The Voice of the Xenolith (12 page)

I thought about those days, years ago, before I turned five, when my mom and dad and I used to travel around the world, and how she used to read to me and take me to markets, and we used to learn about the people who lived in those places and see animals and eat different food, and it was just the three of us, no Jasper to irritate me, and most important, no school to take me away from all the that, to make me do things I didn’t want to do. That was a loss, for sure. But I didn’t want to tell her about that, it was too private.

So this time it was my turn to say ‘Hmmm’ because I couldn’t think of anything to tell her.

Mrs. E. went to put the kettle on for tea, and when she came back, you could see that she was thinking. Then she looked at the paper on granite again because she wanted to see what I had written about the desert sand protecting the hieroglyphs.

“Do you know what interests me?” she said. “It is how those three words, ‘granite’ and ‘protect’ and ‘lost’, decided to make an appearance in our session today, together. What is it about those three words that makes them want to be together?”

Well, I was getting used to Mrs. E. talking about words as if they were alive, as if they could think for themselves, and have wishes or make decisions, like a person. She had already done that with Silence, when she asked why I thought Silence had decided to make a comeback since I started the new school.

She drew three circles on a page, and in each one she wrote one of the three words: ‘Granite’, and ‘Protect’, and ‘Lost’, and she drew lines to join them all together, like a triangle.

Then Mrs. E. wanted to know, “Can you think of a time, in class perhaps, or at home, or on holiday, when you used your strength to protect something, to prevent it from getting lost?”

I remembered a discussion in class: they were talking about the rights of children, and the other kids in the class were being silly, about the right to stay up all night, and the right to play computer games as much as they wanted to, and I wanted to tell them about the time when we were in Africa and we saw a child who was a child soldier. He must have been only eight or nine, with a gun, and an army uniform, and I wanted to say what about the right of a child to be a child. But I didn’t know how to interrupt and make my voice heard, and the more I thought how terrible and how important this thing was, the worse I felt about saying it.

I should have said it; I should have stood up for my idea in front of everyone in the class, but I didn’t; I said nothing.

“And if you had stood up for your idea, if you had made people listen to it, what would have happened to that idea?”

“It would have been protected, it wouldn’t have got lost. The only way I could make sure it wasn’t lost after what happened was to write it in one of my notebooks at home, the ones where I write my new ideas.”

“So,” said Mrs. E., “You used your strength to protect Jasper from being bullied, and you used your strength to protect your idea, by writing it down and keeping it safe, even if you weren’t, on that occasion, quite strong enough to say it to the class. I am curious: what does that tell you about how you feel about things being lost? If you can save something precious from being lost, what does it mean to you?”

She doesn’t give up easily, Mrs. E.

After she talked to me about granite being strong, about the quality of strength in a person, I remembered a day when I found strength. I must have been six and a half. We were on a school trip to the Science Museum. It was a place I had been often; my parents would take me there at least once a month, because they are both scientists.

The best part about this trip was something I had looked at before but had never tried: it was the echo chamber. You put your mouth at the opening of this giant pipe, and I mean giant, you could drive a bicycle down it, and you shout, and your voice comes back to you as an echo.

I stood aside for quite a long time, watching all the other kids, who had no Heart Attacker and who could just talk whenever, shouting and calling into the tube and hearing their echo.

My teacher was encouraging me to have a turn, and I wanted to, I desperately wanted to, but I also didn’t want to. It was just impossible, to make a loud noise, in front of everyone, in that big place, and even worse to have to hear my own voice coming back to me – to be scared twice!

So for a while I stood around, and listened to the others, and then I crept closer and closer to the tube, but I didn’t dare ask anyone to move aside. I didn’t want to take a space in the queue and have to make the big decision and actually have to do something; not with everyone watching and expecting me to do it.

I remember thinking then of Winnie the Pooh. I was reading the Pooh books at the time because my teacher, when I was still in Year Two, gave them to me to read. In fact I still love them, because I think each character in those books is a metaphor for feelings I often have, and for all I know lots of people have those feelings but I wouldn’t know because I don’t talk to anyone about my feelings – about being nervous and pretending not to, like Rabbit, or about being greedy for delicious sweet things like Pooh, or just feeling silly and bouncy like Tigger.

Anyway, when Pooh is confused or worried or scared he makes up little hums which he hums to himself to express how he is feeling, and sometimes it makes him feel better. Perhaps my teacher chose that book for me deliberately, to give me a little hint that you don’t have to go from quiet to loud in one leap; you can use quiet little hums as an in-between step between being silent and talking to other people. Perhaps Mrs. E. had told my teacher about the
Strategy of Small Steps.
So I tried a tiny little hum, with my mouth firmly closed. But it wasn’t loud enough to make an echo.

I took a deep breath, and I did a breathing exercise that Mrs. E. had taught me and which we had practiced, and I took another breath and kind of imagined that not only Pooh, but also all the fifteen animals from the birthday song were all sitting next to me, encouraging me to be strong and to use a strong voice. I tried to imagine that they would say it with me so we could be strong together, and then I said “BOB” from the ‘Fifteen Animals’ song, quite loudly, and it echoed right back at me, and I wished Mrs. E., or at least Winnie the Pooh, had been there to hear it.

But what happened then was amazing, because a few children standing near me liked my word, and they copied me. And then the echo copied them, and they did it again, and I did it again, and then we were all making silly noises and I was copying their noises, and the echo tube was copying us all, and it was so funny.

So I did it. I made a big noise, right there in front of the children in my class and my teachers and in front of all those people who I had never met who were visiting the museum too, and in front of the echo machine which sent my loud voice right back to me.

That was more than a little step for me; it was a really giant step, and by the end of that school year I was talking in class quite a bit, and I was singing along in assembly, and I joined the afternoon science club and there were five other children there, and I could talk to them while we did science.

I think Mrs. E. must be addicted to tea, because we never got through a session without her saying, “I think it is time for tea.”

Actually it is something I like, because it reminds me of when my dad sometimes has meetings in our home with his team. They are all sharing what they know; there isn’t any one person being the boss. They talk when they want to and they can be silent if they need to think, and if they have nothing to say they say nothing. And they always have something to drink; my father makes them tea or coffee or a cold drink, and I think that is a clever thing to do because it makes people feel they are relaxing in the space together, and they don’t have to worry about being ‘team players’; they are just all there, working.

I learned a lot about tea from Mrs. E. She is very particular about what kind of tea she drinks. It has to be Orange Pekoe, with the leaves of a particular size, not too small; tea bags are her pet hate. Although you can now buy teabags which contain whole leaves in them, Mrs. E. is yet to be convinced. She told me she had visited tea plantations and saw that the tea in tea bags was not good quality tea. She always uses the same teapot which has a special cover to put over it to keep the tea warm, and we have to wait the correct amount of time for the tea to draw, even if we are in a hurry or really dying for the tea.

We drink it without milk; that way you get the real taste of the tea. I will never understand how people can bear to ruin their tea by adding milk.

So one day, while Mrs. E. was getting the tea, I was just looking around at the pictures on her wall and I saw something new. It was a framed certificate. At the top it said, in beautiful Italic script,

Guardian of the Memory

I wanted to see what it said below, but the writing was quite small, so I stood up to read it. I didn’t think Mrs. E. would mind if I read it, because it was in a public place on her wall. What the certificate said, in smaller letters, was this:

This is to certify that

B. Edelstein of London, United Kingdom

has been registered as the Guardian of the Memory of

Ignace Edelstein

a victim of the Holocaust.

That is when I read his name for the first time.

I thought it must be someone in her family, because of the surname. Mrs. E. came in with the tea, and she saw me reading it. I didn’t want to ask, because suddenly I thought maybe it was private after all, but she had seen me reading it, and while we had our tea she told me about him.

He wasn’t someone in her family at all, or at least she didn’t think so. His was a name she found when she went onto the website of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial organisation. She had read that you could be allocated the name of a person who was killed in the Holocaust, and you would be the guardian of that person’s memory. You would be someone who remembered that person, who honoured his memory, because perhaps there were no family or friends to remember him.

I liked the idea that even though Mrs. E. hadn’t known this person, and this person was from another country and not even part of her family, he could still be remembered by someone.

On this website, the Yad Vashem website, they have a long list of names you can choose from; in fact it is about six million names, because six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. So how do you choose one name from so many? Mrs. E. told me she didn’t actually choose the name, it came up at random when she went onto the website and asked for a name she could commemorate.

At first she thought that this particular name, the same as her surname, had popped up precisely because it was the same as hers, but when she asked some friends to try the website, they got all kinds of different names. So it must have been a chance coincidence.

Maybe there is no such thing as chance coincidence.

Anyway, she told me that she was quite touched to have been offered this person, with the same surname as her own, and who knows, it could have been someone in her distant family.

And even if it wasn’t someone from her family, she explained to me, and it was really unlikely that there could be someone in her family that she hadn’t known about, he was a person with whom she suddenly felt a connection, because there was his name, the same as her own.

I think that finding someone with the same name as your own is maybe like seeing someone who is wearing the same T-shirt as you, or who is reading the same book as you on the bus. You feel a kind of connection.

I looked up the surname, Edelstein, in the online word translator. The word felt in some strange way familiar, and not just because of Mrs. E.

And of course, it was familiar, because when I looked up the meaning of the two German words, ‘edel’ and ‘stein’, guess what they mean?

Literally, beautiful stone. Gemstone.