Gabriel Jeroschewitz, September 30th, 2025, dedicated to my high school teachers and our ancestors abridged
The Stones Remember
The past does not only whisper; it tolls like a bell that no hand rings, and on certain nights when the winds rise over the Borders, I can hear it still. Its sound is not in the ear alone but in the bones, a sorrow that rattles like thin reeds in winter water. They call such sensations memory, but let me tell you plainly—some memories belong not to us, but to the land itself. And when men are foolish enough to lean too close, the land sometimes comes awake.
In my boyhood, in those truant afternoons stolen from the blackboard and its chalk-dust tyrannies, I first tasted what I can only now call the dissolution of paper. I had taken some clerkly volume from the back shelf of the school library, a heap of dog-eared authorities no one read except out of punishment. Its subject was the high and far-off times, recounted in a dead tongue, blotted with pedantry. Yet the text began to breathe in the July field where I lay reading, sunlight freckling the grass. Letters blurred with heat, figures of Saxon axe-men and Norman butchers dissolved into streams and reformed as faces of the living earth—faces that looked back at me with neither kindness nor hostility, only recognition.
It was as if the air leaned close and whispered: You are not the first.
From that instant, a restlessness entered me. It has never left. All my life, I have wandered the winding ways of this island—its rivers, ruined churches, long barrows gnawed by sheep, half-forgotten forts perched on hills like broken teeth. And always, beneath the clamour of history with its trumpets and treaties, I have heard a deeper voice, lamenting.
The tale of Britain since the Flood is written in war, as every schoolchild knows. War that gouged the heart high, spilt jewels both red and white, and left brother to kill brother in salt seas brimming with tears. Caesars came with lawful butchers; Saxons with flame for thatch; Vikings with rune-cut axes; Normans with ropes and iron laws. Centuries later, priests jingled threats of Hell while gorging on roasted meat. I don’t need to belabour it. You know the litany. Blood, fire, famine, plague—a fame that soaked away and left only scars.
But what struck me in boyhood and still in grey age is that all this bloodshed was but an echo. The stone remembers older sorrows. Long before English or Scot and Babel cracked our tongues, some people stood among the standing stones and shaped them, not for war but for conversing with something we no longer name. They left no parchment, coin, or crown—only the granite, chalk, and earth patterns.
And this is where the horror begins.
For one August some years ago, I returned to the Borders, to that very place where Powsail Burn joins the Tweed. The riverbanks hummed with bees. A brown bull grazed in the far meadows—a seeming peace. I carried with me a notebook, intent on tracing again those patterns of stone and water that had haunted me for half a century.
But peace is a veil, thin as mist.
As dusk fell, I saw the salmon leap against the weir, flashing silver in the gloom. And in their arc, I thought I glimpsed the outline of a man—antlered, leaf-crowned, half-submerged. Call him Green Man, call him what you will. He vanished, but the river stirred as though it had drawn breath. And then the air pressed close again, whispering: You are not the first.
I confess I grew frightened. My hand shook so that my notes blurred. The evening bells from a village church tolled across the fields, dull and mournful, like the wound-horn of some forgotten battle. With each toll, visions pressed upon me—quick, bleeding visions.
I saw men of the first tribes, beehived and coracled, their skins daubed not with barbarous paint but with bright spirals, intricate as stars. They laughed, gossiped, stole, and feasted. They lived. But then—I saw them undone. Not by Saxon or Roman blade, for these people long predated such invaders. No, their undoing came by something older, a wave without an ebb, flooding the land from beneath.
It was not water. It was forgetting.
A plague of forgetting, thick as fog, rolling in silence. They lost their own names. They lost the words with which they had conversed with stone and river. Children stood beside their parents and did not know them. Lovers lie down together as strangers. All vision was maimed. All amethyst turned adamant. I heard their cries, and in the reeds I heard lamentation, like wind rushing through hollow bone.
The horror of it was not death. It was erasure.
And it spread. What are the endless wars of later age, if not the staggering of blind men who no longer remember themselves? Brothers are killing each other because both have forgotten they are brothers. History itself is an aftershock of this first forgetting.
By nightfall, I was near mad with dread. I stumbled from the river toward the old stone circle on the ridge. The moon rose behind it, pale and pitiless, outlining each stone like a black tooth against a silver sky. I dropped my notebook. The paper was already dissolving beneath my hand—the ink spilling away like water, as it had in childhood. Nothing written would hold.
And then I saw him.
Merlin, they call him, though the name is poor and ill-fitting. A shadow stood among the stones, a man with hair wild as roots, eyes drowned in centuries. He lifted his hand, and I knew it was not to bless but to warn. His lips moved soundlessly, yet I understood: The wound is still open. It bleeds in every age. It will never heal while men forget themselves.
I tried to speak, but my voice was lost to the tolling of some unseen bell. I ran, half-falling down the slope, branches scratching my face. Behind me, I heard the bees hum louder, a droning like the unceasing murmur of graves. I did not look back until I reached the bull in the meadow. Strange comfort, that creature—its breath rising in the cool night, steady, indifferent to men and their madness. Only then did I dare turn.
The circle was empty—stones and nothing more.
Yet I do not mistake. What I saw was true. The land does not lie.
Now, years later, I write this, though I know it will invite mockery. But mockery is a thin thing compared to silence. I must speak if only to bear witness, though my words dissolve even as I set them down. For what am I but nothingness set a-wandering, restless in life and seeking no peace in death, compelled to breathe the ages into the air lest they vanish utterly?
Do you understand?
The stones remain, from China to the Americas, India to Ireland. They are patterned, patient, and immutable. They are the last testimony of our unwritten forebears, those clean and cunning ones we slander as savages. Their presence hints in every human word, and though history lies, beauty endures—an impossible beauty reared by hands now nameless.
But it is fragile. Already, I feel it slipping again. I fear one day it will be gone entirely, and we will be left alone with only our wars, our roasted meat, our pedants prating of Hell. Alone in the garden, restless, unable to die.
And so I leave you this tale, if it endures on paper. Scan it before it fades. Listen—not with your ears, but with your bones. Do not fear the silence between words. For in that silence, the forgotten speak.
And if you find yourself upon some soft summer’s day by the Tweed or any river where stones stand long in field or wood, cup the water in your hands. Look within.
If the salmon leaps, the bees hum, the wind bends reeds into lamentation—know this: Memory is not merely yours. It also belongs to the land; one day, it may call you home.
But beware, for the land remembers not only beauty. It remembers forgetting. And that is a blessing from which no man returns whole..
