Bayan and Mustafa would not have such things said about them! They signed the girls up for ballet, gymnastics and handball. Ali, who was now in a kindergarten, had already begun football training.
They themselves attended matches, shows and tournaments, and volunteered for community tasks. At first the Rashid children took their own chicken sausages along to eat at sporting events, but one day they simply didn’t bring them. Kurdistan felt further and further away.
The children went to church with the rest of their school class at Christmas, and Bayan hung advent stars in the windows like everyone else. Bano said she was a devout Muslim, but when somebody asked her if she was Sunni or Shia, she did not know. ‘I believe there’s a God,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what He’s called, that’s all.’ And after attending church with her class, she said, ‘If God knows there is only Him, there’s no need to say it through the priest.’
As pupils from a minority background, the Rashid children were excused from lessons in New Norwegian, the country’s second official language, which is based on rural dialects. But the proposal only made Bano indignant. ‘If you get a letter in New Norwegian, you have to answer it in New Norwegian,’ she asserted, quoting the general rule. When the teacher praised the fluency of a composition she had written, she was cross. ‘Why say that to me in particular? I started New Norwegian the same time as everybody else in the class.’
If her parents moaned at her or weren’t happy with something she had done, she would retort that lots of immigrant parents had to go and fetch their children from the police station.
‘Mum, we’re not like the ones who don’t want to integrate. The future for us means good jobs, coming home to nice dinners and opening the fridge to find it’s full. You complain about the cost of sandwich fillings and us staying in the shower too long, but Mum, at least we always have food and water,’ she would say consolingly whenever her mother was worried about making ends meet. ‘We’re not ashamed of having a messy house because the main thing is that we children aren’t being neglected. And our sofa and dining table are just as nice as everyone else’s.’
It was important to be ‘like everyone else’. The family had to have the same furniture, the same clothes and the same kind of sandwiches in their packed lunches. That is to say, the same or better. Bano was so pleased when her mother bought her sister a Bergans jacket. ‘Mum, only Lara and one other person in her class have got a Bergans jacket. The others have just got the ordinary brands. I’m so proud she’s got an expensive jacket!’ she exclaimed to Bayan, who had been lucky enough to find the smart jacket in a sale.
Mustafa’s applications had finally borne fruit. The social security office rang and offered him a temporary caretaker job at Grindbakken school in the west of Oslo. And just then, Bayan got a work experience place as a nursery assistant, which after a few weeks turned into a part-time job. But their wages did not allow for any luxuries.
Bano then did an abrupt about-turn and decided the family was buying too much.
‘We’re buying happiness,’ she said. She told her classmates the same thing and imposed a shopping ban. No one was to buy clothes, chocolate or even a roll in the canteen for a week. Her friends found it easier to buy things surreptitiously than to argue with her. Bano was so stubborn.
Bayan and Mustafa called their oldest daughter their guide to Norwegian society.
‘When you go to visit other people, the first thing you have to say is “What a lovely house you’ve got!”’ Bano advised them. ‘Houses are what count in Norway.’
‘The best thing you can do is buy your own house,’ she insisted. When they bought a terraced house, Mustafa was very pleased to get it for less than the valuation, because all the other houses in the street had sold for more than the asking price.
‘But Dad,’ said Lara, ‘why do you think the Norwegians didn’t bid more for the house? We must have been cheated.’
Hmm, thought Mustafa. The house proved to have various defects, like damp in the basement, and it required a lot of renovation. But he was a mechanical engineer after all and doggedly set to work.
Bano was day-dreaming about how they would do up the basement so the three children could have their own living room, bedrooms and even a little office. Things could always get better. She complained, for example, about the kitchen floor being two different colours. When Mustafa tried to sand and polish the floor it took him so long that he had to return the sander before he had finished. The sitting room had no skirting boards and there were wires hanging loose in her bedroom.
‘You ought to be pleased with your room, Bano,’ her father said. ‘You’ve got the best room, much bigger than Lara and Ali’s.’
Craving conformity, she reproached her parents for her name. Bano, what sort of name was that? Nobody else had it. When they told her they had contemplated calling her Maria, she complained even more.
‘Oh, Maria, why didn’t you call me that? I know several people called Maria! I could have been like everyone else.’
Their residence permit kept on being renewed on humanitarian grounds, but only for a year at a time. It wore the family down, not knowing if they would be able to stay in Norway. They were part of a group known as Temporary Residents with No Right to Family Reunification.
When the time came for Bano to start secondary school, and they still had not heard if they would be allowed to stay, she decided to take matters into her own hands. She was the family member best able to follow the news and she kept them all up to date with events. She was going to put the family’s situation to the Norwegian state, she decided, and looked up the government’s contact details in the telephone book. She rang the number of the local government department and asked for the minister.
They did not put her through.
‘You have to be eighteen to talk to the minister,’ the eleven-year-old later told her parents. ‘The department said so.’
Then in 2005, when Bano turned twelve, Lara ten and Ali seven, they were finally granted citizenship, along with several hundred other Iraqi Kurds. The head of the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration subsequently had to resign when it emerged that the directorate had exceeded its remit and issued too many residence permits. The Rashids were among the lucky ones. And so, in February 2009, after ten years in Norway, the whole family became Norwegian citizens.
Bayan made a special meal and bought nougat ice cream, and they were all allowed to eat as much as they wanted.
Sport was an important part of becoming one of the others. Bano spent many hours on the bench at handball matches because she was clumsy and missed the ball so often. But one day, flat-footed and a little overweight, she thundered through the opposition’s defences and scored. From that point on, there was no stopping her. She loved being on the attack, snatching the ball and scoring goals. After each goal the trainer would shout, ‘Home, Bano, home!’ But defending was too boring.
Bano had no time for anything boring. But if there was something to be won, she turned up. When there was a competition among the pupils of the Nesodden schools to see who knew their peninsula best, she did her research on local history. Bano, the outsider, got through to the final.
She wanted to be best on the court, best in the class and as well dressed as everyone else. She wanted to join the gang of popular girls and be as Norwegian as the Norwegians.
But a new interest was gradually taking over.
‘You’ve been with me for the handball all these years, now you’ve got to come into the Labour Party with me,’ Bano told her parents when she joined the AUF in Year 10.