Little Black Book of Stories

by A. S. Byatt

  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 mountain-sides, 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 wild flowers, 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 out-building, also turf-roofed, with his long work-table. It was roughly furnished: there were two heavy wooden bedsteads, a stone sink through which springwater 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 medieval 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 geysers 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 for 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 wild flowers, 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 mad
e 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 disc 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 geysers. Thorsteinn went into his house and held on to the doorpost. Ines began to come with him, and then turned away, looking up the mountain-side, 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.

  Raw Material

  HE ALWAYS TOLD THEM the same thing, to begin with �
��Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don’t invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don’t try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease.” Every year, he glared amiably at them. Every year they wrote melodrama. They clearly needed to write melodrama. He had given up telling them that Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy. In ways both sublime and ridiculous it clearly was, precisely, that.

  The class had been going for fifteen years. It had moved from a schoolroom to a disused Victorian church, made over as an Arts and Leisure Centre. The village was called Sufferacre, which was thought to be a corruption of sulfuris aquae. It was a failed Derbyshire spa. It was his home town. In the 1960s he had written a successfully angry, iconoclastic and shocking novel called Bad Boy. He had left for London and fame, and returned quietly, ten years later. He lived in a caravan in somebody’s paddock. He travelled widely, on a motor bike, teaching Creative Writing in pubs, schoolrooms and arts centres. His name was Jack Smollett. He was a big, shuffling, smiling, red-faced man, with longish blond hair, who wore cable-knit sweaters in oily colours, and bright scarlet neckerchiefs. Women liked him, as they liked enthusiastic Labrador dogs. They felt, almost all—and his classes were predominantly female—more desire to cook apple pies and Cornish pasties for him, than to make violent love to him. They believed he didn’t eat sensibly. (They were right.) Now and then, someone in one of his classes would point out, as he exhorted them to stick to what they knew, that they themselves were what he “really knew.” Will you write about us, Jack? No, he always said, that would be a betrayal of confidence. You should always respect other people’s privacy. Creative writing teachers had something in common with doctors, even if—yet again—creative writing wasn’t therapy.