The Fish Can Sing (27 page)

It may well be that the boots I wore in my confirmation year will come into fashion sometime, for they were good boots, and seldom has anyone been as delighted with his shoes as I was, at least to begin with; truth to tell I was relieved to be able to discard these flimsy moccasins of raw hide which were called cowskinshoes in Reykjavík in my youth. If I had any fault to find with my boots, it would perhaps be that they had rather a lot of nails in the soles, in fact rather like a bed of nails.

Every time I wore these boots into town a nail would emerge, sometimes many nails at once, and I would tread them into my foot. It really was not practicable to go for a walk in these boots unless one took a pair of pliers along too; I had not yet become such a dandy in those days that I would think twice about sitting down in the gutter to haul a few nails out of my boots if the need arose.

On the other hand there was never a live mouse inside the heel of my boot as is now said to be the fashion in Paris, I understand; yet there is nothing I remember so well about these boots as the din and racket they made in polite homes, and most particularly in the Grammar School. The thickness and toughness of the soles, as well as the iron with which the boots were shod, ensured that most people began to feel uneasy when I was heard approaching in the distance.

I developed a neutral expression which caused people more or less not to see me at all; it was as if a cocoon formed around me. I never looked miserable enough to tempt people to make fun of me for any length of time; I was just a little odd, in a rather uninteresting way. But it may well be that people made fun of me more than I realized; I was so unaware as a youth that I did not understand teasing until it became malice or downright mischief – and scarcely even then.

The man is not born, they say, who cannot find his equal. I found Grandpa Jón on my first day in the second class, and he me. He was twice as old as I was and had to shave every day to avoid having a long beard. He came from the Dalir, out west. Through some society which published Christian pamphlets in Norway he had received a higher calling – to convert the Chinese. Grandpa Jón was a constant target for the malicious; people were always telling him obscenities and trying to distress
him with them. This broad-shouldered, fair-haired man was convinced that people would be improved by reading Christian pamphlets in Norwegian, and that it would benefit the Chinese to study enormous illustrated volumes of Biblical stories printed in Kristiania. People never tired of ridiculing his ideas, on the ingrained assumption of Icelanders that all believers must be out of their minds. Because of his age, Grandpa Jón was rather slow at his lessons; but his slowness of comprehension was as nothing compared to his total inability to remember anything. He thought Latin a ridiculous and unnecessary invention, particularly the subjunctive; he believed that it was the prince of darkness who had so arranged it that one verb could have different forms by the score in Latin and by the hundred in Greek; and yet he did not hesitate to tackle all these rigmaroles, for the sake of his calling.

And since all this drivel came pouring out of me in a constant, effortless stream right from the very first day, the teacher suggested to me that I should give Grandpa Jón a helping hand as far as his Latin was concerned.

Often I toiled late into the night trying to force some Latin into him, then hurried home to Brekkukot to sleep and got up again at the crack of dawn to make him repeat it. Grandpa Jón had long been accustomed to getting up very early to see to the cows, and he was always in the best of spirits when I came to see him in the morning, except that he had usually forgotten all the Latin of the previous evening. He wanted us to pray for the Chinese in New Norwegian, and naturally I had nothing against that, except that I thought it would be more to the point to pray to the Saviour to help Jón to learn Latin. New Norwegian was the ideal language for Grandpa Jón, for it is so truncated that it does not have any cases at all apart from a tiny vestige of a German peasant genitive:
the man his dog
. In this preposterous language we would beseech the Saviour to convert the Chinese. Our schoolmates called us Long-Loony and Broad-Loony and people stared at us wherever we went, and drunks pestered us in the street.

But there was one other thing which bound us together more than all the Latin and New Norwegian and salvation of the
Chinese, and that was music. No obstacles were so forbidding that Grandpa Jón would not attempt to overcome them, if the salvation of the Chinese were at stake: and that is why he also embarked on studying music. He had somehow got hold of a little harmonium and was trying to play it; but he was not doing very well, which he blamed on the fact that the keys were too narrow. He did not really care much for music; but he had heard that when one was instructing the Chinese in Biblical stories, one had to play the harmonium as an accompaniment. Finally he decided to seek tuition in organ-playing.

This was during the period of my life when all singing seemed to have died out in me. I never knew what kind of sound would come out of me if I opened my mouth. I had ceased to hear the music that once had filled the air all around me. I contented myself with reading the news which the papers published about Gar
ar Hólm’s never-diminishing fame as a singer abroad; it was now being said that he had taken up residence in a baronial castle.

A girl dressed in Danish style halted on the other side of the street to stare at us. There was nothing that Jón and I were less inclined to do than pay any attention to women. I did not even look across the street; but I had the vague impression that she was wearing red gloves. We were so accustomed to being gaped at in the street that we ignored it. Then I noticed that she turned and changed direction, and crossed the street to meet us. She looked at me. This was just before spring, and I was soon to sit an examination for the third class and be confirmed by Pastor Jóhann. Her complexion was like summer butter. Her gloves were red, just as I had suspected, and had tassels. I had an idea I knew her. Was I seeing right?

“Don’t you know me?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Why don’t you know me?”

“Raise your cap,” said Grandpa Jón.

“Why?” I said.

“Are you such a boor as all that?” she asked.

When I looked at her more closely I saw that she was scarcely a
woman except in name only, even though she was wearing those red gloves; perhaps not more than a couple of years older than I.

“Why is there never a card from Gar
ar Hólm?” she asked.

“What sort of a card?” I said.

“What a fool you are,” she said. “And who is that fool who’s with you?”

“Why are you concerning yourself with us?” I asked.

“Tell me absolutely truly” – and she lowered her voice and came a little closer to me: “Wasn’t it quite definitely a gold coin?”

“Yes,” I said, “of course it was a gold coin.”

“Jesus, how glad I am to hear you say that!” she said. “Daddy says it must have been brass.”

“What does he know about it?” I said.

She said, “Yes, that’s just what I always say. Thank you very much. I see you’re at school. What are you going to be?”

“A lumpfisherman,” I said.

“When are you going to stop behaving like a fool?” she said.

A little later I said to Grandpa Jón, “Listen, Jón, I’m beginning to want to learn to play the harmonium.”

“I would not advise any man to do that,” said Jón. “It is both a tedious and a trivial exercise. I would never have let myself in for it had it not been essential for China.”

Music had not been an educational subject in Iceland since the Middle Ages – indeed, it was considered an affectation or an aberration, especially among the educated – until Gar
ar Hólm won for Iceland musical fame abroad; and then a few people began to think more highly of it. But for a long time afterwards it was still generally considered rather odd to be famous for singing. So it was practically unthinkable in my younger days for people to let themselves in for the tedium that music involved, except in the cause of salvation; music was good when people had to be put into the ground.

What surprised me most was that the precentor in the Cathedral should recognize me when I went to him with Grandpa Jón to learn to play the organ.

He said, “Was it not you whom Pastor Jóhann sometimes led by the hand into the churchyard to sing for him?”

“Only for very minor funerals,” I said apologetically, for I knew that the precentor himself had the honour and responsibility of all the major funerals.

“That doesn’t matter, I recognized you all the same,” said the precentor. “You are related in some way to our Gar
ar Hólm. Are you perhaps thinking of playing before the Sultan in Algiers? Or for the Chinese, like our friend Jón here?”

This was the first time that I had encountered the phenomenon of a “dwelling-house” in the sense which has existed in one part of this world since the year 1000: dining-room and drawing-room; not just an open hearth, but a kitchen; furniture with French names,
chiffonier, buffet, canapé;
and a Danish wife. For the first time I sat on a plush chair with tassels. The harmonium stood in the precentor’s study next to the vestibule. But the gleaming grand piano in the drawing-room seemed to me to be the crowning glory of the house. I thought at first that an instrument with such a broad keyboard must contain all the notes that can be heard in the universe, and was astonished when I learned that its characteristic feature lay in the fact that each note had its fixed position, so long as it was not out of tune, and that even the violin encompassed more notes although it only had four strings.

“Have you ever heard any music?” asked the precentor.

“Not since I was small,” I replied.

“Oh well,” he said, “that’s something at least, if you heard some music when you were small.”

I did not explain it further, for truth to tell I had been thinking of the bluebottle, which even in winter sometimes still buzzed in my inner ear when I was falling asleep.

“Blær!” he called out. “Come and play the piano!”