I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  Soon after, I was invited to be a guest on a public radio talk show for immigrants called Rendezvous in Germany. I seized the opportunity to ask the editor to let me intern there for two weeks. It was the beginning of my radio career. The show had guests who spoke Greek, Turkish, Spanish, and other languages, and they always needed two moderators, one an immigrant, the other a child of migrants like me. My Turkish wasn’t good enough to host a program. I can order food in that language but not more, and at the time they didn’t have Arabic programs. Ironically, I was useful on the show because I spoke fluent German, even if most Germans considered me a foreigner.

  The shows were very political. We talked about integration, the role of women, and racism within migrant communities. Some people of Turkish descent wouldn’t let their children marry Moroccans, and some migrants discriminated against blacks. These people craved respect but, at the same time, they didn’t respect others. We talked about racism in soccer, about gay rights, and about hypocrisy in general.

  After I’d been working part-time at the station for about a year, the head of a pop music program offered me a job moderating a call-in request show called The Wish Island. Sometimes I couldn’t even pronounce the names of the songs, which were mostly in English. I was taking English at school, but my teacher preferred casual conversation in German to teaching. Nevertheless, the head of the show told me I had a great voice. He wanted me to work on other programs as well. I felt that moderating a pop music show was fun and surely the best-paid job I’d ever had—it paid twice what I made hosting the migrant program. But it wasn’t what I was aiming for. The photograph from All the President’s Men still hung on my bedroom door. I gave up the music show after two months.

  I was still freelancing for Frankfurter Rundschau, covering local neighborhood stories. One afternoon, a very nice assistant to one of the editors told me about a journalism school in Hamburg. “The Henri-Nannen School is one of the best in Europe,” she said. “You should look into it after your studies.” I still had half a year of high school to go, but she had planted a seed. There’s no harm in trying, I thought.

  I learned that most of the people who went to Henri-Nannen already had careers in journalism; they had finished their university degrees and wanted to get access to big outlets such as Der Spiegel, Stern, or Die Zeit, all of which funded the school. Competition to get in was brutal. Applicants had to research and write a narrative and an editorial; we also had to select one of five topics chosen by the school and report and write a story about it. The year I applied, narrative topics included following a young athlete, spending a night at a gas station, or spending the day at a home for elderly people. I tried the gas station but didn’t like it, so I ended up spending a couple of days with a woman my mother knew who lived in a home for the elderly. For the editorial, I wrote about whether the private lives of politicians should be covered by the press. It was the height of the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky scandal. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I do recall suggesting that if Bill Clinton had engaged in sexual activities with Monica Lewinsky somewhere other than in the Oval Office, the act would have been less publicly important. Because he did it on official turf, it was an abuse of power, and thus fair game for journalism. The topic was risqué for a nineteen-year-old. It got the school’s attention.

  A few months after I applied, someone from the Henri-Nannen School called to tell me I had been accepted. I was overjoyed, but there was a problem. Sometimes the news organizations that funded the school would insist that a doctor or lawyer get preferential treatment over a high school graduate. I was asked to try again the following year. No, I thought. I’ll never do that.

  Instead, I graduated from high school and started at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, working at the radio station when I could and living at home. I kept building my journalism skills and making contacts. While interning at a weekly paper in Hamburg, I traveled to the Netherlands to interview the primary European leader of the PKK, a Kurdish separatist militant organization that the United States and the European Union had labeled a terrorist group. I lied to my parents for the first time, telling them that I was going to interview a Kurdish painter.

  The following winter, when I was caught up in my studies, I got another call from Henri-Nannen. Apparently someone in the class had received a job offer. “We want to offer you the spot,” the woman from the school said. “Can you be here in ten days?”

  I put my university studies on hold and started at the Henri-Nannen School in Hamburg, nearly four hours by train from Frankfurt. Luckily I knew the city a little and had one close friend there, who had interned with me at the Hamburg weekly, working in the paper’s arts and style section. He had grown up in a conservative town and had been forced to leave after he came out as gay. He moved to Hamburg and, like me, he understood what it meant to be an outsider.

  I even felt like an outsider in my journalism classes. Unlike most of my fellow students, my parents hadn’t been educated at universities. There was a lot of talk in my presence about oppressed Muslim women, and some of my fellow students asked ridiculous questions like “Will your parents choose your husband?” or “Are you going to marry one of your cousins?” I think if I had been the daughter of rich Arabs or if my parents had been doctors, things would have been different. The people who ran the school told me that I was one of the youngest students they’d ever admitted, and the first child of Muslim guest workers.

  My classmates were the children of German parents, what my father’s coworker had called “German Germans.” They were older; some had studied in Britain, the United States, or France, and many had been journalists for a while. To make matters more difficult, I wasn’t interested in partying, nor was I afraid to question some of the established journalists who came to talk to our class. When a journalist who was considered one of the country’s top investigative reporters described his research on Iran, I couldn’t contain myself.

  “Have you been there?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I do my interviews by phone.”

  I was incredulous. “Aren’t you worried about your sources? If you talk on the phone, don’t you think the intelligence services might listen, and your sources might get in trouble?”

  The reporter gave me a dim look. Such threats were overestimated, he said. But I remembered how Woodward and Bernstein would make a point of meeting people in out-of-the-way places so as not to be overheard. I told him that I’d interviewed the European leader of the PKK in person for just this reason. Later, some of my classmates criticized me for speaking to their idol this way, but compared to Woodward and Bernstein, my fellow students seemed frustratingly uncritical.

  In early 2001, shortly before graduation, our class organized a five-day trip to New York. Besides being excited to see the country I’d admired for its great movies and investigative journalism, I longed to eat a typical hamburger in a typical diner. The school gave us some money, but only enough for airfare and some of our accommodations. I used the money I’d put aside from working weekends at the radio station to cover the rest.

  In New York, I wandered alone around the city. People were different than in Germany, busy but smiling. I went to the World Trade Center and stood in front of the Twin Towers. At a class visit to the New York Times, we looked at the Pulitzers on the wall and visited the newsroom, which was similar to the one I had seen in All the President’s Men. It was like a dream. I wondered what might have happened if things had been different, if my parents had settled in the United States instead of Germany, or if they’d been rich enough to send me to America or Britain for a year to learn better English. Might I have had a shot at working for the New York Times or the Washington Post?

  I graduated from the journalism school in May and returned to Frankfurt, where I wanted to finish my university degree in political science and international relations and eventually apply for a correspondent’s job with a German radio station or write for a magazine based in t
he Middle East or North Africa.

  That was the plan, but it all seemed very far away. I divided my time between studying and freelancing for local newspapers and the radio station. I was living with my parents to avoid paying rent, but I didn’t end up saving much. After years of punishing labor in a poorly ventilated kitchen, my father suffered from asthma, and back injuries had left him unable to stand for long periods. By the time I moved back home, he was working reduced hours and would soon retire. My mother had also retired early because of the pain in her back and shoulders from years operating the heavy clothing irons at the church laundry. My parents also suffered from depression, though they didn’t talk about it. Immigrants of their generation, the cleaners and cooks, worked hard and kept their heads down, never challenging the authority of the “German Germans.” For years, my mother visited a doctor who gave her painful injections for a ringing in her ears that never went away. She meekly accepted that the doctor knew what he was doing until the day I accompanied her to his office and asked why her condition hadn’t improved. The doctor was genuinely surprised. “Usually, people like your mother don’t ask me questions,” he said.

  “We didn’t understand that we also had rights,” my mother told me later. “We never dared to question anything.”

  My parents had left their homes and families, and they worked tirelessly to build better, easier lives for their children, yet we still struggled. When my father’s boss had died several years earlier, the owners of our building in the beautiful, affluent neighborhood where I’d grown up decided to sell, and we were asked to leave. We moved to a different part of the city and into a former U.S. military housing development where all the buildings looked the same. The barracks had been bought and turned into affordable housing, mostly for immigrants. In our new apartment, the door opened right into the living room, as is common in American homes, rather than the typical German layout with a foyer and hallway leading to a more private living space. The building managers extolled the apartments’ built-in shelves and cabinets, but we later learned that some of them contained poison from disinfectants that had been used to clean them.

  My sister Fatma worked, but she didn’t get paid much, and because of her disability she needed support. My brother was still in high school. With my parents unable to work much, supporting the family fell to my sister Hannan and me. I still kept the photograph of Redford and Hoffman on my bedroom door, but I knew where my responsibilities lay: not in the glamorous world of American journalism, but here at home.

  Shortly after I returned to Frankfurt, I learned that the radio station where I’d worked on the migrant and music shows was looking for a backup correspondent in Rabat, the capital of Morocco. During journalism school, I’d interned for six weeks with the station’s previous Rabat correspondent, Claudia Sautter, who had become a friend. Now she was leaving, and the station had chosen her replacement, but it needed someone else who would cover North and West Africa when the new correspondent went on vacation. I’d worked on a range of shows at the station, including political programs, and my internship and visits to my grandmother had made Morocco a kind of second home to me. I spoke Moroccan Arabic. Claudia encouraged me to apply.

  I met with the editor, but things didn’t go as I’d hoped. The editor explained that he wouldn’t send someone who came from a particular country to be a correspondent there. I told him that I didn’t understand this logic, but that it didn’t matter, because I was from Frankfurt.

  He was clearly uncomfortable. My roots were in Morocco, he said, and therefore he couldn’t nominate me for the post. My insides started to ache, and I felt tears coming. Don’t you dare cry, I told myself.

  I repeated that I had been born in Germany and explained that my parents had actually come from two different countries, Morocco and Turkey. By his logic, I said, he would have to immediately fire all the “German Germans” who were covering Germany and bring in foreigners. He turned pale and said that we had nothing more to discuss. I stood up and dashed out of his office just as the tears began to slide down my cheeks. You will never be accepted as a full German, I thought. You don’t stand a chance in journalism.

  Three months later, on a Tuesday in September, I was listening to my favorite international relations professor, Lothar Brock, lecture on … something. I don’t remember, because in truth I wasn’t really listening. At the beginning of the talk, I had turned off the ringer of my mobile phone, but for the past hour I’d felt it vibrating through my backpack. Something was terribly wrong; the only reason someone would be calling me over and over was that something had happened to my family.

  When Professor Brock called a break, I rushed outside. The messages on my phone confirmed my fears: “Souad, where are you?” “Souad, you must come home.” “Souad, come home now!”

  Yes, something was definitely wrong at home. I ran back into the lecture hall and spoke with Dr. Brock. “Go home,” he said. “I hope everything is okay. You’ll let me know, won’t you?”

  I ran for the bus, for the twenty-minute ride to my family’s apartment. When I burst through the doorway, everyone but my father, still at work, was seated around the television.

  Wordlessly, I sat down and stared at the scenes of carnage from New York City. My thoughts immediately turned to my visit six months earlier. I had gone to lower Manhattan specifically to see the World Trade Center, the towers that stood so heroically, icons of American money and power.

  Now they were gone. And all those lives.

  “Maybe it was the Russians,” my mother said hopefully. And unconvincingly.

  I glanced at Hannan, who was staring at me. “I hope no Arabs were involved,” she said. “If so, the backlash is going to be huge.”

  But she and I already knew. Here in Germany, Muslims would suffer. We stared with horror and incomprehension at the televised scenes coming now not just from New York, but also from Washington, DC, and a small town in the state of Pennsylvania. How did this happen? What could drive men to such violence, such hatred, such extremism?

  Very quickly, a German angle emerged. We learned that the plot’s ringleader, Mohamed Atta, two other hijackers, and several other key players in the attacks had lived and plotted in Hamburg, making up what would become known as the Hamburg cell.

  I told my professors I had to go there to find out more. I called my former landlady, and it turned out my room was still empty. I took the next train to Hamburg and moved back in.

  I had no newspaper to work for, so I started freelancing. The German papers were filled with reports about possible connections between Mohamed Atta’s group and the al-Quds mosque in Hamburg. A Moroccan student who had known Atta told me that he was brilliant but intense when it came to Islam. “If you want to know more, go to Steindamm,” the student told me, referring to a busy street in Hamburg’s red-light district. Atta and his friends used to eat at a chicken shop there, he said, and gave me the address.

  So I put on my standard student uniform of jeans and a sweater, along with some lipstick and kohl, the thick black eyeliner favored by Moroccan women, and went to Steindamm. In this neighborhood, which I’d never visited during my time in Hamburg, sex shops, sex cinemas, and hookers coexist with small Turkish, Arab, and Persian groceries and informal mosques. I hadn’t anticipated the scene and felt a bit out of place. I noticed people on the street looking at me.

  I went into a little restaurant the student had told me about and sat down near a window, just watching the activity on the street. I ordered bread with honey and listened as people at nearby tables talked in Arabic. They were saying that they were afraid their businesses would suffer, and they were warning one another not to talk to reporters.

  “How is life, brother?” I heard one man ask, and I thought he and his companion must be relatives. Later, I came to understand that something like brotherhood and sisterhood knitted Muslims together, no matter where in the world they were.

  The other man answered that he knew some of the men on the pla
nes. “Oh, God, these journalists. They are asking a lot of questions. They think we are all terrorists.”

  I sat there for a bit, drinking tea. The restaurant had a separate room for families and children, but I had chosen the main dining room, where the men sat. The people at nearby tables must have thought me strange, sitting there all alone.

  A group of men sat at an adjacent table. One was obviously a respected personality. The others listened intently when he talked, and nodded in agreement. He spoke a Moroccan dialect of Arabic. “How should we have known that?” he said. “They used to be such nice guys.”

  I knew that if I listened quietly I might learn something. I found that these men were affiliated with the al-Quds mosque. I discovered that the man to whom the others deferred was called al Hajj and was the head of the Mosque Council. Sometimes a reporter is simply lucky enough to pick the right restaurant for tea.

  I went back to my apartment and looked for the number of the mosque. It was not in the phone book, and there was no Internet connection, so I went to an Internet café to get the number and called.

  “As’salam alaikum,” a man’s voice said. Peace be upon you.

  In my excitement I didn’t say “wa’alaikum as’salam,” the traditional response. After hearing the complaints about reporters, I didn’t identify the purpose of my call. I just asked for al Hajj.

  “Just tell him it’s Souad,” I said.

  “There’s someone called Souad who wants to talk with you,” the man called out.

  When al Hajj came to the phone, I said, “My name is Souad. I’m Moroccan. I’m just trying to find out the truth about what is going on.”

  He was a clever man. “I don’t want to talk with journalists,” he said. “They don’t honor and respect our rules in the mosque. Who are you working for?”