The Fish Can Sing (28 page)

In the doorway there appeared a vision which struck me dumb for a long time. Every ray of light had been gathered into one point, and there stood this transfigured shape. The sun shone into and out of her hair. She looked at me with eyes in which blue blended with green. Then she sat down at the piano.

I can no longer recall with any certainty what it was she played, but I have the impression that it was something by Gade or Lumbye; or was it Hartmann? Perhaps it was just
The Snowdrop
.
Did she play well? She had large blue hands. I regard them as being above all other hands. The movements of her body were like the leisurely tail-movements of the lumpfish, and the soul in her face had the fragrance of strawberries. Seldom has anyone ever listened to piano-playing with such a devout lack of spirituality: I was hoping and praying that this could be life itself and that it would last as long as the melody.

Then the melody ended. She stood up and smiled. The music had warmed her eyes, and her cheeks were flushed. I could feel everything going black, as if I were about to faint. But when she had looked me over, she stopped smiling. Then she went out. I was sure she had not thought it worth her while, playing in front of such a person.

Under the sloping roof in Hríngjarabær there stood a harmonium with four and a half octaves, and every second key silent: Gar
ar Hólm’s legacy.

“What a mess your instrument is in, Kristín dear,” I said.

“What do you mean, child?” she replied. “I’ll have you know that I wash it in soap and water every spring and autumn.”

“You can only hear every second note,” I said.

“It sounds perfectly all right to me,” said the woman. “If any more sound came out of it I would get a fright. You only need to touch a single note in it and then I see everything before me just as it was here in the churchyard in the old days.”

Nonetheless she gave me permission to let Grandpa Jón help me to repair it. Neither of us had ever repaired a harmonium before, but we prayed to the Saviour in New Norwegian before we started, and by the time we finished we had succeeded in making most of the keys produce a sound. And that evening, when I began to practise my scales, the old woman came in and sat down in her easy-chair and listened. Life’s morning visited her again, the morning of eternity, the churchyard as it used to be. Before long she was asleep in her chair.

I came once a week or more for tuition with this kindly man with the long face and brown eyes and the huge Adam’s apple in which dwelt the gentle bass voice I had sometimes heard trembling in the breeze from the churchyard when I was small; there was a cleft in his collar for the Adam’s apple, like those pictures of Danish composers; and his good wife gave me coffee with bread and cheese. I was so entranced by the study of music that if I started on the harmonium under Kristín’s sloping roof at bedtime, I would often sit there throughout the night until it was time to go and meet Grandpa Jón next morning. The precentor’s instruction had little form and bore no relation to actual music lessons; it was like an extension of casual gossip about this and that, or as if we were amusing ourselves with an innocent pastime because we had nothing else to do. There was never any suggestion that this musician, who was then the finest musician in Iceland, thought it a waste of his time to be teaching such a lout the scales. We had one thing in common, teacher and pupil: neither of us ever mentioned payment. I never realized until many years later that the actual time of this composer – the only Icelander who could compose music in those days, who was the Cathedral organist as well – could be reckoned in money; yet perhaps it was not so after all.

But though this house of sunshine was so far beyond me, it nevertheless drew me so irresistibly that the Grammar School faded away into the twilight even though I was attending it. Most other things paled beside music. I would much rather have gone to that house every single day.

Sometimes, late at night, a strange thing would happen to me; suddenly I would get up from my studies for no apparent reason at all and go out; and before I knew what I was doing, I would be standing in front of a red-painted house of timber and corrugated
iron with white window-frames, or else I would be seated on the stone dyke round a little cottage across from it, staring at the windows. Sometimes there was music and singing to be heard from within the house; sometimes the shadow of what I was sure was a girl would be thrown on to the curtains. And although I am doing my utmost to avoid any exaggeration, I do not hesitate to say that no other sight has ever had such an effect on me. I thought at first that my heart had stopped, and then it started beating furiously; and at that I would take to my heels like a thief and scurry away out of sight. The night watchmen would give me a very strange look, to put it mildly. I find it hard to believe that any thief suffered more agonies of conscience than I, for having stolen with my eyes a glimpse of that shadow. Sometimes I felt that the only thing that could save me would be if it had been the shadow of someone else.

I was always aware of whether she was at home in the house or not. I always felt much better if I saw that her coat was not hanging in the vestibule. If I became aware of her presence in the house from some muffled sound, like a creak on the staircase or a door slamming upstairs or certain footsteps in the kitchen, I would become distracted and confused, and even start wondering if my boots were not too large.

“What’s wrong?” asked the precentor. “Have you been up all night with Jón again, praying for the Chinese?”

If I was lucky, and she was out of the house throughout the whole music lesson, the precentor would say, “I really do think you could learn to play this instrument. By the way, what are you thinking of doing with yourself when you leave school?”

I said that I had always thought of going in for fishing although I could not bring myself to mention lumpfish specifically; apart from that I had no definite plans, I would say.

“You’re not, I suppose, thinking of becoming a world figure, like Gar
ar Hólm?” said the precentor.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said, and thought for a bit; then I added, “But it would be good to hear Gar
ar sing a song like
Der Erlkönig.”

“Ah,” said the precentor. “That’s what we are all waiting for.”

“He must be the greatest singer in the world, isn’t he?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said the precentor. “He was working behind the counter of old Jón Gu
mundsson’s Store when I knew him. If I remember right, the old man had even started paying for him to go to school at that time; but that didn’t last long. People who want to become world-famous never stick in a classroom for long.”

“Is it not then absolutely certain that he is a world-famous person?” I insisted.

“He is at least so famous that both of us have heard about him,” said the precentor. “And that’s something.”

“Have you never heard him sing, then?” I asked.

“No,” said the precentor. “But neither was I present when Christ redeemed the world.”

I must have been considerably taken aback to have found at last, in this precentor, the only person outside the turnstile-gate at Brekkukot who seemed reluctant to commit himself about the genuine fame and excellence of Gar
ar Hólm, the singer. And I do not remember, in the period covered by this book, ever again having mentioned my former neighbour at Hríngjarabær to anyone else – this man whom people called my kinsman, and who had said that he too had been sent out to buy pepper for three
aurar
, just like me.

Did I mention that the precentor often lent me music-books with finger-exercises in them? Once, some real music got in among them by mistake, a book of Schubert’s songs, and from this I had learned
Der Erlkönig
.

I began leafing through this volume on the old harmonium at Hríngjarabær, and quickly came to the conclusion that it was for much more advanced pupils: solo songs with accompaniment, with German lyrics. Nevertheless, I started working my way through it, and since I had no voice at all at this time, I had to pick out the melody with my fingers. Since Latin had come before German, as far as I was concerned, I had to look up every second word in order to understand the poetry. The extraordinary corporation of poets who provided Schubert with his texts aroused both my wonder and my curiosity so overwhelmingly that I find it difficult to imagine that a tribe of pygmies in darkest
Africa could have been more astounded than I was. Naturally I could not manage the accompaniment except for brief passages here and there, nor was the instrument suitable for it; but there I found the harmonies which laid a spell upon my heart. The harmony of water and wind, often with the sound of some kind of drum – this for a time was the accompaniment to my life. It was no small adventure in the middle of one’s formative years to find oneself right at the heart of the German worship of romanticism. On the other hand, the iron discipline that was applied to words in Brekkukot retained its influence over me; the eloquence of that German corporation was worthless coinage in our house. In Brekkukot, words were too precious to use – because they meant something; our conversation was like pristine money before inflation; experience was too profound to be capable of expression; only the bluebottle was free. The over-luxuriant German poetry actually told me very little, and sometimes nothing at all; I was merely astonished. But one note, if it were played in correct relationship to other notes, could tell me much; and sometimes everything.