Little Black Book of Stories

by A. S. Byatt

  “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 superimposed 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 hand 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 hand 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, on to the bread, on to 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, on to 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 the 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 snow-storms, 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 s
tudy 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 hipflask 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 among 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 gun-metal, 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 war-horse, 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 St. 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. St. Brendan believed he had come to Ultima Thule; the volcano, Mt. 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 truck-like 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 Thorstein
n, as they came to the Skaftáhraun, this was made by the eruption of the Lakagígar 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 non-existent 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.”