The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri

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СКАЧАТЬ a noise. Maman Moti was praying. “Can I pray too?” I asked. She told me about Jesus and love and freedom, and I believed. Soon, Maman became a Christian too. Everything was a miracle after that. Maman’s metal allergy? Gone. Because of Jesus she could wear bangles again. Every night, I heard Baba shouting through the wall. What was this insanity? Didn’t she have enough sense to know that all religions were manipulative and irrational? Hadn’t she just watched her own country fall into religious madness?

      My parents had a terrible marriage, screaming-throwing fights that lasted into the early hours. He was addicted to an unnamable demon something. She would stage detoxes for him, and he sat shaking for a day or two, until some animal part of him burst out and chased her for the keys. At first, these were medical rages. Later, they were rages of coming loss. I heard stories of their courtship when Baba used to hide raw almonds around the house and write clues in verse for her to decipher, because he knew she loved riddles. He was as addicted to poetry and riverside picnics as he was to his pipe. At family meals or parties, eyes flitted to the door until he arrived. And yet, I was afraid of him. When I was two he had pulled out my front teeth because the tonsil surgeon had broken them on his way into my mouth.

      In London, Baba sensed a looming danger in Maman’s new calling. Devotion to a faraway god, too, can be a powerful addiction.

      For many nights, Maman sat up with her distant mother, a woman young enough to be her peer and whose elusive love had been Maman’s lifelong grail. They drank tea and discussed purpose and belief. My mother, Sima, was Moti’s second daughter: she wasn’t the infallible, beautiful eldest, Soheila, after whom Moti pined most, or her only son, or the precious youngest she had scooped up on the day she ran away to England, the only person she hadn’t left behind, and in whom she had invested all her English hopes. Maman was only the dutiful second. The one who read her medical books and cooked for her broken family. The one who obeyed. No one had taught her that this is how you get overlooked. She married young and found herself tricked: he was an addict. Maman hated being a doctor. Seventeenth on the Konkour meant the family gave her no choice but medicine. If she had confessed that sometimes she dreamed of owning a farm, they would’ve laughed—her father was a mayor. She went to medical school, married Baba. She found kindness with Baba’s Maman Masi, a sweet farm woman with turmeric-stained fingers who hugged and kissed, fed and praised. Maman Masi was old enough to be a mother to grown-ups.

      By the time we arrived in London, Maman was strung out and ready for life to start meaning something fast. Trapped in the Islamic Republic, she craved rebellion, freedom. Too conservative for feminism, she reached for the next best thing: Jesus. Now she shared something more vital with her mother than Soheila ever had. Now she stood for an ideal that even the Islamic Republic couldn’t take away, because she was willing to die for it.

      Maman Moti boasted that she had the gift of prophecy. She had dreamed that, one day, her four children would gather around her in the West, and they would all be true believers. Having fulfilled her duty, Maman smiled and started on dinner.

      What does it mean to believe truly? I don’t know anymore, though I did then. Maman believed in Jesus more than I had seen her believe in anything, and that made him real. Every night, we both spoke to him, either alone or together, with more passion than we’d spoken to anyone.

      We celebrated my sixth birthday with strawberry cake in the park in Golders Green. We let ice cream drip onto our fingers. We saw ginger hair, platinum hair, dark coffee skin, and we bought bananas and wandered the city, without fear of bomb sirens or morality police. Maman and Maman Moti let their over-brushed curls fall onto their shoulders. I learned to write from the left side of the page and bought three new toys: a ballerina that danced on a podium, a Barbie doll, and a row of penguins that climbed some steps and slid down a curly slide. Baba had paid a tailor to sew and pad tins of Iranian caviar into the lining of his suitcase. He passed them out one night at a pre-wedding celebration.

      When the suitcases were stashed away, I began to imagine a free life in England. I believed that we had moved to be with my dear, elegant Maman Moti and Gigi, her pompous cat. I was going to school. I would learn English. They let me believe this.

      The children were welcoming at first, teaching me English words using toys and pictures, helping me figure out the cubbies and milk line. But after a few days, a group of boys began to meet me in the yard and, pretending to play, pummel me in the stomach. Each morning it seemed a little less like play. They followed me in the playground and shouted gibberish, laughing at my dumbfounded looks. Maman Moti told me to pray and imagine God protecting me.

      One day, I was playing with some girls, pretending the door handle to the art studio was an ice cream dispenser. The art studio was a freestanding room (like a shed) in the middle of the blacktop, and we often ran in and out of it during playtime. As I pulled on the handle, a boy grabbed my hand and shoved it into the doorjamb. Another boy slammed it shut, and I heard a sickening crunch.

      At first it didn’t hurt—just a prick at the base of my pinky nail and a numbness spreading up through my hand. But then there was blood—a lot of it—seeping out of the hinge and creeping down the doorframe. The teachers ran across the playground, shouting foreign sounds. I felt my breath changing and climbing to the top of my throat where it grew quick and shallow. When I pulled my hand away, a piece of my pinky dangled by a shred of skin and fell to the ground. The boy looked ill, all pasty and slack-jawed. He didn’t run away. I was sticky with blood up to my elbow, the red smears covering the front of my shirt and now my face, too. I had wiped at my tears without thinking. That’s when the fire sparked in the place of my missing nail and shot up my arm and down the side of my torso.

      I howled.

      If I had been seven, maybe I would have handled it better. Maybe I would have collected enough English words by then to keep that gang of blond boys from tormenting me every day, from punching me in the stomach, from grabbing my ponytail at lunch. Maybe if I was seven, I could understand the words the teachers were shouting at me now.

      I soaked through the first napkin, then a second, until the springy blacktop under my feet was covered in red blossoms. Amid the chaos, one of the adults picked up the tiny piece of my finger. She wrapped it in another paper napkin and gave it to me, and that made sense. It was a piece of my body. I should keep it. I held my finger-bundle tightly against my chest as I was rushed to the hospital.

      No one asked me about it, until it was my turn to be with the doctor, a broad-shouldered man my parents’ age. More blond hair, this time over a kind face. I held the napkin out to him. He examined the nub, and he smiled at me. I didn’t understand what he said, but my mother was there, and she said that it was very clever of me to save it. I closed my eyes as he sewed the tip of my finger back on. “The nail won’t grow back,” the doctor said to my mother, and I saw the grief in her face when she told me instead that it might not grow as fast as the others.

      We drove home through the foggy streets, the same streets I had seen in cartoons and picture books back in Isfahan, with bananas sprouting from fruit stands, bunches of helium balloons, and ice cream with two sticks of chocolate Flake. What miracles England had offered me in just a month. Despite the ache in my hand, I still loved these streets. I wanted to walk up and down my grandmother’s road in West Hendon, looking for change so I could buy Maltesers and real Kit Kats (with the logo in the chocolate) and Hula-Hoops. I wanted to go to the park in Golders Green and visit the incredible Mothercare shop and the adjoining McDonald’s in Brent Cross. I wanted to keep collecting English words so I could ask my classmates all the questions I was storing up for the day my tongue adjusted and we could be friends.

      Did you know it takes a week to eat through a pack of tamarind?

      What is at the bottom of shepherd’s pie, and why does it resist so nicely when I put my fork in it?

      Who is Wee Willie Winkie? Am I the СКАЧАТЬ