Louise Mangos - Her Husband’s Secrets

Yasmine sifts through a few photos of JP lying on my pillow, and stares at one of him as a baby. I want to tell her to take her hands off my child.

‘You know they used to lock up young girls in this place who became enceinte when they were not being married. And they hadn’t done anything wrong. No stealing. No kill—’

‘It was called the “re-education” of unmarried mothers then,’ I interrupt. ‘The system was tailored for the likes of Fatima. Usually put here by their own parents who didn’t know how to deal with their daughter’s pregnancies.’

‘The worst is they were still doing this thing until the 1980s,’ she says. ‘Imagine, in our lifetime! They will not take Adnan away from Fatima permanently. They cannot do this. To provoke such publicity again would be, how do you say, une atrocité .’

‘Fatima must have the ghost of one of those girls in her room,’ I say. ‘She often screams as though she might never see Adnan again. Maybe tomorrow she won’t. It’s hard to imagine the destinies of the babies. Who knows where Adnan will end up if he is farmed out to a foster family? I don’t know if it’s any less barbaric than back then.’

Yasmine looks at me and raises one eyebrow. I’m not sure she understands everything I say, but she doesn’t ask for clarification.

She has shuffled the photos out of order and my breath quickens to see the images carelessly handled. They are so valuable to me, and I’m worried she’s smearing them with hand cream or grease from the kitchens. I doubt I’ll be able to get fresh copies. The family didn’t give these to me. That would never happen. These are photos Anne has sent me, copies from her collection. Her son Valentin is JP’s best friend. I wonder what JP will look like the next time I see him. Kids change quickly in six months. I’m surprised every time.

‘Don’t …’ I start to say, and am silenced by a look that either tells me I’m being too precious, or that I shouldn’t mess with her.

Yasmine often talks about Hindelbank’s history, repeating its horrors as if trying to make the events of the recent past more believable. To make her own imprisonment more of a fantasy. Or perhaps to kid herself that she is here even though she has done nothing wrong. She came to Hindelbank after me in May, from Basel. She was part of a gang crossing the French border in a transit van, periodically relieving pre-alpine villages of their bicycles. They indiscriminately loaded up bikes, using bolt cutters on even the strongest of locks. It was on their fourth or fifth foray into the country that they were finally caught.

Yasmine is Algerian, but chooses to converse with me in English, despite knowing I can speak French fairly fluently. She pronounces all her th’s as a soft zz.

I am quite the novelty. There was another English woman here until just before I arrived. She was rumoured to have murdered a man who had been stalking her family. But she was released before I arrived, and no one wants to talk about those who get out. So I am the only one here right now. Everyone wants to practise my mother tongue, except the guards who bark their orders in Swiss German. They are aware that most of the Swiss citizens, who don’t even constitute half of the inmates here, can barely understand their guttural Bern dialect. Most of the guards speak only one of the four languages of Switzerland: the most discordant of them all.

Yasmine reaches for a pack of cigarettes in her pocket and taps it on her thigh, a pointless resettling of tobacco in those poisonous cylinders. I make a tutting sound and shake my head. First the photos, now she wants to smoke.

‘No, Yasmine,’ I say firmly.

She sighs and rolls her eyes, but silently places the soft packet of Gauloises on the table, and continues to look at the images of JP. I think back to when she first arrived, how she boasted about the bikes they used to steal.

‘You would not believe how many people leave their VTT on the street without locking them, expensive ones too,’ she’d said, using the French Vélo Tout-Terrain acronym for mountain bikes. ‘I’ve heard that all the serious road-racing bikers prefer to sleep with their bikes rather than girlfriends or wives. In any case, there is not much business in France for second-hand road bikes. People are too suspicious. Road bikers are puristes , want to know the origins of such things.’

I’d marvelled at her expertise on the bicycle black market back then.

That was in spring this year, exactly seven years since I came to Switzerland. The season of beginnings and arrivals. I can’t believe I have been in this country for that long. And I have been in prison for six months. That’s the hardest thing to understand, given my innocence. I’m 26 now. My life should be entering the next exciting phase. I once hoped I could raise my family within Switzerland’s safe society, as long as I kept my bike locked up. Its clockwork systems, true democracy and magical geography offered a dramatic but somehow tamed beauty. But in contrast, it is the rigid rules, chauvinistic values and xenophobic attitudes that have me trapped in a nightmare from which I fear I might never awake.

‘Does he look like his father? Those piercing grey eyes are not from you,’ queries Yasmine, squinting at my hazel eyes, which are now a little hot with the strain of my memories. Her eyes flick back to another photo of JP as a toddler.

‘Yes, he looks a lot like his father,’ I say, inexplicably choking up, not because of JP, but because I remember how he made me feel. JP’s father. In the resurfacing of old hatred, old blame, I’m horrified that my body still betrays me. After all that he did, after all that I have endured, he remains in control of my feelings. I recall that pooling hot sensation in my belly when Matt looked at me with his smoky eyes. He made me believe I was the only woman in his life.

I glance at Yasmine, worried she has a window to my thoughts. I swallow the tears that threaten.

I’m ashamed of my vulnerability.

* * *

Seven years ago

On the last Friday evening of the season, with the pub full of workers spending their weekly wage, the barman turned up the volume on the stereo and played a series of Latin American numbers. A few people began to move to the music.

It was then I discovered that along with his other seductive traits, Matt was a talented dancer. He gathered me into his arms, moulding me to his body with one strong hand splayed over the base of my back, applying enough pressure to claim complete control without force. With my hand on his shoulder, he pressed my other hand close to his chest, gently sweeping the backs of his fingers across my breast. His warm dry breath raised the fine hairs on my neck, and he turned his hips slightly, his leg pushing between my thighs.

Not a flutter of air passed between our bodies as we danced a grinding merengue in the crowded darkness of the bar. Our movement together was hypnotic, arousing a fervour of unreleased passion as I involuntary pressed myself to him and felt his desire against my thigh. My cheeks burned as he swung me around to the desperate fiery strumming of ‘Bomboléo’ and I could hardly breathe with the anticipation of what might follow.

We drew apart when the song had finished. He took my hand to lead me out of the door of the bar. The night air chilled my cheeks, but my body was on fire. At the side of the woodshed, he leaned in to me, the pungent smell of creosote eclipsed by the sweet, beery scent of his breath. He kissed me deeply with his hot mouth, pulling my shirt and bra up to expose my breasts to the night. The tightening of my nipples in the sudden cold craved his touch and his lips.

Clothes crumpled, zips sawed, underwear pushed to the side and I welcomed the exquisite, almost violent force of him thrusting into me. Throwing my head back, my hair caught in the splinters on the woodshed wall. We wedged our feet into a drift of packed snow under the roof overhang, jeans pooled at our feet in a tangle. I gasped from the long-awaited satisfaction and release, oblivious to the discomfort of shoving against the rough wall.