The Secret Language of Stones

Chapter 11

That night, after a light supper with Anna-Monsieur Orloff and Grigori were picking up someone at the train station-I retired early and nestled into the sanctuary of my basement suite.

Strangely, I didn’t mind it being windowless. My great-grandmother had contributed a few objets d’art to make it special. An old carpet, too worn in spots for her grand mansion but perfect for me. Dark green with lavender wisteria flowers, it set the tone for the colors of my room. She also had contributed a magnificent stained glass screen with a scene of Leda and the Swan on the shore of a pond in a forest. Cleverly, she’d told me to place a lamp behind it, and the screen lit up and offered a spectacular rainbow of magical blue, green, and lavender hues. My bureau was a fine piece of rosewood carved in an Art Nouveau style along with a matching headboard my father had brought from his factory. And I had a comfortable armchair upholstered in pine-green velvet, which my great-grandmother had donated. Retiring to my room was like escaping into the deepest part of the woods, where ancient pagans enacted rituals by the shore of a bubbling brook.

A pale green glass globe Anna had given me sat on the bureau. Beside it a bowl of stones, for practice. I’d picked out and polished each precious piece. There were chunks of jade, amethyst, lapis lazuli, jet, and three opals. Usually at night, before I went to bed, I worked with one of them, trying to control and fine-tune my ability. Anna believed I must embrace lithomancy completely in order to learn to control it. She’d taught me how to meditate using one of the stones. How to relax and concentrate fully, feeling the stone’s energy and connecting to it. To become one with the precious object. To lose myself in its depths and search its secrets without fear. To just be and see what came to me. Anna cautioned me she’d been practicing her art for over thirty years and still found much to learn. I’d only been studying mine for three. But as Monsieur observed in the studio, I was impatient.

Instead of practicing, I unbuttoned my chemise and withdrew the talisman I’d originally made for Madame Alouette. All day I’d been feeling its pull. As if it was calling to me, begging me to wrap my fingers around it and enclose it in my palm. Because the rock crystal lay between my breasts, it was warm. But it warmed even more as I examined its star-shaped inclusion. Wrapped in its gold cage of stem-like wires that wound around and then met at the top of the loop to create a link, it hung from its silk cord, shining in the room’s soft light. Removing the cord, I took a heavy gold link chain from my jewel box, strung it through the loop, and then lowered it over my head again. As the egg nestled once more between my breasts, I thought I heard a sigh.

Preferring low light, I shut off all but a small reading light and the lamp behind the glass screen. Bathed in a peacock blue glow, the room really might have been in the middle of the woods. The night stretched ahead before me. After work, after supper, without obligations, I could do whatever pleased me. Most evenings, I read of other times and places to dull the sharp edge of reality we lived during the day. I was still making my way through my great-grandmother’s book of ghost stories by Edith Wharton and opened it to my silver bookmark-a gift from the Orloffs on my twenty-second birthday.

Other women read love stories to forget the war; I preferred to go deeper into darkness, into manifestations of evil, to help understand the nightmare around us.

I read a few pages but was distracted. A presence imbued the room. Not a shadow, not a scent. Almost a blur.

Against my chest, the talisman seemed warmer than a few moments ago.

“Hello?” I whispered to the darkness, feeling a little foolish talking out loud to myself. I waited. If I’d imagined my previous conversations with Jean Luc, then surely I could manifest another now.

“We always need to weigh what we think we see and hear with our wish life,” Anna once explained to me. “Those of us with access to the future or the past, or who can speak to people no longer here, are prone to creative thinking. The line between reality and fantasy is so thin for us. Imagine a psychic says you’ll meet a tall stranger at the opera and marry him. The next time you go to the opera you find a tall stranger in the box next to yours. Believing in the reading, you might go out of your way to meet him, flirt with him, and entice him. If he then begins to court you, did you create that scenario, or was the psychic right? It’s important to learn to be strict with yourself and not manifest what isn’t there, what isn’t meant to be there.”

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.