The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri

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СКАЧАТЬ about slapping some fool hard across the face. Khosrou and I sat in that car, conjuring violent scenes. My brother glared silently at the car roof. Later he told Maman stories of how he would protect her, build her a castle in a mountain far away, fill it with Smarties.

      Maman dropped me off at Baba’s dental office while she ran errands with Khosrou—my chronic motion sickness made me a terrible passenger. I slipped into the surgery, sat in the nurse’s chair to watch Baba fill a tooth. Long reddish hair fell over the back of the chair. I leaned to get a better look. The patient wore a silky blouse and jeans. Her chador hung on a rack near my face—in Baba’s office, women could cover as they pleased if the door was closed. “Aren’t you going to say hello, Dina joon?” said Baba.

      I mumbled hello. Baba frowned. “Since when are you shy?”

      I glanced at the woman’s red lips and made-up eyes. She was a stranger. And anyway, who can recognize a face with the mouth pried open? But then Baba leaned back and she sat up and spit. “Hello, Dina joon,” she said. I knew that voice—it was my first-grade teacher, Ms. Yadolai. Old Ms. Yadolai, restored, it seemed, to twenty-five or thirty by some witch’s spell. “I saw you in the waiting room, telling everyone to shush,” she said. “Where did you get that sweet nurse’s costume?” She meant my photo hanging across an entire wall of Baba’s waiting room, my finger to my lips.

      I shrugged. I was too transfixed by the miracle I was witnessing.

      “Dina, don’t be rude,” said Baba.

      “I’m sorry,” I said. “Ms. Yadolai, what red hair you have.”

      Little Red Riding Hood was one of few storybooks not banned by the clerics; that joke was well-worn. She laughed, thanked Baba, and gathered her things. “See you in school,” she said, whipping her black chador around her body, tucking at the temples. Despite makeup, she gained twenty years in one swing of her arm. A good scrub would cost her another twenty, and all her power, returning her by morning to old Ms. Yadolai.

      Now, finally, I understood the function of hijab.

      I started to believe that Christianity was feminism. Years later, my mother told me that when she had been a Muslim she was simply searching, and Islam fit only some of what she held sacred. In Christianity, she found her beliefs in their purest form. I now know that I was searching for feminism, and along the way, I shed every doctrine and institution that failed to live up to it. Islam went first. Later, all religion would follow.

      Our church wasn’t underground; it was behind gates and thick curtains. A rotating schedule in the homes of Assyrians and Armenians, who, if they could prove their ancestry and refrained from proselytizing, were theoretically left alone. Only apostates and pied pipers risked arrest and death. By allowing us into their homes, the Christian-born who hosted us tied their fates to ours, and this bonded us beyond friendship.

      News of pastors, even Armenian ones, being shot or disappearing into the notorious Evin Prison wasn’t rare. Political prisoners were routinely tortured and killed in Evin. We focused our attention elsewhere. Once we slipped past the front gate, headscarves came off and we sang songs, and planned Christmas celebrations, and heard funny sermons from our portly, heavily bearded Assyrian pastor, Brother Yusuf. The year we returned from England, Maman explained Christmas to us. She told us about Father Christmas and stockings by our beds, and it struck me that this character sounded like an older Brother Yusuf.

      “If he visits all the children in the world,” I asked, “why didn’t he come to us before?” Maman told me that he only visited Christian children, and now we were Christians, wasn’t that exciting? “But I didn’t know about Jesus before,” I said. “You said Christianity is fair. If I didn’t know, why would he skip me? What about kids who are too young to have a religion? Does Father Christmas only visit houses with Christian parents?”

      Maman blinked a few times. “Dina, it’s for fun. Maybe it’s Father Christmas. Maybe it’s Brother Yusuf in a costume. Do you want a stocking, or do you want to sit in protest for all the ones you didn’t get?”

      “Yes, I want one,” I said, and immediately suspended disbelief.

      “Good,” she said, then added (as she often did), “Keep asking these kinds of questions. You can think for yourself now; no more reciting.”

      For a while I did this. I read my Bible, found inconsistencies, and presented them to Brother Yusuf. I often asked my questions over meals at our sofreh, or his sofreh, with several families sitting around a feast on the floor. Brother Yusuf was the slowest eater I had met. He delighted in every bite, relishing and savoring and licking his lips, his big bearded cheeks bouncing as he chewed, nodded slowly, and complimented the chef. He treated my questions as he would an adult’s, as if I were part of an important theological conversation. Though, he didn’t always solve my problem. Most contradictions were dispatched with one of two answers: “The rules were different under the Old Testament,” or “That reads differently in the original Hebrew.” It didn’t matter. The important thing was that he was impressed, that he called me clever.

      When Brother Yusuf and the Christians visited, Baba disappeared to Ardestoon or stayed in his office—he despised Brother Yusuf, called him “that dirty Assyrian” or “that bearded charlatan.”

      Sometime in 1987, while the war raged on, sirens shrieked, and the days thrummed endlessly with news of executions, Maman was arrested. I didn’t know the details, only that her office had been stormed, the patients sent home, and she had been questioned for hours. She had been given a choice: spy against the underground church or face arrest and execution.

      Maman and Baba fought. Baba threatened to take Khosrou and me away. One night, Maman took us to a hotel, but they wouldn’t accept a woman alone with two children.

      Having found her purpose, Maman intensified her efforts. She kept stacks of Christian brochures under a thin blanket in her backseat, passing them out to patients and acquaintances. She started studying braille and sign language, so she could reach out to the deaf and the blind.

      Maman was arrested again, her office ransacked, her records stolen. She grew rigorous in her domesticity, sewing complicated, lifelike stuffed squirrels and cats. She found thin mattress foam and made a stuffed car for Khosrou. As the gaze of the morality police grew hotter and more unbearable, she leaned heavier on the church, and on Brother Yusuf. Sometimes when I spied on them talking in his home office, I detected an intimacy that felt like a betrayal to Baba—their talk was too playful. It was a strange habit of new Christians, these overly loving exchanges that were supposed to mimic brotherly or sisterly love. “My dear sweet” this or that. Each time Maman met with the pastor, his office door remained wide open.

      One afternoon, a car screeched to a stop behind the high wall separating the street from Brother Yusuf’s front gate. His wife rushed out of the kitchen, scooping up her baby girl, Rhoda. His son, Yoonatan, and I stopped playing cards. Maman and Brother Yusuf stashed their Bibles away. Maman fixed her hijab. A hard knock shook the metal gate outside. “I’ll break it down!” a man shouted. And though his voice was angry, almost violent, all my fear dissolved. I knew that voice, and no matter how much he shouted and whom he threatened to hurt, it brought me only joy.

      Khosrou was terrified, though. He screamed and jumped into Maman’s arms. He cried for a while, then his brow furrowed as if he were accepting new orders, a new role. “Don’t worry, Maman. I’ll protect you!”

      Brother Yusuf had hardly opened the gate before Baba rushed in and grabbed him by the throat. He shouted terrible things. “You dirty Assyrian,” he spat into the man’s СКАЧАТЬ