Also, Miss Ellis has another motive for carrying on tutoring me, but I can’t tell Maman about that or she’d hit the roof with fury and fear. It was my decision, though, and Miss Ellis was pretty reluctant when I first told her of the plan that Felix and I had made.
Felix came over on his bike a couple of weeks ago and I could see there was something on his mind. We went and sat in the courtyard for a while and tried to talk about the weather and the bakery and the fact that the locusts had gone at last, although there’s not a leaf to be seen and the city is going to take quite some time to recover. There were several awkward silences and after one of them he finally plucked up the courage to ask me how I was doing. I shrugged and picked up a feather that had fluttered down from the roof, where the turtle doves were murmuring softly to each other, smoothing the grey filaments between my fingers.
‘Your papa was a very brave man, you know,’ Felix said in a low voice. ‘He’s helped establish a resistance network here in Casablanca and, even though they caught him, his work will continue. It’s important that it does, so that he and the others who died with him won’t have given their lives in vain. I shouldn’t really be telling you this, but I just wanted you to know.’
His words, like those of Abraham Lincoln, were a call to arms. They startled me, jolting my soul, so that I felt as if I was waking up from a deep sleep and opening my eyes to the life that continued to go on around us. ‘It is for us the living to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far nobly advanced,’ I whispered to myself.
‘What did you say?’ Felix asked.
I shook my head. Then I let the feather fall back to the ground at my feet and turned to face him. ‘What can I do, Felix? Tell me what I can do to help. I want to keep my papa’s work going. I can pass on messages, ride my bike across town, come and visit you in the mellah. Tell me.’
He refused at first, saying my maman would kill him if she thought he was involving me. But I can be pretty persistent when I’m determined about something and, in the end, I managed to persuade him to give me a job. It’s only passing on messages from him to Miss Ellis when she comes to teach me my lessons, but he says they are important. He says he doesn’t know exactly what’s happening – and he wouldn’t tell me even if he did, but I can tell he really doesn’t. After all, we are just two little white mice in this war between giants – but he thinks the Americans and the British are planning something big. It’s important that the lines of communication, which my papa helped to establish, continue to pass information back and forth so that the resistance here on the ground in Morocco can be ready to help when the call to arms comes.
Miss Ellis wasn’t too keen on our plan at first, but then she admitted it would be a help as it would look much more natural if Felix visited me now and then as my friend and she just happened to be continuing as my tutor. I feel a tiny bit less helpless knowing I’m playing a small part in Papa’s ‘unfinished work’。
When my papa was murdered （I refuse to call it by anything other than its true name）， Maman, Annette and I were frozen with grief and fear for several weeks at first. I didn’t want to see anyone, not even Nina, but one day Kenza persuaded me to go and sit in the courtyard with her for a little while and she fed me ghoribas and told me that Nina was missing me terribly and wanted to bring me some books from the library so that we could read together again. Just as she said that, a pair of turtle doves fluttered down from the roof to peck at the crumbs I’d scattered on the ground beside the pomegranate tree. A few tiny green shoots have begun appearing on it after the locusts ate all the leaves. I said I’d like to see Nina, but could the three of us go to the beach one day soon because there was something I needed to do there. Kenza looked at me with her lovely dark eyes and they looked very sad, even though she was smiling in an understanding way. I could see she knew exactly what I was talking about and she nodded and said she’d ask Maman if it would be okay to organise a taxi to take us again.
And so Kenza, Nina and I went to the ocean so that I could write my papa’s name on a stone and throw it into the waves. I was crying a lot when I did it because I really didn’t want to have to let him go like that, even though I knew I had to.
We can’t go to Papa’s grave because the Nazis won’t tell anyone where they buried the twenty so-called traitors that they shot. Madame Bénatar is still working on it, but Annette says we may never know and we need to stay strong for Maman and not show her how much pain we truly feel as that would just make it even worse for her, if such a thing were possible, which I doubt. But for once I didn’t want to argue with Annette and so I decided the best thing would be to go to the ocean instead, where I could remember Papa and say goodbye in my own way.