by Jacinta Nandi
When my baby was five weeks old, I left his dad & went and lived in a women’s refuge – the German word is Frauenhaus. It was full of fucked-up women with stuff missing: teeth, skin, self-esteem. There were girls in there from Turkey, from Poland, from Slovakia, from Russia, from Kenya, from Chile. There were girls there from Germany, too. They were pretty scary, actually, the Germans, to be honest. I was pretty scared of them, anyways.
We used to have a weekly house meeting and a weekly mother’s meeting. The house meeting was on Monday and the mother’s meeting was on Thursday.
So, one time, at the weekly mother’s meeting, the social worker, Agnieska, told us how we should react when we caught our children masturbating. She said we were not to shout at them, swear at them, tell them they were going to hell, hit them, hit them with sticks or bind their hands behind their backs and make them sit in the corner for two hours. Instead, we were to say, in a calm, neutral voice:
“Oh, that feels nice, doesn’t it? But that’s something we do when we’re on our own, not in front of other people.”
The Turkish girls who could speak German, i.e. the Deutschtürkinnen, all covered in gold, gold hair, gold chains, gold earrings, had to translate for the Turkish girls who couldn’t speak any German, i.e. the import brides and the old grannies in headscarves and pyjamas.
The room exploded.
There were women laughing, screaming, thumping the table. Some of the girls were crying with hysterical laughter. Agnieska tried getting us all to concentrate, but minutes passed before the table-thumping stopped.
“Is that really what German people say to their children when they catch them doing that?” One Turkish girl asked, shaking her head in vague disbelief.
“That is the correct, healthy thing you should say to your children – if you want them to grow up normal.” Agnieska replied sternly.
At the word normal we all started giggling a bit, and the Turkish girls started arguing amongst themselves in Turkish, and Agnieska got all pissed off again.
“Once, I saw a man touch himself there,” said a Russian girl. “In the street, he showed me what he was doing.”
“The Germans are always touching themselves there,” answered another Russian girl, knowingly. “My man was always doing it.” Then she glared at Agnieska accusingly, only Agnieska didn’t notice.
One of the old grannies in headscarves started speaking in Turkish, bitter, angry, loud: it sounded like a prayer, or like she was cursing us all. I couldn’t tell what she was saying but you could tell she didn’t think much of Agnieska’s advice concerning masturbation.
“What’s she saying?” Agnieska asked Dilek.
“She says she would rather kill herself than tell her children to touch themselves there.” Dilek translated.
Agnieska looked a bit put out. I felt a bit sorry for her. She was, after all, only trying to be helpful.
“Of course,” she said, finally, when the old granny stopped her prayer-like cursing, “if you feel very strongly about it then it doesn’t really matter what the healthy, normal, correct thing to say is. Because, as parents, we always have to be honest to our own value systems. But, really, children who masturbate should not be threatened with physical violence. And, you know, ladies. You don’t come to a women’s refuge for no reason. All of you have got, let’s be honest here, fairly disturbed and mentally imbalanced children.”
After that, we discussed Lena, who had been allowing her children to stay up in the TV room past nine o’clock and not giving them any breakfast before school. All the women told outrageous stories of horrific neglect, and Agnieska took notes.
“I think she has some Nesquik and sterilized milk in her bedroom, though,” I said. “I think she gives them a cup of chocolate when they get up.”
Monika looked at me, raised her eyebrows and sighed, spiteful and exact. “A cup of chocolate,” she said, “is not breakfast.”
Next we discussed how we should explain to the kids that we ended up living in a women’s refuge. Agnieska said we should show them our wedding photos and tell them how happy and grateful we were to marry our husbands, but that it then, unfortunately, didn’t work out.
But Monika went off on one about the burnt toys.
“How do I explain to Lukas and Simone that their daddy burnt all their toys?” She demanded, arms folded, eyeing us all viciously. When I first arrived in Berlin, I knew this Palestinian boy whose girlfriend had made him go to the cinema to see Titanic fifteen times. “Am Ende, Jack immer tot,” he used to say. Jack always dead in the end. It was like that at the mother’s meeting every fucking Thursday. In the end, the toys always ended up getting burnt.
And I got sick of these women, pale and grey, phoning up their mums to tell them when their Hartz-IV money – the German social security payment – was in the bank. I got sick of the social workers, so desperate for us to hate each other. I got sick of the alcoholics, who turned up every Friday, and left Sunday night. I got sick of living with losers, and being like them, being one of them. But most of all – I was sick of Monika, sick of her white, fluffy face and greasy, heavy hair, sick of watching her waddle past me in her tracksuit bottoms, sick of listening to her shout at her kids. But most of all I got sick of hearing about her stupid fucking burnt toys. I imagined them: old, plastic dolls, with the eyes poked out and their mouths full of ash. Brown and discoloured, black and empty.
“I think you should just not mention it,” I suggested, helpfully.
After the mother’s meeting was over I went into the kitchen and put water on the stove. Marina came up to me, nuh. She said she was going back to her husband, but didn’t want to tell the other girls, nuh, because they’d despise her.
“You’re the only one I’ve told, nuh,” she said. “You can have my handbag, nuh, it’s Esprit, nuh. Because I owe you one cleaning Dienst, nuh?”
“But Marina,” I said. “I thought he wanted to kill you.”
It wasn’t like I cared. I just thought it kind of polite to mention it, in case she’d forgotten or something.
“You know how it is,” she said. “Between a man and a woman. There’s conflict. There’s rows. There’s fighting. And then, afterwards, you go away. You’re hurt, you’re angry. And then maybe there’s a bit of exaggeration. Men exaggerate, women exaggerate. You’re hurt. But you know. There’s always love, nuh. There’s always love.”
“So you’re gonna drop the charges, then?” I asked. “I don’t need the handbag, it’s okay.”
“It’s the easiest thing in the world, nuh,” she said, “going away, leaving the man you love, who loves you, and why? You know what I mean? I mean, why, nuh?”
“You’ll have to drop the charges,” I said. “Or you’ll get grief from Social Services.”
“He’s the father of my baby,” she said. “Doesn’t every child have the right to a father’s love?” She touched her belly briefly. I put the baby bottle in the pan and nodded.
Sometimes I look back on those days and I know why, I know exactly why those social workers hated us so much. It’s because we were so fucking stupid.
