The Fish Can Sing (32 page)

There was no one stirring except for a few red-bearded peat-cutters who sat on their frame-carts as solemn as Biblical pictures,
whipping their lazy hacks on the way south to Vatnsmýri where there were once the greatest peat-pits in the whole world. The clucking of the hens was just about reaching its climax, with all the dedicated lack of humour which is the chief characteristic of the hen-run.

Then suddenly I heard the iron gate at the footpath into the churchyard being opened; the hinges squeaked. When I looked round I saw a woman come out of the churchyard and pull the gate shut behind her, a plump and glowing girl wearing Danish clothes with her coat flapping open; and in one hand she held her hat by the elastic as if she were carrying a bucket. At first she looked at me without seeing me; she was deep in thought, and I imagined that she had got up early to go to the churchyard to mourn a lost friend. She set off in the direction of town. Somehow I got the impression from her walk that she was rather depressed; at least she was taking no particular care over the way she walked, and her hair was dishevelled by a breeze that was not there at all.

When she had gone about a couple of hundred yards in the direction of the town she suddenly stopped and looked back. She looked at me and gave me a nod, away in the distance. Perhaps it had taken her as long as that to call to mind this boy who was sitting on the wall looking after a cow; but then she turned right round and walked back towards me. She was in every way a big girl, even bigger from the front than behind; perhaps she had been eating too much white bread. I began to feel a little uncomfortable; I was not used to seeing women, and always found it a little embarrassing. I wished she had taken off her coat. When I realized that she was heading towards me, I looked away and was staring at something entirely different when she came up to me. The cow continued to graze.

“Good morning,” said the girl.

“Good morning,” I replied, rather reluctantly, and stared into the blue.

“It’s lovely weather today,” said the girl, trying to be affable.

“Yes, tolerably so,” I replied.

“I’m just having a stroll to amuse myself,” she said. “The doctor says I’m too fat.”

When she came close I could not help noticing that her face was a little drawn and her eyes lustreless, with dark blue shadows under them; and there were wisps of hay in her hair.

“Don’t you recognize me?” she said. “At least I know you. What’s your name again?”

“Long-Loony,” I said.

“Long what? Why are you telling me fibs? Do you think I’m as stupid as that?”

“You’ve got some rubbish in your hair,” I said.

She put her hand up to her hair and pulled out the wisps of hay.

“There’s a bit of moss left,” I said.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’ve told me about it – will you remove it for me, I haven’t got a mirror?”

When I had pulled the rest of it from her hair, she said, “Can I ask you something?”

She took a photograph out of her coat pocket and handed it to me. It showed a woman, not quite middle-aged, and two children, a boy and a girl. At first I thought it was an American photograph, because the women in the pictures we sometimes got from America had the same backwoods-farmer’s expression as this one had, the same hands disfigured by digging-tools or by grappling with boulders and tree-stumps, or else boiled by endless wash-days; and clothes and hairstyles in some out-moded foreign fashion.

The children’s clothes were too big, as if they had been made for them in a hurry for the sake of the photographer. The little girl’s hair was plaited into two pigtails that stuck out like bristles, and her eyes were wide with fear and curiosity; but the boy was beginning to look around in a self-possessed sort of way. But what surprised me most was that the name of the photographer was quite obviously Danish, and underneath it was printed the name of a town in Jutland.

“Who are the people in this picture?” asked little Miss Gú
múnsen.

“How should I know?” I replied. “Where did you get it?”

“I found it up in the churchyard,” said the girl.

“How extraordinary,” I said, and looked at her in surprise.

“It was lying on a tombstone,” said the girl. “Are you quite sure you don’t recognize it?”

I said it was out of the question.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “And goodbye. Listen, how far are you on at school, by the way?”

I told her, more or less.

She asked, “What are you going to be?”

“I am going to be a lumpfisherman,” I said.

“Oh, do stop teasing me always,” she said. “Well, I’m off home now for some sleep. Don’t you think I’m beginning to get thinner? Listen, talking about something completely different -exactly how are you related to Gar
ar Hólm?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“Of course you’re related,” she said. “Do come along with him some time when he comes.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She had walked away a few steps when she turned on her heel again, or rather on the pointed toes of her fashionable little shoes – “Oh, what’s the name of Gar
ar Hólm’s wife again? And what’s her nationality? And where is she now?”

“Gar
ar Hólm’s wife?” I said. “Are you in your right mind?”

“No, of course I’m not in my right mind,” she said. “And anyway one couldn’t possibly imagine a greater shame if he were married, a world-famous man like that, and not tell anyone about it! By the way, could I leave this photograph with you?”

“What on earth am I to do with it?” I said.

“Perhaps you would be kind enough to return it for me – to the churchyard.”

“This photograph doesn’t concern me in the slightest,” I said.

“But won’t you in that case just do me one tiny little favour?” she said. “Who knows, I might be able to do you a favour sometime.”

“Oh, I suppose I can throw it over the churchyard wall for you, if you like,” I said.

“No, don’t throw it,” she said. “Give it to the man who is sleeping in there in the churchyard. You see, there’s a man sleeping on a tombstone; a foreigner.”

“You surely haven’t been going through the pockets of a sleeping foreigner?” I said.

“How can you be such a beastly pig!” she said. “But even though you think such horrid things about me, I hope with all my heart that you don’t talk about it to anyone. Perhaps I’ll do you a favour another time. Goodbye.”

And with that the girl set off homewards once again, and this time she did not turn back. I sat on the wall with the photograph in my hand, and stared after her. The cow went on grazing. There was a wonderful smell of peat-smoke coming from my grandmother’s chimney. When the girl was out of sight I went into the churchyard to look for the foreigner whose pockets I thought little Miss Gú
múnsen had searched to steal a photograph of his wife while he slept on a tombstone. But no matter how I searched, I found no one sleeping on a tombstone in the churchyard.

Guests in their party best went streaming into the home of the editor of the
Ísafold
at twilight that late-summer evening, and all over the house the lights were fairly blazing. As the evening wore on, the townspeople began to gather in the street outside; they were the sort of people who neither had the worry of preparing for parties nor the bother of attending them, dockers and seamen with jackets over their jerseys, the kind of men who in my young days used to be called “landless men” because they had a house full of children but no cow; and there were the bakers and artisans who were establishing urban culture in Iceland by acquiring hard hats and stiff collars and canes, the kind of people who live in constant risk of being mistaken for one another – and their wives; there were fishwives who had lost their employment salting down fish on the shore because of old age – this was about the time when Iceland had just become the first country in
the world to pass a law relating to old-age pensions, even though that pension scarcely covered the cost of a rusk; here and there one could see pretty young girls in national dress, some from out in the country, others from Hafnarfjör
ur in the south; a few young louts just about as tedious as myself were slouching around; and there was no shortage of the kind of cynical mocking-birds who have always peopled town squares as a matter of course ever since the days of the Greek Comedies.