The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri

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СКАЧАТЬ Sepâh about drug trafficking. They intended for Darius to hear. He wanted to weep—they would never let him go. He would die on a crane, or facing a firing squad, before he turned thirty.

      “You’ve been drinking and you attacked Basiji officers in the street,” said the guard. When he shook his head, the Sepâh knocked him in the temple with the butt of a huge rifle. Darius toppled off his chair. He gripped the table leg and pulled his legs into his stomach, like a newborn. Before he lost consciousness, he felt another two blows to his head, then one to his back, just behind his heart. They were striking to kill.

      He woke in the hospital with his parents standing over him. His body felt light, his mouth dry. He had been in a coma for three months.

      “You can’t stay in Iran,” said his father. “They’ll kill you.”

      His mother had explained that they had visited the house almost weekly. “Your son is antiregime. He has problems with Islam. He’s a drug dealer. An apostate. And underground operative. His blood is halal for us.”

      It seemed that was all they wanted—to establish that Darius’s blood was halal. When his parents went to complain of harassment, every officer said that Darius had attacked Basijis in the street. “If they get you in the street again,” said his father, “you’ll be dead. Please, I have some money. Take it and get out and live some kind of life. You can make home anywhere if you try. Find happiness away from here.”

      Darius spent two weeks letting his siblings feed him as he recovered some of the thirty pounds he had lost. He took his pills. Pockets of black formed in his memory. His body was covered in scars now—his arms, face, neck, legs. Every morning his parents begged him to leave.

      When asked to describe his journey, Darius forgets things. He recalls details out of order. His head pounds. Once in a halfway house, all his muscles clenched and a tic twisted up half his body for hours. He is a single man; he looks fit and isn’t yet so jaded that he can’t laugh now and then. But he stumbles into dark patches; he loses details as a liar would. He is rarely believed. “Economic migrant,” they call him, seeing only his youth and potential. In newspapers and on his iPhone, Europeans are always debating how much refugees will contribute; they claim to want the economically beneficial kind, the “good” immigrants. And yet, they welcome only those with a foot in the grave. Show any agency or savvy or industry before you left your home, and you’re done. People begin imagining you scheming to get out just to get rich off an idea (or a surgery or an atelier). They consider the surgery or atelier that doesn’t yet exist as property stolen from them. The minute you arrive, though, even if you did have a foot in the grave, god help you if you need social services for a while.

      Darius drove to Urmia, an Iranian city near the border with Turkey. From there, with the help of a smuggler, he crossed the mountain on foot. He wore running shoes, and the mountain crossing took him forty-five minutes. Every few steps he thought he felt the gunshot in his leg or back. If he fell, he knew, the smuggler would leave him. “Now you’re in Turkey,” said the smuggler somewhere on the mountain. “I turn back here. Good luck.”

      In the Turkish village, he was driven to a mud hut and taken for twice the agreed fee. “Call your family and ask for more,” they said. “The journey was more treacherous than expected.” He recalled no hardship that hadn’t been explained before the trip, but single young men from Iran rarely stir up sympathy—economic migrants, exploiters, opportunists. He paid. He sat in the hut for four days, awaiting the next step, though this one was already disappearing into the dark patches, the spoiled, battered parts of his brain.

      The first airboat was too full. Sixty, including many exhausted children watching Darius with shy eyes. A few meters in, it toppled, releasing its occupants into the Aegean. All luggage washed away. The strong swam back, not daring to imagine what had become of the others, those tired children. Darius ran into the woods, where Turkish officers picked him up and took him to jail.

      He wasted away in a Turkish jail cell for two months. He had no papers, gave a false name, and spent his days in a delirium. Trapped in a fever dream, he remembers little—it is so easy to doubt him. He spent that time with his eyes closed. They released him when his brain medicines ran out. Too much trouble. “Get out of Turkey,” they said, and he tried to oblige.

      On his next try, Darius’s boat made it to Lesbos. As joyful men jumped out and began pulling the boat ashore, a voice nearby whispered, “Don’t celebrate too soon. This is where the hardship really starts.”

      “We’re in Europe,” said Darius, to the dark. “We’re on free soil.”

      “But we’re not going into Europe. We’re going to Moria.”

      III

      I was born in 1979, a year of revolution, and grew up in wartime. The itch in my brain arrived as war was leaking into our everyday—sirens, rations, adults huddled around radios. It announced itself one lazy afternoon in our house in Isfahan, between the yellow spray roses and the empty swimming pool, whispering that I might take a moment to count my pencils. Then, that night, it grew bolder, suggesting that the weight of the blanket be distributed evenly along my arms. The itch became a part of me, like the freckle above my lip. It wasn’t the side effect of this blistering morning at the Abu Dhabi United Nations office or that aimless month in an Italian resettlement camp. Those days simply made it unbearable.

      Even in Ardestoon, my father’s village, where I tiptoed with my cousins along a riverbank, picked green plums in leafy orchards, and hiked in mountains, the itch endured. It made me tuck my grandmother’s chestnut hair into her chador with the edges of my hands, circling her face and squeezing her cheeks until I was satisfied. It took up space in my personality, as the freckle did above my lip, so that now and then I tried to straighten the papery skin of my ninety-year-old nanny, Morvarid, pressing my palms across her forehead as one would an old letter. I picked everyone’s scabs. Zippers had to be forced past the end of the line. Sometimes when furious, the itch showed up as a tic in my neck. At other times, it helped me be better. It made me color inside the lines. It made my animals sit in a row. I didn’t miss any part of a story, because I triple-checked page numbers.

      Now and then Maman joked that I was becoming fussy like Maman Masi and Morvarid, that I was becoming a tiny old lady. This was fine with me—I loved their floral chadors that smelled of henna, their ample laps and looping, gossipy stories, their dirty jokes. As a toddler, I marched around in an old flowery chador that Morvarid had sewn for me. I wore it so much it started to make my hair fall out. In a fit of anger, Maman tore it to pieces.

      At school, my scarf was lopsided and my handwriting a disaster, but my math was perfect. The teachers in my Islamic Republic girls’ school were witchy creatures who glistened in brutal black chadors. They didn’t lean down and tuck in your stray hairs. They billowed past. They struck rulers against soft palms. They shouted surnames at six-year-old girls. Nayeri. Ardestani. Khalili. Shirinpour. The minute you turned your headscarf inside out to cool your damp neck, they appeared, swaddling your bare skin again with their own hot breath. The school was stifling, and militant women were empowered to steer girls away from Western values—this made them cruel. If they didn’t like your work, they tore it to shreds as you sat humiliated, picking splinters off your unsanded desk. They taped weekly class rankings to the gray cement wall outside the classroom window. Every week twenty girls rushed that wall. The schoolyard was a concrete block. Opposite the classrooms was a putrid cave of water fountains and dirty squat toilets, the ground a mess of wet Kleenexes and cherry pits and empty tamarind packets that oozed brown goo into the drain. I liked to keep my back to it. But that meant facing the rankings, and if you turned another way, you had the nightmarish Khomeini mural, and on the fourth wall, the enormous bloody martyr fist (and rose). The only way to have a safe place to look was to be number СКАЧАТЬ