The Ungrateful Refugee Page 17
They bring out homemade presents. Familiar music from someone’s phone strains to fill the packed room. Teenage girls gossip quietly as children run underfoot. Mothers serve the lemon cake again. Two grandmothers, both having chosen to live at Katsikas, look serenely at their displaced offspring – they remind me of my own mother, how she follows me everywhere even when I don’t want her there. A girl from the noodle morning gets up to dance. Her body swings about brazenly, expertly, and when she asks me to join her I’m embarrassed. I can’t dance like that. I don’t have access to . . . that. Others feign shock. There are clucks and titters. I was raised in America, after all. My life should be all disposable income and sexy clothes and inexplicable connections to asylum officers. And, look, I’m acting like some silly village girl. ‘Didn’t your mother teach you to dance?’ Farzaneh asks me. She jumps up now to dance with her elder daughter. She takes her hand and they move in exactly the same way, the girl’s narrow hips keeping time with her mother’s. I want them to think differently of me – that I haven’t squandered my freedom on a joyless life. But maybe it’s time they learned some things about the powers of refuge: it can’t transform you, at least not in the exact way you’d like. There’s no such a thing as a single redeeming story. And money can’t buy moves like that.
My bones ache from the work of this year, of this decade. Someone cranks up the tempo. Everyone cheers. Taraa, the grandmothers and I lean on cushions and watch the others dance. Am I this wilted? I want to sleep. Taraa tucks her twisted feet under her skirt, pats my hand and signals for my tea to be refilled. Three women in kaftans who, just that morning, I had mistaken for sixty, dance like restless thirty-year-olds, fresh from divorces.
On my last day in Greece, as the store is closing and I am saying my goodbyes, a bewildered Iranian man in his mid-forties wanders into the waiting area. I greet him in Farsi and he looks relieved. He tells me that he has just arrived at the camp. He has no clothes, no food. The volunteers register him and agree to keep the store open so he can shop. They tell him to return at 3 p.m. and they will open the men’s store so he can have his ten items. He is larger than average. I hope he will find something.
Since he knows nothing of the points, I help him choose his food. He gets eggs, rice, a kilo of bananas, oil. He puts back the oil – he is starting to understand how shopping will go here. He gets cookies, pistachios, milk. He puts back the milk. He doesn’t buy much else. Since his last twenty points won’t buy oil, he settles for four juice boxes. He leaves happy, nodding thanks.
What did he expect, this new arrival? The chaos of Calais? The horrors of the isles? Is he ready for his heart and mind to erode, bit by bit, as he waits? Does he have children in Iran? Will he send for them, or will they be born in a foreign place? Will they learn German, Italian, or English? Will he work in his old profession again? Will 2030 find him lecturing in a university, or driving an Uber, washing dishes, cleaning homes whose shelves hold a fraction of the books he once owned? These questions torture the mind and yet the world will say, ‘He made it out! He is safe!’ He has a metal container to live in, food to eat. But charity and welcome are different things. Why do we ask the desperate to strip off their dignity as the price of help? You never forget the moment you were part of a shivering horde, when another human threw you your food, when you slept in mud alongside your confused children, when you shoved and grunted beside other faceless people, some of them former architects, doctors, teachers. It can break your spirit as fast as hunger. And yet, it seems too much to ask, in these hard-hearted days, to suffer the minutiae.
From November 2017 until February 2018, Refugee Support was at Tombru camp in Bangladesh, a no-man’s land where people live in bamboo and tarpaulin structures, where they suffer severe malnutrition, poor sanitation and lack of medical care. Many are rape victims and there abound conflict injuries, cholera, diphtheria, overcrowding, sexual violence, to say nothing of the local opposition. It is a living hell. We must do better. These camps are filled with humans, just as intelligent and interesting as our best citizens. In some of their cultures, the how of things is as vital as a roof. More and more, as I write these pages, I am confident that, though refuge is undeniably today’s battle, dignity is tomorrow’s.
The night at Taraa’s, after tea and popcorn, I heard my name called from a nearby window. ‘Dina khanom. Come here.’ It was Valid, Taraa’s husband. As I approached, I smelled Iranian aubergine, my favourite, with turmeric and olive oil. I calculated it in points: olive oil forty. Turmeric perhaps ten or twenty from the ‘one week only’ shelf. ‘Come and eat with us,’ he said. The sky was darkening. I was exhausted from walking the Isoboxes and heavy-hearted and I missed my daughter. I was afraid of looking little Naser in the eyes again. I declined and though he repeated the offer thrice, as is customary, I thanked him and said I needed to sleep. He nodded, his eyes sad, and I knew I should have stayed. He was trying to make up for the uncomfortable tea, the hysteria, with a dish from home. Back in my bed, after a stale fish dinner, I wondered what could compel me to reject Iranian aubergine. Once again, I had behaved just like those Thanksgiving volunteers at the shelter in New York. I had come to this camp expressly to accept cups of tea from their hands, to sit with them and eat a bite as friends. And yet, I couldn’t face that room again, not because I was afraid of their need – I didn’t want to see the shame pulling at Valid’s eyebrows.
On the way to my rental car, I think of how nervous I have been to revisit this strange waiting place, this limbo that shaped me, that is now shaping thousands of others from my home. We will be forever linked and defined by it. Maybe one day soon, I’ll find one of my Barba neighbours, the scarred soldier who kicked the football with me, the Romanian wife, or the brick-laying grandmother. More and more often now, I conjure Barba in my memories. The refugees I knew in 1988 are thirty years past their trials. I wonder what they’ve done with their days. Was anyone tossed back? What about the American homeschoolers who gave us workbooks? Or the Italian pastor and his family who visited us bearing small luxuries and comforting prayers? I wish I could bring Barba back to life for a day, or an hour.
As I clean the coffee cups and candy wrappers from the back seat, I remember a final errand. I jog back into the camp, find a door, knock. I have knocked on this door twice already. Yesterday, Majid said, ‘No need for goodbye. Remember? Everything happens in threes.’ Now I stand at that family’s doorstep a third time, waiting to be invited in. No one answers. A neighbour pokes a head out and says, ‘They’re out. Maybe playing football.’
‘OK,’ I say, ‘I guess I have to come back then.’ I don’t like this unfinished feeling. I shuffle around, trying to decide what to do next. I scratch my neck, check inside my backpack and my pockets, for nothing. I think maybe they’ll return in a minute, or five minutes.
‘Next time in England,’ says the voice, releasing me from my wait. She recedes behind a makeshift curtain, a light blue fabric that might have been medical scrubs, and I recall that we used to say that too.
PART THREE
ASYLUM
(on stories and the alchemy of truth)
I.
We landed in Will Rogers World Airport on a stifling July day in 1989. Jim, the American writer Maman had met in Maman Moti’s church in London years before, came for us at the airport. We loaded into the car, jetlagged and confused, unable to take in the details of our new life. The Oklahoma landscape seemed like miles and miles of nothing, like we had landed on Mars. It was the barest, flattest land I had seen. Jim took us to his house. We met his wife, Mary-Jean. They gave us their loft, a wood-panelled space decorated in russets and browns, and left us to rest in a big bed.
The day we arrived in the United States, Baba sent Maman a letter demanding the return of his children. It was as if he hadn’t believed we were gone until some asylum office took us in. Maybe he hadn’t mourned us yet.
We rose early the next morning and lined up to see a parade – it was the Fourth of July, but i
t seemed that all those families on beach chairs waving American flags and eating watermelon were celebrating our arrival. The parade weaved down residential streets, house after house of actual white picket fences. Some had porch swings, American flags. We were in a film.
Jim and Jean were right-wing Evangelical Christians – I marvel now that they agreed to sponsor a family of strangers from a place they knew from a hostage crisis and a war. They spoke to Maman about her plans, making clear that she wouldn’t take advantage of any of the resources available to refugees (‘We’re hardworking Republicans,’ Jim chuckled; he wasn’t joking.) He would instruct her how to hunt for a job, a car, a driver’s licence, an apartment. In the meantime, we would live in their attic.
Jean wore tube tops far above her shorts, sprayed her hair with Aqua-Net and made bologna-mayonnaise sandwiches on plastic plates with stacks of Pringles on the side. She took Daniel and me to Toys R Us and to an ice cream shop with an unfathomable array. There is nothing, nothing, like ice cream on an Oklahoma summer night, cicadas and twangy music tickling your ear, beside a mouthy grandmother with a bare midriff and no moral police to witness it. No hijabi teachers shouting. No bullhorns thrust in your face. We drove to the Edmond Public Library where she got us library cards and we checked out thirty books each – stories about rebellious sisters and bodies in puberty and Indian ghosts and shameful history like slavery and the Trail of Tears – that would have been banned at home. I spent the next year consuming stories. I was voracious and the huge gaps in my English closed like a shallow wound. I learned to put myself in another’s skin: a kid with freckles, a girl called Blubber. I thought of Khadijeh, who had given up and sprung many leaks, and I wished I had sat beside her and said that we were all afraid, even me and Pooneh.
When I wasn’t reading, I was watching television. After every Friday night lineup (TGIF!), I had a dozen new words in my mouth. In those early days in Oklahoma, the show that captured my imagination was Perfect Strangers, an American sitcom about distant cousins, one American, one seemingly Greek, who became unlikely roommates. For me, the show wasn’t about their friendship. It was about Balki Bartokomous, a funny, hopeful, lonely immigrant. Every day I would sit on the floor of Jim and Jean’s Oklahoma living room and watch him fumble through American life without losing his joy and, for half an hour, I was comforted. For Balki, any country would be easy because he knew how to love, to be kind. Balki didn’t have an itch in his brain. He didn’t need to count. Balki was my hero.
One day Jean announced, ‘Today I’m getting you the best treat you’ve ever had in your life – the best sweet in America, hands down.’
We squealed. The best sweet in America? It would have to be better than saffron ice cream, rosewater cream puffs and pomegranate fruit leather, better than honey baklava and sugared window-bread and crunchy fried tendrils of dough drenched in honey and covered with cinnamon. It would have to be better than pistachio cookies and chocolate walnut cake and crème caramel and the queen of all desserts, the unbeatable sholezard: chilled saffron almond rice pudding. ‘Really?’ we said. ‘Thank you!’
So, when, after a hot, nauseating thirty-minute car ride, we took our first sip of a blue slushie, we were a little annoyed. We didn’t complain, because she was being kind; she just had no clue that we came from a pastry-making people. ‘Thank you, Jean!’ we said, as we had practised, and we drank enough of the blue ice water to please her. We would experience this moment again and again in our American lives. Always we kept silent and nodded our thanks, acknowledging that this was better than what we had known, that we were lucky to be here. We did this when we first tasted hard-shell tacos. We did it with iced tea, bland winter fruits, sugary yoghurts. We did it with children’s stories and songs and jokes and riddles. And some things did delight us: Tex Mex. BBQ. Corn Chip Pie. Bulgogi (I’ll get to that). Soon, whether our immigrant amazement was real or pretend, we came to believe that Iran had never had much to offer, that America was simply better – with one exception. The spell broke when it came to math. After two years without formal schooling, I expected to suffer to catch up. But it took my American classmates another two years to reach the math lesson I had abandoned in Iran, that day when we heard the sirens, dropped our pencils and fled.
Jim had a dog called Cuji – aptly named after Stephen King’s terrifying Cujo. Unless it was TV time, I stayed in the attic to read and avoid the dog. Now and then, I meandered into Jim’s office and we played a drawing game on his computer. One day, he asked if I missed any snacks from home. ‘Jean can get anything at the grocery,’ he said. ‘Just name it.’ I did badly crave one after-school snack. I tried to explain it: you fry spinach in olive oil and put it in cold yoghurt with a bunch of salt. I wanted it very much. ‘Good lord, grody!’ he said, holding his nose. ‘Didn’t you have Twizzlers or jelly beans?’ I said those things were grody and he laughed.
School began while we were still at Jim and Jean’s. I counted down the days, itching to study and learn and prove my worth. ‘Do they have dictée here?’ I asked Jean. She shrugged. I tried to explain that there existed two kinds of tests in the world: the easy kind and terrifying shouty-speedy dictée. Soon I would learn that everything in America was the easy kind, and yet Americans constantly spoke of their superiority. I began to think that I might excel here, once I learned to sound American. Wasn’t this, after all, the reason my brilliant mother was working in a factory? Sounding American, in all the various ways, would be the great project of my youth.
At school, children ching-chonged at me. I was confused – where did they think I came from? They whispered things about cat-eating and foot-binding. They said in Iran we didn’t have showers. I was terrified, recalling on the one hand how London boys had pummelled my stomach and sliced my finger and, on the other hand, the brutal consequences of confiding in teachers in Iran. I flinched a lot and remained silent. In my fantasies, I had answers: about Ardestoon picnics under leafy canopies, fussy old women with turmeric fingers, cream puffs, Maman’s seventeenth, our hammam in Isfahan with its many showerheads that could swivel and point to one spot, so that you could pretend to stand in a waterfall. Once I told a group of girls my favourite riddle about two guards (‘one always lies, one always tells the truth . . .’). They stared at me like I was foaming at the mouth. I took these stories home to Maman and we laughed about them over chickpea cookies.
We learned that you cannot talk about Iran this way. ‘Tell them about the Three Miracles,’ said Maman. ‘I bet some are believers.’
‘They’re all Christian,’ I said, burying my head in her lap.
‘No, they’re not,’ she said. ‘In Iran, it was dangerous to call yourself a Christian. Only real believers found their way to our church. Here, everyone is just born with that label. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not faith. It’s habit. Here, the Christians are like the Muslims in Iran . . . praying out of habit.’
In our school, poor children stood in a separate line to get their free lunch cards. Every two weeks, the kids with money bought theirs with bank cheques for fourteen dollars. To spare us the humiliation, Maman convinced a kind secretary to take her cheques from us, which the secretary then tore up. She gave us normal blue lunch cards, accounting for our aid separately in her ledgers. I didn’t discover this ruse for three decades.
Within weeks the children told their parents about the Iranian kids in school. Then the insults became a touch Middle Eastern: turbans and camels and such. They made fun of me for wearing certain clothes too frequently, for not owning enough pairs of jeans. After years in a uniform, I didn’t know how to choose clothes. Maman didn’t either: once she sent me to school in a yellow knit bonnet. I missed Isfahan, my grey manteau, even my headscarf. The itch ravaged me at night and I developed a tic in my neck. I grew too fat, then too wiry. Once I stole a toy from the church general store, to see what would happen. A few months after our arrival, a cheap barber chopped off all of my hair. And when my Iranian nose began to sprout, the children g
rew merciless. My pretty face was gone. I missed my friends and Baba and I became obsessed with grooming my teeth.
Meanwhile, I battled with my teacher, Miss White, over a papier-mâché topographical map of the United States, a frustrating task that was strangely central to her concerns about my education. When I tried to explain that only a few months before I had lived in Italy, at a hotel for refugees and the whole subject of social studies confused me, she looked at me sleepily and said, ‘Awww, sweetie, you must be so grateful to be here.’
‘Yes,’ I said, though I was struck by a dislike in her tone. Iranian culture relies on hidden meanings and subtext. Important things go loudly unsaid and children are taught to hear them. My American teacher, though, was accustomed to being taken literally by children, even when the gaps in her words brimmed with meaning. She was prone to sarcastic asides she thought we wouldn’t understand. Once when I asked for ‘a rubber’, she smirked at me, then said, ‘Lord, you’re serious. Say eraser, honey.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘What’s rubber mean?’
Miss White squinted. ‘It’s a material used in making erasers.’
Her eyes told me that rubber is the American word for something wicked. Chasing up that mystery on the playground is how I first learned about sex, a fact that my mother, the doctor, refused to confirm for years. I also cemented my status as a blacktop pariah.
‘She’s a perv and a cat-eater!’ said a curly blonde named Dawn.
My reactions only made things worse. ‘But where did you get the cat thing?’ I pleaded with the popular girls.
‘So, you admit to being a perv?’ said Dawn.
‘No,’ I said, ‘but I know where that came from.’
Again, I had no place to look at recess. I sat near the jungle gym facing the building, reading, trying to avoid the gaze of children and teachers. And I learned something else from the rubber episode: that teachers are the same around the world; that the kind ones aren’t clustered in America, as I had expected. Every school the world over is full of Khanoms or Misses.