The Secret Language of Stones

Chapter 23

That night Monsieur Orloff and Grigori fought. I didn’t know why they were in the store after it closed. Or what they argued about. But their heated words carried from the shop down to my apartment, so lying in my bed, I could hear them. If only I could have understood them. Russian is a complicated-sounding language to the French. Our words flow like water, smooth like sips of wine, like the texture of our cheese, silky like my mother’s paints on her palette. Russian sounds like throwing rocks into a stream, like chopping wood, breaking branches.

Placing the silken pouch around my neck as Anna had suggested, I tried to go to sleep, but the fight continued long into the night, and so I finally got out of bed, picked up the binder of columns written by Jean Luc, and continued to read.

There were over one hundred. He’d written a column every other week for four years. Plus several that had never been published. A soldier’s letters home to his lover. Except there was no lover. He’d only imagined her in his mind. She was as ephemeral to him as he to me. And yet, as I read, I could picture him with his careless smile and hair falling into his eyes. It wasn’t the photographs of Jean Luc I’d glimpsed in his parents’ apartment that I saw in my mind, but my mother’s paintings of him. I’d been too far from the photos to see any of Jean Luc’s expressions. But the man my mother had depicted was animated and vital. Yes, wracked with guilt, but also with a yearning for life, sensual and smart, determined and creative. A poetic soul who sent me on lonely treasure hunts around Paris.

The more I read, the more I was able to fill in about him. He was an avid reader who’d traveled as far as China and Australia and Egypt. Sorry he was an only child, he’d had an imaginary friend when he was a boy. Sometimes, in the trenches, he thought about that friend, almost wishing he could conjure him again. A dog lover, he missed his terrier-the dog I’d met at his mother’s house. An inveterate museum visitor, he found solace there. Art made him think, wonder, engage in philosophical questioning. Among the list of artists he mentioned whose work he’d studied and appreciated, I was stunned to find my own mother’s name. Reading about her work in one of his columns did more than surprise me; because of its context, it stunned me.

Jean Luc wrote he’d been home on leave and gone to the gallery on rue la Boétie, where her work was shown. He’d fallen in love with one of the paintings, wanted to buy it, and was distraught to learn it had already been sold.

Stupefied, I read on, realizing the painting he’d wanted to buy was of me.

Portraits of her sitters illustrated via the items that exemplified them was one of my mother’s specialties. She painted my father in the reflections of all the windows of a building he’d designed. My younger sister Delphine, following in my mother’s artistic footsteps, could be seen in puddles of watercolors in her paint tin. My brother, her twin, who had all attributes of a businessman even as a teenager, was pictured on a ten-franc note. My mother had painted me over and over in the flashes of fire in a string of opal beads.

Putting the book of columns down, I took off Anna’s pouch and replaced it with Jean Luc’s talisman. Between my breasts, under my nightgown, it warmed my flesh instantly.

“You knew my mother’s work? You’d seen my portrait? Did you recognize me when you first saw me here?”

No. I felt drawn to you, but I didn’t realize till just now, as you read it. So that’s who you are, the famous painter’s daughter. La Lune’s daughter.

“Her real name is Sandrine Duplessi, but she signs her paintings that way. Do you know about the original La Lune?”

No, but I’d love you to tell me the story.

And so I told him about my ancestor, a sixteenth-century courtesan, a witch, a painter. And a spirit who kept herself alive for almost three hundred years, waiting for a descendant strong enough to host her-who turned out to be my mother.

Her tale frightens you.

“It does.”

Because of what you might have inherited?

“Of course. Witches’ blood flows in my veins. Witches! Who were burned at the stake and were pilloried. Who are shown as old crones to be feared.”

Is that why you came to Paris? To escape her and your ties to her?

“No, I came to help with the war effort.”

Are you sure?

“Of course.”

I’m not as certain, Opaline.

A breeze blew against the back of my neck.

“How do you do that?”

I pull at the energy in the atmosphere. Do you like it?

“It both frightens me and reassures me at the same time. If I physically feel the heat and the gusts of wind, then I know you’re not a manifestation of my imagination. Not a symptom of some kind of mental illness. If I feel you, then you are real. Or at least as real as any spirit might be.”

You know the reason you can hear me, feel me, is because of the powers you inherited. Your mother is right…

I couldn’t help but laugh sarcastically.

But she is. If you embraced them, it might help. You could learn to use them. You’d be happier.

“Even you are pushing me?” I shook my head, disappointed for the moment.

The breeze embraced me now. As if he’d put his arm around me to soothe me.

Why are you so afraid of the dark?

I shivered. I didn’t want to talk about my fear of the dark. I’d never told anyone what I’d seen there.

What happened? What did you see in the dark?

“You promised not to read my mind.”

I wasn’t. Your memories aren’t the same as thoughts.

“I don’t want you to read my memories either.”

It’s not quite reading them, more like reaching out for them. They have some physicality thoughts don’t.

I started to hum a song, trying to block him out. A song I’d loved since childhood.

Jean Luc laughed.

That song you are humming now. You are on a great white horse, wearing a little green dress, and your hair is all curled. Were you six? Seven? A happy moment, wasn’t it?

“Yes, my father took me to the carousel down on the Croisette in Cannes, by the beach. How did you know that?”

Your memories are like a mosaic, thousands of colored tiles. But not just on a flat plane. They’re multidimensional and go backward and forward in time. That’s where I see the darkness too. Black shadows of fear.

“Well, the world has been a scary place for quite some time.”

Jean Luc sighed.

I didn’t want us to be mired in my fear. “Can I touch you?” I asked.

I’m not sure.

I reached out. My hand met no impediment.

“And yet you can touch me. It’s unfair.”

Like this?

A heated breeze flowed around me and caressed me. Molding the wind into hands, he removed my robe and unbuttoned my nightgown with fingers I could not see but felt.

If it weren’t for you…

“Yes?”

You’re keeping me from moving on.

“But that’s a bad thing, isn’t it? Isn’t peace on the other side?”

I don’t think so. Not for me. But do you want me to move on?

“No,” I cried out. “But I suppose that’s selfish of me. You’re unhappy and unmoored. You can’t stay here for me, you must go.”

Not yet. It’s impossibly unfair I didn’t find you until now. You’re who I would have settled down to be with. Who I would have stopped traveling to stay at home with. Given up all the wild nights and excess of wine just to be with you like this. Just like this, but you’d be able to see me.

Tears fell from my eyes, dripped down my cheek. The wind brushed them off.

I want to try to make you see me.

“Yes, please.” I sat up, leaned forward, searched the shadows in the corners of the room.

Lie down, be still. Keep your eyes open.

I did as he asked. Naked but warm, in my strange little bedroom without any windows, decorated with all the drawings of pieces of jewelry I dreamed of making.

Now, look, Opaline, right above you.

As I watched, a puff of cloud formed. A bit of condensation. A mass of opalescent fog. And in its mother-of-pearl shine, I saw a glimmer of Jean Luc smiling at me, an expression of lust and desire on his face.

It lasted a moment and then, as quickly as it had appeared, dissipated.

I sensed how much effort it had taken him to manifest the image because the wind immediately grew cold and I began shivering. Had he disappeared? Had he crossed a line that would prevent him from coming back? The panic began to build inside me. I started to freeze. And just when I thought all really was lost, the warmth returned, blew over my breasts, between my legs. My shivers had nothing to do with temperature but sensations. My phantom lover had not left me after all.