eight years old when she fled the country together with her mother and brother. They spent two years in different refugee camps in Italy and Dubai before they were granted asylum in the United States.
What is it like to be a refugee? Even though there are close to 80 million people who have been forced to leave their homes, this is a question that most of us never give much thought. In Dina Nayeri's book The Ungrateful Refugee. What Immigrants Never Tell You, she weaves together her own vivid story with those of other refugees and asylum seekers. She describes the desperation they feel having to leave their home country, the dangers they face, and the systems that help and hinder them along their journeys.
Below, you will find an excerpt from the book describing the life of the refugee Darius before he is forced to leave Iran. He manages to get out of the country alive, but what awaits on his journey and when he reaches Europe?
Darius
Darius took a last drag from his cigarette and stamped it out on the tiles outside the tea shop. ‘Has she texted today?’ his friend asked.
‘No,’ said Darius. They were standing under Isfahan’s famous Thirty-Three Arches after an evening coffee and water pipe. ‘Let’s hope this means . . .’
‘Yes,’ said his friend. ‘A shame, though. Such a piece.’
Darius chuckled and said goodbye.
On the way home, his pocket vibrated. Nowadays, each text sent an icy rivulet down his back. He glanced at his phone. It was her.
Dariuuuuuus. What’s going on?
He stopped in the road to reply – quick disavowals. No
games. Please, Miss, stop texting. I’ve had so much trouble.
She wrote again: It’s fine. I just want to say hello.
Please delete my number. You’ll get me killed.
He switched off his mobile and quickened his pace. It was already past ten. He was three streets from his house, crossing a narrow alley, when they came. ‘Hey, Seamstress!’ a voice called. Darius was a tailor, a good one. He didn’t care that they found it low. He was tall and handsome, and he knew how to make clothes that fit. One day he would have a chain of shops. One day he would make beautiful Western suits. Before he could turn, someone had punched him in the side of the neck. Then a baton bludgeoned his leg and he was down, holding his side to stay their kicks.
In the chaos, every detail detached from reality. The world narrowed to a series of sensations and his aching brain could only make room for snippets: that they were Basijis, the pitiless volunteer militia. That they were four, or five, young men. That he was so close to home that his parents could probably hear his screams. That one of them said, ‘Leave Iran or die.’
He slept in the alley for an hour after they left. The last thing he heard was a distant echo down the alley, ‘Don’t let us see you again.’
Then he went home. The next day, the doctors stitched his face, arms and legs. His mother cried in her room.
‘What a world these young people have inherited,’ she wailed to his father. ‘Twenty-three and our boy has known no other life. Remember the days before the revolution? Remember 1978?’
Darius was born in 1992. The paradise of old Iran gave him no nostalgia, only curiosity and some pride. Still, he wished for a chance. To make a business, a life, a family. He wanted to tell that girl that he liked her company, though he rejected her two or three times a week. He wanted to take her for coffee, to see the wind tangle her hair, to watch her laugh in a cinema. Maybe they would fall in love. Maybe they wouldn’t. They’d never know, because her parents, both Sepâh, both militant and revolutionary with jobs in the ministry, had found out and decided to kill him.
They had no interest in questioning their daughter, telling her their plans for him or hearing that she was the aggressor.
In a year, they returned for him. Darius’s wounds had healed, but he had scars on his arms and face. He hadn’t spoken to the girl again, though she tried. Now he sat at his mother’s sofreh cloth, eating dinner with his parents. They knocked hard and his father answered. They tore into the house, knocking a vase over and stepping on the sofreh with their shoes.
‘Have you texted the young lady again?’ one of them barked.
‘I swear, only to beg her not to text. I swear. You can look.’ Darius tried to tell them that she didn’t understand; that she felt safe because of her parents and so she thought he was safe too.
‘So now it’s the young lady’s fault?’ said the most senior Sepâh. They lifted him off his feet by his shirt and dragged him to their headquarters. He waited for hours. The Sepâh opened the door. He didn’t ask questions, just lobbed accusations and waited for a reaction. Darius kept his gaze on the table.
‘You have disgraced the daughter of Mr Mahmoodi.’
‘No, sir. I didn’t,’ he said to the table.
‘You are a communist operative.’
‘No, sir, I’m a tailor. I make shirts.’
‘You have been drinking.’
‘No, sir.’ He was so tired. It didn’t matter what he said.
A guard entered, whispered to the Sepâh about drug trafficking. They intended for Darius to hear. He wanted to weep – they would never let him go. He would die on a crane or facing a firing squad, before he turned thirty.
‘You’ve been drinking and you attacked Basiji officers in the street,’ said the guard. When he shook his head, the Sepâh knocked him in the temple with the butt of a huge rifle. Darius toppled off his chair. He gripped the table leg and pulled his legs into his stomach, like a newborn. Before he lost consciousness, he felt another two blows to his head, then one to his back, just behind his heart. They were striking to kill.
He woke in the hospital with his parents standing over him. His body felt light, his mouth dry. He had been in a coma for three months.
‘You can’t stay in Iran,’ said his father. ‘They’ll kill you.’ His mother had explained that they had visited the house almost weekly.
‘Your son is anti-regime. He has problems with Islam. He’s a drug dealer. An apostate. An underground operative. His blood is halal for us.’
It seemed that was all they wanted – to establish that Darius’s blood was halal. When his parents went to complain of harassment, every officer said that Darius had attacked Basijis in the street.
‘If they get you in the street again,’ said his father, ‘you’ll be dead. Please, I have some money. Take it and get out and live some kind of life. You can make home anywhere if you try. Find happiness away from here.’
Darius spent two weeks letting his siblings feed him as he recovered some of the fifteen kilos he had lost. He took his pills. Pockets of black formed in his memory. His body was covered in scars now – his arms, face, neck, legs. Every morning his parents begged him to leave.
When asked to describe his journey, Darius forgets things. He recalls details out of order. His head pounds. Once, in a halfway house, all his muscles clenched and a tic twisted up half his body for hours. He is a single man; he looks fit and isn’t yet so jaded that he can’t laugh now and then. But he stumbles into dark patches; he loses details as a liar would. He is rarely believed. ‘Economic migrant,’ they call him, seeing only his youth and potential. In newspapers and on his iPhone, Europeans are always debating how much refugees will contribute; they claim to want the economically beneficial kind, the ‘good’ immigrants. And yet, they welcome only those with a foot in the grave. Show any agency or savvy or industry before you left your home and you’re done. People begin imagining you scheming to get out just to get rich off an idea (or a surgery or an atelier). They consider the surgery or atelier that doesn’t yet exist as property stolen from them. The minute you arrive, though, even if you did have a foot in the grave, God help you if you need social services for a while.
Darius drove to Urmia, an Iranian city near the border with Turkey. From there, with the help of a smuggler, he crossed the mountain on foot. He wore trainers and the mountain crossing took him forty-five minutes. Every few steps he thought he felt the gunshot in his leg or back. If he fell, he knew, the smuggler would leave him.
‘Now you’re in Turkey,’ said the smuggler, somewhere on the mountain. ‘I turn back here. Good luck.’
In the Turkish village, he was driven to a mud hut and taken for twice the agreed fee. ‘Call your family and ask for more,’ they said. ‘The journey was more treacherous than expected.’ He recalled no hardship that hadn’t been explained before the trip, but single young men from Iran rarely stir up sympathy – economic migrants, exploiters, opportunists. He paid. He sat in the hut for four days, awaiting the next step, though this one was already disappearing into the dark patches, the spoiled, battered parts of his brain.
The first airboat was too full. Sixty, including many exhausted children watching Darius with shy eyes. A few metres in, it toppled, releasing its occupants into the Aegean. All luggage washed away. The strong swam back, not daring to imagine what had become of the others, those tired children. Darius ran into the woods, where Turkish officers picked him up and took him to jail.
He wasted away in a Turkish jail cell for two months. He had no papers, gave a false name and spent his days in a delirium. Trapped in a fever dream, he remembers little – it is so easy to doubt him. He spent that time with his eyes closed. They released him when his brain medicines ran out. Too much trouble.
‘Get out of Turkey,’ they said, and he tried to oblige.
On his next try, Darius’s boat made it to Lesbos. As joyful men jumped out and began pulling the boat ashore, a voice nearby whispered, ‘Don’t celebrate too soon. This is where the hardship really starts.’
‘We’re in Europe,’ said Darius, to the dark. ‘We’re on free soil.’
‘But we’re not going into Europe. We’re going to Moria.’
Copyright © Dina Nayeri,
Canongate Books