The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri

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СКАЧАТЬ native-born that new arrivals don’t dare reveal. I’ve wished to say them for thirty years and found it terrifying till now.

      In 2016, I began a journey to understand my own chaotic past. I was a new mother and confused about my purpose. I had changed my face and hair, my friends, my education, my country and job, so often that my skin felt raw. My memories had grown foggy, and I had combed them ragged for fiction. I had prided myself on being a chameleon, as many immigrant children do, but now I felt muddied by it—I felt like a liar.

      I spent months traveling. I went to refugee camps in Greece, to communities of undocumented Dutch. I visited immigration lawyers and homes of new arrivals. I drank tea with refugees and asylum seekers and naturalized citizens. I spoke with mothers, lone travelers, schoolchildren. I was looking for stories, for whispers of stories hidden by shame or trauma, and for lies too. I searched for people from my own refugee hostel, Hotel Barba. I spoke to my parents, who reminded me of the many complications of point of view. During my travels, I came across dozens of stories; I have chosen a few to follow in these pages, tales all the more harrowing because they are commonplace now and, in the asylum office, often disbelieved.

      And so, I’ve left out the story of the Syrian man I met in Berlin who floated with a child for seven hours then found himself cleaning a slave ship, or the jailed scholars or activists who are hit with public fatwas—even your everyday Trumpian admits that those guys deserve rescue. I’m interested in doubt, in the feared “swarms.” These are stories of uprooting and transformation without guarantees, of remaking the face and the body, those first murderous refugee steps—the annihilation of the self, then an ascent from the grave. Though their first lives were starkly different, these men and women were tossed onto the same road and judged together. Some of their stories are far from over, but they have already repeated them so often, practiced and recited them so much, that these dramatic few months (or years) have become their entire identity. Nothing else matters to their listeners, and all suffering seems petty after the miracle of escape. But did the miracle happen? Now their struggle isn’t to hang on to life, but to preserve their history, to rescue that life from the fiction pile.

      Though the truth of these stories struck me hard, I know that I, a writer, was peeking in different corners than the authorities. I wasn’t looking for discrepancies. I abhor cynical traps that favor better translators and catch out trauma victims for their memory lapses. I don’t have accent-verifying software. I saw the truth of these stories in corroborating scars, in distinct lenses on a single event, one seeing the back as vividly as another sees the front—no flat cutouts. I saw truth in grieving, fearful eyes, in shaking hands, in the anxiety of children and the sorrow of the elderly.

      And yet, to re-create these stories, I was forced to invent scenes and dialogue, like retouching a faded photograph. Writers and refugees often find themselves imagining their way to the truth. What choice is there? A reader, like an interviewer, wants specific itches scratched. You will see.

      In the meantime, where is the lie? Every crisis of history begins with one story, the first drop in a gushing river. Consume these lives as entertainment, or education, or threats to your person. It is your choice how to hear their voices. Use all that you know to spot every false stroke of the brush. Be the asylum officer. Or, if you prefer, read as you would a box of letters from a ruin, dispatches from another time that we dust off and readily believe, because the dead want nothing from us.

      II / Darius

      Darius took a last drag from his cigarette and stamped it out on the tiles outside the tea shop. “Has she texted today?” his friend asked.

      “No,” said Darius. They were standing under Isfahan’s famous Thirty-Three Arches after an evening coffee and water pipe. “Let’s hope this means . . .”

      “Yes,” said his friend. “A shame though. Such a piece.”

      Darius chuckled and said goodbye. On the way home, his pocket vibrated. Nowadays, each text sent an icy rivulet down his back. He glanced at his phone. It was her. Dariuuuuuus. What’s going on?

      He stopped in the road to reply—quick disavowals. No games. Please, Miss, stop texting. I’ve had so much trouble.

      She wrote again: It’s fine. I just want to say hello.

      Please delete my number. You’ll get me killed.

      He switched off his cell phone and quickened his pace. It was already past ten. He was three streets from his house, crossing a narrow alley, when they came. “Hey, Seamstress!” a voice called. Darius was a tailor, a good one. He didn’t care that they found it low. He was tall and handsome, and he knew how to make clothes that fit. One day he would have a chain of shops. One day he would make beautiful Western suits. Before he could turn, someone had punched him in the side of the neck. Then a baton bludgeoned his leg and he was down, holding his side to stay their kicks.

      In the chaos, every detail detached from reality. The world narrowed to a series of sensations, and his aching brain could only make room for snippets: That they were Basijis, the pitiless volunteer militia. That they were four or five young men. That he was so close to home that his parents could probably hear his screams. That one of them said, “Leave Iran or die.”

      He slept in the alley for an hour after they left. The last thing he heard was a distant echo down the alley, “Don’t let us see you again.”

      Then he went home. The next day, the doctors stitched his face, arms, and legs. His mother cried in her room. “What a world these young people have inherited,” she wailed to his father. “Twenty-three and our boy has known no other life. Remember the days before the revolution? Remember 1978?” Darius was born in 1992. The paradise of old Iran gave him no nostalgia, only curiosity and some pride. Still, he wished for a chance. To make a business, a life, a family. He wanted to tell that girl that he liked her company, though he rejected her two or three times a week. He wanted to take her for coffee, to see the wind tangle her hair, to watch her laugh in a movie theater. Maybe they would fall in love. Maybe they wouldn’t. They’d never know, because her parents, both Sepâh, both militant and revolutionary with jobs in the ministry, had found out and decided to kill him.

      They had no interest in questioning their daughter, telling her their plans for him, or hearing that she was the aggressor.

      In a year, they returned for him. Darius’s wounds had healed, but he had scars on his arms and face. He hadn’t spoken to the girl again, though she tried. Now he sat at his mother’s sofreh cloth, eating dinner with his parents. They knocked hard and his father answered. They tore into the house, knocking a vase over and stepping on the sofreh with their shoes.

      “Have you texted with the young lady again?” one of them barked.

      “I swear, only to beg her not to text. I swear. You can look.” Darius tried to tell them that she didn’t understand; that she felt safe because of her parents and so she thought he was safe too.

      “So now it’s the young lady’s fault?” said the most senior Sepâh. They lifted him off his feet by his shirt and dragged him to their headquarters. He waited for hours. The Sepâh opened the door. He didn’t ask questions, just lobbed accusations and waited for a reaction. Darius kept his gaze on the table. “You have disgraced the daughter of Mr. Mahmoodi.”

      “No, sir. I didn’t,” he said to the table.

      “You are a communist operative.”

      “No, sir, I’m a tailor. I make shirts.”

      “You have been drinking.”

      “No, СКАЧАТЬ