I bought a throw pillow too to put on top of the bed when no one was in it. I said don’t tell me anything about it, but she did anyway. She talked and talked and so I had to talk too. It had been painted, she told me, in Venice. And I said, hesitating, that it looked just like it had. She thought I meant something about the colour. Oh yes, she said, that blue, it only comes from, but I wasn’t listening. I meant only that it looked like a beautiful thing that had already resigned itself to sinking into the sea and I loved it for that. In the painting on the pillow manic streaks of colour glubbed deeper and deeper underneath what was absolutely a beautiful and striking blue. Exuberance of the Resigned I would have called it, the colour, if it had been mine to name.

In a room behind the counter where the girl was slipping the last of my sheets into an embossed paper bag, I saw what I had really come for. Wooden shelves stacked high with duvets. Down, wool, bamboo, cotton, summer weights and winter weights, and, I had heard, read I mean, real eiderdowns. There was a skylight in the roof and as I walked into the room I saw how the light just tumbled down from it in strands like Rapunzel’s hair, turning the duvets stacked on the shelves there a kind of gold. For a moment it was so quiet and wonderful inside me.

I asked the girl, who had of course followed me, to show me the eiderdowns. She pulled one down and unzipped it from its white cloth case and inside I saw what I had been looking for. I’ll take it, I said, wanting to get out of the store now. Wanting to get it home, back to my room in the apartment. When shopping is done for me, it’s done.

She tried to tell me a bit about the eider ducks, whose feathers were sewn into the duvet I had just purchased. She tried to tell me about the men and women in Iceland who collect their feathers, the feathers the eider ducks have used to line their nests. But I didn’t want to hear her talk about it. I was here for my own purposes.

How could she know really anything important about the ducks, about me, about the sheets? How could she know, really know anything about the feathers that were sewn, hand-sewn by old Danish men in wool caps, into the feather-cloud pockets of the eiderdown. She didn’t know that they weren’t just any feathers wrenched off any old eider duck. She didn’t know that the feathers I was purchasing were the feathers that the eider duck mothers make their nests with, only those. She was much too young to understand that the mother eider duck rips her warmest, her softest feathers from her own breast in order to make nests with them, the feathers, for her eggs. The girl was much too young to understand that these feathers were the only thing warm enough, soft enough, right enough to keep a mother eider duck’s eggs alive in the freezing dead nothing northern winds of Iceland. The only thing. I wanted to laugh when I saw the eiderdowns stacked up in the room in the back of the shop because what comfort in this world is not made from the bodies of mothers. Their actual bodies.