The Fish Can Sing (16 page)

I suppose the only things that count are the things a man gets for himself, my good woman. Would you care to see my peaked cap? Álfgrímur! There’s a good lad, find my cap and show it to the woman. And if there’s any fluff on the peak, blow it off.”

While the woman was examining the cap, Runólfur came up into the loft. Captain Hogensen recognized our room-mate by his breathing even though he could not see him.

“Be careful, Runólfur,” said Captain Hogensen, “we have got a land-owning woman in the cubicle. She is from the east.”

“You’ll be all right here with the man who commands warships,” said Runólfur. “Where are you from, if I may ask?”

“I am from Landbrot,” said the woman.

“What kind of fish do you have there?” asked Runólfur.

“We live for the most part off torsk,” said the woman. “And we had a little ling when I left home.”

“Torsk, indeed? Well, well,” said Runólfur. “And did you say ling? What happens to all the proper codfish, woman?”

“You never see proper codfish on the inland farms,” said the woman.

“Tcha, the sort of fish you mentioned, we just use that for fertilizer down here in the south,” said Runólfur. “By the way, since you are getting out and about again, you ought to take a little pleasure-trip out to Ness to see the parish clerk’s marvel; and you should not underestimate the miracle at Grótta, either – my goodness, what cess-pools, heavens above! That would be something to put in your letters home, woman. There has been nothing to equal them in the whole world since the great peat-pits were dug in Vatnsmýri many years ago.”

In a book by a major author it says about a certain place that the air in the city was pregnant with the name of a certain lady. I have sometimes thought that something like that could be said about our air round the churchyard and the name of Gar
ar Hólm. His portrait was always hanging there, both in our living-room and the living-room at Hríngjarabær, as well as in the drawing-room of the King’s Minister; and although one never heard him mentioned spontaneously in our house, I soon realized that his name was closely connected with the workings in our old clock. If a visitor brought up his name, as if by accident, the question was evaded; at the very most they might say something to the effect that little Georg had been a nice boy when he was growing up in the churchyard here; but these evasive replies were not least what made him so exciting in my eyes. It was strange that this man who performed in concert halls all over the world and had become such an Ariel that we scarcely dared mention his name aloud, should once have been a little boy here in the churchyard just like myself. I always felt sure that whenever my grandmother and Kristín of Hríngjarabær were talking together in private with pious expressions on their faces, they were talking about this supernatural creature.

I do not know whether it was the awareness of this world singer, who had once been a boy here like myself, that was responsible for the fact that from my earliest childhood I began to take notice of singing and everything connected with singing, and had now begun to sing at small funerals for Pastor Jóhann; but it was not because I was taking Gar
ar Hólm as a model, at least not deliberately – his portrait was too remote from me even though it hung in people’s living-rooms.

Perhaps it was just that the same sound had awakened us both, except that for him it had been a quarter of a century earlier.
But one thing was certain: I can scarcely remember the time when he was not the distant murmur behind the blue mountain beyond the sea in my own life.

By this time, I had been taught to read by my grandmother. The reading-matter that took over where the Saviour’s genealogy in Hebrew ended consisted of advertisements in the newspapers; the
Ísafold
came to us twice a week, four pages each issue. At that time it was the custom to advertise in verse if one wanted to sell stockfish or needed a girl for spring work. We learned these verses by heart. Even to this day there is scarcely any poetry I find so memorable as advertisements celebrating frozen haddock and other stockfish, paying tribute to a foreign pastry called Fluff, and a Chinese all-purpose medicine from Denmark discovered by a man called Valdimar Pedersen. I shall permit myself to quote here for the purpose of preservation a poem by a lively saddler in Laugavegur about saddles and bridles and other leather goods:

“Yes, reason can make rhyme out of anything,” said my grandmother, as I tried to spell my way through these advertisements for her.

But there were other texts, in prose to be sure, which quickly attracted my attention after I had learned to read, and these were the articles about the fame of our world singer, Gar
ar Hólm. I do not think that any paper was ever published in Iceland in those
days which did not carry at least a brief notice about his fame as a singer, and sometimes even more than one article in each issue. The headlines always went something like this: “
ICELANDIC SONG ABROAD”; “ICELAND’S ART WINS FAME AFAR”; “ICELANDIC MUSIC IN OTHER LANDS”; “THE WORLD LISTENS TO ICELAND”; “IMPORTANT CONCERT IN CAPITAL CITY”; OR, “ICELAND APPLAUDED IN INTERNATIONAL PAPER LE TEMPS”
. The Subject of the articles was always the same: Gar
ar Hólm had yet again earned fame for Iceland abroad. In the town of Küssnacht he had sung the following songs:
How Beautifully that Bird did Sing, The Sheep are Bleating in the Pen
, and
The East Wind Coldly on Us Blew
, and the newspaper
Küssnachter Nachrichten
had said such and such. A little later, Gar
ar Hólm had sung in all the major cities of France, all of which I somehow seemed to feel started with a “Q” and ended with a “q”. Then all at once it turned out that he had set off on a concert tour to London, Paris, Rome and Cairo, New York, Buenos Aires and onwards. Soon afterwards snippets would appear from
La Stampa
and
The Times
of London, as well as some lavish words of praise from Mohammed ben Ali in Cairo; in all these cities, people had been breathless with admiration for the artistry that had come from Iceland. The late Kristín of Hríngjarabær now appeared in a very special light. Strangers would come up to me in the street and pat me on the head and say they knew that I was related to him in some way. And when I was sent to the Store to buy oil, the shopkeeper would give me a fistful of raisins as a mark of respect. Yes, many were the free hand-outs I got in Gú
múnsen’s Store on the strength of Gar
ar Hólm’s name.

Every single summer for as long as I can remember, the return of the world singer was awaited with due taciturnity but infinitely more eloquent glances on both sides of the churchyard, until this tension had lasted for so long that I began to think it natural and inevitable that Gar
ar Hólm was not arriving that summer, and perhaps even never; for there are so many cities in the world. And just when I had finally reconciled myself to the idea that Gar
ar Hólm was just an idle rumour, like most other events that were reported from abroad, and had prepared myself
to believe that he would never, ever, arrive – suddenly he came.