The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri

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СКАЧАТЬ Khadijeh, whose name routinely appeared at the bottom of the list, released a quiet river of pee at her desk. She never moved. She sat still as her gray uniform slowly darkened below the waist, as drops of sweat released her bangs from her scarf, and she wept without a sound. She had fallen three sentences behind in the dictée and given up, not just on the test, but on the whole business of civilization. What a quick, uncomplicated solution, to go feral: to sit there, leaking, waiting to be dragged out by a murder of Islamic Republic schoolteachers, listening for the snap and swish of the principal’s chador down the hall.

      On the day of Khadijeh’s quiet surrender, I was number one on the list, so I had a place to look.

      At day’s end, I took the short way home, down alleyways lined with drainage gutters where live fish traveled the old city. I ran to my room and thought of Khadijeh, how she had just let go. I pitied and envied her. I knelt to examine my pencil tips, then checked the bookshelf for the seven books I had recently bought, and the four I had bought before that. It wouldn’t be right to count to eleven—I had to count the seven books, then the four. And the next time I bought books, say three of them, I would count the three, the seven, and if I still remembered them, the four, each time I left my room. When I was finished, I breathed deeply until the thing floating too high in my chest (I imagined a metal bar) had moved back down, away from my throat. Years later, when I heard the story of Sisyphus, I said, “Like pushing down the bar,” and tapped my chest; my teacher frowned.

      The following week, during silent reading time, a present arrived for me. This was custom. If you ranked high, your parents could send a gift to be presented to you in front of the class. Ms. Yadolai, my first-grade teacher, an old woman I loved and whose name is the only one I remember, brought in the gift to my third-grade classroom. She was Baba’s dental patient, so he must have delivered the package to her. Baba never bothered with details; he entrusted everything to friends. It was a book of constellations. Everyone clapped. I lifted the lid of my desk and slipped the book inside next to my pencils and the tamarind packet I had squeezed from a corner and rolled shut, like toothpaste.

      Khadijeh never came back.

      I was instructed to work on my handwriting. I sat with Baba on the living room carpet, an elaborate red Nain knotted on Maman Masi’s own loom, and we ate sour cherries with salt and we practiced. I asked Baba about Khadijeh. He said that everyone was made for a certain kind of work, and maybe Khadijeh had realized early that school wasn’t for her. This is why I had to earn twenties in every subject, to distinguish myself from the Khadijehs of the world and to reach my great potential. “You are the smartest,” said Baba. “You can be a doctor or engineer or diplomat. You won’t have to do housework. You’ll marry another doctor. You’ll have your PhD.” His voice contained no doubt or worry. It was just how things were destined to be. “Your mother came in seventeenth for the Konkour. Not seventeenth percentile. Seventeenth person in the country.” If I had to make a list of mantras from my childhood, it would certainly include not seventeenth percentile, seventeenth person. My mother’s national university entrance exam result was legend. I came from test-taking stock.

      We did such good work, Baba and I. He emptied his pockets of pistachio and chocolate and sour cherry, and we sat together on the floor, cross-legged and knee to knee, whispering secrets and jokes as we drew bold, stout-hearted Ks and Gs. I clicked our finished pages into my rawhide messenger bag and, the next day, I took them to show my teacher, a woman whom we called only by the honorific khanom.

      Khanom scanned my pages as I straightened up in my chair, my hands tucked beneath my haunches. She frowned and exhaled heavily through her nose. Then she glanced at the girls watching us from the edges of their scarves, tapped the pages straight against my desktop, and tore them in half. She reached for my practice notebook and tore the used pages in that too, taking care not to destroy any unused ones. This was to show me that my work was worth less than those unfilled pages.

      Tears burned in my nose. I imagined a metal storm-door shutting over my eyeballs, so that nothing could get out. I reminded myself of Khadijeh, her watery surrender. I imagined that under her chador, Khanom’s skin was dry and scaly and she needed girlish tears to soften her, as she couldn’t afford black-market Nivea Creme. I tried to pity her for that.

      A few years before first grade, my family had spent three months in London. There, my mother had converted to Christianity. Since our return, teachers had been probing me for information. Maman and Baba were respected in Isfahan. They had medical offices and friends and degrees from Tehran University. Maman had round, melancholy eyes and Diana haircuts in jet-black. She wore elegant dresses and a stethoscope. Her briefcase was shiny polished leather. No schoolgirl rawhide and click-buckle for her. But Maman was an apostate now, handing out tracts to her patients, a huge cross dangling in her windshield. Baba may have remained respected and generous and Muslim, but that wasn’t enough to protect me from abuse when I declared myself Maman’s ally.

      “What is your religion?” the teachers would ask, every day during recess. They would pull me aside, to a bench between the toilet cave and the nightmarish Khomeini mural, and they would ask this again and again.

      “I’m Christian,” I would say. In those days, I thought Muslim literally meant “a bad person,” and no individual or event helped dispel that notion—not even Baba, or his mother, Maman Masi, who was devout. We lived under constant threat of Iraqi bombs. We endured random arrests, executions, morality police roving the streets for sinful women (Gashte-Ershad or “Guidance Patrol,” they now call it). Though they were picked off and dragged to gruesome fates, the underground Christians we had befriended seemed consumed with kindness. Meanwhile, my teachers pecked hungrily at us all day, looking for a chance to humiliate.

      Later in life, far from Isfahan, I would meet kindhearted Muslims and learn that I had been shown half a picture: that all villainy starts on native soil, where rotten people can safely be rotten, where government exists for their protection. It is only among the outsiders—the rebels, foreigners, and dissidents—that welcome is easily found. Since our return from London, we had lost our native rights; we were exiles in our own city, eyes suddenly open to the magic and promise of the West, and to the villains we had been.

      •

      In 1985, when I was nearly six and hadn’t yet attended my Islamic girls’ school, we visited my beloved Maman Moti—Maman’s mother—in London. Years before, Maman Moti had run away to England, leaving all but one daughter behind. That spring, we went to watch my aunt Sepideh, Maman’s youngest sister, marry an Englishman. Our stay was temporary, a visit followed by a half-hearted stab at emigration. It only lasted a few months, but I was enrolled in school for the first time. I spoke only Farsi.

      In the airport, the guards tore through our things. Baba seemed unbothered as he unzipped his suitcases and buttered up the guards. “Ei Vai, did I leave an open pack of Lucky Strikes with my shirts? Agha, you have them. The smell will ruin the fabric . . . I smoke Mehrs, but people give the strangest things to their dentist.”

      We were surrounded by so much clamor and haste. A guard picked up Babaeejoon, a beloved stuffed sheep, and turned him over in his hand. He took out a knife and ripped open its belly, pulling out its stuffing while my brother, Khosrou, cried on Maman’s shoulder. “Be brave, Khosrou joon,” Baba said. “They have to check so bad people don’t smuggle things.”

      Though Babaeejoon had been my gift after tonsil surgery, his death became my brother’s trauma, because at the time of his disembowelment, Babaeejoon was Khosrou’s sheep. I soothed myself by reciting everyone’s ages: Aunt Sepi was nineteen. Maman was twenty-eight. Maman Moti was forty-four. I was five, Khosrou two. The airline served saffron rice pudding.

      That night, I slept beside Maman Moti, whom I called my city grandmother. With her rolled hair and silky blouses, she was the opposite of Maman Masi, СКАЧАТЬ