The Ungrateful Refugee Page 2

  And while we grumble over what we are owed and how much we get to keep, the displaced wait at the door. They are painters and surgeons and craftsmen and students. Children. Mothers. The neighbour who made the good sauce. The funny girl from science class. The boy who can really dance. The great-uncle who always turns down the wrong street. They endure painful transformation, rising from death, discarding their faces and bodies, their identities, without guarantee of new ones.

  A Dutch officer asks an Iranian refugee, ‘Do you fear for your safety?’

  He says, ‘Yes, my two friends and I were arrested as communists twenty years ago. Each week we check into the local police headquarters. Last week, both my friends disappeared after their check. I ran.’

  ‘Have you become involved with underground communists again?’

  ‘No,’ says the petitioner. He isn’t a dissident. But he is hunted.

  ‘Then you’re safe,’ says the officer. ‘It seems your friends resumed their political activities. But you didn’t, so you have no reason to fear.’

  The assumption of the office isn’t just thoroughness and justice on the part of the Iranian government (laughable), but also infallibility. How is one to honestly navigate such a dishonest, self-serving system? The savvy ones who have asked around know not to explain how the Islamic Republic works, how often innocent people disappear. They simply say, ‘Yes, I got involved again,’ so that the officer can check a box.

  Escape marks the first day of a refugee’s life. On the day we left home, I was told that I could live however I wished, that my gender would no longer limit my potential. And this was true. I was born out of Maman’s Three Miracles. But already a limit had been imposed. Until now, the world waited for me to define myself. Would I be artistic or analytical? Shy or bold? Religious or secular? But now, my first category had been assigned: refugee, not native-born. I didn’t realise it then, because escape is euphoric. It is a plunge into fog, a burning of an old life, a murder of a previous self.

  Escape creates a chameleon, an alert creature always in disguise. What does that first blush feel like? An itch. For me, it was a daily, unrelenting discomfort in my mind and skin. It inflamed my OCD. I developed a tic in my neck. Changing colour soothed those pains for a time.

  Now, thirty years have passed; I have so much to say. The world no longer speaks of refugees as it did in my time. The talk has grown hostile, even unhinged, and I have a hard time spotting, amid the angry hordes, the kind souls we knew, the Americans and the English and the Italians who helped us, who held our hands. I know they’re still out there.

  What has changed in three decades? A reframing is in order. I want to make sense of the world’s reaction to us, of a political and historical crisis that our misfortunes have caused. I feel a duty: I’ve lived as an American for years, read Western books. I’ve been both Muslim and Christian. There are secrets I can show the native-born that new arrivals don’t dare reveal. I’ve wished to say them for thirty years and found it terrifying till now.

  In 2016, I began a journey to understand my own chaotic past. I was a new mother and confused about my purpose. I had changed my face and hair, my friends, my education, my country and job, so often that my skin felt raw. My memories had grown foggy and I had combed them ragged for fiction. I had prided myself on being a chameleon, as many immigrant children do, but now I felt muddied by it – I felt like a liar.

  I spent months travelling. I went to refugee camps in Greece, to communities of undocumented Dutch. I visited immigration lawyers and homes of new arrivals. I drank tea with refugees and asylum seekers and naturalised citizens. I spoke with mothers, lone travellers, schoolchildren. I was looking for stories, for whispers of stories hidden by shame or trauma and for lies too. I searched for people from my own refugee hostel, Hotel Barba. I spoke to my parents, who reminded me of the many complications of point of view. During my travels, I came across dozens of stories; I have chosen a few to follow in these pages, tales all the more harrowing because they are commonplace now and, in the asylum office, often disbelieved.

  And so, I’ve left out the story of the Syrian man I met in Berlin who floated with a child for seven hours then found himself cleaning a slave ship, or the jailed scholars or activists who are hit with public fatwas – even your everyday Trumpian admits that those guys deserve rescue. I’m interested in doubt, in the feared ‘swarms’. These are stories of uprooting and transformation without guarantees, of remaking the face and the body, those first murderous refugee steps – the annihilation of the self, then an ascent from the grave. Though their first lives were starkly different, these men and women were tossed onto the same road and judged together. Some of their stories are far from over, but they have already repeated them so often, practised and recited them so much, that these dramatic few months (or years) have become their entire identity. Nothing else matters to their listeners and all suffering seems petty after the miracle of escape. But did the miracle happen? Now their struggle isn’t to hang on to life, but to preserve their history, to rescue that life from the fiction pile.

  Though the truth of these stories struck me hard, I know that I, a writer, was peeking in different corners than the authorities. I wasn’t looking for discrepancies. I abhor cynical traps that favour better translators and catch out trauma victims for their memory lapses. I don’t have accent-verifying software. I saw the truth of these stories in corroborating scars, in distinct lenses on a single event, one seeing the back as vividly as another sees the front – no flat cutouts. I saw truth in grieving, fearful eyes, in shaking hands, in the anxiety of children and the sorrow of the elderly.

  And yet, to recreate these stories, I was forced to invent scenes and dialogue, like retouching a faded photograph. Writers and refugees often find themselves imagining their way to the truth. What choice is there? A reader, like an interviewer, wants specific itches scratched. You will see.

  In the meantime, where is the lie? Every crisis of history begins with one story, the first drop in a gushing river. Consume these lives as entertainment, or education or threats to your person. It is your choice how to hear their voices. Use all that you know to spot every false stroke of the brush. Be the asylum officer. Or, if you prefer, read as you would a box of letters from a ruin, dispatches from another time that we dust off and readily believe, because the dead want nothing from us.

  II.

  DARIUS

  Darius took a last drag from his cigarette and stamped it out on the tiles outside the tea shop. ‘Has she texted today?’ his friend asked.

  ‘No,’ said Darius. They were standing under Isfahan’s famous Thirty-Three Arches after an evening coffee and water pipe. ‘Let’s hope this means . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said his friend. ‘A shame, though. Such a piece.’

  Darius chuckled and said goodbye. On the way home, his pocket vibrated. Nowadays, each text sent an icy rivulet down his back. He glanced at his phone. It was her. Dariuuuuuus. What’s going on?

  He stopped in the road to reply – quick disavowals. No games. Please, Miss, stop texting. I’ve had so much trouble.

  She wrote again: It’s fine. I just want to say hello.

  Please delete my number. You’ll get me killed.

  He switched off his mobile and quickened his pace. It was already past ten. He was three streets from his house, crossing a narrow alley, when they came. ‘Hey, Seamstress!’ a voice called. Darius was a tailor, a good one. He didn’t care that they found it low. He was tall and handsome, and he knew how to make clothes that fit. One day he would have a chain of shops. One day he would make beautiful Western suits. Before he could turn, someone had punched him in the side of the neck. Then a baton bludgeoned his leg and he was down, holding his side to stay their kicks.

  In the chaos, every detail detached from reality. The world narrowed to a series of sensations and his aching brain could only make room for snippets: that they were Basijis, the pitiless volunteer militia. That they were four, or five, y
oung men. That he was so close to home that his parents could probably hear his screams. That one of them said, ‘Leave Iran or die.’

  He slept in the alley for an hour after they left. The last thing he heard was a distant echo down the alley, ‘Don’t let us see you again.’

  Then he went home. The next day, the doctors stitched his face, arms and legs. His mother cried in her room. ‘What a world these young people have inherited,’ she wailed to his father. ‘Twenty-three and our boy has known no other life. Remember the days before the revolution? Remember 1978?’ Darius was born in 1992. The paradise of old Iran gave him no nostalgia, only curiosity and some pride. Still, he wished for a chance. To make a business, a life, a family. He wanted to tell that girl that he liked her company, though he rejected her two or three times a week. He wanted to take her for coffee, to see the wind tangle her hair, to watch her laugh in a cinema. Maybe they would fall in love. Maybe they wouldn’t. They’d never know, because her parents, both Sepâh, both militant and revolutionary with jobs in the ministry, had found out and decided to kill him.

  They had no interest in questioning their daughter, telling her their plans for him or hearing that she was the aggressor.

  In a year, they returned for him. Darius’s wounds had healed, but he had scars on his arms and face. He hadn’t spoken to the girl again, though she tried. Now he sat at his mother’s sofreh cloth, eating dinner with his parents. They knocked hard and his father answered. They tore into the house, knocking a vase over and stepping on the sofreh with their shoes.

  ‘Have you texted the young lady again?’ one of them barked.

  ‘I swear, only to beg her not to text. I swear. You can look.’ Darius tried to tell them that she didn’t understand; that she felt safe because of her parents and so she thought he was safe too.

  ‘So now it’s the young lady’s fault?’ said the most senior Sepâh. They lifted him off his feet by his shirt and dragged him to their headquarters. He waited for hours. The Sepâh opened the door. He didn’t ask questions, just lobbed accusations and waited for a reaction. Darius kept his gaze on the table. ‘You have disgraced the daughter of Mr Mahmoodi.’

  ‘No, sir. I didn’t,’ he said to the table.

  ‘You are a communist operative.’

  ‘No, sir, I’m a tailor. I make shirts.’

  ‘You have been drinking.’

  ‘No, sir.’ He was so tired. It didn’t matter what he said. A guard entered, whispered to the 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 anti-regime. He has problems with Islam. He’s a drug dealer. An apostate. An 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 fifteen kilos 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 trainers 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 metres 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 tuc
k 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 colour 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 grey 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 one on the rankings.