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.