The Ungrateful Refugee Page 3

  One morning, Khadijeh, whose name routinely appeared at the bottom of the list, released a quiet river of pee at her desk. She never moved. She sat still as her grey uniform slowly darkened below the waist, as drops of sweat released her bangs from her scarf and she wept without a sound. She had fallen three sentences behind in the dictée and given up, not just on the test, but on the whole business of civilisation. What a quick, uncomplicated solution, to go feral: to sit there, leaking, waiting to be dragged out by a murder of Islamic Republic schoolteachers, listening for the snap and swish of the principal’s chador down the hall.

  On the day of Khadijeh’s quiet surrender, I was number one on the list so I had a place to look.

  At day’s end, I took the short way home, down alleyways lined with drainage gutters where live fish travelled the old city. I ran to my room and thought of Khadijeh, how she had just let go. I pitied and envied her. I knelt to examine my pencil tips, then checked the bookshelf for the seven books I had recently bought and the four I had bought before that. It wouldn’t be right to count to eleven – I had to count the seven books, then the four. And the next time I bought books, say three of them, I would count the three, the seven and if I still remembered them, the four, each time I left my room. When I was finished, I breathed deeply until the thing floating too high in my chest (I imagined a metal bar) had moved back down, away from my throat. Years later, when I heard the story of Sisyphus, I said, ‘like pushing down the bar,’ and tapped my chest; my teacher frowned.

  The following week, during silent reading time, a present arrived for me. This was custom. If you ranked high, your parents could send a gift to be presented to you in front of the class. Ms Yadolai, my first-grade teacher, an old woman I loved and whose name is the only one I remember, brought in the gift to my third-grade classroom. She was Baba’s dental patient, so he must have delivered the package to her. Baba never bothered with details; he entrusted everything to friends. It was a book of constellations. Everyone clapped. I lifted the lid of my desk and slipped the book inside next to my pencils and the tamarind packet I had squeezed from a corner and rolled shut, like toothpaste.

  Khadijeh never came back.

  I was instructed to work on my handwriting. I sat with Baba on the living-room carpet, an elaborate red Nain knotted on Maman Masi’s own loom; we ate sour cherries with salt and we practised. I asked Baba about Khadijeh. He said that everyone was made for a certain kind of work and maybe Khadijeh had realised early that school wasn’t for her. This is why I had to earn twenties in every subject, to distinguish myself from the Khadijehs of the world and to reach my great potential. ‘You are the smartest,’ said Baba. ‘You can be a doctor or engineer or diplomat. You won’t have to do housework. You’ll marry another doctor. You’ll have your PhD.’ His voice contained no doubt or worry. It was just how things were destined to be. ‘Your mother came in seventeenth for the Konkour. Not seventeenth percentile. Seventeenth person in the country.’ If I had to make a list of mantras from my childhood, it would certainly include: not seventeenth percentile, seventeenth person. My mother’s national university entrance exam result was legend. I came from test-taking stock.

  We did such good work, Baba and I. He emptied his pockets of pistachio and chocolate and sour cherry and we sat together on the floor, cross-legged and knee-to-knee, whispering secrets and jokes as we drew bold, stouthearted Ks and Gs. I clicked our finished pages into my rawhide messenger bag and, the next day, I took them to show my teacher, a woman whom we called only by the honorific Khanom.

  Khanom scanned my pages as I straightened up in my chair, my hands tucked beneath my haunches. She frowned and exhaled heavily through her nose. Then she glanced at the girls watching us from the edges of their scarves, tapped the pages straight against my desktop and tore them in half. She reached for my practice notebook and tore the used pages in that too, taking care not to destroy any unused ones. This was to show me that my work was worth less than those unfilled pages.

  Tears burned in my nose. I imagined a metal storm-door shutting over my eyeballs, so that nothing could get out. I reminded myself of Khadijeh, her watery surrender. I imagined that under her chador Khanom’s skin was dry and scaly and she needed girlish tears to soften her, as she couldn’t afford black-market Nivea Creme. I tried to pity her for that.

  A few years before first grade, my family had spent three months in London. There, my mother had converted to Christianity. Since our return, teachers had been probing me for information. Maman and Baba were respected in Isfahan. They had medical offices and friends and degrees from Tehran University. Maman had round, melancholy eyes and Diana haircuts in jet-black. She wore elegant dresses and a stethoscope. Her briefcase was shiny polished leather. No schoolgirl rawhide and click-buckle for her. But Maman was an apostate now, handing out tracts to her patients, a huge cross dangling in her windshield. Baba may have remained respected and generous and Muslim, but that wasn’t enough to protect me from abuse when I declared myself Maman’s ally.

  ‘What is your religion?’ the teachers would ask, every day during recess. They would pull me aside, to a bench between the toilet cave and the nightmarish Khomeini mural and they would ask this again and again.

  ‘I’m Christian,’ I would say. In those days, I thought Muslim literally meant ‘a bad person’, and no individual or event helped dispel that notion – not even Baba or his mother, Maman Masi, who was devout. We lived under constant threat of Iraqi bombs. We endured random arrests, executions, morality police roving the streets for sinful women (Gashte-Ershad or ‘Guidance Patrol’, they called it). Though they were picked off and dragged to gruesome fates, the underground Christians we had befriended seemed consumed with kindness. Meanwhile, my teachers pecked hungrily at us all day, looking for a chance to humiliate.

  Later in life, far from Isfahan, I would meet kindhearted Muslims and learn that I had been shown half a picture: that all villainy starts on native soil, where rotten people can safely be rotten, where government exists for their protection. It is only amongst the outsiders, the rebels, foreigners and dissidents that welcome is easily found. Since our return from London, we had lost our native rights; we were exiles in our own city, eyes suddenly open to the magic and promise of the West and to the villains we had been.

  In 1985, when I was nearly six and hadn’t yet attended my Islamic girls’ school, we visited my beloved Maman Moti – Maman’s mother – in London. Years before, Maman Moti had run away to England, leaving all but one daughter behind. That spring, we went to watch my Aunt Sepideh, Maman’s youngest sister, marry an Englishman. Our stay was temporary, a visit followed by a half-hearted stab at emigration. It only lasted a few months, but I was enrolled in school for the first time. I spoke only Farsi.

  At the airport, the guards tore through our things. Baba seemed unbothered as he unzipped his suitcases and buttered up the guards. ‘Ei Vai, did I leave an open pack of Lucky Strikes with my shirts? Agha, you have them. The smell will ruin the fabric . . . I smoke Mehrs, but people give the strangest things to their dentist.’

  We were surrounded by so much clamour and haste. A guard picked up Babaeejoon, a beloved stuffed sheep, and turned him over in his hand. He took out a knife and ripped open its belly, pulling out its stuffing while my brother, Khosrou, cried on Maman’s shoulder. ‘Be brave, Khosrou joon,’ Baba said. ‘They have to check so bad people don’t smuggle things.’

  Though Babaeejoon had been my gift after tonsil surgery, his death became my brother’s trauma, because at the time of his disembowelment, Babaeejoon was Khosrou’s sheep. I soothed myself by reciting everyone’s ages: Aunt Sepi was nineteen. Maman was twenty-eight. Maman Moti was forty-four. I was five, Khosrou two. The airline served saffron rice pudding.

  That night, I slept beside Maman Moti, whom I called my city grandmother. With her rolled hair and silky blouses, she was the opposite of Maman Masi, whose henna hair I had never seen below her temples. I heard 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 would sit 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 grownups.

  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 any more, 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. 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 were seven, I would 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 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 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 KitKats (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 only one who finds him sinister?

  Where are your hammams? Why do you bathe next to the
toilet?

  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 grownups from my grandmother’s church and in my parents’ soothing whispers, I heard a steady refrain about gratitude 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 had been 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 grey 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.