Refuge--A Novel

by Dina Nayeri

  “I wonder if they went to the wrong hotel,” I said.

  Reaching for my hand, Gui said, “I’m excited to meet your dad. And nervous.”

  “Me too,” I said, and we meandered back and forth past that café, maybe thrice, looking up at the couple as they sampled a flaky pastry and at the old man with his cup of Turkish tea, staring out at the road, lost in his thoughts; he was in another world, but when he saw me, he smiled like a five-year-old.

  At first nothing registered. Because I had seen Baba only eighteen months before and had a fresh image of him in my mind, I hadn’t looked twice at the old man in the balcony; I hadn’t needed to. But now the man got up, reaching for his cane, and hobbled toward the steps with a familiar gait. He pushed a hand into his arched back as he negotiated that first step, that boyish grin never leaving his face.

  Except his smile was no longer ginger and toothy, but marred by two missing teeth and lost in a cloud of gray—gray skin, a gray mustache, hair that had gone entirely white. I stood dumbfounded. In just a year and a half, Baba had aged a decade—my Baba who had once had fire-red hair, who had played soccer and plummeted down an enormous waterslide. Had he spent the last few months obliterating his memories with the kinds of cocktails he had devised in Madrid? My heart throbbed and I wished for just a few more seconds to adjust. But Baba was almost at the bottom of the steps, and Gui was pulling me toward him. “Dr. Hamidi?” he said, extending his hand. And I had yet to decide if this was indeed Dr. Hamidi.

  Baba approached me tentatively. I guess my behavior wasn’t very welcoming. I recalled how he kept touching my face in Oklahoma, how he threw himself into Kian’s arms in London, how the smallest kindness moved him in Madrid. And now, the drift had led us here, lingering two feet apart, unable to say hello. “Hi, Babajoon,” I said, and the words caught in my throat. I hugged him carefully, because maybe he would break. Where were his back teeth? I wanted to ask this—where did they go?

  Gui was thrilled by Baba’s Iranian village look, as if he had assumed that I had oversold this aspect of my father. The green counting beads, the giant gold ring, the cane with a gaudy lion head, the yellowing pads of his fingers. As an old man, Baba was a spectacle, though after we finished our greetings, I realized that the only tangible changes were his missing teeth and whitened hair. He looked tired.

  “Is pleasure,” said Baba in his special English, which, after just two words, I knew had eroded. He openly stared at Gui, nodding and chewing his mustache. His admiration of my husband embarrassed me for hours after I should’ve forgotten it.

  “Have you checked in?” I asked Baba in Farsi.

  “Of course I did,” said Baba. He returned to gawking at Gui, who stood six inches taller, examining him like an art installation, or a fancy suitcase he might want to buy, but only after much more research. Each time Baba’s gaze became uncomfortable, Gui fired off one of the simple questions he had memorized. How was your flight? How is your dental practice? What do you want to do today? Baba just nodded and smiled wide. “Il me comprend?” Gui whispered to me.

  As we strolled, I noticed the deeper, unnatural curve in Baba’s back, and the tightly wrapped bandages peeking out from the space between his socks and his trousers, the sun glinting off his metal bandage clips. Was he shorter than he had been in Madrid? Was this possible? Confused and angry at the world, I stormed toward the pansiyonlari reception ready to release, but the manager had already seen everything. He watched puzzled as Guillaume and Baba attempted to converse just outside the glass door. Fondling his tiny mustache, he seemed to forget his affected ways. Before I could speak, he said, “We were waiting for an Iranian family for him, and maybe someone else for you.”

  “But he checked in hours ago,” I said, flinging Western disdain.

  He threw up his hands. “It didn’t even occur to me, Miss. We get many European couples here. We’re the number one choice for European couples. We don’t get as many Iranian weekenders. Sometimes Tehranis, yes. The Iranian gentleman escaped my notice.” He said Iranian gentleman with the clunky, showy arrogance of someone born just a little farther west.

  “Well, it’s lucky that people have names, right?” I said. He explained that my father had spelled Guillaume’s name wrong when he had checked in. Still, I felt no kindness toward this man who had made Baba sit and worry for hours, just because he didn’t look the part. What was he supposed to look like?

  “I apologize,” he said. “We won’t charge for your father’s . . .” He pretended to glance sidelong at a bill. “. . . six ‘extra-hot’ coffees.”

  His tone was infuriating. Did this idiot think he could buy us with a few cups of Turkish sludge? “Fine, but let me ask again,” I said, “has Kian Hamidi checked in?”

  The host didn’t look at his roster or at the ancient computer in the corner behind him. He considered the question, then, his gaze darting past me at the door, said, almost distractedly, “There’s an American backpacker in room five.”

  • • •

  We found Kian in room five.

  When he opened the door to the three of us, he broke into a stunned smile—we were mismatched even to him. He greeted us, then turned to Baba and said in choppy, practiced Farsi, “I want to be clear that I don’t forgive what happened in Madrid, and that if I smell so much as a waterpipe, I’m out of here.”

  Kian and I took turns as translator. At the Grand Bazaar, I ambled between Gui and Baba and passed their words back and forth while Kian loaded up on cumin and fenugreek, saffron and ground ginger, and fifteen kinds of tea. He lugged bags of spices, never accepting help, but borrowing an extra ace bandage from Baba to wrap his forearms so he could carry more. At lunch, I took a break while Kian translated, his spices arranged on the table so he could smell and taste them again. He sprinkled sumac from his own stash on Gui’s burger. Sometimes, when Kian and I were distracted, Baba tried to communicate with Gui with his own mangled translations, importing entire unsanitized idioms directly from some fourteenth-century Isfahani village. Kian and I never interrupted Baba’s spasms of English, though I wanted to—badly. I had almost no time alone with Gui and I was desperate to know his genuine impressions. Each time Baba started up, I pretended not to hear, and Kian went silent, smirking as Gui tried to work out what he was hearing.

  One day, at a kabob house overlooking the Bosporus, Baba tried a pistachio-lamb skewer and he muttered, “This is very good. Is wedding in my ass.” Gui’s jaw stopped moving mid-chew. Kian snorted into his palm for a full minute. Baba grinned, happy that his mischief had been noticed. “What? You never hear expression?” After that, when Baba was worn out or in pain, he would lean back in his chair and say things like, “Dirt on my head!” or “Ghosts of my stomach!” After a good joke, laughter bellowed from his gut, and he would say to whoever had delivered it, “May God kill you.” I had to explain to Gui that this, in Farsi, simply means, “You’re terrific,” or something of the sort. Without fail, when a kitchen couldn’t fill one of his requests (he always special ordered plain yogurt, white rice, grilled kabobs, stewed chicken, and Caesar salads, as he couldn’t eat most other things), he said, “The bride can’t dance, so she says the room is crooked.”

  Every time Baba lobbed a new idiom, Kian wrote it in his notepad. Baba delighted in this attention and began an aggressive campaign to make Kian laugh, maybe to atone for Madrid and win back his son’s love and approval by supplying all the fun we had missed on that other trip. Once, after a day of touring mosques and catacombs in Sultanahmet, Baba said, “I’m dead with tiredness,” then realizing that his choice had been workaday, he added, pointing his remark at Kian with expectant eyes and zero subtlety, “My life is draining from my ass.” It seemed that Persian villagers have a lot of sayings relating to the condition of their asses.

  After every meal, Baba said to the waitress, “Miss, it is time to light up our homework,” at which point Gui or Kian, whichever was s
itting next to him, leaned back behind Baba’s head and made the universal pen-scratch gesture for the bill.

  Soon we learned to communicate through these sayings, and Gui began to understand Baba in ways I hadn’t expected. They seemed, in fact, to be enjoying each other’s company. They even convinced Kian to go for waterpipes. (“I swear is only fruit water,” said Baba, “no addictions.” Later he joked that Gui got addicted to the strawberry one anyway.) Sometimes when I arrived late to breakfast, served buffet style in a glass greenhouse in the hotel gardens, I would find Baba and Gui sitting quietly across from each other cracking eggshells and reading newspapers, each in his own native tongue. Baba would grumble, “Bank crisis spreads.”

  Gui would respond, “The Dow is bouncing back though.”

  Baba would look up from his coffee and wrinkle his brow. “What you mean?”

  “Back up,” Gui would respond. “Bouncing back . . . up.” He was unconsciously adopting Baba’s big hand gestures.

  “Yes,” Baba would murmur and nod and return to his paper, “Dow.” Then he would look up again. “Is big trouble coming, you think? What is problem?”

  And Gui would shrug and say, “The mortgage lenders sold wet wood.” And Baba would chuckle and nod and crack into another egg.

  For two weeks, the staff of the pansiyonlari, including the peacock manager, watched us and whispered, especially at breakfast. Each morning, the European lawyer would arrive with the aging Iranian villager, both hungry at first light, devouring hard-boiled eggs with butter, drinking carafes of coffee, hoarding the French and the Farsi newspapers. They spoke reverently of particular villages in Provence and southern Iran, howling at common details: stone kitchens, hearty mothers, toothless farmers at their market stalls. Just before breakfast closed, the American backpacker, yawning and grumpy, would plop down beside them, usually within minutes of his nervous Continental sister with her pastel clothes and panicky ponytails. The backpacker and his sister usually complained about the eggs. The aging villager always asked for English crumpets. And the French lawyer wrote their itinerary in the margins of his city map and studied it, referencing two guidebooks before declaring that it was time to begin the day. Their drink orders were absurd:

  One dark tea in glass with cardamom and, if you have, English crumpet.

  Une noisette. Merci.

  One black coffee, only if it’s ground on-site—I can tell—otherwise water.

  One something authentically Turkish, preferably rural and ancient.

  I noticed that Baba wanted to spend hours at breakfast and dinner. He seemed more fragile now; always tired, always thinking. Sometimes he recited lines of poetry to himself and shared them with Gui, who would jot down a few key words and look up the English versions at night on the Internet. “Your father quoted from ‘Saladin’s Begging Bowl’ today,” he would say. Or, “Found it! He’s reading Hafez!”

  In restaurants Baba became irritated, his stomach always hurting. I started to carry bags of almonds and raisins in my purse, since he could eat them without upsetting his stomach. He chewed with his front teeth, and once, when I saw him struggle with an almond, I had to excuse myself so I could recover. The restaurants were the most difficult, but he liked the kabob place overlooking the Bosporus, because its simple cuisine was identical to a Persian kabobi. We ate there three or four nights before the rest of us grew antsy about missing so many celebrated Turkish restaurants. He ate many Caesar salads, rejecting every fish as smelly, every piece of meat as undercooked. “My dinner bleeds! What barbaric place is this?”

  I stopped caring about missing restaurants. In Amsterdam I had grown thin, though the scientist in me compelled me to feed myself. When left alone, I drank broth soups and ate puréed apples, carrots, and parsnips. I boiled things, steamed things, or left them raw. I skinned vegetables halfheartedly, so that they looked blotchy and afflicted. In less than two years, I had become the sort of woman who earns a parsnip at day’s end. On the other hand, when Gui ate at home, I made lamb with butternut squash and prunes in turmeric sauce, or eggplants roasted in olive oil and garlic with whey. I baked cream puffs and served them with cardamom tea. I melted saffron into a teacup of butter and poured it over beds of fluffy basmati. Being a good wife was a simple science, easily mastered—I had a list.

  I don’t know if Baba saw my indifference to food. He kept putting half his kabobs on my plate. For days at a time, he conversed with us only in poetry and cuisine. In the evenings, he tried to get Kian and Gui drunk, just so he might feel better understood. Baba and Gui drank whiskey together, but Kian and I never joined. We were glad to outsource the drinking duties. One night, after a few shots, Baba said, “You are good husband, Gilom. Better husband than I was any of times.”

  Before bed, Gui told me that Baba asked him strange questions over breakfast. He wanted to know when we would have children, if we had discussed where our final home would be, and if he knew all of my hobbies. He said, “Person like Niloo cannot be bored. Or is trouble.” I told Gui that Baba was just projecting.

  We walked a lot, the four of us. Walking helped with the long silences, when Baba was too tired to speak English and we were too tired to translate. Gui didn’t mind. Baba gave us no scares on that trip, and I suspected he was suffering through a mini withdrawal, trying hard to behave. Gui bought bottles of Cabernet and Shiraz for us to drink at night, in our rooms, over cards or books or games. He whispered, when Kian and Baba were out of earshot, “Your dad has an endless stash of whiskey. We have to switch to wine or I’ll die of liver malfunction.”

  I missed the best part of the trip, the day we went to the bathhouse and I went alone to the women’s bath while Kian, Baba, and Gui sat in the steaming, foggy rotunda together and laughed about the peering hotel staff while getting their shoulders kneaded out by a Turkish attendant in a lunghi cloth. I was massaged by an enormous woman in a blue Speedo who kept putting her arm down her bathing suit to straighten god knows what. I worried that Baba would have a heart attack breathing the hot, saturated air of the hammam. For the rest of that day, I battled a nagging loneliness, not because I had been separated from my family in the bathhouse, but because something felt finished. This trip felt like a last return. As I sat in the steam, I knew that this was my final trip with Baba—maybe because he was so old, maybe because I was so tired, or maybe because of the constant fear that Gui would see my family for what we were.

  During our walk back, I spotted some pencil sketches in a shop window. Baba said, “This is Mevlevi art. Whirling dervishes. We must go and see Rumi’s grave.” Baba wanted to go in and talk to the artist, who said he could do any variation of the dervishes for us. I wanted the one in mid whirl, the dancer’s arms high in the air, his head falling back. In the ten minutes we spent browsing the store, the artist had sketched a flowing, elegant miniature on cream stock, placed it in a red wooden frame, and presented it to me. I thanked him and asked if the dervish was inspired by an older pictoral depiction of the dance, or if it was his own creation.

  “What are you doing?” Kian interrupted in distressed Farsi. “He just painted that and he’s waiting for your reaction. Nod, praise it, do something.”

  Looking at the middle-aged Turkish artist with his paisley shirt unbuttoned halfway and his unassuming smile, I saw that Kian was right. This man was waiting for something from me. I praised the sketch until everyone looked satisfied, but I left distressed. Was I always oblivious to these unspoken needs?

  Later, I tried to watch Baba for signs of fatigue or discomfort—though I didn’t admit this, I was still looking for evidence of opium or worse. But he was even-tempered throughout the trip. Baba suggested we go to a Mevlevi dervish show. “The dance is prayer,” he explained to Gui. “It’s . . . a transcendence. Very tranquilizing.”

  At the show Baba closed his eyes and turned his beads between thumb and forefinger, nodding to the rhythm of the chants, transported. Behind us, a t
rio of American women talked loudly, reading from guidebooks and asking questions about the costumes, wondering when the show would end. In a quiet moment, they chimed in and Baba winced. For some minutes, I debated whether to speak up—Baba had been uncomfortable for most of this trip, the food, the walks, the language, the lack of drugs; only now, watching these white-clad men twirling, was he at home. I could see from his expression that he was trying to reenter his trance.

  It took me ten minutes to find the courage to speak up, that fourteen-year-old who used to hide in water park changing rooms still whispering in my ear that it was my family who was out of place, my father who was embarrassing. Finally, I turned to the women. “This is a religious ceremony,” I said. “Please shut up or leave.”

  Baba looked at me aghast. He whispered, “Niloo joon, why you are this rude? Let everyone enjoy in own way. Americans enjoy by talking.”

  The women smiled kindly at my Baba. They apologized and retreated into silence. Baba returned to his trance, cross-legged, eyes shut, oblivious. Gui took my hand and whispered in my ear, “Relax, Chicken. This is supposed to be fun.”

  For days after that, I felt like I had destroyed something.

  Later, in Baba’s room, Baba and Gui talked over whiskeys while Kian and I played a game we invented. In each round an ingredient is chosen—pomegranate or butternut squash or pork shoulder—and each player writes down a recipe. Best one wins. The better recipe is easy to spot, since we have similar palates, but we also incorporate a kind of honor system: if both players declare their own recipe superior, they can’t cook the other person’s recipe for six months. So freedom to experiment cancels out pride and we become neutral judges. We play this game constantly on planes. Kian usually wins and I collect dozens of new recipes.