The Fish Can Sing (42 page)

“Tidings have reached us from beyond the sea that Gar
ar Hólm, the world singer, will be setting foot again on Icelandic soil shortly. The great world celebrity is on his way here from the realm of France; during the winter he has been gladdening men’s hearts with beautiful singing south of the Alps in all the greatest cities in that part of the world. The singer has been given an overwhelming reception by the populace in all these places, as well as by the most important princes and other men of rank, and even by the Pope himself, in the greatest pleasure-domes and fairy-palaces of the goddess Thalia in those countries.

“It is rumoured in the south that when the Pope summoned Gar
ar to sing for him in St. Peter’s Cathedral, His Holiness declared that this was a voice that reached the higher heavens and glowed with a reflection of the good light. The Pope had the singer brought to his presence and invoked a special blessing on him, and added a papal intercession for all Icelanders.”

This text went on for another two or three columns, but I thought it unnecessary to read any further and handed the paper back to the girl.

“Jesus!” said the girl. “So you’re too high and mighty to read what it says in the paper!”

“Isn’t everything that appears in print just as true whether I read it or not?” I said. “Isn’t it?”

“I say!” she replied. “I do wish you wouldn’t be so conceited, Álfgrímur; excuse me, but I’m older than you are. I think it would do you no harm to wear a student’s cap like other students, yes and even to read what it says in the paper, especially when it’s about your own relative. By the way, is it true that you’re going to be a singer too?”

“Who says that?” I asked.

“Our friend Madame Strúbenhols, who teaches me to play the guitar.”

“I’m off,” I said, “and I’m sorry for disturbing you, I didn’t know that Kristín had visitors.”

“I must be going too,” said the girl, and stood up and kissed the
old woman. “May Jesus be with you, Kristín dear, I’ll come and see you again soon if I may. Álfgrímur, you can accompany me into town, I want to talk to you.”

The outcome was that I went with her; and when we were outside on the paving I could not help reminding her that this was not the first time I had walked with her down this hill.

“Jesus, yes, there’s the shed,” she said, and pointed towards the old out-house in whose doorway we had met one morning the previous year. “Wasn’t I completely mad?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes, but you were stupid too,” she said. “You were wearing his shoes.”

She said nothing for a while, and we walked down the path together. Eventually she started up again: “What an incredibly strange woman that is.”

“What woman?”

“His mother. This is the third time I’ve taken her flowers, and I’m no further on. I’m sure there isn’t a single living person who knows what that woman thinks. She hasn’t even heard her own son sing.”

“Why are you bothering about her?” I asked.

“Have you ever heard him sing?” she asked.

“No,” I replied.

“Try to be sincere for once and tell me the truth,” she said, “you who know all about music. Speak!”

“I have heard the song of Iceland,” I said, “the bluebottle for whole summers on end; and a little chirping from the birds in between. And sometimes, in the autumn, the screeching of the swan, which is called the swan’s-song in Danish novels. And then of course the bawling of the drunks when the ships are in. And
Just as the One True Flower
here in the churchyard.”

“Do you think it’s a lie, then, that he has sung for the Pope?” said the girl.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Who was present when Jesus redeemed the world?”

“The woman ought at least to be able to confirm or deny whether her son is married,” said the girl. “But I haven’t even been able to get that out of her.”

“What concern is that of yours?” I asked.

“What concern is it of mine?” said the girl. “You’ve always been a beastly pig.”

“Will you tell me quite honestly what you want with Kristín of Hríngjarabær?” I asked.

“I don’t make any secret of the fact that I have never thought about anyone else except this man ever since I was a little girl; always only him. I know he is greater than all other men. Even though he were married I would be ready to be his mistress for ever and ever. But now I’ve had it investigated and, thank God, if he ever was married, he has now renounced his former life completely.”

“Have you poured out all this hysteria to Kristín?” I said.

“Call it what you like. I’m not talking to you because you’re a decent person, but because you’re related to him; and now a student. And because I simply have to say something to somebody. You know yourself how frightened I was last year. But here’s the letter.”

She pulled a letter from her handbag and gave it to me. It was from Denmark, and I half-thought I recognized the name on the postmark until I remembered that I had seen it on a photographer’s stamp the previous summer. The photograph had been found on a man who was sleeping in the churchyard; a picture of a work-worn, rather gross woman, and two children.

I ran my eye over this Danish letter. It said something to the effect that, in reply to an inquiry, the name Gar
ar Hólm was unknown in these parts, and that there was no Icelander living in this town as far as was known; no one in any way connected with Iceland at all apart from a certain Hansen from Schleswig who was married to a woman who owned a little butcher’s shop in the square; he was a reserved man who did not mix much with the other residents and was away from home for long periods, besides; he had once or twice signed on as a deckhand on board a ship which carried salt-fish from Icelandic ports to Spain. At the end of the letter there was some kind of official stamp and an illegible signature.

“Why are you showing me this?” I asked.

“So that you can see it was only my imagination, or some misunderstanding. Don’t you know that he’s coming here soon, don’t you know that Daddy has invited him home to Iceland to sing at the golden jubilee of Gú
múnsen’s Store? It was perhaps childish of me to write and inquire. But I couldn’t help myself, I wanted to be absolutely sure. Because I’m the one who is waiting for him. And he has written to me again. Now I know that when he comes, he is coming because of me; he is coming because he is beginning a new life.”

We Icelanders have always felt grateful to the Pope ever since he wrote a letter of consolation to Bishop Jón Arason shortly before the emissaries of a certain King Kristian III, a German malefactor in Denmark, led this chief clergyman of ours out to his execution. We have for a long time suspected that Popes are higher than emperors. But in one respect we had always, until now, considered what he said rather far from the truth and sometimes even a little laughable, and that was when he opened his mouth about religious faith. Yet we had now arrived at the point where we believed implicitly in his infallibility over a bit of news which came into the category of faith to the extent that we had been nowhere near when it happened, just as we had been far away when the world was being redeemed. We had fallen into the paradox of believing in one of the most improbable of the many doctrines which, rightly or wrongly, have been ascribed to the Pope.

I think I can assert that during this summer after the concert in St. Peter’s Cathedral, the sun of Gar
ar Hólm’s fame stood higher in Iceland than ever before. So it was little wonder that the student at Brekkukot had difficulty in believing that he himself had actually exchanged shoes with this man up in Kristín of Hríngjarabær’s hayloft last year.

“I gave them to a Danish seaman who was sailing on a fishing vessel to Trékyllisvík,” said Gar
ar Hólm when I asked him what had become of my boots.

At the instigation, I think, of Gú
múnsen’s Store, I had been commissioned to wait upon the world singer during those late-summer days when he was staying here in order to entertain the townspeople on the occasion of the Store’s golden jubilee. This time the singer was here as the guest of the Store, and naturally there was no question of offering him accommodation in anything less than a three-roomed suite in the Hotel d’Islande.