Now, of course, as far as the whole school was concerned, Marie and I were married, with a big house, two cars and three children. People knew I was a bit touchy about it, and because they didn’t want to lose their ears, they didn’t dare tease us too much about our relationship. One day, when I was in the lodge with Haisam, he said something that pleased me, and should have intrigued me too.

“You have to admit, it’s pretty impressive, what she’s done…” Then he added, “Marie’s discovered the secret to making you more alive.”

But he was a hopeless case: he just couldn’t take his eyes off the chessboard.

“Hmm, that’s odd…” he murmured, absent-mindedly.

“What’s odd this time?”

“Well, you remember the 1922 Rubinstein-Tarrasch endgame – from the Dutch Defence?”

“Of course I remember,” I said, just to play along.

“I’d never noticed that by playing h8 on his twenty-sixth move, Rubinstein won a piece with Qe7. Stupid of me, huh?”

“How will you ever forgive yourself?”

His eyes smiled at me behind his big spectacles. He looked enormous in the little lodge: he made me think of a mythical creature. Perhaps he’d take over from his father and stay there all his life. After all, Dad had taken El Dorado over from his father. And maybe I’d follow the same pattern. I suddenly thought of Haisam’s symbolic drawing, the one I’d found in my rucksack on the first day of school: an apple tree with big red apples lying all around the trunk. When he’d given it to me, he’d said, “The apple never falls very far from the tree.”

“What does that mean?” I’d asked.

“It’s a parable. One day you’ll understand.”

“One of those big umbrellas? Are you kidding me?”

“No, you dope, that’s a parasol. Look it up in the dictionary.”

That evening, I’d followed his advice.

Parable a simple story or statement designed to illustrate a puzzling moral or spiritual lesson.

I could see it was puzzling, that’s for sure, but apart from that I had absolutely no idea what my dear Egyptian was going on about with his apple tree and his apples.

Haisam was always finding really deep ideas in totally unexpected places. And then he’d come up with exactly the right words to express their deepness. When he’d said, “Marie’s discovered the secret to making you more alive,” that was just what I felt myself. I hadn’t become “more intellectual” as Dad had put it – and as I’d thought too – but “more alive”. And that’s something much more important. Sometimes, it seemed to me that my eyes had never been fully open before. I felt I could now focus on things and on the world in general, as though all through my life I’d been looking through a fuzzy lens.