The Fish Can Sing (30 page)

This was what I had always suspected.

On the other hand, about a week later I was completely taken by surprise in Su
urgata one day. I was on my way into town. When I came to the corner where the path to the churchyard branches off up the hill, I suddenly ran into a gentleman who was out for a stroll with his cane. I was not, in point of fact, accustomed to looking people in the face when I passed them, but one was always aware from a long way off what was coming towards one in the street. This time I happened to look at this man’s face by accident; it was none other than Gar
ar Hólm.

At first I really was not sure that I had not made a mistake, for truth to tell this person seemed to me a little down at heel. Five years is a huge span of a man’s lifetime, of course, and indeed he had aged appreciably, in the face at least, the features hardened, the lines deepened. He was not merely sunburnt, but downright weather-beaten; and there was now a suggestion of squinting in the expression of his eyes.

To be sure, this was the man who gazed at the heavenly light, as it said in the Latin book about the eagle,
adspicit lucem caelestem
, so there was little hope that such a person would recognize Álfgrímur; but as he strolled along pensively, heedless of time and place, he nevertheless threw me a glance with that sidelong squint he had now developed. How did it happen that in the instant that I drank in the man’s face and appearance with my eyes and
compared it with the image I retained in my childhood memory of the heaven-gazer, and also the picture of him you could get in the shops on postcards and badges – how was it that I suddenly could scarcely help feeling that he had become a little ordinary? At least, he did not have the same dash as before. And unless I was very much mistaken, he was wearing the same hat as he had been previously. On the other hand he was wearing new shoes, and that was a rare enough sight in my youth; to be honest I could not remember ever having seen a person in new shoes before – they shone from afar. There was not a stain or wrinkle on his clothes, any more than there had been five years ago; but I was not absolutely sure that he had got himself a new suit since then; at any rate, this suit was of the same kind of blue cloth with red pinstripe as the old one.

I stopped as soon as he passed. I could not help it. I turned round and stared after him. And for some reason or other, he too looked back over his shoulder and paused.

“Do you know me?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Álfgrímur,” I said.

“Ah, so it wasn’t a lie after all?” he said, and smiled at me out of his dark brooding. I stood nailed to the road. Finally he walked up to me very simply and stretched out his hand:

“So you really exist after all. I thought I had dreamed it. Was it not you who ate the five-aurar cakes?”

“Well, yes; I was offered them; bu-but I never ate more than one,” I said.

Gar
ar Hólm threw off the burden of his world fame and laughed. “At all events it was you who was sent to buy the pepper. Did you buy it? Have you ever delivered it?”

I did not trust myself to answer this question, and changed the subject.

“We thought you had decided against coming,” I said. “The triumphal arch was taken down.”

“How like them!” he said, and laughed with an affected gaiety I did not really like very much. “Come and see me some time.
We shall go and buy five
-aurar
cakes.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Thank you very much, sir.”

“There is no need to be so formal with me,” he said. “It is like being formal with oneself. But if there is anything I can do for you, then let me know. Think about it.”

He was ready to say goodbye and hurry away, obviously not expecting that I had a wish ready-made. But that was just what I had. For years and years I had had this wish; and now the time had come to make it:

“I want so much to ask you to sing
Der Erlkönig
for me.”

“Der Erlkönig?”
he said in amazement. “What
Erlkönig?”

“Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind,”
I said.

“What’s all this about?” he said. “What business is this of yours?”

“I have been having a look at Schubert,” I said.

“Schubert?” he said. “What for?”

“It was just by chance,” I replied.

“We’ll have a talk about this later on,” he said. “Come and see me one day. Hotel d’Islande. I shall try to do what I can for you.”

He shook my hand in farewell – and I noticed that his hand was hard and rough.

That summer, things began to look up a little for me. For many years I had not dared to open my mouth to sing within earshot of anyone else for fear of the sound that might come out. But when I was away on errands far from any company, either down at Skerjafjör
ur or at Sogin, the pressure of the melodies building up inside me forced me to utter bursts of sound; and that summer, my throat began to produce noises something like the note I was trying to achieve. After that I seized every possible opportunity of exercising my voice whenever I found solitude.

It so happened one day that I caught sight of our Pastor
Johann, now in his eighties, hobbling up to the churchyard, almost bent double now, behind the coffin of some stranger. So I joined him, as I had done when I was small. Unbidden, I sang
Just as the One True Flower
over the coffin, nearly the whole psalm, if I remember rightly. When I had finished singing and Pastor Johann had scattered earth over the coffin, he came over to me, much moved, and took me by the hand and said:

“You are now such a big, tall man, my dear Álfgrímur, that I cannot bring myself to give you ten
aurar
. Instead, I am going to pray to God to be with you, always.”

“Thank you,” I said, although I would really much rather have had the ten
aurar
. “But I can hardly believe that I deserve God’s presence for that caterwauling. Actually I was beginning to think that I would never be able to croak another note again.”

Then Pastor Johann said, “Some voices never manage to break properly. But in all good men there lurks a true note, I won’t say like a mouse in a trap, but rather like a mouse between wall and wainscoting. But it is a special grace if God allows them to sing the note that they hear. I am old now, and my voice has never recovered from breaking; I have never had the good fortune to sing the note I hear inside me. But that note is just as true for all that.”

It was little wonder that I was thinking about singing that summer, when my voice was coming back; and very understandable that I was so elated at knowing that the great singer himself was now in the country. And on his friendly invitation, and in the hope of hearing
Der Erlkönig
at least, perhaps, I was not long in taking advantage of the kindness. I smeared sheep-leg grease on my footwear and tried to subdue with water the tuft of hair on the top of my head, and set off for town. I did not stop until I reached the lobby of the Hotel d’Islande; I went over to the hotel-keeper, who was sitting behind the reception desk, and bade him good day.

After a long pause he looked up and glanced at me over his spectacles, but he went on leafing through his papers and did not reply to my greeting. There were some canaries in a cage behind him. This was all very Danish. I cleared my throat.

“Who are you?” I was asked, in half-Danish.

“My name is Álfgrímur.”

“Yes, and what’s wrong with you?” said the man.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just wanted to see someone.”

“Someone?” said the hotel-keeper, and looked me up and down. “There is no someone here.”

“Excuse me, but doesn’t Gar
ar stay here?”

“I don’t understand,” said the man.

“I have business with Gar
ar Hólm.”

The man stood up and took off his spectacles with great ceremony to look at me: “Are you referring to the opera singer?”

I said yes.

“What do you want with him?”

“He asked me to come and see him.”

“My dear young man,” said the hotel-keeper, coming right forward to the counter: “You must be from the provinces.”