The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri

haunches. She frowned and exhaled heavily through her nose. Then she glanced at the girls watching us from the edges of their scarves, tapped the pages straight against my desktop, and tore them in half. She reached for my practice notebook and tore the used pages in that too, taking care not to destroy any unused ones. This was to show me that my work was worth less than those unfilled pages.

      Tears burned in my nose. I imagined a metal storm-door shutting over my eyeballs, so that nothing could get out. I reminded myself of Khadijeh, her watery surrender. I imagined that under her chador, Khanom’s skin was dry and scaly and she needed girlish tears to soften her, as she couldn’t afford black-market Nivea Creme. I tried to pity her for that.

      A few years before first grade, my family had spent three months in London. There, my mother had converted to Christianity. Since our return, teachers had been probing me for information. Maman and Baba were respected in Isfahan. They had medical offices and friends and degrees from Tehran University. Maman had round, melancholy eyes and Diana haircuts in jet-black. She wore elegant dresses and a stethoscope. Her briefcase was shiny polished leather. No schoolgirl rawhide and click-buckle for her. But Maman was an apostate now, handing out tracts to her patients, a huge cross dangling in her windshield. Baba may have remained respected and generous and Muslim, but that wasn’t enough to protect me from abuse when I declared myself Maman’s ally.

      “What is your religion?” the teachers would ask, every day during recess. They would pull me aside, to a bench between the toilet cave and the nightmarish Khomeini mural, and they would ask this again and again.

      “I’m Christian,” I would say. In those days, I thought Muslim literally meant “a bad person,” and no individual or event helped dispel that notion—not even Baba, or his mother, Maman Masi, who was devout. We lived under constant threat of Iraqi bombs. We endured random arrests, executions, morality police roving the streets for sinful women (Gashte-Ershad or “Guidance Patrol,” they now call it). Though they were picked off and dragged to gruesome fates, the underground Christians we had befriended seemed consumed with kindness. Meanwhile, my teachers pecked hungrily at us all day, looking for a chance to humiliate.

      Later in life, far from Isfahan, I would meet kindhearted Muslims and learn that I had been shown half a picture: that all villainy starts on native soil, where rotten people can safely be rotten, where government exists for their protection. It is only among the outsiders—the rebels, foreigners, and dissidents—that welcome is easily found. Since our return from London, we had lost our native rights; we were exiles in our own city, eyes suddenly open to the magic and promise of the West, and to the villains we had been.

      •

      In 1985, when I was nearly six and hadn’t yet attended my Islamic girls’ school, we visited my beloved Maman Moti—Maman’s mother—in London. Years before, Maman Moti had run away to England, leaving all but one daughter behind. That spring, we went to watch my aunt Sepideh, Maman’s youngest sister, marry an Englishman. Our stay was temporary, a visit followed by a half-hearted stab at emigration. It only lasted a few months, but I was enrolled in school for the first time. I spoke only Farsi.

      In the airport, the guards tore through our things. Baba seemed unbothered as he unzipped his suitcases and buttered up the guards. “Ei Vai, did I leave an open pack of Lucky Strikes with my shirts? Agha, you have them. The smell will ruin the fabric . . . I smoke Mehrs, but people give the strangest things to their dentist.”

      We were surrounded by so much clamor and haste. A guard picked up Babaeejoon, a beloved stuffed sheep, and turned him over in his hand. He took out a knife and ripped open its belly, pulling out its stuffing while my brother, Khosrou, cried on Maman’s shoulder. “Be brave, Khosrou joon,” Baba said. “They have to check so bad people don’t smuggle things.”

      Though Babaeejoon had been my gift after tonsil surgery, his death became my brother’s trauma, because at the time of his disembowelment, Babaeejoon was Khosrou’s sheep. I soothed myself by reciting everyone’s ages: Aunt Sepi was nineteen. Maman was twenty-eight. Maman Moti was forty-four. I was five, Khosrou two. The airline served saffron rice pudding.

      That night, I slept beside Maman Moti, whom I called my city grandmother. With her rolled hair and silky blouses, she was the opposite of Maman Masi, whose henna hair I had never seen below her temples. I heard a noise. Maman Moti was praying. “Can I pray too?” I asked. She told me about Jesus and love and freedom, and I believed. Soon, Maman became a Christian too. Everything was a miracle after that. Maman’s metal allergy? Gone. Because of Jesus she could wear bangles again. Every night, I heard Baba shouting through the wall. What was this insanity? Didn’t she have enough sense to know that all religions were manipulative and irrational? Hadn’t she just watched her own country fall into religious madness?

      My parents had a terrible marriage, screaming-throwing fights that lasted into the early hours. He was addicted to an unnamable demon something. She would stage detoxes for him, and he sat shaking for a day or two, until some animal part of him burst out and chased her for the keys. At first, these were medical rages. Later, they were rages of coming loss. I heard stories of their courtship when Baba used to hide raw almonds around the house and write clues in verse for her to decipher, because he knew she loved riddles. He was as addicted to poetry and riverside picnics as he was to his pipe. At family meals or parties, eyes flitted to the door until he arrived. And yet, I was afraid of him. When I was two he had pulled out my front teeth because the tonsil surgeon had broken them on his way into my mouth.

      In London, Baba sensed a looming danger in Maman’s new calling. Devotion to a faraway god, too, can be a powerful addiction.

      For many nights, Maman sat up with her distant mother, a woman young enough to be her peer and whose elusive love had been Maman’s lifelong grail. They drank tea and discussed purpose and belief. My mother, Sima, was Moti’s second daughter: she wasn’t the infallible, beautiful eldest, Soheila, after whom Moti pined most, or her only son, or the precious youngest she had scooped up on the day she ran away to England, the only person she hadn’t left behind, and in whom she had invested all her English hopes. Maman was only the dutiful second. The one who read her medical books and cooked for her broken family. The one who obeyed. No one had taught her that this is how you get overlooked. She married young and found herself tricked: he was an addict. Maman hated being a doctor. Seventeenth on the Konkour meant the family gave her no choice but medicine. If she had confessed that sometimes she dreamed of owning a farm, they would’ve laughed—her father was a mayor. She went to medical school, married Baba. She found kindness with Baba’s Maman Masi, a sweet farm woman with turmeric-stained fingers who hugged and kissed, fed and praised. Maman Masi was old enough to be a mother to grown-ups.

      By the time we arrived in London, Maman was strung out and ready for life to start meaning something fast. Trapped in the Islamic Republic, she craved rebellion, freedom. Too conservative for feminism, she reached for the next best thing: Jesus. Now she shared something more vital with her mother than Soheila ever had. Now she stood for an ideal that even the Islamic Republic couldn’t take away, because she was willing to die for it.

      Maman Moti boasted that she had the gift of prophecy. She had dreamed that, one day, her four children would gather around her in the West, and they would all be true believers. Having fulfilled her duty, Maman smiled and started on dinner.

      What does it mean to believe truly? I don’t know anymore, though I did then. Maman believed in Jesus more than I had seen her believe in anything, and that made him real. Every night, we both spoke to him, either alone or together, with more passion than we’d spoken to anyone.

      We celebrated my sixth birthday with strawberry cake in the park in Golders Green. We let ice cream drip onto our fingers. We saw ginger hair, platinum hair, dark coffee skin, and we bought bananas and wandered the city, without fear of bomb sirens or morality police. Maman and Maman Moti let their over-brushed curls fall onto their shoulders. I learned to write from the left side of the page and bought three new toys: a ballerina that danced on a podium, a Barbie doll, and a row of penguins that climbed some steps and slid down a curly slide. Baba had paid a tailor to sew and pad tins of Iranian caviar into the lining of his suitcase. He passed them out one night at a pre-wedding