The Storyteller of Casablanca (9)
Annette crinkled up her nose and she started to cry again when she saw the mattresses on the floor that were to be our new home in Morocco. ‘Don’t worry, ma chère,’ Papa said, stroking her back as Maman hugged her tight (I think she might have been crying too). ‘We won’t be here for long. This is just temporary until they can find proper places for us all. I’ll go and look for someone to speak to straight away.’ I wanted to go with him, but he told me to stay and look after Maman and Annette. ‘Talk to some of the others,’ he said. ‘See what you can find out about how things run here.’
It was so hot and smelly in the hall that most people had gone outside, so I decided that would be the best place to go and try to find someone to talk to once Maman and Annette had settled themselves a bit. I took my book, so it would look as if I was just casually doing some peaceful reading, and went to try and find a place to sit in the shade, only in the camp there weren’t any shady trees or comfortable benches to sit on like the parks in Paris. So I found a patch of hard ground instead, against the wall of the building out of the sun, and sat down and watched some boys kicking a football around in the dust.
After a while, the boys noticed me and one of them deliberately kicked the ball right at me. My reflexes are quick, though, and I managed to catch it. The boys shouted at me to throw it back, but I just glared at them and shouted back, ‘If you want it, you’ll have to come and ask politely.’ There’s never any excuse for bad manners, as Maman frequently reminds us. The boy who’d kicked it at me came storming over and demanded I hand it over. ‘Only if you don’t aim it at innocent bystanders again,’ I said defiantly. You can’t let bullies get away with that sort of behaviour, as I have learned from my reading.
Some of the other boys came over too, and one of them, with a broken tooth, apologised and asked nicely if I would please return it. I was about to throw the ball to him when, to my absolute horror, the bully spotted my book on the ground beside me and grabbed it. ‘A hostage!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘You want your book back then you give us back our ball.’
I leapt to my feet and let the ball fall on the ground. Tears of rage and pain sprang into my eyes as he held my precious book above his head, beyond my reach, laughing and jeering. He was taller than me and a few years older and a truly horrible specimen. As he waved the book about, trying to make me jump for it, the dust jacket came loose and tore and the hot wind snatched it, blowing it across the patch of bare ground and on to the barbed wire of the fence surrounding the camp, where it got stuck.
I was really crying now. I was about to start hitting the bully with my fists when the boy with the broken tooth stepped in and took the book from his hand. ‘Give it back to her. We have the ball now anyway. Come on, the others are waiting to get on with the game.’
The bully turned and spat at the feet of the book-rescuer. For a moment I thought he was going to start on him – and he was a lot bigger and heavier than either of us – but in the end he turned away and went back to join his friends.
The boy with the broken tooth handed me back the book. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and thanked him. Then I started to set off towards the barbed wire fence to try to retrieve the dust jacket.
‘Stop!’ The boy grabbed my arm.
I tried to shake him off. ‘Let me go,’ I protested. ‘I need to get that back.’
‘You can’t. It’s dangerous to go near the fence. The soldiers keep everyone away from it, look.’ Sure enough, a guard with a gun was patrolling there. ‘Let it go,’ the boy said. ‘At least the book itself wasn’t damaged so you can still read it. That old cover is all torn now, in any case.’
The tears came back into my eyes at the thought of losing a part of my papa’s book that I had always taken such good care of, the only book I had left in the world. But the boy was right, I still had the rest of it, and I knew I needed to pull myself together if I was going to be able to survive in that camp. He handed me a rather dirty handkerchief so that I could blow my nose and then he smiled at me kindly. ‘It looks like a good book,’ he said. ‘Want to tell me more about it?’
‘Don’t they need you back on the football team?’ I said, not wanting to have anything to do with someone who was friends with that bully.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t like them much, and they’re rubbish at football in any case.’
So that was when I made friends with Felix Adler, who had come to Morocco from Vienna via France. He had a cheerful smile made a bit lopsided by that broken tooth, which he told me was as a result of an accident with a swing in the park back at home. He and his parents had been in the refugee camp for a couple of weeks already. He told me it was called A?n Chok and that some people had been there for months. But he also told me there was a committee run by a kind lady called Madame Bénatar who was Moroccan but Jewish as well and that Papa should speak to her if he could. She was very good at organising places in the city of Casablanca for people like us to live. Some people took refugees into their own homes, especially in the mellah, which is the name for the Jewish Quarter, even if they didn’t have much space themselves. Felix and his parents were hoping to move to such a place soon.
I was happy to be able to report this important information to Papa when he returned and he smiled and kissed the top of my head. ‘Well done, that is very helpful to know. Don’t worry, ma p’tite, we’ll find a place of our own to rent.’ I realised that money was going to help us again.