A King in Hiding

by Fahim

  At the end of the afternoon we stopped for a while beside the Seine, worn out. Ignoring all our difficulties in communicating with each other, I just went for it, and promised them that I would never let them down, that they could always count on me. When things have got tough, I’ve often thought back to my ‘Eiffel Tower oath’.

  Chapter 7

  SPRING, SUMMER, SETBACK

  My second day at school and it’s all gone wrong already. The morning drags on for ever. At lunchtime all the others go off to the canteen. I’m on my own in the covered part of the playground when the ‘weirdo’ in my class turns up. He shoves me up against the wall and tries to choke me. He’s raging and screaming at me. I have no idea what he’s on about. I pretend I don’t care and just shrug my shoulders.

  Then after a bit I’ve had enough. Now it’s my turn to lose it, and I throw a punch at him. A direct hit! He’s down! To make sure he doesn’t get back up I sit on top of him, but then he starts to yell and I’m worried about getting into trouble. So I get off him and head for the canteen. Then he jumps me from behind and knocks me over, the coward. He’s stronger than me. In the end I give up. He says sorry and we go to the canteen together. After that he respects me; he even becomes my friend.

  It’s my first fight. My first proper fight. In Bangladesh I’d had a few scraps with my friends, but only in fun. I had an enemy, but we’d never had a fight. Luckily no one’s seen us, so I don’t get punished.

  My third day, and school closes for the ‘February holiday’. Yay! I’ll be able to spend most of it playing chess and football. Unluckily, during a game of football one of the big boys at the hostel kicks my foot instead of the ball: I feel a terrific pain and instantly the trainer on that foot starts to shrink. My father takes me to hospital, where we have to wait for ages – in France you always have to wait. I have an X-ray, and the doctor tells me I’ve broken my foot. I get an awesome plaster, which is hot when it goes on and really tight. I have to drag it around for the whole of the holiday, which means I can’t run. And it makes my foot shrink: when it comes off my trainer is far too big.

  Back to school. The teacher, Mme Faustine, shows me things and teaches me their names: cheek, ear, mouth and eyes, cat, dog and bird. Then it’s my turn to say things: trousers, jumper and sock, table, chair and exercise book.

  Mme Faustine is strict, and she’s always getting cross. One day, when she finds out that Lujai the Sri Lankan boy hasn’t done his homework, she’s so angry that she knocks his table over. None of us makes a sound. No one dares to move. I never get into trouble. I’m good: I don’t muck about or talk in class. I don’t speak French, in any case. None of us talk in class because none of us can speak French.

  We are all given different work to do. Since I’ve already been to school, Mme Faustine gives me exercises to do on my own. Some of the others have never been to school before coming to France. For them it’s hard. It takes them ages to pick things up. Some of them smile a lot, some of them are sad. Some try to speak, but most of them don’t say a word. Some of them are even frightened: you can see it in their faces.

  I learn French quickly. It’s easy.

  I learn to say my name and write it, to count, to understand what people are saying and to read stories.

  I learn colours, the days of the week, the alphabet, masculine and feminine and verbs.

  I learn what different instructions mean: colour in, cut out, put a cross, copy, read, write, cross out, repeat, glue and draw round.

  I learn the difference between a river and a stream, a stone and a pebble, a house and a family, day and night, sadness and fear.

  I learn sheep, lamb and … ewe; bull, calf and … cow; father, child and … mother.

  I learn the difference between tu and vous. When I go to the club, I decide to say vous to Xavier. It’s more respectful, classier.

  By March I can understand everything.

  By April I can make people understand me.

  By May I’ve lost my accent, but I’m still quiet and shy.

  By June I’m fluent, even if I still make little mistakes.

  French is helpful. I can talk to my friends. All of them except Sohan, my best friend, who doesn’t understand French. I try to help him, but at the end of the year he goes to live in the south of France, and he disappears from my life too.

  Maths is simple. Except for problems to begin with, when I don’t understand the instructions in French. English is easy. French children are only taught a few words, but I can speak it already.

  We do art too. And music. I wonder what the point of it is. We learn songs to put on a show, a ‘musical comedy’. My father is surprised and not very happy: he’d rather I was either working hard at school or playing chess.

  We do PE too. We have to fence. It’s dumb. You have to hold a metal stick and follow all sorts of complicated rules. You aren’t allowed to hit anyone properly, in case they get hurt. I try to anyway. Mme Klein gets cross with me and sends me out of the class.

  Every day after school my father comes to meet me with a cake and a carton of fruit juice. We walk back to the hostel with the other children who live there and their parents. We play football, then Yolande comes to make sure we do our homework.

  I like living in the hostel. There’s room to move, play and run about. Even if it’s noisy, even if you have to share the toilets and showers, and even if it isn’t a proper home. At least we have a roof over our heads. It seems that there are some people who don’t, even though France is a rich country. I’m happy to live at the hostel until I get my own home. I wouldn’t like to sleep on the streets. Thank goodness I’ll never have to!

  XP: With Fahim, I discovered what daily life was really like for political refugees. The France Terre d’Asile hostel in Créteil is the oldest hostel for asylum-seekers in France, and also one of the largest and best. It is run by 30 or so permanent staff, including Muhamad – Fahim and Nura’s social worker – and Frédéric, known as Fred, who is in charge of applications and other paperwork.

  The hostel offers accommodation to over 200 people, and during the day helps many more to negotiate the labyrinthine complexities of official bureaucracy, or simply with the necessities of daily life. It has a kitchen, showers and washing machines that they can use. It’s a strange sort of world in microcosm, a sort of Noah’s Ark of humanity, where you may come across men, women and children of all types and nationalities, young and old, families and single people: a real Tower of Babel, echoing with every language you can think of. At this point there were more Bangladeshi asylum-seekers in France than any other nationality, and there were several Bangladeshi families living at the hostel.

  More than neighbours yet not quite a community, living more intimately than side by side but not quite cohering as a group, these people live their separate lives, see to their affairs, do their housework, cook for themselves and submit the forms and paperwork they are asked for. But they also make friends, set up support networks and display an instinctive solidarity with each other – translating for newcomers and passing on useful tips – before they are forced apart again, as the currents of life sweep them on to different shores.

  You have to get to the canteen on time, pick up a tray and join the queue. In the morning my father goes down without me, as I’m not hungry. When I don’t have school, I have lunch with him. In the evening, we take our tray up to our room as we like to eat late. The man who dishes out the food isn’t fair. He gives bigger portions to pretty women and to people from certain countries. He tips them off when there’s something good coming up, and when we get there there’s none left. People in the queue moan about it, but my father never says anything, so I don’t either.

  Gradually I get used to French food. I like the grilled chicken legs, gateaux, strawberries, kiwi fruit, cherries and apricots. I don’t like tomatoes or onions – I leave them on the side of my plate – carrots and petits pois when they’re all mixed up together, or artichokes. I don’t like the bread either: it�
��s cold, like it’s mouldy. I refuse to eat merguez (which are all long and thin and disgusting) or figs (which are ugly looking). And most of all I hate being forced to eat anything, like I am at school.

  After two months at the hostel we aren’t allowed to eat at the canteen any more, and like the others we’re given money to cook for ourselves. My father’s good at looking after us. He cleans and tidies the room, does the shopping, cooks our meals, does the washing up and washes and irons our clothes. In Bangladesh he used to pay a woman to do all that. Now he does it himself, and he does it brilliantly. I am always well dressed with my hair neatly combed. I often hear the people who run the hostel say things like:

  ‘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 co
nnection 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: