The Fish Can Sing (36 page)

“Tut tut!” said my grandfather. “Really!”

“But in this life,” continued the visitor, “she is descended from one of the oldest families in the north.”

“Well, just as you say,” said my grandfather. “I only hope she doesn’t come from a family older than Adam’s. Do come inside and have something warm to drink on that. Who are you, by the way, if I may ask, my friend?”

“I am called E. Draummann,” said the visitor. “Ebenezer Draummann. My family comes from the Thingeyjar district, and I’m an agronomist and secondary school graduate by education.”

“And what has drawn you both down from the north?” said my grandfather, and began to help the visitor support his wife, for she seemed more than a little numb in the legs.

This woman had long fair hair, blue eyes and a Mother-Iceland expression, as was then the fashion; she had handsome features with one of those noses which are sometimes described in Danish novels as Grecian; but she was rather plumper than was becoming. The reason for this may well have been her illness, with long periods in bed and lack of exercise.

“We have come south in search of a cure, Björn,” said the husband of this distinguished woman. “And I would like to ask you to let her lie in some comfortable corner in your house while we are finding ourselves accommodation here in the south.”

The couple were given a bed in the mid-loft beside us, in the cubicle in which the undersigned is said to have been born, and in which the woman from Landbrot had died.

Ebenezer Draummann was somewhere between thirty and sixty years old when he helped his wife through our turnstile-gate in Reykjavík, a short, stooping, broad-shouldered man. His head dithered slightly, and his hands trembled. He was incredibly pale, and yet there was some underlying colour in his skin, red and blue at the same time. His hands were freckled, and he was bald in the way that some people become from having a disease of the scalp – he had perhaps had ringworm in childhood. In place of eyebrows he had long red patches which looked sore, as if the eyebrows had just been plucked out by the roots. One could see that he had a sparse, rather patchy growth of beard, reddish in colour, but he removed this stubble secretly, using,
I think, some other implement than a razor. He had clear blue eyes, the most piercing ever seen, so penetrating that if one ever saw such eyes in an animal, in a seal, for instance, it would be difficult to avoid crying out in amazement and jubilation and saying, “Good heavens above, that creature has human eyes!”

When this couple came to stay with us, E. Draummann was wearing a waistcoat with horizontal stripes. His blue Cheviot jacket was too tight across the shoulders and rather short in the sleeves. He had a white rubber collar and a loose shirt-front of the same material, with the collar fastened to it at the front, but he never used a tie: the loose front served as a substitute for a shirt, for he was rather a shirtless man. He wore threadbare trousers of undyed homespun which were much too short, and this was all the more unfortunate because the man never wore any socks. He wore foreign-made canvas shoes, scarcely the ideal footwear here in Iceland during winter.

I do not remember which one of us it was who asked him, on that very first day, why he did not wear socks; but he replied, “The Masters do not wear socks either.”

He spoke in a low voice, and when he had given a reply to anyone, he had the habit of smiling to himself and blinking and moving his lips as if he were continuing a silent conversation with himself.

After a while he added, to explain his lack of socks, “The man who wears no socks can acquire things which bestockinged people can never obtain. By saving on socks, one can afford stamps for letters to philosophers throughout the world and get from them the correct interpretation of obscure words in Sanskrit. For example, what does the word
prana
mean? Or
karma?
And
maya?”

Obviously there was no one at Brekkukot who could answer this.

“And you don’t know either, young man – and you a pupil at the Grammar School?”

“No,” I said.

“There you are, then,” said Ebenezer Draummann. “Everyone wearing socks, and no one knows what
prana
is. Not even this young man from the Grammar School.”

“Where did you find yourself such a beautiful wife, lad?” said
Captain Hogensen, whose nature was so chivalrous that he always spoke of women in the way in which people with sight would do.

“Everyone has heard tell about the Langahli
folk, of course,” said E. Draummann (he said “fol-k” in the German pronunciation, as they all do in the north). “In that family there have been government officials, poets, and factors of royal estates, as you know. My wife is from the side of the family that inherited the intelligence and the virtues but rather less of the wealth and position. These folk always had well-educated private tutors for their children, of course. Chloë had fourteen brothers and sisters. I cannot claim that these people’s good fortune in their children has always matched the excellence of their teachers, if it is measured by the yardstick of this world, which many have proved and still more have yet to prove is a trifle short at one end. But I know one thing, that there was no teacher there before me who could understand Chloë. Because the moment I set eyes on this young girl for the first time, I knew that a higher incarnation had been born into the Langahli
family. And I said to myself, ‘Aha! One of these Egyptians’.”

“One of those Eyfir
ings, quite so,” said Hogensen. “But the most important thing is that you liked the look of her right from the start.”

“Liked the look of her? No, certainly not,” said E. Draummann, “I didn’t like the look of her. I don’t really like the look of anything. I know perfectly well that all life is
maya –
a mere illusion. But the previous summer I had had the good fortune of being given access to the
Secret Doctrine
by a man in Akureyri who had just arrived from London. To be exact – this incarnation, this higher being, if I may so put it, this woman whom I call my wife, belongs to a remote sphere; and she is of another age.”

“Quite so, yes,” said Captain Hogensen, “with a cast of mind inclined to the Saga Age, perhaps, as so many of the Langahlí
family have had.”

E. Draummann smiled to himself, blinked, and moved his lips as if he were reading some text to himself, but he made no reply. And Runólfur Jónsson said not a word but drew up his legs, now that the discussion was becoming uncomfortably remote from life
on board fishing-smacks, and the miracles and modern wonders which were happening on Seltjarnarnes.

The door of the woman’s cubicle had been closed and she could be heard settling down in bed in great distress. Ebenezer Draummann went in to tuck her up in bed. Whenever he rose from his seat, it was his custom to square his shoulders as if he were going to lift a barrel.

“Now I shall tuck you in carefully, my lamb,” he could be heard saying behind the door.

But the pains did not leave the woman; she went on groaning.

“Now I shall pat you a little, my lamb,” said the husband.

But all to no avail; the woman went on groaning as if she were far gone. Then her husband said, “Now I shall lay my hands here on your temples, my lamb.”

It seemed as if the woman’s pains eased a little at the patting and laying-on of hands, but not entirely.

“Now we shall have the Indian prayer,” said the husband, and they recited it together.

Then the woman fell asleep.

E. Draummann came back to join his room-mates.

“What did you say your wife’s name was again, lad?” asked Hogensen.

“Her name is Chloë,” said E. Draummann.

“Ah, yes, Klói; just like a mongrel,” said Hogensen. “And she’s a bit low. I don’t suppose her illness has anything to do with her name?”

“It is a great and difficult task to be her doctor,” said Draummann. “Her spiritual maturity is more advanced than mortal flesh can bear. She stands on the brink of a new incarnation.”

“Oh yes, it often happens that the power drains out of a family,” said Captain Hogensen. “And the Langahlí
family has lasted very well. There have always been quite exceptional clergymen in that family, in the north: outstanding womanizers, tremendous drinkers, and great men for a fight if it came to that; and also renowned fishermen, famous horsemen, and great versifiers.”

Ebenezer Draummann nodded his head rather piously at this information.

“We can thank our lucky stars,” he said, “that the Almighty does not let there be any spiritual kinship between relatives. Your sister could be the queen of Atlantis even though you were a sheep-thief from Rugludalur.”

“Ach, I’m beginning to hear badly now,” said Captain Hogensen, and indeed the distance between people there in the darkness of the mid-loft was lengthening. And Runólfur Jónsson had started snoring.

E. Draummann had long suspected, according to what he himself said, and had at last found proof the previous year, that although his wife came of this famous Langahlí
family, she had nothing in common with her father and mother nor with anyone else in Iceland or in this part of the world in this century and this millennium.