The Secret Language of Stones (9 page)

That evening, the plane and chestnut trees were in heavy leaf and the flowers in full bloom. Children too young to be preoccupied by war played in the grass with one another, running around pedestrians, chasing balls, crying out with laughter.

The stroll gave me time to think about what message I would give Madame Alouette from her son, for surely the talisman wouldn't work and I'd need to fake the results.

Passing the fountain, I stopped to watch a group of four little boys sailing toy boats, focusing on their progress, serious about the race.
Had Madame Alouette brought Jean Luc here? Did he remember days he'd spent innocently playing? In that netherworld where he hovered, how far could his mind travel? Would he know I'd tricked his mother? Would he be upset? And the most important question of all: What was I doing? Why was I holding on to his talisman?

Once I exited the park, it was only a few blocks more to 70 bis rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, the Tin Nose shop, as it was known. Outside the building, a small sign identified Anna Coleman Ladd's studio by its formal name, the Red
Cross Studio for Portrait Masks—a division of the French Bureau for Reeducation of the Mutilated.

I was about to ring the bell when the concierge appeared, helping a soldier out to the street. Moving haltingly, the young uniformed officer made his way across the cobblestones. When he saw me, he started and pulled back and then, as if remembering something, smiled and continued forward.

“
Bonsoir
,” I said.

“
Bonsoir, bonsoir
,” he sang back enthusiastically, and doffed his cap to me with a grand gesture.

I smiled, not sure why his greeting was so ebullient. I must have looked surprised because he answered my unasked question.

“Mademoiselle, you are the first stranger in four months to look at me without grimacing and looking away.”

“Ah,” I said, now realizing. “So you've come from the studio?”

“Yes.” He tapped his cheek, and I heard the hollow sound of his knuckles on metal.

“I didn't notice you were wearing a mask,” I said sincerely.

“I know. I could tell. Isn't it wonderful!”

Tears welled up in my eyes.

“Don't,” he said. “I'm one of the lucky ones.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. No one was lucky. They called it the Great War, but that implied worthiness and grandeur, not violence and helplessness and the utter waste and devastation our country, our city, our people endured.

Like so many buildings in Paris, the gates at number 70 opened into a courtyard. Since the war, many of them had returned to seed with no one to take care of them. Most of the men were off at the front, and women were forced to take on more of the jobs they left unfilled. Ministering to trees, bushes, and flowers was now a luxury few could afford.

But number 70 was well tended. Ivy and wisteria twisted up the sides of the building and grew around the bases of the many classical Greek and Roman sculptures. Brightly colored geraniums filled window boxes on almost every sill, and dozens of old olive trees grew in mossy terra-cotta pots.

I was nervous about what I was about to do, and so for a moment, before making my way upstairs, I paused in the courtyard, breathing in the calming, cool green scent.

After climbing five stories, I opened the door into a large studio full of activity, tall windows, and a bank of skylights, but it was the wall of faces, ghostly and immovable, that stopped me from taking another step. Each haunted stare represented a man who'd lost part of himself in battle.

The numbers of men who'd died and were wounded were abstractions. We read them in the paper, little black marks separated by commas, or we learned a name, one at a time, from a client or neighbor. Sometimes we saw a grainy photograph. But here were dozens of specific, sightless faces staring out at me, reminding me of the disfigurement and loss, the waste and the travesty of the war.

“Mademoiselle? Can I help you?”

I turned to find a young woman wearing a white smock.

“I'm here to see Madame Alouette.”

She offered me a seat on the bench under the masks and went to fetch her. While I waited, I took in the studio, which was surprisingly cheery, with vases of flowers and brightly colored posters of American and French flags.

Two soldiers hunched over a table played dominoes, glasses of
wine and a plate of chocolates nearby. Another soldier, his back to me, sat in an armchair by a window, sipping something hot and reading one of the many newspapers spread out on a coffee table.

Much like at the workshop at La Fantaisie Russe, there were stations for the sculptors. I counted six. At a seventh, an artist, paintbrush and palette in hand, sat in front of a soldier, touching up the mask on his face.

“It's the best way to match the skin tone,” Madame Alouette said.

I'd been so engrossed I hadn't heard her approach. I turned to greet her. “This is amazing.”

She looked around, as if seeing it through fresh eyes. “Even so, it's not enough. These soldiers suffer so much before they get here. From the terrible battles where they were wounded, to overcrowded field hospitals, then traveling in ambulances on stretchers or with crutches, all to come home to doctors who operate on them, often several times, often to no avail. Finally, when there's nothing the doctors can do to restore their shot-off jaws or empty eye sockets, they come here. We're their last resort. With copper and foil and paint we create an illusion so each of them has a way to face the future. They won't ever be handsome. Most of them won't even be ordinary looking again. But at least they can go out into the world and back to their families and not suffer stares and grimaces.”

She was quiet for a moment. “I hope you don't find it too disturbing—­some people do. I appreciate you coming to meet me here.”

Remembering what I was there to do, I became nervous again. I'd never deceived a client and was beginning to regret my decision.

“Would you like some tea or coffee?” she asked. “Or a glass of wine? We try to make it as pleasant as possible for them.”

“If it's not too much trouble, I'd like a cup of coffee.”

“Good, so would I. As you can see, we work long hours, and I have a long night ahead of me. So many boys need masks, but each takes weeks to make. There's never enough time. Eloise,” she called
to another young girl wearing a white smock. “Can you bring two coffees, please?” She turned back to me. “Let me show you around.”

The studio's slanted ceiling was fitted with skylights separated by wooden beams functioning as a design element to section off the big space into stations. As we went from one to the next, the artists stopped what they were doing to explain their process.

“After we meet with the soldiers, we bring them here.” Madame Alouette indicated a small room off the main space with a comfortable chair, several cameras on tripods, and a table with various pencils, paper, and calibration instruments. “In addition to photographing the subjects, we need measurements of their features.”

She opened one of the folders on the table. Inside were four photographs of the same man. The front view showed a missing chunk of his right cheek, a scarred crater where there should have been bone. Then a right profile shot, a left profile shot, and a photo of the back of his head.

Pointing to the red notations I'd noticed on the photos, Madame Alouette said: “In addition to making a plaster mask of the soldier's face, we also measure everything by hand—the length of his nose, if it's all there, the distance from ear to ear, the space between the eyes.”

“What a difficult job.”

“Yes. Our measurer is Madame Sisley. She is very gentle and knows how to put the soldiers at ease.”

Next Madame showed me the stations where the models were made. There were twelve in progress. Looking at the heads, each deformed in a terrible way, I shrunk back. The right side of one boy's face was blown off, and only part of his right ear remained intact. Another was missing his chin. Each immobile white head was mangled in a unique way.

I thought of Timur and couldn't help wondering if the bomb that killed him had damaged his face too. And what of Madame Alouette's son? Jean Luc had become such a vivid presence in my mind, and yet I had never even seen a picture of him. If he looked anything
like his voice sounded, he must have been handsome. When the end came for him, had he been disfigured, his beauty destroyed?

Following Madame Alouette, we arrived at the station where the masks were painted. Next, she showed me the wall of spectacles, where dozens and dozens of pairs of glasses stared out at me.

“Why are there so many?” I asked. “Does something happen to the soldiers' eyesight?”

“No, we attach the masks to glasses as an anchor. Sometimes we need to paint an eye onto one of the lenses, other times we just use unmagnified glass. If the soldier has lost his ear, it's more complicated. There is an elastic that attaches—”

The young woman arrived carrying the tray of coffee. Madame Alouette took it from her and thanked her.

“We can visit in the consultation room, Mademoiselle Duplessi, it's this way.”

We sat down in a small, comfortable room set up much like a sitting room in someone's home. There were two couches, a card table with four chairs, a vase of roses on the fireplace mantel, landscape paintings on the walls, and decorative carpets on the floor. Suddenly, it occurred to me there were no mirrors anywhere.

Everything about the studio had been designed with the soldiers in mind. The first part of their journey back to life started here, and clearly great pains had been taken to lessen their anxiety about being stared at and prodded and measured.

“It's quite a lot to take in the first time you see it, isn't it?” Madame Alouette asked, as she poured the coffee.

“Yes. It is . . .” I searched for the word. “It is heartbreaking.”

“Do you take milk?” she asked.

I asked for a little, and she poured it in.

“Sugar?”

We all knew how hard it was during the war to get sugar, and I'd learned to drink my coffee unsweetened. “No, thank you.”

“It is heartbreaking,” she said as she handed me the cup, “but at
the same time positive and hopeful. You need to see it that way too or you won't be able to bear it.” She sounded desperate for me to understand. And I did.

“You give them back dignity.”

“Yes.” She nodded vigorously. “The masks aren't the same as faces. People still sometimes stare, but with curiosity, not disgust, not horror. The boys can meet women, court them, or go home to their wives and make love to them. They can hold their children, they can get jobs.”

But in the dark, I thought, in the dark they are still wounded.

“Did you bring the charm?” she asked.

I pulled the leather pouch out of my pocketbook and slid it across the table. She reached for it, opened it, and took out the talisman. Letting the silk cord hang from her fingers, she studied the jewel. The crystal egg swung in the soft light, glowing a little with energy.

“How does this work?” she asked.

“You put it on . . .”

She slipped it over her head.

“And hold it between your hands.” I showed her how to clasp the talisman between her hands as if she were in prayer—not because of religious significance, I explained, but because, enclosed, the talisman contained its energy. “Now, I put my hands over yours,” which I did. “And in a moment or two . . .” I stopped talking, closed my eyes, and waited.

Normally the scent of apples would overpower me right away. Nausea would follow seconds later along with a terrible pounding in my head. And then, in the midst of the discomfort, the messaging would begin. The dead soldier's voice would flood into my awareness.

I didn't expect any of those effects. The hair in the locket wasn't Jean Luc's, but rather from the little boy who lived in the Palais upstairs from our shop.

Except, within seconds of putting my hands over Madame Alou-
ette's, the distress began. The scent, the headache, the nausea all descended on me, and the voice was the same one I'd heard at the workshop, in the shelter, and in my bedroom.

But of course, I thought. I'd performed so many sessions, my body anticipated the reactions and delivered them. And I'd manufactured the voice before—why not again?

Often the messages I pulled from the ether contained information too personal for me to understand, but sometimes they were generic enough to be clear even to me. I'd planned on giving Madame Alouette one of the more comprehensible communiqués I'd heard over the years. I knew them all, those sorrowful farewells were lodged in my heart.

But I didn't require some other soldier's thoughts; I heard Jean Luc's.

No pain. Tell her there is no more pain.

“He's not in pain anymore,” I whispered.

“Jean Luc? Is he here?”

I nodded.

She
is worried about the pain because of the accident I had when I was little.

“He knows how much you always worried about him being in pain, since the accident when he was a little boy, and he wants you to know he's not in pain anymore and you can stop worrying.”

I could see it in Madame Alouette's eyes, in the set of her mouth. She would never stop mourning her son, she would never miss him less, but with just that one sentence, she gave up her fear. Silent tears fell in silvery tracks down her smooth cheeks as she smiled. Even though I'd witnessed similar transformations before, they always stunned me. How little and at the same time how much it takes to give succor.

“He grew so fast, he was always too thin and so always cold. He gravitated to warmth, playing too close to the fireplace, despite my warnings. One day an ember sparked and flew out. Jean Luc didn't
understand—he was only about four—he just felt its warmth and thought it was a toy—and so picked it up and put it on his palm. He only suffered minor damage to his fingertips, but his palm was severely burned and he was in pain, terrible pain, for days . . .” She paused. “Do you have children?” she asked.