The Fish Can Sing (50 page)

“I think I would rather try to get myself a job in the fishing industry abroad, rather than wait until I was quite dead,” I said.

“And give up singing?” he asked.

“I suppose so,” I said. “At least, my grandfather reckons that fish comes first in every man’s life.”

“If you are not prepared to starve this Christmas, like the last one, and like next Christmas and the Christmases thereafter, and wake up with numb fingers and shuddering with cold on Christmas night, and feel the weight of all the sorrows of creation upon you, that is because you lack the string.”

“I’m afraid I’m too stupid to understand that,” I said. “What string?”

He replied, “The one that does not give you power over heaven and earth.”

“What does it give, then?” I asked.

“One tear-drop for the creation of the world,” said the singer.

We sat silent for a while under the marble statue of the Archangel in the late-summer dusk, and there was scarcely a breath of wind to stir the tansies.

“Then there are other days,” said Gar
ar Hólm.
“Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, als alle Knospen sprangen
. Schumann. Heine.
And the Rhine. One morning a group of young people go on a pleasure-trip up the river, and you are out the whole day. You come to an old orchard and dance a reel, you go into a cool medieval inn and drink out of age-old tankards. The girls in the party are wearing national costume, in peasant tradition. And in the evening when you are sailing home and the moon is riding high in the heavens, before you know it one of the girls is snuggling against you in the night breeze as you sit there in the stern of the ferry boat looking out on the wake streaming away behind you. It’s the same girl that came right into your arms during the dance. And now she’s tired, and nestles her face against your cheek. She pretends to sleep. And when it’s time to part she whispers, ‘Are you going to see me tomorrow?’

“But tomorrow, of course, she’s no longer a folk-dancer in national costume. She’s a well-bred and educated girl, dressed in big-city style, even rather grand in manner. The restaurant where she had arranged to meet you especially recommends its caviare. She asks you when you will have finished learning singing. Later she calls it ‘this singing’. Finally she says ‘this blessed singing’. In other words, ‘When are you going to stop this damned bawling?’ How do you answer then?

“If you answer, ‘Never’, she thinks you’re exceptionally droll and laughs and laughs; and her laughter, moreover, is absolutely real. She asks you what in the world you are going to do when you have finished learning singing; and if you reply, ‘Nothing’, she laughs again. It’s rare to meet such an unusually amusing man. You are older than all other people. You must be a millionaire since you can afford to permit yourself to be so droll. ‘I’m from Gú
múnsen’s Store in Iceland’, you say; is it surprising that she wants to meet such a droll fellow as often as possible? Finally she takes you home to meet her parents: Sunday lunch with white wine, and a polite stroll in the park afterwards. Then she says, ‘Won’t you give up singing, if only for my sake, and come and work in my daddy’s office, he’s got a business that bakes a hundred tons of hard-tack biscuits a day’ (or slaughters eleven hundred pigs – or was it eighteen hundred pigs?) ‘and plays the double bass on Sundays. Perhaps we’ll get married; and in a year
you’ll be a head clerk there. And the following year perhaps a sub-manager. Finally we would own the bakery’ (if it’s a bakery -the slaughterhouse if it’s a slaughterhouse) ‘you and I. And you will play the double bass with pork-worshippers and hard-tack biscuit bakers on Sundays’.”

When Gar
ar Hólm had told me this part of my life story he asked me one of the most difficult questions that has ever been asked on the Archangel Gabriel’s tombstone. He said to me: “What do you do now?”

Many a man has had difficulty in answering this question.

“My grandmother would say, “You are what you are yourself, and nothing else’,” I said.

“That’s where she’s wrong, the old woman,” said Gar
ar Hólm. “What a man is himself is the one thing he is not. A man is what other people think he is. Do you imagine that the Emperor of Japan is an emperor, really? No, he’s just like every other poor wretch. And therefore you say to the girl, ‘No thanks, I’m going to be a world singer.’

“I know this is a difficult hour in your life,” Gar
ar Hólm went on. “You study the girl from tip to toe, you note what a healthy complexion she has, how neatly she does her hair; or let us say, the way she walks with her head held high, as they say in Iceland, heavens above! Do you imagine that a better match could be found anywhere else in the world? The story has now reached the point where the peasant’s son has met the king’s daughter: you will get both the princess and the kingdom on the day you give up singing. So what do you do?

“Words fail you,” said Gar
ar Hólm. “She looks at you expectantly, awaiting your reply. But you remain silent, because the woman hasn’t been born yet who can understand you. If you had never suspected it before, you realize at that moment that there is nothing on earth more perfect than a woman – in her own way, and within her own limits. And you silently take your leave of her and walk away – for ever.

“In the evening, when you get back to your room, you pack the few things you own: one pair of socks and a shirt; and the old shoes you wear when it’s wet; and two neckties because
you’re a fine gentleman; and seven handkerchiefs because Franz Schubert only owned seven handkerchiefs when he died, and besides that, you are rather prone to colds, like all singers. And don’t forget your book of voice-training exercises; and the book of Passion Psalms from your mother in Iceland, don’t forget that, dear friend, for that’s to be laid on your breast when you are dead. You catch the night train out of the city. And you never go back there again.”

My life story had now reached the point where it made little difference how I replied; so I said nothing.

“Listen, don’t look so depressed, old fellow. This is what all of Heine’s poems are like, it’s only peasants who don’t laugh at them; or rather, perhaps, Calviniste. Abroad, it’s the normal practice that if someone is looking really sad in the street, a horde of fat men comes running over waving cheque-books and hire him for a circus; they teach people like that to ride a bicycle which disintegrates when they try to mount it, or else make them play a stringless fiddle with a broomstick.

“Listen, would you not rather go with a choir to America, my friend? A hundred dollars a month and all found. And now your luck is knocking at your door, horse-luck, fluke – the only luck a good Icelander ever recognizes: good fortune.

“And very soon there arrives in America one of these solemn, self-important German-Scandinavian choral societies which are representing European culture on a goodwill mission and trying to increase mutual understanding between the two continents. Such a decorous society is of course all dressed up in the ceremonial clothes that the Danes call white-tie-and-tails, but which the Americans use chiefly for corpses. In America, on the other hand, choral singing is never heard except as a comic turn, so it arouses twice the mirth when the buffoons come on stage dressed like corpses. The sprinkling of lumberjacks who bought tickets because they were related to the singers quickly fall asleep or flee, and there is no one left except a few caustic newspapermen and some girls who are looking for a husband; or some circus-managers looking for an act. And now it so happens that you are asked to sing the solo part in a choral work, let’s say it is
something by Handel. You step forward when your turn comes; and the spotlight falls on a face that is more serious-looking than a frozen spruce-cone in this company of shroud-covered berserks.

“You raise your eyes; and it’s as if all the people wake up. And when you open your mouth and the first notes are forming in your throat, pumped out from the depths of your heart – hmm, no, we won’t talk about that, no one understands the heart. But anyway, it’s a long time since such a serious face has been seen in a country where the glossy magazine smile is a public duty. Besides, the Mosaic Law of singing is Always Smiling -
sempre sorridente
. You start singing with a voice-tone that vacillates between a pastoral poem and a war-cry. A pastoral poem sung by a heroic tenor, that is comedy itself raised to the nth degree. And the laughter comes rolling at you in waves.”