I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  She lived in the city, but her home had the feeling of a farm. She had no land to speak of, but she kept chickens, rabbits, and pigeons in a sliver of open ground between the living room and kitchen. She didn’t trust the local butchers, so she slaughtered her own chickens and we always had fresh eggs. She also fed and cared for a couple of neighborhood cats. She always told me that the Prophet Muhammad took care of cats, so we should treat them well. She would never let a beggar leave our doorstep without giving him something to eat, and when a beggar came, I would often end up sitting on the stoop and talking to him, asking why he was poor and other impertinent questions. My grandmother was so embarrassed. “Why don’t you let the man eat?” she’d say. But I was curious. She didn’t just feed the beggars and send them off. She’d have something to say to them, a good word, something to give them hope. “You’re going through tough times, but God is great, and you’re going to get better,” she’d say. As a sign of respect, they called her hajja, a title usually reserved for people who had completed the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, where my grandmother had never been.

  Although she had been born into comfortable circumstances, she had a natural head for home economics. Having her own chickens meant that even when money was tight we never went hungry. She cooked or baked with the eggs, or gave them to neighbors as gifts. Her pigeons were trained to deliver letters, a lucrative side business. She worked on a farm sometimes, milking cows. (When she took me with her, I would pull their tails.) She also still worked as a nurse and midwife and made medicinal oils.

  She kept her coins—what she called “small money”—in a handkerchief hidden in her traditional long Moroccan dresses, but she hid her “big money”—bills—in her bra. “Make sure you don’t keep all your money in one place,” she told me. “You have to hide it so the sons of sin don’t see how much money you have.” “Sons of sin” was my grandmother’s term for anyone who behaved badly, from a neighborhood tough to a serious criminal. I thought her bra trick funny at the time but, later, I found myself emulating her. In dicey reporting situations, a bra can be a good hiding place for memory chips and money. Especially in the Muslim world, few people will dare to check there.

  My grandmother was stern but immensely lovable. When my grandfather visited her, he’d say, “Why don’t we get married again?” But she wouldn’t let people mess around with her. That was what made her different from other women. She wasn’t afraid to take risks; that’s something I learned from her.

  My grandmother explained to me that no matter what position a person had, if he or she was in the wrong, one shouldn’t keep silent. I remember once on a crowded bus in Meknes, a lot of young men were sitting while we stood. “Which one of you is going to stand up and make space for an older woman and a child?” she asked. When nobody paid attention, she grew irate. “You sons of sin!” she yelled. “You should be ashamed. In Germany, they would all get up and make space for an older woman and young child.” The bus driver was laughing and telling her to take it easy, but finally one of the men grew so ashamed that he got up and gave her his seat.

  At the time, the political situation in Morocco was sensitive. Anyone who criticized the police or the government could face trouble. My grandmother didn’t care. Once, a policeman asked her for a “donation” after he saw her coming out of the bank. She asked him what charity organization the police were running now. When the cop made clear the money was for him, my grandmother began to berate him. Wasn’t he ashamed, not only of being corrupt, but of taking money from a poor old woman who had to feed her granddaughter? “Why don’t you go ask the guys in ties if they’ll give you a private donation?” she asked him. “Because you don’t dare. Instead, you take it from those who are weakest.” The policeman shushed her but she yelled even louder, so that all of the people around us would hear what she had to say. And it worked: he finally went away without his bribe.

  She spoke up on my behalf in ways I’ll never forget. My grandmother couldn’t read, but she had mastered most of the Koran. When I was almost four, she decided I should learn to read the holy book, so she started sending me to Koran school a few mornings a week. I’d sit on the floor with other kids, learning to read and memorize the suras, and on Friday I’d recite what I’d learned in front of my grandmother. Our teacher, known as a fqih, would read out the lines, and we would repeat them, following along in the text. But the teacher was an aggressive young man, and when a student did something he didn’t like, he’d strike the child’s hands with an iron ruler.

  My grandmother was very protective of me. She took seriously the responsibility my parents had given her when they left their baby daughter in her care. When I started at the Koran school, she had a talk with the fqih, Si Abdullah. “Don’t ever touch this girl,” she told him. “Don’t ever beat her.” One afternoon, Si Abdullah caught me speaking with another child, and the ruler came out. He told me to hold out my hands, palms up, and struck them with the metal. Then he asked me to turn them over and brought the iron down hard on my knuckles. I yelped in pain, burst into tears, and ran out of the classroom and down the street to my grandmother’s house.

  I cried and told her that Si Abdullah had beaten me. When she saw the marks on my hands, she was furious. She grabbed me and dragged me back to the school. We crashed into the classroom, where my grandmother took off her leather sandal and started beating Si Abdullah in front of everyone, shouting that she wouldn’t let anyone touch her granddaughter. “Why did you beat her?!” she yelled. I was still crying, but all the other kids laughed as Si Abdullah cringed and ducked to avoid her blows.

  She was so inspiring that I picked up her appetite for arguments and would eagerly debate with her. Once, when a friend of my father’s named Mahmoud was visiting, she made me one of my standard meals: two- or three-day-old bread with warm milk, honey, and cinnamon. “I don’t want to eat this again,” I told her. “I’ve been eating this every second day.”

  “You’ll eat what I make for you,” she answered.

  “But why are you always making this bread with milk? My parents send you enough money that we could afford other food.”

  “You should say Alhamdulillah that you have something to eat, you little devil,” she told me, invoking a common Arabic phrase meaning “praise be to God.” “There are so many poor people who would be happy to have something to eat.”

  She and Mahmoud were astonished by the sharpness and strength of my arguments, given that I was only four years old. Mahmoud burst into laughter when he heard my answer: “Well, Grandmother, if you are so worried about the poor people who have no food, then why don’t you invite them to our house and let them eat this?”

  My grandmother kept herself very clean. We had a faucet in our washroom, which we used for daily washing, but twice a week she would drag me to the hammam. I dreaded those bathhouses, with their heat and darkness, the stink of olive oil soap, and the loud voices of the naked women, who sounded to me like they were screaming. The women who worked there washed me with hot water and soap, roughly scrubbing my skin. My grandmother told me to close my eyes and keep quiet, but it felt like torture.

  Meknes was very hot in the summer. The smell of the sandy ground hung in the air. When it rained, which wasn’t often, everyone would open their doors and welcome the drops. I used to dance in the rain, while my grandmother screamed at me to come back in before I got sick. “But if the rain is washing me, we don’t need to go to the hammam this week,” I told her.

  My father and mother understood that my grandmother would have loved to keep me in Morocco, but after three years they wanted to bring me back to Germany. It was a shock for my grandmother, who was hoping that I would stay with her.

  For the first time, I saw her crying while speaking to my parents. But she also understood that it was time for me to be reunited with my mother, father, and sisters.

  Three months later, my father came to take me back to Germany. I still remember how I hugged my grandparents and we all
cried. My grandparents asked me not to forget where I came from. “I will go to school there and come back to you,” I told them. “I promise I will not forget who we are. Never.”

  * * *

  BACK IN FRANKFURT, I met my two sisters. It was December, and I saw snow for the first time in my life. I learned that my eldest sister, Fatma, now nine, had suffered brain damage because of complications when she was born. She needed a lot of extra help and support and went to a special day care. Hannan was just a year younger than Fatma, and we became fast friends.

  I missed my grandparents deeply, and it took time to get used to my parents. My mother spoke Arabic, but I barely understood her when she didn’t speak darija, the Moroccan dialect, which she had learned but spoke with a funny accent. Then there was the weird language everyone else around me spoke. I couldn’t understand a word of German.

  One evening, I saw Fatma and Hannan each cleaning one of their boots and putting it in front of our bedroom. They told me I should do the same because “Nikolaus” would come. I had no idea what they were talking about. I asked if this was a friend of our parents. I didn’t know that Germans celebrate the coming of Saint Nikolaus early in December, several weeks before Christmas. They told me that Nikolaus would bring chocolates, and if the boot was cleaned well, there would be more sweets in it.

  I began to clean my boots, too, and thought that if I cleaned both of them, Nikolaus would fill both up with sweets. When my parents sent us to bed, I kept thinking about this Nikolaus who would come with chocolates. I heard some noise and then I heard my parents switch off the lights.

  I climbed out of bed, carefully opened the door, and looked for my boots. One was empty, but the other was filled with chocolates and candy. I couldn’t believe that a stranger would bring in one evening as much chocolate as I had ever gotten in almost three years in Morocco. I began to eat the candy and chocolates in the dark, until the boot was nearly empty. Then I began to worry about my sisters. It would be unfair, I thought, if they saw their boots filled and mine empty, and they felt bad for me. So I took candy and chocolate from each of their boots and dumped them into mine.

  The next morning when we all woke up and saw what Nikolaus had brought for us, my sisters wondered why their boots hadn’t been filled up to the top.

  “You should be happy that he came,” I told them. “In the past he has always forgotten me, when I was in Morocco.”

  Both my parents were laughing. “You’d better go and wash away the chocolate around your mouth,” my mother told me.

  Our observance of Nikolaus’s yearly visit was one way in which my parents tried to help us fit in in Germany. My mother worked for a church, and I went to a Christian kindergarten and later to day care on the premises. My parents told us that the three monotheistic world religions had a lot in common. There were Adam and Eve, who were banned from paradise, a story that was not only told in Judaism and Christianity but also found its way into the Koran and Islamic traditions. There was Abraham, the “father of believers,” who is mentioned in the Koran, the Torah, and the Bible. There was Jesus, who was a prophet in Islam, but also important for Christians, since they believed he was the son of God. There was Moses, a prophet to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. All three faiths shared traditions of fasting, the belief in one God, and the importance of the holy scriptures. My parents explained that, as Muslims, we honored all prophets; the main difference was that we believed Muhammad was the last prophet of God.

  Along with the Muslim holidays, we celebrated Christmas with a plastic tree and electric lights—my parents were too afraid of fire to get a real tree and decorate it with candles—as well as wrapped gifts. They would take us to the Christmas market, where we’d ride the carousel and eat traditional heart-shaped cookies, roasted chestnuts (a favorite of my mother’s), and popcorn with salt and sugar, followed by dinner at McDonald’s, Burger King, or North Sea, where we ordered fish and chips.

  My mother worked as a laundress for nuns in a church community. A nun ran my kindergarten, where the teachers included a mean-spirited woman who would read us fairy tales. “You see, all the nice princesses are blond, and all the bad people are dark-haired,” she’d tell me. I was the only dark-haired girl in the class, so this really hit me. “Wasn’t Snow White also dark-haired?” I asked. This didn’t seem to matter to this teacher, who sometimes took the opportunity to smack me when no one was looking, until Hannan caught her and told her to stop.

  In the church laundry and dry cleaning service, my mother worked with a nun named Sister Helma and two women from Yugoslavia, whom we knew as Aunt Zora and Aunt Dschuka. They would wash and iron the nuns’ habits and white head coverings. We called the place where they worked the “washing kitchen.” There were several washing machines, including one for sheets and another for head coverings, and one big dryer. Each woman had an ironing table. My mother’s iron was so heavy that it strained her back, giving her aches that still troubled her decades later. At break time, they drank coffee and ate bread or borek, a pastry stuffed with sheep cheese, brought by one of the Yugoslavian women. The nuns’ head coverings reminded me of the head scarves worn by my grandmother and other elderly women in Morocco.

  The kindergarten playground was visible from the window where my mother stood ironing. I would look up from playing to wave and wink at her, or she would come and bring me something to eat or drink. Aunt Zora’s husband was a gardener in the same compound. He was always drunk, but he had a good heart. Whenever my sisters and I saw him drinking beer from the stall across the street, he’d tell us not to tell his wife, and he’d buy us ice cream.

  At the restaurant, my father worked with several Germans, an Indian we called Uncle Baggi, Uncle Latif from Pakistan, and a gay Scotsman named Tom, whom we called Uncle Tommy and whose partner sometimes picked him up from work. All the men wore tight trousers and shirts and listened to rock music, and they became my father’s friends. They would come over for lunch or dinner, and Latif or Tommy would bring bottles of beer and get funny after a while. I remember Uncle Tommy sometimes staying overnight in our guest room when he worked too late to catch the train home.

  Latif was a sort of handyman for Willy Berger, my dad’s boss, doing electrical and maintenance work at the restaurant and in Mr. Berger’s and our home when it was needed. In the mid-1980s, Latif went to visit his family in Pakistan. He returned a changed man.

  Shortly after he got back to Germany, my father called him because the lights in our house weren’t working. When I opened the door, I saw Latif, who used to wear tight jeans and shirts unbuttoned halfway down his chest, clad in wide white trousers and a traditional tunic. His hair had grown since I’d last seen him, and he had a long beard.

  Before, he’d always greeted my mother with a handshake, but now he refused to touch or look at her. He started looking into the problem with the lights. When my father got back from the grocery store, I could see surprise in his eyes.

  My mother had prepared coffee and cake. But she told my father she sensed that Latif was no longer comfortable sitting with her. My sisters and I joined my dad and his old friend. Latif looked intently at my father and spoke to him. I was only about seven years old, but I remember hearing him say something about the need for hijab, a head scarf, for my mother and us girls, and that my father should think about the “jihad that Muslims were waging in Afghanistan.” He also said that my father had to stop being friends with Uncle Tommy because he was gay.

  We later learned that Latif had been in touch with groups in Pakistan that were supporting the war against the Soviets. He ultimately became part of the mujahideen movement, though we never learned the exact details. While the Arabic term mujahid refers to someone performing jihad, it was commonly used to describe the fragmented Islamist movement against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. When I asked my father later which groups Latif was linked to, he said he’d never asked because he didn’t want to know.

  Latif’s presumptuousness enraged my father. He told hi
s old friend that he had no right to come to our house and tell him what Islam was, how his daughters and wife should dress, or whom he should be friends with.

  My mother heard my father’s voice rise and came to see if everything was all right.

  “Tommy is our friend, and if you don’t like it, then you can stop coming over here,” I heard my father say. Latif took his things and left.

  Some weeks later, my father came home and said that he had seen Latif in the city center with other bearded men. They had set up a table and chairs under a tent, and they were handing out books, trying to convert people to their interpretation of Islam and telling them about the war in Afghanistan. They were speaking to migrants but also to Germans, many of whom remained bitter about the division of Germany and hated the “godless” Soviets.

  “There were men from Algeria, Morocco, Pakistan. They all were calling for support of the ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan,” my father said. He told my mother never to let Latif into our house again. “I don’t want you or our daughters to have anything to do with people like him,” he said.

  There was something else happening in Europe at about this time. In Britain, France, and Germany, some men who had returned from the fighting in Afghanistan began to tell other Muslim immigrants that it was their duty to protect oppressed Muslims around the world. Back then, these men weren’t seen as threats. Western Europe was proud of its freedom of thought and expression, and these former fighters were allies of a sort, helping defeat the Soviets. Political leaders didn’t suspect that the people fighting the Soviets would one day turn against them and their allies in the Middle East. They didn’t realize that a quiet battle was beginning between secular, individualistic ideals and radical religious ideologies coupled with the will to rise up and fight injustice.