style="font-size:15px;"> ‘You look really hot today. Are you going somewhere?’
There were some repressed giggles, but most of the room gave Bilal a cold stare.
‘I’d appreciate it if you’d keep such thoughts to yourself, Bilal.’
‘I bet you would,’ Bilal said. ‘You know what we call women in Morocco who walk around like that?’
I gave him a warning look. I’d recently made clear to the class the consequences of swearing, specifically of using the word ‘whore’.
Bilal sat up straight, leaned towards me as if in confidence, and said, ‘Prostitutes.’
Anger coursed through me but I managed to control myself. ‘Do you have chewing gum in your mouth? Do be so kind as to put it in the bin.’
Bilal worked his long body out from under the desk and walked, with the same sly grin, to the bin. He spat out the gum and went back to his place. As he prepared to sit down again, he stared leisurely, suggestively, at my breasts.
That’s when I did something wrong. I should have told him to leave the classroom and report to the headmaster, but instead I looked at his crotch, my expression scornful. It happened so quickly – I shocked myself – I realised I was making a mistake, but it was too late. Bilal had seen it. His expression changed from sly to hard, his lips thinned and his eyes filled with a threat that set all the alarm bells in my body ringing. I stepped backwards and that’s when he pulled the knife.
The memory fills me with a burst of confidence. I’m going to go to the police; of course I’m going to go to the police.
I head back towards the centre, brave the traffic along the Coolsingel Canal and turn off into a side street called Doelwater Alley. I park there and look over at the ‘swimming pool’, as the mint-green tiled police station is known.
But I don’t get out of my car.
My eyes sweep the alleyway and the square in front of the police station, searching for Bilal. He isn’t here. Of course he isn’t here, but he might come out from behind a parked car once I get out of mine.
I don’t really expect that to happen, but my heart pounds away all the same and I wonder whether I’ll be able to get any words out once I’m inside.
I need to get a grip on myself. A glass of iced water would do me good, but all I’ve got is a mouldy tangerine lying next to the gear stick.
I take a deep breath. Would Bilal really have stabbed me? I’ve known him long enough not to believe that. Yet, that look in his eyes when I provoked him…Who knows what I triggered in him? Even though I have a good relationship with most of the students from immigrant families, I’ll never truly understand them.
I imagine Bilal being interrogated – he might have to spend some time in a prison cell – and then I see the Bilal I’ve always known, an arrogant but intelligent boy who is probably already regretting what he did. Maybe Jan is right and I’d only make it worse by reporting it.
I don’t know how long I sit in my car, but at some point I wake up from my stupor and drive home.
I’ve always felt the need to make the world a better place. As a five-year-old, I took the new kids at school under my wing, and this protectiveness carried on into middle and high school. For the bullied kids, my support made the difference between a quiet, unremarked existence and being the butt of classroom jokes. I was popular at school and other children followed my lead.
When I was fifteen, I started working on the school magazine. Before that, no one read the magazine; afterwards I’d see copies in school bags and on the tables in the canteen. My complaints about teachers discriminating against the immigrant students made me a kind of school heroine.
I’d take on anyone, whether it was about headscarves being tolerated in the classroom or smoking on school grounds.
I’ve only ever wanted to help.
As I drive home, I remember Bilal’s face as I fled the classroom, the aggression in his eyes, the complete arrogance of his manner. What I usually see with my Moroccan and Turkish students is that they’ve lost all sense of direction. These kids are born in the Netherlands, they grow up watching Sesame Street and Disney cartoons, but feel that they’re considered second-class citizens. They don’t feel Turkish or Moroccan, but don’t feel Dutch either. Caught between the culture of their parentage and the country they live in, they’re wrestling with their identity, anxious because there are no jobs to go to when they leave school, angry because they feel discriminated against.
If a student is having problems, I offer to buy them a drink, sit down with them, and discuss what’s going on, while respecting their social codes. We almost always find a solution. My teacher training didn’t prepare me for today. We were taught pedagogy and maintaining discipline, not how to handle aggression or violence.
I’m almost home when I think of how empty it will be there: the silent rooms, nobody to tell my story to. Should I go to Raoul instead? It’s ten past three, he’ll be in a meeting right now. To Elisa’s then? If she’s busy she’ll make time. You can always drop in on her.
Elisa is my twin sister. We’re identical twins, but I’m fifteen minutes older; perhaps that’s the reason I’ve always protected her – first from the school bullies and later from a crowd who liked to spike your drinks with ecstasy and cadge money from you.
When Elisa set up a photography studio, I soon realised that her lack of business acumen would stand in the way of success. She wasn’t assertive enough to get new clients and she let the clients she did have barter her prices down. In any case, the studio didn’t attract much custom. Not that it really mattered, neither of us has to work. We come from a wealthy family; wealthy and old and noble. It’s not something that particularly interests us – we never talk about it.
But money can’t buy everything. Our parents always impressed on us that we should study and get jobs, that it was more comfortable to have wealth, but that shouldn’t be the guiding principle in life. We weren’t spoilt as children; we got the same pocket money as the others, did Saturday jobs and had to take on a paper round if we wanted extra money. It was an education I feel deeply grateful to my parents for.
I would have got by on my salary, but my husband’s company would never have got off to such a flying start without the cash injection from my parents. I wonder whether Elisa could actually make a living from her photography.
To help her along I regularly have a series of portraits of Valerie taken. She never wants to charge me, but of course I pay the going price.
My husband has a successful software company and I asked him to give Elisa as many advertising commissions as he could. It turned out he’d been doing that all along, which I should have known because Raoul and Elisa get on really well.
I’m happy about that because Elisa is just as important to me as Raoul, perhaps even more so. The idea that identical twins have a special connection is true for us.
I’m often asked what it’s like being a twin. It’s a curious question. It’s not that I’m unaware of how unusual
