The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri
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 was seven, I could 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 he 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 chocolate 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 Kit Kats (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 grown-ups from my grandmother’s church and in my parents’ soothing whispers, I heard a steady refrain about gratefulness 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 were 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 gray 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.
•
We returned altered. Now we were converts in the Islamic Republic, illegal Christians in an underground church. We endured three nightmare years before the day of our escape—three years of arrests and threats, of armed revolutionary guards (pasdars or Sepâh) slipping into the backseat of our car at traffic stops, bursting into Maman’s medical office. Three years of daily terrors and Maman’s excuses about faith and higher callings.
It was a daily whiplash. The idyllic village life of my father on Fridays, sitting in my sweet grandmother’s lap, kissing her henna hair, listening to her reedy voice, eating her plum chicken or barberry rice, then traveling back to the city, to another phase of Saddam Hussein’s War of the Cities (a series of missiles that killed thousands in 1987 alone) that waited at our doorstep. Every few days, sirens blared. We taped our windows and ran to basements, where we chatted in the dark with our neighbors.
That Maman chose this moment to become a religious activist out of her medical office baffled Baba—they fought night after night. Making a life after the revolution had been hard work. Baba had learned which patients to prioritize, which palms to grease, which tailor altered suitcases, who to smoke with in relative safety. But now Maman hurried down unsafe streets pulling two children along, her scarf falling back as she slipped into strange doors to meet Christians. She broadcast her story over an illegal Christian radio station, tucked brochures into women’s chadors under the nose of the morality police, and did everything a person could do to draw attention to her apostasy. Maybe she feels guilty, Baba thought. She had once been a devout Muslim, and though she was never political, preferring to make her strict, conservative father happy, Maman had joined other medical students in the streets to protest the Shah, willingly covering her hair.
Teachers began to pull me away at recess. When I tried to opt out of weekly Islam classes, they held me in the schoolyard and told me that Maman would be jailed, beaten, maybe killed.
When I told Baba that Khanom had torn our proud, far-reaching Ks and Gs, his eyes flashed. My Baba was known for his pleasure-seeking ways: his riotous humor, his sumptuous feasting, his devotion to poetry. We were kindred spirits in our secret excesses. His vices, though, weren’t all bright and merry. He loved the poppy, and it made him rage. His anger was slow to ignite, but God help you if you were the one to light him up.
The next day in the schoolyard, we lined up by grade and performed our required chants, straining our small lungs. An older girl, a fourth or fifth grader, pressed her lips to a bullhorn and led us in muffled pledges we didn’t understand: I am the daughter of the revolution. I am the flower of my country. Death to America. Death to Israel.
Then