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.
But even with our good fortune it still took a while to find somewhere for us to live and be allowed to leave the camp once we had our permis de séjour, which Madame Bénatar helped us get. And in the meantime we quickly discovered that the annoying buzzing of the daytime flies was replaced at night by the high-pitched whining of swarms of mosquitoes that liked to spend the hours of darkness feasting on the blood of exhausted refugees. Between the bugs and the crying babies and the whispered arguments between some of the grown-ups in the hall, no one managed to get much sleep.
Felix got teased in the camp because of his broken tooth. Some of those other dreadful boys called him Croc, which means ‘fang’ in French. He didn’t care, though. He told me that when he got to America he would get his tooth fixed and then his smile would be as perfect as a movie star’s. I didn’t mind his imperfect smile really, because the thing you noticed most was the way his eyes smiled too and so that broken tooth didn’t seem to matter at all.
A few days after we met, he came over to our corner of the hall one evening. He had something behind his back and he was looking very shy all of a sudden. Then he handed me the dust jacket with the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse on it. He’d managed to get it back from where it was stuck on the fence when the guards weren’t looking, he told me, and he’d done a pretty good job of mending it, sticking the torn pieces on to a sheet of old newspaper with some glue he’d made from flour, which he’d begged from the kitchen, and water. I couldn’t believe how kind he was, risking his neck for me like that, and I gave him a hug as now I knew he was a true friend. Felix’s face went pink with embarrassment, but he seemed pleased that he’d made me so happy, too. I wrapped the cover around my book and it looked good there, bearing its battle scars but back where it belonged.