Salima Salih

Salima Salih is one of a small but very important group of writers living in the West. Particularly in the work of émigré women, the Western experience seems to have enabled liberating and bold visions and given writers more freedom to depict what would have been considered controversial material in the home culture, such as female sexuality and racial and religious interaction. “Those Boys” is certainly characteristic of such writing in its representation of the challenges facing the integration of Arab and Muslim communities into Western countries. Salih was born in Mosul, northern Iraq, in 1942 and studied law and art at academic institutions in Baghdad. She went to Germany in 1978 to study journalism at the University of Leipzig and has been residing there for more than two decades. She has been active as a fiction writer and translator, and among the writers she has translated into Arabic are Ingeborg Bachmann and Christa Wolf.

“Those Boys” is a touching piece whose theme has a long history in Arab fiction—life in the West. What is new in this story is the presentation of the theme from the perspective of a parent as she reflects on children whose sensibilities are being shaped by their Western experience. Unlike traditional Arab fiction about the West in which adults have a temporary presence, the writings of émigré writers deal with settling down and integration into Western communities. Nurruddin and Ali represent two very different personalities and attitudes toward assimilating Western values. Nurruddin is well adjusted, and Germany is home to him; Ali still seems attached to the norms and values of the community he left behind.

“Those Boys” originally appeared as “Haʾulaʾal-abnaʾ” in the magazine Al-Ightirab Al-Adabi 51 (2002): 61–65.

Those Boys

At school the kids talk about video games, about Codam, the aquarium, and the botanic garden. And the Eiffel Tower and the Giza pyramids. There are no border crossing points in Frederickstrasse and no border guard who inspects the passport and asks about the kid. I say, he’s here in Berlin. “In the capital,” he corrects me.

The kids also talk about their latest purchases and about political parties and trends. They’re confused, and they feel out of place. They listen to their parents at night and ask questions, but get only half-answers. Their parents are preoccupied with vanishing institutions and lost jobs, and their teachers with designing curricula and selecting textbooks and calculating their overtime hours.

When Nurruddin comes home, we usually sit down to talk. “Thomas roots for the Republicans,” he says hesitantly and bashfully. This is when Nurruddin was thirteen and still capable of talking to us, his parents. He had known Thomas since the first grade, and the two had become close friends a few years ago. It is this closeness that made Thomas reveal his thinking. But wouldn’t that mean the end of their friendship? Nurruddin has realized in the past few weeks that Republicans cannot be his friends. He has an Arabic name and complexion, but German manners. A bicultural boy.

Thomas’s political choice confused him a little. They used to invite each other to birthday celebrations, and lately Thomas would come with his parents and take Nurruddin to their orchard in the suburbs and bring him back in the evening. Once, Nurruddin returned with a bag of cherries. Thomas’s birthday comes during the cherry season.

Thomas thought Nurruddin was ambitious because his grades were good, even though he never worked hard for them. “Cheat on your tests, but don’t let them catch you,” he used to tell him. I had to lecture Nurruddin to stay away from that. This year Thomas is not celebrating his birthday. He is going on a bike tour and will play soccer with Nurruddin, who never has enough of it.

Around 11:00 P.M. darkness starts to spread over Rudolph Zeiwert Street. From the balcony I can hear noises from the playground. The German children will go home around seven or eight, and the Arab boys will start another round of play. Nurruddin, Ismael, Hadi, and Khalifa won’t miss dinner even if they are late. Their mothers will be waiting for them, and they will always have a hot meal. Nurruddin plays with both teams—with the Germans till they leave and with the Arabs till darkness falls.

Nurruddin no longer belongs to the select group of children who can buy whatever they want in the western side of the city. Nor will he get a “1” in math and in language and history or a “4” in self-application because he did only the assigned work, finding it unnecessary to fill out pages and pages with extra exercises. And a “3” in behavior because he touched the school fence when the pupils went with the caretaker on their daily walk. He’s seventeen now, and on his way to school he smokes a mint-flavored cigarette, oblivious to outside noises and scenes. Even to exotic fish in a bowl or to a drunkard crowing like a rooster in public.

Nurruddin writes diaries I can’t read or, rather, whose lousy handwriting I can’t read.

“Mother keeps reminding me that she was the first person I knew when I was born, and she is therefore the person who knows me the best. Flirting with her, I’d say, But my eyes were closed, and when I opened them it was the nurse’s face I saw first. The nurse, what was her name, Zahida? She was the first person I saw as I lay on the scales. Anyway, when we have an argument, she tells me I don’t know you anymore, which gives me the feeling that I beat her. Then I go to my room satisfied and even forgive her her oppressiveness.”

In London he writes his diaries in English, and in Paris he meets new friends. I remember all his old friends, Sacha, Nico, Matthias, Bourne, Nadine, Ulrika. Those who played with him and those who didn’t, they all have changed, and I don’t quite recognize them when they show up at the door with shaved faces and harsher voices. But I remember the names—Michael and Stefan.

“Do you really want to know something about Stefan? He volunteered for the army.”

I hardly knew the young man, but I remember him as an ideal child. He wasn’t one of Nurruddin’s friends, and Nurruddin made no effort to befriend him. Now I see in him the fruit of firmness and obedience.

But Thomas has remained a true friend and never became a Republican.

Ali, who came from a distant land, tastes the cookie I offered him and then recoils in terror. “Does it contain any alcohol?” I apologize sincerely because I don’t know. Who steeled these boys against the temptations of new experiences and against the influences of a new environment? Not just their mothers, who have stayed at home and think of their faraway boys and whether they heat their dinners and manage to do the laundry. They never did these things when they lived at home. Homes to which fathers would return late, lucky if they caught a meal with the family. More often, the boys would succumb to their hunger and eat early.

Ali remembers his mother, and his face contracts with anguish. He’s learned the ritual of becoming a man and cries without tears. He also knows that as a man it doesn’t become him to fail. These boys adore their mothers, their partners in oppression, the guardians of their secrets, their allies in the face of cruelty or lack of sympathy. They are the ones who would intercede on their behalf when fathers became unrelenting. To shield them from punishment, before the fathers returned, they would fix the windowpanes the boys had broken or simply claim the pane was hit by a stone no one knows where it came from. Sometimes the boys didn’t get pocket money from their fathers, and they had to do odd chores to earn it. But they could always count on the resourcefulness and generosity of their mothers, who saved pennies here and there and hid them between layers of clothes. When the boys were sick, the mothers would rub their foreheads, and when they came home from school, the mothers would examine them just in case they were missing a body part.

Nurruddin knows that scrutiny and dodges it. He hates it because he knows that I, his mother, will see through him and discover his joys and worries and miseries. He hurries to his room when he has something to hide, and the door closes before my look can corner him and he finds himself dealing with questions he doesn’t want to answer.

Ali says, “My brother called this morning and wanted to know what I have been doing in Berlin since I arrived here a year ago.”

What glamorous results could he achieve within the confines of his conditional residency? He goes to school with little kids and has to be home before 10:00 P.M. He has to get a reduced-price transportation pass from the Department of Social Security and has to learn how to say, “Gestaten Sie bitte, darf ich durch, Rindfleisch, kein Schweinfleisch.”¹

In the communal kitchens of their housing complexes or in their tiny cold apartments the boys try to cook what their mothers cooked for them, but they add too much garlic or forget to add salt. The tastes they knew at home will remain beyond them. They sleep in and go late to the German-language class. They stay up until two in the morning, debating the causes of the Lebanese civil war or Emad’s opinion that freedom sometimes can be dangerous. They can’t sleep because their mothers’ prayers are not hovering over them.

In their letters they become remarkable university students or successful professionals working for big companies and living in villas surrounded by trees. They consolidate their positions by marrying the boss’s daughter. But by doing so they put themselves at a disadvantage: “Why don’t you send some money, then?” And so they have to become even thriftier and save to send their mothers a first installment. Perhaps their mothers need the money or perhaps just assurances that their sons are not failing. For such gestures the boys live poor and work for little pay. Can they write to their mothers and say that they don’t have the status of residency that would enable them to work legally?

Working in the civil service, Nurruddin has a chance to get to know these boys. They tell him stories about the routes they took to get here, the interrogations, the legislation directed at foreigners, and the types of residency. They ask him how he ended up here, and he can’t answer. He has always been here, a baby, a little boy, a young man, simply at home here. Kids played with him at the kindergarten, invited him to their homes, and celebrated his birthday. They quickly got to know his name and not only accepted his brown skin, but coveted it when they let the summer sun bake theirs. He was here when a child snatched his toy in a doctor’s waiting room. Stunned, he didn’t say a word and looked to me, his mother, for help. He was two and hadn’t learned the word mine because ours then was his. He had refused to take pocket money. “What would I do with it?”

“To learn how to take care of your needs,” replied the neighbor, “how to economize.” Nurruddin knew he didn’t need money because he had what he wanted. But one day he realized that “ours” was not enough, and “mine” gradually became more sharply defined and more urgent. Now, he asks for pocket money and saves to pay for his trips and the cigarettes he smokes in secret. He has dumped the piggy bank and bought a safe with a lock. Approaching his rite of passage to manhood, Nurruddin has severed the umbilical cord. It’s the age of the first cigarette, the first kiss.

Now, Nurruddin doesn’t eat the food I cook. He buys frozen foods that only need heating and won’t tell me where he goes in the evening. His friends’ names have become secrets, like the secrets of where he plays soccer or the school supplies he likes most. The secrets are multiplying, and he gloats at my increasing curiosity and anxiety. He reads Hermann Hesse and Karl Krause but can’t find words to say to me. He keeps changing his friends and plays “Work Is a Rotten Thing” on the guitar.

1. “Excuse me, let me through; I want beef, not pork.”