M. Rose - The Secret Language of Stones

I vacillated between believing I was going mad and concluding I just had conjured him the way children create imaginary friends. Maybe the conversations were proof of insanity. Or maybe just a manifestation of my loneliness.

While Grigori provided some companionship, it was fleeting and there was no true passion. Without both, I felt alone. But since Timur had died, I felt it wise to deny that part of myself. Not only out of guilt but because passion had stirred my powers and I feared anything that would magnify them even more. Despite myself… was I yearning for it now? Yearning for love, despite the danger? Even knowing I had little hope of finding it? History had invaded my personal life. The war had stolen all our dreams. Women who were supposed to have had houses full of children would probably remain childless now; men who otherwise might have made their fortunes were now dead in the trenches. Even if I was brave enough to go searching for love, my chances of finding it were slim.

If I was going to invent a companion, why not the author of the wonderful columns about art and individualism that had influenced me so long ago?

“I went to the offices of Le Figaro ,” I said out loud. “I met a receptionist who has quite a crush on you.” A moment passed in silence. Just about to be convinced yet again that, yes, I’d imagined it all, I felt an almost breeze blow through my room. There should be nothing suspect about a breeze. Except it was impossible. There were no windows here. Yet it brushed my face, ruffled my hair. The very air moved. I smelled limes mixed with… I sniffed again… mixed with verbena and a hint of myrrh.

Why did you go there?

“I used to read your columns about art, but then when you started writing about the war… I couldn’t anymore. I lived with too much news and reality from the front. But now that we’ve…” I hesitated, searching for the word. “Now that we’ve met, I want to read them. I planned on buying back copies, but only one was available. Who did you write them to? Who was Ma chère ?”

At the time I didn’t know. Now I think maybe I wrote them for you.

“Me?”

I think we were supposed to meet but I messed that up.

“What do you mean?”

It’s all my fault, I misread the signs, I delayed issuing orders…

The words ceased. Silence. And then I heard what sounded like a sob.

“Jean Luc, what do you mean about us meeting? About messing that up?”

I think if I hadn’t made those mistakes in the field, I would have come back to Paris and visited your store and looked at the jewelry and seen something to buy for my mother and would have met you.

I put my hand up to the talisman to touch it. To touch him?

“But now you won’t.”

No.

“I’m sorry.”

Yes. Me too. For you. For so many, many things.

I didn’t say anything.

Don’t cry.

He could see me?

“How did you know I was crying? So you really can see me? Where are you?” I was so frustrated and confused.

Until you started to make the talisman I was asleep, floating… and then the closer you came to completing it, the more aware I became. When you touch it, you come into focus. Through fog. As if there is a certain distance between us. Yet more clearly than makes any sense, considering I am a world away from you.

“I don’t understand,” I whispered. “And I am a little afraid.”

And then I felt, or I thought I felt… no… I did feel his hand brushing my hair off my forehead.

I don’t want to make you afraid.

His touch made me shiver and begin to tremble.

I can’t bear for you to be afraid of me. You, here, it’s the only time since… since it happened I don’t feel as lost.

I tried desperately to quell the shaking. Pressure increased against the spot he’d cleared. Not lips, no. But a force suggesting lips. Perhaps from the shock, my shaking stopped.

When I kissed you just now, you felt it, didn’t you?

I nodded.

And now, do you feel this?

Somehow he’d taken my hand. I looked down and saw nothing but my own hand in my lap. I didn’t feel flesh. Instead, it was as if I were holding smoke. And where our hands met, my skin warmed to his touch.

We sat like that, or I did, for several moments. I should have become more afraid, but instead my fear calmed. Jean Luc being there comforted me. Excited me.

My mother has a book of all of my Ma chère columns. Including some never published because they were too risqué. I’d like you to read them. Then you’ll understand. More than I can tell you here in the time left to me. I can’t stay. Will you read them?

“What do you mean you can’t stay?”

It takes an effort to be here. So much effort. Have to… learn how to…

He continued speaking, but from an ever greater distance. His voice fading.

“Jean Luc?”

Silence.

And then, my tears came. As if I’d known him for years and just found out he’d died. I glanced down at my hand again. It looked no different from before and yet was cold. I touched my right hand with my left. Trying to find where his amorphous fingers had lain, trying to pick up a sense of him. But there was nothing there. He’d gone. And I was alone. Again.

I practiced what I planned to say to Madame Alouette on my walk back to the mask studio. I came up with various reasons I might want to examine her book of Jean Luc’s columns. All of them logical, but were any of them believable?

Upon arrival, an assistant informed me Madame was working with a soldier and asked if I could wait, or would I prefer to come back? Afraid if I left I’d lose my nerve and never return, I agreed to wait.

When Madame Alouette came out, her hands and smock smeared with gray clay, she seemed excited to greet me.

“Have you received another message?” she asked right away.

Taken by surprise that she knew, I started to answer without thinking. “I have been-” And then I stopped myself. In my nervousness, I almost admitted something that I could not share with her, certainly not yet. “No, not that. I came because I have been thinking”-I tried covering my error-“about your son’s columns. I went to the newspaper’s office to buy old issues, but they only sell a month back. The woman there told me,” I lied, “sometimes family members keep scrapbooks of newspaper stories a loved one has written and I thought-” I needed to stop rambling. Her expression suggested I’d made a very odd request.

“Yes, I do have a book just like that. All the ones that were printed as well as some that weren’t. You’re interested in reading them? Because of something else he told you?”

“No, there’s nothing…” I tried to make light of it, but what could I say that would make any sense? What had I been thinking in going to see her? I’d upset her and now I owed her something more.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Sometimes the voices of the soldiers, of the soldiers I talk to, get inside my head. Almost as if once I’ve heard them they get stuck there. It’s happened now with your son. I’m not sure why, but I thought if I could read the columns, get to know him better… perhaps I might be able to…” I searched for the word. “Dislodge him.”

Behind me, one of the other mask makers or soldiers must have opened a window because a strong gust of wind blew at my back. I turned. All the windows but one were shut against the rain. No one stood beside the opened one.

“Eloise?” Madame Alouette called out. “You need to get the concierge and tell him one of the windows needs to be fixed. It just flew open.” She circled back to me. “The lock must be loose. Things are always going wrong here. It’s such an old building.”