The Voice of the Xenolith (16 page)

I must have been about eight, and Jasper was four, or even less, because I am four and a half years older than he is. We were on the island and we had gone swimming. And suddenly my mother looked around and couldn’t see Jasper. Everyone panicked, because he hadn’t yet learned to swim properly, and they were all running around looking for him. In those days, I had finished my speech therapy and I wasn’t totally silent in public places but I still didn’t like drawing attention to myself. But I knew where he was and I was trying to tell people and they weren’t listening, just panicking and running around calling Jasper. So I took a deep breath and I shouted, really loudly:

“STOP RUNNING AROUND! I KNOW WHERE HE IS, HE IS SAFE!!”

Everyone stopped in their tracks and turned around to see where this big voice was coming from and they couldn’t believe it was from Amethyst who usually said very little, and if she did speak it was usually in a quiet voice.

But I knew that Jasper’s favourite place on the beach was near the ticket seller’s station, at the entrance to the beach, because even at age four he was interested in numbers, and the tickets had numbers on them, each number printed twice. The seller would tear off one side of the ticket and give it to the visitor to the beach, and he would throw the stubs in a box, and he always let Jasper play with them on condition he didn’t lose them. And sure enough there was Jasper, looking at the numbers on the tickets and trying to get the ticket seller to tell him what the numbers were in English and in Greek.

“So what was it that you managed to do to help Jasper, that time when your parents were panicking and nobody knew what to do?”

“I had to really shout at all those adults, and I had to make them listen to me because I knew where he was, and they weren’t listening; they thought they knew what to do but they didn’t. I first said it in a quiet voice but they weren’t listening, they were too busy running and panicking, so then I had to shout.”

“And when the people didn’t want to listen to you, when they thought you were too young to be sensible and they shouldn’t bother with what you were saying, but you kept on at them, you made them listen, what was it that you were doing for Jasper?”

I had to think for quite a long time to find the right way to explain it to her. The only word I could think of was protecting. But it wasn’t protecting Jasper, because I knew he was safe. I was protecting the adults, my parents, who were completely hysterical.

“Well,” said Mrs. E., “I think when you needed to protect your mother and father, and maybe Jasper too, you used a loud voice, and at that moment Silence knew it must take a back seat, because for sure you weren’t silent when you were telling those adults to listen to you!”

I looked at her.

“I wonder,” Mrs. E. went on, “I wonder if protecting things, protecting ideas and the people in your family, this idea of guarding and protecting and being responsible for ideas and people, is very important to you? Is this something that someone who knows you very well, perhaps your grandmother, might say is a good way to describe you?”

And that was when I understood what I needed to do for Ignace, to be the guardian of his memory. I had to protect him.

Obviously, I am not stupid; Ignace was dead, he had been murdered, and even if I had been there at the time and knew him when he was alive I wouldn’t have been able to protect him from being murdered. Nobody could.

But I could protect him now: I could protect his story, and keep his story alive, and in that way I could be the guardian of his memory. And this time, Silence would not be the way to keep things safe or perfect; this time, like that time when my parents thought Jasper was lost, Silence would have to take a back seat, to bow out, to leave the stage, to move off, to go off to some desert and hang around there until it was needed again.

I have already told you that I like to search for lost things, for things that haven’t been seen for a very long time, perhaps never seen by any living person. If Ignace died in 1942, there was probably nobody left living on this earth who had ever met him; and if he had no children, or if all of his family were also killed, there would be nobody left on earth who was his family, and nobody to tell his story.

He was as lost as any diamond buried deep underground, or any fossil covered by a cliff. And my way of being responsible for his memory, the way I could help Mrs. E., and perhaps be responsible for her too, would be to try to find him. Not to rescue him, because it was too late, and anyway nobody could have rescued him, but to retrieve what was lost, to recover, to tell his story, and in that way, to protect his memory.

Another English paper. I hesitated before handing this one in, because it seemed so private, so personal, and I didn’t know what the English teacher would think of me. But in the end I had to give her something, and I had written nothing else, so I handed it in.

Searching for Ignace Edelstein

By Amethyst Simons

In this paper I am going to talk about what it means to search for something hidden or lost, when you don’t really know what it is you are looking for.

Last year, for my mother’s birthday trip, we went to Florence and saw some amazing statues by Michelangelo. There are four statues, all in the same museum, and they are called ‘Prisoners’ or ‘Slaves’. They are only partly carved, actually unfinished, so that they seem to be trying to get out of the rock; in a way, they are enslaved in the rock forever. Perhaps Michelangelo didn’t have time to finish them; I prefer to think that he was deliberately showing how hard the marble is to carve, and how strong a sculptor has to be to make something emerge from a rock. Or maybe his aim was to show how strong a slave has to be, just to survive.

For me it was very strange to think how the work I sometimes have to do to get a fossil out of its surrounding rock is in a way like what a sculptor does when carving into marble. So I felt a connection between myself and Michelangelo, and when my family had had enough of the museum and wanted to go and eat, I just wanted to stay there and look some more.

In the guidebook, I read something Michelangelo is supposed to have said. It was about finding something hidden inside the stone that he was working on; it was about how the thing or the figure he was looking for was always already there, inside the stone, and all he had to do was to release it so it could be seen. I wrote it down in a notebook which I carry with me on my trips. What he is supposed to have said is this:

“In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to other eyes as mine see it.”

So for Michelangelo, what he was finding was not ever really lost; he could see it within the stone, and in his mind’s eye it was always there, ready and waiting for him to show it.

But I am looking for a person who I can’t see; not in my mind’s eye and not in a photograph. Ignace Edelstein is someone I have never met, and I don’t know if there is anyone of his family who is alive today. I know nothing about him. Not what he did, what he liked or what he was interested in.

All I know is his name, his date of birth and date of death. And I know where he was born and where he was murdered. And my job, my responsibility, is to find him, to reveal him, and to guard his memory.

But I don’t know how you can remember someone you never knew, who you can’t picture, and who you know nothing about.

You may be wondering: Why would I care who this person was and what happened to him? I am not related to him. He wasn’t famous. He is just one name on a very long list; a list of six million other Jewish people who were murdered in the Holocaust. One name out of six million names.

But for no reason that I can yet explain, I am searching for Ignace Edelstein. And even if I can’t yet explain the reason why I am looking for him, why I want to hew away at the walls that are surrounding him and preventing the world from seeing him, I know that I want to do this. And to do it, I will need to have a strategy.

The strategy I have chosen is ‘The Strategy of Small Steps.’ Michelangelo must have used his hammer and chisels carefully, slowly, so as not to make a mistake. I will use my knowledge of tracking and searching carefully and slowly too, one step at a time.

I have come to believe that there is no such thing as a chance coincidence. Successful detectives have to link up all the clues and information they discover, even suggestions and hints, to make inferences and find what they are looking for.

So to me it seems important that what Michelangelo was doing around the year 1520 is not too different from what some quarry workers were doing around 3000 years ago when they started to carve an obelisk at the syenite quarry in Egypt and abandoned it, and not too different from what I am doing in searching for Ignace Edelstein. Neither Michelangelo’s statues nor that obelisk were ever completed; they are only partially released from the rock around them.But you can start to see their shape emerging; in the mind’s eye both the statues and the obelisk are identifiable objects, that you can see and name and describe.

I spend a lot of time searching for things: fossils, new words, names of birds. So I know something about the strategy of the search. And even if I never find out everything I want to about Ignace Edelstein, even if my work remains incomplete, I will still be like Michelangelo who created four unfinished statues, or the quarry workers who started to carve an obelisk: those people from the past who created some of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

I will be like Michelangelo and the quarry workers: I will start with a chisel and a hammer and chop my way, a bit at a time, until I can reveal Ignace to the world so that I, and also other people, can see him.

I bought myself a new Moleskine book and I wrote ‘Ignace Edelstein’ on the cover. On the first page I wrote his name, the two dates, and the two places: where and when he was born and died. Then I stopped because I was stuck. What do I do next? I needed a more precise strategy. Small steps are all very well, but that is a very general idea and I needed to decide exactly where to start, and which steps to take.

I started in the same way that I start searching for fossils, if I am in a new site. You start by thinking: what do you actually know? What is it about this site, this landscape, that you already know?

So I started with the landscape, with geography, because even though I don’t do geography homework, I do, as I have told you, know something about geography. I knew from the certificate that Ignace was born in Constantinople, which is now called Istanbul, in Turkey, and I knew he died in Auschwitz, which is in Poland. So I had two place names to start with, and at some time there must have been a journey from one place to the other. So I drew two circles on the page, one for each place, and drew a pencil line joining them.

It seemed strange, because when I looked it up, I found out that the German army in World War Two didn’t have Turkey as one of its targets, and so Jews living in Turkey were not sent to Auschwitz. So how and why did Ignace Edelstein get caught by the Nazis if he lived in Turkey?

I went online and typed in a few words for a new search: ‘Turkish born’, ‘1942’, and ‘Edelstein.’

Bingo. It didn’t even take a moment to hew away that particular bit of stone and to find what I needed. Up came a list, titled ‘Turkish born Sephardim deported from France during World War Two’, and there was his name, on a very long list, alphabetically ordered. Next to his name it said ‘Convoy number 3’. And the date on which that convoy left for Auschwitz: 22.6.1942.

A new word for me: Convoy.

And now I knew why he was caught by the Nazis: he had been in France, and not in Turkey, during the war.