the girl with a stone Heart

chapter 9

“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 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 stonework,” 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 things. He moved slowly and deliberately, laying out before her a stone angel head, a collection of hands and feet, large and small. All had originally been the typical funereal carvings of the place. But he had pierced and fretted and embellished them with forms of life that were alien and contradictory yet part of them. Fingers became prisms and serpents; minuscule faces peered between toes; and the tiny bodies of mice or marmosets gripped ankles or lay around wrists like Celtic dragons. He said, “I am not supposed to appropriate things that belong here. But I take the lost ones—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?”

“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 carved hand, which contained a basilisk and two mussel shells. When she took it from him, it chinked, stone on stone, against her awkward fingers. He heard the sound, and took hold of her knobby wrist through her garments.

“I must go now.”

“No, wait, wait,” he said.

But she pulled away, and hurried in the dusk toward the iron gate.

That evening, she understood that 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 some bread and cheese. She was trembling with exertion and emotion, with fear of stony enclosure and complicated anxiety about the Icelander. As she struggled to cut the soft loaf, the bread knife slipped and sliced into her stone hand, between finger and thumb. She felt pain, which surprised her, and saw a spurt of hot blood from the wound whose depth she could not gauge. She watched the thick liquid run down the back of her hand, onto the bread, onto the table. It was ruddy-gold, dripping 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, then trickled, a duller red now, onto the plastic floor, which it singed in amber circles. Her veins were full of molten lava. She put out the tiny fires and threw away the burned bread. She thought, I am not just going to stand in the rain and grow moss. I may erupt. She felt panic. To turn to stone is a figure, however fantastic, for death. But to become molten lava, to contain a furnace?