The Fish Can Sing (10 page)

Jón Hákonarson was certainly descended from good stock, and was a true-blue Icelandic chieftain in Brei
afjör
ur by nature and lineage, attitudes and ideals, even if there had been nothing else to commend him. But the King of Denmark himself had elevated him to a recognizable wordly rank that made genealogy, as well as attitudes and ideals, superfluous; and indeed he called himself by rights a Danish naval commander and His Danish Majesty’s Pilot. He never parted with his blue, gilt-buttoned uniform nor the cap pertaining to His Danish Majesty’s Pilot in Brei
afjör
ur. He always put on this uniform at Christmas and Easter, and also on New Year’s Day and the first day of summer, and on these occasions he would sit on his bed with a dignified bearing all day without touching his horsehair. It was his custom to rise from his bunk on New Year’s morning, put on his finery, and get someone to lead him into town in order to invoke God’s blessing on the authorities and try to worm a little horsehair out of them.

Another of the guests in the mid-loft during my time there was
our Superintendent, as we always called him, who I thought for a long time was the superintendent for the whole town. Apart from that, I think he was called Jón of Skagi.

This superintendent was a very distant relative of those two cousins, my grandmother and Kristín of Hríngjarabær. He was the sort of guest about whom one could never actually be sure whether he was staying there or not. Generally speaking, he never came to bed before everyone else was asleep, and he had finished his morning coffee with grandmother and gone off into the blue before anyone else was up and about.

Our superintendent was probably descended from the Hidden People; at least I never heard it suggested that he was descended from pastors, sheriffs, and poets. It was a real event if we who shared the nights with him ever managed to speak to him; for a long time I scarcely knew whether he was actually staying with us or not – and yet, his two pouches lay on a shelf over the bed when I was small, the one full of snuff and the other of gold. Whenever anyone happened to run into this superintendent he was invariably so clean and spruce that he shone. When a month or so had passed without anyone remembering that he existed, and someone then eventually came across him outside somewhere, he had no other news to offer than that it was splendid weather for mice that day; and when that was agreed, he would hasten to add, “Yes, and it’s no worse for eagles.”

I did not begin to inquire about who this man was until I was a little older; and I don’t care if I anticipate my own story here: he was a philosopher. A certain bee had settled in his bonnet; he had left his farm in Akranes because he had come to the conclusion that he could be of greater use to mankind if he left off raising sheep for slaughter. He had sold his excellent salmon-river to the English for gold, and moved to the capital to become a superintendent. But in those two pouches that lay side by side on the shelf above his bed the chronicle that is recorded here came into being.

The superintendent’s bed-fellow was the man whose job, in my younger days, was to spread manure for people in the capital, as well as on the home-fields of the farms in the nearby valleys
and out on the Nesses. His name was Runólfur Jónsson. It would not be excessive praise to say of him that in the whole of Iceland there has never been a greater admirer of good cess-pools, not excepting the Icelandic Agricultural Society.

Runólfur Jónsson was also descended from pastors, sheriffs, and poets, but he was first and foremost related to one of the most excellent Chief Justices this country has ever known. He never discussed his distinguished antecedents in everyday conversation; but when he had a drink in him, which he called “acquiring a battleship”, he would make his way down town and preach about the Chief Justice on the steps of the Theological Seminary or on the pavement in front of Gú
múnsen’s Store, although unfortunately the kind of audience he attracted there were least likely to be impressed by such distinguished antecedents. Runólfur Jónsson had worked on fishing-smacks, and had been on Gú
múnsen’s Store boats for more than thirty years, but now he had been put ashore once and for all because of salt-burn in his eyes; he had become what my grandfather called the retired dominie of Gú
múnsen’s Store. Most of Runólfur’s earnings while he had been at sea had gone into paying fines for turning up late for his boat. On the other hand in his latter years, as I have already said, he took it upon himself to empty people’s cess-pools in the town and its neighbourhood. From earliest times, cess-pools had always lain open and unprotected at people’s doors in Iceland, as is still the custom on farms in France; and in these open cess-pools more Icelanders have drowned than in any other sea, the ocean excepted, and therefore it fell to Runólfur’s lot to encounter more and more dangerous seas as he grew older.

But round about this time a symptom of the new age was appearing in the future capital city, as well as out at Seltjarnarnes, in that the pioneering elements in the farming community were building concrete pits on their farms to replace the cess-pools in front of their houses. Runólfur Jónsson admired these modern receptacles more than any other piece of contemporary craftsmanship in the world; he considered a good cess-pit to be a supernatural phenomenon, or a miracle. For him it was a pleasure not to be reckoned in money, and a compensation for much that
he had had to do without during his life, to be allowed in his old age to spread manure from these matchless modern masterpieces.

Runólfur Jónsson usually got drunk four times a year, and then always for a few weeks at a time. In between times he was sober. It was more often than not the superintendent, his bed-mate, who enabled him to “acquire a battleship”. It goes without saying that he invariably vanished from Brekkukot when The Drink called, and did not return until he had sobered up again; the spirit which prevailed at Brekkukot allowed that all people were considered human beings, not to say gentry, whether rich or poor, saint or criminal – all except drunkards. And besides, these crooked little turf cottages held up by a few rotting wooden spars would have been reduced to ruins long ago if they had housed drunkards. But no sooner had this Chief Justice’s kinsman ended his battleship expedition than he came climbing up our stair again and began sleeping beside the superintendent once again.

I am not going to describe here Runólfur Jónsson’s condition when he returned from these expeditions, except to say that the moment he turned up, the superintendent would cut his hair and beard and begin to clean him up carefully all over with soft-soap, creosote, and brimstone; the superintendent considered this service for Runólfur as axiomatic as giving him money for liquor.

But although Runólfur was always completely sober at home, he could never reconcile himself to the mental attitudes of those who live on this dry dung-heap they call land, and so his conversation with them was often rather weird. One of his conversational short-comings was that he could never remember the names of people or places, excepting only that of Björn of Brekkukot and that of Gú
múnsen, when he was drunk. So he had to resort to the expedient of using long circumlocutions for personal names, and even his friends could find it difficult to fathom what he was saying. I shall not go right through his vocabulary here, but it must be admitted that it resembled in some ways Konrá
Gíslason’s Danish dictionary. He never called my grandmother anything other than “the woman who had the children”; his bed-mate he called “the man who owns the pouches”, and Captain Hogensen he naturally never called anything but “the man who
commands warships”. Unfortunately, Runólfur Jónsson could not remember what the Saviour’s name was either, and if it ever happened that he had to mention God he had to resort to the unfortunate expedient of referring to “the Man who is above Björn of Brekkukot”. Nor did he know the name of the land he lived in, except that it was dry.