The Fish Can Sing (8 page)

“Wasn’t it terribly bad, grandmother?” I asked.

“We won’t talk about that, little one,” she said. “What’s past is past.”

A long time went by before I summoned up enough courage to mention the luckless Gar
ar Hólm again. But on one occasion when I was alone with Aunt Kristín at Hríngjarabær I said to her, “Why is Gar
ar Hólm always travelling?”

“He’s singing, of course,” she replied, rather brusquely; and from then on I always noticed that every time her son’s name was mentioned, she seemed almost to become angry. Although I was more than a little surprised at such a reply, I did not dare
for a long time to go into it further, and went on gazing respectfully at the picture.

“Don’t you know that singing is the noblest thing on earth?” said the woman, as crossly as before.

“Can he sing high?” I asked.

“What do you think, child?” she said. “No one in Iceland can go so high. But he can also get deep down. That’s his old harmonium in the corner there. And here’s your ten
aurar
. And now try not to ask questions about things you don’t understand and which don’t concern you.”

I longed for the time when I would be thought clever enough to have secrets disclosed to me; but until that time came I went on pondering this difficult problem.

It is strange, considering how intimately I knew Brekkukot, so intimately indeed that I felt I had lived there even before I was born, and despite the fact that this woman, my grandmother, had taught me how to speak and think and ended by teaching me to read – it came as a complete surprise to me when someone told me many years later that she had never had a bed to sleep in, in her own home. I then had to acknowledge that the only times I had ever seen her asleep were in her kitchen when she was sitting on the lower stone of the hearth, which jutted out a little, and leaning back against the upper stone; her head would sink forward and her hands with their knitting would drop into her lap and the restless needles would be stilled for a while; and there was only a faint glimmer in the fireplace. I am told that no one ever saw her go to bed in the evening; but if there was an empty pallet available somewhere she may perhaps have stretched out on it for an hour or two in the middle of the night, or else contented herself with leaning back against those
hearthstones. What is certain is that if she slept, she never went to sleep before everyone else had retired; and no matter how early anyone rose in Brekkukot, she was always up and about already and had made the coffee or even cooked the porridge. And I can remember, too, with absolute certainty that the fire in her hearth never went out during all the time that I was my grandfather’s and my grandmother’s son there at Brekkukot.

I have already described how this woman impressed upon me never to kill flies in other people’s houses. Now I just want to mention one or two other doctrines that she taught me.

When Skjalda was put out each morning late in the summer and I had to drive her to the pastures, this cow had the bad habit of putting her head over the bit of fencing round the swede-patch and starting to eat the leaves off the swedes. The fencing was actually rather old and dilapidated by then, rotting and moss-grown, and in several places did not reach as high as the tansies and angelica and the docken clumps, so it was not perhaps the animal’s fault that she paid no attention to such a fence; but if she managed to get at the swedes she became so enthusiastic that she paid no heed to me even when I whipped her with all my might and main with a docken-switch. I had just learned a few swearwords by then from various good people, and when the cow refused to budge despite all the beating, I used to shout, “You damned old cow, Skjalda!” and a few other sentiments of that kind.

That summer a man from Borgarfjör
ur on his spring trip to the capital had left his dog with us at Brekkukot by mistake. The wretched cur stayed with us all summer, waiting for his master to come and fetch him on his autumn trip. He looked just like any other old sheep-dog. He was very bored at Brekkukot, because he was always thinking about his master and wondering how on earth the man had managed to forget him. He often lay with his head on his paws at our turnstile-gate or on the paving at the door of the cottage, with his eyes open and that rather pathetic expression of doggy melancholy on his face; and it did not help matters that the dratted cat was always prowling somewhere around him – a brindled stray who had also settled in with us.
The dog was a guest himself and could not bring himself to chase cats on an alien farm. My grandmother would sometimes toss him some fish-skin and bones if she happened to pass near him, and always with the same words: “Here you are, creature!” or else, “Help yourself, you brute!”

The dog was the only animal I ever heard her address disrespectfully apart from the cat, and she never mentioned the cat without a slight grimace of distaste, as if this creature were some abominable family fetch which had dogged her and her kin from time immemorial. The cat was called Brand, and never had other than four titles of address: “that devil”, “that disgrace”, “that pest”, or “that bane”. Never on any occasion did my grandmother pat the dog or stroke the cat; yet she had a constant supply of fish-skin and bones in the pocket of her skirts. I should add that she was nevertheless the only person in the house to whom these two stray creatures attached themselves unconditionally and unreservedly. Wherever she went around our plot of land, even if it was only to the clothes-rope, they were both round her at once and almost on top of her, the dog with boisterous affection while the cat rubbed herself against my grandmother’s leg with her tail held straight up in the air and ending in a handsome hook at the tip. Whenever my grandmother had to slip over to see Kristín at Hríngjarabær the animals were always at her heels until she reached the churchyard gate, which she never allowed them to pass through, of course.

And now to return to the point where I left off, with the cow standing with her head inside the fence eating the new-grown swedes – this was a good opportunity, I thought, now that we had a dog around the place; and I set the dog on the cow.

As the day wore on it became very warm. The dog lay on the paving with his head on his paws and his eyes open and was undoubtedly thinking about his master and wondering why he never came. I was sure that the poor creature could not sleep for sheer boredom. So I sat down beside him on the paving and started to pat him on the head, as people had done to me when I was small. Then I began to sing to the dog the following little poem which I had composed myself, to a tune that I made up
as I went along and which was so moving that I burst into tears as I sang it:

When it was nearly six o’clock my grandmother came out to have a look at the swedes in this fine weather; she walked past me as I played in the grass, and seemed not to notice me. But while she was looking at the swedes, with her back to me, I was sure I heard her say, as if she were talking to herself, “I hope I didn’t hear correctly this morning, that someone in this house was using ugly words about the cow.”

“It wasn’t me!” I shouted.

“At least I hope that no one has ever heard Björn of Brekkukot doing that,” she said.

“The cow was at the swedes!” I said.

“I know few things more wicked than speaking ill of a cow,” my grandmother said, “except perhaps setting a dog on her. The cow gives us our milk. The cow is mother to us all. ‘Little cow, little cow, have you any milk now.’ ‘The blessed beast’ is what one says about the cow.”

I said nothing. She went on peering under the leaves to see if there were any swedes ready for the soup-pot yet. And as she stooped over them, I heard her say as if to the swedes, “I wonder who was blessing a dog out here in front of the house today?”

“I can’t remember doing that!” I cried.

“I thought I heard someone blessing a dog,” she said. “My ears were probably deceiving me. About dogs one says ‘the brute’, ‘creature’, or ‘wretch’. At least no one has ever heard Björn of Brekkukot saying nice things to a dog.”

Our horse, Gráni, was pastured on a distant moor out at Sogin, and occasionally he had to be fetched when he was needed for work. It is no exaggeration to say that at that time, Sogin was one of the farthest points of the atlas. There is a modern town at Sogin now, and no one who enters this paradise could suspect that a few decades ago there were horse-grazings there. When Gráni had to be fetched, it was a journey that took the best part of a day. At Sogin there was a little moorland brook called the Soga Stream; it was comparatively easy to jump over it. And yet this stream for some reason or other formed a most sinister impression on my grandmother’s mind. She never really wanted me to go to fetch the horse by myself, but always in company with some other boy who was also going to fetch a horse and who could pull me out of the stream if I were to fall in.

“Be careful of the Soga Stream”, was always the last thing she said when we were setting off. And when we arrived back with the horse or horses in the evening, the first thing she always asked was: “Was there much water in the Soga Stream today?” If there were ever a downpour when Gráni was out on the moor and there was a chance that he would have to be fetched in a hurry, the old woman could be heard muttering, “My, my, what a lot of water there must be in the Soga Stream today.”

And now one day, as had happened so often before, I was sent off to fetch our horse out at Sogin, accompanied by a few other boys who were on the same errand.

This was about the time, not long after the Boer War, when the Barbed-wire Age was beginning in Iceland. This special commodity, which is banned by law in most countries except for military purposes and was indeed said to have been invented during the Boer War, has pacified the Icelanders more than any
other foreign product one could name; and whereas in other countries there are severe penalties for putting this wretched stuff up in the open in peacetime, in Iceland barbed wire became the most desirable luxury commodity in the land for a while, next only to alcohol and cement. There are few things over which the nation has united over so wholeheartedly as stringing this glorious material round every part of the land, over hill and dale, heath and moor, right up to the mountaintops and out to the farthest sea-cliffs. At first, many people behaved as the Boers had done towards the English, and simply climbed over the barbed wire wherever they came to it, but then the Althing passed a law declaring barbed wire to be inviolate in Iceland. These laws were made more far-reaching by special local regulations in some districts and towns, including our town of Reykjavík; here, a by-law about barbed wire was issued to the effect that anyone caught climbing over these sacred boundary-fences would have to pay a fine of ten
krónur
. ten
krónur
at that time was the price of a yearling ram.

To come back to us boys on our journey – after great detours and many digressions and the usual boys’ dawdling for much of the day, we eventually reached some hillocks to the south-east of the horse-moors. There were a few scattered farms around, some up on the hills and others in the grassy hollows or dales, and the lands belonging to these farms were festooned with barbed wire for their full length and breadth.