The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri

theological conversation. Though, he didn’t always solve my problem. Most contradictions were dispatched with one of two answers: “The rules were different under the Old Testament,” or “That reads differently in the original Hebrew.” It didn’t matter. The important thing was that he was impressed, that he called me clever.

      When Brother Yusuf and the Christians visited, Baba disappeared to Ardestoon or stayed in his office—he despised Brother Yusuf, called him “that dirty Assyrian” or “that bearded charlatan.”

      Sometime in 1987, while the war raged on, sirens shrieked, and the days thrummed endlessly with news of executions, Maman was arrested. I didn’t know the details, only that her office had been stormed, the patients sent home, and she had been questioned for hours. She had been given a choice: spy against the underground church or face arrest and execution.

      Maman and Baba fought. Baba threatened to take Khosrou and me away. One night, Maman took us to a hotel, but they wouldn’t accept a woman alone with two children.

      Having found her purpose, Maman intensified her efforts. She kept stacks of Christian brochures under a thin blanket in her backseat, passing them out to patients and acquaintances. She started studying braille and sign language, so she could reach out to the deaf and the blind.

      Maman was arrested again, her office ransacked, her records stolen. She grew rigorous in her domesticity, sewing complicated, lifelike stuffed squirrels and cats. She found thin mattress foam and made a stuffed car for Khosrou. As the gaze of the morality police grew hotter and more unbearable, she leaned heavier on the church, and on Brother Yusuf. Sometimes when I spied on them talking in his home office, I detected an intimacy that felt like a betrayal to Baba—their talk was too playful. It was a strange habit of new Christians, these overly loving exchanges that were supposed to mimic brotherly or sisterly love. “My dear sweet” this or that. Each time Maman met with the pastor, his office door remained wide open.

      One afternoon, a car screeched to a stop behind the high wall separating the street from Brother Yusuf’s front gate. His wife rushed out of the kitchen, scooping up her baby girl, Rhoda. His son, Yoonatan, and I stopped playing cards. Maman and Brother Yusuf stashed their Bibles away. Maman fixed her hijab. A hard knock shook the metal gate outside. “I’ll break it down!” a man shouted. And though his voice was angry, almost violent, all my fear dissolved. I knew that voice, and no matter how much he shouted and whom he threatened to hurt, it brought me only joy.

      Khosrou was terrified, though. He screamed and jumped into Maman’s arms. He cried for a while, then his brow furrowed as if he were accepting new orders, a new role. “Don’t worry, Maman. I’ll protect you!”

      Brother Yusuf had hardly opened the gate before Baba rushed in and grabbed him by the throat. He shouted terrible things. “You dirty Assyrian,” he spat into the man’s face as he hovered over him, his shirt collar still in his fists. “Don’t you have your own wife to corrupt? Do you know what trouble you’ve caused?” Why had Baba come today? Maybe he had been smoking, or had a visit from the moral police. Baba didn’t harm Brother Yusuf. He released his anger and, when the women managed to calm him, turned back toward the door, leaving Maman to apologize again and again.

      The war made everything seem like the last of its kind. Every lazy afternoon, every family dinner, every drink of water. Some days at school, only a third of the students were present, the classroom eerily quiet and breezy, because parents had heard of a coming bomb raid.

      My teachers reached in deep and planted gruesome images. They told me just enough to make me ask around and fill in the gaps. 1987 was a brutal year. For some, 1988 would be worse. Thousands of intellectuals, leftists, and political dissidents disappeared that year, massacred by firing squad and hung from cranes, dying slowly. Sliced feet and skinned backs, hot irons to the thighs, their deaths covered up—it was a purge unprecedented in Iranian history. These images competed in my nightmares with scenes from the Book of Revelation and movies about the rapture: horsemen and plagues and the Antichrist. Which was the worse fate? Did most eight-year-old girls have such choices?

      I decided to talk to my teacher, to make peace. One day after class, I waited for the room to empty, straightened my scarf, checked my area, and meandered to her desk. “Khanom,” I said. She didn’t look up from her papers. “I’ve been practicing my handwriting.”

      “Good,” she said, her head still down so that all I saw was the gray fabric lump of her head. “That’s why we’re here.”

      “I didn’t tell Baba,” I said, trying not to let my dignity leak away. “He looks at my notebooks. I didn’t . . .”

      Now she looked up with her stony eyes, folding her arms over her papers in a rehearsed, wooden sort of way. “Miss Nayeri, the world is brutal for women. It’s a thousand times harder than for men. Whatever our private conflicts, we don’t betray each other to men. Do you understand?”

      I shook my head. “Baba isn’t one of those men. He was just angry . . .”

      She rolled her eyes, capped her pen, and sat back. “Who’s your biggest rival in the class? Who do you hate more than me?”

      “I don’t hate you, Khanom,” I said. What a terrible mess this was.

      She waited. I didn’t want to answer, because Pooneh was also my best friend and a distant cousin. I loved her and craved to beat her so much that sometimes when we kissed hello, on both cheeks as our parents had taught us, I squeezed her face hard to calm my itching teeth. It was a painful, confused affection, like a Mafia boss kissing a rival brother goodbye.

      Now Khanom smiled. Even though I came in first twice as often as Pooneh did, I was the one always chasing, because I was the one who publicly cared, while she shrugged and smiled and puffed her porcelain cheeks. That I would have to suffer another twenty years of sprinting alongside Pooneh exhausted and thrilled me. “Whatever you do to each other to win,” she said, “the minute you run to a man, you’re a traitor.”

      Then she went back to her work. “I’m sorry,” I said, though I felt that the story had been unfairly rewritten. “I’ll do the work over. I do love you.”

      She gave me a strange look. I had said the wrong thing. You don’t tell teachers you love them. Why had I said it?

      For a moment, we both stood our ground, Khanom determined to ignore me, as I remained planted in her line of vision. I shifted onto my other foot, moved my messenger bag to my back.

      She glanced up again, smiling kindly now. “It’s OK, Miss Nayeri,” she said. “I’m OK. I’m stronger than you think.” She made muscle arms under her chador, and we both laughed. “How would you like to do a very special job that only the top students can do?”

      My fingertips went cold—I knew my school’s rituals and rewards, and yet I wanted so much to please her. She lifted herself off the chair with a weary sigh and opened the book cabinet behind her. She pulled out a piece of paper tucked beneath the red bullhorn. When I didn’t move, she waved it at me until I reached up and took it from her.

      “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’ hands and feet. I pictured Rhoda and Yoonatan, Brother Yusuf savoring my mother’s Salad Olivieh and strapping on his Father Christmas belly. I would be betraying them all.

      Alone in my bedroom, I agonized. I took off my uniform