A King in Hiding (7 page)

‘He looks after his son so well!'

‘Have you seen how clean and tidy their room is? You could eat off the floor.'

‘At least that poor child has the good luck to have a father like that.'

‘What a perfect family, look how attentive his father is!'

My father is quiet and discreet. He's popular with our neighbours. They are from Sri Lanka, Armenia, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Iraq. Not all of them are as quiet as us. There are two women on our floor, one from an African country and the other from Chechnya, who have rows every day. They fight over their children, over crumbs left in the kitchen or over dirty toilets, and they scream and yell and pull each other's hair. Sometimes my father tries to pull them apart, and then they hit him instead.

One day they're fighting with a broom when it hits me on the hand. One of my fingers swells up and turns blue. I'm so angry and think my finger might be permanently bent. Another time the old witches gang up on me: they shout at me and tell my father I've made the corridor dirty. It isn't true, but my father believes them and gives me a slap. After that I hate them.

There's an Armenian couple who have fights in the evening. You can hear them hitting each other in their room. He hits her, and she hits him. Every night. It's violent. The neighbours are worried and cluster outside in the corridor, but no one dares to interfere. I wonder why they stay together if they hate each other so much. When the noise stops, we hear whispering. In the morning, the woman goes out to do whatever she has to do as if nothing has happened.

In another family it's the daughter who gets hit. She's the same age as me, and her mother makes her do everything: the cooking, the housework and the washing. She's never allowed out. When her older brother tries to defend her, the mother locks the door so she can beat her daughter in peace. One evening he was desperate to help her and banged on the door so hard that he broke it.

Fortunately most people are nice. I like Muhamad, who works at the hostel. He's there when we need help. Sometimes he asks me to help him out, and I go to his office to translate when a new Bangladeshi family arrives. He always gives me a Coke.

Like me, my father goes to school: he has French lessons. He never misses a lesson, and is absolutely determined to learn the language in order to ‘integrate'. But he makes lots of mistakes and gets his words muddled up. For instance, one lunchtime in the canteen he hears someone say:

‘
Bon appétit
!'

So after that he says it all the time to everyone, in the lobby, on the stairs, in the garden:

‘
Bon appétit
!
Bon appétit
!
Bon appétit
!'

He thinks it means ‘hello'. It makes me laugh.

XP
:
At first I thought Nura wasn't making much effort to learn French. While his son was bilingual within a matter of months, Nura had difficulty following what was being said and found it difficult to string even two or three words together to make himself understood. Even now his French is still rudimentary. He understands what people say to him, though you're never quite sure to what degree. He can make himself understood in daily life, but he finds it difficult to discuss more complex matters.

Yet in fact Nura was assiduous in attending the numerous French lessons that were laid on at the hostel and at other community centres in Créteil. He would spend long hours hunched over the books that I passed on to him, and I even funded some private lessons for him – with a Bulgarian as his teacher. The truth was that the one thing that would have helped Nura's language skills to take off was spending time in a French-speaking environment, surrounded by colleagues, friends and neighbours who spoke French. And at that time he had access to none of this. As time went on, I began to realise just how stupendous an effort of will it had cost him to achieve as much as he had. It was a predicament in which he was by no means alone. People from Mali and Senegal, who are used to hearing several languages that share a structure not dissimilar to French, find French much easier to learn. People from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, by contrast, speak languages that bear so little resemblance to French in their structure – not to speak of their written forms and ways of thought – that they often struggle. Moreover, Nura was 45 and had never learned any language apart from his native Bengali, with the exception of a little basic English. So for him the idea of learning another language was a completely foreign concept.

How many times did I look at Nura and wonder how lonely he must feel, so far away from his family, his friends and his place in Bangladeshi society; looked at askance by so many people; locked into his own language, culture and hopes; and with his only chance of a future – and his only companionship – resting on an eight-year-old child.

After school, in the hostel corridors, in the kitchen, the only thing the adults ever talk about is their ‘papers'. It's one word everyone knows, even people who can barely understand any French. My father is doing everything he possibly can to get papers for us. It's taking him ages for all sorts of reasons: he has to get hold of documents from Bangladesh; the offices out there close down every time there's a demonstration; the post is slow; my father doesn't want to give them our address in France; and everything has to be translated.

When finally he's managed to get everything together, we go to the OFPRA, the French government department dealing with refugees and stateless people. When we get there, we have to take a ticket and wait in a big room with loads of other people. As the ticket numbers come up they appear on a small screen. It takes ages for them to change, even when I stop looking. Also I'm worried: what if I don't understand the questions they ask us?

By the time our number eventually comes up it's lunchtime. Too late! We'll have to come back. The next day we have to wait all over again, until a lady hands us a ‘receipt' that allows us to stay in France while our application is being considered. Three months later, a letter arrives by recorded delivery giving us another appointment. This time we see a lady who gives us another appointment a month later. I'm at school that day, so my father goes by himself.

He comes back late that afternoon looking puzzled. He's seen the lady, this time with an interpreter. To start off with she asked him simple questions: his name, my name, his date of birth, my date of birth, etc. After that my father got confused, because the interpreter was Indian and didn't speak much Bengali. He stumbled when he tried to translate what my father said to the lady, and when he translated what the lady said, my father couldn't understand what he was saying. After the first question, my father said:

‘I don't understand.'

The interpreter translated, and the lady looked surprised. The question seemed to hover in the air, hanging over my father's head. It seemed as if it was really important. Then the lady said:

‘What's your job?'

‘I used to be a fireman. Then I set up a small car business.'

Years later I read the translation of this, as given by the interpreter:

‘I used to be a fireman.
Then I set up a car dealership in Germany
.'

‘A car dealership?' asked the lady.

‘I rented cars out by the day.'

‘Did you import the cars from Germany?'

My father was surprised at this. He explained:

‘No, it was a business in Bangladesh.'

‘So what was the connection with Germany?'

‘There wasn't one.'

My father frowned: why was she asking about Germany?

The lady looked at him in astonishment: what was he concealing from her about his car imports from Germany?

After that, she focused her questions on our problems in Bangladesh.

As my father was giving his answers, the interpreter would suddenly cut across him:

‘Don't say that. No, that's no good for your application. Wait, I'll say it another way. You mustn't say that sort of thing. It's better if I say something else.'

He argued with my father, interrupted him, butted in when he was in the middle of answering, made him lose his thread, cut across his conversation with the lady, changed his replies. My father was getting annoyed. The lady, who couldn't understand anything of what was going on, was starting to get suspicious.

At the end of the interview, my father returned to the original problem:

‘I didn't understand the first question, at the beginning.'

But it was too late, the lady had made up her mind:

‘I asked you why you had left your own country. You said, “I don't know.”'

Later on at the hostel, when my father talked about what happened, the Bangladeshis there told him some surprising things:

‘You know, Nura, there are some Indians who try to pass themselves off as Bangladeshis in order to seek asylum in France. Before you arrived, there was an Indian in the hostel who managed to get his visa that way. Maybe the interpreter was trying to sabotage your application so as to give more chance to people from his own country?'

Summer is here. At school, some of the children start to talk about their holidays. The children from the hostel say nothing. After coaching one evening, Xavier asks:

‘Fahim, would you like to come and spend the month of July with me in Brittany?'

‘Brittany? What's that?'

‘It's a region in western France. My mother has a house there. I take a few pupils there every year. We relax, have fun and compete in the Plancoët tournament.'

This makes me happy. My father too: he's invited as well and he really likes ‘Exavier'.

‘Who'll be there?'

‘Quentin. And Olivier and his mother and sister – they've rented a gîte nearby.'

Our holiday in Brittany is fantastic. Marie-Jeanne, Xavier's mother, is like him: she looks ancient, but in fact she's really nice, good fun and full of life. She has only one fault, but it's a big one: she smokes all the time, and it makes the house smell awful. It's a big, untidy house: the opposite of our own room at the hostel. My father and I sleep with the others in the dormitory on the first floor, while Xavier sleeps in a caravan in the garden.