The Fish Can Sing (24 page)

“Here is the gold coin,” I said again.

“Oh, just put it in your pocket, old chap,” he said.

“Jesus!” said little Miss Gú
múnsen. “I wish Daddy could see this. And Mummy.”

He left me standing, in the street outside Fri
riksen’s baker’s shop with the gold coin in my hand. He himself strolled off in the other direction with his cane in one hand and leading little Miss Gú
múnsen and her two loaves with the other. But when he had gone a short distance he suddenly remembered something and turned on his heel and called out to me as I stood there with the gold coin still in my hand:

“I clean forgot,” he shouted, “to ask you to give my greetings to your grandmother. And also to Pastor Jóhann. Tell him that he was quite right: there is only the one note – and it is pure.”

I have forgotten all about the woman from Landbrot in the excitement over this great concert at Austurvöllur – which never came to anything, of course. The visitor who had come to see the rest of us had to sail away the day before he was due to sing, naturally, because he was committed to the wider world for greater things which could not wait. But the visitor who had come to see the woman from Landbrot, he stayed.

“Learn never to look forward to anything,” said the woman. “It is the beginning of knowing how to endure everything.”

“What would your children say if they knew of you lying in the midst of this noisy company here in the mid-loft at Brekkukot?” said my grandmother.

“I like hearing their voices,” said the woman. “I always dread it when someone goes out.”

“Well, we have nothing but chatter to offer you, either,” said my grandmother.

Then the woman said, “My little boy, who could never bear to be away from his mother, and my little girl, who now owns twelve sheep – I know that they would never expect me to be so unkind as to die before their eyes just when our Lykla is at last about to start giving milk – we who haven’t owned a cow for seven whole years.”

“I see that you have hung up your tunic, Commandant,” said Captain Hogenson. “Tell us the latest lies before you go to sleep.”

“I have lost the wretched cat which has been wandering around my place down by the harbour for a month,” said the superintendent. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the authorities have hanged it. Developments are so rapid nowadays. Excuse me, but whose is that gold coin lying on the shelf above you, Captain Hogensen?”

“It is Álfgrímur’s gold coin,” said Captain Hogensen. “People
are beginning to give even gold coins away nowadays. One doesn’t dare give a child anything less than half a cow’s worth now. Come on now, make up a few real sensations.”

“No sensations,” said the superintendent. “Not yet. It’s only here in the mid-loft that anything happens. Anything new with you in the cubicle there?”

“I suppose I’m rather like the cat,” the woman called out from her cubby hole. “It gets lost in between times and then turns up when it has been given up.”

“That’s right,” said the superintendent; he was taking off his socks on the edge of Runólfur Jónsson’s bed. “Cats have nine lives. Time enough to mourn when we have seen Pussy hanged. The real sensation, Hogensen, would be if it were now to be proved that there was a life after the lives of the cat. But I haven’t heard that yet. Not today, my friend. But perhaps tomorrow, my friend.”

Runólfur Jónsson, whom everyone had thought to be asleep, turned on his other side and spoke up: “The woman who eats the ling,” he said, “ought to take a trip out to Ness to see the miracles.”

“Well, I don’t give a rap for the cat,” said Captain Hogensen. “I only care about ticks, my good men – poli-ticks. Ha-ha-ha-ha. I don’t call anything news if it isn’t about politics.”

“I understand, my friend,” said the superintendent. “We understand. We know you are on board warships. That’s very important. But I too have my place, my dear Hogensen. Creation is incomparable as far as it goes.”

“And I could never hold with grumblers when I was navigating,” said Captain Hogensen. “They cursed every day except Sundays. Because they got soup every week-day.
Den helvedes suppe
, they used to say. But on Sundays there was a bit of pork in it; and then they said,
Lovet vare Herren den Almægtige.”

“Precisely,” said the superintendent.
“Lovet være Herren den Almægtige
. Except that I would say these beautiful words every day except Sundays; and that is because I have never been able to eat pork. I have only to smell pork and I am done for. And now I’m going to bed. May God give you all a good night. And remember to tell little Álfgrímur when he wakes up tomorrow morning that I have put the gold coin aside so that it does not get lost.”

And the woman who ate ling went on living. For a long time she would reach out for the door and pull it to while she was having her attacks, because she did not want her groans and cries to disturb the man who commanded warships. When the attack had passed she would push the door open again. But if any visitors arrived with news about great events, or if someone was telling an episode from
The Lives of Great Icelanders
, or if some cheerful fellow started reciting verses about seafaring, or horses, the woman would throw her door wide open. She always said something to me whenever I walked past; she invariably asked about the weather, about the direction of the wind that day, or whether I thought it would manage to stay dry. But it was a tricky business answering her on these matters.

Once I said to her, “The rain has set in.”

“What absolute nonsense!” said the woman. “To the best of my knowledge it was dry this morning.”

“Look out of the window,” I said.

“I know,” said the woman. “It’s pouring at present. But no one says that the rain has set in unless the stones haven’t dried for a week.”

Late one evening she asked me the same question; I was at pains to be accurate and said, “It was coming down this morning.”

“It’s terrible, the way you talk!” said the woman. “And the sheep already gathered for the autumn! You never say it’s coming down unless it rains while the hay is still being dried.”

So it was little wonder that I suspected that something lay behind it when this philological woman asked me one day, “Tell me, my boy, can you read and write?”

I could not bring myself to deny it, but on the other hand did not dare to make much of it.

To be able to read and write has never really been considered education in Iceland, any more than taking dried cods’-heads apart; not even among the lowest of the low. In my time, children were not generally sent to school until after they had read all the Icelandic Sagas at home, about forty books in all; but though I had often heard visitors reading aloud parts of the Icelandic Sagas, I myself had read no others than those which happened
to be in our house because someone had left them behind.

Even though I tried because of this to make as little as possible of my reading and writing ability, nonetheless the woman decided there and then to ask me to go down town for her and buy her a pen for half an
eyrir
and stationery for two
aurar
. No sooner had I returned with these implements than she began to dictate a letter. I should make it clear that I had not managed to achieve any great familiarity with orthography, and therefore my spelling was not unlike that of learned men in Iceland round about the year 1100. This woman’s letter was my very first attempt at calligraphy; I am thus one of the people who invented orthography in Iceland. I shall not reproduce this orthography here, but the substance of what I wrote down to the woman’s dictation was something like this:

“To Nonni and Gunna, they are my children, you see. Our Lykla will be calving in autumn; we have always longed for a cow, you see. When she calves, I want to ask you to be kind to her. I know she has been getting ready for a long time. I think now, since the hay-harvest was so good, that we should have the courage to add another head to our stock. If it’s a heifer, we should call her Rose. But it’s not easy to rear a heifer, Gunna dear. When our Lykla has calved …”

It was going to be a long-drawn-out business to compose this document. The woman was so fastidious in her choice of words that she made me cross it all out as fast as I wrote it down.

“We’ll tear up this awful rubbish,” she would say. And the few lines we had been struggling to compose for most of the day were consigned to oblivion. We went on like that for days on end. We never succeeded in expressing meticulously enough the kind of slops the calf was to be fed. By nightfall we were so exhausted that we were almost in a coma; and then we tore up the whole day’s output. This woman must surely have been descended from Snorri Sturluson. One thing is certain, that she never deviated from the most stringent standards of Icelandic prose style. Often when I myself am writing something, this woman comes to my mind again. Unfortunately, she failed to realize that one can set one’s literary standards so high that it becomes impossible to utter
a single word or groan except at the very most to say
A-a-a
. Often these letter-writing sessions would end with the woman taking a fit. I would leave the cubicle, defeated, with the pen and stationery, and close the door. Captain Hogensen would take a pinch of snuff from the medicine bottle he kept under his pillow and say, “I think the time is coming for me to brush my coat.”

October passed, and there was no change inside the cubicle; except that the woman only became paler and more lifeless. Until finally the time came when she became transparent; she underwent that transformation, that transfiguration of countenance that sometimes comes to sufferers when the last of their strength ebbs away.

One day after the frost had come, this woman from Landbrot asked to see Björn of Brekkukot; she wanted to give him some money she kept in her skirt pocket, so that he could buy some wood to make a coffin for her.

He said, “Well, I have never nailed a box together except perhaps for fish. But I can perhaps get hold of a handyman.”

Not to make a long story of it, they found someone handy with a hammer, and work on the coffin started in the store-shed. My grandfather and the handyman he had got hold of measured the woman with a ruler. I took part in this work in various ways, handing them nails and other small things and finally holding the little jar of lamp-black which was applied to the wood as a sign of mourning. The woman asked incessantly how the work on the coffin was going; she had somehow got the notion that the coffin would be too short, and there were times, when the pain left her, that she was distinctly worried about this. She made me measure her with a length of twine and then sent me out to the store-shed with the twine to compare it with the coffin. But by that time the coffin was finished and the handyman would answer:

“Tell the old crone from me, my lad, that if she is too long for the coffin we’ll cut her down to size. Stranger things happened in the Sagas.”

“When our Lykla calves,” said the woman –

“When our Lykla calves;

Yes, when our Lykla calves:

If it’s a bull,

If it’s a little bull-calf,