Our parents were Aïcha and Hans Schiller, Mama was Algerian, Papa was German. Rachel came to France in 1970 when he was seven. His name was actually Rachid Helmut but people shortened it to Rachel and it stuck. I came here in 1985 when I was eight. I’m Malek Ulrich, and that turned into Malrich and that stuck too. We lived with Uncle Ali, he’s a good man, he’s got seven kids of his own and a heart the size of a truck. The way he sees it, the more kids around the house, the better. He was from back in the bled too, he’d been friends with Papa but he was one of the first people to leave and go to France. He worked every lousy job going and managed to build a life for himself here. He’s a typical chibani – an old soldier – he doesn’t say much. I made his life hell, but he’d never complain, he’d just smile and say, ‘One day, you’ll be a man.’ His own sons disappeared one by one: four of them are dead, illness and work accidents, the other three are out there somewhere, working on building sites in Algeria, the Persian Gulf, Libya, going wherever the work is, chasing after life. You could say they’re missing in action, they never come home, they never write, they never phone. They could be dead for all he knows. Now I’m the only one Uncle Ali has left. I never saw my father again. I never went back to Algeria and he never came to France. He didn’t want us going back to the bled, he’d say: ‘Some day, maybe, we’ll see . . .’ Maman came three times for a fortnight and spent the whole time crying. It’s fucked up, we couldn’t even understand each other. Maman only spoke Berber and we’d be babbling away in whatever random Arabic we picked up on the estate and bits of German cobbled together. Maman never spoke much German and the best we could do was string together what little we remembered, so the three of us would just sit round smiling, saying, Ja, ja, gut, labesse, azul, Ça va?, genau, cool, et toi? Rachel went back once, when he came to take me back to France. Papa never left the village. It’s weird, but family stuff is always weird, there’s so much you don’t know, you don’t think about that. After school, where he studied German out of family loyalty and English because he had to, Rachel went to the Institute of Engineering in Nantes. I didn’t get the chance, I never got past my first year in secondary school. They accused me of breaking into the head’s office and I got expelled. I made my own way, I hung around the streets, took a couple of courses, and a few part-time jobs, did a bit of dealing, went to the mosque, wound up in the courts. Me and my mates were like fish in a river – sometimes we swam with the current, sometimes against. We got busted all the time, but we were always let off with a caution. We made the most of the fact we were too young to get banged up. I got hauled in front of every youth offender court and in the end everyone forgot about me. I’m not complaining, what’s done is done. It’s fate, mektoub the old Arabs on the estate call it. Me and my mates would say shit like that all the time: Adversity makes the best teacher, danger makes the man, a man gets his balls by using his fists . . .