The Ungrateful Refugee Page 5

  ‘You can lead tomorrow’s morning exercises,’ she said. ‘Don’t be sad.’ She leaned down to my height and touched my cheek. ‘We’re friends again.’ Then she hugged me and muttered encouraging words in my ear. She smelled like my mother’s soap and I wrapped my arm around her neck. Under her chador, a familiar lump comforted me; a ponytail, bound low, hanging down to the top of her shoulders. It made me trust her: yes, my teacher was a person. Her body wasn’t covered in scales. She had real hair tied up in a girlish ponytail. I didn’t want to stop touching it, but a moment later she pulled away.

  I slogged home in cement shoes, feeling the breath of the four horsemen on my neck. Was there any way to escape hell if I led a schoolyard full of girls in chanting death to Israel, God’s own people? I might as well drive the nails into Jesus’s hands and feet. I pictured Rhoda and Yoonatan, Brother Yusuf savouring my mother’s Salad Olivieh and strapping on his Father Christmas belly. I would be betraying them all.

  Alone in my bedroom, I agonised. I took off my uniform and dropped it in the laundry basket. I sat at my desk, tried to do math through tears. How would I survive tomorrow? Aside from damning myself to hell, it would be humiliating. I had been so brazen and boastful about my new faith. A few hours later, Maman burst in. ‘What is this?’ she said. She was holding my manteau in one hand, the scrap of paper with the chants in the other. ‘Why is this garbage in your pocket?’

  The metal bar was so far up my throat now that I could hardly take a breath. I confessed everything. ‘You cannot do it, Dina,’ she said, then she went on to repeat the story of Peter denying Jesus three times and Judas and every other betrayer in the Bible and in history. ‘When the class lines up for chants, what do you normally do?’

  ‘I don’t say them. I ask Jesus for strength, like you told me to.’

  ‘You tell your teacher that your mother forbids you. Tell her that in our faith we don’t recite things. Don’t argue with her about the text. Then get back in the line and do as you always do, OK?’

  I nodded.

  The next day, I dragged myself to school. I separated from my body with each step and by the time I passed through the school gate, crossed the blacktop and climbed the podium, I was numb and limp, hovering outside myself. I was already in Baba’s car speeding toward Ardestoon, toward my Morvarid’s withered henna arms. The stage was only inches from the ground. I read the words into the red bullhorn, barely waiting for the back chant. I conjured up the blond London boys who had punched me and severed my finger and I thought, maybe viciousness is genetic; maybe some people, like British boys and Persian girls, are bred for it.

  When my volume dropped, a teacher straightened my back and the bullhorn so that it touched my lips and I tasted plastic and metal. I said the final words and started back down the podium to join my class, stopping as I passed to return the paper to Khanom. The moment the last syllable dropped like phlegm from my mouth, I began praying for forgiveness; I prayed all day. I never told Maman what I had done. Maybe she knew. It took months to escape the nausea of that morning and even then, I was marked: long after the Islamic Republic, the war and the refugee years had receded and I had become an ordinary American, I would still be someone who once stood on a podium in an Isfahani schoolyard and shouted Death to America into a bullhorn.

  For a few weeks in the spring of 1988, everything was on apocalyptic pause – that’s how it felt when sirens warned of bombs already on the way. A pause as we looked up to the sky, waiting for word that our daily labours were worth continuing, that in an hour we would still have homes and schools. Or bodies. The television blared out insanity – was it propaganda or had the producers succumbed to madness? I shiver at the memory of a drama in which two boys with shaved heads and long white robes, good Muslim boys from less sophisticated cities, walked through the bombed-out rubble of their neighbourhood looking for the bodies of their parents. They passed a weeping man carrying his son’s limp body – their friend. When they stumbled upon a wreckage that had been their roof, they sat atop it and cried, caressing the ground, now a family gravesite, with the sacred touch of new orphans. This drama played at 3 p.m., during children’s hour.

  I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t deserve to breathe. Nothing was mine to keep. ‘Maman,’ I ran to her and cried into her skirt. ‘Tell me a riddle.’

  School was a ghostly place, nearly empty now. The teachers didn’t bother with lessons. We sat in lonely silence and wrote. During breaks, we wandered the hallway and the blacktop one by one. No groups remained. Pooneh didn’t come. I missed her. I needed her to make me try my best.

  ‘A worthy rival is a precious thing,’ said Baba.

  ‘You shouldn’t compete with anyone but yourself,’ said Maman.

  Had there been a day when these two agreed on one single thing?

  Isfahan grew quiet and sad. People tiptoed, exchanging ration coupons for basics and rushing home, taking their tea to the bomb shelter. The New Year slowed things down. It brought smoked fish and spray roses and tiny pink buds, but little hope. We cocooned in the church and listened to news of our murdered brothers and sisters and we prayed for rescue.

  Meanwhile, in the Ministry of Intelligence, one man was making Maman’s case his pet project. She was arrested a third time in her office, thrown in jail for the night. Next time, the man said, if she didn’t agree to disclose church secrets, she would be executed. Baba paid them to release her into house arrest. As she was leaving, the man promised Maman that tomorrow she would have her final chance to accept his offer, or she wouldn’t return home again. That night, police cars surrounded our house.

  Maman didn’t sleep. She packed. ‘We are leaving. I know we are. This is the moment when Jesus will perform miracles.’

  Khosrou grew tense, his little brow always furrowed. It seemed he would have to act fast, if he were to build Maman that castle in time.

  ‘Your Jesus is going to save you?’ Baba bellowed. ‘At least admit that the person performing the miracles will be me. I’ve lost my family because of this lying, grifting, Pied Piper man. Please be sure to thank him for me.’

  The arrival of this day struck Baba like a rock hurtling down a mountain; he had tried so hard to keep that boulder moving upward. But now Maman was taking his children, abandoning him, her country, her life.

  Baba spent the night on the phone. Maman in prayer.

  The next morning, to allay suspicion, Baba went to his office as usual and I walked to school. A handful of teachers and girls in halfhearted hijab roamed the halls. In class, we read silently and I left early. At home, I packed my things. The itch pawed and suffocated me. I stared at my animals and books all lined up, my solar system and the Victorian doll with folds in her dress for hiding secrets. I couldn’t bring the squirrel with its furry white belly, or my cat, elephant, or duckling. They would be safer here, Maman had told me. Remember Babaeejoon?

  I clenched my fist around some dried sour cherries, warming and loosening there, staining my palm bright red. I stared into a drawer of dried berries and fruit leathers. I ate the hot cherries in my hand.

  Despite everything, I was excited to go: beyond our borders lay every kind of possibility. If I could just pull myself away from my things . . .

  We waited in the kitchen for my Uncle Reza – my father’s younger brother. Baba had sent him to fetch us in a borrowed car. A few months before, we had moved from the house with the pool and the spray roses. Now we lived in a third-floor flat and the plan must have been to climb down the fire escape and leave from the back.

  Reza was thirteen when I was born. Now twenty-one, he had soft chestnut hair and a lazy smile, faded jeans, the kind of youth and freedom that Iran granted only to some men and only briefly. I couldn’t imagine a more heroic person. On Fridays in Ardestoon, Reza would put me on the back of his motorcycle and we would whiz through the countryside, past rivers with ducks and orchards full of sour cherries, mulberries, almonds and green plums, to a mountain where sheep grazed. The back of that
motorcycle was peace for me, a place of no worry. It was freedom, my hair flying as I clutched his stomach and screamed into his shoulder. How would I live without those afternoons? Who would be my new Uncle Reza? What if it took him years to follow us? What if he never did?

  At the kitchen table, Maman underlined her Bible in a third or fourth colour (one for each year). I began to panic about leaving. I had two months left of the third grade. I’d have to learn English. How long would that take? How could I be number one in school if I didn’t speak English?

  ‘Maman,’ I said. She continued to read. ‘Maman!’

  She looked up. ‘What is it?’

  ‘How do you say the word “write” in English?’

  She told me, then frowned and said, ‘Why?’

  ‘Because,’ I said, ‘math will be the same, but during dictée, the teacher always says, write this, write that. So if I just listen for “write” and sound out what comes after . . .’ After three years of Iranian dictée, after Khadijeh, I divided tests into two kinds: the easy kind and the kind with a chadori teacher breathing down your neck, shouting sentences that must be written verbatim in calligraphy, with a fountain pen.

  Maman laughed. ‘English spelling isn’t like that. You’ll see.’

  Reza arrived just as sirens began screaming. We watched the surveillance cars from the kitchen window; they hesitated, then scattered. ‘Let’s go,’ said Reza. A lucky crack had opened in Maman’s house arrest; I held my favourite uncle’s hand for the last time and we ran through it.

  We scrambled into the back of the car with our suitcases. The street was deserted, just a long sun-streaked hollow where I played with the neighbourhood children. Blurred by rain and tyres and shoeprints, our chalk hopscotch ladders still coloured the street from top to bottom. We weren’t going far on this leg of the journey. We would fly to Tehran, then drive to Karaj, where we could hide in the home of Maman’s elderly grandmother (Moti’s mother). She had pillows lining a wall beside a small television, a bed-ridden husband and cherry trees that would be blossoming now.

  Earlier that morning, before he left for work, I had asked Baba, ‘When are you coming?’

  ‘Soon,’ he said. ‘I’ll come to Karaj.’

  Uncle Reza drove us past Baba’s building; his office was on the third floor, his operating room facing the street.

  ‘Wave goodbye to your Baba,’ he said, his voice too quiet and low.

  I squinted at the man in the window and waved. I knew the window, the big chair beyond, the desk with our photos scattered under glass. I couldn’t see his face. We were in a moving car and he was three storeys up.

  In the front passenger seat, Maman stared at the streets with grieving eyes, taking in every shop sign and utility pole. Waving to Baba had unnerved me. Maman always told me the truth. She told me about her arrests, the death of church leaders. But now I understood that we were sealing a door even tighter than I liked, that I’d never again see this life from inside. I may never sit beside my cousins, glance for my name above Pooneh’s, or tuck in Maman Masi’s hair. Morvarid would die without me.

  I made promises to myself. If we made it to the United States or England, I would work twenty times harder to avoid Khadijeh’s fate. I would learn English and become exceptional. In the West, the criminals wouldn’t be in charge. Teachers would be kind. Worthy rivals would abound.

  From his office, Baba was making calls. I don’t know when they found the solution for sneaking out of Isfahan. I only know that it happened at the eleventh hour, because when we got in the car and headed to the airport, we had no tickets and no hope. Every flight was cancelled because of the bomb alert. Somehow, though, either before we left or as we drove, Baba’s phone connected to a friend: maybe a village classmate, or a fellow prisoner, or a guest at his hookah, or most likely, a patient relieved of pain.

  A mile or two outside the terminal, our car broke down. The road to the airport was sandy and flat, like desert, and there was no traffic now that the airport was shut. Then Reza spotted a far-off Jeep. As it approached, the olive of a police vehicle stained the horizon and Maman began to pray.

  Did Reza grow up with a booming personality like my father or brother? I remember him as a quiet person with a silent laugh and I never saw him after that day. I have a photo of us at my eighth birthday party, running around the last of the musical chairs, my hair flying, Reza grinning. He was no showman like Baba, but at twenty-one, he was charming enough to befriend a police officer who hadn’t bothered to speak to any central authority that morning. The name on his ID matched my mother’s. His hair was tinted red like mine. Maybe the officer was bad at birthday math (Reza was far too young to be my father), or maybe he just didn’t bother. He gave us a jump and escorted us to the airport.

  Minutes later, Baba’s friend (or classmate or patient), now an airport security agent, snuck us onto a cargo plane that had stopped only to refuel. We sat beside the merchandise and we flew to Tehran undetected. For decades, I believed our escape was divined. In Karaj, we hid in my great-grandmother Aziz’s house. There, Maman and Baba rushed to get us out of the country and Maman’s ‘Three Miracles’, the foundation of our escape story and therefore our future identities, came to pass.

  A few nights before we left the country, a man called Baba’s office at midnight, expecting to get an answering machine. He was in agony over an abscessed tooth. Baba was slumped behind his desk, puffing smoke into the darkness, thinking of how to get us out without exit visas or passports, in a country where even plane tickets took months to secure. In the midst of this fog and for no apparent reason, he answered the telephone. The man begged for help, but Baba got calls like this all the time. He was one of the best dental surgeons in Isfahan. ‘I know Dr Nayeri,’ people would say, ‘he grew up in Ardestoon and he drives an American car. He must be good.’

  Just before hanging up, Baba asked, ‘Where do you work, Agha?’

  The man said he worked at the passport office. Baba laughed. Surely, this was a joke. But no, the man gave his credentials. Within hours, Baba had sobered up and was bent over the man’s mouth, performing a free root canal. The next morning, my mother, brother and I had our passports.

  We decided to try for Dubai. Baba had friends there. And the route through Turkey seemed more dangerous, more the fugitive’s way. We needed a visa and plane tickets, which were sold out for months. Back then, Iranians booked flights in advance and paid a fluctuating rate on departure day. One morning as we broke fast with bread, cheese and sweet tea with Aziz, the radio announced that due to pressure from inflation, Iran Air was changing its pricing model. Many bookings were cancelled in the transition. Maman clapped her hands and reached to the sky. ‘Another miracle!’ When she said this to Baba, he raged. ‘Again . . . it was me. Not God. I’m God.’

  Days later, Baba’s distant relative in Dubai, a stranger named Jahangir, agreed to sponsor us for tourist visas. His reasons are a mystery to me; Baba knows. Jahangir wasn’t privy to Maman’s troubles or her plan to stay past our visas and make us refugees, to throw us at the mercy of the United Nations. Within days, in spring 1988, we were on a plane out of Iran.

  IV.

  KAWEH AND KAMBIZ

  Lately, I have become enraptured by a pair of stories. I came across each man in a newspaper article, years apart and chased both stories last year. Sometime in the early 2000s, two promising young men left Iran through Kurdistan. They were strangers to each other, though they could be brothers. Their faces, their names, are eerily alike. Fate, though, spit them out at two ends of a long spectrum, two extremes so distant that one wonders how civilised societies allow a single hour, or day, to carry such consequences (where is our humility?). Both men ran from danger while harbouring big dreams; one was labelled an opportunist, the other a survivor.

  Kaweh and Kambiz each left Iran in early adulthood. Earnest and hardworking, they set off without family, money, or a change of clothes. I am drawn to the place where their stories diverge, the vital
hinge where one man is believed and the other is not, this weighing station of human worth operated for profit by winners of a great lottery of birth.

  Like many Iranian boys, Kaweh spent his mornings in a strict Islamic classroom, his afternoons kicking footballs and paddling a ping pong ball for the pride of his village and his evenings reading all the Western books he could get his hands on. His older brother was studying math in university and brought him Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; Around the World in Eighty Days; Journey to the Centre of the Earth. At night, Kaweh raced through the books, inviting Verne to show him the vastness of the world. His three older siblings, clustered at around a decade older than Kaweh, and his baby sister, six years younger, shared bedrooms. Kaweh camped in the living room. Like an only child, he slept, did his work and walked to school alone. He developed a rich inner life, his solitude interrupted only by his strict, military father – a man with few words and no desire to hike mountains or explore rivers – coming in to watch Poirot.

  Born in 1981 in lush mountainous Kurdistan, the neck of ‘the cat’ (the shape of modern Iran on a map), Kaweh had never known his country before the 1979 Revolution. Every day, his teachers checked the boys’ homework. If it wasn’t done, they cut tree branches and whipped the soft of the children’s hands. In winter, they made the boys bury their hands in snow until all feeling was lost. They squeezed pencils between tiny fingers.

  Paveh was a relatively poor and tight-knit Kurdish town. Everyone knew each other and the children competed for academic and athletic honours. And yet, the law required them to speak only in Farsi in school, at the bank and other places of business. ‘I don’t understand,’ Kaweh told his mother one day as they picked aubergines and tomatoes from their garden. ‘Hozan can’t even speak proper Farsi. In town we speak in Kurdish, but when I go to the post office to give him a letter, I have to tell him in Farsi and hope he does it right. If I say a word in Kurdish he gets scared.’