The Voice of the Xenolith (23 page)

Ignace was sure Andre was getting involved in the Resistance, especially after August 1941 when Jews were forbidden from keeping radios in their houses. Andre was a radio technician; he had not one but three radios. One night, after it was announced that all radios owned by Jews would be confiscated, he packed the radios into large bags and disappeared, in spite of the curfew which forbade Jews to be out on the streets at night. He came back five hours later with his eyes wild and his hair on end but he said nothing to Ignace, refused to say where he had been and went to bed without saying a word.

When Ignace came home from work that evening in July, he was not surprised that Andre was not home; lately his brother was out more than he was at home.

Ignace made himself a sandwich because he was too tired and too worried to make dinner. He was sitting and eating when suddenly there was a very loud banging on the door and a shouted command.

“Open up! Police!”

Ignace was not stupid and he was not blind. He knew what was happening in Paris; he knew that twice already Jews had been rounded up by the French police. Jewish lawyers, doctors and scientists had been a special target and were arrested and sent to the detention centre in Drancy. Many of the first people arrested were foreign Jews, not Jews born in France. He was one of those, a foreigner, born in Turkey, a probable target. But nobody believes it can happen to them.

Useless to try to run; the street was crowded with police and dogs. There was no back door to his apartment. No time to think; they were banging on the door, banging and shouting.

If he could at least warn Andre. Ignace was terrified that Andre might come home at any minute and get caught.

He and Andre had an agreement, a secret code, which Andre had insisted on when the arrests first started. Ignace had initially been upset when Andre suggested it, because it had made him even more convinced that Andre was in the Resistance, but Andre had insisted and Ignace had agreed.

The code was that if either of them, coming home, saw that on the windowsill of their front window, the one facing the alley, was their mother’s old brass coffee pot, which Ignace had brought with him from Turkey in a moment of sentimentality, it was a sign of danger, a sign to stay away and not to come near the house.

So the last thing Ignace did before opening the door to the police was to put the coffee pot on the windowsill.

As he was marched to the police van he saw his neighbours watching him. They said nothing, they didn’t protest, they didn’t ask him where he was going, and they turned their gaze away so that they didn’t meet his eye.

The next morning, nothing had changed in Impasse Briare. People bought their croissants as usual, and went to work.

You may wonder how it is that I started to feel that I knew something more about Ignace than just the dates and places and the history I had been reading about the Holocaust. What I mean is, I got to know more than just the facts about the Jews who had been deported; I got to know
him.

Something similar happened a long time ago when I was going to Mrs. E. for speech therapy. I must have been five years old and I had not been going to her for very long. I had been playing for a few weeks with the same things, because I couldn’t speak and tell her I wanted something new to play with. I knew there were lots of toys in the cupboard because she had shown me, but I couldn’t ask her, and I certainly couldn’t walk over to the cupboard because then she would have looked at me and wondered what I was doing, and maybe she would have asked me and expected me to answer. I didn’t know how to ask her, or what to say, and each time I thought about it my heart started to beat too fast, so I just kept quiet.

But there was always something strange about Mrs. E. and I really think she can read people’s minds. I know this is not something most people would believe. I looked it up and I have made a list of a few of the words which mean something similar:
extra-sensory perception, mindreading, parapsychology, intuition
. Also, something I found when I was reading about speech therapy, ‘
theory of mind
.’ This means that you are aware that other people can have thoughts which are different from your own thoughts and ideas. I read that some people don’t have this ability at all; these people just can’t imagine what other people may be thinking.

I think perhaps Mrs. E. is gifted in that way, in the same way that my brother Jasper is gifted at maths and magic tricks. Perhaps there isn’t really anything magical at all in what she does; perhaps that is something that some good teachers just know how to do. But still I don’t know how she does it, because one day when I was thinking about those other toys in the cupboard, she suddenly said, “I wonder if we could look at some different toys today,” and she opened the cupboard and took out a new game.

So somehow she got to know me as a person: she knew what I needed at the time, even though I had not yet said a single word to her. Not one.

There were a few other times when that happened with Mrs. E., when she seemed to read my mind. I told you about that memory game, where you have pairs of identical cards. You put them facing down, all mixed up, and by turning over two cards, one at a time, you have try to find both cards of the pair, and the person who has the most pairs in the end is the winner.

When I first went to see her, I liked playing the memory game because I didn’t have to talk at all to play the game. That was before I made progress and she wanted me to say the name of the picture I had picked up. In those early sessions when I was still not talking to her at all, all I had to do was find another picture, but she would sometimes talk; she would say things like “Hmm, I wonder where I saw the picture of that peacock, I know we saw it somewhere!” and what she was saying was exactly what I was thinking when I was searching for a specific picture. So you can see what I mean when I say I thought she could read minds.

Of course, now I know that what she said then is what anyone playing that kind of game would be thinking. You don’t have to be a mind reader to know that. And now I know that she was doing that to help me feel that she and I could communicate, even if I had no words at all. But still, it somehow made me feel good to know that I didn’t have to speak, and that she could somehow speak for me and say aloud exactly what I was thinking at exactly that moment. It was like a silent message passing between us.

And I think something like that happened with me when I was searching for Ignace.

The papers I wrote for my English teacher, about Ignace, are based on the few true facts that I found out in my research. The facts were a few dates and a few places, and a profession. I knew so little about him. But gradually, through all the months when I was searching for him, I was applying the strategies of the search: starting from what I knew, looking for clues. Getting my eye in, setting up a hypothesis, using small steps. I was tracking, I was creating a story, and trying to see into his mind, so that I could build up a picture of a person.

Some of what I have written is true and is based on research: what it was like in Turkey at that time, how young people were moving to Paris, the Paris exhibition in 1937, and what Paris was like during the German occupation. What it was like in Drancy, the address where Ignace and Andre lived, and their professions: all facts.

I don’t know for sure if Ignace worked for the Herz jewellery company, but it is true that Bernard Herz really was a famous dealer in stones and pearls in Paris, and Suzanne Belperron really was the leading jewellery designer of the time who joined Herz and was allowed to design anything she wanted for Maison Bernard Herz. And it is true that some of her designs involved setting precious stones into stone instead of metal, which of course was something which excited me because of my ideas about xenoliths.

Bernard Herz, the wealthy and famous jeweller, came to the same end as Ignace. His name is also listed on the granite memorial wall in Paris. These are the few details we have about him: born on 31
st
May 1877, deported on convoy number 59 from Drancy to Auschwitz on the 2
nd
of September 1943. He died there in the same year.

Of his convoy of 1000 people, only 13 men survived, and Bernard Herz was not one of them. Perhaps because he was 66 when he arrived in Auschwitz; the Nazis would have considered him too old to be useful as a labourer.

Mrs. E. is 63; my grandmother is 68. Both of them would have been considered too old to deserve to live.

Suzanne Belperron was not a Jew but she was arrested for being in partnership with Bernard Herz. It was forbidden to operate a business with a Jew, or to run a business under a Jewish name. So for a while they ran the business under her name, but after she was arrested, the teamwork of Suzanne Belperron and Bernard Herz came to an end.

Suzanne, unlike Ignace and Bernard Herz, was released from prison, and she went on to work in the Resistance, and to run the business and to save it for Bernard’s son Jean who survived the camps and came back to Paris and to his work after the war.

Those are the facts. So you may be thinking that everything else I have written here is invented, or imagined, and only a hypothesis, but it may also be that I have found the real Ignace.

I wonder what he would have thought of me, searching for his life like a detective, trying to keep something of him alive even though he was murdered so long ago and even though I don’t know of any person in the whole world who was related to him or who knew him or his family. Maybe he would have thought, like many other people think, that I am weird. As strange as a xenolith: different from the other people around me, somehow caught in a group of people where I don’t really belong. Spending all my free time, as well as my homework time, searching for a dead person.

But I think that in some ways I am like Ignace, and he is like me.

Our fascination with stones, for a start. I can imagine him sorting through the polished gemstones at his work, carefully catalogued and kept in a box just like my tool boxes, with little compartments, to find the right stone for a particular design he was working on.

I can imagine him spending hours with little notebooks, drawing the brooches or rings he was going to make, working out how to construct them.

I share with him his perfectionism, which is something my parents think is a failing in me, but which meant he would spend hours at work, cutting, polishing, working and reworking each piece until it was perfect. The perfectionism which made him such a talented jeweller, which might have allowed him to work on the designs of Belperron, to make her inventive and unusual designs work as a piece of jewellery which someone could wear. To find new techniques to make stone look like metal, to fit stones into stones, to create a xenolith.

The most beautiful xenoliths you can imagine.