The Ungrateful Refugee Page 27

  I write a Facebook post asking if anyone knows anyone. They don’t. I watch videos of the boy keeping the ball in the air with his feet. I don’t know how to judge its impressiveness. I call his coach. I ask him what the family should do for their son. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘the processes are in place. Recruiters come. The top kids get seen.’ I know this. The family is already in England, a country that takes its football seriously. Now they need to sweat. That’s the rule. ‘He should just keep playing. Keep getting stronger.’

  I tell Minoo – I give her a long, thrilling pep talk about the road ahead, the toil and the sacrifice, the glorious final scene when her son doesn’t get into Arsenal, but has worked hard enough to get into Oxford! How about that? My heart is beating – I love this story. She is disappointed.

  We meet for coffee at a café in Camden. Her eyes are puffy, her thin body weighed down. She drags herself. It’s always a struggle to pay; she insists on buying my coffee though they’re living off fumes. I have to pretend that I’m sensitive to the subtle differences in foam and that I have to be the one to order while she watches our purses. I return with two cappuccinos and a cookie. ‘You look tired,’ I say. ‘You need some sugar.’

  ‘We can’t keep living like this,’ she says. The council has put the family of four, including a very ill husband, in a studio apartment so small you can touch the bathroom door and the kitchen table from the bed (which the four have shared for nearly a year). It’s a coffin. Her husband is growing sicker. The children can’t be in the flat after school, to do homework or to play, because it’s stifling and unhealthy. I try to relate – Sam and I are temporarily living with his parents outside London with our baby. Everything is in flux. ‘In a year, we’ll both be in our own homes,’ I tell her. ‘We’ll have dinner parties with ghorme sabzi and we’ll say: Remember the days when we were homeless and miserable and we couldn’t tell the flat white from the cappuccino because the new Gail’s barista was so perfectly useless?’ She laughs. ‘My Farsi is a mess,’ I say.

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ she says. ‘They say I have to practise English.’

  ‘We’ll speak English then,’ I say. She smiles through her misery.

  The next day in the private high school, one of my students arrives early to class. She’s arranging a brunch for her friends. She sighs loudly and slams her laptop shut. ‘If we don’t reserve today, we’ll end up at Nando’s!’

  ‘What’s Nando’s?’ I ask. It sounds familiar.

  ‘A terrible restaurant chain,’ she says. Now I remember. Kaweh spoke of it. If your kids are begging for Nando’s . . . I tell my student about Kaweh, the asylum lawyer, and about living off thirty-five dollars a week. She says, ‘Actually, to be honest, I secretly like Nando’s.’

  Months pass. My real estate chain closes and Sam, Elena and I move into a flat in London. The council keeps sending Minoo letters, putting off hope of new housing. Her husband’s condition worsens. Her children grow restless. I’m leaving soon for Greece, to visit two refugee camps. Maman Moti appears, with her manic devotion to a strange man, her neighbours with the radiation machine pointed through the planks of her floor.

  We decide to have a birthday party for Elena. I invite Minoo and her family. I ask Maman Moti if she’ll come and speak to Minoo about becoming British: the initial struggle of transforming, the slow falling into place.

  ‘I don’t want anything to do with refugees,’ says Maman Moti, her lips tightening. She is adamant on this point – she repeats it fearfully. ‘I got away from that life. I’m not going to chase Iranians here.’

  She clears her throat and adjusts herself at my kitchen table. She wrings her hands. She wants to help me, but breaking her rule pains her. The English pride she’s cultivating is ever at odds with latent immigrant self-loathing. I try another way. ‘You can be an example to this poor girl.’

  She looks me over and nods. ‘Of course, dear. I’ll talk to her.’

  Maman Moti’s philosophy is full-on assimilation. ‘You don’t wear an Eskimo coat in the Sahara,’ she says. ‘In England, it’s best to be English.’ For this, she considers herself progressive, modern. Once, in reply to an obvious phishing scam email, she wrote a message that began, ‘Dear Microsoft, thank you for your kind letter.’ She takes great care with etiquette. ‘How society sees you makes your personality,’ she says.

  She seems concerned about our obligations to Minoo. ‘But, darling, I don’t have advice. This girl must leave the past in the past.’

  ‘I know, Maman Moti,’ I say, ‘I just want her to see how far you’ve come, that your life is easy now. I want her to see that it’s possible.’

  Maman Moti nods gravely. At the party, she sits in a corner as she is served. To be fair, she’s the oldest person in the room. No one expects her to mingle or blend. She speaks with Minoo for a while – they both look deeply uncomfortable. And yet in my imagination, they are two ends of the same story. Don’t they each crave a word from the other side?

  ‘I’m finished with that life,’ Maman Moti reminds us, afterward. ‘I told her to learn English immediately, no excuses, no sadness.’

  ‘Good,’ I say. I’m unsatisfied. I had imagined tears and hugs and grandmotherly wisdom. ‘What about the culture? What did you tell her?’

  ‘To leave it behind! Don’t go looking for other Iranians. Befriend the English. Learn English ways. I like Iranian food, but I also like tea in the afternoon with nice tea biscuits. I like cakes by Gü. Do you know Gü?’

  What is she babbling about? ‘Gü is nice,’ she sighs. ‘I told her to keep her eyes on Jesus. Keep her eyes on the Lord and all will be well.’ Her faith saddens me – all she wants is to succumb to someone. How can her response to exile be capitulation?

  She adds, about her talk with Minoo, ‘I explained that the East rejected the Lord and so, He rejected them. Now the West accepts Him and they have all the prosperity. We follow our Lord to prosperity.’

  A few months after Elena’s birthday party, Mom visits from the States. I invite Maman Moti to lunch. She brings Gü. It’s delicious. Maman is weirdly deferential to her, using formal Farsi pronouns, serving Maman Moti as if she’s her mother’s personal handmaid and not a woman with a doctorate. Wow, I think, this retired housewife really has her shit figured out. She hasn’t just assimilated to England: she could teach negotiations at Harvard Business School. Just withhold until you’re worshipped. Funny she doesn’t follow this rule with her English friends, on whom she dotes.

  I decide to invite Minoo again, for a kebab cookout in the garden. I ask Maman if she can speak to her. ‘They’re a family of exiled Christians!’ I say. ‘They’re exactly like us. It would be unchristian not to.’

  When they arrive, Mom begins to grill them almost right away. Which church did you attend? Who was your pastor? Did you know so-and-so? When did you become born again? How do you like your church here? She is making a point of using certain code words: flock, congregation, believers, born again. I am appalled and embarrassed. But I know what Maman is doing. Their presence is bringing out her survival instinct. After thirty years, she lives in a universe where frauds have to be rooted out.

  Minoo’s husband answers evasively. He pretends to recognise a name or an address – the reasons seem clear to me. She is being pushy. Or maybe he’s afraid of sharing information with strangers. Or maybe, as Pooyan says, he finds Christians in the West disappointing – maybe we’re not devout enough for him. I definitely am not. Minoo helps in the kitchen. She’s attentive and quick. When she smiles I notice a drop in the white of her eye, like a lodged tear. It’s always been there; I’m sure I’ve seen it. She marvels at my uselessness in the kitchen. ‘Do you do any housework?’

  I explain that Sam and I have a reverse-gender arrangement. I make the money. I do as much around the house as her husband would – more.

  ‘That makes no sense, Dina joon,’ she says. I fume.

  That night, Maman wants to talk. ‘They’re not Christians,’ she says.
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  ‘How—’ I begin, then change tack. ‘So what? They’re refugees.’

  ‘Dina!’ she says, frantic. ‘You don’t know their secrets. Didn’t you see? They’re afraid of their shadow. You have a baby girl. Are you insane?’

  Oh my God – my pulse quickens. To what dangers have I exposed my baby girl? How do I fix it? Maybe if I make some calls I can get my hands on their papers. Wait . . . No. No, this is in my head. In our heads. In our insane, rattled heads. I shake it off. ‘Of course they’re scared!’ I shout at her. ‘They live in a three-by-three hole for a year, then come out one time and you’re suspicious because they’re not socially perfect? They agree too much? They say what we want to hear? They’re just afraid of us because we’re settled and intimidating! Don’t you remember how scared we were?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she says, calmer now. ‘But we were never afraid of our story. The truth is the truth and it has to be told. And when did I say they have to be socially perfect? We were having a nice talk about home and you were so uncomfortable and making everyone else uncomfortable with your behaviour – you should have seen yourself.’

  I fill a water glass with white wine. I feel the urge to abuse Sam, but he’s doing the dishes alone and I’m not that much of a hobgoblin yet. I wish I had one of my old kick bags from Taekwondo. I take my wine to bed and spend ten minutes remembering the way a double kick-pad claps against a roundhouse, stinging the top of your foot. It’s not the singular sound of home – I haven’t decided what that is yet – but one of them.

  For a brief period early on, I translated words and customs for an unwilling Maman. I was only ten and, within months, I understood our new country in ways she couldn’t fathom. Over time, she accepted some of my wild claims as American basics but, back then, she glared as if I were culpable in the West’s sins. Some things I couldn’t make her accept:

  All church youth groups have a costume party for Halloween. They are not secret pagans. We don’t have to move to an underground church.

  Ice skating is a tough sport. People don’t practise for eighteen hours a day just so they can hold each other by the crotch on television.

  If a boy with longish hair knocks on our door, it’s because I have no friends. He isn’t selling drugs. ‘Student Council’ isn’t the name of his gang. There’s zero chance he’ll talk to me tomorrow.

  It was dispiriting, this period after (and before) Maman and I spoke the same language, when we were unmoored from each other and I was a child drifting in a lonely world. I didn’t forgive her for it until I was twenty-eight, when I moved to a French village and understood what it meant to burn with shame as a cheesemonger or a grocery clerk snorts as if you’re stupid, oblivious to the name or reputation of your illustrious university.

  After I met Minoo, I tried to explain what would soon happen to her daughter. ‘She will become English!’ I said. ‘And you shouldn’t be frightened. She’ll do so much good with her fluency. She’ll be able to slip in and out of every party, from Norooz dinner at grandma’s, to Easter dinner with the queen, like a beautiful little chameleon with her gorgeous dark hair and clever eyes.’ She squinted at the unknown word. ‘Never mind,’ I said, because I didn’t want to say lizard. ‘She’ll be happy and English.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Minoo sadly, ‘but what about me?’ I didn’t feel sorry for her then; I thought only of her daughter, of how Minoo would drag the girl back as she struggled to fit in. I thought of Maman’s refusal to let me shave my legs, wear shorts or skirts. Growing up was a constant fight with Maman, who saw every adolescent alteration as surrender to the hedonistic West: her child becoming a loose American teenager. Maybe I was meant to help Minoo’s daughter. As for Minoo’s transformation, I knew too little of that. I thought, I’ll introduce her to Maman and Maman Moti.

  It wasn’t a mistake. The morning after the awkward cookout, Mom and I spoke again. We had both had a sleepless night. I made a pot of coffee. She said, ‘Minoo is a sweet girl. Of course we’ll help. Of course you should befriend her.’ The instinct to cut all ties from the old life is so strong – my mother, brave as she is, is still nervous around new arrivals, still afraid of being hunted down by the past. As is her mother. As am I.

  Later we talked about perspective in people’s stories, what is true and what is imagined and whose memory is most reliable. ‘Last night I was thinking,’ she said. ‘The gospels are four versions of the same story. And they are all somehow true.’ It was two long, narrow roads, finally crossing.

  In the early summer Camden Council sends Minoo another noncommittal letter. She asks if I can do anything. I join her for a visit to her caseworker. I bring Sam’s brother (called Daniel, like my brother), a barrister. After months of refusing to let me see her home, always meeting me in cafés and parks and Tube stops, Minoo relents and we visit. There’s nowhere to look – her husband sits beside their children on the bed. A callous part of me wants him to reach out and touch the bathroom door, the kitchen table, so I can confirm this for my rant to the council bureaucrats. Minoo serves fruit and tea. We stare at a pile of grim papers.

  At the meeting, a young caseworker explains the process. Minoo can apply for medical disability points for her husband and she can use those points toward a suitable home in Camden. Otherwise, she can get in line for subsidised private housing. It’s a labyrinth. After an hour, I think I understand it. I ask if the two processes can begin simultaneously, so that she doesn’t have to wait twice if the request for points is rejected. The caseworker says ‘Yes.’ I translate as she takes Minoo through a series of humiliating forms. No Iranian would continue being my friend after I’ve witnessed and taken part in this abjection. When we leave, I ask about the timeline and next steps. The caseworker says, ever cheerfully, that the application will be processed within days and the medical points resolved.

  When we don’t hear from the council in several weeks, I call again. I can’t reach the worker, though she sends annoyed emails hinting that my involvement isn’t welcome. When I reach her by phone, she says Minoo’s file is missing key medical statements. ‘You never mentioned those,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe not in the meeting with you, but Minoo knew.’ She didn’t.

  ‘But I triple-checked every step with you. I asked many times. I made a list.’ We chase up the forms. Then they say that it would help to have a letter attesting to the worsening of the husband’s condition in the flat. We jump through hoop after hoop until the request is rejected. We discover that the two processes were indeed not simultaneous – the caseworker claims never to have said that it was. The wait begins again at day one, with Minoo’s small children still sharing a bed with a sick man and Camden Council officials claiming, straight-faced, that this is acceptable to them.

  ‘They made my neighbour wait four years,’ Minoo tells me, her voice breaking. ‘Then her kids grew and they said she was no longer eligible.’

  Minoo falls into a depression. A friend at Amnesty International tells me that Minoo’s situation is enviable compared with some others’. She reminds me of the twenty-eight-day rule: asylum seekers have four weeks after acceptance to find a home, a bank account and a job, or they face the streets. At least Minoo’s family has the one bed, the roof, the sink. She’s further along the long road to respectable Britishness.

  Minoo and I drift apart. I try to adjust to the way she communicates. Again, I fail. Iranian pride has only two textures: marble hard or crumbling. It’s never a malleable, habitable thing. Her situation makes hers worse. She responds in two-word texts, even to open questions. Then, randomly, she says she misses me very much. She can’t calibrate. I realise that I’m her only friend. She is trying to behave as she thinks British friends do – cool, unmoved. I recoil. Then I text again. We meet in parks and she always shows up at the wrong end of the park, then suddenly forgets how to read a map. She turns off the data on her phone, so she doesn’t receive my texts or WhatsApp messages and she won’t place a call. Even if she’s lost, she waits fo
r me to ring her. I understand why. I’ve seen her finances – it still makes me angry. Where is her savvy? Her agency and drive? Did she leave it in Iran? Because this is a chance to start again. ‘So, start already!’ I want to scream. I tell her that it’s enviable to live in central London, that she should be spending her days in libraries, reading, studying English, visiting museums. She shrugs listlessly and I get it, I get it, I get it. But.

  Maybe this is my role. I’m not very good at friendship. I’m intense and impatient with other people’s needs. But there are things only I am allowed to say – because I understand Iranian doublespeak and I was a refugee once. No British person would ever tell Minoo to stop the damn moping. But I can say that. I can say, ‘OK, saving phone minutes is legit, but avoiding the library is laziness. You have an Oyster card. You have Google Maps. Stop crippling yourself with sorrow.’ I try to say it. But she’s so sad. How does anyone communicate with her? I start pummelling myself with jokes instead. I joke about my itchy brain, my post-baby tummy, my grey hairs, the men who dumped me, my bad cooking (I’m a good cook, but Minoo is undoubtedly better), my failures as a daughter. Is this how people help the depressed? I’ve become a circus clown, a jester.

  That night, reading Edward Said’s Orientalism, I stumble on a passage that soothes me. One day, years from now, I will show it to Minoo’s daughter. ‘The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home, the more easily is one able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision. The more easily, too, does one assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance.’ Maybe I’m not detached enough from home to relate to Minoo. Or maybe she just needs a professional. We visit the National Gallery and I walk her children through the Tudor rooms, telling stories of Henry VIII and his wives, the rivalry of Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots. ‘Who is the winner, do you think?’ I ask them. ‘England’s most glorious queen or the one who mothered every king and queen since?’ The children love the scandals. Minoo follows glumly. ‘How do you know all this?’ she mutters. ‘Books, Minoo joon,’ I say, pointedly. She looks away. ‘Books,’ I whisper to her daughter, winking. She giggles.