The Fish Can Sing (41 page)

“I consider it absolutely imperative to have public barber’s shops in Iceland where there is a pleasant smell and where people say good morning in a friendly fashion and wear white coats and take care to handle their sharp knives deftly so as not to cut people’s throats too often every day, which is undeniably a considerable temptation in this community. But as for the other question, namely whether it is a misdeed to be shaved by someone else, then naturally a lot depends on what a person means by morality, and indeed what value one places on it. I shall now tell you a little parable about how differently people value morality in different countries. As you all doubtless know, old Goethe, the German, once wrote a little book which he called
Faust;
it’s about a man who became a candidate for Hell by sleeping with a woman. Obviously various other things happen in the book, but that’s the kernel of it. Towards the end of the book Goethe stops short of actually despatching the man to Hell even though he so richly deserved it, and instead lets him be saved by God’s mercy and because of his interest in draining marshlands, and sends an angelic host to fetch him and lift him up to Paradise. But now I shall tell you a story which goes in quite the opposite direction. When I was in Copenhagen recently there was an excellent fellow there called Pedersen. He was red-haired and balding and had blackened teeth and seldom used soap, not so very unlike me,
as a matter of fact, in character and appearance, except that he happened to be engaged to forty-five girls at once. For some strange reason the Danes dragged this excellent man into court and began to interrogate him and his sweethearts. The poor little sweethearts stood there in the court all in a row, crying their eyes out, and even though they scratched one another a little at times and tugged at one another’s hair now and again, yes, and even weren’t above spitting a little on one another, they all had this in common that they all begged for mercy for their betrothed; for each and every one of them was convinced that she was the Gretchen (or should we say Maggie) whom he truly loved.

“Each one of them had truly given him her heart; each and every one of them was prepared to let him have her last shilling at any time so that he could go out and buy himself a beer. All of them, separately, had discovered something in Pedersen that could never be valued too highly, and his excellence continued to grip the imagination of each and every one of them quite unblemished, regardless of the fact that it had been proved that he had been carrying on with forty-four others simultaneously. They not only forgave him before God and man but also announced one after another that they were prepared to give up everything for him; many of them begged to be allowed to go to prison in his place, if anyone had to go to prison at all. Some said, ‘If anyone is guilty in this case, it’s not him but me!’ And the judges sat for hours pondering which was the greater crime: that one man should be carrying on with forty-five women, or that forty-five women should be carrying on with one man. The outcome of it all was that Pedersen was fined fifty
krónur
. And since Pedersen was broke, as philanderers always are, the sweethearts had to chip in to pay the fine, and according to my reckoning they must have had to fork out one
króna
and eleven
aurar
each. You see, that’s how the Danes looked at the problem: what the German wanted to punish a man for with nothing less than Hell itself, in Denmark it cost no more than one
króna
eleven
aurar
apiece. Isn’t it rather the same sort of thing where the Barbers’ Bill is concerned …?”

Good deed or misdeed? My mind was reeling with all this
dialectic about the Barbers’ Bill when I emerged from this keen debate into the open again.

For some time I had felt in my heart a certain uneasiness, as all guilty people do; I felt I had done something against my better conscience, something which was not worthy of my dignity. But what was the value of Better Conscience if it forbade people to bring others better health and a little romance? And what did the Dignity of a stupid slip of a boy matter? As if God and man cared one little whit on which side of the rump he rode or whether he had a saddle! Could a good deed be a misdeed? The Master Santajama had chosen to wait eight thousand years in order to break the cycle of incarnation and had preferred to risk being reborn over and over again as a domestic animal rather than deny himself the chance of being of use to a woman who was probably very fond of him anyway – assuming nothing worse than that. What do eight thousand years matter to the soul? Is there any hurry, is there not plenty of time to complete the circle from Nirvana to Nirvana? Or is there perhaps anything on earth that is more perfect than a fine head of livestock? Maybe I was the god Vishnu, too, as Ebenezer Draummann had suggested when his wife told him what had happend.

But one thing at least was clear to me: I would never see Blær again. This was in fact my only sorrow. I had betrayed the unincarnated woman, the woman of heaven – “eternity in woman’s form”, as it says at the end of the book that the red-haired man had made so much fun of at the Barbers’ Bill meeting. With my laying-on of hands I had dragged this ideal down from its heaven and laid on it the shackles of incarnation, crammed it into the prison of the flesh. Now there was no longer any hope of seeing a shadow against the curtain; the mirage had disappeared.

On the day I graduated from school as a university student my grandmother made hot chocolate for everyone up in the mid-loft. It was that thick, fatty, sweet, strong chocolate which is never brewed any more, with cinnamon-bark in it, and with cold pancakes with sugar to boot. It was a great moment to be allowed to drink chocolate in the company of these people who symbolized peace in the world, and I was fortunate to have lived among them. But once again, just like the time some years back when my grandfather had told me his plan to send me to school, I felt apathetic and just a little bit apprehensive. Once I had been apprehensive about losing the security which reached as far as the turnstile-gate at Brekkukot; now I was apprehensive about the new paths which would open up when I stopped treading the well-worn route up to school in the morning, in a half-circle round the Lake, and back home again in the afternoon. Where was I to go on all the mornings which I had yet to wake up to after this?

“And what are you now thinking of becoming, friend?” said the superintendent. Contrary to all custom he had allowed himself to play truant for half an hour from his supervisory labours in order to share this excellent chocolate.

I must have been slow to reply.

“I have never dreamt of anything less than the office of sheriff for our Álfgrímur,” said Captain Hogensen.

“Does the blessed child not know what it wants to be?” said Runólfur Jónsson. “I wouldn’t have thought that would ever be a problem.”

But he did not say what I ought to become, at least not on that occasion; he was perhaps unable to recall for a moment what the job was called. But I knew perfectly well that as soon as he
acquired another battleship he would remember: I knew that deep down he would not be satisfied on my behalf with anything less than studying to be a Chief Justice.

“Oh, I suppose it will be the lumpfish,” I said, half in jest and half seriously, because no matter how many Latin inflections I learned, I could never stop putting this fish above all other fish in the south.

“Tut tut!” said my grandfather, with a suggestion of a grimace. “Really!”

In other words, he did not like the reply.

“Perhaps Björn had been thinking rather of cod for you,” said the superintendent.

“Lumpfish,” said my grandfather, “are only a momentary joy in the spring, even though it cheers so many people when the season starts; but some years they fail completely. And now Gú
múnsen’s Store and the rest of them have got big ships which in one haul can catch ten or twenty times as much as my little boat can carry, and with that I and people like me are finished here in the Bay. On the other hand, Runólfur Jónsson here can tell us what it’s like to catch cod for Gú
múnsen. And therefore I suggest, my boy, that you study for the church – that has always been a useful occupation here in Iceland; what pastors don’t get paid in fish they get paid in butter.”

I opened my eyes wide in amazement, and I was now almost ready to believe that my grandfather was actually making a joke. Or did people perhaps become pastors in Iceland on the sober advice of some grandfather who, because of some caprice of the history of religion, read Vídalín’s
Book of Sermons
on Sundays instead of sacrificing to the bird Colibri, the bull Apis, or the idol Ra?

But I simply had not taken it into account that when Björn spoke, it was not always Björn who was speaking; there was someone else even closer to Björn of Brekkukot than Björn himself – my grandmother.

She said, “Björn here has always wanted little Grímur to have something from us that people could not take away from him any time they felt like it.”

“Oh, they come and take it all away, my good woman,” said Runólfur Jónsson. “ ‘When one goes, another comes, and all on chestnut horses’.”

My grandmother said, “Anyone who does no one any harm cannot be harmed by anything that others do. ‘Learning gladdens the heart and brings renown.’ Riches are what others cannot take away from you.”

“On my shelf are two pouches,” said the superintendent. “Time passes in them as in everything else. Actually they are both empty, except that in one of them there lies a gold coin, and it is yours, my friend. Do you want it today or later?”

“Later,” I said.

That evening when I went to see Kristín of Hríngjarabær, it so happened that she was not alone; there was someone with her. I felt it the moment I went in; as I opened the door I saw a young woman sitting there, well-dressed and perfumed, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and red gloves with tassels: little Miss Gú
múnsen. She was reading aloud from a newspaper to the old woman. On the table between them there were flowers and fruit.

“Congratulations, Álfgrímur,” said the girl when she saw me at the door, and she offered me her hand without standing up.

“Eh?” I said.

“You are placed first in the paper here,” she said. “ ‘Álfgrímur Hansson, Brekkukot’. I thought you would be wearing a student’s cap.”

“But I find it even more remarkable that you two should know one another,” I said.

“Bless the child, she doesn’t know me at all, but she comes all the same with oranges,” said the old woman. “Oh, how good they smell, much too good for poor old wretches like me.”

“How can Gar
ar Hólm’s mother talk like that?” said the visitor. Then she silently handed me the latest issue of the
Ísafold
, which she had just been reading aloud when I came in. The big picture of Gar
ar Hólm had been brought out once again and put on the front page; and the article that accompanied it was written in that extraordinary epic style which in my youth was used for momentous news in the newspapers, for instance anything
concerning the king or for major disasters at sea or if some important person died: