The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri

lifting and lowering hands. I could only hear snippets. “Yes, Dr. Nayeri . . .” “. . . I’ll speak with her . . .” “. . . Sir, we’re in the middle . . .” When old Ms. Yadolai arrived, he calmed, because she was sweet and harmless, like Maman Masi, his mother.

      Then Khanom stepped out from in front of our line and started toward him. Suddenly she looked small, like one of us. Was she twenty? Twenty-five? She was trying to look strong, professional, but Baba was on a crusade. He wanted her heart. “She’s just a child!” he shouted across the blacktop as he approached her at twice her pace. “You’re a grown woman. She isn’t responsible . . . She’s not your enemy.” Khanom began muttering that this was only about the handwriting. Baba railed on. “She worked hard, and I checked the work. How dare you! Where did you go to university?”

      I noted that the last question was germane to the proceedings. That it affected her credibility, her allotment of power against my father. Baba was no sexist. If she had lifted her shoulders, bellowed out “Tehran University,” and defended her actions, if she had said, “Dina is chatty, fussy, and odd. She has an itch in the brain and bad handwriting and one of her eyes is too small,” he would have shown some respect for her methods. I know this because Baba—though he smoked opium and beat my mother and was incapable of lifting a finger for himself—instructed me never to cower to men. If you flinch, they will hit harder. Show your fangs, not your throat. But this was 1987 Isfahan and most Babas didn’t teach their daughters these things. The poor woman didn’t have the training.

      She cried. She leaked before a man who shook his head at her and walked away, stopping to wave to his daughter who stood spellbound in a row of muppety gray heads, quietly growing a coarse new skin.

      That night we walked along the Thirty-Three Arches and Baba took us to Hotel Koorosh, my favorite restaurant, where Baba and other local doctors had a membership. We ate schnitzel and crème caramel on white tablecloths. We drank yogurt soda with three sprigs of mint. I knew now that my teacher wasn’t scaly or witchy or a demoness, and that it was important not to bend. And I knew that I was capable of rooting for someone who wasn’t totally on the right side of a thing. In war, villainy and good change hands all the time, like a football.

      •

      A few days later, Maman was stopped in the streets by the Gashte-Ershad. We were at a traffic stop and my younger brother, Khosrou, opened the back door and jumped out into the madness of Isfahani morning traffic. I was in the front seat beside Maman, so I didn’t see him do it. All I saw was Maman throwing the car into park and hurling her body out of the car, dashing across three lanes, and snatching him up. In the process, her scarf slipped back a few inches, revealing half a head of loose hair. Then we heard the shouting; a pasdar was pointing and ranting at Maman. “Watch your hijab, woman!” As he crossed the asphalt, his shouting grew louder, angrier. He began to curse, calling her vile names.

      “My son ran into traffic,” she said. She had already fixed her hijab so that every strand was tucked away. But he towered over her, threatening, spitting. They stood by the open driver’s side door. If he had leaned in, he would have seen the huge cross hanging on her rearview mirror. Maybe he would have made an issue of it. He shouted a few more times, gave Maman a warning, and returned to the other officers watching us from their car.

      When he was gone, Maman’s cheeks glistened with rage. I wonder if she imagined herself in a country where men are punished for such things, where women can defend themselves. I wonder if she ever fantasized about slapping some fool hard across the face. Khosrou and I sat in that car, conjuring violent scenes. My brother glared silently at the car roof. Later he told Maman stories of how he would protect her, build her a castle in a mountain far away, fill it with Smarties.

      Maman dropped me off at Baba’s dental office while she ran errands with Khosrou—my chronic motion sickness made me a terrible passenger. I slipped into the surgery, sat in the nurse’s chair to watch Baba fill a tooth. Long reddish hair fell over the back of the chair. I leaned to get a better look. The patient wore a silky blouse and jeans. Her chador hung on a rack near my face—in Baba’s office, women could cover as they pleased if the door was closed. “Aren’t you going to say hello, Dina joon?” said Baba.

      I mumbled hello. Baba frowned. “Since when are you shy?”

      I glanced at the woman’s red lips and made-up eyes. She was a stranger. And anyway, who can recognize a face with the mouth pried open? But then Baba leaned back and she sat up and spit. “Hello, Dina joon,” she said. I knew that voice—it was my first-grade teacher, Ms. Yadolai. Old Ms. Yadolai, restored, it seemed, to twenty-five or thirty by some witch’s spell. “I saw you in the waiting room, telling everyone to shush,” she said. “Where did you get that sweet nurse’s costume?” She meant my photo hanging across an entire wall of Baba’s waiting room, my finger to my lips.

      I shrugged. I was too transfixed by the miracle I was witnessing.

      “Dina, don’t be rude,” said Baba.

      “I’m sorry,” I said. “Ms. Yadolai, what red hair you have.”

      Little Red Riding Hood was one of few storybooks not banned by the clerics; that joke was well-worn. She laughed, thanked Baba, and gathered her things. “See you in school,” she said, whipping her black chador around her body, tucking at the temples. Despite makeup, she gained twenty years in one swing of her arm. A good scrub would cost her another twenty, and all her power, returning her by morning to old Ms. Yadolai.

      Now, finally, I understood the function of hijab.

      I started to believe that Christianity was feminism. Years later, my mother told me that when she had been a Muslim she was simply searching, and Islam fit only some of what she held sacred. In Christianity, she found her beliefs in their purest form. I now know that I was searching for feminism, and along the way, I shed every doctrine and institution that failed to live up to it. Islam went first. Later, all religion would follow.

      Our church wasn’t underground; it was behind gates and thick curtains. A rotating schedule in the homes of Assyrians and Armenians, who, if they could prove their ancestry and refrained from proselytizing, were theoretically left alone. Only apostates and pied pipers risked arrest and death. By allowing us into their homes, the Christian-born who hosted us tied their fates to ours, and this bonded us beyond friendship.

      News of pastors, even Armenian ones, being shot or disappearing into the notorious Evin Prison wasn’t rare. Political prisoners were routinely tortured and killed in Evin. We focused our attention elsewhere. Once we slipped past the front gate, headscarves came off and we sang songs, and planned Christmas celebrations, and heard funny sermons from our portly, heavily bearded Assyrian pastor, Brother Yusuf. The year we returned from England, Maman explained Christmas to us. She told us about Father Christmas and stockings by our beds, and it struck me that this character sounded like an older Brother Yusuf.

      “If he visits all the children in the world,” I asked, “why didn’t he come to us before?” Maman told me that he only visited Christian children, and now we were Christians, wasn’t that exciting? “But I didn’t know about Jesus before,” I said. “You said Christianity is fair. If I didn’t know, why would he skip me? What about kids who are too young to have a religion? Does Father Christmas only visit houses with Christian parents?”

      Maman blinked a few times. “Dina, it’s for fun. Maybe it’s Father Christmas. Maybe it’s Brother Yusuf in a costume. Do you want a stocking, or do you want to sit in protest for all the ones you didn’t get?”

      “Yes, I want one,” I said, and immediately suspended disbelief.

      “Good,” she said, then added (as she often did), “Keep asking these kinds of questions. You can think for yourself now; no more reciting.”

      For a while I did this. I read my Bible, found inconsistencies, and presented them to Brother Yusuf. I often asked my questions over meals at our sofreh, or his sofreh, with several families sitting around a feast on the floor. Brother Yusuf was the slowest eater I had met. He delighted in every bite,