The Fish Can Sing (49 page)

“Once upon a time a king and queen were in their kingdom and a peasant and his wife in their cottage: I shall try to tell you the story as far as it goes. In this house, in that very place downstairs where our beloved patriarch Jón Gu
mundsson has been emperor over far more non-singing fish than any other Icelander has ever been before, a little peasant boy began his singing; or rather, here he became notorious for bawling and bellowing. It was during the years that our host, de la Gu
mundur, so called because it was the fashion to speak French here in Löngustétt in those days, was improving himself out in Copenhagen along with those pork-worshippers, hard-tack bakers and double basses he has described for us this evening. In those days the Store was patronized by Icelanders who no longer got any enjoyment out of begetting children in sobriety, and some with some justice, for dry land in Iceland has always been just as dangerous for the children as the sea has been for their fathers. When they had returned half of their children, or even more, to mother earth, many Icelanders started the habit of investing the rest of their income in a battleship, to quote old Runólfur Jónsson, one of the greatest cookhouse-lubbers and Chief Justices there has ever been in Iceland. When these people had acquired their battleship they screeched
O’er the Icy Sandy Wastes
until they started weeping. Then they sobbed
Oh, Thou Sweet and Cooling Well of the World
until they lost the power of speech and lay flat on their backs on paths and thresholds – that’s what is called being ‘dead’ in Iceland. And respectable ladies who wanted to go into the Store to buy pepper for their eternal fish had to step over these men.”

“I have always been a prohibitionist,” interrupted Jón Gu
mundsson; he had leaned forward over his porridge and was using his hand as an ear-trumpet in order to hear the speech. “And I can’t help it if stupidity is so ingrown in people. When I was young I liked cod-liver oil; but I mixed it with tar so that I would not drink too much of it. I am eighty-five years old now, and I have never drunk anything to speak of other than whey, although I use skim milk on porridge. And there were
some people who never sang at all, thank God.”

Gar
ar Hólm the opera singer went on: “When the people had finished burying these forty or fifty out of every hundred children which it was then the custom to bury in Iceland, with wholesome and genuine sorrow, they used to challenge the Store to a battle of singing, and wheeled out no less formidable war-chariots than the Andrew
rímur
, in which people are knifed like tallow or sliced like meat-paste. Then there was nothing for it but to give a good account of oneself, ladies and gentlemen! My voice had only just broken round about then. I am not going to describe for you in any great detail the greatest of all the victories I won, when I realized that in a singing combat with one of the biggest louts and braggarts in this community I had managed to make him so hoarse that he could not raise a single squeak, and the concert could only be finally settled with fisticuffs. Yes, the singing combats I waged in defence of the Store’s good name are without number. Indeed I am not boasting but merely stating a fact when I tell you that before I was fully eighteen years old there was scarcely a single bawling baboon whom I did not sing down to hell the moment he came through the door of the Store. My dear old sea- and liquor-man, Jón Gu
mundsson, you who have never seen the southern nesses sink beneath the horizon, and have never drunk anything other than whey; and you, dear de la Gu
mundur, Knight of the Danish Order of Dannebrog and linguist and so much more than I can count – accept at last the thanks of your counter-jumper from the liquor-shop whom you wanted to make a butcher’s-boy in Denmark.”

“Perhaps you are going to accept their offer and become one of their shop-assistants?” said Gar
ar Hólm when we were outside in the street again.

He had not stayed for very long after he had made his speech
of thanks; excusing himself by saying that he had promised to look in on the King’s Minister, he rose and made his farewells. But once we were outside he made no attempt whatsoever to set course for the Governor’s house, but headed straight for the churchyard.

“Who knows?” I said. “My grandfather actually wants me to study for the church. But I was unlucky enough to be dux of the school, and it’s said that duxes never become anything.”

“I have no doubt they will send you to music college and pay all the expenses if they discover you can sing louder than the drunks downstairs in the shop – but most particularly if the Danes tell them that you can bawl louder than pigs. But I want to tell you in advance that no one gets a double-chin from becoming their spiritual table-guest. Christmas-time will see you turn into some side street in a foreign city and fumble for any loose change that might be lurking somewhere in your pockets, and try to work out whether you have enough for a cup of coffee in some bistro where there may be a fire in the grate. You see, the cheque you were expecting from Iceland has not arrived in time for Christmas, any more than it did the previous year. You have no friends. You walk home. You huddle under the threadbare strip of blanket that goes with the rented room and you put your tattered overcoat on top to try to get the Christmas shivers out of your bones. I know that it takes a real man to attain that one pure note; many have given all that they had, even their physical and mental health, and died without ever having attained it. And yet they were to be envied, compared with those others who became famous singers without ever knowing that the one pure note existed; and they were happy in comparison with those few who came near it for a moment, or even actually attained it.”

We were sitting on the low bench-shaped tombstone on the grave of the late Archangel Gabriel.

“Does the cheque never arrive, then?” I asked.

“Your heart misses a beat every time the postman rings the bell, sometimes thrice a day, sometimes six times. You have been hoping against hope that the miracle would happen now, during this last quarter of an hour before holy Christmas Eve comes
in at six o’clock. Christmas after Christmas you wait in foreign cities for the postman’s last call on Christmas Eve; but the famous cheque from Iceland never comes. No creature in the whole universe is so deeply embedded and hard to dislodge as the cheque from Iceland. It is not because Gú
múnsen’s Store is a bad shop. But it’s not exactly a music shop. When he has provisioned something like twenty ships with hard-tack biscuits, and tied a ribbon and bow round the coal scuttle, and found a new cord for the editor’s lorgnettes, and supplied a packet of pins for the forty-ninth aunt, it may well be that Gu
mundur suddenly thinks, ‘Oh, hell, I almost forgot all about culture itself, where on earth did I put Zoëga’s English Primer that I was going to study tonight when my wife had fallen asleep? And wait a minute, didn’t the Store have some singer or other wandering around abroad somewhere?’ But it might well be March by then, perhaps even April. Who knows, you might see a few pound notes before spring.”