The Fish Can Sing Read online

  Our clock had a decorated face, and in the middle of the ornamentation one could read the legend that this clock had been made by Mr James Cowan of Edinburgh, 1750. It had no doubt been built to stand in some other house than Brekkukot, for its plinth had had to be removed so that it could fit under our ceiling. This clock ticked to a slow and stately measure, and I soon got the notion that no other clock was worth taking seriously. People’s pocket-watches seemed to me to be dumb infants compared with this clock of ours. The seconds in other people’s watches were like scurrying insects having a race, but the seconds in the timepiece at Brekkukot were like cows, and always went as slowly as it is possible to move without actually standing still.

  It goes without saying that if there were anything happening in the room you never heard the clock at all, no more than if it did not exist; but when all was quiet and the visitors had gone and the table had been cleared and the door shut, then it would start up again, as steady as ever; and if you listened hard enough you could sometimes make out a singing note in its workings, or something very like an echo.

  How did it ever come about, I wonder, that I got the notion that in this clock there lived a strange creature, which was Eternity? Somehow it just occurred to me one day that the word it said when it ticked, a four-syllable word with the emphasis on alternate syllables, was et-ERN-it-Y, et-ERN-it-Y. Did I know the word, then?

  It was odd that I should discover eternity in this way, long before I knew what eternity was, and even before I had learned the proposition that all men are mortal – yes, while I was actually living in eternity myself. It was as if a fish were suddenly to discover the water it swam in. I mentioned this to my grandfather one day when we happened to be alone in the living-room.

  “Do you understand the clock, grandfather?” I asked.

  “Here in Brekkukot we know this clock only very slightly,” he replied. “We only know that it tells the days and the hours right down to seconds. But your grandmother’s great-uncle, who owned this clock for sixty-five years, told me that the previous owner had said that it once told the phases of the moon – before some watchmaker got at it. Old folk farther back in your grandmother’s family used to maintain that this clock could foretell marriages and deaths; but I don’t take that too seriously, my boy.”

  Then I said, “Why does the clock always say: et-ERN-it-Y, et-ERN-it-Y, et-ERN-it-Y?”

  “You must be hearing things, my child,” said my grandfather.

  “Is there no eternity, then?” I asked.

  “Not otherwise than you have heard in your grandmother’s prayers at night and in the Book of Sermons from me on Sundays, my boy,” he replied.

  “Grandfather,” I said. “Is eternity a living creature?”

  “Try not to talk nonsense, my boy,” said grandfather.

  “Listen, grandfather, are any clocks other than ours worth taking seriously?”

  “No,” said my grandfather. “Our clock is right. And that is because I have long since stopped letting watchmakers have a look at it. Indeed, I have never yet come across a watchmaker who understood this clock. If I cannot mend it myself, I get some handyman to look at it; I have always found handymen best.”

  2

  FINE WEATHER

  When I was not in the living-room listening to the strange creature in the clock, I was often outside playing in the vegetable garden. The tufts of grass between the paving-slabs reached to my waist, but the dockens and tansies were as tall as I was, and the angelica even taller. The dandelions in this garden were bigger than anywhere else. We kept a few hens, whose eggs always tasted of fish. These hens would start their clucking when they were pecking for food around the house early in the morning; it was a comfortable sound and I never took long to fall asleep again. And sometimes, around noon, they would break into their clucking again as they strutted about in their hen-run, and once again I would fall into a doze, entranced by this brooding birdsound and the scent of the tansies. Nor must I forget to thank the bluebottle for its share in this midsummer trance; it was so blue that the sunshine made it glint green, and the joyful note of earthly life vibrated ceaselessly in its well-tuned string.

  But whether I was playing in the vegetable garden, or out on the paving, or down by the path, my grandfather was always somewhere at hand, silent and omniscient. There was always some door standing wide open or ajar, the door of the cottage or the fish-shed or the net-hut or the byre, and he would be inside there, pottering away. Sometimes he would be disentangling a net on the drystone dyke; or else he would just be tinkering with something. His hands were never idle, but he never seemed to be actually working. He never gave any sign of knowing that his grandchild was nearby, and I never paid much attention to him either, and yet somehow I was always involuntarily aware of him in the background. I would hear him blowing his nose with long pauses between each blow, and then taking another pinch of snuff. His constant silent presence was in every cranny and corner of Brekkukot – it was like lying snugly at anchor, one’s soul could find in him whatever security it sought. To this very day I still have the feeling from time to time that a door is standing ajar somewhere to one side of or behind me, or even right in front of me, and that my grandfather is inside there, pottering away. So I think it only right, if I am to talk about my world, that I should first of all give some account of my grandfather.

  The late Björn of Brekkukot was born and bred in this part of the world; his father had been a farmer here in Brekkukot in the days when it had been a farm with its own meadows on the south side of the Lake, where, later, peat-pits were dug to supply this future capital city with fuel. In those days there were Danish governors ruling over Iceland. But by the time my story starts, an Icelandic governor had been appointed; he was called the King’s Minister because he was under the thumb of the Danish king in just the same way as was the Althing we had for a so-called Parliament. When my grandfather was born there were barely two thousand people living in the capital; in my own childhood there were nearly five thousand. In grandfather’s childhood the only people who counted were a few government officials (who were called variously “the gentry”, or simply “the authorities”), and a few foreign merchants, mainly Jews from Schleswig and Holstein who spoke Low German and called themselves Danes; for in those days Jews were not allowed to do business in Denmark itself, only in the Danish duchies and colonies. The rest of the town’s inhabitants were cottagers who went out to the fishing and sometimes owned a small share in a cow, or had a few sheep. They had little rowing-boats, on which they could sometimes hoist a sail.

  In my grandfather’s boyhood everyone was self-sufficient as far as fish was concerned, except for the gentry and the merchants, who lived on meat, for the most part anyway. But as the community grew and began to develop into something like a town, with some basic divisions of labour, and there began to be artisans and harbour-workers who had no opportunity of going to sea for themselves, and as a little money began to circulate, one or two people started to make a livelihood by catching fish for their neighbours’ larders.

  One of those who made his living in this way was my grandfather. He was not a ship-owner in the sense of being in big business; nor did he own shares in a boat with others. He was never one of those who dried fish on a scale large enough to trade with merchants and accumulate gold and silver in a chest and then suddenly start buying up land or plots of ground or taking shares in a decked ship, as was then becoming the fashion. Nothing like that. When the weather was fine it was his custom to row out to sea early in the morning from the landing place at Grófin or Bótin, with one or two helpers in his boat, and put his nets out somewhere just beyond the islands – or at the very most, perhaps, they might paddle the boat out as far as Svi. When he returned, grandmother and I would be waiting at the landing place with a bottle of coffee wrapped in a sock and a slice of ryebread in a red handkerchief. Then grandfather would go off with his catch in a wheelbarrow and sell it in the town for ready money, either in the street or from door to door. During the winter season, or late on in the summer, he would catch mainly cod and haddock, and sometimes also plaice and small halibut; no other fish counted. If any of the fish were not sold at once, my grandfather would clean them at home and hang them up on spars in the fish-shed, for drying into stockfish.

  During the last few months of winter he would stop going out to the fishing, as it was called, and turn his attention to lumpfish, which he would look for among the seaweed either in Skerjafjörur or out at Grandi. I am not sure if it is generally known that there is a distinct contrast between the male and female lumpfish; the male is one of the most beautifully coloured fish to be found, and tasty to match, but the female is less highly thought of and is usually salted down. In the south, out on the Nesses, spring is said to have arrived when the lumpfish season starts and the bark-coloured sails of the Frenchmen are glinting out in Faxaflói.

  Towards the end of March my grandfather would be down in the town with his wheelbarrow every morning, just as people were getting up, to sell fresh lumpfish. Those who row such a short distance out to sea are not usually reckoned as fishermen at all in Iceland – I doubt whether my grandfather ever saw the open sea in his whole life. Nor would it be correct to say that he ran a fishing business, even though he dabbled about in the seaweed with a helper or two, or put out a net a stone’s throw away from the shore. In other countries, someone who rowed out in a small boat early in the morning and had fish at your door by breakfast-time would certainly be called a fisherman; indeed, my grandfather himself looked a little like those fishermen in foreign paintings, except that he never wore boots, let alone clogs, but always the traditional home-made moccasins of treated hide known as “Icelandic shoes”, or “thin-shoes”. When he was out rowing in ra
in or heavy seas, he would put on trousers and smock made of hide treated with train-oil. But when he was going round the town he always wore those green Icelandic thin-shoes, and blue woollen stockings with a white border on top, made by my grandmother; if it was wet he would tuck his trouser-ends into his stockings, but however much mud or mire there was in the streets, there was never a spot to be seen on grandfather’s stockings or shoes.

  He grew his whiskers in a collar round his chin, like those Dutch or Danish fishermen you see in pictures, and his hair hung in long white locks cut square at the bottom. When he was not wearing his sou’wester, he had on a broad-brimmed black hat of the kind that is called a clerical hat in Germany but an artist’s hat in Denmark, with a shallow crumpled crown and red silk lining. This hat was never new, as far as I can remember, but it never became old either, and the creases in it always remained the same. It blew off once, and after that he got my grandmother to sew on two tapes, which he would then tie under his chin when the weather was windy.

  In our fish-shed, half of which was used for storing fishing-gear, the lumpfish would be hung until late spring, along with dried catfish, halibut, and haddock. Sometimes my grandfather would boil fish-liver over an open fire to the south of the fish-shed; and the rancid smell of the lumpfish, mixed with the odour of liver-oil and sediment, would blend with the scent of growing grass and tansies and angelica, and the peat-smoke from grandmother’s chimney. About the time that the bluebottle was laying her eggs the stockfish had to be fully cured, for this was the time for the fish-shed to be emptied. Every single stone in the walls of our cottage glistened with fish-scales, as did the spars of the fish-shed and the peats in the stack to the north of the shed. You could also see the glint of scales in the mire that formed between the shed and the cottage when it was wet; and every single thing within our plot of land was smeared with liver and oil, right out to the turnstile that revolved horizontally on its axle in the garden gate behind our cottage. In the southern-most corner of our plot, farthest from the cottage, was grandfather’s store-shed; it, too, was divided into two compartments, with a deal floor in one of them where all sorts of supplies were stored, for it was our custom to buy all our household necessities at half-yearly intervals; the meat we salted down ourselves in a barrel to last the whole year. At the other end of the shed lived Gráni and Skjalda; so the smell of oil and the tang of smoke at our place was mixed with the scent not only of grass, but of a horse and cow as well.

  And still this day of high summer continued to pass …

  And now, as I sat there in the vegetable garden playing by myself on this summer day, with the bluebottle buzzing and the hens clucking and grandfather’s net-hut half open and the sun shining from a sky with as much brightness as a sun can have in this mortal world, I saw a man come walking past the wall of the churchyard, staggering beneath a monstrous load on his back, a cram-full bushel sack. He jostled his way with the sack through our turnstile-gate, which was only about two feet wide, so there was no mistaking that he was on his way to visit us. I really cannot remember whether I knew him then, but I always knew him when I saw him thereafter. He was one of those odd-job-men who lent a hand occasionally; he went out in the boat with grandfather sometimes, or helped him clean the fish. He had a little place in the Skugga district, I think, and a brood of starving children, but that does not concern us here. I think he was called Jói of Steinbær. I am only telling what happened to him at Brekkukot because I have never been able to get it out of my mind, and because my own story would somehow not be complete if I did not record it here. But before I tell this story, I want above all to warn people against thinking that they are about to hear something epic or spectacular.

  The man laid his sack down on the paving at the cottage and seated himself upon it, wiping the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. He addressed himself to me, a mere boy at this time, and said, “Is your grandfather, Björn the skipper, at home?”

  When my grandfather came out of the net-hut and round to the paving where the sun sparkled on the fish-scales, the visitor rose from the sack and fell to his knees beside his burden, took off his cap and began to wring it, lowered his head and said, “I stole these peats from you last night, Björn, from your peat-stack over there next to the wall of the shed.”

  “Is that so?” said my grandfather. “That was a wicked thing to do. And it’s only about a week since I gave you a sack of peats.”

  “Yes, and I’ve scarcely slept a wink all night because of my conscience,” said the thief. “I didn’t even have any appetite for my coffee this morning. I know I’ll never have another day’s happiness until you have forgiven me.”

  “Quite so,” said Björn of Brekkukot. “But at least you can try to stand up straight while we are talking. And put your cap on.”

  “I feel as if I will never be able to stand up straight again all my life,” said the thief, “let alone put my cap on.”

  My grandfather solemnly took a pinch of snuff:

  “Yes, it’s hardly to be expected that you would be feeling light-hearted after a deed like that,” he said. “Can I offer you a pinch of snuff?”

  “Thank you for offering,” said the thief, “but I feel I scarcely deserve it.”

  “Have it your own way,” said my grandfather. “But in a case like this I need to do a little thinking. Won’t you come inside and have a cup of coffee while we discuss this?”

  They left the stolen goods in the middle of the paving and went inside. And the sun shone on the sack of peats.

  They went into the living-room.

  “Have a seat and show us some cheer,” said my grandfather. The thief put his crumpled cap beneath the chair and sat down.

  “Yes, it’s wonderfully fine weather we’re having now,” said my grandfather. “I do believe there has been fishing-weather every single day since April.”

  “Yes,” said the thief, “it’s wonderfully fine weather.”

  “I have seldom set eyes on such spring haddock as this year’s,” said my grandfather. “Rosy-fleshed, and fragrant.”

  Yes, such blessed haddock,” said the thief.

  “Or the growth in the meadows!” said my grandfather.

  “Yes, you can certainly say that,” said the thief. “What growth!”

  My grandmother served them. They went on discussing the season on sea and land while they swilled their coffee. When they had finished the coffee the thief stood up and said thank you and shook hands. He picked his cap up off the floor and made ready to take his leave. My grandfather accompanied him back out to the paving, and the thief went on wringing his cap between his hands.

  “Are you perhaps going to say anything to me before I go, Björn?” said the thief.

  “No,” said my grandfather. “You have done something which God cannot forgive.”

  The thief heaved a sigh and said in a low voice, “Ah, well, Björn, you have my warmest thanks for the coffee; goodbye, and may God be with you now and for ever.”

  “Goodbye,” said my grandfather.

  But when the visitor was on his way out through the turnstile-gate with his cap, my grandfather called out to him and said, “Oh, why don’t you just take that sack with you and whatever’s in it, poor chap. One sack of peats doesn’t matter a damn to me.”

  The thief turned back at the gate and came and shook my grandfather’s hand in gratitude again, but could not say a word. He turned his head away while he put on his cap. Then he shouldered the sack of peats once more and edged himself with it through the turnstile the way he had arrived in that fine weather.

  3

  SPECIAL FISH

  I have now described how my grandfather was a man of orthodox beliefs without its ever occurring to him to ask God to model Himself upon men, in accordance with that strange passage in the Lord’s Prayer which says: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.” My grandfather said plainly to the fellow from Steinbær: “God cannot forgive you, but to me, Björn of Brekkukot, it doesn’t matter a damn.” So I cannot help suspecting that my grandfather had a special scale of standards for most of the things that happen in the life of a fisherman.