The Fish Can Sing (59 page)

“I don’t know how Björn will take this. As far as Gú
múnsen’s money is concerned, it has never been valid currency with us hitherto. Besides, I would have thought that the same thing applied to singing as has been said about poetry here in Iceland: ‘I write for my own contentment and not my own aggrandizement’. See what happened to poor Kristín’s little Georg, who could have become the bell-ringer after his step-father: he took to travelling. And the bell passed into the hands of other people.”

Autumn had just breathed in our direction the previous evening, but next morning it was away again. It glistened on the raindrops on the grass-tufts between the paving-slabs and on the optimistic late-summer dandelions and the fish-scales in the mire; and the tansies glowed red in the sunshine.

It was on this morning that our superintendent came up from the harbour pushing a hand-cart. Jónas the policeman accompanied him. They were heading towards the churchyard. On the hand-cart lay an oblong object, the size of a man, covered with canvas. They laid this object on a trestle that rested across the benches in the mortuary; but they did not take the canvas off. The superintendent had not been home during the night, but now he arrived with his companion for some morning coffee. My grandfather was sitting in the doorway of the fish-shed mending his nets, and bade the two men good day. The smoke from my grandmother’s chimney went straight up into the sky on this calm, clear, late-summer morning of eternity.

I did not ask what had happened, nor how it had happened; I had no wish to know. But I heard that there were some people who criticized our superintendent for his part in the affair. Many years later I was allowed to glance through some old police records, and there I came across a report of a brief interrogation of the superintendent that had taken place that very day. In it he stated that a visitor had come to see him in his little cubicle at the harbour near midnight the previous evening. The sheriff asked what the visitor had wanted.

“Oh, nothing very much”, said the superintendent. “He only wanted to be allowed to die in there.”

“And what did you say to that?” asked the sheriff:

“I said, ‘Please yourself, my friend’,” replied the witness.

Sheriff: “And then?”

Witness: “He took a small holder from his pocket and asked me to go outside.”

I shall not quote any further from these police records. After the corpse had been placed in a coffin it was left in his mother’s house at Hríngjarabær. And since I had been in attendance on him during the days he had been in Iceland, it so happened that I was present when his luggage was opened in the hotel and the pockets of his clothes emptied. In his suit-cases, which were of good quality and fairly new, were found bricks wrapped in straw; and nothing else. In his pockets there were a few Danish bank-notes left, five
-krónur
and ten
-krónur
notes, barely a hundred
krónur
in all; and a number of scraps of paper covered with huge sums, for the most part ordinary mathematical puzzles which result in strange and unexpected answers.

I never saw the body of Gar
ar Hólm the singer, but I sang over his clay. And it was I who went to fetch his mother Kristín and escorted her at the funeral.

The funeral service was held in the mortuary in the churchyard and not in the cathedral. We, his closest relatives, sat on the front bench – Björn of Brekkukot and my grandmother and Kristín and I. Pastor Johann made the funeral oration. He was extremely old by now – I believe he was one of the oldest serving clergymen in Iceland by then; and indeed it was considered a sign of his senility that he forgot to mention in his funeral oration whom he was burying. He talked about those people who have no faces; those whom the Saviour loved above all others. Did he perhaps think for a moment that he was burying one of those now? Quite often I did not know very clearly what Pastor Johann was thinking. Nor did I know what Kristín of Hríngjarabær was thinking. I did not know what my grandfather and grandmother were thinking. As for myself, I have seldom been so certain that the man who was being buried was not in the coffin.

Oh, blessed moment when the mists are clearing …

Then the coffin was carried into the churchyard. The copper bell was rung. I was given a sign to step forward to the edge of the grave and sing.

It was one of those white autumn-sunshine days with a very gentle breeze. I hope that the breeze carried my singing to some little boy sitting in a vegetable patch amidst the tansies and dockens somewhere nearby, looking on death as just another innocent entertainment.

While the grave was being filled in, Pastor Johann tottered over to us and greeted us; first Björn of Brekkukot, then the two women, and then myself. He greeted us all by name, even me -yes, he remembered exactly what we were called; and I was most of all surprised that he should know me still, considering how old he had become, and how changed I was. I thought perhaps it was because I had such a funny name. But no. He said he wanted to see me about something.

“I still owe you some money, my dear Álfgrímur, and I am beginning to feel very ashamed of it,” he said.

“You must be making a mistake, Pastor Johann,” I said.

“No,” said Pastor Johann, and put his hand in his pocket under his cassock. “I always remember my debts. I remember very clearly that I asked you to sing at the funeral of a man here many years ago. I promised you thirty
aurar
for the singing. But my purse was so old by then, I think it must have started to leak; whatever the reason, I could only find twenty-nine
aurar
. But now my daughter in Copenhagen has sent me a new purse.”

He pulled this beautiful new purse out from under his cassock and began to try to open it with his blue, numb fingers. And to break the silence while he was struggling with the clasp, he said, “I have never known how to sing properly. But the day has never dawned that I have not known that there is one note, and it is pure.”

Pastor Johann finally managed to open his new purse, and in it he found the one
eyrir
he had owed me for so many years, and handed it to me.

“It is good and lovely to sing,” he said as he gave me the coin. “Especially if one is aiming at nothing higher than to sing over the clay of those people who have no faces.”

It was quite certainly towards the evening of that same day that I happened to catch sight of my grandfather coming from the
direction of town with his hat tied under his chin as if he had been out in a storm. I did not even speculate on what my grandfather had been doing down town, for there was enough to think about. But later in the evening, when I was on my way out for a stroll to pass the time, my grandmother spoke to me at the door and brought me back into the kitchen.

“Perhaps you’d like a sugar-stick, just like the old days when you were smaller, Grímur dear?” she said.

Then she handed me a generous slab of black candy-sugar.

“Listen, grandmother,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s some other Grímur you’re thinking about? As far as I can remember, you always told me when I was small that sugar was bad for the teeth.”

“No, it’s all the same Grímur,” she said. “But it’s quite true that sugar is unhealthy for the teeth, except just on special occasions. But fortunately there have not been very many special occasions in this house.”

“Did you say ‘fortunately’, grandmother?” I asked.

“Slow good luck is best,” she said.

“This is absolutely marvellous sugar, grandmother,” I said.

“Listen, Grímur dear,” she now said. “Do I remember right, or did I dream it, that you had some sort of paper from that wholesale merchant Gú
múnsen?”

“That’s right,” I said. “The Store wants to pay for my training abroad for five years.”

“That’s wonderful, I must say,” she said. “Indeed I’ve always heard that they’re fine people. But I’m afraid, Grímur dear, that your grandfather is not very pleased that you should have this paper.”

“I’ll have to do something,” I said, “since grandfather doesn’t want me to be a lumpfisherman.”

She replied, “Once upon a time I was allowed to decide that the name Grímur should be added to your own name. It could be that I had it in mind, both then and sometimes later, that someone named Grímur might mention my name if ever he were in need rather than the names of those people in Gú
múnsen’s Store.”

“I shall gladly throw that paper into the fire and study for the church,” I said. “Perhaps one day I would get far enough
to hear that one pure note that Pastor Johann hears.”

I had already taken the paper out and was going to put it into my grandmother’s fire.

“No, you shouldn’t put it into the fire,” she said. “That would not be courteous. You should rather take it back to the Store and tell them that you no longer need it. Your grandfather would rather that any studying you do should be done on his money.”

“I didn’t know that grandfather had any money,” I said.

“Brekkukot has been in Björn’s possession and his family’s possession longer than anyone can remember, but he sold it today,” she said. “It’s getting too much for us now. But we’re thinking of hanging on here for the winter. In the spring we’re going to move into a basement in Laugavegur. We haven’t got so long left now, thank goodness. Your grandfather wants you to sail on the first ship to study whatever your mind is set on.”

For some time no one had heard our clock, any more than if it had not existed. But for these last few days the living-room was quiet, and then I heard that it was still ticking away. It never let itself get flurried. Slowly, slowly went the seconds in my grandfather’s timepiece, and said as of old: et-ERN-it-Y, et-ERN-it-Y. And if you listened hard enough you could make out a sort of singing note in its workings; and the clear silver bell struck. How good it was to hear once again the note of this clock in which there lived a strange creature! And to have been allowed to stay here in Brekkukot, in this little turf cottage which was the justification of all other houses on earth, in the house that gave other houses purpose.