The Voice of the Xenolith (20 page)

He sits at his work table, the leather apron covering his lap to protect him from the heat of the soldering, the apron with the cuff to catch any gold particles that may fall off the table.

He starts up the small pendant drill; he readies his soldering torch, he puts on his protective goggles. He has to be careful of his eyes, but also of his hands: any injury to his hands or eyes would mean the end of his career, the end of who he is. He is a jeweller. His work is in his hands and his eyes and his imagination. His head is bowed in total concentration. This is not team work; this is one person doing one thing, and doing it perfectly. To talk to him now would be to distract him, to cause him to make a mistake, to bend the metal before it is ready to be bent, to chip a precious stone, to drop something.

My parents were worried about me; they said I was getting morbid, because I couldn’t stop thinking about Ignace, and reading about Drancy and Auschwitz.

They were right, I was getting morbid and I couldn’t stop. I had to find him. Even if it was almost impossible, even if he was buried like a fossil under tons of rock for millions of years and there were almost no clues to help me find him.

I do know something about searching, I do sometimes find fossils, and I was going to find Ignace.

As soon as we came back from my thirteenth birthday trip I started to plan my next birthday trip, for my fourteenth. I know it seems stupid to plan the next one right after the current one, but I didn’t really need to think much; it was obvious to the whole family what I would choose. I wanted to go to France.

There is a museum in Paris, a memorial to the Holocaust, where they have put up a huge granite wall, called the Wall of Names. On it are engraved the names of all those Jews who were deported to concentration camps by the Nazis. I wanted to see what a wall of 70,000 names looks like, how big it must be to take all those names, and what kind of granite they have used. But most of all I wanted to be sure that Ignace and his brother really had a place on that wall.

At that museum they also keep documents, like those collected by the Klarsfelds, and I wanted to go there to try to find more information.

Except this time, we had a problem. My dad was not working. The university he worked for was in financial trouble and they were offering redundancy to people, even people who had worked for them for a really long time. So now my dad was trying to set up his own business as a geology adviser to some mining companies, and in the meantime, while he was not working, we needed to be careful with money.

My mother had an idea. She said, “Since you are already thirteen, you can start earning money in holiday jobs.”

I thought that was a good idea, but there was another problem about going to France: the language. Nobody in our family knows French very well; my dad can speak a bit but is not good at reading French. I needed someone who could not only ask the way, but who could read and translate for me the documents in the museum. And the only person I could think of, who I knew spoke French, and the only person I would trust with this job, was Ignace’s other guardian, Mrs. E.

Which meant I had to earn not only enough money for my ticket (my mom said she would pay for her ticket, and this time, my dad and Jasper would stay home to save money) but I also had to pay for Mrs. E.’s ticket, because I was not going to ask her to pay a huge amount of money for something that was really my birthday present.

My dad said it was a good lesson in waiting, because we all knew it would take a long time to make enough money at a holiday job. I was actually quite upset, not that I thought I shouldn’t have a holiday job, but because it was the first time in our family that a birthday trip was in doubt. And also because it was still a while before the summer holidays, when I would be able to start a job, and all that time I wasn’t finding anything new about Ignace, and I was stuck with the little I knew.

My mom was still worried that I was obsessing too much about finding Ignace. She said to me, “What if you get to Paris, and we go to the documentation centre, and you still can’t find anything more about him?” But I thought, if I could even just see his name on the wall, that would be something.

So my dad spoke to someone at the Museum of London, and though they have a policy of not taking volunteers who are under eighteen, he knew people there and they agreed to interview me and they said that if they found me suitable they would give me a chance. My dad told me what they said: they needed people who were ‘serious’, and ‘mature’ – that is no problem for me, I can say that much about myself – but they also mentioned the words ‘good social skills’ and ‘someone who can take groups of school children around and explain the exhibits to them’ and I thought, well that’s it, they will never take me.

Because even though I am not a selective mute any more, I know I don’t have good social skills, and maybe I have no social skills at all, good or otherwise. I don’t like talking to people I don’t know, I don’t like small talk, I don’t chat. Some girls in my class call me weird and they are probably right.

As usual when there are problems with me, my parents spoke first to my grandmother and then they spoke to Mrs. E.

My grandmother said, “Nonsense! Amethyst is the most sensible and capable person I know, I would hire her any time!” but Mrs. E. was a bit more cautious, and she asked for a day or two to think about it.

When I next went to a session with her she said, “Let’s talk this through. What duties do you think they may ask you to do in this job?”

All I knew was what they had told my dad. So we looked online and saw that they were offering guided tours for teachers, where a teacher can bring a class, or a small group of kids, to the museum, and a guide would take them around and explain things.

Mrs. E. wasted no time. She got my mom to phone my English teacher and offer to host five kids in the class, as a reward perhaps for doing some good work on a project, by taking them on a tour of the museum which would be led by a guide who works there. So even though it made me cringe because it is definitely not cool to have your mother come to the class and talk to the kids, her idea was brilliant, because the five kids chosen (and I made sure that I would be one of them) got to take time off from school one morning and to have a guided tour at the museum.

Mrs. E. came with us, and all through the tour she and I were taking notes: not about the exhibits, which I had already seen a few times because I like to spend time at that museum, but about what the guide did: how she spoke, what she said, how she got the kids to move on from one place to the next, and to stop using their phones during the tour.

At my next session with Mrs. E. we compared notes. She had noticed a lot of things which I hadn’t even thought of: how the guide greeted us at the door, what she said when she was introducing the tour and how she explained the rules about behaviour and about sticking together.

Mrs. E. also noticed how the guide made her voice just loud enough so that all the kids would hear her, but not so loud as to disturb other people visiting the museum. She had made notes about how the guide ended the tour: she had noticed how she got us to go via the shop before leaving so we would be sure to spend some money, which the museum probably needs for their running costs.

So we went over and over the list and role-played it until I was reasonably sure I would be able to handle a tour like that.

Mrs. E. also coached me in interview techniques. Always walk into the room with your head straight up, don’t tilt it to the side, it makes you look unsure of yourself. Always make sure to look the interviewer in the eye, because they like eye contact, even if you hate it. (She knew me very well by then, having worked with me in my selective mutism days.) Make sure to look at all the interviewers, if there are more than one, so nobody feels left out, because the one you leave out will not like you and will feel you are not up to the job.

Mrs. E. made me walk into the room and greet her, over and over, because she said the first few moments of an interview can be the deciding factor. She made me practice a confident handshake and greeting, over and over, until she was satisfied that I looked sufficiently mature and confident.

By the time the day of the interview arrived I was sick of the whole thing, but I knew that if I ever have to be interviewed for a university application or a job, or if I ever have to give a talk in public, I will know all the strategies. Not ‘small steps’ this time, but
Strategies for Confident Talking.

Well you can imagine what a good interview I had, because besides talking to the interviewers about my fossil collection and my interest in landscape archaeology, I could also tell them that I felt competent in guiding a tour, because I had made a study of tour management and I could give them very practical examples of what I meant.

This was not the first time Mrs. E. has shown me that having a strategy can get you what you want in life, and I hope it won’t be the last time, because having a strategy is what made it possible for me to earn some money, and to go to Paris with my mom and Mrs. E.

I started working at the museum on the first day of the July school holidays. A funny thing happened when I was working there. I wasn’t the only guide; there were three others, all older than me. They had all finished school and were having a gap year or waiting for the university term to start.

We had to share out the work between us. I didn’t want to take the teenage groups because I am a teenager myself and I didn’t think the kids would listen to me, so the older volunteers agreed to do those, and I was happy to do the younger kids’ tours, because I just imagined myself dealing with irritating kids like my brother Jasper, and I knew exactly how to handle them.

That’s not the funny thing I want to tell you. The funny thing was that the three other guides and I became a team. We helped each other out, we shared jokes about some of the awful kids who came on our tours, and some of the more awful teachers who brought them, and I remembered how one of the main complaints of my P.E. teacher was that I was not a team player. That’s the funny thing I wanted to tell you about.

The summer holidays were coming to an end. I had saved up some money for the tickets by working every day and every weekend, but it was not enough. But everyone was suddenly very encouraging and interested in my project about finding Ignace, and my grandmother offered to lend us money so that we would have enough for our trip.

I was still seeing Mrs. E. once a week even though it was school holidays. At one of our sessions, after we had done some work on vocabulary and style, I told her about my new list of words:
‘pro’
words. The main ones on this list were
protest
and
protect.

I wanted to put the two words together, because I was sick of my parents and teachers worrying about me and it felt like they were suffocating me and over-protecting me, so I wanted to
protest against protection
.