Refuge--A Novel

by Dina Nayeri

  A NEW-YEAR WORLD

  JUNE 2009

  Isfahan, Iran

  When two thuggish ill-wishers who have much to gain financially from one’s death enter one’s bedroom unannounced, it’s natural to indulge in a little deathbed hysteria. But Bahman didn’t. He had seen such plays at aggression, the chest-thumping puffery and swagger of certain Iranian men (usually anxious ones with a little money and not much education, the kind from South Tehran), and he knew the limits of Sanaz’s hurt and resentment. So not death, but they would hurt him.

  The queasy paralysis of the withdrawal helped. He had been slipping in and out of a long stupor, and the painful spasms racking his body seemed wholly unrelated to any physical impetus. The entire event might have been a dream. Oh, how the universe turns on itself! How nimbly some infections spread, unseen until their work is done. Soleimani had once been his friend—had he harbored hatred for him in those days? Before Bahman married Sanaz, Soleimani’s family had hosted him and his children in London. Now the same man shoved a pillow over his face, putting on a show to intimidate him. He leaned on top of him and spoke into his ear, promising to kill him if he touched Sanaz again. Bahman choked into the cottony mound, fabric filling his mouth and crushing his nose. He felt the man’s cold spit in his ear but didn’t struggle. Though his heart was pounding out a fitful rhythm, the weary organ threatening to explode out of his chest, he knew how much to expect. Mostly he thought, How did my life come to this? I was the cleverest student in medical school. And then, an unbidden thought, out of the ether: Why did I become a dental surgeon instead of trying for more? Why did teeth seem to matter so much more than the heart or the brain? Was I lazy? Did I not trust myself? Even as a young man, he had a special reverence for the human mouth. He had always been attracted to a flawless smile, and teeth fascinated him, these instruments of tearing that tie us to our primal ancestors, and yet are signals of modern refinement and grace. Now these thoughts came to him as he endured the pillow over his face, his body too weak and unwilling to engage in the drama of a few seconds without oxygen.

  Soleimani lifted the pillow. He stared at Bahman with a cold gaze and said, “I would break your hand.” Something writhed in Bahman’s stomach. This was a credible threat—hadn’t he once accused him of arrogance, claiming that all his pride would be gone with one fracture of the hand? “But your prospects are Sanaz’s too.” He punched Bahman in the gut. Bahman heaved clear acrid bile onto his pillow.

  Then the two men left. On his way out, the bearded man cast an apologetic glance around the girlish room, eyeing the apricot wallpaper, the yellow plastic wastebasket. Bahman waited half an hour (or was it five minutes?). He sat up in his bed, panting, wiping his brow, and staring at the black television screen. He swallowed some water. He felt no pain in his stomach but his legs itched badly. And he sensed that the diarrhea phase was about to begin. He called to Fatimeh. She hadn’t heard Sanaz let the men in. “That shit-eating snake!” Fatimeh said. “Please let me put some turmeric in the princess’s face soap.” Bahman chuckled. He had forgotten Fatimeh’s rural humor. He gave her some cash and asked her to take it to the guards. “Tell them they could at least protect us from break-ins.” Of course, Bahman knew that the intruders had also paid the guards. But what he was offering was undoubtedly more. How foolish he had been not to pay them from the start.

  When she had carried out his errand, Fatimeh cleaned his sheets and helped him change his pajamas. A distinctive fresh scent, like lilac and tea leaves, filled the room as soon as the new sheets were on, and Bahman realized how much grime he had been living in, layers of sweat after a day of vomiting. The indignity of allowing Fatimeh to clean his soiled linens didn’t bother him. This was his third detox attempt. And Sanaz had been the only woman from whom he had tried to hide the disgraces of being human, and of growing older.

  Maybe Fatimeh, with her hardworking village sheen, was his only true friend. As she was leaving, he called to her, panting between words as a wave of nausea hit him in the throat, making his mouth water. These animal spasms repulsed him. “Fatimeh joon . . . when this is all over . . . let me repair your teeth.”

  Her brown and broken smile died and deep grooves settled on her cheeks, bracketing her face. Her marble blue eyes, a sign of northern blood like his ginger hair, clouded over, and she said, “Go to sleep,” and closed the door gently behind.

  For three days, he suffered. The diarrhea came and went. The shivers intensified and receded. The itching stopped. Waves of pain and wooziness and delirium crashed down on him, possessed his body, then released him. For an entire day, his face seemed to be melting, as every crevice began to stream, eyes and nose and mouth becoming loose spigots of mucus and water and blood.

  Meanwhile, the women fought. Sometimes Bahman saw it, and tried to understand their individual grief. Had Sanaz never been confronted by a supposed rival who refuses to compete? Did Fatimeh hold out hope of returning to this house?

  “What do you want here?” Sanaz would shriek when she couldn’t think of any new cruelties to fling at Fatimeh, no more pots to salt or medicines to throw out. Once Sanaz threw out Fatimeh’s spice jar from Ardestoon, and Fatimeh wept alone in her room, because each year the spice is different. That year’s special taste had ended early for her, only three months after the New Year.

  Fatimeh’s tactic was often just stony silence. She only answered on every fourth outburst, and even then it was usually an under-the-breath “God help you” or an impish reedy-voiced reference to Sanaz’s blood pressure.

  Sometimes, when he was feeling well, Bahman entertained himself by goading them. “Why are you here?” Sanaz would ask Fatimeh again at lunchtime.

  Bahman would grin wide, forgetting about the missing tooth in the back. “I like her food,” he’d say. “It’s full of butter.”

  “It’s full of butter,” Fatimeh would drone, hiding a smirk, keeping her eyes on her cross-stitch or on Shirin’s coloring book. Shirin often sat in her lap as they ate.

  “Come now! You like it too,” Bahman would prod Sanaz. “Look how much we’ve both grown.” And Sanaz’s arm would circle her waist and she would glare.

  “Who wants to do recitations?” Bahman would say. Then he would offer up an easy one for Sanaz, something from the Rubaiyat perhaps. “Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough,” he would murmur to himself, pretending to be stuck.

  Sanaz would sit silently chewing, refusing the bait. But as soon as Fatimeh opened her mouth, Sanaz would say, as if she were doing him a favor, “A flask of wine, a book of verse, and thou.”

  He would tap his chin and nod as if saying, Oh yes, now I remember, then with feigned difficulty, “Beside me singing in the wilderness.”

  They always let Shirin do the last line. She would scream, “And wilderness is paradise enow!” At such times, Bahman always thought of the girl’s natural father.

  On the fourth morning, while the women and Shirin were food shopping, Bahman phoned Donya Norouzi. This woman’s appearance in his life was a sign from whatever pitiless gods might exist. Regardless, he wasn’t certain what hope he sought from her. He told himself he wanted to help.

  A man answered on the second ring. Given Bahman’s gruff, aged voice like smoky scotch, and his title, and his presence, he had no trouble getting her on the phone. A quick, “I’m Dr. Hamidi, DDS, please put Ms. Norouzi on” was enough. The trick of getting these rural men to put their women on the phone with another man was the cloak of the professional: no apologies, no explanations, and, most important, the ability to endure the silence that followed with a kind of ease that carries through the phone. He chuckled, thinking if only he had known this trick when he was twenty, a ginger university student with a footballer physique and a married lover he could never get on the phone. That was before he met Pari in a waiting room and fell instantly in love.

  Donya seemed cautious, her voice breathless and low, her mouth obvio
usly pressed to the receiver. Someone must have been listening, because instead of asking, “Who is this?” she pretended to know him. “Doctor?” she said.

  He realized now that he had no sane reason for calling, and, yes, surely some man (or his nosy mother) was listening. He couldn’t speak openly this way. He said, “Khanom Norouzi, I need to change your gum graft to four p.m. tomorrow. Can you come to my office then?” In his office, he could find out her situation, maybe try to help.

  “Your office?” she repeated.

  He gave her the address, making sure to specify thrice that it was a dental office. As he spoke, he strained to make his voice older, more jolly and foolish. With the listener handled, he added, to convince her, “I’m sorry I didn’t say hello at the courthouse. I saw you, and I thought, who wants to be reminded of their receding gums in the middle of their legal matter. I hope whatever papers you were signing weren’t too tiresome, and that there’s not too much pain in your mouth.”

  “No, Doctor,” she mumbled. Somewhere far off, he heard a click. It seemed the listener found Donya’s gums too boring to wait for the pleasantries to end.

  He was sure she would come. He hung up and congratulated himself. He hadn’t been involved in a good scheme in years. When he was young, he created fun out of thin air. He used to play pranks on Pari every day. Why did he stop?

  He thought, Maybe I’ll play a joke on Fatimeh. But he couldn’t think of any.

  He wandered out to the front door and waved a guard to him. He was still ill, his hair stuck to his head from the constant sweating. “Agha,” he said, holding out a handful of bills. “I need to visit my dental office tomorrow at four. Can you call the judge and get permission?”

  “Call him yourself,” said the guard, annoyed at having been made to stand and walk. “If he agrees, we’ll take you.” He took the money and returned to the car.

  Ali secured the judge’s permission. Again, it required money, but Ali’s charm was unparalleled and he got some extra information too: the court was finding very little evidence of Bahman’s guilt, and the judge would illuminate his fate soon. Not that a lack of evidence ever stalled a guilty verdict in this country: the judge must have hobbled to the realization that Bahman was harmless, not a plausible criminal to be made an example of, and useful to the economy and to the judge personally.

  The next day, Ali came to the house and the two brothers accompanied one of the guards to Bahman’s office building. Ali waited with the guard downstairs (this would buy more time), while Bahman, his pocket full of aspirins, went upstairs. For the first time since his latest varicose flare-up the previous year, he walked with a cane. Halfway up the stairs, he stopped and tossed two more aspirins into his mouth. His office was on the third floor of a modest complex, and a steady stream of banking and jewelry repair customers entered the front doors every hour. When he was settled in his leather desk chair, he looked out the window at the guard’s olive car. At four o’clock, he spotted Donya entering the main door unbothered.

  He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. He sat at his desk and stared at a locked drawer. Inside were cash and documents. Behind those, in an invisible compartment installed by the city’s craftiest furniture designer, he stored extra opium and a pipe. His itchy arms and exhausted stomach, his ruined throat, begged him to open it. Just to smell it for one boundless moment. He resisted, retrieving only some cash and an envelope, on which he printed Donya’s name.

  He tidied his desk a bit—though Ali had already gone through the inbox, the outbox, last month’s receipts, and the calendar. She entered without ringing the bell, perhaps thinking that this was a clinic and not a private office. “Akh, excuse me,” she said when she found him sitting alone at the desk beneath a giant photo of a four-year-old nurse (Niloo, 1983), mouthing “Shhhh.” The best thing about that photo, the thing that most people noticed, was that Niloo wasn’t making the universal quiet gesture. She was touching her nose with the pad of her finger, and looking at something in the same palm. The only indication of her intention was the menacing pursed lips and gathered eyebrows.

  “Khanom Norouzi?” said Bahman, getting up. “Come in. I made tea.” He was aware that he sounded like a teenage suitor, and indeed he was nervous.

  “Look, agha,” she said, loosening her scarf, “I know what you want. You heard my situation and you decided I need money, right? You think we could arrange a temporary marriage for a few hours?” Bahman flushed. Mortified, he tried to speak, but wasn’t his purpose indeed to offer her money? Wasn’t he, in fact, holding an envelope with her name on it? And yet, why did simple kind acts always go this way? Maybe it was punishment for giving so little to Pari and the children when they left. Donya looked around the empty office, then at his cane. “No patients today, agha?” When Bahman coughed into his hand, she softened. “Look, don’t get upset. I can use the money, but I’m sorry to tell you that my divorce never went through.”

  “No, khanom, you misunderstand completely,” he said. “Please just sit down. I don’t want to marry you, or anything remotely like that.”

  She sat in a plastic chair across from him, adjusting her navy manteau around her haunches. She tossed her yellow sunglasses on his desk. “My teeth are fine.”

  He could see from across the desk that they were not. Her maxillary central incisors were crowding each other like riffraff outside a cheap butcher shop. He said, “I feel moved by your situation. I saw that you were forced to stay.”

  Her brow wrinkled and she stared at him confused. “And?”

  “I only want to help. To share what luck I’ve found.” He pushed the envelope toward her. “I have a daughter. I only want to see some good come to you.”

  She looked inside the envelope, her suspicious gaze back on him when she saw the amount. He had given her the equivalent of three thousand American dollars, a sum that might pay her rent for six months, if she wanted to live alone in the city. He searched in his pocket for the aspirin and took two more with water. She seemed unsure whether to refuse three times as was customary. This might be an amount too big for tarof. “What do you want?” she asked again, reaching for her glasses as if she might take the money and run out the door.

  Suddenly he had no fatherly advice, no words to offer. The money, it seemed, was all he had to give. He shrugged. “I’m still stuck too,” he said, wiping his brow. He felt so weak and he imagined that he could smell the sweet opium in his desk. Maybe he would smoke it once this lady had absconded with her windfall.

  She sat silently for a moment, her shoulders relaxing; maybe she was talking herself into trusting him. “Agha, are you sick?” she asked. “Are you dying?”

  He laughed. Yes; maybe he was looking and acting terminal. “I’m just tired,” he said. “Take the money. I hope we both get unstuck soon. We made it out of jail, didn’t we?” He tried to dust off his old Cheshire grin, a ghost of his youthful smile.

  She tucked the envelope into her handbag and eyed the name plaque on his desk. “Look, Dr. Hamidi,” she said, “I went through the same anger and regret at first, and then I realized something: What does it matter what the law says? If you’re married or divorced, none of it matters outside the borders of this shit country.”

  “Which happens to be where we live,” he said, reaching for his beads. Briefly he wondered why this woman’s perspective mattered to him. Maybe she reminded him of Niloo, or maybe this was just his time to hear what was echoing all around.

  “Not for me,” she said. She picked her cuticles as if uncertain about trusting him. “Not for long. Look at what’s happening in the streets; riots, killings, arrests. Neda. If you make it out of the country, you can throw yourself at some embassy’s mercy, agha joon. There’s Istanbul or Dubai. Just go and live your life.”

  He chuckled. “Just abandon it all,” he said, “like some vagrant. I’ll leave that to the young.” He thought of a time when he could have left, whe
n he could have joined Pari and their children. Instead, he had locked himself in this office, passing the hours in a miasma of opium smoke. He had waved goodbye through the window, unable to leave behind his practice, his reputation, his warm village, and his photos.

  “What do you have here that’s so important,” she said, pulling a loose strand of hair out of the sunglasses, “especially if your path put you in that court?”

  As she was leaving, he called after her, “Khanom, can I ask why you wanted a divorce? Was he an addict or a philanderer or what?”

  She smiled. “Those are just reasons for courts.”

  “What then?” he pressed. “Did you fall in love? Why the hysterics?”

  She shrugged. “It’s a curse to be a bad fit. It’s like spending every day trying to force a hundred mixed-up lids onto the wrong jars. People think that’s not enough reason, but it’s the one thing that’s unfixable. It poisons everything.”

  Alone again, he sat at his desk, fondling the tiny key to the compartment. He was so close to freedom from this disease, closer than he had been the last two times. He tried to remember a time when he didn’t need the wretched plant, when he could travel to the other side of the earth and simply wander, to have a coffee or a sandwich outside, speak to a stranger, not bothering or panicking about how to procure some. He thought of his first time around a manghal, when he tried opium with a group of young friends in a sour cherry orchard in Ardestoon just before he set off for university. They sat in a rustle of trees munching on sour plums and pistachios, and someone lit the manghal and filled it. Pari often said, when she tried to get him through those two detoxes by the power of desire alone, that those boys had turned him into an addict on purpose, so that he would be forever tied to Ardestoon, so that he wouldn’t go off and live freely as a doctor in Tehran. Had they succeeded? He never stayed in Tehran. He made his home in the closest city to Ardestoon, returning every Friday to the village of his youth. Did he return for his mother and father, his warm community, the thick stews of his childhood sickbeds and the bowlfuls of mulberries from their orchards? Or did he return for the manghal? That first time he smoked, his body brimmed with love for the universe, for every woman in it, for every showy pirouette of nature. He wanted to be a part of it and to change it. He wanted to suck its marrow with enough recklessness to break the bone, break his jaw, break with the earth and float in the ether. That first time, it wasn’t oblivion he wanted but to be a deity in his own orbit.