A STONE WOMAN
(FOR TORFI TULINIUS)
At first she did not think of stones. Grief made her insubstantial to herself; she felt herself flitting lightly from room to room, in the twilit apartment, like a moth. The apartment seemed constantly twilit, although it must, she knew, have gone through the usual sequences of sun and shadow over the days and weeks since her mother died. Her mother—a strong bright woman—had liked to live amongst shades of mole and dove. Her mother’s hair had shone silver and ivory. Her eyes had faded from cornflower to forget-me-not. Ines found her dead one morning, her bloodless fingers resting on an open book, her parchment eyelids down, as though she dozed, a wry grimace on her fine lips, as though she had tasted something not quite nice. She quickly lost this transient lifelikeness, and became waxy and peaked. Ines, who had been the younger woman, became the old woman, in an instant.
She busied herself with her dictionary work, and with tidying love away. She packed it into plastic sacks, creamy silks and floating lawns, velvet and muslin, lavender crêpe de Chine, beads of pearl and garnet. People had thought she was a dutiful daughter. They did not imagine, she thought, two intelligent women who understood each other easily, and loved each other. She drew the blinds because the light hurt her eyes. Her inner eye observed final things over and over. White face on white pillow amongst white hair. Colourless skin on lifeless fingers. Flesh of my flesh, flesh of her flesh. The efficient rage of consuming fire, the handfuls of fawn ash which she had scattered, as she had promised, in the hurrying foam of a Yorkshire beck.
She went through the motions, hoping to become accustomed to solitude and silence. Then one morning pain struck her like a sudden beak, tearing at her gut. She caught her breath and sat down, waiting for it to pass. It did not pass, but strengthened, blow on blow. She rolled on her bed, dishevelled and sweating. She heard the creature moaning. She tried to telephone the doctor, but the thing shrieked raucously into the mouthpiece, and this saved her, for they sent an ambulance, which took the screaming thing to a hospital, as it would not have taken a polite old woman. Later they told her she had had at most four hours to live. Her gut was twisted and gangrenous. She lay quietly in a hospital bed in a curtained room. She was numb and bandaged, and drifted in and out of blessed sleep.
The surgeon came and went, lifting her dressings, studying the sutures, prodding the walls of her belly with strong fingers, awakening sullen coils of pain somewhere in deep, yet less than mothlike on the surface. Ines was a courteous and shamefast woman. She did not want to see her own sliced skin and muscle.
She thanked him for her life, unable to summon up warmth in her voice. What was her life now, to thank anyone for? When he had gone, she lied to the nurses about the great pain she said she felt, so they would bring drugs, and the sensation of vanishing in soft smoke, which was almost pleasure.
The wound healed—very satisfactorily, they said. The anaesthetist came in to discuss what palliatives she might be allowed to take home with her. He said, “I expect you’ve noticed there’s no sensation around the incision. That’s quite normal. The nerves take time to join again, and some may not do so.” He too touched the sewed-up lips of the hole, and she felt that she did not feel, and then felt the ghost of a thrill, like fine wires, shooting out across her skin. She still did not look at the scar. The anaesthetist said, “I see he managed to construct some sort of navel. People feel odd, we’ve found, if they haven’t got a navel.”
She murmured something. “Look,” he said, “it’s a work of art.”
So she looked, since she would be going home, and would now have to attend to the thing herself.
The wound was livid and ridged and ran the length of her white front, from under the ribs to the hidden places underneath her. Where she had been soft and flat, she was all plumpings and hollows, like an old cushion. And where her navel had been, like a button caught in a seam at an angle, was an asymmetric whorl with a little sill of skin. Ines thought of her lost navel, of the umbilical cord that had been a part of her and of her mother. Her face creased into sorrow; her eyes were hot with tears. The anaesthetist misinterpreted them, and assured her that it would all look much less angry and lumpy after a month or two, and if it did not, it could be easily dealt with by a good plastic surgeon. Ines thanked him, and closed her eyes. There was no one to see her, she said, it didn’t matter what she looked like. The anaesthetist, who had chosen his profession because he didn’t like people’s feelings, and preferred silence to speech, offered her what she wanted, a painkiller. She drifted into gathered cloud as he closed the door.
Their flat, now her flat, was on the second floor of a nineteenth-century house in a narrow city square. The stairs were steep. The taxi driver who brought her home left her, with her bag, on the doorstep. She toiled slowly upwards, resting her bag on the stairs, clinging to the banisters, aware of every bone in knee and ankle and wrist, and also of the paradox of pain in the gut and the strange numb casing of the surface skin. There was no need to hurry. She had time, and more time.
Inside the flat, she found herself preoccupied with time and dust. She had been a good cook—she thought of herself in the past tense—and had made delicious little meals for her mother and herself, light pea soups, sole with mushrooms, vanilla soufflés. Now she could make neither cooking nor eating last long enough to be interesting. She nibbled at cheese and crusts like a frugal mouse, and could not stay seated at her table but paced her room. The life had gone out of the furnishings and objects. The polish was dulled and she left it like that: she made her bed with one crumpled pull. She had a sense that the dust was thickening on everything.
She did what work she had to do, conscientiously. The problem was, that there was not enough of it. She worked as a part-time researcher for a major etymological dictionary, and in the past had been assiduous and inventive in suggesting new entries, new problems. Now, she answered those queries which were sent to her, and they did not at all fill up the huge cavern of space and time in which she floated and sank. She got up, and dressed herself carefully, as though she was “going out to work.” She knew she must not let herself go, that was what she must not do. Then she walked about in the spinning dust and came to a standstill and stared out of the window, for minutes that seemed like hours, and hours that seemed like minutes. She liked to see the dark spread in the square, because then bedtime was not far away.
The day came when the dressings could, should, be dispensed with. She had been avoiding her body, simply wiping her face and under her arms with a damp face cloth. She decided to have a bath. Their bath was old and deep and narrow, with imposing brass taps and a heavy coil of shower hosing. There was a wide wooden bath-rack across it, which still held, she saw now, private things of her mother’s—a loofah, a sponge, a pumice stone. Her mother had never needed help in the bathroom. She had made fragrant steam from rosewater in a blue bottle, she had used baby talc, scented with witch-hazel. For some reason these things had escaped the postmortem clearance. Ines thought of clearing them now, and then thought, what does it matter? She ran a deep lukewarm bath. The old plumbing clanked and shuddered. She hung her dressing gown—grey flannel—on the door, and very carefully, feeling a little giddy, clutching the rim, climbed into the bath and let her bruised flesh down into the water.
The warmth was nice. A few tense sinews relaxed. Time went into one of its slow phases. She sat and stared at the things on the rack. Loofah, sponge, pumice. A fibrous tube, a soft mess of holes, a shaped grey stone. She considered the differences between the three, all essentially solids with holes in. The loofah was stringy and matted, the sponge was branching and vacuous, the pumice was riddled with needle holes. She stared, feeling that she and they were weightless, floating and swelling in her giddiness. Biscuit-coloured, bleached khaki, shadow-grey. Colourless colours, shapeless shapes. She picked up the sponge, and squeezed cooling water over her bust, studying the random forms of droplets and tricklings. She did not like the sponge’s touch; it was clammy and fleshy. The loofah and the sponge were the dried-out bodies, the skeletons, of living things. She picked up the pumice, a light stone tear, shaped to the palm of a hand, felt its paradoxical lightness, and dropped it into the water, where it floated. She did not know how long she sat there. The water cooled. She made a decision, to throw away the sponge. When she lifted herself, awkwardly, through the surface film, the pumice chinked against her flesh. It was an odd little sound, like a knock on metal. She put the pumice back on the rack, and touched her puckered wound with nervy fingers. Supposing something should be left in there? A clamp, a forceps, a needle? Not exactly looking she explored her reconstructed navel with a fingertip. She felt the absence of sensation and a certain glossy hardness where the healing was going on. She tapped, very softly, with her fingernail. She was not sure whether it was, or was not, a chink.
The next thing she noticed was a spangling of what seemed like glinting red dust, or ground glass, in the folds of her dressing gown and her discarded underwear. It was a dull red, like dried blood, which does not have a sheen. It increased in quantity, rather than diminished, once she had noticed it. She observed tiny conical heaps of it, by skirting boards, on the corners of Persian rugs—conical heaps, slightly depressed, like anthill castings or miniaturised volcanoes. At the same time she noticed that her underwear appeared to be catching threads, here and there, on the rough, numb expanse of the healing scars. She felt a kind of horror and shame in looking at herself spread with lumps and an artificial navel. As the phenomenon grew more pronounced, she explored the area tentatively with her fingertips, over the cotton of her knickers. Her stomach was without sensation. Her fingers felt whorls and ridges, even sharp edges. They disturbed the glassy dust, which came away with the cloth, and shone in its creases. Each day the bumps and sharpness, far from calming, became more pronounced. One evening, in the unlit twilight, she finally found the nerve to undress, and tuck in her chin to stare down at herself. What she saw was a raised shape, like a starfish, like the whirling arms of a nebula in the heavens. It was the colour—or a colour—of raw flesh, like an open whip wound or knife slash. It trembled, because she was trembling, but it was cold to the touch, cold and hard as glass or stone. From the star-arms the red dust wafted like glamour. She covered herself hastily, as though what was not seen might disappear.
The next day, it felt bigger. The day after, she looked again, in the half-light, and saw that the blemish was spreading. It had pushed out ruddy veins into the tired white flesh, threading sponge with crystal. It winked. It was many reds, from ochre to scarlet, from garnet to cinnabar. She was half-tempted to insert a fingernail under the veins and chip them off, and she could not.
She thought of it as “the blemish.” She thought more and more about it, even when it was covered and out of sight. It extended itself—not evenly, but in fits and starts, around her waist, like a shingly girdle pushing down long fibrous fingers towards her groin, thrusting out cysts and gritty coruscations towards her pubic hair. There were puckered weals where flesh met what appeared to be stone. What was stone, what else was it?
One day she found a cluster of greenish-white crystals sprouting in her armpit. These she tried to prise away, and failed. They were attached deep within; they could be felt to be stirring stony roots under the skin surface, pulling the muscles. Jagged flakes of silica and nodes of basalt pushed her breasts upward and flourished under the fall of flesh, making her clothes crackle and rustle. Slowly, slowly, day by quick day, her torso was wrapped in a stony encrustation, like a corselet. She could feel that under the stones her compressed inwards were still fluid and soft, responsive to pain and pressure.
She was surprised at the fatalism with which she resigned herself to taking horrified glances at her transformation. It was as though, much of the time, her thoughts and feelings had slowed to stone-speed, nerveless and stolid. There were, increasingly, days when a new curiosity jostled the horror. One day, one of the blue veins on her inner thigh erupted into a line of rubious spinels, and she thought of jewels before she thought of pustules. They glittered as she moved. She saw that her stony casing was not static—points of rock salt and milky quartz thrust through glassy sheets of basalt, bubbles of sinter formed like tears between layers of hornblende. She learned the names of some of the stones when curiosity got the better of passive fear. The flat, a dictionary-maker’s flat, was furnished with encyclopaedias of all sorts. She sat in the evening lamplight and read the lovely words: pyrolusite, ignimbrite, omphacite, uvarovite, glaucophane, schist, shale, gneiss, tuff.
Her inner thighs now chinked together when she moved. The first apparition of the stony crust outside her clothing was strange and beautiful. She observed its beginnings in the mirror one morning, brushing her hair—a necklace of veiled swellings above her collarbone which broke slowly through the skin like eyes from closed lids, and became opal—fire opal, black opal, geyserite, and hydrophane, full of watery light. She found herself preening at herself in her mirror. She wondered, fatalistically and drowsily, whether when she was all stone, she would cease to breathe, see, and move. For the moment she had grown no more than a carapace. Her joints obeyed her, light went from retina to brain, her budded tongue tasted food that she still ate.
She dismissed, with no real hesitation, the idea of consulting the surgeon, or any other doctor. Her slowing mind had become trenchant, and she saw clearly that she would be an object of horror and fascination, to be shut away and experimented on. It was of course, theoretically, possible that she was greatly deluded, that the winking gemstones and heaped flakes of her new crust were feverish sparks of her anaesthetised brain and grieving spirit. But she didn’t think so—she refuted herself as Dr. Johnson refuted Bishop Berkeley, by tapping on stone and hearing the scrape and chink of stone responding. No, what was happening was, it appeared, a unique transformation. She assumed it would end with the petrifaction of her vital functions. A moment would come when she wouldn’t be able to see, or move, or feed herself (which might not matter). Her mother had not had to face death—she had told herself it was not yet, not for just now, not round the next corner. She herself was about to observe its approach in a new fantastic form. She thought of recording the transformations, the metamorphic folds, the ooze, the conchoidal fractures. Then when “they” found her, “they” would have a record of how she had become what she was. She would observe, unflinching.
But she continually put off the writing, partly because she preferred standing to sitting at a desk, and partly because she could not fix the process in her mind clearly enough to make words of it. She stood in the light of the window morning and evening, and read the stony words in the geological handbooks. She stood by the mirror in the bathroom and tried to identify the components of her crust. They changed, she was almost sure, minute by minute. She had found a description of the pumice stone—“a pale grey frothy volcanic glass, part of a pyroclastic flow made of very hot particles; flattened pumice fragments are known as fiamme.” She imagined her lungs full of vesicles like the frothy stone, becoming stone. She found traces of hot flows down her own flanks, over her own thighs. She went into her mother’s bedroom, where there was a cheval glass, the only full-length mirror in the house.
At the end of a day’s staring she would see a new shimmer of labradorite, six inches long and diamond-shaped, arrived imperceptibly almost between her buttocks where her gaze had not rested.
She saw dikes of dolerites, in graduated sills, now invading her inner arms. But it took weeks of patient watching before, by dint of glancing in rapid saccades, she surprised a bubble of rosy barite crystals, breaking through a vein of fluorspar, and opening into the form known as a desert rose, bunched with the ore flowers of blue john. Her metamorphosis obeyed no known laws of physics or chemistry: ultramafic black rocks and ghostly Iceland spar formed in succession, and clung together.
After some time, she noticed that her patient and stoical expectation of final inertia was not being fulfilled. As she grew stonier, she felt a desire to move, to be out of doors. She stood in the window and observed the weather. She found she wanted to go out, both on bright days, and even more in storms. One dark Sunday, when the midday sky was thick and grey as granite, when sullen thunder rumbled and the odd flash of lightning made human stomachs queasy, Ines was overcome with a need to be out in the weather. She put on wide trousers and a tunic, and over them a shapeless hooded raincoat. She pushed her knobby feet into fur boots, and her clay-pale hands, with their veins of azurmalachite, into sheepskin mittens, and set out down the stairs and into the street.
She had wondered how her tendons and musculature would function. She thought she could feel the roll of polished stone in stony cup as she moved her pelvis and hips, raised her knees, and swung her rigid arms. There was a delicious smoothness to these motions, a surprise after the accommodations she was used to making with the crumbling calcium of arthritic joints. She strode along, aimlessly at first, trying to get away from people. She noticed that her sense of smell had changed, and was sharper. She could smell the rain in the thick cloud blanket. She could smell the carbon in the car exhausts and the rainbow-coloured minerals in puddles of petrol. These scents were pleasurable. She came to the remains of a street market, and was assailed by the stink of organic decay, deliquescent fruit mush, rotting cabbage, old burned oil on greasy newspapers and mashed fishbones. She strode past all this, retching a little, feeling acid bile churning in a stomach sac made by now of what?
She came to a park—a tamed, urban park, with rose beds and rubbish bins, doggy lavatories and a concrete fountain. She could hear the water on the cement with a new intricate music. The smell of a rain squall blew away the wafting warmth of dog shit. She put up her face and pulled off her hood. Her cheeks were beginning to sprout silicone flakes and dendrite fibres, but she only looked, she thought, like a lumpy old woman. There were droplets of alabaster and peridot clustering in her grey hair like the eggs of some mythic stony louse, but they could not yet be seen, except from close. She shook her hair free and turned her face up to the branches and the clouds as the rain began. Big drops splashed on her sharp nose; she licked them from stiffening lips between crystalline teeth, with a still-flexible tongue tip, and tasted skywater, mineral and delicious. She stood there and let the thick streams of water run over her body and down inside her flimsy garments, streaking her carnelian nipples and adamantine wrists. The lightning came in sheets of metal sheen. The thunder crashed in the sky and the surface of the woman crackled and creaked in sympathy.
She thought, I need to find a place where I should stand, when I am completely solid, I should find a place outside, in the weather.
When would she be, so to speak, dead? When her plump flesh heart stopped pumping the blue blood along the veins and arteries of her shifting shape? When the grey and clammy matter of her brain became limestone or graphite? When her brainstem became a column of rutilated quartz? When her eyes became—what? She inclined to the belief that her watching eyes would be the last thing, even though fine threads on her nostrils still conveyed the scent of brass or coal to the primitive lobes at the base of the brain. The phrase came into her head: Those are pearls that were his eyes. A song of grief made fantastic by a sea change. Would her eyes cloud over and become pearls? Pearls were interesting. They were a substance where the organic met the inorganic, like moss agate. Pearls were stones secreted by a living shellfish, perfected inside the mother-of-pearl of its skeleton to protect its soft inward flesh from an irritant. She went to her mother’s jewel box, in search of a long string of freshwater pearls she had given her for her seventieth birthday. There they lay and glimmered; she took them out and wound them round her sparkling neck, streaked already with jet, opal, and jacinth zircon.
She had had the idea that the mineral world was a world of perfect, inanimate forms, with an unchanging mathematical order of crystals and molecules beneath its sprouts and flows and branches. She had thought, when she had started thinking, about her own transfiguration as something profoundly unnatural, a move from a world of warm change and decay to a world of cold permanence. But as she became mineral, and looked into the idea of minerals, she saw that there were reciprocities, both physical and figurative. There were whole ranges of rocks and stones which, like pearls, were formed from things which had once been living. Not only coal and fossils, petrified woods and biohermal limestones—oolitic and pisolitic limestones, formed round dead shells—but chalk itself, which was mainly made up of microorganisms, or cherts and flints, massive bedded forms made up of the skeletons of Radiolaria and diatoms. These were themselves once living stones—living marine organisms that spun and twirled around skeletons made of opal.
The minds of stone lovers had colonised stones as lichens cling to them with golden or grey-green florid stains. The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammilated, botryoidal, dendrite, haematite. Carnelian is from carnal, from flesh. Serpentine and lizardite are stone reptiles; phyllite is leafy green. The earth itself is made in part of bones, shells, and diatoms. Ines was returning to it in a form quite different from her mother’s fiery ash and bonemeal. She preferred the parts of her body that were now volcanic glasses, not bony chalk. Chabazite, from the Greek for hailstones, obsidian, which, like analcime and garnet, has the perfect icositetarahedral shape.
Whether or not she became wholly inanimate, she must find a place to stand in the weather before she became immobile. She visited city squares, and stood experimentally by the rims of fountains, or in the entrances of grottoes. She had read of the hidden wildernesses of nineteenth-century graveyards, and it came to her that in such a place, amongst weeping angels and grieving cherubs, she might find a quiet resting place. So she set out on foot, hooded and booted, with her new indefatigable rolling pace, marble joint in marble socket. It was a grey day, at the end of winter, with specks between rain and snow spitting in the fitful wind. She strode in through a wrought-iron gate in a high wall.
What she saw was a flat stony city, house after house under the humped ripples of earth, marked by flat stones, standing stones, canted stones, fallen stones, soot-stained, dropping-stained, scum-stained, crumbled, carved, repeating, repeating. She walked along its silent pathways, past dripping yews and leafless birches and speckled laurels, looking for stone women. They stood there—or occasionally lay fallen there—on the rich earth. There were many of them, but they resembled each other with more than a family resemblance. There were the sweetly regretful lady angels, one arm pointing upwards, one turned down to scatter an arrested fall of stony flowers. There were the chubby child angels, wearing simple embroidered stone tunics over chubby stone knees, also holding drooping flowers. Some busy monumental mason had turned them out to order, one after the other, their sweetly arched lips, or apple-cheeks, well-practised tricks of the trade. There was no other living person in that place, though there was a great deal of energetic organic life—long snaking brambles thrust between the stones for a place in the light, tombstones and angels alike wore bushy coats of gripping ivy, shining in the wind and the wet, as the leaves moved very slightly. Ines looked at the repeated stone people. Several had lost their hands, and lifted blind stumps to the grey air. These were less upsetting than those who were returning to formlessness, and had fists that seemed rotted by leprosy. Someone had come and sliced the heads from the necks of several cherubs—recently, the severed edges were still an even white. The stony representations of floating things—feathered wings, blossoms, and petals—made Ines feel queasy, for they were inert and weighed down, they were pulled towards the earth and what was under it.
Once or twice she saw things which spoke to her own condition. A glint of gold in the tesserae of a mosaic pavement over a house whose ascription was hopelessly obscured. A sarcophagus on pillars, lead-lined, human-sized, planted with spring bulbs, and, she thought, almost certainly ancient and pagan, for it was surrounded with a company of eyeless elders in Etruscan robes, standing each in his pillared alcove. Their faces were rubbed away, but their substance—some kind of rosy marble?—had erupted into facets and flakes that glinted in the gloom like her own surfaces.
She might take her place near them, she thought, but was dissuaded by the aspect of their neighbours, a group of the theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity, simpering lifeless women clutching a stone cross, a stone anchor, and a fat stone helpless child. They had nothing to do with a woman who was made up of volcanic glass and semiprecious stones, who needed a refuge for her end. No, that was not true. They were not nothing to do with her, for they frightened her. She did not want to stand, unmoving, amongst them. She began to imagine an indefinite half-life, looking like them, yet staring out of seeing eyes. She walked faster.
Round the edges of the vast field of stones, within the spiky confine of the wall, was a shrubbery, with narrow paths and a few stone benches and compost bins. As she went into the bushes, she heard a sound, the chink of hammer on stone. She stood still. She heard it again. Thinking to surprise a vandal, she rounded a corner, and came upon a rough group of huts and a stack of stony rubble.
One of the huts was a long open shelter, wooden-walled and tile-roofed. It contained a trestle table, behind which a man was working, with a stonemason’s hammer and chisel. He was a big muscular man, with a curly golden beard, a tanned skin, and huge hands. Behind him stood a gaggle of stone women, in various states of disrepair, lipless, fingerless, green-stained, soot-streaked. There was also a heap of urns, and the remains of one or two of the carved artificial rocks on which various symbolic objects had once been planted. He made a gesture as if to cover up what he was doing, which appeared, from the milky sheen of the marble, to be new work, rather than restoration.
Ines sidled up. She had almost given up speech, for her voice scratched and whistled oddly in her petrifying larynx. She shopped with gestures, as though she was an Eastern woman, robed and veiled, too timid, or linguistically inept, to ask about things. The stonecutter looked up at her, and down at his work, and made one or two intent little chips at it. Ines felt the sharp blows in her own body. He looked across at her. She whispered—whispering was still possible and normal—that she would like to see what he was making. He shrugged, and then stood aside, so that she could look. What she saw was a loose-limbed child lying on a large carved cushion, its arms flung out, its legs at unexpected angles, its hair draggled across its smooth forehead, its eyes closed in sleep. No, Ines saw, not sleep. This child was a dead child, its limbs were relaxed in death. Because it was dead, its form intimated painfully that it had once been alive. The whole had a blurred effect, because the final sharps and rounds had not been clarified. It had no navel; its little stomach was rough. Ines said what came into her stone head.
“No one will want that on any kind of monument. It’s dead.”
The stonecutter did not speak.
“They write on their stones,” Ines said, “he fell asleep on such a day, she is sleeping. It’s not sleep.”
“I am making this for myself,” he said. “I do repair work here, it is a living. But I do my own work also.”
His voice was large and warm. He said:
“Are you looking for any person’s grave here? Or perhaps visiting—”
Ines laughed. The sound was pebbly. She said, “No, I am thinking about my own final resting place. I have problems.”
He offered her a seat, which she refused, and a plastic cup of coffee from a thermos, which she accepted though she was not thirsty, to oil her voice and to make an excuse for lingering. She whispered that she would like to see more of his work, of his own work.
“I am interested in stone work,” she said. “Maybe you can make me a monument.”
As if in answer to this, he brought out from under his bench various wrapped objects, a heavy sphere, a pyramid, a bag of small rattling objects. He moved slowly and deliberately, laying out before her a stone angel head, a sculpted cairn, a collection of hands and feet, large and small. All were originally the typical funereal carvings of the place. He had pierced and fretted and embellished them with forms of life that were alien and contradictory, yet part of them. Fingers and toes became prisms and serpents, minuscule faces peered between toes and tiny bodies of mice or marmosets gripped toenails or lay around wrists like Celtic dragons. The cairn—from a distance blockish like all the rest—was alive with marine creatures in whose bellies sat creatures, whose faces peered out of oyster shells and from carved rib cages, neither human faces nor inhuman. And the dead stone angel face had been made into a round mass of superposed face on face, in bas-relief and fretwork, faces which shared eyes and profiles, mouths which fed two divergent starers with four eyes and serpents for hair. He said:
“I am not supposed to appropriate things which belong here. But I take the lost ones, the detached ones without a fixed place, I look for the life in them.”
“Pygmalion.”
“Hardly. You like them?”
“Like is the wrong word. They are alive.”
He laughed. “Stones are alive where I come from.”
“Where?” she breathed.
“I am an Icelander. I work here in the winter, and go home in the summer, when the nights are bright. I show my work—my own work—in Iceland in the summer.”
She wondered dully where she would be when he was in Iceland in the summer. He said:
“If you like, I will give you something. A small thing, and if you like to live with it, I will perhaps make you that monument.”
He held out to her a small, carved head which contained a basilisk and two mussel shells. When she took it from him, it chinked, stone on stone, against her awkward fingertips. He heard the sound, and took hold of her knobby wrist through her garments.
“I must go now,” she breathed.
“No, wait, wait,” he said.
But she pulled away, and hurried in the dusk, towards the iron gate.
That evening, she understood she might have been wrong about her immediate fate. She put the stone head on her desk and went into the kitchen to make herself bread and cheese. She was trembling with exertion and emotion, with fear of stony enclosure and complicated anxiety about the Icelander. The bread knife slipped as she struggled to cut the soft loaf, and sliced into her stone hand, between finger and thumb. She felt pain, which surprised her, and the spurt of hot blood from the wound whose depth she could not gauge. She watched the thick red liquid run down the back of her hand, onto the bread, onto the table. It was ruddy-gold, running in long glassy strings, and where it touched the bread, the bread went up in smoke, and where it touched the table, it hissed and smoked and bored its hot way through the wood and dripped, a duller red now, onto the plastic floor, which it singed with amber circles and puckering. Her veins were full of molten lava. She put out the tiny fires and threw away the burned bread. She thought, I am not going to stand in the rain and grow moss. I may erupt. I do not know how that will be. She stood with the bread knife in her hand and considered the rough stripes her blood had seared into the steel. She felt panic. To become stone is a figure, however fantastic, for death. But to become molten lava and to contain a furnace?
She went back next day to the graveyard. Her clashing heart quickened when she heard the tap of hammer on stone, as she swung into the shrubbery. It was a pale blue wintry day, with pewter storm clouds gathering. There was the Icelander, turning a glinting sphere in his hand, and squinting at it. He nodded amiably in her direction. She said:
“I want to show you something.”
He looked up. She said:
“If anyone can bear to look, perhaps you can.”
He nodded.
She began to undo her fastenings, pulling down zips, unhooking the hood under her chin, shaking free her musical crystalline hair, shrugging her monumental arms out of their bulky sleeves. He stared intently. She stripped off shirt and jogging pants, trainers and vest, her mother’s silken knickers. She stood in front of him in her roughly gleaming patchwork, a human form vanishing under outcrops of silica, its lineaments suggested by veins of blue john that vanished into crusts of pumice and agate. She looked out of her cavernous eye sockets through salty eyes at the man, whose blue eyes considered her grotesque transformation. He looked. She croaked, “Have you ever seen such a thing?”
“Never,” he said. “Never.”
Hot liquid rose to the sills of her eyes and clattered in pearly drops on her ruddy haematite cheeks.
He stared. She thought, he is a man, and he sees me as I am, a monster.
“Beautiful,” he said. “Grown, not crafted.”
“You said that the stones in your country were alive. I thought you might understand what has happened to me. I do not need a monument. I have grown into one.”
“I have heard of such things. Iceland is a country where we are matter-of-fact about strange things. We know we live in a world of invisible beings that exists in and around our own. We make gates in rocks for elves to come and go. But as well as living things without solid substance we know that rocks and stones have their own energies. Iceland is a young country, a restless country—in our land the earth’s mantle is shaped at great speed by the churning of geysers and the eruption of lava and the progress of glaciers. We live like lichens, clinging to standing stones and rolling stones and heaving stones and rattling stones and flying stones. Our tales are full of striding stone women. We have mostly not given up the expectation of seeing them. But I did not expect to meet one here, in this dead place.”
She told him how she had supposed that to be petrified was to be motionless. I was looking for a place to rest, she told him. She told him about the spurt of lava from her hand and showed him the black scar, fringed with a rime of new crystals.
“I think now, Iceland is where I should go, to find somewhere to—stand, or stay.”
“Wait for the spring,” he said, “and I will take you there. We have endless nights in the winter, and snowstorms, and the roads are impassable. In summer we have—briefly—endless days. I spend my winters here and my summers in my own country, climbing and walking.”
“Maybe it will be over—maybe I shall be—finished—before the spring.”
“I do not think so. But we will watch over it. Turn around, and let me see your back. It is beautiful beyond belief, and its elements are not constant.”
“I have the sense that—the crust—is constantly thickening.”
“There is an idea—for a sculptor—in every inch of it,” he said.
He said that his name was Thorsteinn Hallmundursson. He could not keep his eyes off her though his manner was always considered and gentle. Over the winter and into the early spring, they constructed a friendship. Ines allowed Thorsteinn to study her ridges and clefts. He touched her lightly, with padded fingers, and electricity flickered in her veining. He showed her samples of new stones as they sprouted in and on her body. The two she loved most were labradorite and fantomqvartz. Labradorite is dark blue, soft black, full of gleaming lights, peacock and gold and silver, like the aurora borealis embedded in hardness. In fantomqvartz, a shadowy crystal contains other shadowy crystals growing at angles in its transparent depths. Thorsteinn chipped and polished to bring out the lights and the angles, and in the end, as she came to trust him completely, Ines came to take pleasure in allowing him to decorate her gnarled fingers, to smooth the plane of her shin, and to reveal the hidden lights under the polished skin of her breasts. She discovered a new taste for sushi, for the iodine in seaweed and the salt taste of raw fish, so she brought small packs of these things to the shelter, and Thorsteinn gave her sips of peaty Laphroaig whisky from a hip flask he kept in his capacious fleecy coat. She did not come to love the graveyard, but familiarity made her see it differently.
It was a city graveyard, on which two centuries of soot had fallen. Although inner cities are now sanctuaries for wild things poisoned and starved in the countryside, the forms of life amongst the stones, though plump, lacked variety. Every day the fat pigeons gathered on the roof of Thorsteinn’s shelter, catching the pale sunlight on their burnished feathers, mole grey, dove grey, sealskin grey. Every day the fat squirrels lolloped busily from bush to bush, their grey tails and faces tinged with ginger, their strong little claws gripping. There were magpies, and strutting crows. There was thick bright moss moving swiftly (for moss) over the stones and their carved names. Thorsteinn said he did not like to clean it away, it was beautiful. Ines said she had noticed there were few lichens, and Thorsteinn said that lichens only grew in clean air; pollution destroyed them easily. In Iceland he would show her mosses and lichens she could never have dreamed of. He told her tales, through the city winter, as the cold rain dripped, and the cemetery crust froze, and cracked, and melted into mud puddles, of a treeless landscape peopled by inhuman beings, laughing weightless elves, hidden heavy-footed, heavy-handed trolls. Ines’s own crust grew thicker and more rugged. She had to learn to speak all over again, a mixture of whistles and clicks and solo gestures which perhaps only the Icelander would have understood.
Winter became spring, the dead leaves became dark with rain, grass pushed through them, crocuses and snowdrops, followed by self-spread bluebells and an uncontrollable carpet of celandine, pale gold flowers with flat green leaves, which ran over everything, headstones and gravel, bottle-green marble chips on recently dug graves, Thorsteinn’s heap of rubble. They lasted a brief time, and then the gold faded to silver, and the silver became white, transparent, a brief ghostly lace of fine veins, and then a fallen mulch of mould, inhabited by pushy tendrils and the creamy nodes of rhizomes.
The death of the celandines seemed to be the signal for departure. They had discussed how this should be done. Ines had assumed they would fly to Reykjavík, but when she came to contemplate such a journey, she saw that it was impossible. Not only could she not fold her new body into the small space of a canvas bucket seat that would likely not bear her weight. She could never pass through the security checks at the airport. How would a machine react to the ores and nuggets scattered in her depths? If she were asked to pull back her hood, the airport staff would run screaming. Or shoot her. She did not know if she could now be killed by a bullet.
Thorsteinn said they could go by sea. From Scotland to Bergen in Norway, from Bergen to Seydhisfjördhur in East Iceland. They would be seven days on the ocean.
They booked a passage on a small trading boat that had four cabins for passengers, and a taciturn crew. They put in at the Faroe Islands and then went out into the Atlantic, between towering rock faces, with no shore, no foam breaking at the base. In the swell of the Atlantic the ship nosed its way between great green and white walls of travelling water, in a fine salt spray. The sky changed and changed, opal and gunmetal, grass green and crimson, mussel blue and velvet black, scattered with wild starshine. Thorsteinn and Ines stood on deck whenever they could, and looked out ahead of them. Ines did not look back. She tasted the salt on her black-veined tongue, and thought of the biblical woman who had become a pillar of salt when she looked back. She was no pillar. She was heaving and restless like the sea. When she thought of her past life, it was vague in her new mind, like cobwebs. Her mother was now to her flying dust in air, motes of bonemeal settling on the foam-flowers in the beck where she had scattered her. She could barely remember their peaceful meals together, the dry wit of her mother’s observations, the glow of the flames in the ceramic coal in the gas fire in the hearth.
She opened her tent of garments to the driving wind and wet. She had found her feet easily and did not feel seasick. Thorsteinn rode the deck beside her like a lion or a warhorse, smiling through his beard.
She was interested in his human flesh. She found in herself a sprouting desire to take a bite out of him, his cheek or his neck, out of a mixture of some sort of affection and curiosity to see what the sensation would be like. She resisted the impulse easily enough, though she licked her teeth—razor-sharp flinty incisors, grim granite molars. She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did not translate into the English language, or into any other she knew: they were things that accumulated, solidly, knocked against each other, heaped and slipped.
Thorsteinn, like all Icelanders, became more animated as they neared his island. He told tales of early settlers, including Saint Brendan, who had sailed there in the fifth century, riding the seas in a hide coracle, and had been beaten back by a huge hairy being, armed with a pair of tongs and a burning mass of incandescent slag, which he hurled at the retreating monks. Saint Brendan believed he had come to Ultima Thule; the volcano, Mount Hekla, was the entrance to Hell at the edge of the world. The Vikings came in the ninth century. Thorsteinn, standing on deck at night with Ines, was amazed to discover that the back of her hands was made of cordierite, grey-blue crystals mixed with a sandy colour, rough and undistinguished but which, held at a certain angle, revealed facets like shimmering dragon scales. The Vikings, he told her, had used the way this mineral polarised light to navigate in the dark, using the Polar Star and the moonlight. He made her turn her heavy hands, flashing and winking in the darkness, as the water drops flashed on ropes and crest curls of wake.
Her first vision of Iceland was of the wild jagged peaks of the eastern fjords. Thorsteinn packed them into a high rugged trucklike car, and they drove south, along the wild coast, past ancient volcanic valleys, sculpted, slowly, slowly, by Ice Age glaciers. They were under the influence, literally, of the great glacier Vatnajökull, the largest in Europe, Thorsteinn said, sitting easily at the wheel. Brown thick rivers rushed down crevices and into valleys, carrying alluvial dust. They glimpsed the sheen of it from mountain passes, and then, as they came to the flatlands of the south, they saw the first glacial tongues pouring down into the plains, white and shining above the green marshes and under the blue sky. Thorsteinn alternated between a steady silence and a kind of incantatory recitation of history, geography, time before history, myth. His country appeared to her old, when she first saw it, a primal chaos of ice, stone silt, black sand, gold mud. His stories went easily back to the first and second centuries, or the Middle Ages, as though they were yesterday, and his own ancestors figured in tales of enmity and banishment as though they were uncles and kinsmen who had sat down to eat with him last year. And yet, the striking thing, the decisive thing, about this landscape, was that it was geologically young. It was turbulent with the youth and energy of an unsettled crust of the earth. The whole south coast of Iceland is still being changed—in a decade, in a twinkling of an eye—by volcanic eruptions which pour red-hot magma from mountain ridges, or spout up, boiling, from under the thick-ribbed ice. This is a recent lava field, said Thorsteinn, as they came to the Skaftáhraun, this was made by the eruption of the Lakagìgar in 1783, which lasted for a year, and killed over half the population and over half the livestock. Ines stared impassively at the fine black sand drifts, and felt the red-hot liquid boil a little, in her belly, in her lungs.
They travelled on, over the great black plain of Myrdalssandur. This, said Thorsteinn, was the work of a volcano, Katla, which erupted under a glacier, Myrdalsjökull. There is a troll woman connected to this volcano, he told her. She was called Katla, which is a feminine version of ketill, kettle, and she was said to have hidden a kettle of molten gold, which could be seen by human eyes on one day of the year only. But those who set out to find it were troubled by false visions and strange sights—burning homesteads, slaughtered livestock—and turned back from the quest in panic. Katla was the owner of a pair of magic breeches, which made her a very fleet runner, leaping lightly from crag to crag, descending the mountain-scree like smoke. They were said to be made from human skin. A young shepherd took them once, to help him catch his sheep, and Katla caught him, killed him, dismembered him, and hid his body in a barrel of whey. They found him, of course, when the whey was drunk, and Katla fled, running like clouds in the wind, over to Myrdalsjökull, and was never seen again.
Was she a stone woman? asked Ines. Her stony thoughts rumbled around heavy limbs made supple by borrowed skin. Her own human skin was flaking away, like the skins snakes and lizards rub off against stones and branches, revealing the bright sleekness beneath. She picked it away with crystal fingertips, scratching the dead stuff out of the crevices of elbow, knee joint, and her nonexistent navel.
Thorsteinn said there was no mention of her being stone. There were trolls in Iceland who turned to stone, like Norse trolls, if the sun hit them. But by no means all were of that kind. There were trolls, he said, who slept for centuries amongst the stones of the desert, or along the riverbeds, and stirred with an earthquake, or an eruption, into new life. There were human trolls, distinguishable only by their huge size from farmers and fishermen. “Personally,” said Thorsteinn, “I do not think you are a troll. I think you are a metamorphosis.”
They came to Reykjavík, the smoky harbour. Ines was uneasy, even in this small city—she strode, hooded and bundled behind Thorsteinn, as he showed her the harbour. Something was to happen, and it was not here, not amongst humans. New thoughts growled between her marbled ears: Thorsteinn wandered in and out of chandlers’ and artists’ stores, and his uncouth protégée stood in the shadows and more or less hissed between her teeth. She asked where they were going, and he said—as though she should have read his thoughts—that they were going to his summer house, where he would work.
“And I?” she said, grumbling. Thorsteinn stared at her, assessing and unsmiling.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Neither of us can know. I am taking you where there are known to be creatures—not human. That may be a good or a bad thing, I am a sculptor not a seer, how can I know? What I do hope is that you will allow me to record you. To make works that show what you are. For I may never see such a thing again.”
She smiled, showing all her teeth in the shadow of her hood.
“I agree,” she said.
They drove west again, from Reykjavík, along the ring road. They saw wonders—steam pouring from mountainsides, hot blue water bubbling in stony pots in the earth, the light sooty pumice, the shrouded humped black form of Hekla, hooded and violent. Thorsteinn remarked casually that it had erupted in 1991 and was still unusually active, under the earth and under the ice. They were heading for the valley of Thorsmork, Thor’s Forest, which lay inaccessibly between three glaciers, two deep rivers, and a string of dark mountains. They crossed torrents, and ground along the dirt road. There were no other humans, but the fields were full of wildflowers, and birds sang in birches and willows. Now it is summer, said Thorsteinn. In the winter you cannot come here. The rivers are impassable. You cannot stand against the wind.
Thorsteinn’s summer house was not unlike his encampment in the graveyard, although it was likely that the influence was the other way. It was built into a hillside, walled and roofed with turf, with a rough outbuilding, also turf-roofed, with his long worktable. It was roughly furnished: there were two heavy wooden bedsteads, a stone sink through which spring water ran from a channelled pipe in the hillside, a table, chairs, a wooden cupboard. And a hearth, with a stove. They had a view—when the weather was clear—across a wide valley, and a turbulent glacial river, to the sharp dark ridges of the mountains and the distant bright sheen of the glacier. The grassy space in front of the house looked something between a chaos of boulders and a half-formed stone circle. Ines came to see that all the stones, from the vast and cow-sized to clusters of pebbles and polished singletons, were works in progress, or potential works, or works finished for the time being. They were both carved and decorated. A discovered face peered from under a crusty overhang, one-eyed, fanged, leering. A boulder displayed a perfectly polished pair of youthful breasts, glistening in circles of golden lichen. Cracks made by ice, channels worn by water, mazes where roots had pushed and twisted, were coloured in brilliant pinks and golds, glistening where the light caught them. Nests of stony eggs made of sooty pumice, or smooth thulite, were inhabited by crystal worms and serpentine adders.
The stonecarver worked with the earth and the weather as his assistants or controllers. A hunched stone woman had a fantastic garden of brilliant moss spilling from her lap and over her thighs. An upright monolith was fantastically adorned with the lirellate fruiting bodies of the “writing lichens.” On closer inspection, Ines saw that jewels had been placed in crevices, and sharpened pins like mediaeval cloak brooches had been inserted in holes threaded in the stone surface. A dwarfish stone had tiny, carved gold hands where its ears might have been expected to be.
Thorsteinn said that he liked—in the summer—to add to the durable stones work that mimicked and reflected the fantastic succession of the weathers of that land. He suspended ingenious structures of plastic string, bubble wrap, polyurethane sheeting, to make ice, rain floods, the bubbling of geysirs and mud baths. He made rainbows of strips of glass, and bent them above his creatures, catching the bright blue light in the steely storm-light and the wet shimmer of enveloping cloud in their reflections.
There were many real rainbows. There could be several climates in a day—bright sun, gathering storm, snowfall, great coils and blasts of wind so violent that a man could not stand up—though the stone woman found herself taking pleasure in standing against the turbulent air as a surfer rides a wave, when even Thorsteinn had had to take shelter. There were flowers in the early brief summer—saxifrages and stonecrops, lady’s bedstraw and a profusion of golden angelica. They walked out into soft grey carpets of Cetraria islandica, the lichen that is known as “Iceland moss.” Reindeer food, human food, possible cancer cure, said Thorsteinn.
He asked her, rather formally, over a fireside supper of smoked lamb and scrambled eggs, whether she would sit to him. It was light in the northern night: his face was fiery in the midnight sun, his beard was full of gold, and brass, and flame-flickering. She had not looked at herself since they left England. She did not carry a mirror, and Thorsteinn’s walls were innocent of reflecting surfaces, though there were sacks of glass mosaic tesserae in the workshop. She said she did not know if she any longer differed from the stones he collected and decorated so tactfully, so spectacularly. Maybe he should not make her portrait, but decorate her, carve into her, when ... When whatever was happening had come to its end, she left unsaid, for she could not imagine its end. She tore at the tasty lamb with her sharp teeth. She had an overwhelming need for meat, which she did not acknowledge. She ground the fibres in the mill of her jaws. She said, she would be happy to do what she could.
Thorsteinn said that she was, what he had only imagined. All my life I have made things about metamorphosis. Slow metamorphoses, in human terms. Fast, fast in terms of the earth we inhabit. You are a walking metamorphosis. Such as a man meets only in dreams. He raised his wineglass to her. I too, he said, am utterly changed by your changing. I want to make a record of it. She said she would be honoured, and meant it.
Time too was paradoxical in Iceland. The summer was a fleeting island of light and brightness in a shroud of thick vapours and freezing needles of ice in the air. But within the island of the summer the daylight was sempiternal, there was no nightfall, only the endless shifts in the colour of the sky, trout-dappled, mackerel-shot, turquoise, sapphire, peridot, hot transparent red, and, as the autumn put out boisterous fingers, flowing with the gyrating and swooping veils of the aurora borealis. Thorsteinn worked all summer to his own rhythm, which was stubborn and earthy—long, long hours—and rapid, like waterfalls, or air currents. Ines sat on a stone bench, and occasionally did domestic things with inept stony fingers, hulled a few peas, scrubbed a potato, whisked a bowl of eggs. She tried reading, but her new eyes could not quite bring the dancing black letters to have any more meaning than the spiders and ants which scurried round her feet or mounted her stolid ankles. She preferred standing, really. Bending was harder and harder. So she stood, and stared at the hillside and the distant neb of the glacier. Some days they talked as he worked. Sometimes, for a couple of days together, they said nothing.
He made many, many drawings of her face, of her fingers, of her whole cragged form. He made small images in clay, and larger ones, cobbled together from stones and glass fragments and threads of things representing the weather, which the weather then disturbed. He made wreaths of wildflowers, which dried in the air, and were taken by the wind. He came close, and peered dispassionately into the crystal blocks of her eyes, which reflected the red light of the midnight sun. She made an increasing number of solitary forays into the landscape. When she returned, once, she saw from a great distance a standing stone that he had made, and saw that through its fantastic crust, under its tattered mantle, it was possible to see the lineaments of a beautiful woman, a woman with a carved, attentive face, looking up and out. The human likeness vanished as she came closer. She thought he had seen her, and this made her happy. He saw that she existed, in there.
But she found it harder and harder to see him. He began to seem blurred and out of focus, not only when his human blue eye peered into her crystal one and his beard fanned in a golden cloud round the disk of his face. He was becoming insubstantial. His very solid body looked as though it was simply a form of water vapour. She had to cup her basalt palm around her ear to hear his great voice, which sounded like the whispering of grasshoppers. She heard him snore at night, in the wooden bed, and the sound was indistinguishable from the gurgle of the water, or the prying random gusts of the wind.
And at the same time she was seeing, or almost seeing, things which seemed to crowd and gesture just beyond the range of her vision, behind her head, beyond the peripheral circle of her gaze. From the deck of the ship she had seen momentary sea creatures. Dolphins had rushed glistening amongst the long needles of air caught in the rush of their wake. Whales had briefly humped parts of guessed-at bulks through the wrinkling of the surface, the muscular span of a forked tail, the blast of a spout in a contracting air hole in an unimaginable skin. Fulmars had appeared from nowhere in the flat sky and had plummeted like falling swords through the surface which closed over them. So now she sensed earth bubbles and earth monsters shrugging themselves into shape in the air and in the falling fosses. Fleet herds of light-footed creatures flowed round the house with the wind, and she almost saw, she sensed with some new sense, that they waved elongated arms in a kind of elastic mockery or ecstasy. Stones she stared at, as Thorsteinn worked on her images, began to dimple and shift, like disguised moor birds, speckled and splotched, on nests of disguised eggs, speckled and splotched, in a wilderness of stones, speckled and splotched. Lichens seemed to grow at visible speeds and form rings and coils, with triangular heads like adders. Clearest of all—almost visible—were the huge dancers, forms that humped themselves out of earth and boulders, stamped and hurtled, beckoned with strong arms and snapping fingers. After long looking she seemed also to see that these things, the fleet and the portentous, the lithe and the stolid, were walking and running like parasites on the back of some moving beast so huge that the mountain range was only a wrinkle in its vasty hide, as it stirred in its slumber, or shook itself slightly as it woke.
She said to Thorsteinn in one of their economical exchanges:
“There are living things here I can almost see, but not see.”
“Maybe, when you can see them,” he said equably, scribbling away with charcoal, “maybe then ...”
“I am very tired, most of the time. And when I am not, I am full of—quite abnormal—energy.”
“That’s good?”
“It’s alarming.”
“We shall see.”
“Do humans in Iceland,” she asked again, conscious that something was staring and listening—uncomprehending, she believed—to the scratch of her voice, “do humans turn into trolls?”
“Trolls,” said Thorsteinn. “That’s a human word for them. We have a word, tryllast, which means to go mad, to go berserk. Like trolls. Always from a human perspective. Which is a bit of a precarious perspective, here, in this land.”
There was a long silence. Ines looked at his face as he worked, and could not focus the eyes that studied her so intently: they were charcoal blurs, full of dust motes. Whereas the hillside was alive with eyes, that opened lazily within fringing mossy lashes, that stared through and past her from hollows in stones, that flashed in the light briefly and vanished again.
Thorsteinn said:
“There is a tale we tell of a group of poor men who went out to gather lichens for the winter. And one of them climbed higher than the others and the crag above him suddenly put out long stony arms, and wound them round him, and lifted him, and carried him up the hillside. The story says the stone was an old troll woman. His companions were very frightened and ran home. The next year, they went there again, and he came to meet them, over the moss carpet, and he was grey like the lichens. They asked him, was he happy, and he didn’t answer. They asked him what he believed in, was he a Christian, and he answered dubiously that he believed in God and Jesus. He would not come with them and we get the impression that they did not try very hard to persuade him. The next year he was greyer and stood stock-still staring. When they asked him about his beliefs, he moved his mouth in his face, but no words came. And the next year, he came again, and they asked again what he believed in, and he replied, laughing fiercely, Trunt, trunt, og tröllin í fjöllunum.”
The English scholar who persisted in her said, “What does it mean?”
“ ‘Trunt, trunt’ is just nonsense, it means rubbish and junk and aha and hubble bubble, that sort of thing, I don’t know an English expression that will do as a translation. Trunt trunt, and the trolls in the fells.”
“It has a good rhythm.”
“Indeed it does.”
“I am afraid, Thorsteinn.”
He put his bear-arm round the knobs and flinty edges that were where her shoulders had been. It felt to her lighter than cobweb.
“They call me,” she said in a whisper. “Do you hear them?”
“No. But I know they call.”
“They dance. At first it looked ugly, their rushing and stamping. But now—now I am also afraid that I can’t—join the circle. I have never danced. And there is such wild energy.” She tried to be precise. “I don’t exactly see them still. But I do see their dancing, the furious form of it.”
Thorsteinn said, “You will see them, when the time comes. I do believe you will.”
As the autumn drew in she grew restless. She had planted small gardens in the crevices of her body, trailing grasses, liverworts. Creatures ran over her—insects first, a stone-coloured butterfly, indistinguishable from her speckled breast, foraging ants, a millipede. There were even fine red worms, the colour of raw meat, which burrowed unhindered. She began to walk more, taking these things with her. In September, they had several days of driving rain, frost was thick on the turf roof, the glacial rivers swelled and boiled and ice came down them in clumps and blocks, and also formed where the spray lay on the vegetation. Thorsteinn said that in a very little time it would be unsafe to stay—they might be cut off. He watched her brows contract over the glittering eyes in their hollow caves.
“I can’t go back with you.”
“You can. You are welcome to come with me.”
“You know I must stay. You have always known. I am simply gathering up courage.”
When the day came, it brought one of those Icelandic winds that howl across the earth, carrying away all unsecured objects and creatures, including men if they have no pole to clutch, no shelter built into the rock. Birds can make no way in such weather, they are blown back and broken. Snow and ice and hurtling cloud are in and on the wind, mixed with moving earth and water, and odd wreaths of steam gathered from geysirs. Thorsteinn went into his house and held on to the doorpost. Ines began to come with him, and then turned away, looking up the mountainside, standing easily in the furious breakers of the moving air. She lifted a monumental arm and gestured towards the fells and then to her eyes. No one could be heard in this wailing racket, but he saw that she was signalling that now she saw them clearly. He nodded his head—he needed his arms to hang on to the doorpost. He looked up the mountain and saw, no doubt what she now saw clearly, figures, spinning and bowing in a rapid dance on huge, lithe, stony legs, beckoning with expansive gestures, flinging their great arms wide in invitation. The woman in his stone-garden took a breath—he saw her sides quiver—and essayed a few awkward dance steps, a sweep of an arm, of both arms. He heard her laughter in the wind. She jigged a little, as though gathering momentum, and then began a dancing run, into the blizzard. He heard a stone voice, shouting and singing, “Trunt, trunt, og tröllin í fjöllunum.”
He went in, and closed his door against the weather, and began to pack.