The bus into the city center came into view around the corner. Lie stepped aboard. He wanted to make it to the Latin American Pentecostal church—Restauracion de Dios—before noon.
Ayan left the footpath and entered the school building, passing the “Welcome” sign written in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and French, and continuing on down the corridors. Without removing her niqab, she walked into the classroom and sat down at her desk.
* * *
She has been married off. That was the Norwegian teacher’s first thought on entering the classroom and seeing the shrouded figure after her long absence. As she rounded the rows of desks and came to the front of the class, she saw that the pupil’s face was completely covered.
The outfit, which included long black gloves, reinforced the teacher’s suspicion that her parents had forced her into marriage. It was probably how their married women had to dress—to ensure that no other man could look upon them. There had been a special focus on forced marriages and genital mutilation at the schools in the Oslo region that year. The teachers had been sent material with information on the phenomena.
The Norwegian teacher was a slight, fair-haired woman in her fifties who preferred the pupils of yesteryear. She found herself constantly explaining words that seemed to be disappearing from the language: livestock was cattle, sap ran in spring, a pasture was where animals ate. What a demesne was and what gentry meant. She’d had pupils who did not know what a troll was. Was it possible to go through the Norwegian school system and never have heard of one? It certainly seemed so.
It was also lamentable when Knut Hamsun no longer stirred the emotions of the young. When the naturalist and feminist author Amalie Skram no longer brought a tear to the eye. Had literature lost its hold over young minds? At times the pupils could remind you of Dead Souls, they were so faraway in class. But not all the pupils were bad; some of them still wanted to engage in discussion, relate the works to their own lives, their own feelings, seek a convergence between literature and reality.
One of these was Ayan. She was an asset in class, whether the discussion was about nineteenth-century literature, the printing of caricatures, or freedom of expression. At the same time, conflicts rose around her. As form teacher, the Norwegian instructor was the one who had to have a word with Ayan the time the school was collecting donations for its annual fund-raising event. She had convinced several of her fellow pupils not to participate because the money was earmarked for Norwegian Church Aid. On another occasion, in an essay she submitted, she wrote that she viewed people who were not Muslims as weeds.
“What kind of view of humanity is this?” the teacher had asked. Or had Ayan not understood the concept of weeds?
Pupils from an immigrant background could have a weak and imprecise grasp of concepts. Perhaps she meant to say something else? Like how in a garden you needed many different types of plants—diversity?
The teacher asked Ayan to stay after class.
“Have you been married off?”
“No,” Ayan replied.
“Then why are you dressed like that?”
“I’m practicing.”
“For what?”
Ayan did not answer.
“To get married?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Are they sending you to Somalia?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Dressing this way, you’ll only shut yourself off from society from people, from working life…”
“Who said I wanted to work in Norway?”
“You’ll close the door on so many opportunities…”
“Who says I want to live here?”
Where had she learned to respond in this manner? Answering a question with a rhetorical question, so cocksure and rude. No matter, the rules forbade covering up in class.
“Here in Norway we have to show our faces.”
“You can’t prevent me from dressing how I want,” Ayan replied.
“Yes I can, there are clear rules about it.”
“Show me the rules,” Ayan said brusquely. “Where is it written?”
The teacher was nonplussed. Now that she thought about it, she could not remember seeing anything about covering up. She became uncertain.
“I’m going to have to take this up with the principal,” she said.
“Dressing like this is an important part of my religion,” Ayan declared, and before turning to leave she added, “and this is a free country, isn’t it?”
* * *
Hanne Rud had become the principal of Dønski Upper Secondary School the same autumn that Ayan had transferred from Nesbru. She had noticed the IB program pupil around and surmised that Ayan had wanted to change schools because she felt more at home here. Around half of the pupils had an immigrant background, many were Muslim, and a number of them dressed like her—in long skirts with wide capes or ponchos with hoods up. Clothes reflected identity and a common identity meant security. Groups of ethnic Norwegian pupils went around in ripped jeans and plaid shirts, all in muted tones. Hanne’s uniform was skinny jeans and a blazer, and she usually wore heels.
This was her second post as principal. She had held the same position at Nadderud Secondary—the school in Bærum requiring the highest grades for admission—before coming back to Dønski, where she had previously taught. While many failed to get accepted at Nadderud, Dønski had plenty of unfilled places. By the application deadline the previous spring, barely four hundred pupils had applied and there was space for over five hundred. But Hanne did not shrink in the face of adversity, and her goal was to make the school more popular. She had applied for the job precisely because it was a school facing challenges. The dropout rate was high, particularly among boys.
She spent a good deal of time in the corridors. She wanted to get to know as many of the students as possible and thought it important they knew who she was, so that they could approach her if something was up.
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