Read Online Number 8 by Anna Fienberg - Free Book Online Page A

doesn’t call the exterminator.”
    Asim tears a leaf off the branch and studies it. “Perhaps if you give them another house, they won’t use your roof.”
    â€œHow do you mean?”
    â€œWell, I was thinking, we could
make
a possum house—a place just for them. We could build a little wooden house in this tree, or maybe the maple tree, it is better.”
    â€œBut how would we do that? Where do we get the wood and how do we know—”
    â€œMy father has a shed where he keeps all his tools. There is everything we would need—I helped him make the bench where we have breakfast and a work table where we study. My father has much experience in these things. There is plywood left over, we have the hammer, nails, saw, even the electric drill…”
    This is really exciting. We sit for ages in the tree, planning how we are going to build this thing. I still can’t quite believe I have a friend who’s happy to hang out every day, someone I can rely on. Seems I can talk to him about anything, as if we’re brothers or something.
    Strange, too, because Asim is Kurdish. He even has a different alphabet. The only “curd’ I’d ever heard of was something Little Miss Muffet ate in that nursery rhyme.
    When I told Asim about the curd thing, he laughed. That’s how I knew I’d like him straightaway. And when I heard a bit about what he and his people had been throughin Iraq, I admired him even more. I don’t think I could ever have a sense of humor about those things. He told me the year he was born his family were driven out of their home and lost everything they owned. They had to escape to somewhere near Turkey and hide—just because they were Kurds. There was no shelter, or clean water or food for them. They were refugees.
    And just before he turned one—it was a freezing November day—his mother died.
    Asim doesn’t remember her, but he has an album that tells her story in photos. His father made it for him, and it has a thin polished wood cover, with a gold lock and key.
    When Asim first told me about what happened to him, I didn’t know what to say. Only that, in a weird way, I felt like we had a lot in common: my father died when I was two. I don’t really remember anything about him except a smell of fish and salt baked in the sun. It was a comfortable smell. And there was a blue T-shirt and lots of crinkles around his eyes. He had blue eyes like mine. Sometimes you don’t know if you remember how a person looked because of photos you’ve seen. You make up a picture from there.
    So I told Asim about my dad, and that I’ve had to move around a lot since then—“just like you,” I said. How stupid did I feel as soon as I blurted that out! There’s me in comfortable apartments or houses with heating and hot water and food and no Iraqi police spying outside preparing to take my family away—no having to run for my life. I felt ashamed after I’d said that. I went home and told Mom and she said she knew what I meant, but not to worry. “What you have showed Asim is empathy,” she said, “and it is a good, decent human quality. It’s a pity there aren’t more people like that ruling the world.” I asked her what empathy meantand she put down the potato peeler and took a deep breath so I quickly said, “It’s okay, I’ll look it up in the dictionary,” because I knew one of her speeches about the government was coming on, and I just wanted to lie on my bed and think about things.
    In that first week Asim and I talked about moving and meeting new people and how weird it all is, but most of all we talked about numbers. For Asim, although English was so difficult to learn, counting was the same in any language. He’d had to stay in a detention center for six months, and there were so many different languages and problems, the only way he could really