The Fish Can Sing (34 page)

While I was setting the candlestick on the edge of the hatch the singer wormed his way out of the cocoon of newspapers; he had a special way of doing it so that the papers were not dislodged. Then he folded them all up neatly and laid them aside with great care, slipped his shoes on and put on his collar and tie. He took a small comb in a case out of his pocket and combed his hair with practised gestures, and ran his fingertips down the creases of his trousers: and now this was a man that no one would have believed was staying anywhere other than at a luxury hotel, if not in the house of the Governor himself. I have seldom been so relieved as I was then that it was not considered proper for a youngster like myself to speak to an older man without being spoken to first. I sat down on the edge of the hatch and brought out my pair of pliers and busied myself with pulling nails out of my boots.

“Listen, friend,” said Gar
ar Hólm when he was quite ready. “As I told you the other day, I thought you were standing too close to the edge of the grave while you were singing. If I may be permitted to offer you some good advice, the singer should stand at a suitable distance from the grave.”

“But if it had only been a sea-scorpion?” I said.

“In that case, it’s splendid,” he said. “But anyway, thank you very much for the singing. Always sing just as you sang that day. Sing as if you were singing over a sea-scorpion. Any other singing is false. God only hears that one note. Anyone who sings for other people’s entertainment is a fool, but not quite such a fool as the man who sings for his own entertainment. I want you to be quite clear about that right from the start, my lad, because I too was brought up here in the churchyard, just like you.”

“Do you think I could learn to sing, then?” I asked.

“Tcha, no one learns to sing,” he said. “On the other hand, I see that you are rather badly shod, and I want to give you my shoes.”

“That – that’s quite unnecessary,” I said.

“No,” he said, “it’s not unnecessary. We are friends. You sing. I give you shoes. And help yourself, here’s some meat-paste. Or would you rather have some Danish pastry?”

And so we two singers up in the hayloft ate the snack that Kristín of Hríngjarabær had bought for the mouse. And there was no getting out of it – I had to put his shoes on, and he changed into my battered pair.

“I want to ask you to do me a little favour,” he said. “It is to lock the door carefully on the inside and sleep here in the hayloft with me tonight. I want to ask you to be on your guard if anyone knocks at the door, and to go down and say to anyone that asks that Gar
ar Hólm the opera singer is not here.”

When I had complied with his request and locked the door of the byre on the inside, and was back up in the hayloft, he picked up the conversation where he had left off.

“Dear friend,” he said. “You asked me whether you could learn to sing. I don’t know. It could well be that you have the makings of a singer. It could well be that the world will give you the best that it has: glory, power, honour, what else is there? Palaces and parks, perhaps? Or merry widows? And then what?”

“I wanted so much to ask you to teach me just a tiny bit about singing,” I said, “even if it were only to sing
Der Erlkönig
for me just once.”

“There is only the one note, which is the whole note,” said
Gar
ar Hólm. “And he who has heard it does not need to ask for anything. My own singing doesn’t matter. But remember one thing for me: when the world has given you everything, when the merciless yoke of fame has been laid on your shoulders and its brand has been stamped on your brow as indelibly as on the man who was convicted of the worst crime in the world – remember then that you have no other refuge than this one prayer: ‘God, take it all away from me – except one note’.”

Someone was trying to open the door. I woke up at the creaking of the warped door and the screeching of the battered hinges; I could not remember clearly where I was, but I felt I had not been sleeping for very long. The smell of hay was heavy in my nostrils. High in the gable-wall, right under the ridge, there was an open, square-shaped window, and through it streamed the red rays of the rising sun, swirling with dust-motes. What on earth was I doing here?

The door downstairs went on creaking. I looked around me in the hayloft and saw that I was alone. How had I managed to get here? Then I remembered that I had been sent to see to the mouse. But when I looked around there was neither jug nor plate in sight; nowhere any sign that anyone else had been here except I; not even a scrap of the great London
Times
. It must all have been a dream, I thought. But if someone finds me here, what will he think? At long last the door was pushed open and a young female voice called out, “Where are you?”

“Here,” I replied, getting to my feet, and began to clamber down the stairs.

And who should be standing there on the threshold in the crimson rays of a new morning but little Miss Gú
múnsen, this plump and glowing girl? It was quite plain to me that she was disappointed at finding me there.

“Jesus!” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Are you alone?” she asked.

I said yes, and asked in return, “What do you want here?”

“I must be mad,” she said. “Jesus! Are you quite sure there’s no one else in there?”

She ducked her head under the lintel and squeezed in through the doorway, clambered halfway up the stair and peered into the hayloft. Then she went back to the doorway again in despair.

“Tell me what you were doing here,” she said again.

“N-nothing,” I said. “I just fell asleep.”

“Alone?” she asked. “Are you sure there was no one else there?”

I replied, “None other than those who sometimes visit people in their sleep.”

“Did you dream about someone, then?” she asked.

“That’s another matter,” I said. “But now I’m awake.”

“I haven’t slept a wink all night,” she said, and was now nearly in tears.

I asked, why not?

“Why not? What business is that of yours?” she said. “Because my daddy and my mummy locked me in my room, of course. Until I managed to crawl out through the window when it began to grow light.”

She flopped down on the flat stone outside the door, with her hair all tangled and tear-stains on her face, completely exhausted. Her clothes were loose on her and she had made no attempt to fasten them; she was almost like some shapeless bundle inside her dress as she dropped carelessly there on the door-slab, with these big knees sticking out from under the hem of the dress; she put her elbows on her knees and buried her face in her hands and went on muttering the name of the Saviour. At last she tore herself out of her despair, took her hands away from her face, looked at me in sudden anger, and said in the kind of tone that went with the words:

“You’re in league with him! Where is he? Bring him here!”

“Whom?” I said.

“Whom?” she repeated. “Whom do you think? Do you think
I’m an idiot? Do you think all this pretending is doing any good? What has been happening tonight?”

I replied, “Nothing that I know of. And I am not obliged to account to you or anyone else for what I dream.”

“You have always been a beastly pig,” she said, and looked down at my feet. “You’ve stolen his shoes! I could well believe that you’ve murdered him!”

It was not until I myself had actually seen the shoes I was wearing, these glossy shoes from a foreign land, that I was convinced that I had not been dreaming; my shoes were more remarkable than any dream.

“If you are asking me about one particular man,” I said, “I know nothing except this: that he gave me his new shoes, and he got my old shoes.”

“And where did he go?” she asked.

“I think he must have gone to the warship,” I said.

“There isn’t any warship,” she said. “Ah-ha-ha-ha! You’re lying! Uh-hu-hu-hu! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Ih-hi-hi-hi!”

I said nothing, and let her howl to her heart’s content. To be honest, I felt it a little improper to be exchanging words with a person who came out with the sort of wild accusations that this girl had done against me; we in Brekkukot were not used to this sort of talk. She went on pouring out her anger and despair into her tear-drenched hands something like this: “And my daddy who for years and years has been paying his bills at the best and most expensive hotels so as to make him famous throughout the whole world. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Thousands and thousands. A million. The gold he scatters around, it’s all Daddy’s gold. That’s how he treats us. That’s how he disgraces us when it really matters. And the
Ísafold
, which my daddy keeps going with these miserable few
krónur
which the fishing yields – that’s the paper that Gar
ar Hólm makes a national laughing-stock. Dear Jesus! Oh, God! And he’s the one who had promised to show me the whole world. I could well believe that he really is married to that hag of a fishwife with the lice-ridden children.”

I was slowly beginning to realize that in circumstances like these it is difficult to communicate with people at all; words cease to
mean anything at all when people begin to bawl. As soon as the scale becomes natural sound, all music ceases. I made no reply, and looked silently at this plump girl sitting in a heap on the threshold of this creaking old cow-shed, so decayed through and through and dried up and long since ceased to be a house.