The Secret Language of Stones Read Online Free PDF

those byways, and I experienced them as if they were my own. I found no escape, no option but to suffer through each woman’s mourning.
    â€œBut he needed that haircut. My husband said he looked like a little girl with all those curls. And he did.”
    She stroked the strands, and I pictured the child in the barbershop chair.
    â€œThe barber did everything he could to distract him, but my son fought back, covering his head with his arms so ferociously none of us could pry them apart. Such a determined little boy.” She looked up, her eyes bright with tears. “Who became such a determined man.”
    â€œWhat did he do? Before the war, I mean.”
    â€œHe was a journalist. Maybe you read some of his pieces? Since the war began, he’s been writing a column of weekly letters from a soldier at the front to his fiancée.”
    â€œShe must be devastated.”
    â€œOh, he didn’t have a fiancée. I’m not even sure if he left a special woman behind.” She smiled sadly. “He told me there wasn’t one—except for me.” She smiled again. “But his editor wasn’t interested in a soldier’s letters to his mama. So my son writes to an unnamed, imaginary lover every week and in the process shares what the war is like, what he’s feeling.”
    The suffering in Madame Alouette’s voice as she spoke of herson in the present tense was difficult to listen to. It always was. The mourners’ pain reached out and ensnared me. Encircled and paralyzed me. It infected the air I breathed, got into my lungs. I felt their anguish in my own heart.
    â€œWhat is the name of the column?”
    â€œ Ma chère .”
    â€œBut isn’t Ma chère written by Jean Luc Forêt?”
    â€œAh yes, Alouette is my second husband’s name. His father died in a fire when Jean Luc was only four.”
    â€œHow terrible.”
    She bowed her head a bit and nodded.
    â€œSo Jean Luc Forêt is your son. My father and I read him all the time . . .”
    Now it was my turn to be lost in thought. Before the war, my father and I had always read Forêt’s column on the avant-garde art scene. Like us, Forêt believed art was the highest form of individualism. He believed in beauty. In rage. In the pure form of expression through the arts. A fearless crusader for those artists who forged ahead, he never seemed to care how much criticism he got for it.
    My father and I both admired him and worried for him whenever he went so far as to make a new enemy from what he published in the pages of Le Figaro . I remembered one column in particular he’d penned about a young artist being ridiculed for his work—for it being too ugly. Jean Luc argued that art frees us from our prejudices and gives us the chance to become our best selves, individuals who dare to dream. And even if those dreams aren’t always as pretty as we’d like, or don’t conform, or frighten us, it is our duty to encourage art to flourish. All art. Every kind.
    I’d torn it out of the paper and glued it in my sketchbook. Without knowing him, I’d felt as if the writer in Le Figaro had spoken directly to me, offering a credo I’d taken to heart.
    But once Jean Luc started reporting from the front, I’d stopped reading him. The war was too much of a presence in my life. Timur’sdeath still too fresh in my mind. And now Jean Luc was dead as well? My heart seized up, sharing Madame Alouette’s grief in a way new to me. I’d never before known of any of the soldiers I’d messaged.
    â€œI got the telegram last week,” Madame Alouette said. “Jean Luc’s entire outfit was killed. All his men . . .” She shook her head desolately. “And for each is a mother and father, perhaps a wife or a sister or daughter or son.” She stopped speaking, closed her eyes, collected herself, and then continued. “I am trying