I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  “If you think you’re coming upstairs, you’re mistaken,” she told him. Then she invited him up, and they drank more coffee.

  The romance moved fast, and they married in a civil ceremony at Frankfurt’s City Hall a few weeks later. My father’s boss was his best man, and my mother’s Japanese roommate was her maid of honor.

  My mother got pregnant quickly. But life changed dramatically for Muslims and Arabs in West Germany during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, when a group of eight Palestinian terrorists entered the Israeli team’s quarters, killed a coach and a weight lifter, and took nine other athletes hostage. The militants belonged to a group called Black September. They vowed to kill the hostages unless Israel agreed to release two hundred Arab prisoners and guaranteed the hostage takers safe passage out of West Germany. Israel, following a long-held policy, refused to negotiate. The Germans, however, promised to fly the militants and their hostages to Tunisia. At the airport, German snipers opened fire on the Palestinians. But the terrorists were well trained; they killed the hostages. The raid ended in disaster, with all the hostages, five of the hostage takers, and a police officer dead.

  Years later, it emerged that Black September was an offshoot of Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization. But in the immediate aftermath of the Munich attack, Muslims and Arabs faced new scrutiny. My parents felt the change, especially my father. Police would stop him often and ask for his papers. The homes of Arab students were searched because police suspected them of supporting militant groups or sheltering their members. “Some people would even say, ‘Arabs should leave,’” my father told me. It didn’t bother him because something bad had happened, and the Germans were trying to figure out who was behind it. He understood why they were suspicious.

  The pressure continued throughout the 1970s, as terrorism became a daily reality in West Germany. Groups such as Black September and the Baader-Meinhof Gang, which called itself the Red Army Faction, were motivated by hostility toward Israel and what they dubbed Western imperialism, but ideologically they were left-wing and secular. The Red Army Faction included the children of German intellectuals; they saw West German leaders as fascists and compared them to Nazis. This wasn’t entirely wrong; at the time some influential posts in West Germany were held by people with connections to the Nazis. The Red Army Faction undertook bank robberies, bombings, hijackings, kidnappings, and assassinations. The group had connections to the Middle East. In the late 1960s, Baader-Meinhof members traveled to a Palestinian training camp in Lebanon for instruction in bomb making and other guerrilla skills, and some members took part in joint operations with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and other groups. The Red Army Faction kidnapped West German politicians and industry leaders, including Hanns-Martin Schleyer, an influential businessman and former SS member, whom they also killed.

  In 1973 my mother gave birth to my oldest sister, Fatma. A year later, my sister Hannan arrived. Then, in 1977, my mother learned that she was pregnant for the third time. The doctors advised her to have an abortion. They thought I would be born with a congenital defect that could leave me without arms or hands. My mother was distraught.

  “It’s all in the hands of God,” my father told her. “Let’s have the child and whatever happens, happens. We’ll deal with it.”

  In those days, some Turkish migrants were known to cause scenes at German hospitals when women gave birth to girls. They wanted sons.

  When I was born, the doctor looked apologetic. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a girl.”

  “Is she okay?” my mother asked. “Does she have arms and legs?”

  “Not only is she okay,” the doctor said, “she just peed on me!”

  Because I was born healthy, against all the doctors’ predictions, my parents named me “Souad,” which means “the happy fortunate one” in Arabic. And in many ways I was a very lucky child. Klettenbergstrasse, where we lived then, is one of the nicest streets in Frankfurt. My father’s boss, who owned the restaurant where he worked, rented an apartment at number 8, and he found us an apartment in the same building, at the very top, in a sort of attic. The building was old and had six flats. Most of the other residents in the building and the neighborhood were bankers, managers, or business owners. A stewardess for Lufthansa lived in the other top-floor apartment, across from ours. We were the only guest worker family.

  While the area was beautiful, our apartment was not. The roof leaked so badly that sometimes my mother had to set up buckets to catch the rain. Both of my parents had to work, and not only to support us. They also felt responsible for their families back in Morocco and Turkey and sent their parents money every month. A German woman cared for my two older sisters during the day in her apartment. When my mother’s younger sister came to visit her and their brothers in Germany, she took care of me during the day.

  When I was eight weeks old, my parents learned that my mother’s father was very ill. They couldn’t afford to buy airline tickets on such short notice; the bus was more affordable, but it meant at least four days of travel. My parents worried that the trip would be too much for me.

  Antje Ehrt and her husband, Robert, who lived in our building, offered to take care of me for the four weeks that my parents would be gone. My parents accepted but insisted on paying for my expenses. But my parents’ return was delayed because my grandfather’s health worsened, so they stayed longer. There were no telephones. The Ehrts started to worry about how they would explain to the authorities where this baby had come from.

  After my parents came back, the Ehrts became like godparents to me. The couple had two children of their own and were more open-minded and inviting than some others in the neighborhood. Robert Ehrt was a manager at a big German company. I was told later that when I was a baby, he would come home from work and play with me and give me a bottle.

  The family used to eat in their kitchen, and when I stayed with them as a baby they would leave me in the bedroom. But I didn’t like that. I wanted to be where the action was. I would scream until they came and got “madam” in her bassinet. They would put the bassinet on the kitchen counter so I could be close to them as they ate.

  On the ground floor lived another couple who would influence me. Ruth and Alfred Weiss were Holocaust survivors. My father would sometimes buy them bread from the bakery, and my mother would send them cookies or food she had cooked.

  “Many of my teachers were Jewish,” my father always told us. “I am very grateful for what they have taught me.”

  When I was just a few months old, my mother’s sister, the one who had come to Germany to visit and had been babysitting for me, decided to return to Turkey to help care for my grandfather. My parents discussed sending me to Morocco, to stay with my father’s mother. There, I would be with someone who would really take care of me; I would also learn Arabic and get my early Islamic education.

  It seemed the right choice. I was still breast-feeding, and since my mother wouldn’t be with me, my Moroccan grandmother found a Berber woman in her neighborhood to nurse me. Back in Germany, my mother mourned. She knew that I would make my first memories far away from her.

  My Moroccan grandmother, Ruqqaya, had been named after one of the Prophet’s daughters. She and her relatives bore the surname Sadiqqi; they were known to be descendants of Moulay Ali Al-Cherif, a Moroccan nobleman whose family came from what is today Saudi Arabia and helped unite Morocco in the seventeenth century, establishing the dynasty of the Alaouites, who are still in power today. They were a dynasty of sharifs, a title that only the descendants of Muhammad’s grandson Hasan are allowed to carry.

  My grandmother had been born into a wealthy family in the province of Tafilalt, in the city of Er-Rachidia, in the early years of the twentieth century. In those days, birthdays weren’t always carefully recorded, but she remembered the French marching into Morocco in 1912. Her family owned land in the region, and she used to tell me about the date palms there, and the cows, sh
eep, goats, and horses they kept. Her relatives were considered nobility because of their connection to the Prophet. Such people are sometimes called by honorifics—moulay and sharif for the men and sharifa or lalla for the women—but my grandmother never used her formal title.

  She was married young, at thirteen or fourteen, to the son of a close friend of her father’s, a prosperous and wellborn boy a bit older than she. She gave birth to a baby boy about a year later. Over the next few years, they had another son and a daughter, but her husband grew violent, hitting her and their children. She told her parents she wanted a divorce. This was discussed in the family, but the friendship and business ties between her father and her father-in-law proved too strong. Have patience, her family told her, these things sometimes pass. My grandmother refused. She divorced her husband and left, taking her three children with her.

  It was a radical move in those days, and my grandmother became an outcast. She was a young woman on her own who couldn’t read or write, and she had never learned to work because she’d never had to. She fled with her children to Meknes, one of Morocco’s four royal cities, where she married again. She never talked about her second husband, except to say that the union was brief: he left her while she was pregnant with another child, a girl named Zahra. Now she was alone again, with children from two different men. She swore never to marry again, vowing instead to work and support her family alone. In those years, she made her living mainly as a nurse and midwife, and she also mixed and sold healing oils.

  My grandmother took risks but she always knew who she was—and she never forgot her roots. She told me that some of her most crucial role models had been the wives of the Prophet. His first wife, Khadija, had been a successful businesswoman who was older and had supported Muhammad financially and emotionally when his own tribe turned against him. She is honored by Sunnis and Shia as the first convert to Islam and as Muhammad’s most loving and faithful confidante. Another of his wives, Aisha, was known for her intellect and extensive knowledge of the Sunnah, the tradition of sayings and activities of Muhammad, which is the second most important theological and legal source for many Muslims after the Koran. While Sunnis revere her as one of the Prophet’s sources of inspiration, some Shia see Aisha more critically, suspecting her of having been unfaithful to the Prophet and arguing that her opposition to Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali was an unforgivable sin. “Don’t think women have to be weak in Islam,” my grandmother told me.

  She met the man who would become my grandfather in Meknes. His name was Abdelkader, and he, too, came from a wealthy background. But by the time they met, prison and torture had broken his body and his fortune was gone.

  My grandfather came from a province known as al-Haouz and its outskirts, not far from Marrakech, which was known to have one of the strongest opposition movements against the French. In al-Haouz and other parts of Morocco, Muslims and Jews fought side by side for independence. My grandfather had been a tribal chief and a local leader in the independence movement, developing strategy and helping to funnel weapons and supplies to fighters trying to force out the French. They called it a jihad, but my grandfather and his comrades had strict rules: they could target only French soldiers and known torturers who worked on behalf of the French, not women or civilians.

  One day in the late 1940s, the French arrested my grandfather and asked him to give up the names of those belonging to the resistance in his area. “You will get even more land and privileges,” the French interrogator told him. “If you don’t work with us, we will throw you in jail and take away your lands.”

  Grandfather believed in the rebellion. He believed that even if the French took away his property, one day his country would get independence and he would get his land back. They threw him in jail, where he was beaten. They made my grandfather and other prisoners stand naked in contorted positions, urinated on them, and doused them with cold or hot water; some were raped with bottles. They seized his olive trees, his almond and orange groves, and his horses. They gave many of his possessions to collaborators.

  He spent a few months in prison. When he was released, the French banned him from returning to his lands; he had lost everything but his pride and hope. He went to Meknes, where he found work as a laborer, building houses. He didn’t know the trade, but he had to survive. Meknes was booming, and people needed places to live.

  This man who had once owned horses and many acres of land decided to settle in Sidi Masoud, a ragged community that resembled a shantytown. Sidi Masoud was home to Moroccans who had come to the city from different regions and for different reasons; they built their dwellings hurriedly and poorly from wood, sheet metal, and whatever else they could find or get cheaply.

  One day, a woman of noble lineage moved into Sidi Masoud with her children. One of Abdelkader’s friends, who knew of his past as a tribal chief, told him laughingly that his status in the neighborhood would now be topped by that of a true sharifa.

  Abdelkader knew that this woman had children, so he went to welcome her and brought along some sweets. Instantly suspicious, she told him she didn’t need candy or gifts. He was impressed. Within a few weeks, he’d asked her to marry him. Abdelkader was in his midtwenties, younger than my grandmother, and while he still felt strongly about Moroccan independence, the jail and torture had weakened and scarred him. As a child, when I asked about the marks on his hands and arms, he said they were from lit cigarettes that the French had pressed into his skin; he bore the marks of a horse whip on his back. I think he was drawn to my grandmother in part because of her strength, and because she was a healer. He undertook to provide for her and her children, even adopting her youngest daughter, who had been born fatherless and had only her mother’s name on her birth certificate.

  In 1950, less than a year after their marriage, my grandmother gave birth to my father; he was her youngest, and her favorite. The family lived in a small, simple dwelling made of iron and wood. The walls were roughly nailed together, leaving gaps where you could see the sky. There were two small rooms and no running water or kitchen. The washroom was a partitioned corner with a hole in the ground for a toilet and a bucket of water for washing.

  “There was one well with drinking water,” my father told me. “You had to walk two kilometers and carry the filled buckets back the whole way.”

  The French still occasionally summoned my grandfather or came to the house to arrest him. They told him that he could still get his lands back if he would only cooperate with them. But my grandfather refused. He worried for his family, especially that the French would take my grandmother to hurt him even more. There were rumors of French soldiers and those who worked with them raping women. My father remembered my grandfather used to have a pistol that he kept hidden in the house. Once, when my father was four or five, my grandparents got into an argument and my grandmother threatened to tell the French about my grandfather’s gun. “They’ll lock you up, and I’ll get rid of you,” she said, only half joking. My grandfather didn’t want to go back to prison. He took the pistol to the mosque and threw it in the latrine.

  My grandparents were both still active in the Resistance, particularly in motivating neighbors to take part in protest marches against French rule. In 1956, Morocco finally got its independence, but my grandfather never got his land back. Instead the local mayor offered him two kilograms of sugar. My grandparents refused to accept it. Both were deeply disappointed, and my grandfather fell into a depression.

  When my father turned seven, my grandparents divorced. Grandfather Abdelkader moved to a different part of Meknes, and my grandmother and her children were on their own again.

  “She would wake up in the morning, pray, make breakfast for us, wake my oldest sister to take care of the rest, and then leave in the early morning and come back just before it turned dark,” my father recalled. They had a primitive gas oven, which they used for cooking, or roasted their food over hot coals. They had one small radio that worked only when my grandmother had the money t
o buy batteries, and they relied on candles and oil lamps for light.

  By the time I arrived in Morocco as an infant, to live with my grandmother, she had left the shantytown. Working in Frankfurt, my father had earned enough not just to support us but also to send his mother money to buy a house in the middle of Meknes with three rooms, a kitchen, and an indoor bathroom with a traditional squat toilet and a faucet in the wall.

  My grandfather used to visit and would tell me stories of fighting the French colonialists. He also once told me that the most powerful people were those who could read and write, because they would be the ones to explain to the world, and to write history. He feared that people would hear only the account of the French colonizers and that the stories of people like him would be forgotten.

  A Jewish family lived three houses down from my grandmother. The mother would often come over on Fridays and bring homemade bread, which she said had been baked specially for that day. I now know that it was challah, prepared for the Jewish Sabbath. In exchange, my grandmother would bring over plates of couscous or cookies. Their daughter, Miriam, became a close friend of mine. She was two years older than I, and fluent in French; we called her “Meriem,” the Moroccan version of the name. Before I turned four, she and her family left for France.

  My grandmother had deep, dark eyes and white hair that was sometimes dyed red with henna. She was probably five foot six with very strong hands and a firm, muscular body, shaped by hard physical labor and toned by the medicinal oils she made and rubbed into her skin. She had an irresistible, contagious laugh.