The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ narrative, my mother held on; she still defines her life by it.

      “Because they were very unlikely,” Maman said.

      “Will there be Smarties there?” Khosrou asked. For three years since London, my brother had held on to the promise of more Smarties, and also Divist-jib, or “Two hundred pockets,” which was how his toddler ears had heard “Digestives.” I imagined a portly Briton with a chef hat and a small fork tapping exactly two hundred dents onto the chocolate side of each cookie.

      “How unlikely?” I asked—I wanted to know the numbers. How often did stories like ours end badly? I knew I shouldn’t doubt, that doubting would show the frailty of my belief and dry up my future blessings. And I did believe. But I was also a mathematical kid and I had questions that, for lack of a statistical vocabulary, I couldn’t articulate then. Instead I asked about my toys and books again. “You promise no one will go in my room?”

      Miraculous or not, the manner of our escape meant that we didn’t land in the United Arab Emirates as refugees. We had a three-month sponsored visa courtesy of Baba’s wealthy relative, Mr. Jahangir, miracle number three, the man who had surfaced during our weeks in hiding. But Maman knew that soon we would become refugees. Or worse, illegal immigrants. We had no intention of returning to Iran when our visas expired. The day after we landed, Maman requested European asylum from the United Nations office in Abu Dhabi and hoped for a response before our visas ran out and the Emirati immigration authorities found out we had blown through our welcome. We told Mr. Jahangir nothing of our plans.

      “It smells,” I moaned into Maman’s lap in the hot, sweaty car ride to Sharjah, the city outside Dubai where we were to settle. “I can’t breathe with this smell.” She held my head in her long denim skirt as she had done hundreds of times before, on desert trips to our village house in Ardestoon, through a fussy, motion-sick, chafe of a childhood. Unfamiliar smells made me crazy, but I was learning how to alter them with pleasant mental associations, an early hint of how much I could change, if I really focused, inside my faulty, itchy mind, which Maman playfully compared to Morvarid and other grumbling old village women I had loved. Smells of other humans, though—never. They made me want to scratch off my skin.

      Maman rented a single room in a hostel populated by other runaways who didn’t qualify as refugees. I hated our building, a smoky industrial stack of studio apartments with paper-thin walls, a lobby encased in glass like a holding cell, where the manager, a Korean student, sat watching television all day. We paid by the month from Maman’s life-and-death satchel (the cash, the passports), shared one bed, and tried to ignore the cockroaches and mice. The night I saw the first cockroach I jumped on the bed and held my arms and legs and rocked until I stopped imagining it crawling all over my body. Maman jumped onto the bed too, and the three of us held each other, until it became a game. Now we were in a boat. Now the seas were churning and sloshing. “Keep your legs in!” Maman warned, and we squealed, delighting in the fear. “Don’t let the sharks get your toes! Here comes a big wave!”

      “Oh no! Shark!” I shrieked and burrowed under my mother’s arms and torso. “It’s under the boat! We’re going to die! We’re dead!”

      “Who’s the strongest rower?” said Maman, as Khosrou jumped up and down, panting and puffing out his chest. “Don’t overturn the boat!”

      “We may have to sacrifice one of us to the shark,” I said, eyeing my baby brother and his juicy limbs.

      “Dina!” said Maman. She pulled us close to her, under the covers, so that soon we were breathing in her soft powdery daffodil smell and we quieted down. We were finally alone, Khosrou, Maman, and I. We had a small bathroom, a mini fridge, a hot plate, and bare walls; and we were safe.

      “What do you think Baba is doing now?” I asked, burying my face in the soft spot under her arm. I imagined my playful baba with no one to play with, or sneak ice cream with, or read poetry to. Baba had no sense of proportion or appropriateness or any of the parental senses at all. When I was two, he would routinely wake me from my bed at midnight to eat ice cream with him. When we were alone, he would ask me things I couldn’t fathom, like “Where’s the olive oil?” or “Was there mail today?” I was three.

      “I don’t know,” said Maman. “Maybe he’s pulling a tooth or doing a root canal? Maybe he’s gone to Ardestoon and is having some nice ghorme sabzi right now . . . Ouch, don’t do that!” I had picked a scab off her arm.

      “It was ready!” I said as Maman rubbed the raw skinless flesh I had exposed. I nuzzled back under her arm again. “I want ghorme sabzi.”

      “I want Smarties,” said Khosrou from under Maman’s other arm. “And chicken schnitzel!” We pronounced it sheh-nee-sell.

      “We’ll never eat chicken schnitzel again,” I said, “Only Hotel Koorosh makes that, and Hotel Koorosh is in Isfahan.” I thought of our special-occasion dish, so tasty with its lemony skin separating from the slim chop.

      “They have chicken schnitzel in other places,” said Maman.

      “No, they don’t,” I said. “Only Hotel Koorosh has schnitzel. Everyone knows that. I miss Hotel Koorosh. Do you think Baba is there tonight?”

      “I miss Babaeejoon,” said Khosrou—years later he still mourned that toy sheep, disemboweled by airport guards looking for contraband.

      “Tomorrow,” said Maman, “maybe we’ll find Smarties and schnitzel and you can write Baba a letter.” She yawned, and we fell asleep in each other’s arms, where we would sleep every night for sixteen months.

      The UAE was a strange country where Middle Eastern unrest collided with Western decadence. The Persian Gulf beaches were dotted with fancy resorts, but if you dared wade past their beachside pools into the waters of the gulf, crude oil stuck like black tar to your legs, suggesting some nearby oil spill, or a bombed-down plane. In Dubai, an entire mall was devoted only to gold, and secular and religious alike spent obscene sums on trinkets. Burkas, chadors, and headscarves glided up and down streets, while Western women sat bareheaded in cafés beside Arab millionaires in crisp white robes that added bridal grace to their movements.

      Maman and I threw away our headscarves like so much dirty tissue paper. I wore my hair in ponytails or loose, even in the streets, and she cycled through a tiny wardrobe of Western staples. After three years sweating and itching under Islamic school uniforms and the extra-tight academic hijab, the Emirati heat was nothing—I had never felt so free.

      And yet, for the first time, the management of money became urgent and visible for us. We didn’t have much, and Dubai was expensive. Any Iranian we might find there would be obscenely wealthy. Iranian refugees rarely go through Dubai; Turkey requires no visa, and they can get there in the back of a truck. But Maman had, more or less, panicked into Dubai, and we would soon know if straying from the herd was foolish or wise.

      Most mornings we sat inside our gray boxy room to avoid the suffocating heat (you could cook an egg on the sidewalk) and tried to utter the new sounds and syllables Maman remembered from university English classes. We found a beachside public pool, but evening admission prices were too high; everyone wanted to swim at night. During the day, the water was near bubbling, but the prices were low and the pool was entirely ours. Maman wore tights under her one-piece suit, out of modesty and as protection against the relentless sun, and taught us how to float.

      One day we wandered away from the pool, toward the gulf—it was only a few steps away. And Maman didn’t say no. Despite her conservatism and piety, she liked to instigate adventures with us—she had only just turned thirty-two and СКАЧАТЬ