Refuge--A Novel

by Dina Nayeri

  “Okay, Maman,” says Niloo with a sigh. “You’re cutting out. I have to go.”

  “I cut out?” Her mother’s voice recedes and Niloo hears her tapping on her screen with a long fingernail. “I got no wave,” she mutters at her cell, then, the phone back on her ear, adds, “Send photo to your Baba. He thinks about you all the times. And say hello to Gay.” She hangs up without pausing for a reply.

  Niloo knows Bahman misses her and that he wants to schedule a fifth visit. In his email he suggested Dubai. It feels strange to allow him to get too close. She’s afraid she will bungle things, ruin his fantasies of her—and don’t we all need our fantasies to survive? Sometimes, she still gives in to visions of herself as a senator or Nobel laureate. Why muddy up Baba’s dreams? Besides, he’s not Baba anymore. He’s just another sad Iranian addict, a population in the tens of thousands.

  • • •

  At lunch, Niloo meets a decade-long Iranian refugee, a quiet man named Karim whom Mam’mad mentioned before. Though Mam’mad treats Karim like a son, Mam’mad moves and dresses like an educated man and Karim does not.

  “Hello, Khanom Cosmonaut,” says Mam’mad as he opens the door. He straightens his glasses and looks her over in a fatherly way, as if he’s admiring that she dressed herself today. He reaches for her backpack. “Give me that thing before your spine crumbles and you have to abort your moon mission.”

  Though she’s looked forward to speaking Farsi and eating Iranian pickles and sharing stories of home, she has an excuse prepared in case she needs to leave fast. What can these refugees, men alone in a new city, want from a friendship with her? She hopes they realize that she has no connections at any immigration office.

  He offers her a treat from home, sour cherry sharbat, the sweaty glass blurring three shades of crimson that she mixes together with a long spoon. As she enters, the younger man, Karim, gets up from atop a pillow and extends his hand. Mam’mad points out that Karim and Niloo are close in age, a fact that seems to embarrass Karim. His handshake is weak, as if he’s afraid of hurting her, and she realizes that, as a rural Iranian, he has only recently learned to shake hands with women. Lunch is already set up on the floor, a green herb frittata and garlic pickle that he has made on a hot plate. Mam’mad lives in one room overlooking a narrow canal, one of the darker, gaunter ones in a nice district thanks to the egalitarian Dutch practice of placing public housing in every neighborhood. His is likely a student room, a temporary space. He sleeps in one corner, on bedding arranged neatly on the floor, and eats in another, on a set of pillows and a sofreh cloth that matches the ones at the squat. To be here and not in some refugee camp in the middle of nowhere meant that some Dutch foundation, maybe Hivos, must have taken interest in him.

  The three perch on cushions, on their haunches, eating off the sofreh as if they are back in Iran. It thrills Niloo, like a childhood game of pretend. They play Iranian songs; she remembers the prettiest one, “Age Ye Rooz” (If One Day), a song for traveling lovers. They talk of their lives, though Niloo mostly listens. Mam’mad is a scholar. He’s lived a quiet life of discipline and study. He is accomplished in both mathematics and literature, has taught both at university level, a rare thing. After some talk, she suspects that he pays for this room in part with his own money. He has reached his fifties without despairing of reality (only people), or seeking solace in oblivion. Niloo has never met an older Iranian man like him, one who isn’t addicted to something, and his presence comforts her. Karim, though, has many dependencies—his wife, Iran, maybe opium. His rough hands hint at farm work.

  She asks why they are here without their families. “Did Hivos bring you?”

  “I escaped with a smuggler.” Karim speaks so quietly that she has to strain to understand him. His eyes remain on his plate as he chews his bread slowly.

  Mam’mad dips his bread into a puddle of oil beside the herb frittata. “I came with Scholars at Risk. They invite you to give a few lectures, and if it’s too dangerous to go home, they help with asylum petitions. But I did the classes years ago and no one’s lifted a finger. I’m stuck,” he adds. “Karim is even worse off. Unskilled, illegal.”

  “If not for my family,” says Karim, the misery in his voice settling over the sofreh, paling the food like a gauzy sheet thrown over it, “I’d go home today, right into Evin prison.” A flash of yellow, a rotting tooth, peeks out as he speaks.

  “Maybe Niloo khanom can help you,” says Mam’mad, keeping his tone casual and his hands busy tearing sprigs of parsley. Ah, she thinks, the request. She shifts on her pillow and puts down her bread, just in case. “It might be a perfect match,” he says. “Karim needs an English translator with the right accent and Siavash is overextended as it is. Just a few hours of your time to go to some immigration offices, Niloo khanom. Karim will do whatever work you need in return.”

  Karim nods. “I’ll do the work regardless.” He hardly whispers. Pale and worn down in a faded striped shirt and old khakis, Karim sits with his back straight and his gaze down, unable to get comfortable. The nervous expression tightening his gaunt face makes Niloo think he’s younger than he looks, twenty-seven or -eight. Neither man shows any skill at veiling the fact that Karim has been invited expressly because they think Niloo can help him.

  “What accent?” she asks, imagining Gui’s reaction. “And who’s Siavash?”

  “The young man with the scars. He’s American too,” Mam’mad sighs, as if he hates telling her this. “The embassies and the agencies are run by poorly educated Western bureaucrats. If your translator has an American or Dutch accent, like yours or Siavash’s, your story gets believed. If not, then not.” She has an urge to protest. How could a process so important, a process that brought her to America and gave her this life, be so haphazard and subjective and ugly? Mam’mad adds, “And not just that. The well-connected liars with the dramatic stories get the best treatment because they’re happy to rub every detail in the officer’s face. Meanwhile, these office fools, they completely ignore the quiet torture victims who are too traumatized to relive anything, and don’t know any good translators anyway.” She watches Karim, who betrays no emotion, his eyes on his meal. Isn’t it shameful for him to be discussed this way? But the men seem used to this talk, and Mam’mad carries on. “Karim has told his story ten different times. Every time they ask for details, he flinches and says something vague, and they think he’s making it up.”

  A heaviness bears down on her chest but she strains to hide her emotions. It would embarrass Karim if she cried, so she doesn’t. “It can’t be like that,” she says. Mam’mad shrugs, turns both hands, showing his palms as if to say, Why would I lie?

  She imagines herself as an adult refugee, trying to navigate the maze of embassies and procedures and unspoken rules. The idea chills her—if only she had left a few years later, her accent, her education, and her life would be different. Niloo can still conjure the tedium of standing in sweaty, smelly embassy lines in Rome, waiting for her mother to explain their situation. She recalls Maman’s shaking hands, her nervous voice, her lilting English. Was it the wrong accent? Did the officer pity her because she was young and pretty and a mother? Or was it her story that compelled? Years later Maman told her that the reason they were believed was that the officer interviewed Niloo and Kian alone and saw that the children were, in fact, raised as Christians. Niloo remembers that afternoon at the embassy. She had been bored, working on a math worksheet while Kian colored a picture of a cowboy. When the lady asked about Jonah, she hardly looked up. She rambled about whales and how big one would have to be to swallow a person and how when she grew up she wanted to travel and dig up the bones of that whale, and find the spot on Ararat where Noah docked. When the lady asked her to identify Saint Peter, she said, “He’s not a saint. That’s what Catholics think and they’ve been wrong since Luther and Calvin. He’s the one who denied Jesus three times.”

  “Did Mohammad ever deny
Jesus?” said the officer, hoping to catch her out—maybe the Hamidis were Muslims in Protestant clothing, maybe they had some leftover allegiance toward Mohammad and Hassan and Hossein.

  Niloo looked up at the officer. She was already shedding the bouncing Ardestooni girl, her voice dulling. “No,” she said, “but neither does Satan.”

  And that’s why the United States granted asylum to the Hamidis—one stupid answer to a stupid question between a shallow-thinking bureaucrat and a child desperate for black-and-white. That’s why she slept for a night at Jesus House and went to Yale and met Gui and studied the ways of the human race and became an atheist. It makes her laugh to remember herself then. “I’ll translate for you, Karim agha,” she says, as she helps herself to her discarded morsel and to more pickles. “No need to do any work.”

  Mam’mad claps and hoots and shakes Karim by the back of the neck—there is a small smile hiding under that downturned face. Then Mam’mad talks of Karim’s family in Iran, his life in Holland, and his crimes. Karim only listens and nods. Back home, he was accused of smuggling opium. “Since when does the Islamic Republic crack down on opium?” she asks, suddenly afraid. She thinks of Baba and his vices. (With alcohol Baba is careful, a merry, sheltered drunk, his glass kept full by a constant stream of friends who gravitate to him for a good time. Opium though . . . it unleashes a reckless, slobbering, angry fiend.)

  “Only for their political enemies,” Mam’mad reassures her as he refills Karim’s glass. Everyone has an addict back home, some beloved person who can never stray too far from the poppy fields. “Don’t worry, Niloo joon.” It pleases Niloo that he’s already calling her by the most familiar version of her name. She senses Karim relaxing; when he shares a few words about his wife—featherlight hair down to the middle of her back, the way she skins almonds all day and burns the skins to make kohl for her eyes—Niloo feels finally at home at Mam’mad’s sofreh.

  Over the next few weeks, Niloo visits Zakhmeh regularly. She eats several meals with the two men (always humble egg dishes) and they become an unlikely trio walking Amsterdam’s most obscure canals by night. Each time, Mam’mad tells stories. He explains how Iranians end up in Holland. “Scholars come here, they languish, they never find work. They are sent home,” he says. Always he adds something about himself. “I should be a knowledge worker, not a refugee,” he often mutters. “Siavash keeps stalling on the papers.” Siavash, who has learned passable Dutch and by now knows his way around all kinds of immigration forms, has been volunteering to sort out asylum applications for Mam’mad and his family.

  Usually the older man bemoans his lost credentials for a while before recalling some other complaint. One evening in his apartment, he says, “Tell me, Niloo khanom, why do the Dutch greet travelers this way? I don’t mean immigration. I mean . . . nobody has even welcomed me to the neighborhood. Did you know that?”

  Compared with hypersocial Iranian ways, Dutch culture is lonely. No casual conversation from strangers, no grand shows of generosity. Mam’mad tells her that, despite years sharing their street, he still has no invitations, not even for a tea, even after he used his limited earnings to take baghlava to every one of his neighbors. The Dutch love their dogs more than the stranger down the road. And the worst part, no respect for the learned class. “Did I offend them?” he says, his voice tensing. She wants to assure him that this is just their way, but he rambles on, “In Iran I was harassed, arrested, my daughters stopped in the streets. My work was torn apart by people without even a first degree. And then I arrive here, and the same shit followed me. This Siavash, he says he’ll help but who knows his motive, where he came from. Maybe he wants my petition to fail. Who knows? Ahmadinejad’s people, they have their hands in everything, even abroad.”

  This sudden paranoia is familiar. She heard words like this in Italy and Dubai, in the refugee camps. It spins out of the waiting and idleness, combined with the smallest fearful memory. She wants to make him laugh, to reject gloomy thoughts of unwelcoming natives, so she tells him about the Dutch. Maybe she can make him understand that there are no plots, that the people of Holland are bred cold.

  “You’re not missing anything,” she says. “When the Dutch invite you to lunch, they serve one slice of bread, ham or cheese, not both. Sour milk and then, to top off the insults, one cookie next to your coffee.”

  “One cookie?” he says, bushy gray eyebrow rising. “I don’t understand.”

  “I mean they don’t bring out the whole tin,” she says with a nervous laugh. “They put one cookie beside your coffee like in a restaurant. It’s Dutch stinginess.”

  “Ei vai.” He slaps one hand with the other. “I’ve never seen that.”

  “That’s because all your Dutch friends are squatters and hippies,” she says. “The poor, progressive ones . . . they like sharing.”

  Karim nods and dips a toe into the conversation. “I’ve heard people say that if the Dutch invite five people for dinner, they make exactly five potatoes.”

  Mam’mad shakes his head. “Generosity is a poor man’s gift,” he says. “What happens if you’re at a Dutch house and want a second cookie or another potato?”

  “You suffer silently,” she says, her tone grave as she flashes a big smile at Karim, who adds, “Or go home.”

  “Shameful!” Mam’mad says, distracted from his troubles. He pushes a plate of radishes toward her. She takes one and wraps it in a mint leaf and eats. She notices, when Mam’mad is sober, his lisp disappears. He sounds like the university professor he was in Iran. This amplifies the charms of his lisp, a sign that he makes a practice of refining his speech, that he seeks rigor in the day-to-day. If Baba were here, he’d consider it a falsity and pour the man drink after drink until the lisp returned. Then he would examine his palate to see if he could fix it. He would see no hypocrisy in this. Mam’mad probes for more and Karim too seems interested. “What else?”

  “Let’s see,” she says. “Oh, the restaurant bill is literally called the reckoning.”

  He slaps the floor. “You lie!” He shifts to his right leg, hugging one knee and adjusting the pillow under him. He nudges Karim. “Are you still listening? Cold-blooded bastards. I suspect hell is run by a Dutch demographer with a clipboard that hangs around his neck on orange rope.”

  “Exactly.” She tucks her legs neatly beneath her haunches, the bottoms of her feet facing the wall. Two years in an Isfahani girls’ school has taught her to sit this way. She searches her mind for other Dutch oddities; she enjoys Mam’mad’s surprise.

  “These Dutch,” Karim mutters with a long breath. “Our hell is probably different from their hell.” Mam’mad catches Niloo’s eyes from over his glasses, and they abandon the subject. He gets up from the island of cushions to fetch a tin of cookies, because Iranians, Niloo has noted, take hints where there are none.

  A few days later, during her lunch hour, Niloo accompanies Karim to visit his caseworker, an elfin man who seems annoyed by her presence at first. When he realizes that her English is better than his own and that she isn’t intimidated by his position—she hopes he sees in the way she runs her nail on the cheap wood of his desk, the way she eyes his name that slides in and out of a plastic plaque, that she wouldn’t accept his job if offered it—he addresses all his questions and responses directly to her, bypassing Karim, who shrinks into his body a little more.

  Afterward, she whisks a sweaty Karim to the nearest brown café, a typical Dutch watering hole. “That was good!” she says. “Everything will work out soon.”

  For the first time, he looks directly in her eyes. “Do you really believe that, Niloo khanom?” Then he drops his gaze again.

  The despair in his voice saps her of the will even to keep walking, as if someone stuck a tube in her arm and syphoned off all the wonder and resolve. She has never lived with such absolute lack of hope. “Don’t say things like that,” she says, feigning cheer. Karim pulls open th
e heavy wooden door of the bar. “Everything will look better with a drink in our hands. I think I’ll have a glass of smoky red. What will you have? Should I order us a bottle?”

  “One day, Niloo khanom, when things are looking happier,” he says, “you’ll have to tell me how you managed to become American. Because as far as I see it, every immigration office is the same. They’re all like the dehati fiancé who takes you ring shopping again and again and never buys you one.”

  He waits for her reaction with a crooked half smile, unveiling a missing canine tooth now that he trusts her. The enormity of the gesture, and its smallness, moves her and she promises herself that she will do more for him, that she will deserve his trust. But for now, he wants her to laugh. So she does.

  • • •

  The night of the next storytelling event, she’s unlocking her bike outside the apartment when Gui drives up on his scooter. “Going to the guitar-pick place?”

  “Zakhmeh,” she says, and leans in so he can kiss her cheek. “It’s not hard.”

  “Hop on,” he says, nodding over his shoulder. “Let’s go together.”

  She stands there with her bike lock in hand, trying to think of an excuse to say no.

  “Is this a Perimeter thing?” He gives her a wounded look. She wants to say, It’s a personal space thing. Can’t any person need that? Does it have to be part of some Niloo strangeness for you to mock? Niloo has developed a number of tactics for leaving the house unseen on storytelling nights. She calls Gui at work, asking what time he’ll be home so she can leave half an hour before. She bikes on the canal side, not the street side, of the apartment, since Gui can’t ride his scooter there. Now and then she goes straight from work, picking up a bite to eat at the corner shop along the way. Now she searches for a loving way to say no, but catches Gui’s eager smile, and she finds herself unable. “Okay,” she says. “But I have to stop for a snack. Tonight’s yellow split pea.” When he shrugs, she adds, “It’s bad. Trust me.”