The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri

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 labors 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 neighborhood 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 half-hearted 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 color (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