The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri

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      How can you bring yourself to sit . . . on a toilet?

      I love your yellow hair, your red freckles, your chocolate brown skin.

      Do you want to come to Maman Moti’s and meet Gigi, her snooty cat?

      But I didn’t do or ask any of those things. I didn’t know the words.

      That night Maman Moti told me to pray. “Thank God he could sew it back on,” she said. I dreamed Jesus was sitting by my bed. Again, I believed.

      In the chatter of grown-ups from my grandmother’s church and in my parents’ soothing whispers, I heard a steady refrain about gratefulness and my lucky finger. God had protected me. It was my moment to shine! But I was furious. Why isn’t anyone angry? Someone should punish that boy.

      I never went back to that school. I kept wondering why those boys were so nice to me that first day, before they began stalking me in the yard. Years later, I figured that must have been how long it took them to tell their parents about the Iranian girl.

      A few weeks later, we were back in Isfahan. I was sent to an Islamic school for girls and told that no cruel British boys would follow me. Here at home, I was safe. The school issued me a headscarf that obscured my neck and hair. They draped my body in a shapeless gray manteau. Nothing was simple or practical; nothing was as I liked. And so, one day in the first grade, I started counting things on my lucky fingers.

      •

      We returned altered. Now we were converts in the Islamic Republic, illegal Christians in an underground church. We endured three nightmare years before the day of our escape—three years of arrests and threats, of armed revolutionary guards (pasdars or Sepâh) slipping into the backseat of our car at traffic stops, bursting into Maman’s medical office. Three years of daily terrors and Maman’s excuses about faith and higher callings.

      It was a daily whiplash. The idyllic village life of my father on Fridays, sitting in my sweet grandmother’s lap, kissing her henna hair, listening to her reedy voice, eating her plum chicken or barberry rice, then traveling back to the city, to another phase of Saddam Hussein’s War of the Cities (a series of missiles that killed thousands in 1987 alone) that waited at our doorstep. Every few days, sirens blared. We taped our windows and ran to basements, where we chatted in the dark with our neighbors.

      That Maman chose this moment to become a religious activist out of her medical office baffled Baba—they fought night after night. Making a life after the revolution had been hard work. Baba had learned which patients to prioritize, which palms to grease, which tailor altered suitcases, who to smoke with in relative safety. But now Maman hurried down unsafe streets pulling two children along, her scarf falling back as she slipped into strange doors to meet Christians. She broadcast her story over an illegal Christian radio station, tucked brochures into women’s chadors under the nose of the morality police, and did everything a person could do to draw attention to her apostasy. Maybe she feels guilty, Baba thought. She had once been a devout Muslim, and though she was never political, preferring to make her strict, conservative father happy, Maman had joined other medical students in the streets to protest the Shah, willingly covering her hair.

      Teachers began to pull me away at recess. When I tried to opt out of weekly Islam classes, they held me in the schoolyard and told me that Maman would be jailed, beaten, maybe killed.

      When I told Baba that Khanom had torn our proud, far-reaching Ks and Gs, his eyes flashed. My Baba was known for his pleasure-seeking ways: his riotous humor, his sumptuous feasting, his devotion to poetry. We were kindred spirits in our secret excesses. His vices, though, weren’t all bright and merry. He loved the poppy, and it made him rage. His anger was slow to ignite, but God help you if you were the one to light him up.

      The next day in the schoolyard, we lined up by grade and performed our required chants, straining our small lungs. An older girl, a fourth or fifth grader, pressed her lips to a bullhorn and led us in muffled pledges we didn’t understand: I am the daughter of the revolution. I am the flower of my country. Death to America. Death to Israel.

      Then Baba stormed through the metal gate, striding in his Western shirt and tie past the Khomeini mural. In seconds the principal and two teachers were surrounding him, nodding, lifting and lowering hands. I could only hear snippets. “Yes, Dr. Nayeri . . .” “. . . I’ll speak with her . . .” “. . . Sir, we’re in the middle . . .” When old Ms. Yadolai arrived, he calmed, because she was sweet and harmless, like Maman Masi, his mother.

      Then Khanom stepped out from in front of our line and started toward him. Suddenly she looked small, like one of us. Was she twenty? Twenty-five? She was trying to look strong, professional, but Baba was on a crusade. He wanted her heart. “She’s just a child!” he shouted across the blacktop as he approached her at twice her pace. “You’re a grown woman. She isn’t responsible . . . She’s not your enemy.” Khanom began muttering that this was only about the handwriting. Baba railed on. “She worked hard, and I checked the work. How dare you! Where did you go to university?”

      I noted that the last question was germane to the proceedings. That it affected her credibility, her allotment of power against my father. Baba was no sexist. If she had lifted her shoulders, bellowed out “Tehran University,” and defended her actions, if she had said, “Dina is chatty, fussy, and odd. She has an itch in the brain and bad handwriting and one of her eyes is too small,” he would have shown some respect for her methods. I know this because Baba—though he smoked opium and beat my mother and was incapable of lifting a finger for himself—instructed me never to cower to men. If you flinch, they will hit harder. Show your fangs, not your throat. But this was 1987 Isfahan and most Babas didn’t teach their daughters these things. The poor woman didn’t have the training.

      She cried. She leaked before a man who shook his head at her and walked away, stopping to wave to his daughter who stood spellbound in a row of muppety gray heads, quietly growing a coarse new skin.

      That night we walked along the Thirty-Three Arches and Baba took us to Hotel Koorosh, my favorite restaurant, where Baba and other local doctors had a membership. We ate schnitzel and crème caramel on white tablecloths. We drank yogurt soda with three sprigs of mint. I knew now that my teacher wasn’t scaly or witchy or a demoness, and that it was important not to bend. And I knew that I was capable of rooting for someone who wasn’t totally on the right side of a thing. In war, villainy and good change hands all the time, like a football.

      •

      A few days later, Maman was stopped in the streets by the Gashte-Ershad. We were at a traffic stop and my younger brother, Khosrou, opened the back door and jumped out into the madness of Isfahani morning traffic. I was in the front seat beside Maman, so I didn’t see him do it. All I saw was Maman throwing the car into park and hurling her body out of the car, dashing across three lanes, and snatching him up. In the process, her scarf slipped back a few inches, revealing half a head of loose hair. Then we heard the shouting; a pasdar was pointing and ranting at Maman. “Watch your hijab, woman!” As he crossed the asphalt, his shouting grew louder, angrier. He began to curse, calling her vile names.

      “My son ran into traffic,” she said. She had already fixed her hijab so that every strand was tucked away. But he towered over her, threatening, spitting. They stood by the open driver’s side door. If he had leaned in, he would have seen the huge cross hanging on her rearview mirror. Maybe he would have made an issue of it. He shouted a few more times, gave Maman a warning, and returned to the other officers watching us from their car.

      When he was gone, Maman’s cheeks СКАЧАТЬ