The Ungrateful Refugee Read online

  I had never liked living in that building, but I had also never been evicted, or lived in the kind of place that made eviction a possibility. I had always had roots. My grandparents’ village home had been theirs for decades, maybe a century – it had an old-world tanoor oven and a cave of a kitchen. My parents had owned every home we lived in. Each chair and couch and table seemed welded to its place and there was a small tree growing through a glass enclosure in the living room. But here, someone had decided to build dorms and, with a snap of a capitalist finger, we were out. Until that moment, I had been too busy to feel my displacement. I missed home and Baba and my big family, but I was never afraid. We were having an adventure.

  Now, though, I felt like we were lost in a strange country and that we weren’t fastened to anything at all.

  The next day, Maman rushed into the room and told us there had been another miracle. The hostel had no leases, only a handful of month-by-month tenants. The owner, with his vast oil sums and his capitalist plans and his rush to repurpose the building before the new academic year, announced that he would move the paid-up tenants to a hotel down the street for the rest of the month. Only one hotel had enough capacity for the thirty or forty displaced residents: a tourist hotel with a life-guarded pool and tennis courts, colour televisions in every room, soft comfortable sheets, plush towels and Western toilets. We wouldn’t be able to eat at the hotel, or touch anything reserved for the tourists. We’d have to be light-footed and invisible. But we could sleep there.

  All I heard was the thing about Western toilets. I couldn’t use them. My body refused to adjust. I was accustomed to a porcelain hole in the ground with striated foot rests, like a radiator panel, my strong thighs holding me up in squat position as I relieved myself. To sit while taking a shit was unheard of, barbaric, like doing it on the couch. ‘Dina, stop this vasvas,’ said Maman. (The Persian word for OCD is quaint enough for parents to throw around. I hated it, though. My habits were normal and I liked them treated as such.) ‘We’ll figure out the toilet in the two weeks we have there,’ said Maman. ‘And you’ll learn breaststroke and freestyle.’

  Arriving at the hotel felt like emerging from icy water into sun, or walking into a schoolhouse after the last stifling day of summer. The Sadeghis were there too and Mozhgan and I whispered as our mothers checked us in. We were shown our rooms – thirty years later, I remember the sensation of stepping inside: we were offered two rooms, each with a large bed, connected by a double-door. Mozhgan came with me to our part of the hotel. When she saw our space, she squeezed my hand and rushed to find her family, who were settling in.

  An hour later, a hotel manager knocked on our door. ‘I’m so sorry, madam,’ he said. ‘But we have to lock the door between the two rooms. You only have one, not both. I’m sorry for the confusion.’

  Maman and Daniel didn’t mind. We had spent months sharing a bed and now we would share a much nicer one. I was angry, though. I had looked forward to privacy, to breathing room and clean walls.

  ‘It’s strange,’ said Maman, after we realised that the adjoining room would remain empty. The real estate developer had paid for a block of rooms. It was hard to imagine him bothering with petty negotiations about room size. Why did they make a point of taking away some of our space? Maman went downstairs to investigate. She returned shaking her head, her eyes darkened by disappointment and anger. ‘Mrs Sadeghi complained that we had the same amount of space as them, even though they’re five and we’re three. Can you believe it?’

  ‘Mozhgan’s maman told the hotel to take our room?’ I asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘I think she got greedy,’ said Maman. ‘She thought they’d give her a third room. Instead they took ours away.’

  ‘Can’t she ask to change it back?’ I said, feeling hopeful.

  Maman shook her head. ‘You are never to mention it to them, Dina. They won’t fix it. Because it was probably jealousy, too. They’re villagers who saw a woman doctor alone with two children, calling herself a Christian out in the open, no scarf, and they wanted to punish us. Next time you see Mozhgan, you make sure to say how happy you are here. And teach her some of your English words, OK?’ I giggled. I loved this Maman; yes, this was petty, but she was always vigilant, making sure Daniel and I didn’t lose an ounce of our dignity, that we never suffered from shame. Over the decades, as I grew into a Western woman and a gulf of culture and taste opened up between us, we fought over this Iranian habit more than any other: the value she placed on dignity and face, the way she guarded against bad faith and jealous eyes. And yet, I know that if she hadn’t warned me against the Sadeghis’ bitter intentions, or the Jahangirs’ brutal class markers, I would have grown up unable to change myself. I would be bound to a single safe habitat, without the confidence or boldness to live like a chameleon, free to make my home in any corner of the world.

  Those windfall weeks flew by. I swam so much my skin turned from olive to dark brown. One afternoon, Maman jumped into a cab. ‘Take me to a church,’ she said. The driver wore a turban and a long beard. He turned and eyed her. Then he pulled onto the road. Had this been a mistake? she wondered. Will he take me to some alley or, worse, the Iranian embassy? He drove for a long time, through unfamiliar streets and a patch of desert and pulled up in front of an unmarked building with a typed sheet on the door. ‘What is this?’ she said. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘This is the church for converts like us.’ Maman grinned. For her, exile was one astounding kindness after another, which she called miracles, forgetting that she was a young mother with a wan, girlish face, in a world run by guilt-eaten men.

  The paper listed denominations and languages, each with a timeslot. She checked her watch. The anglophone protestants were about to meet. There she met Jim and Barbara, an Australian missionary couple with a son, Nathan, exactly my age. They gave her VHS tapes for us, a Christian cartoon called The Flying House. On her way in, she gave it to the hotel manager and asked if he would play it on the video system (a VCR in the manager’s office feeding to a channel shared by all hotel guests). He agreed, happy to make up for the business with the Sadeghis.

  A few days before we were to leave the fancy hotel, Baba visited from Isfahan, to bring our clothes and to see me and my brother. The authorities had questioned him for weeks after our escape, and after a period of palm greasing and low lying, he convinced them that he had nothing to do with Maman’s new religion, her proselytising, or her escape. And, we would soon discover, he had another reason not to fear suspicion on our account.

  We opened the door and fell into his arms, our jolly, happy Baba with his red hair and pockets full of chocolate and sour cherries. ‘Dina! Khosrou! I missed you,’ he said and we hugged him and asked what he had brought us.

  Maman flitted about, rearranging suitcases. She made tea. Once or twice she called Daniel by his new name. Baba raised an eyebrow. Then he asked my brother, ‘Are you Daniel now?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Sima, what are you doing? Khosrou is my great-uncle’s name! He named Dina. You can’t change our son’s name.’

  She shrugged. ‘He’s going to live in an English country. They can’t make the sounds, you know this.’

  They fought. Over the name and over where we would live and over money (there was never any for us) and over his opium and over her troublesome Christianity. But most of all, they fought over her clothes.

  ‘These don’t fit,’ she said, standing in front of the mirror in a skirt so stretched out it wouldn’t stay over her hips.

  ‘You’ve lost weight,’ said Baba.

  ‘Someone much bigger has worn this,’ said Maman.

  ‘You’re imagining things again. Everyone is against you, aren’t they, Miss Born Again?’

  ‘Don’t pretend like I’m crazy,’ said Maman, holding a ruined dress against her body. ‘You know you’ve let some woman go through my house and wear my clothes.’ Maman had looked forward to being reunited with some of her wardrobe. Almost everything we had brought had wor
n out and we were beginning to look a little more refugee-like every day – it doesn’t happen all at once, I now knew, and we had to break free of this waiting place quickly or we would be one of the indistinguishable Eastern hordes. Who would take us in looking like so much riff-raff?

  ‘Some woman?’ Baba shot back. ‘A kind, motherly woman who at least knows how to live instead of hiding behind God all the time,’ he muttered. His Cheshire smile was gone. Now he chewed his tongue and the cat-like tip of it protruded from his mouth, his eyes full of the same feline fury. In Isfahan, he looked like this just before he blew up and slapped Maman across the room. It was the one thing I didn’t miss about home.

  ‘Throw them away if you don’t want them,’ he said. Then he dug his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and left, slamming the door.

  ‘Maman, why is there another woman in our house?’ asked Daniel, when we were alone. He sat beside her and held her hand like a little man.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘It’s normal. It’s because Baba is a man. He can’t cook or clean and every man needs a woman to do . . . woman things.’

  Daniel thought for a moment. ‘But who will do your man things?’ he asked, eyes wide, as if they had just opened to the ugliness of the world.

  Maman burst into tears. Baba left the next day, or the day after that. This was why he didn’t worry about visiting us. Maman had been naïve not to guess it: he had married again – his right, under Sharia law, as husband to only one woman. And as far as the authorities were concerned, he had renounced his unmanageable first wife to her fate. He was free to live unbothered in Iran, as is any straight, married man with money and open doors, a gentle, necessary profession and a decorative Koran.

  That night, the manager paid us another visit. ‘I can no longer play those videos, madam, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked my mother as she took the VHS tapes from him.

  ‘You know why,’ he said, his voice no longer kind. ‘I thought they were just cartoons.’

  We moved into Jim and Barbara’s house the next day. There, we learned the rhythms of the Australian household, thinking maybe they would be similar to English or American ones. We ate dinners of cold meats and sliced vegetables at five o’clock, an absurd hour. We buttered our bread with something made of oil. We sat on Western toilets and showered in the morning instead of mid-afternoon. Maman enrolled us in Nathan’s English school. Somehow, Barbara got our fees waived. The school taught an Arabic and British curriculum. It had uniforms and a motto I liked because it wasn’t bombastic but practical and easy to achieve. Be Thorough. I was assigned to the third grade, the grade I had nearly finished last year in Isfahan. I put on my uniform and endured the shame.

  The children in the playground explained to me that two types of people lived in Dubai: the Arabs and the English. You could tell them apart by their clothing, but it was trickier with fair-skinned girls in school uniforms, like me. They knew I was from Iran because of my broken English. I hadn’t realised until then that my English was all that broken. Every night, I read Nathan’s old children’s books – Babar and Richard Scarry hardbacks about animals with service jobs, and Roald Dahl. But each morning, before the first bell, I made a dozen new mistakes. I didn’t realise that we were divided, not only by grade, but by houses. I was in Dougherty House. Though Dougherty had done nothing for me, offered no true refuge or identity and though I had no ties to it, I had to find some hidden stores of loyalty for my house. If I received good marks or points for good behaviour, my house would benefit.

  ‘You’re closer to an Arab,’ the playground girls would say. ‘You’re not an Arab, but not far from it.’ I never played with these girls. I only watched them. Nathan had a crush on a girl named Naomi, a waifish blonde thing who never finished her lunch. When I finished mine, she called me greedy. Still, I found her fascinating. She sang in choir and always smelled like daisies. One day, our grade filed by a high-school classroom with its curtains drawn. Flashing lights and music seeped through an opening in the curtain. I peeked in. The older kids were dancing, boys and girls together, as a disco ball made their faces glow in many colours. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s just a dance,’ said Naomi, as if it were nothing.

  ‘At school?’ I said. ‘With the teacher standing there?’ I thought these were things you did in secret when you were twenty, your parents old and asleep in their bed, and if you got caught you might be lashed. Naomi shrugged. I kept peering in. One of the teenagers, who seemed not to be revelling so much as completing a task, frowned at me through her breathy exertions and the teacher pulled the curtain shut.

  I decided to enter a swim race in breaststroke. The event was public and, when I came in third (out of four), Maman ran to the edge of the pool and pulled me out. ‘I’m proud of you,’ she said. ‘These girls have been swimming since they were babies. You learned to float two months ago in boiling water. Nobody would know that watching this race.’ That, Maman knew, had been my only goal: that no one should guess who I had been before I turned nine, a girl who couldn’t even float. I hadn’t come in first, but I had passed for one of them; I had won something better than a medal.

  For some crazy English reason, Dougherty House got my points.

  Everyone knew that any day, or month, I might leave and so there was no permanent place for me in clubs or teams or in friendships: I was too mired in uncertainty. Even my uniform was borrowed and too big. I was offered a role in a play, but Maman mentioned to my teacher her hopes after our latest Abu Dhabi trip and my role was pulled for fear that I wouldn’t be in Dubai on opening night.

  I began to fret again, to count everything, to hold my chin too long against my neck. I decided to fast, thinking maybe God would see how serious I was and take us away from there, to someplace I could stay, get comfortable, make real friends, buy fresh workbooks. I wanted to go home – anywhere. When my teachers saw that I wasn’t eating, they scolded me for dieting and made me eat; they thought the pressures of a co-ed environment were getting to me. Dougherty lost points. But Maman believed me when I explained that this wasn’t about looking like Naomi.

  In February, Maman began to look distracted. She prayed and prayed. She travelled to Abu Dhabi without us. Something was happening again.

  I found out later that, as she had done in Isfahan, she had begun passing out Christian tracts in Muslim communities, a dangerous and reckless thing. She was desperate for something to do, a way to make the gears move faster. Whether it was the tracts or something else, the United Arab Emirates now knew that we had overstayed, that our visa had expired months before. Mr Jahangir was called. A court was convened.

  ‘Madam,’ said the judge, ‘you are in violation of several laws here. You must pay a fine of twenty-thousand dollars and leave the UAE in two weeks or you will be put in jail with your children. Do you understand?’

  Maman just stared. The colour fled from Jahangir’s face; he put a hand over his mouth, shaking his head.

  ‘Do you understand that you must leave?’ asked the judge.

  ‘Yes, Your Honour,’ she said, her voice weary.

  The judge paused, looked at his papers, as if considering the case again. He said, ‘I will forgive the fine. But leave in two weeks or risk jail.’ Jahangir made a small noise (who else would have been saddled with the fine but the sponsor?). Maman thanked the judge. ‘See that you pay the court fees on your way out,’ he continued. ‘And, madam, do not pass out any more of your tracts in this country.’ Maman nodded.

  ‘What will you do now?’ asked Jahangir. His relief from the fee pardon gone after a moment’s thought about the deadline. ‘Nothing gets done in two weeks, Sima. All three of you in jail? How? How will this work?’

  If you ask Maman now, she will tell you that she did nothing but pray. That she asked the entire church to pray. And I believe that to be true. I also believe that either Barbara or Jim or Jahangir or someone at the church called UNHCR. Perhaps that’s the purpose of prayer:
that it reaches human ears. Maman disagrees. She says that our application had been in the works for months; maybe it was already in the final stages. Whatever the case, thirteen days after the court date, we received a call that Italy had said yes. They weren’t offering us asylum, but they would be our next pass-through state, a safe haven as we petitioned other countries. We needn’t worry about the judge’s deadline, as Emirati immigration authorities had been contacted and were satisfied. Regardless, we should pack immediately.

  The next day, in February 1989, we were flown to Rome, then driven to Mentana, a village outside the city, to a home for refugees on their way elsewhere. We hardly had time to say goodbye to those we had known.

  II.

  We drove up the winding path to Hotel Barba. It was winter. We ate hot pasta in the glass room. We drank tea in the courtyard, listened to stories in each other’s rooms. An old lady collected bricks. We gossiped.

  Maman didn’t partake in the human drama of the place. People grumbled. They complained. They fought. But she kept to herself. When it became obvious that we would be staying at Hotel Barba for a while, she made it her job to continue our education as before. She refused to languish in the hotel like the other exiles.

  Now and then, workers from churches and charities drove up the hill and dumped huge piles of donated clothing in the courtyard. The residents would rush to dig through the piles, scattering the clothes. For hours or days, unwanted items were strewn around the yard. The workers would hand out coupons that the residents could redeem for tins of snacks if they visited the church. Maman never bothered with either offering, not because we didn’t need these things, but because you can only accept so much charity before you lose sight of who you once were. ‘It won’t happen any faster if we sit and wait,’ Maman said. ‘People pay a fortune to visit this country. Let’s be tourists.’ She stuffed our backpacks and we rode buses to Pisa, Venice and Rome. She was still thirty-two, braving public buses alone with little money, no Italian and two whiny children.