The Fish Can Sing (17 page)

One midsummer morning, when the soft clouds were disintegrating over Mount Esja, Kristín of Hríngjarabær had just risen from her bed and was going outside to feed the hens as she always did first thing in the morning; and what did she see but a gentleman in an overcoat standing on the paving at the door of Hríngjarabær and having a good look all around? At first the old woman thought that this was a foreigner who had arrived to take pictures of the funny life led by people in Iceland, where one could still see, in among the timber-houses with their corrugated-iron covering, turf cottages with dandelions and buttercups on the roof, and horse-daisies growing between the stones in the paving, and where people still wore the same kind of home-made moccasins which peasants in Europe used to wear a thousand years ago when towns did not exist and therefore not cobblers either. But this was not one of the lesser gentry, judging by his overcoat, which could scarcely have cost less than the price of a cow; and a hat like that must have reached the best part of a suckling lamb.

“Godmorgen,”
said Kristín of Hríngjarabær in Danish.

And at that this great and distinguished person turned to the woman and took her in his arms. It was her son.

I would point out that although this is how Gar
ar Hólm’s return was described to me, I did not hear the story in our house. I have said it often, and I say it again, that regardless of what I myself may have thought from the beginning, and regardless of what other people in Brekkukot may have thought, Gar
ar Hólm and his travels and fame and anything else that concerned him were simply not considered news in our house. It may well be that the two old women needed to slip across to see one another for a private chat round about this time, but scarcely more often than usual. But I have no doubt at all that they found it a complicated problem, I am tempted to say an insoluble social problem, to have in the family someone so at odds with his environment in size and shape as Gar
ar Hólm.

I was accustomed to having strangers who came to the capital staying with us overnight, and so it came as rather a surprise to
me that Gar
ar Hólm did not ask to stay the night with us at Brekkukot. I mentioned this to my grandmother.

She replied, “How could you ever imagine that Kristín of Hríngjarabær’s son would stay at our house?”

I understood this to mean that obviously Gar
ar Hólm would be staying with his own mother. And one day soon afterwards, when I was sent over to Hríngjarabær with some milk for Kristín, I began to peer all around me to see if I could spy any evidence of the presence of a visitor.

“What are you looking for, child?” said Kristín.

“I thought perhaps there was someone here,” I said.

“Who did you think was here?” she asked.

“I thought perhaps that Gar
ar Hólm was here,” I said.

“Who has taught you to mention him?” she asked.

“Everyone is talking about it,” I said.

“Talking about what?” said the woman. “And who is everyone? Certainly not Björn of Brekkukot.”

“There’s something about him in the
Ísafold,”
I said.

“In the
Ísafold!”
said the woman. “God help the child, he’s started to read newspapers. Here’s a lump of candy for you, and off you go home. And don’t go dawdling on Archangel Gabriel’s tombstone, in case your grandmother needs you for a message. Gar
ar Hólm! The very idea! The things the child says! If he were not living in the Governor’s house, my boy, he would obviously be staying at the Hotel Iceland where it costs a suckling lamb to sleep for a night and a cow to sleep for a week.”

A reply like that was not exactly calculated to add haste to the steps of a thoughtful chap on his way through the churchyard. It was a mathematical problem, really. If it cost a suckling lamb to sleep for a night and a cow to sleep for a week, what an unimaginable host of sheep and cattle we must own at Brekkukot! On the other hand, if it ever occurred to my grandfather to move house with us all from Brekkukot down to the Hotel Iceland (which actually was called “Hotel d’Islande” in print), including Runólfur and Captain Hogensen and even the superintendent as well, and we all then began to sleep there, and slept for perhaps a month, then things would begin to get tricky. And yet despite
all this, the Hotel d’Islande was not grand enough for Gar
ar Hólm; it was beneath his dignity to stay with a lesser man than the Danish King’s Chief Minister in Iceland, the one whom Kristín called the Governor, the man who had no horsehair.

“White ravens are rare,” said Björn of Brekkukot one morning when the sun glistened on the fish-scales in the mire round our house and two important-looking visitors were edging their way through our turnstile-gate.

“Hullo, my dear Georg, and welcome home. And hullo to you, little Gú
múnsen. Well, well, it’s enough to make the lice drop dead from my head! Condescend to enter the house.”

The man my grandfather called “little Gú
múnsen” was in fact none other than Gú
múnsen the merchant himself, the owner of Gú
múnsen’s Store where I had got all the raisins on the strength of a dubious family relationship with a great man; and “my dear Georg”, this foreigner with the broad-brimmed hat and the eyes, nose, and mouth of an eagle – this was the great man himself. It was no wonder that I was too tongue-tied to say hullo.