what they like. They shiver with political fury and listen to music from chic sixties Tehran and read The Blind Owl and pressure their children to attend Harvard. Every young Persian thinks his parents fall in group two, even if their house has Corinthian columns or smells like fried cilantro. To American guests, they serve Baked Lays with cucumber-yogurt dip.

  “I’m in this one, no?” says Mam’mad. “Or is group three for the serious scholars?”

  She edits group three as much as possible through the mist and fog in her brain, but becomes distracted by the struggle to remember the exact wording.

  Group Three: Fresh-off-the-boat Persians. They may have been here for twenty years but the musk of the village follows them. They read the Koran. Their houses smell like ghormeh sabzi, or at least fried cilantro. Often their teeth need work—this isn’t an issue of class, but of habit. Even rich villagers are villagers. They hang ghilim rugs bearing Nastaliq script on the walls. If they come into unexpected money, they sink it into fake watches or visit the Grand Canyon. They hope their children will try for good universities, but secretly wish them to stay close to home. They know what Harvard is, but not Yale. They don’t burn with need for it, as do groups one and two. They pickle and store things (garlic, shallots, onions) in big jars in the garage next to the derelict car and try to serve it to Western guests wearing tight smiles, who sample one item.

  “Ei vai, you’re putting me in with these bastards because of one mention of pickle?” Mam’mad teases. “Which group is for tiny, stonehearted backpack ladies?”

  To which group does she belong? she wonders. Maybe she’s just American now. She hurries through group four because Mam’mad has spent all night surrounded by its members and she doesn’t want to bore him. He seems to her now like an amalgam of Baba, Uncle Ali, and all the Ardestooni men she has known.

  Group Four: Artists and Activist Persians. Fiery, wandering, no ambition beyond tipping the world off its axis. They drink a lot, smoke a lot, rant against religion, have imaginative sex with strangers. Sometimes they wander to California or New York and play the Arab character on a cheap daytime soap or telenovela while they finish their book of stories or their album. They write letters to poets currently in residence at Evin prison. They grow old in white ponytails and floral skirts that hint at Northern Iran, but are actually purchased from farmer’s markets in Fort Greene or Camden Town or the Jordaan. They read the news and can really dance. To guests, they serve beers, mixed nuts, and whatever hasn’t gone off in the fridge, as local natives would.

  “Ahh, and our squatting friends,” says Mam’mad, nodding at a spot beyond her head, as if he can see her list floating there. “Khanom Scientist, I think people aren’t so straightforward . . . but I still want to offer you lunch and pickles.”

  “Okay,” she says, momentarily forgetting her Persian manners. Then, unable to hide her alarm in her hazy
state, “Oh, God, should I have refused three times?”

  “We’re living by Dutch rules now,” he says. Every time Mam’mad mentions the Dutch, he seems to be struggling not to tell someone to go fuck himself. “My daughters are far away. We’ll eat and you’ll tell me stories of your family.”

  “That sounds nice,” she says and starts the long walk home.

  What stories of the Hamidis can she tell Mam’mad? They are like all the other families, separated by miles and years and changing habits. When Niloo was growing up in Oklahoma, her mother served her classmates chips with creamy yogurt dip, but also mixed nuts, leftover banana bread, Persian pickles with delicious bites of stewed lamb—there’s no classifying Pari Hamidi. Maybe Niloo will tell Mam’mad about Ardestoon, or about her marriage and career, the things she has accomplished in the West. Maybe she’ll talk of that night at Jesus House, the hiccup between two lives. Maybe her stories will discourage him from bringing his own daughters here, because, if he does, they might morph into Western women and begin to baffle him.

  She might tell him secrets from her night walks. That nothing feels finished enough, ever. That she left something crucial back in Isfahan and can’t remember what it is. That sometimes she envies her mother’s religious fervor, the freedom to relinquish control. She wants to say that she’s exhausted. That, despite her father’s most sacred belief, she isn’t brilliant or worldly or elegant. She’s just a village girl, a twiggy refugee kid under a boulder of a pack, finally turned American. Hearty and iron-legged, she doesn’t rely on fragile genetic adornments like talent or brains. The thing she has is stamina; and if she calmed down, as everyone advises her to do, she would be nothing. But don’t mistake Niloo for another frantic exile, because she begins healing before she’s hit the ground and she knows the rules now. Mostly she wants to say that she tries so hard. She tries harder than anyone. She tries when she should be sleeping and loving and making memories and mistakes and friends, when she should be learning how to turn the gears without so much straining.