The Voice of the Xenolith (14 page)

After I saw the certificate in memory of Ignace Edelstein, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. For the next few days I kept thinking about what it would mean to be a proper guardian, a responsible guardian. The dictionary said ‘responsibility’ meant being answerable, being reliable and dependable. I liked the fact that I had found two more
‘re’
words,
responsible
and
reliable
, and I added them to my list even though their meaning was not the same as my original
‘re’
words.

Although maybe they did connect: if you
reclaim
something,
retrieve
it, you are showing yourself to be
responsible
and
reliable
.

But in the case of being responsible for the memory of a person who is dead, I think it is a bit different. Because when you are responsible for a living person, like I am supposed to be when I babysit my brother Jasper even though he is the most irritating person I have ever met, then that person notices what you are doing. But a dead person doesn’t know, can’t know, what you are doing for him, so you have to make it up, to do the thing that seems responsible in your own eyes, and only you will know about it.

I asked Mrs. E. what she had to do to be the Guardian of the Memory of Ignace, and she said, to light a candle in his memory once a year, on Holocaust Memorial Day.

It didn’t seem enough.

The certificate on Mrs. E.’s wall also gave the date on which Ignace Edelstein was born: It said ‘
Born Constantinople 16.02.1903.’
And his date of death: ‘
Died in Auschwitz 14.07.1942.
’

So he was thirty-nine when he died.

I tried to think of anyone I knew who was thirty-nine. My dad is forty-one, so that is nearly the same age. I tried to imagine what it would be like for my dad to die but I couldn’t let myself think about that.

Was Ignace a dad? Did he have children who got left behind when he was taken, who grew up without a living dad?

I just couldn’t see how Mrs. E. could guard the memory of Ignace Edelstein when nobody knew anything about him.

I was still going to Mrs. E.’s house once a week, and we would work on different things: sometimes the homework which I was not keen to do, or some research for my English papers.

Then we had a new project. Every Friday, one student in the class would offer to give a talk to the rest of the class on any topic linked to what we were learning at the time. It was voluntary and you will already have guessed that I had never yet volunteered. But now I decided I was going to get the teachers off my back, at least for the rest of the term, by choosing one lesson where I was going to show everyone how I could participate, how I could not only talk in class but actually make a complete speech.

I hadn’t felt, for a long, long time, the kind of panic I used to have when I had to speak, but just thinking of having to do this was making me breathe faster and feel a bit panicky. Mrs. E. must have noticed, because she said, “Do you remember the window man?”

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

She reminded me that a long time ago, while I was still going to her for speech therapy because I wasn’t talking at school, she had invited a man to come and repair her windows because her house was old and the windows didn’t fit well and there were draughts in every room.

Then I remembered. I think it was a short time after I started going to her for speech therapy, before I could speak to Mrs. E.

One day, when I was having a nice quiet time at speech therapy, colouring in some little labels I made for the tree house, which would show which dolls lived on which level and which doorbell you had to ring to get a certain doll to come and open the door for you, I heard someone walking in the room above Mrs. E’s room.

Before that there had never been anyone around except my mother who would sit with us for a little while at the start of the session and then go and sit in the waiting room and make phone calls to her friends or read or play Patience on her phone.

So when I heard footsteps I thought at first that it was my mother coming back into the room, but I know her footsteps; she always wears the same kind of shoes and they make a very specific sound, and her footsteps are always quick, kind of brisk and snappy, and make a clicking sound on the ground, and she always moves quickly. And this was not her. It was someone bigger, heavier, with big shoes that didn’t click. Someone who moved slowly and who was coming down the stairs.

I froze.

I looked at Mrs. E. and she didn’t seem to have noticed anything.

It’s not that I was scared of people, I don’t want you to think that. I wasn’t scared he was a robber or anything. I just didn’t want him to look at me or talk to me. Mrs. E. carried on pretending she couldn’t hear anything so I carried on playing snakes and ladders and not talking. But I couldn’t concentrate and I made mistakes counting the numbers on the dice. The footsteps walked past our room; the door was closed so thankfully nobody could walk in and look at me, and the footsteps went towards the back of the house.

Mrs. E. must have seen that I was frozen, because I was being even more still than usual, or maybe she read my mind, so she said, “Don’t worry, that is the man fixing my windows. He will be walking around upstairs for a while and sometimes he has to come downstairs to get his tools.”

I guess all that may have been one of her strategies too, or at least it became one, because one day she said, “Would you mind if I leave the door of my room open, just in case the repair man needs to call me to check if I am happy with what he has done?”

And that seemed okay. Small steps.

And the next thing she did was to say, “Well, the windows are all fixed now, no more draughts blowing in, do you want to come and help me test them?”

So we took some tissues from the tissue box, and she showed me how to tear them into long strips, and we went upstairs where the man was, and Mrs. E. showed me how to hold a strip next to the closed window, and if it moved or fluttered it meant there was still a draught coming in, but if it stayed absolutely still in our hands it meant the window was properly sealed.

I remember how impressed I was with her strategy of using tissues to check the draughts, and I went around our own house for days after that, checking our windows.

And I wonder today if she had a few strategies going on at the same time; if she had told the window man not to speak to me and not to frighten me, because he just stood aside and said not a word. Mrs. E. and I tried out every single window with our tissue strips, and there were no draughts, and she asked me, right there in front of the window man, if I was sure, and I nodded ‘yes’ for each window, and then she paid him his money and thanked him and he left.

Of course, even though I don’t think that Mrs. E. specially invited the window man to help me get over my phobia, I do know now that she had some careful strategies which she used. I have read about them online, and they are things that speech therapists use to help people like me, with selective mutism. Like getting me to just nod, but still to be seen to answer the question she had asked me, so I was actually communicating in the presence of a new person. Or getting me to walk all around the house, with her and the window man, so that I was taking new steps up the ‘staircase of different places’, and not just limiting my communication to when I was sitting in her office.

Mrs. E. would say to me, “I know talking is hard for you sometimes. Not at home, but outside your house. But do you know, I know some other children, and talking is sometimes hard for them too.”

Well that was interesting for me, not because I used to think ‘why me’, or anything like that, but because suddenly there was a kind of name for my trouble which was different from Heart Attacker (nobody but me knew about that particular name) but which was a bit easier to think about. Just hearing her say “Talking is hard for you sometimes” made me feel that it wasn’t something inside me that was the problem, it was just something that happens to people, and it happened to other people too, not only to me.

Now I realise it was only when she gave my fears a name, when she said “talking is hard” that I started to see that I could think about this thing that was happening to me in a new way. I could look at it carefully, and maybe find a way to get away from the fear, instead of thinking of it as something that was completely out of my control. So I guess being given a name for a problem can make it possible to understand that if something happens to you, you yourself are not the problem; it is the thing that has happened that is the problem.

I started to think that names are important in a whole new way, which I hadn’t thought of before.

She also said, “Those other children, they also feel fear when they have to talk. And sometimes the panic makes them feel like they can’t breathe, but if they breathe deep and slow, counting to five, and letting the air go out and in slowly, then they may feel better.”

And we would do a little bit of practice breathing so I would know how to do it if I needed to. Mrs. E. liked to say, “Be prepared! You may need to use your breathing strategy this week!”

I think it helped to know that I had a strategy to carry around with me, like carrying around an asthma inhaler, just in case.

So now, in High School, while I was preparing to give the Friday talk to the class, she reminded me of the strategy of breathing and we practiced it a few times, just in case I might need it.

Once I had decided to do the Friday talk to the class, I had to choose in which lesson to do it.

I talked to Mrs. E. about it and we went through the list of every teacher, and every subject, and what was going on in each class. Of course at first I wanted to do it in the English class because my English teacher had no complaints about me and she would have appreciated the effort I put in, knowing how much I hated talking in front of lots of people.

But it seemed like only half a victory, because I was already halfway there with her. I could have just written one of my papers which I was anyway writing for her, and read it to the class; it might be quite easy. But there would be no sense of having changed anything much, and it wouldn’t do anything for my reputation as a non-participator.

Mrs. E. agreed that perhaps I wouldn’t feel any sense of achievement if I chose the English lesson, it being so easy for me. But it wasn’t a sense of achievement I was looking for, because doing this was not a personal goal of mine. It was, I have to be honest, a way to say to them, to the teachers and also to my parents, “Ha! You think I can’t do it! You think I can only be sullen, that I have an Attitude. Well, I will show you that my Attitude is something I can put on, and take off, like a hat, whenever I choose.”

So I chose the geography lesson as my test case for participation, because that teacher was the one who hated me. I chose him because I wanted to show him up, but I didn’t tell Mrs. E. that.

I wrote the oral presentation at home, and gave it to Mrs. E. to read at our next session. I had written about the Karoo Desert: how it used to be, about three hundred million years ago, not a desert at all, but a huge shallow inland sea with swamps and trees, and how it was now a really wonderful site for fossils of amphibians, many of which are in museums in South Africa. I wrote about the quagga, which was a kind of zebra which lived in the Karoo. The quagga had brown and white stripes, not black and white, and those stripes were only on their necks and heads. They were hunted to extinction in the late 1800’s which shows how things can become extinct not just when the environment changes, or when a meteor causes the extinction, but when people hunt things to extinction. I wrote about how the Karoo is actually a semi-desert, not a true desert, and about the best crop being the sheep which can graze on the driest plants. I wrote about the special kind of metal multi-bladed windmills which you see there, which are so typical of the Karoo landscape, and which I think are so beautiful. There is such low rainfall that farmers need to be constantly pumping water out of the ground. I wrote about how the farmers try to start their work before dawn so that by the time it gets really hot, by eleven a.m., they can go indoors and close their shutters and sit in their houses until evening, when it gets a bit cooler.