The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri

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      The war made everything seem like the last of its kind. Every lazy afternoon, every family dinner, every drink of water. Some days at school, only a third of the students were present, the classroom eerily quiet and breezy, because parents had heard of a coming bomb raid.

      My teachers reached in deep and planted gruesome images. They told me just enough to make me ask around and fill in the gaps. 1987 was a brutal year. For some, 1988 would be worse. Thousands of intellectuals, leftists, and political dissidents disappeared that year, massacred by firing squad and hung from cranes, dying slowly. Sliced feet and skinned backs, hot irons to the thighs, their deaths covered up—it was a purge unprecedented in Iranian history. These images competed in my nightmares with scenes from the Book of Revelation and movies about the rapture: horsemen and plagues and the Antichrist. Which was the worse fate? Did most eight-year-old girls have such choices?

      I decided to talk to my teacher, to make peace. One day after class, I waited for the room to empty, straightened my scarf, checked my area, and meandered to her desk. “Khanom,” I said. She didn’t look up from her papers. “I’ve been practicing my handwriting.”

      “Good,” she said, her head still down so that all I saw was the gray fabric lump of her head. “That’s why we’re here.”

      “I didn’t tell Baba,” I said, trying not to let my dignity leak away. “He looks at my notebooks. I didn’t . . .”

      Now she looked up with her stony eyes, folding her arms over her papers in a rehearsed, wooden sort of way. “Miss Nayeri, the world is brutal for women. It’s a thousand times harder than for men. Whatever our private conflicts, we don’t betray each other to men. Do you understand?”

      I shook my head. “Baba isn’t one of those men. He was just angry . . .”

      She rolled her eyes, capped her pen, and sat back. “Who’s your biggest rival in the class? Who do you hate more than me?”

      “I don’t hate you, Khanom,” I said. What a terrible mess this was.

      She waited. I didn’t want to answer, because Pooneh was also my best friend and a distant cousin. I loved her and craved to beat her so much that sometimes when we kissed hello, on both cheeks as our parents had taught us, I squeezed her face hard to calm my itching teeth. It was a painful, confused affection, like a Mafia boss kissing a rival brother goodbye.

      Now Khanom smiled. Even though I came in first twice as often as Pooneh did, I was the one always chasing, because I was the one who publicly cared, while she shrugged and smiled and puffed her porcelain cheeks. That I would have to suffer another twenty years of sprinting alongside Pooneh exhausted and thrilled me. “Whatever you do to each other to win,” she said, “the minute you run to a man, you’re a traitor.”

      Then she went back to her work. “I’m sorry,” I said, though I felt that the story had been unfairly rewritten. “I’ll do the work over. I do love you.”

      She gave me a strange look. I had said the wrong thing. You don’t tell teachers you love them. Why had I said it?

      For a moment, we both stood our ground, Khanom determined to ignore me, as I remained planted in her line of vision. I shifted onto my other foot, moved my messenger bag to my back.

      She glanced up again, smiling kindly now. “It’s OK, Miss Nayeri,” she said. “I’m OK. I’m stronger than you think.” She made muscle arms under her chador, and we both laughed. “How would you like to do a very special job that only the top students can do?”

      My fingertips went cold—I knew my school’s rituals and rewards, and yet I wanted so much to please her. She lifted herself off the chair with a weary sigh and opened the book cabinet behind her. She pulled out a piece of paper tucked beneath the red bullhorn. When I didn’t move, she waved it at me until I reached up and took it from her.

      “You can lead tomorrow’s morning exercises,” she said. “Don’t be sad.” She leaned down to my height and touched my cheek. “We’re friends again.” Then she hugged me and muttered encouraging words in my ear. She smelled like my mother’s soap, and I wrapped my arm around her neck. Under her chador, a familiar lump comforted me; a ponytail, bound low, hanging down to the top of her shoulders. It made me trust her: yes, my teacher was a person. Her body wasn’t covered in scales. She had real hair tied up in a girlish ponytail. I didn’t want to stop touching it, but a moment later she pulled away.

      I slogged home in cement shoes, feeling the breath of the four horsemen on my neck. Was there any way to escape hell if I led a schoolyard full of girls in chanting death to Israel, God’s own people? I might as well drive the nails into Jesus’ hands and feet. I pictured Rhoda and Yoonatan, Brother Yusuf savoring my mother’s Salad Olivieh and strapping on his Father Christmas belly. I would be betraying them all.

      Alone in my bedroom, I agonized. I took off my uniform and dropped it in the laundry basket. I sat at my desk, tried to do math through tears. How would I survive tomorrow? Aside from damning myself to hell, it would be humiliating. I had been so brazen and boastful about my new faith. A few hours later, Maman burst in. “What is this?” she said. She was holding my manteau in one hand, the scrap of paper with the chants in the other. “Why is this garbage in your pocket?”

      The metal bar was so far up my throat now that I could hardly take a breath. I confessed everything. “You cannot do it, Dina,” she said, then she went on to repeat the story of Peter denying Jesus three times, and Judas, and every other betrayer in the Bible and in history. “When the class lines up for chants, what do you normally do?”

      “I don’t say them. I ask Jesus for strength, like you told me to.”

      “You tell your teacher that your mother forbids you. Tell her that in our faith we don’t recite things. Don’t argue with her about the text. Then get back in the line and do as you always do, OK?” I nodded.

      The next day, I dragged myself to school. I separated from my body with each step, and by the time I passed through the school gate, crossed the blacktop, and climbed the podium, I was numb and limp, hovering outside myself. I was already in Baba’s car speeding toward Ardestoon, toward my Morvarid’s withered henna arms. The stage was only inches from the ground. I read the words into the red bullhorn, barely waiting for the back chant. I conjured up the blond London boys who had punched me and severed my finger, and I thought, maybe viciousness is genetic; maybe some people, like British boys and Persian girls, are bred for it.

      When my volume dropped, a teacher straightened my back and the bullhorn so that it touched my lips and I tasted plastic and metal. I said the final words, and started back down the podium to join my class, stopping as I passed to return the paper to Khanom. The moment the last syllable dropped like phlegm from my mouth, I began praying for forgiveness; I prayed all day. I never told Maman what I had done. Maybe she knew. It took months to escape the nausea of that morning, and even then, I was marked: long after the Islamic Republic, the war, and the refugee years had receded and I had become an ordinary American, I would still be someone who once stood on a podium in an Isfahani schoolyard and shouted “Death to America” into a bullhorn.

      •

      For a few weeks in the spring of 1988, everything was on apocalyptic pause—that’s how it felt when sirens warned of bombs already on the way. A pause as we looked up to the sky, waiting for word that our daily СКАЧАТЬ