The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri

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       ESCAPE

      (on good faith, credible risk, and opportunism)

      I

      We became refugees. Somehow it felt more settled than what we had been for the past ten months, hiding out in the United Arab Emirates. There, we were illegal: all the same dizzying displacement, uncertainty, and need, but we had to find our own shelter. Without a state to say, “Yes, we will be responsible for you,” we were so unmoored it was hard to fathom a next step. Maybe that’s why every move had been last minute, someone’s kindness or a stroke of luck. Miracles. And so, when we landed in Rome in winter 1989, I bubbled with love for Italy and every Italian; it was unlike anything I had felt for Dubai or Sharjah. This airport was so European, so brimming with leisure; I wanted to run to every kiosk and smell the Western chocolate and touch the expensive fabrics. But a man in a black suit held a sign with Maman’s name, and we were led away to a car.

      My mother, younger brother, and I bundled in the backseat, cold, and dirty from the long flight. I tried to stay awake for the ride through the Italian countryside. Finally, after an hour, we spotted a house on a hill, breaking up the rolling valleys in the distance. We had been told that we’d be taken to “a good refugee camp,” a temporary safe space for transients seeking asylum outside Italy. It was called Barba, and it had once been a hotel. The Italian government had leased this building to house the likes of us, political and religious asylum seekers and passers-through with particular need: elderly family, children. It was exciting to watch Barba appear, and to know that, even though our clothes and bedding and daily routines would be those of refugees, though we would be confined there, our house would be on a hilltop, in the husk of a pretty hotel.

      We pulled up a winding hill road after dinnertime. Our room was small, perhaps even smaller than the cockroach hostel in Sharjah, and we had no fridge or hot plate this time. Only a bathroom and a bed. We sat on our bed and wondered where we’d get money, if we’d find friends among our neighbors. Would we meet Farsi speakers? How long would we stay? Which country would finally take us? We wondered about that night’s meal.

      We considered walking to a store in Mentana. Then someone knocked. An Italian woman, young, with a punkish haircut gestured to us that we had missed the dinner call. That night, for the first time, I saw the canteen, a glass circle overlooking all that lush valley. Now empty and dark, in the morning it would fill up with displaced families like us, Iranians, Afghans, Russians, Romanians. It would buzz with many languages, many kinds of prayers. There would be children, mothers, grandmothers. But for now, the room was silent. We ate bowls of leftover pasta in semidark and heavy silence, and thanked God that meals were provided here.

      Despite its grand skeleton, Hotel Barba was a refugee camp and we had to stay put, as we had no status in Italy. We were served soup, pasta, coffee, bread at precise times each day, and we sat in the winter chill, praying that by summer we’d be gone from there. Every day when the postman arrived, we would swell outside the mail cubbies, jostling for a good view. We wanted to know, “Who got his letter today?” When someone did, the crowd would hush as he opened the envelope, fingers trembling, eyes scanning, then either wept quietly into his palm, muttering curses, or loudly on his knees, thanking his god. Everyone was frantic for a letter from America or England or Australia or Canada (roomy anglophone countries). A letter would mean the wait was over; our lives could now begin.

      In the absence of work or school, all we did was dream, a maddening state, and battle loneliness. We ate with people from our own countries; we prayed in our own ways, some before eating (sitting, heads bowed), and some after (standing, holding hands). On cool days, the children snuck into a neighboring orchard to steal unripe peaches and plums, because our tongues were itching for something sour, and there was nothing else to soothe the craving. I tried to teach some English words to a handful of burly Russian men, skipping around the yard in my pink skirt and pointing to a tree, a fence, a chador, a babushka (the men indulged me by taking notes).

      We fought boredom in increasingly desperate ways: an Afghan grandmother collected bricks from a nearby construction site and carried them back to her room under her chador. Her daughter read our fortunes from the leftover sludge in mugs of instant coffee. A young Iranian soldier with his face half-bleached from a wartime chemical burn taught us how to play soccer. Despite his new kind of whiteness, he was as interesting to me as princes in my storybooks. Perhaps I sensed that he was attracted to Maman. And wasn’t she just me, in another body? Here was a man who wanted us, who wanted to play games with me, to make me laugh, and then to look out of the corner of his eye to see if Maman was watching.

      We had left Baba behind in Isfahan. I began to understand, bit by bit, over years, that I would never live with my father again. I was beginning to understand other things, too, to peek out from inside my own skin. I spent time with loving grandmothers from many countries. I joined Maman for tea and oranges in the rooms of Russian Christians. I read English books and played hopscotch and became obsessed with having a home again, with ending the wander days, rooting, and with the mysteries of adulthood. I craved everyone’s stories—I was becoming some later version of myself.

      In a refugee camp, stories are everything. Everyone has one, having just slipped out from the grip of a nightmare. Everyone is idle, without permission to work or run away, reckoning now with a new place in the world. Everyone is a stranger, in need of introduction. And tea is cheap (at Barba, we all came from tea-drinking countries). What better conditions than these to brew a pot, sit on pillows around a low table, and talk? At Barba, I learned to listen, and to savor startling details, byproducts of a strange confluence that may never recur: a grandmother hiding bricks in her chador, a splash of cream across a handsome face, a stampede for jam.

      It wasn’t just a pastime. Our stories were drumming with power. Other people’s memories transported us out of our places of exile, to rich, vibrant lands, and to home. They reminded us of the long, unknowable road. We couldn’t see yet, fresh from our escape, but other sharp turns lay ahead. We had created our life’s great story; next would come the waiting time, camp, where we would tell it. Then struggle for asylum, when we would craft it. Then assimilation into new lives, when we would perform it for the entertainment of the native-born, and finally, maybe in our old age, we would return to it, face it without frenzy: a repatriation.

      For two decades, our escape defined me. It dominated my personality and compelled my every decision. By college, half my life had led up to our escape and the other half was spent reliving it, in churches and retreats where my mother made it a hagiographic journey, on college applications where it was a plea, at sleepovers where it was entertainment, and in discussion groups after public viewings of xenophobic melodramas like China Cry and Not Without My Daughter, films about Christian women facing death and escaping to America. Our story was a sacred thread woven into my identity. Sometimes people asked, But don’t a lot of Christians live there? or Couldn’t your mother just say she was Muslim? It would take me a long time to get over those kinds of questions. They felt like a bad grade, like a criticism of my face and body, an unraveling of that sacred thread: I am rescued cargo; therefore, I am enchanted. I have purpose. With every good work, I repay the universe. If I didn’t have that, then I would be faceless, an ordinary person toiling for what? Soulless middle-class trifles?

      Once in an Oklahoma church, a woman said, “Well, I sure do get it. You came for a better life.” I thought I’d pass out—a better life? In Isfahan, we had yellow spray roses, a pool. A glass enclosure shot up through our living room, and inside that was a tree. I had a tree inside my house; I had the papery hands of Morvarid, my friend and nanny, a ninety-year-old village woman; I had my grandmother’s fruit leather and Hotel СКАЧАТЬ