A King in Hiding (10 page)

Dressed up to look rather like Desmond Tutu, he would target relatives who were loaded with wealth (he would run a practised eye over the old biddies' jewellery as he set his highly flexible rates) and with ambition, and who fondly imagined that their children were more intelligent than their peers. I even heard that he had managed to persuade one credulous grandmother to buy a ‘life membership' for her grandson, who inevitably gave up chess soon afterwards.

This ‘guru' had a nose for sniffing out gifted players, and a talent for exploiting their prowess while convincing the world that it was all down to his teaching methods. So he hovered over Fahim, before offering money to Nura to sign him up for his club. When Nura – who doubtless had some experience of dealing with crooks and swindlers – mockingly suggested that he should ask me direct, his expression was a sight to behold.

In the summer, my friends in the club set off to play in the tournament at Saint-Affrique in the Aveyron. I'm envious of them, but travelling around is expensive. I have to stay behind on my own with Xavier at Marie-Jeanne's house, and I get a bit bored. I spend a lot of time on the internet, playing chess and going on journeys on Google and YouTube.

On 26 July it's my tenth birthday. I'm sad: now I'll never be the French under-10s champion.

‘Xavier, did Einstein really say that “Chess players ruin their lives instead of doing important things”?'

‘He was talking about his friend Emmanuel Lasker, world chess champion, and what he actually said was: “The strong chess player is a man endowed with a brain of extraordinary abilities which he squanders fruitlessly at a chessboard instead of using them for far more important ends.” Was he right, do you think?'

‘No!'

‘Then hang on to this quotation from Tarrasch instead: “I have always had a slight feeling of pity for the man who has no knowledge of chess, just as I would for a man who is ignorant of love. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy.”'

I play in the Plancoët tournament, and for the first time in my life I play against an international master, the Bulgarian player Velislav Kukov. Sitting opposite him is exciting: I so badly want to beat him. At the start of the game he takes the advantage. I try to catch up. Too late. I'm caught in Kukov's traps. I try to hold on. Help! All I can do is counter his attacks. Then suddenly inside my head I hear Xavier saying: ‘Don't let your opponent lead you by the nose. A good player doesn't think much of what his opponent does, despises it even. That's why many people think chess players are conceited.'

This gets a reaction from me, just as Kukov starts to slow down. He probably thinks I'm just a kid who doesn't know how to follow up my moves. You have no idea who you're up against, pal! He exchanges queens? Excellent! Exactly what I was counting on. Now I decide to go for promotion: I advance, I roll forward, I flood him with a wave of pawns. He refuses to sacrifice a bishop, and his rook falls into my trap. I send a pawn on ahead to release my queen. He spots his mistake. Too late! My first victory against a master. He's so annoyed that he flings his score sheet across the board. I'm jubilant. Next day, Xavier shows me an article with my photo in a newspaper called
Ouest-France
. It's a shame my father can't read French.

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The win against Kukov – doubtless helped (being realistic) by the fact that the master was exhausted after a long journey – was the culmination of good steady progress on Fahim's part. He had listened to advice, put his coaching into practice, made a plan in his head, established a goal, put it into effect, and caught out a master. The young and gifted competitor was turning into a true player.

This achievement also marked the end of an era. Fahim never spoke of his personal circumstances now. Whenever I talked to his father about such matters he would stand a little way off or look at something else, as if all the problems they faced didn't concern him. While everyone else was devastated by the tribunal's decision, he carried on looking as unconcerned as ever. Some people thought he was oblivious. And yet, this boy who was usually so composed now looked nervous in tournaments and couldn't stop fidgeting. Already that spring, a championship final had shone a clear light on his state of mind. In a game that he had planned carefully both tactically and strategically, he was well ahead both in time – meaning his opponent had to play faster – and in position. He had seized control of all the white squares, so confining his opponent to the black squares, and he was fighting him for those every inch of the way. All of a sudden, when the game was virtually his, Fahim let a key defensive pawn go on the attack, opening up the field for his opponent. ‘Impatience in small things confounds great projects,' as Confucius said. With a single move, he lost the game.

I didn't yet know it, but Fahim was about to be sucked into the depths of a dark vortex. Just as he was learning how to view his game strategically, he was overtaken by events. The boy who had loved the fight, the tension, the tactics and clever moves, now charged headfirst into the fray, preferring speed and bluff to reflection, not bothering to project into the future, trying to knock his opponent off balance through his sheer nerve, as though he was driven by an overwhelming secret rage. This boldness and daring would come into their own at fast-paced blitz games, but during slow games they could get him into trouble, and increasingly into danger.

After the holidays in Brittany I go back to Créteil – in time to pack my bags. We gather our things together and leave them at the chess club, which isn't used during the summer. I leave my trophies behind in Muhamad's office, where he will keep them safe. The twelfth of August is heartbreaking. We walk out of the hostel, leaving behind us our friends and playmates, our sense of security and our hopes, and eighteen months of peaceful and almost normal life. We go to a small hotel on the other side of Créteil where the hostel staff have hassled the emergency helpline for homeless people into finding us a room. It's clean and nice, but sad. When I open the window, the room is filled with the smell of the McDonald's next door.

As soon as we get there, I search my bags for my coin collection: euros, centimes, Arabic coins and loads of others from places I don't know, that I've found on the ground or people have given me. Coins that I've kept in case one day I might need them. A secret treasure store that I keep in a red tin that my father brought home. I've stuck labels with the days of the week inside it. I've put each coin in the section matching the day when I found it, and all the sections are full. I haven't shown my treasure to anyone, not even my friends. I get it out when I'm on my own, and it reassures me, makes me feel I'm rich. It was the first thing I got ready to put in my case. But I look everywhere and I can't find it: it isn't there. I can feel the rage rising inside me, rage at this life that's taken away from me everything I have.

Chapter 10

LIFE ON HOLD

U
sually I like going back to school at the start of the year – for a day or so anyway – but this year I drag my feet all the way. Nothing's how it used to be: my gang have made new friends, kids who've arrived at the hostel over the summer, and I feel left out. After school my father and I go to the hostel, where Yolande is waiting to help me with my homework. Everyone is very nice to us. While I do my school work, my father finds a little corner in one of the kitchens and makes us a hot meal: no sandwiches for us tonight. Then we go back to the hotel, where I let the time drift past, watch cartoons and go to bed to forget.

Every other week, we have to phone the homeless emergency helpline. Since my father doesn't speak very good French, I make the call for him. I feel awkward, uncomfortable, embarrassed by the feeling that we're begging. When I pick up the phone I have a hollow feeling in my stomach: please let them say we can stay where we are. My father watches me intently, listening, studying my responses, straining to understand. Everything depends on me, as if I'm the adult and he's the child. It weighs on me so much that sometimes I hang up and don't say anything, don't tell him what the answer was. Then instantly I feel sorry and I'm really nice to him again.

We get another fortnight! Once, twice, three times! Then they're going to do building work, so one day we have to leave and go to another hotel. Fortunately the helpline people manage to find us a room in a nearby town called Bonneuil. We pack our bags and move on again. And every fortnight I call again.

Then we have to leave the second hotel, only this time the helpline can't find us anywhere else to go. There's no space anywhere. So I call back again, and again and again, until in the end they find us a room in Paris. Miles away. I write down the address on a scrap of paper, find it on a Métro map and explain to my father. We get moved on from one hotel to another, each of them worse than the one before, until one evening we find ourselves in a real hovel, a tiny, filthy broom cupboard at the end of a dark corridor, with toilets that are unusable and washing facilities on another floor. I didn't know it was possible for anything to be so filthy. We cling on to the room even so, and I make my fortnightly calls over and over and over again: please let us stay here, please, please let us live here!

My father wakes me up early. Exhausted, I catch the Métro for the journey to school in Créteil, which seems to go on for ever. At first Céline, my teacher, asks me why I look so tired, why I don't pay attention. I'm too ashamed to tell her the truth, so I say I stayed up late watching television. But after a few days she stops asking, and when she goes round the class and between the rows of desks she sometimes puts her hand on my shoulder. After school my father takes me to the hostel or the chess club, then we set off on the journey ‘home'. Weekends are yet another round of endless journeys, to lessons, coaching and tournaments. I can't cope with it any more. I fall asleep on the Métro. I fall asleep when we're eating. I fall asleep at school. And when I play chess I rock to and fro all the time, like a robot with no off switch.

Then one day my father snaps, not for himself, but for me. He asks me to call the helpline and describe how we're being forced to live. To tell them. To beg them. At the other end of the line I can hear people talking. They sound embarrassed. Finally they find us a hotel in Saint-Maur, next door to Créteil. So we go back to Val-de-Marne and to a gentler pace of life. I go to bed earlier, get up later, go to school by bus, get my breath back. And I try to get rid of the black moths that are always fluttering about inside my head.

On my father's furrowed brow, worries pile up like storm clouds. We've run out of money. At the hostel we were given 285 euros a month to buy food, clothes and other essentials. It wasn't much and we had to economise, but we managed. My father used even to set aside 30 euros each month for the time when we would leave the hostel and move into our own home. He would get cross if I wasted money. Like the time when I was playing with my friends on a hill, and the room key fell out of my pocket. I went back over my steps and looked everywhere, but I couldn't find it. My father lost his temper and shouted at me: having another key cut would cost 50 euros. Then he went round with that scary expression all day. After that I was more careful.

Now he gets nothing. The 1,000 euros from the Paris championship has gone. Our pockets are empty. Some nights we have nothing to eat. Sometimes I think I'm going to die of hunger. Fortunately Xavier is there, always generous when we need to eat, buy trainers for school or pay entrance fees for tournaments.

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:
Fahim and Nura spoke little about their problems: so little that not everyone around them was aware of their situation. Some people, naturally mindful of others and generous in their response, were always there for them, offering both financial and moral support. Not everyone though. One night I remember losing my temper with families at the club who would reel off all the usual clichés about ‘feckless' foreigners who ‘weren't capable of bringing up children'. Thinking of Nura, I told them how much respect these parents deserved – parents who were prepared to sacrifice their own wellbeing for the sake of their children's future, men and women capable of travelling halfway round the world to ensure their children's safety. Blinded by their prejudices, some of these people at the club hadn't noticed a thing, and they were knocked sideways. I turned to one of the boys:

‘You remember last week, when the heating at the club was on the blink?'

‘You told us to put our jumpers on.'

‘Do you remember what Fahim said?'

‘Yes, he said he didn't have a jumper.'

‘Did you understand what he meant by that?'

‘Well yeah, he'd left it at home.'

‘No. When Fahim said he didn't have a jumper, he meant that he didn't
have
a jumper.'

There was silence. The next week, the same boy arrived with a bundle of clothes for Fahim and Nura. At that point I think some of them began to open their eyes.

Without a visa, my father isn't allowed to work. For a long time he has respected this ban, because he doesn't want to be in a position that's illegal. But he thinks it's cruel that he isn't able to make himself useful. So he helps out in any way he can. Rather than hanging around all day doing nothing, he does the cleaning at the chess club and a bit of gardening for Marie-Jeanne in Brittany, and he helps out at the hostel at short notice whenever the staff need it. It's his way of saying thank you to all the people who have helped us.

He's got into the habit of combing the streets to salvage anything that people have thrown away and that can still be used: televisions, microwaves, children's clothes, crockery and so on. He takes it all back to the hostel and gives it to people who've just arrived and who have nothing.

Then my sister Jhorna becomes very ill. She has water on the brain and constant nosebleeds. She needs an emergency operation, but in Bangladesh there's no social security: if the family can't pay for the operation and hospital care, then the sick person stays at home. And they die.

My father is desperate. We don't have a penny, and he needs to find 1,500 euros, urgently. Swallowing his shame at being forced to beg, he turns once again to Xavier, who – as always – comes to his aid. It isn't enough, though. One of Xavier's friends who we don't even know pays the rest, and then a chess player offers my father a job helping him to re-lay his floor. For the first time in a long while, I see my father smile. He is taking control of our lives again. Jhorna has the operation and it saves her life.

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After this experience, Nura decided to defy the ban and carry on working. He couldn't bear to be a burden on society any longer. From then on he searched everywhere, asked everyone, thought of every job imaginable. I lost count of the times he arrived at the club triumphantly brandishing one of those free newspapers, in which he'd circled lucrative-looking small ads promising ‘Top deals', ‘Win 2,000 euros a month', ‘Set up your own business'. Every time I had to be a wet blanket, warning him off cons and fraudsters.

He got it into his head that he was going to sell fruit in the Métro, but soon had to give up that idea. To get a contract with RATP, the transport operator, he would need a valid work permit. He thought he could use me as his front man, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that I managed to convince him of the risks that we would both be running.

On another occasion he got wind of a small business selling mobile phones. I had to explain to him that this would undoubtedly be merchandise that had ‘fallen off the back of a lorry'.

But I did lend him the money to buy a Chinese trader's stock of wallets, belts, hats, gloves, necklaces and miniature Eiffel Towers, and at the weekend he would set up a makeshift stall in the market at Montreuil. That brought him in a little money, until the police arrived and confiscated his stock, along with that of a lot of other minor street traders. He left with 10 euros in his pocket, upset but pleasantly surprised by the courteousness of the police officers, and relieved not to have been taken away by them.

Nura was an excellent handyman, and for a while he worked cash-in-hand as a painter on building sites, where he was greatly valued by his bosses for his efficient work and conscientious attitude. But his early positive experiences were soon followed by other less happy ones, such as the building site where he had to wait two months to be paid, the one where he was paid 150 euros for 75 hours' work (or 2 euros an hour), and the one where after two weeks the foreman in charge claimed not to know who he was and sent him packing empty-handed. So then he decided not to work any more for people he didn't know. But his lack of French narrowed down the possibilities. He couldn't be taken on as the duty volunteer at the chess club, for instance, because he was unable to welcome visitors and answer their questions. Fortunately, tournaments were an opportunity to make new contacts. Some parents asked him to give chess lessons to their son in the afternoons. Fahim would go with him as interpreter. The journeys were time-consuming and meant that Fahim had to miss his own lessons. Nura stopped doing it.