The Fish Can Sing (37 page)

“When I was talking to her,” he said, “she would often not hear for hours at a time what I was saying, but just stare out into the blue; so I tried putting her into a trance. And when she was hypnotized, I took hold of her little finger and began to question her. And then it turned out that in another life she had looked after goats and played the flute: that is to say, she had been Chloë. Later she was born again as a famous courtesan in Rome. But that was only the beginning. All around this woman was an unbroken, strange world. She had been born into the world yet again, probably because of some trifling peccadillo in her former life, or even some untimely act of kindness, just like the Master Santajama who had to be born again and again for eight thousand years, sometimes as an ox or some other domestic animal, because he had taken pity on a woman who suffered from nymphomania.”

It had accordingly become the vocation and life’s work of this scholarly gentleman from the Thingeyjar district to support this
woman who was bed-ridden most of the time because she was too spiritually advanced to live in this world. He had married her when she was sixteen and cared for her ever since.

His mind was completely taken up with how he could best serve this mystic creature; her origin in space and time obsessed him to such an extent that he paid scarcely any heed to other matters; he worshipped the woman in the way that is given to idolaters more than any other religious believers, and to those believers who have their god in substantial form rather than in books or dogma. But he eschewed no learning, however remote or far-fetched, in his quest to understand this higher being, this incarnation as he called her, and to acquire whatever material benefits were likely to make her existence tolerable in this mundane world in which she was condemned to live for yet another span. As was mentioned previously, the
Secret Doctrine
had been of some guidance to him in the matter; but that book had reached the north of Iceland only recently. He made every effort to find capable doctors for the woman; but this couple considered all true medical art to be supernatural and magical, even the most conventional mixtures, and the husband never tired of trying out on his wife new prayers and magic formulas of various kinds, such as breathing-exercises from yoga and drinking salt water through the nostrils, as well as laying-on of hands and many other ploys that will be referred to later.

In just the same way as the woman was to her husband the kind of phenomenon that never ends and which no one can ever fully understand, so did she look up to her husband as the only man who was capable of guiding her life in her chronic illness and in the absolute dichotomy that had developed between the coarse substance of mortality and the spiritual maturity her soul had reached after many reincarnations. The husband was his wife’s sole and utter refuge and stay, even though he had neither house nor home to offer her, much less a marriage-bed, and scarcely even a scrap of clothing to cover her nakedness, and had now moved with her into our mid-loft at Brekkukot away in the south.

And however much the woman was to her husband a Greek shepherdess, Horace’s mistress, and a few other things that have
not been recorded yet, she was probably above everything else a soul – the soul itself; I think I can state categorically that if anyone here in Iceland in my youth owned a soul, it was Ebenezer Draummann. Acquaintance with this couple was at least bound to raise doubts in every intelligent person as to whether having a soul is the monopoly of fish, as some modern philosophers believe. And even so I am well aware that to call this woman her husband’s soul is saying very little, for she was also his flower, his bird, his fish, his jewel of jewels, saint, angel, and archangel. Her husband had a little Oriental mat, a prayer mat, which he always carried under his arm and which he called his all; he would spread the mat on the floor beside his wife’s bed and take up Buddhist postures. Often he would sit for hours at a time on the mat at his wife’s bedside and practise breathing-exercises from yoga; he would try to concentrate all his thoughts to be able to move some inanimate object that was lying on a certain shelf somewhere up north, and transmit thoughts telepathically to the Masters in the East, and practise taking leave of his body. He also drank great quantities of salt water through his nostrils. At night-time he would lie down on this prayer mat and sleep on it beside his wife’s bed.

I listened with only half an ear to Draummann’s long lectures about this woman’s reincarnations and transmigrations as I sat there, an immature coltish boy, with my schoolbooks on my knees; and since Captain Hogensen was now so hard of hearing and Runólfur Jónsson had gone to sleep, the audience-numbers would have been rather below average if our superintendent had not occasionally arrived late at night to listen. He was the sort of man who misunderstood no doctrines and said yes to most people as if he believed them, even though he himself usually followed only what the bee in his bonnet inspired him to do.

And Ebenezer Draummann went on talking about his wife:

“Invariably when I tried to give her some lessons in arithmetic or Danish,” he said, “I saw from her eyes that she was miles away. And before I knew it she had started writing down some weird symbols on the paper in front of her, or else on the table itself. If she were left to herself she could go on with this strange script
for hours at a time. Her mother told me that if she got hold of a needle and thread she would immediately start sewing symbols on to her handkerchiefs or even her clothes if there were nothing better to hand. I took it upon myself to try to get hold of every likely and unlikely alphabet in the hope that I might succeed in interpreting these symbols, but all to no avail. I sent some specimens of the script to learned men both in Iceland and abroad to ask what it was. Most of them never replied, probably because they thought I was not learned enough myself; but finally I heard from one dean who pointed out to me that these were not alphabetical letters in our sense of the term, but some sort of pictorial script not unlike the Chinese lettering on a tea-urn from Hong Kong. Another scholar said he thought they were pictures of insects, and a clergyman on the east coast thought they represented reindeer-moss. Just about this time I had started delving a little into the
Secret Doctrine and
had come to the conclusion that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, as the poet said; so from that moment I started saving up for stamps so that I could write to oracles in distant lands. The smattering of English that I had learned in secondary school came in useful here, and now I wrote to both spiritualists and occultists in London and laid before them specimens of my Chloë’s symbols; but not a single person in England proved to be learned enough to interpret these runes. And then at last it occurred to me to address myself directly to the sages of the Orient; and finally I received a reply from no less a man than that renowned bishop, scholar, and higher incarnation, Dr Leadbeater of Australia. He thought the script so remarkable that he consulted one of those almost transcendental Masters of the
Secret Doctrine
who have permission to read the Akashic Records – and that book has more knowledge collected in it than any other book, because one finds recorded in it everything, both great and small, that has ever happened in the universe since it was first created, and one needs to have taken a fearful number of degrees before one is allowed to pry into it. I have been led to understand that it was a profound Indian higher incarnation who finally discovered the truth about the script: it is the script of the Lepsky
tongue, which was spoken in a kingdom which flourished at the roots of the Himalayas some forty thousand years ago. And the sages thought they could deduce from the script that my wife Chloë had been a princess in that kingdom.”

E. Draummann reckoned he had no other task in life than to cure this supernatural woman of the supernatural ailments that plagued her, and he had not only become a doctor himself from experimenting on her, as has already been described, but he also left no stone unturned to obtain the aid of other health experts in the matter, just in case one of them might be harbouring some method which might be of use. No sooner had he arrived in Reykjavík than he started to seek out all kinds of healers. He was such an artist at talking about his wife to lay people and learned alike that no one could help starting to brood about her; and he talked about her with those robust “k’s” and “p’s” that they use in the north and which are always so much admired by the more soft-spoken southerners.

He began by dragging up to our mid-loft all the more accessible doctors in the capital, the horse-doctors, blood-letters, and enema-givers. He also managed to lure in certificated doctors who wanted to see what sort of a woman it was who had been a shepherdess in Greece, a princess in the Himalayas, and Horace’s mistress, and was descended, what’s more, from the Langahlí
family; they gave her strong-smelling mixtures that made Captain Hogensen and even Runólfur Jónsson sneeze; and on one occasion the chief medical officer himself came along with his cane, lorgnettes, and high collar. There was a female herbalist who came too, carrying an alpenstock and wearing a hood and smoking a pipe. Finally, Ebenezer Draummann got hold of that obsolete race of physicians who applied turf, not forgetting those who specialized in dung, who were then unfortunately beginning to die out but who deserve to have books written about them. Some writers maintain that the special purpose of medical treatment is to comfort the doctors themselves, and one thing is certain, that doctors are always extraordinarily keen to treat one another. E. Draummann, indeed, had no other means of recompensing all this medical treatment except to offer to treat
the doctors or their families in exchange, both by laying-on of hands and telepathy and also by establishing spiritual contact between his patients and the Masters who are to be found in the Himalayas, according to the
Secret Doctrine
.

The woman was always ready to undergo any and every medical experiment in the hope that the pains, particularly the pains in the head, would be eased. Seldom has a woman been more convinced of her husband’s power and intelligence, both natural and supernatural, than this woman was. It was quite unthinkable that she would ever question his arrangements at any point whatsoever. Nothing was more natural to her than that turf-sods should be fastened round her thighs in order to increase her earthly strength, or that people should try to stop up her nostrils with warm cow-dung at the behest of some southern dung-doctor with a cleft palate, to see if such treatment could not ease the head-pains.

I think that few marriages in Iceland at that time were as good, and certainly none better. But unfortunately, no sooner had the doctors vanished down the stairs than this supernatural shepherdess and princess inside the cubicle began once more to groan and whimper in her sore distress.

It was never properly light in our mid-loft, because the little window above the bed I shared with Hogensen was too small for anyone except blind men, philosophers, and those with salt-burn in the eyes – indeed, it was hardly possible to read Latin by it; but it was even darker in the little cubicle, where people had never until now required light for other tasks than being born and dying – what tiny glimmer there was filtered in to Chloë from Hogensen and the rest of us through the crack above the door. Nevertheless she used to the best of her ability this murky light which had never been sufficient to be shared in the first place; whenever her pains left her for a moment she started pottering with her sewing. I once heard her tell my grandmother, just as a matter of course, that the pictures she sewed were her memories from the Himalayan Mountains; she added that these memories so beset her that she could not help cutting up every single garment she possessed and covering them with sewing;
and also that her husband had never managed to keep his socks since they got married, because she always unravelled them for sewing yarn.

At first she sewed these extraordinary insects and rare Himalayan plants side by side on to her patches of cloth, and then, when there was no room for more, she would sew new insects over the first ones and roses over roses, until the pictures stood out in high relief; she decorated them with locks cut from her fair hair and feathers she plucked from the pillow; eventually the cloth had become as stiff as a board and could be stood on its edge. She made these solid pictures so expressive that it was unlikely that anyone who set eyes on them once would ever forget them.

She never seemed to acknowledge people’s existence unless they were her doctors in one way or another, or her nurses. When there were no doctors she said very little. She never talked to the rest of us in the mid-loft, but asked for the door to be kept shut. Many days would pass without my seeing her at all, except for a brief glimpse of her in bed if someone walked into or out of her cubicle: this sun-bright, milk-white Mother-Iceland face with the blue eyes under the shining hair, and the eiderdown drawn right up to her chin – even when she was sewing she drew it up to her chin with only her hands and bare arms out, and in that way she would hold the bed-clothes to her breast, sewing away.