The Fish Can Sing (39 page)

She was standing on the bed at the feet of the sleeping old man and had bent over to peer through the little window where the blade of grass was beating against the pane. Her fair hair was tied together with a bit of string just behind the ears and hung like a tail far down her back. I saw from her profile how pretty her cheek was, rather thin, with that straight nose and well-formed chin, and that mouth which was somehow absolutely correctly shaped; and all that glowing hair.

But in other respects this human body was so close to being a caricature of itself because of its exaggerated shape that it was difficult to imagine that anyone who had such a body could suffer from anything but excessive health, if such a disease exists. Perhaps I did not think of it at the time, but I have often thought since then that if Iceland has ever witnessed the rebirth of that goddess who in olden times brought forth the horn Cornucopia, which was famed for abundance and grew on a famous goat, then it was this woman – in addition to the fact that she was a Lepsky-speaking, forty-thousand-year-old princess from the Himalayan Mountains, the shepherdess who tended goats with Daphnis, and Chloë whom that great poet Horace so earnestly begged the goddess of love to flog. Yet this was the poorest woman in Iceland I have ever heard of, the naked woman without a spindle, so naked, so utterly spindle-less, that there is not even a proverb about her; and if she ever came into possession of a rag of clothing to cover her nakedness, she cut it into pieces and used them to sew works of art with yarn from her husband’s unravelled socks.

“May God help me and forgive me!” said the woman when she became aware of someone standing behind her at the hatch and looking at her. “I was just having a look through the window to see if my husband was on his way.”

And with these words she jumped down from Captain Hogensen’s bed and disappeared into her cubicle and got into bed and pulled the bed-clothes over herself. And it was not very long before she once again succumbed to her sufferings, and her dreadful groans suggested very little hope or none at all.

The precentor’s vegetable garden lay neglected in the March
weather, but the house continued to be as red-painted as ever, and I recognized again the steps where I thought I was going to drop dead in my colossal boots; and also the door with the threshold where I had sometimes stood and waited for someone to answer the door, dreading that some fluting squeak would come out of my throat when I had to say good day.

It was raining. Inside the house, the lamps were lit. But I did not dare to sit on the precentor’s wall for fear that someone would come out of the house and see me. I sat down on the stone dyke of a garden-patch beside a tiny hovel on the other side of the road, opposite the precentor’s house. I gazed and gazed up at the windows in the hope that a shadow would show against the curtains. It was lucky that my grandmother did not know where I was or what I had in mind: that I was going to steal a shadow. If she got to hear of it, she would most certainly send me to see the precentor’s wife with a big pot-bread the following morning.

I sat there all evening, and it rained on me. An old man transparent with age and using a stick and a crutch came out of the hovel and started having a look at the weather from his vegetable garden. He asked me my name.

“I’m called Álfgrímur,” I said. And like all men who are hard of hearing, he thought I said Ásgrímur.

“It’s very moist,” said the old man.

This was his little joke, because one never spoke of it being “moist” except during the hay-making, when one meant that the grass was damp and easy to mow.

When he had gone inside again I noticed that I was soaked to the skin. I stood up and walked across the old man’s vegetable patch. The whole garden had been covered with iron sheets, flotsam of some sort; I had no idea why, and had never seen that sort of thing before. I sat down on the dyke at another spot and went on gazing up at the windows on the other side of the road. But no shadow came. After a long time the door of the cottage opened again and the old man came out for another look at the weather portents.

“Are you from outside town?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“What’s doing?” he said.

“Nothing,” I replied. “But why are these iron sheets here in the garden?”

“I use them in summer to warm the beds,” he said. “They draw the heat of the sun into the earth. You get bigger potatoes that way.”

Time passed, and I sat on the wall in the rain. But however long I waited, no shadow came. At last I noticed that I was not only soaked through but that my teeth were chattering. Then the old man came out to forecast the weather for the third time.

He walked right round his hovel peering in all directions, and discovered that I was still there sitting on the dyke.

“Ach, what was your name again?” he said.

“Ásgrímur,” I replied.

“And what are you waiting for?” he asked.

“I am waiting for a shadow,” I replied.

“Álfgrímur,” said the woman.

I was up in the mid-loft once again towards evening, and I seem to recall that I had started working at my sums – I was at the stage of trying to solve second-degree equations with more than one unknown; and Captain Hogensen was lying on his bed as usual. I could hardly believe my ears when I heard the woman call my name. Until then I had thought that I was much too low in the reincarnation scale for a higher being to take any notice of me, let alone know my name.

“Álfgrímur,” she said again, and now there was no mistaking it: she must be meaning me, for there was no one else to be found with that name in the whole of Iceland. I laid down my mathematics book, got up, and eased open the door of the cubicle. The woman had drawn the bed-clothes right up to that Grecian nose, and her hair flowed over the pillow.

“Would you please,” said the woman, “go down to the water-barrel and fill this bowl with some really cold water for me?”

Without a word, of course, I went off with the bowl down to the door of the cottage and came back with the cold water. The woman went on groaning with pain.

“Indulge my laziness and make me a cold compress,” she said.

“Are you getting worse?” I asked.

“That’s hardly the word for it,” said the woman. “I wish I knew what I had done wrong in some life long ago. My head is like a furnace. Feel my forehead.”

I laid my palm on the woman’s forehead as she wanted me to do. There could well have been a furnace there as she said, but in that case it was quite obviously internal, because on the outside I thought her forehead rather cool, if anything.

“Don’t you think it’s terrible?” said the woman.

“Yes, I suppose so,” I replied.

“Or the way my heart’s beating!” said the woman. “Put your hand here! Feel it!”

She took my hand and steered it down to her breast under the bed-clothes.

“Do you feel it?” said the woman.

“No,” I said, because in actual fact the only thing I felt was how very much softer a woman’s breast was to the touch than the chest of a man; and besides I did not know the difference between right and wrong heartbeats in people.

“Put your hand a little higher and wait until you feel it,” she said, and I did as she asked; but I felt nothing except that her nipple stood up into my palm.

“I’m burning,” said the woman. “Put the compress on me quickly.”

That evening everyone was at home in the mid-loft and the door of the cubicle was half open so that Chloë could console herself with the sound of people’s voices. And then she suddenly spoke up from inside her cubicle:

“There is undoubtedly something more than a little spiritual about Álfgrímur’s hands,” she said. “He changed the compress on my head today, and lo and behold: no sooner had he touched
my forehead than I began to feel a current, and after a moment I got the right trembling and then I fell asleep and woke up feeling better than I can remember for ages. I am quite sure that he has greater talent for laying-on of hands than most of the spiritual healers who have tried their skill on me so far.”

The woman’s husband got up and came over to me and began to examine my hands. He fingered them knowledgeably and then was lost in thought for a moment before he said solemnly:

“These are spiritual hands. It was obvious, I suppose, that Chloë would instinctively perceive anything spiritual in her presence. In these hands, even though they are on the large side and indeed a little clumsy-looking, there is rather less of
tamas
and more of
sattva
than many people would suspect. Who knows but that the boy might be
bodhisattva?
There is something about these hands that reminds one of seal’s hands. Pharoah comes most readily to mind.”

“Ah, pickled seal’s hands!” said the woman. “Can you imagine anything more delicious – if only one dared to eat them because of one’s soul!”

“You mean because of one’s redemption, Chloë,” said E. Draummann.

“We used to call them flippers in Brei
afjör
ur,” said Captain Hogensen.

“Well, seals are of Pharoah’s race, as we know,” said Draummann, “and that’s why they have eyes and hands like human beings: that much at least we ought to know; and they were drowned in the Red Sea, I always thought. It was that nation which stood highest in the life-scale in its time, if only such a heavy
karma
had not lain on it.”

“What
karma
was that?” someone asked, because
karma, prana, sattva
and such-like had become everyday talk in the mid-loft at that time.

“We shouldn’t need to ask about that,” said E. Draummann. “That’s the least we should know. They forced people into slavery and then made them build the pyramids and carry all the stones on their backs.”

Some overnight visitors from down south at Njar
vík were quite
prepared to believe in the healing power of laying-on of hands and other spiritual and supernatural treatments, no less than in the dung-cures which were still practised down on the south coast; but they found it harder to believe that the lout cowering there over his Latin books could be Pharoah reborn.

“Is the northerner not just being a little eccentric?” they said.

It was late in the evening, and contrary to custom the superintendent was at home; the weather had been rather poor and people had not been venturing out of doors, so there was no one for him to superintend. As always when he was present, people turned particularly to him when there was need of philosophical answers. Finally he replied:

“On the contrary,” he said. “Since the Draummanns came to the mid-loft here, I feel that for the first time in my life I have been free from eccentrics.”

He was asked if it weren’t just another of those old wives’ tales to say that seals were Pharoah and his people reborn.

“I won’t say anything about that,” said the superintendent, “but I do know that belief in
karma
and the laws of cause and effect and the doctrine of rebirth and transmigration of souls is at least a more widespread belief throughout the world than, for instance, Christianity. I think that the great masses of Asia profess more or less the same beliefs as this worthy and respectable couple. We in Europe are just an unimportant little headland – those of us who aren’t merely an out-skerry like us Icelanders. What we in Iceland believe is out-skerry wisdom. I feel that I have come home at last when I meet people who hold the same beliefs as the largest population group in the world.”