The Fish Can Sing (26 page)

“I didn’t know grandmother ever had a sister,” I said.

“Your grandmother’s sister died more than fifty years ago,” said grandfather. “But it is partly because of her that your grandmother is with me. I was fond of your grandmother’s late sister.”

“Did grandmother maybe come to you when her sister died?” I asked.

He replied, “Your grandmother’s sister was never with me. And your grandmother was married and living away in the east.”

Then I suddenly remembered that my grandmother had told me that she had once travelled all the way from the east over the mountains to the south here.

“Indeed!” he said. “Tut tut! She lost her husband in the spring fishing season. He drowned in Thorlákshöfn one Easter. And then there was no one left.”

“Eh?” I said, “no one left? Why was there no one left? Where were – the others?”

“There was nothing left,” said my grandfather. “She had had three sons, and lost them all. The last of her sons was on his bier when his father perished. She had given them all the same name; she was always a little obstinate. They were all called Grímur, after her grandfather. Most children here in Iceland died in those days; if it was not something else, it was the diphtheria. But when the youngest son was dead, and she had lost the father as well, the same Easter, well, it was obvious that she had to give up her home. Since her husband was gone too, naturally there was nothing else to be done. So I invited her to come here to Reykjavík, if she wanted to, because I had known her sister a little. And so she left there and came here.”

“I thought that grandmother had never known anything more dangerous than the Soga Stream,” I said.

“When your poor mother wanted to christen you Álfur, years ago, your grandmother insisted that you were also to be called Grímur. That is how obstinate she is. And for that reason she does not want you not to drown in the Soga Stream when you go to fetch Gráni home.”

“I shall try to be careful, grandfather,” I said.

Then he started again: “As I was saying, your grandmother has been talking to me. She says that according to Helgesen, the teacher, you can learn. We want you to have an education.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Her people in the past were all educated men,” he said.

“Then what will I be made to do?” I said. “Will I not be allowed to come out fishing with you again?”

“We were thinking of sending you to school, my boy, and making you learn what they call Latin. The idea is that you start in the autumn, if you are accepted. I went to see Pastor Johann; we have got a University student from Copenhagen to prepare you. There was some talk of you starting tomorrow.”

I asked, “Are you then not going to wake me tomorrow morning to go fishing?”

He replied, “Your grandmother wishes you well, my boy. And so do I, even though I am ignorant.”

And with these words he put out his oar and we pushed off from the rock and rowed ashore.

In Stephan G. Stephansson’s biography it says that when the poet was a foster-child up north in Skagafjör
ur he saw some young men riding over the mountains on their way to school in the south one autumn. He was so deeply distressed by his own misery at not being able to go to school himself and become an educated man that he threw himself down on the heather out there on the moor and wept for a whole day. I have always found it difficult to understand that story. The thought of becoming a Latin scholar had never once occurred to me. I had never been impressed by seeing schoolboys walking around with their tattered books under their arm, nor had I ever wanted to be in their shoes. And now that I had been informed that I was to go and start learning Latin, I inwardly felt as if my grandfather had told me to become an organ-grinder or a scissors-sharpener – the sort of riffraff that sometimes came over from Denmark during the summer.

It came like a thunderclap out of a clear blue sky. All my plans for eternal life at Brekkukot were destroyed. My joy in existence was shattered. The Great Wall of China, within which I was the Son of Heaven himself, was breached – and not at the blast of a trumpet, but at a word. How bitter that it should have been my grandfather who spoke the word that ruined for me our turnstile-gate at Brekkukot. I broke down. I had not cried since I was small, because we did not cry at Brekkukot. I felt that nothing could ever console me again. I rowed and rowed with
all my strength to keep pace with my grandfather, and cried and cried. When we reached the shore, he said:

“Bear in mind, my boy, that you have to take the place of your mother’s Álfur and the three Grímurs of your grandmother.”

I wonder what my grandfather Björn of Brekkukot really thought that Latin was? Did he think it was the magic Sesame which opened all cliffs in Iceland? If so, I am not at all sure that he was all that far from the truth. Where fish leaves off in Iceland, Latin takes over.

In the old days there were more Latin-educated men in Iceland, relatively speaking, than in most other countries. Latin was the badge of nobility in Iceland. A beggar who could lard his speech with Latin was always considered a better man than the one who gave him alms. No one was considered really and truly literate in Iceland unless he knew Latin.

Until this day, the world that I lived in had seemed so sufficient to me that I had never wanted any other. I had everything. Everything in our world was in its own way perfect and complete in my eyes. It had never crossed my mind that Captain Hogensen or Runólfur Jónsson or the superintendent lacked anything in fullness of stature. Hitherto I had believed that my grandmother had never had any Grímurs except me, Álfgrímur. And I had thought that just as she was everything to me, so I had been sufficient for her just as I was; but now I suddenly learned that she had had three Grímurs, in the hope, as far as I could see, of bringing up at least one who would know Latin like her forefathers; and because that had come to nothing she had travelled all the way over Hellishei
i and found me here in the south and reared me in the hope that I would learn Latin in place of her own Grímurs. I could scarcely help feeling that I had rather been tricked.

But I cried only on that one morning, and then silently began my education. And little by little I somehow became reconciled to those three Grímurs who had more or less been wished on to me during a fishing-trip. But on that selfsame day a new course was set, as it were; and a new poem. I took my leave of the cod and the lumpfish, the cow and the horse, the bluebottle and the hen, the low fence that was drowning in tansies, and the horse-daisy; and the harmony of silver and copper – that too faded into the distance.

But when it came to the point, it was not just Latin that I needed instruction in; I had to buy all sorts of other books as well, some of them in languages whose names I did not even know. In Danish, there was the book that told you how many bones there are in a dog. There was also the famous book by Geir Zoëga which starts, “I have a book, you have a pen, there is no ink in the inkstand “. These languages, however, were scarcely considered a formal part of education; I was ordered to learn them for myself while having my meals. The only thing that mattered at all in education was to know how to decline and conjugate, that is to say to inflect Latin nouns according to their cases, and conjugate Latin verbs. These declensions and conjugations were not unlike the magic Sesames I mentioned earlier. In addition I had to learn a piece called The Greater Multiplication Table, which the poet Benedikt Gröndai in his autobiography called the Muck-Rigmarole.

By the time midsummer approached, these rigmaroles came pouring out of me of their own accord at the sight of the blue-faced student who was instructing me at the instigation of Pastor Johann. When Pastor Johann came to see us at the start of the hay-making, I declined for him all the classes of nouns in three genders, all the way from
mensa
to
dies
, and recited four different subjunctives of verbs in all
temporibus
into the bargain. Pastor Jóhann was so delighted with all this that he said that anyone who could decline correctly could also think correctly; and anyone who could think correctly could live correctly – with God’s help. I was now to try for entry into the second class of the Grammar School that autumn.

I want to make it clear that although I was reconciled to do all this to please my grandmother, for many years thereafter I
harboured a resentment over the slow severing of my roots that my schooling brought about; for a long time, half of me went on trying to shelter in this maternal lap, full of mistrust and fear towards everything outside: other smells, other people, other fish. A certain apathy settled over me during this period of my life, a dull lethargy that no joy of youth could dispel. Strangers went past me like ghosts which try to take shape but only become tufts of wool. People’s talk became in my ears merely sound wafted in through the window at dusk, of which you can only distinguish a word here and there. I liked nothing better than to sit on grandmother’s hearthstones while she was cooking, just to talk to her about the weather, or to hear her mutter some ancient ballad or recite a psalm into her knitting.

I have been told that at school I was the sort of simpleton who suffered from dux-disease. It is reckoned in Iceland that those who are afflicted by this disease can never become anything other than drunkards, journalists, or junior clerks. For my own part, since I was not allowed to become a lumpfisherman I did not care in the slightest what I became; I was not interested in anything particular, I wanted nothing. It could well be that my mental inertia during this period was a help to my capacity for memorizing. I learned every conceivable thing by rote quite automatically and without caring. I was spiritually as well as physically in a state of suspended adolescence. Lessons came welling up out of me as if I were talking in my sleep. I could reel off the bones in a dog at the drop of a hat, any time at all, just as if I had them in my pockets; if I had been woken up at three o’clock in the morning, I would have detailed each and every one of them, just as if I had been lying on them.

This spiritual defect used to be considered intelligence. But it also led to my becoming popular with my instructors, and this “intelligence” undoubtedly saved me from the embarrassments I think I would otherwise have brought upon myself wherever I showed my face during my adolescence. Photographs taken of me during these school years made me look like a fugitive from a home for mental defectives. I grew much too tall very quickly from all the liver and fish-roes at Brekkukot – and the succulent fat lumpfish did not make things any better. I was one of the
tallest boys in the school when I entered the second class, in my confirmation year; for instance, my legs were so long that they always got in my way when I walked, and my arms hung on me like some tatty pieces of luggage that I did not know how to get rid of. My face showed no trace whatever of a smile, just as if the soul had been drained from it leaving nothing behind except the anxiety it felt about its own emptiness: a life-prisoner peering out through the bars. Two hundred hairs round the crown of my head invariably stood straight up like a broom, and no power on earth could quell them or sleek them down until Time itself took a hand and I began to grow bald.

I shall try not to bore everyone with too much talk about the appearance of this boy who came from a turf cottage and was now to start stalking the varnished floors of the Grammar School with the sons of merchants, civil servants, and landowners; but nevertheless I feel I cannot completely ignore my boots, and anyway they come into the story again to a certain extent later on.

I was provided with a pair of boots which some peasant had left behind in our house when he set off for America twenty-five years earlier. I was told to wear them out that winter, since my grandmother and grandfather had at long last given up all hope that the man would return to fetch them. But it was easier said than done to wear out these boots. I am not going to say whether these boots were ugly or handsome, for people’s taste in footwear is very varied; shoes of all sorts of shapes and sizes have been considered beautiful in this world, each in turn; once upon a time a shoe was considered the more beautiful the longer a toe it had, until the toe stood straight up like a spike as high as a man’s knee; but at other times the world will hear of nothing but open-toed shoes.