the girl with a stone Heart

chapter 10

She went back the next day to the graveyard. 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. 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 hematite 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. In Iceland, we are matter-of-fact about the world of invisible beings. We make gates in the rocks for elves to come and go. We know that stones have their own energies. Iceland is a young country, a restless country—in our land the earth’s mantle is still being changed at great speed. 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 not entirely given up the hope 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 said. 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 that 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.”

“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.”

“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. Over the winter and into the early spring, they constructed a friendship. Ines allowed Thorsteinn to study her ridges and clefts. He showed her samples of new stones as they sprouted in and on her body. The two she loved most were labradorite and fantomkvarts. Labradorite is dark blue, soft black, full of gleaming lights, like the aurora borealis embedded in hardness. In fantomkvarts 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 took pleasure in allowing him to decorate her gnarled fingers, to smooth the plane of her shin, to reveal the hidden lights under the polished skin of her breasts.