The Voice of the Xenolith (24 page)

I can imagine how carefully he needed to look at each piece, to choose just the right crystal which would give the perfect texture, or to choose the diamond with the greatest clarity and the best colour. I can see him looking carefully, slowly, peering through his special jeweller’s magnifying loupe, at each facet, getting his eye in, just like I do when I am examining my fossils. I use a magnifying lens too, when I want to look more closely at the tiny details of a fossil or a stone which you can’t see with the naked eye.

That kind of looking is not something everybody knows how to do.

Ignace and I have another thing in common: we feel a kind of responsibility to our younger brothers, even though those brothers don’t want to be looked after and are sometimes just irritating to be around.

I can also imagine that he might have been a bit more quiet than his outgoing younger brother; he might have spent his evenings after long days at work, just drawing and planning and designing at home in his apartment in Impasse Briare, while his brother Andre was out with friends. Or while Andre was talking on his beloved radios, talking to the whole world, as if just talking with the person in the room with you is not enough.

I think Ignace was a person who might have understood how someone can be a bit different, can have a
Strategy of Perfection
and a
Strategy of Small Steps
, and even a
Strategy of Silence
.

Maybe we wouldn’t have said a word to each other if we had met. We wouldn’t have needed to, because he and I are so alike. We would sit and do our work, he would be choosing a stone and planning how to construct the piece of jewellery he was working on, and I would be sorting and labelling my fossils, with the place and date on which I found them, or entering new words in my dictionary, and we would be busy with our strategies, sitting silently but not alone.

Or maybe we would have talked. I know I said that I don’t like small talk, and I don’t chat. But maybe we would have talked about how he tried to save his brother, and whether I would have been brave enough to save Jasper if I had been in that situation.

Ignace
: Amethyst. Is that you? We finally meet. I read your story, about how you searched for me. I was astonished how much you found out about me.

Amethyst:
Well, if not for the internet I probably wouldn’t have found anything.

Ignace:
In that case maybe it is just as well that it took seventy years before someone thought of trying to find me, because in the meantime the internet was invented. But it hasn’t been easy for me to wait, all these years, hoping someone would come and search for me.

Amethyst:
What was amazing for me was to find that you were a jeweller, and that your surname means gemstone. Because my name is the name of a stone too.

Ignace
: Well, what is amazing to me is how you persevered, how many hours you spent searching for me. I don’t think I was half as scientific as you when I was your age, and I definitely didn’t have half the perseverance you have.

Amethyst
: I hope you don’t think it was cheeky to make up those things about you, all the things I wrote about why you left Turkey and the secret code you had with your brother. It’s just that I found so few facts about you, and I needed to be able to imagine you as a real person before I could become a proper guardian for you.

Ignace:
Well, you got very close to the real me. But I have something to say. It is about participation. I read all that stuff you wrote about the teachers who wanted you to participate more, to be part of a team. But the way I see it, you worked so hard searching for me, you spent so much time participating in my life, that if anyone is a real participator, it is you. What I want you to know is that a participator is not always the person who talks. It is the person who actually does things, who takes on a job like you did, who does the work. Researching, recovering, retrieving.

Amethyst
: Well I hope that is what I will do when I leave school. I want to be a palaeontologist or a detective. But now, the thing is, now that I have found you, and I have written your story, I don’t know what to do next. You have been such a big part of what I did every day, for months and months.

Ignace:
Well, you have got to know me, but I have read what you wrote, so I have also got to know you, and your family, and even Mrs. E. So I wonder: what would Mrs. E. say?

Amethyst:
She would probably say “I wonder…” and then she would say that she doesn’t know the answer, she needs to think a while, and can we discuss it next week.

I wrote this paper for myself, not for any teacher. I wrote it in the Moleskine notebook where I keep all the information I found about Ignace.

I wrote it without thinking too much, without planning or setting out the main ideas, as my English teacher would have preferred; it sort of poured out of me in one go. I think in a way it helped me to face up to the sadness, the loss, I was feeling at having found Ignace in one way but in another way knowing, at the very same time, that he could never be found, and that only his name remains.

The Strategies of Silence

By Amethyst Simons

When I was five I didn’t speak at school for a whole year.

Now I am thirteen and I speak when I want to, but I often choose not to speak: to children who irritate me, and to certain adults. Silence is for me a choice and a preference. You could call it ‘a strategy of silence.’

I sometimes choose silence as a way to keep my thoughts, my ideas, pure and untouched. If I have to argue with people who don’t like the way I am, who don’t like my ideas, I feel my ideas get spoiled; they get diluted.

There are lots of reasons for choosing silence. What is said cannot be unsaid. I know that some kids say I am weird, and that hurts. If you say something stupid or something hurtful to someone else, it has a kind of permanence to it, like words engraved in granite, which can last for thousands of years. Like the hieroglyphs on Cleopatra’s Needle.

Sometimes silence is simply the appropriate thing, the right thing to do at the time. If you are ever in a bird hide, watching through the narrow window slits, trying to see what is going on out there in the bird world, you will know how to be silent and to guard that silence. Nobody talks above a whisper in a hide. That space is not ours, it belongs to the birds and we can stay there only if we can keep silent.

There is another thing I want to say about silence. If you are talking to someone, you have to be really silent so that you can listen to what they are saying.

I know this from watching what happens in classroom discussions. People think I am not participating but I am actually listening and observing. I get my eye in and I look very carefully, and I see things. And what I see is that very often, people don’t really listen to anyone else; they are using the time while someone else is talking to prepare their case so that they can say again exactly what they said before.

By not listening, they don’t hear any new ideas.

To have a proper discussion, which is supposed to be a dialogue, you have to stop thinking about your own ideas and listen to the other person, and then the other person has to stop thinking about his own ideas and be silent while he waits to hear what someone else is saying.

Dialogue: from the Greek words ‘dio’ meaning two, and ‘logos’ meaning speech.

So in a discussion, silence is not the problem. In a discussion, silence can be the solution.

And that is why I don’t like to take part in discussions in class; because I know a lot about silence and I think very few people know how to be silent.

My grandmother does know about silence; and so does my homework coach, Mrs. E. She is often silent for a long time. I sometimes wonder if people would think she is doing her job, if they would see us, just sitting silently together, but she is one of the few people who knows how to really be silent and to listen, and who doesn’t think silence is a problem.

Silence as a choice has been used in spiritual activity for ages. The Quakers use silence in their prayer services; people all over the world are learning to meditate and to try to silence the noise in their minds.

But my silence is not a spiritual quest. I think part of my silence these days may be because I am sometimes not sure what the right thing is to say, especially if there are lots of people listening, like in class, or at parties, which I don’t often go to. I feel clumsy; I feel awkward. I have to choose what to say and in the end I often say nothing. I once heard someone say something about ‘the embarrassment of being alive’, and I understand what that means.

My silence didn’t feel like a choice when I was five. It was a phobia. At least that is how selective mutism is seen these days by speech therapists, who are the people most likely to be asked to help someone like me.

The problem about being a person who is often silent is that it can become a habit. It may start off as your armour, your protection, but after a few years you feel that it is not armour but rather a part of you. At that stage you are used to having your own thoughts, used to working through problems on your own, used to not needing to talk things through with other people.

That may be a good thing – it may make you an independent thinker; but it may be a bad thing because it can make you anti-social and irritate your teachers. And it can prevent you from discussing things with someone who might say something useful for you to think about.

To be honest, I am not even sure if my silence is entirely a choice these days, now that I am thirteen. Because I do know how to talk, and I do participate in class these days, a little anyway, just enough to keep the teachers off my back. But my silence is perhaps just because of who I am. I am different from other people and that is not a problem for me, though it may be a problem for my teachers.

But even if you know your preference for silence may not be a totally positive thing when taken to extremes, it is something that exists. You become an observer, a watcher. You become more competent at watching people and picking up clues to their feelings. You can read the momentary shifts of facial expression which most people can’t even see; you can see into a person’s mind and you can get to know a person even if no words have been exchanged. Maybe you get to know things about people that they would prefer nobody to know; maybe you know things about them that they don’t even know about themselves.

And when you need to break out of that silence, you feel the awkwardness of it, and you feel stuck.

For a long time, when I was seeing Mrs. E., I thought about silence as a preference, or as a strategy. But there is a different kind of silence: the silence of death.

If you are murdered you have no choice about whether to be silent or not. After you are dead there are no choices at all. Ignace Edelstein is silent because he was murdered. He spoke until the age of 39 and then he was silenced.

I learned a lot about silence while I was searching for Ignace.

One of the things I learned about silence in my search for Ignace is that sometimes the only right thing to do is to be silent, because there is nothing that words can say that are right for some situations. When I try to find the words to talk about Ignace, and the seventy thousand Jewish people from France and the six million Jewish people from all over Europe, and all the Gypsies and disabled people and gay people who were murdered, words fail me and all I can find is silence. At first, when I first decided to be the Guardian of the Memory of Ignace Edelstein, I felt that perhaps silence was what I owed to Ignace and his brother, a silence of respect, because no words could express this event. Choosing to be silent seemed the only right thing to do. In memorial ceremonies there is usually a minute’s silence. But a minute’s silence didn’t seem nearly enough. How much silence, then, would be enough? An hour? A year?