Betrayed Read online

  Despite my mother’s assurances that I could finish my HSC on leaving Australia, it turned out to be impossible because the tests were all in German—and I still had a long way to go before I was proficient enough to understand even the spoken language. I loved the people in the city and so did my brother, who was attending high school while also learning German. He was now of an age when the girls were giving him the eye. His ambition was to go on to college to study electrical engineering and he was to prove himself a brilliant scholar with languages, picking up Arabic, Persian and German.

  I felt under a great deal of pressure from my mother, who obviously didn’t want to see me fail at anything I chose to do. She had overcome many obstacles in her life, given that she had been married off so young, and she was determined that her daughter would do well, too. In time my brother started working at the pizza restaurant as a delivery ‘boy’ and, being so personable, he made a lot of tips.

  My brother and I were very close—we had been since we were youngsters and many people had thought when we were young children that we were twins. How well I remember that first day in Australia when I started primary school and he was going into the adjoining kindergarten. With our mother, we turned up hand in hand and this was to be the first time that he and I would be separated. When the teachers came and started to lead us away in different directions he was so frightened at being taken away from me that he bawled his head off and peed his pants.

  Bawar was not only my younger brother—he grew up to be my best friend and we would share our silly secrets. He knew about my school boyfriend, the boy from the library, and he would back me up in protecting my flirting. If I was on the phone to Patrick, Bawar might call: ‘Hang up quick, Mum’s coming!’ Yes, that was my brother and now we were far away from Sydney, still together, still close.

  It was while I was enjoying my first months in Munster that Bawar and I joined up with his friends from school and we went along to a nightclub. I’d been to discotheques in Australia but this was something quite different. The air was full of a sweet, smokey smell, which I quickly learned was marijuana. I was not tempted to try it, but I did have a sip of vodka, just to experience what my father enjoyed and almost spit it out. ‘How can anybody drink this stuff?’ I cried. I couldn’t understand how my father could enjoy it so much during his nightly ritual, pouring a glass of the liquor to take with his plate of babaganou and homous.

  My brother and I still retained a great respect for our mother—despite the sternness that she sometimes displayed and my earlier suspicions about someone she might have been seeing in Australia—so when she gave us a key to let ourselves in whenever we went out to a nightclub we did not take advantage of the freedom she afforded us. We always made sure we got home at a reasonable time—certainly no later than 2am, which we believed was reasonable for nightclubbers!

  In time, as the months rolled by and my German lessons progressed, our cousin asked if I felt confident enough to convert some English documents into German, and vice versa. At first, as I sat in his legal office, I was hesitant, but my confidence grew as my lessons continued. Working in this way improved my German more and he seemed very happy with my work. In between my jobs for our cousin, sometimes at the pizza restaurant, sometimes in his office, I also found employment at a clothing boutique selling designer clothes from all around Europe. I was trying to earn as much as possible so I could buy a return ticket to Australia to visit my father. There was yet another little business I became involved with—my very own! Once a month an international festival was held at which I had a small stall and sold my own jewellery. Our cousin had helped me by finding where I could obtain the beads from Spain, Morocco and other parts of the African continent.

  But as for my father… where was he? Even though I was saving up money for the fare to visit him, I wondered why he hadn’t come to Germany yet. It was a question I was starting to ask my mother. She told me to be patient because some things moved slowly—just what was she up to? She had started travelling back and forth to London, taking my young sister, now five, with her. Sometimes when I answered the phone, men with heavily accented Arab voices would ask in English if my mother was there. When I asked who was calling, I was given names that I later established were well known in the Kurdish government. It became quite obvious that my mother was involved politically with them in some way. It is a fact that in time she was operating as a broker to send agricultural machinery from Germany to Kurdistan but I believed from the snatches of conversation I heard as she spoke on the phone that her work was not simply that of a broker. Government officials were named in her conversations and there was never any reference to machinery or costs. Whatever those political conversations were about, I never really heard enough to form any strong conclusions.

  One day I asked her outright: ‘Mum, when you fly to London, what do you do?’

  She turned on me, surprised that I should have asked such a question. ‘You’re too young for any of this,’ she snapped. ‘Just keep on doing what you’re doing, improve more so you can go to university.’

  I told her that I could do so much better if I was home in Australia. I missed Sydney so much. My brother, too, who had had so many friends at high school, was feeling just as homesick for Australia. He used to love cricket and I’d hear him asking at our new home, ‘Isn’t there any TV channel anywhere in the whole of Germany that has the cricket?’

  But there was relief at times from the dreariness of life in Germany; our mother would take us on a holiday to other European countries such as Italy, Switzerland and Spain for a couple of weeks. We would almost always go by train and we really lorded it because my mother was earning good money from—well, from whatever work she was doing for the Kurdish government. We stayed in the best hotels, ate fine foods and enjoyed the sunshine. It was bliss while it lasted but of course we always had to return to Germany to that big, dark apartment of ours.

  I had also met a friend of my brother’s, Ojo, who was half German, half African. He was good fun to be with and the three of us would often head off to a coffee shop—where I would drink tea—or go to the cinema together, particularly as it helped me with the language. Sometimes I met Ojo on his own and we’d chat about everything under the sun. I had to be careful, however, that my mother did not see him with me. I was very much aware that she did not approve of black people, even those who were of mixed race, perhaps because of her own Aryan descendancy, revealed in her lovely green eyes and the lighter-coloured hair that she had had in her younger days.

  But I still felt a great loneliness, eminating, I suspected from a desire to return to Australia. Germany felt so crowded compared to Australia and the sky seemed to bear down on me as if it was lower. It was a relief when our mother would take us to Siegen to visit our cousins and it was one of these trips, when I was 18 that I met my cousin Mikael, who was four years older than me. In fact, I’d been introduced to him before, when I was 12, and I’d thought he was fun. I had also met up with him when my family took us to Kurdistan in my early teens and he was also on a visit there. Now he was 23 years old and, I thought, very handsome—tall, dark with a cheeky grin. Having been raised in Germany, he was very Westernised, but his parents still retained their strong cultural traditions. He was still at university, studying international law, but I was soon to find out that he had a frightening dark side.

  You know he’s very interested in you,’ one of my female cousins whispered to me during our latest trip to Siegen.

  ‘Oh nonsense,’ I said. ‘You won’t find me going out with him’—but secretly I would have loved to have gone on a date with him.

  As things turned out we agreed when we got chatting at a relative’s wedding to meet up for a coffee. In time, our short coffee sessions developed into brunch, then lunch and walks in the park. Although I’d had a few crushes on boys in Sydney, and had a platonic boyfriend from the school library, I felt something much stronger with Mikael. I was falling for him but I certainly didn’t wa
nt my mother to find out. I always felt that she was hovering close by, even though she wasn’t, of course.

  Because we were travelling back and forth to Siegen quite frequently I took every opportunity to meet Mikael. During our rendezvous in parks and coffee shops, he gradually told me about his ‘after dark’ activities. He revealed them so gradually to me that I wasn’t shocked. Just a little hint here, a small suggestion there, but taken as a whole, what he was doing was frightening. He and a group of other cousins, along with associates from the Turkish, Arabic and Moroccan community were breaking into shops and homes and stockpiling their stolen goods in a warehouse. One day in a coffee shop, Mikael pulled back his jacket and showed me the butt of a handgun.

  ‘My God, where did you get that?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I’ve got plenty more where these come from,’ he said. ‘I can get hash, pills, anything.’

  ‘No thank you,’ I said harshly.

  While I was falling for him, I was also deeply disturbed about his revelations. I know I should have walked away from him—but my feelings for him had become so strong that each time I told myself to stay away I found myself being drawn back. So I found out more. His parents, he said, accepted that he could ‘acquire’ anything that they might want, although he never revealed any of the stuff was stolen. Once, he told me, he took home a container of live, deadly snakes that he planned to sell to a collector, but in the meantime they were being kept in the bath at his home.

  ‘But they’ll get out and bite someone!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘They can’t get out of the bath… too slippery,’ he assured me.

  I ventured to raise the subject of Mikael’s activities with a cousin and she said she knew he was ‘up to no good’ and suggested we should follow him one night ‘to see what these boys are up to’.

  We followed him and a group of his friends on foot through the dark streets of Siegen, ducking behind cars or into shop doorways if they slowed down. Eventually they reached a park, where, before they slipped into total darkness I was able to make out who they were meeting—a group of men with Mohawk hairstyles, the symbol in those days of neo-Nazis.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ my terrified cousin implored. ‘If they spot us, we’ll be raped and have our throats cut.’

  But Mikael was so kind and gentle with me. He never said a harsh word to me. He treated me like a lady and, being just 18, I felt on top of the world whenever I was with him. Yet I never considered us as being in a relationship—for a start, I lived in Munster and he lived miles away in Siegen and we were only able to meet for two or three days every couple of months or so. And that was how it continued as the months rolled by, with me continuing my work with our cousin at his lawyer’s office in between those visits from time to time to Siegen. Then, towards the end of 1999, as I approached my 19th birthday, we travelled south as usual, this time for a cousin’s wedding. My mother told me we would be staying for three weeks. We were heading into a period when my life was to change for the worse.

  When the time came, I just didn’t feel like going to the wedding and I decided to remain at home. I’d heard that at Kurdish weddings in Germany, everybody looks at everybody else and the ceremony becomes the centre of gossip. Later that afternoon, as I sat alone reading, the phone rang. It was Mikael.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at the wedding?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, I’m supposed to be—but I’m not feeling too well. And you know what, Latifa? I have a longing for that delicious chicken and and sweet corn soup that I remember you making for us some time ago. You don’t feel like making some for me, do you? I’m sure it will be the best medicine.’

  I didn’t see anything suspicious in the fact that this unwell man should be able to drive over to the flat to pick me up and take me back to his place, a two-storey house on the outskirts of town. He was dressed neatly in casuals and I could smell aftershave. I didn’t think anything of it when he put on some music in the lounge room and started jiving around while I was in the kitchen making the soup.

  Later, after we had finished eating, he suggested we watch a bit of TV. The TV was upstairs in his bedroom. I told him I could only stay for a short time because his aunt would be back from the wedding soon.

  ‘Oh, they won’t be back until midnight,’ he laughed. ‘Come on, let’s go and watch some TV.’

  I followed him up the stairs.

  THREE

  There was only one place to sit—or lie, as it turned out—and that was his single bed. He put the TV on, some German movie with the sound down low, and we lay propped up against the pillows. The only light was from a bedside lamp and the screen. We were so close that, inevitably, we started cuddling one another. I didn’t mind—I really did like him and he wasn’t a close cousin in any case.

  ‘This is nice,’ he said as he caressed my neck, ‘but you know something? I’d really like to feel what you’re really like. Really feel your skin up against mine. Can you understand that, Latifa?’

  Yes, I understood. I felt the same way. Were they warning bells I could hear ringing somewhere in my mind? If they were, I ignored them as I slipped off my clothing.

  I turned to Mikael. ‘I want you to promise that this is as far as we go. I don’t want to get pregnant. We can touch, we can enjoy the feeling of each other but that is all.’

  ‘I swear to you,’ he said, embracing me.

  My thoughts raced back to school. To those ridiculous sex lessons. Don’t have sex unless the man is protected. No matter what, don’t let it happen. I began to have second thoughts as I felt him move around to lie on top of me. Suddenly there was a hand over my mouth; his legs were working against mine, I wanted to cry out, to shout ‘No, stop! Stop!’ But his hand was tight over my lips, I was struggling, pushing fighting—and then I felt a sharp stab of pain.

  Moments later he rolled away from me, his hand falling from my face. My breath came in spasms. He’d had sex with me—that much I knew. Another flashback to those classroom lessons—pregnancy, disease. Oh dear God, what had happened? Had I been raped? Was it my fault? Had I led him on? Was that what sex was always like? So painful, so quick? So violent?

  Thoughts raced through my mind as I felt him roll from the bed and then, with his bare back to me, I saw him look down at himself, before he reached for a towel on a chair

  Then Mikael turned and grinned at me. But there was no warmth in his eyes. And even as the grin fell away to a stark, hard face, he said: ‘Now you are mine. You are mine forever.’

  I saw the towel. A glimpse of red.

  ‘Now I love you even more,’ he said. ‘You cannot belong to anyone but me,’ he said. ‘No-one will want you.’

  Panic raced through me. What was he talking about?

  ‘We can now make arrangements for our marriage. You will not be able to refuse me.’

  ‘Marriage?’ I asked. I could hear the shock in my voice. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It’s simple. You’re mine now.’

  I asked him to take me home. We rode in silence, my hands trembling, but as we passed under street lights—for by now darkness had descended—I could see the smile had returned to his face. My body was tense. Pain still ran through me. I felt like nails had been hammered into my body. I had a sudden impression of a painting by a Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, who portrayed personal suffering in her works.

  The following day I met a female cousin in a coffee shop. I was just curious, I told her, but what does it mean when a girl bleeds after having sex for the first time?

  ‘Don’t you know?’ she asked, incredulously. Then she said: ‘It means she’s lost her virginity, of course. She’s not pure any more in the eyes of other men or God.’

  I felt so stupid. Naïve. I was angry with myself. What had I done? Mikael’s voice came back to me. ‘No-one will want you. You are mine forever.’

  I wanted to find him and strangle him for using me, for taking something precious from me that could never be replaced. A precious part o
f my body. My honour.

  Virginity and its loss had never been explained to me, neither in school nor at home. Up until now, I had not understood how precious it was.

  I had to pretend to the cousin that I was following up on some gossip I’d heard about another girl. ‘What do you mean she’s not pure?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, it means that only the man who has taken away her virginity can claim her as his because no Muslim man will want to marry a woman who isn’t a virgin—who has had sex before him. She has to marry the man who has taken her or she will be outcast as a slut.’

  My heart sank. ‘You must have heard of honour killings,’ she continued. ‘In Kurdistan, if your new husband or your family finds out you’re not a virgin, they’ll kill you. She’d be a disgrace to the family and her husband would be humiliated. Loads of women over there have been killed.’

  I tried not to appear shocked.

  I tried to control a shudder. Thank heavens I had grown up in the West. An Aussie girl. Free from such horrors. Thank God I was living in Germany where nobody seemed to care about such things. Sex was all over the TV, the cinemas, the billboards. Yet I felt so much shame. I felt betrayed by Mikael. He knew what he had done, what it meant for me. Of course, I would in time be free to marry anyone I eventually fell in love with, but his actions had denied me the chance of ever marrying anyone from my birth country, Kurdistan, and also from a just about every Muslim country in the world.

  When I next saw Mikael at a family gathering, he whispered to me that he had to see me again. Never, I told him. Not after what he had done.