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 his 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.