13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [8]
THE ANCIENTS attributed
Virtues and a Power
of protection to Precious stones
To ward off ill fortune,
one must wear the
SPECIAL STONE
from the month of one’s birth
To preserve one’s health, one must
wear each month a
DIFFERENT STONE
CONSULT
The Charts of
LUCK-BEARING
PRECIOUS STONES
CLEPER
JEWELER
PARIS, LA BOURBOULE
The middle spread of the booklet contains a chart of birthstones and what they symbolize, and helpfully points out that such stones can be mounted on rings, barrettes, pendants in platinum, gold, silver. The back page lists which stones must be worn each month to preserve one’s health. That Cleper is a clever fellow. His first name is Pierre; clearly, he was born to work with stones, was he not?
The record has not yet yielded a photograph of Pierre Cleper, but this is known: he is a decent-looking man of medium height—not what you would call dashing, but his looks do not explain the fact that he is not married. The fact is that he does not want to marry, ever. He does quite well on his own, thank you very much. He can have a woman when he needs one.
He was in the Great War too, as was every man. Once, the force of the blast from a nearby shell knocked him clean down. Somehow he was uninjured—unsliced by shrapnel, unburned by flame. It was strange. The only thing that happened was that the sound of the explosion made him deaf in his left ear. The other ear works just fine.
Louise has not written much in Pierre Cleper’s little diary. It floats around on the bottom of her purse, and she digs it out when she needs to scrawl down an address or a telephone number. The only marks she has made on the pages where the months of the year are charted are in June and in July: on the nineteenth day of both these months, she has put a small x, in pencil. To the outside observer, this means nothing.
Did you know, the year of this little memento calendar, 1928?—this is our year. Halfway between the Great War and the Greater War: this is the year of our story. In its waning months, yes—an unusually warm November is when everything begins (Cleper’s birthstone chart proclaims November as the month for topaz, the gem of ardent love, nobility). A new family moves into Louise’s building, and new things start to happen.
Madame Henri Brunet
THIS IS THE CALLING card for a happy married couple:
It lists their address—a narrow edifice in the center of Paris, too small to allow for the installation of one of those thrilling creaky elevators that are cropping up in the larger buildings. This is all right by Louise: elevators unnerve her. She does not like the metal grids they are nearly always imprisoned in: an afterthought to the building’s design—a violation of the staircase, formerly open. She does not like the jarring clang the grid makes when it shuts after her, when she gets into the small rising box. She is none too fond of the rising box either, encased in its metal shaft: the heave as it pulls her up is a foreign queasy thing, and the closeness makes her nervous, especially if she is in there with another person. It amuses her that they often put a mirror in the elevator, so she can watch the slight shudder of her body as the thing stops abruptly when it reaches the requested floor. Perhaps she can catch the slight widening of her eyes in the reflection, at this moment of vertigo.
Louise likes the building she lives in. It is six stories high with a green front door into a narrow entryway leading to the staircase and a small courtyard in the back. There is a chambre de bonne under the roof, a romantic and miserable space where some artist or student always lives. She lives on the third floor. She trudges up and down the stairs several times a day (with and without grocery bags), but she tells herself this keeps her fit. She likes the tile on