The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri
“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 favorite 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 neighborhood children. Blurred by rain and tires and shoeprints, our chalk hopscotch ladders still colored 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 bedridden 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 stories 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 canceled 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 the house of my great-grandmother, Aziz. 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 canceled 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 civilized societies allow a single hour, or day, to carry such consequences (where is our humility?). Both men ran from danger while harboring big dreams; one was labeled 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.
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Like many Iranian boys, Kaweh spent his mornings in a strict Islamic classroom, his afternoons kicking soccer balls and paddling Ping-Pong balls 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 Center 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