The Fish Can Sing (57 page)

He sang at first with vehement gestures which I would have thought more appropriate to a performance of drama. But perhaps this demented mixture of laughter and sobbing was nearer reality than other singing and more natural to living creatures than the stern discipline of the roles on our stage at Brekkukot. After a short while the singer had a fit of coughing, and stood there in front of the altar gasping for breath, his face convulsed with spasms, and could not produce another sound. He fell to his knees at his mother’s feet and buried his face in her lap.

And this concert was now over.

Evening. There was autumn in the air, and we could hear the wind buffeting the tombstones and the rain beating down on the tansies. I walked round and round the house, stopping at the turnstile-gate in the rain every now and again to listen for footsteps, as if I were expecting someone; because his parting words to me that morning had been, “Stay at home so that you can be found if you are needed.” But there was no one about – at the most, perhaps, the occasional person hurrying home down to
Grímsta
aholt; until at last the girl came running up. She stopped outside the turnstile-gate in the rain and called my name. I had had more than a suspicion that things were going to turn out something like this.

“He’s not singing!” she said.

“Really?” I said.

“He’s left the hotel. And I’ve already searched in – the other place. I expect he’s already on his way abroad as usual.”

“Had you ever expected otherwise?” I said.

“I’ve come to ask you to come to the rescue,” she said. “The hall is full, the editor has made his speech, the brass band has played thrice. Madame Strúbenhols has finished with Liszt’s Rhapsody, and the conjurer has done his turn twice and was just starting on it for the third time. Now you must come and sing.”

“I don’t know how to sing,” I said.

“Everyone knows you can, come on,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Do you want to make my father a laughing-stock in the town?” she said.

“What’s your father got to do with me?” I said.

“I can’t believe that you are a wicked person, Álfgrímur, until I see it with my own eyes,” said the girl, and started crying.

“I can’t see how it would help your father if I make myself a laughing-stock in public,” I said.

“Madame Strúbenhols has often told us that you can sing,” said the girl.

“I don’t believe that even a trained singer would ever dream of singing unprepared and without notice,” I said.

“I know that you and Madame Strúbenhols have been practising together from a German music-book,” she said. “And you can wear the conjurer’s evening-dress.”

“It’s out of the question,” I said.

“Not even for your kinsman Gar
ar Hólm?” she said.

“Don’t you think he would have sung himself,” I asked, “if he had thought it necessary?”

“Wouldn’t you like to put father in your debt – a debt he would never forget from this night onwards?” she asked.

“Oh, I imagine your father knows what he is doing,” I said. “I find it hard to believe that he will be very disappointed over Gar
ar.”

“So that’s all the feeling you have for me!” said the girl. “Never mind that you won’t do anything for my father – but I see now that you are also prepared to have a kick at me. So that’s the kind of man you are: you seduce me when you find me weeping in the middle of the night, entice me from the man I love so that he goes away and never comes back again, and make me the worst slut in town, ahaha, uhuhu, ihihi …!”

The brass band had played the Björneborgernes March thrice down to the very last note. We reached the back door of the Temperance Hall just as Professor Dr Faustulus finished plucking doves out of the hat for the third time. The conjurer was immediately stripped of his clothes and I was hastily crammed into his finery. There is no need to describe how his frock-coat fitted me, we were so completely different in build; or his collar, limp with sweat from all these strenuous feats of legerdemain. But without further ado I was thrust on to the stage in this get-up, and the professor was left in the wings wearing nothing but his underpants and holding his doves and top-hat. This was the biggest conjuring trick that had been performed all evening: Long-Loony from Brekkukot was on the stage as a substitute for the world singer. Madame Strúbenhols was at the piano.

I hope no one expects me to describe the singing which now took place. But I believe I can claim that it was not done from any vanity, and that my first thought when I landed on the stage was that I was not acting in my own interest. Even though my voice was hardly born – nor I myself as a man – and even though no one knows what shape a worm would take if it ever managed to fly out of its chrysalis, my loyalty to Gar
ar Hólm was nothing new with me; it had always been something secret and fundamental to my vanished childhood. I sang my undivided gratitude to this world tenor who by God’s mercy had lifted himself above our bass at Brekkukot; I sang because I knew that singing is testimony to the gratitude we owe to God – but not because I knew how to sing. I was so deeply committed to this task
right from the first note that the peals of derisive laughter that broke out had no more effect on me than a distant breeze in the eastern mountains so rock-firm was my certainty that since I was standing there (and I had always known, deep down, that I would be the one to stand there), I was standing there through the power of things which were so high above me that I no longer mattered.

Ruhn in Frieden alle Seelen …

Whatever the cause of it: these little, big people, rigid and ossified for so long from being the incarnation of everything that is right and true in a little, big town beyond the seas, these unmusical Icelandic educated and upper classes in the years before we came to be reckoned as people at all, this most tuneless crowd of people that has ever been assembled in the whole world – they all began to listen. After the first song, certainly, most of them looked at the Governor and then at the Bishop; but there were one or two who involuntarily gave themselves up to some power of primitive acceptance of what was happening. People began to raise their hands a little so as to be able to clap them together in applause. I do not think for a moment that the applause was for me. But yet, people acknowledged the singing, and that is always a beginning. After the second or third song both the Bishop and the Governor applauded too – and that had the same effect as an official announcement from the authorities: “We cannot acknowledge that We are listening to bad singing; since We happen to have been invited to a concert and We are present and seated, that concert is by definition a good one.” Then all the people applauded. They went on applauding long after the few songs that I knew were finished. I stood in a trance up on the stage and looked at the people applauding until someone gave me a sign to clear off; and I did not come to again until I was in the wings, and Professor Dr Faustulus had started to take his trousers off me.

The evening was still not over. As I stood leaning against a wall in a daze, one of the people from Gú
múnsen’s Store suddenly came over to me with the message that I was asked to call in at the Store’s office on my way home.

Gú
múnsen’s Store was blazing with lights. Two assistants were
standing downstairs and they looked at me like court ushers as they let me into the mid-shop; they lifted the flap of the counter for me and escorted me through the empty book-keeping department to a door with the mysterious word
Comptoir
painted on it. Merchant Gú
múnsen was standing in his office wearing a frock-coat, top-hat, and decoration, with his iron-stiff cuffs reaching to his knuckles. He had thrown his overcoat across the back of a chair, and was lighting a cigar. This was a very different guise from the one he had worn at the banquet the previous evening: he pulled down the corners of his mouth as he smoked, and frowned; there was a dried-up look about the ruddy cheeks, such as you sometimes see in the plump faces of old spinsters.