The Fish Can Sing (12 page)

The King’s Minister stifled a yawn and replied, “I shall most certainly and sincerely keep this request in mind, my dear Hogensen. But as a matter of fact Iceland is, perhaps, as you yourself say, ahem, hardly the proper party in this matter. On the other hand I think it not unlikely that the proper authorities in this matter could be induced to consider, reflect, and examine whether or not to, ahem, to examine, reflect, and consider what could be done in such a case in these difficult times. And now we must try to get a move on, my dear Hogensen, for we are expecting visitors and to tell you the truth I am not awake yet.”

“Yes, well, then it only remains to me to ask the Minister whether His Excellency himself could not see his way to manage a wisp of horsehair for me in the spring when the royal ministerial horses have their tails docked? I know full well that my good King Kristian the Ninth, who was once a German cottager in Holstein burdened with debts and a brood of children, understands what it is to be a foreign official in the Danish kingdom.”

At this point in the conversation the Minister all but woke up, and he answered almost with force and conviction: “To tell you the truth, Hogensen, I myself am so short of rope that words cannot describe it.
Quite
frankly I have my hands full finding enough rope to bind the hay that is mown here in the Ministry’s meadows. And it was only on Christmas Day that I decided, in agreement with the proper authorities, and gave orders to that effect, that this royal ministry should make every effort to supply itself with the necessary ropes from the horses it has been allotted, and I have taken steps to have the prisoners make these required ropes. On the other hand, here is a newly minted two-
krónur
piece I would like to offer you, and there’s ten
aurar for
the boy. Goodbye.”

In February, it so happened that Captain Hogensen was able to send me to see the Minister again and present him with a set of hay-ropes.

In certain ancient musical scales there are different intervals than those to which people are now attuned, and for that reason they seem to us to lack certain notes; and yet some of the loveliest melodies which are ever sung in Iceland have been written in these modes, such as
Iceland, Land of the Blest
and
Oh, my Beautiful Bottle
.

At home in Brekkukot we did not acknowledge all the concepts which are now all the rage, and indeed had no words for them. All sorts of talk that was in common currency outside the turnstile-gate at Brekkukot struck us as mental illness; words which were commonplace elsewhere sounded not only strange to our ears but were downright embarrassing to us, like smut or other shameless chatter.

For instance, if someone used in conversation the word “charity”, we thought of it as some sort of frivolous, irrelevant, or untimely quotation from the
Book of Sermons
. “Charity” was called “kind-heartedness” in our house, and a charitable person, as one would say in spiritual language, was simply called “kind-hearted”, or “good”. The word “love” was never heard in our house either, except if some inebriate or a particularly stupid maidservant from the country happened to recite a verse by a modern poet; and moreover, the vocabulary of poems like these was such that if ever we heard them, cold shivers ran down our spines, and my grandfather would seat himself on his hands, sometimes out on the garden wall, and would grimace and jerk his shoulders and writhe as if he had lice and say, “Tut tut!” and “Really!” On the whole, modern poetry had the same effect on us as canvas being scratched.

“Falling in love” did not exist with us; instead it was said that someone “liked the look of” a girl, or that a boy and a girl were
“becoming close”. “Courtship” could be mentioned, but that was as far as one could go. I can swear on oath that while I was growing up I never heard the word “happiness” except on the lips of a crazy woman who lodged in the mid-loft with us for a time and who is not mentioned in this book; I never came across the word again until I was almost grown up and beginning to do translation at school. Even after I was fully grown I still believed that the word “weeping” was borrowed from Danish. On the other hand I can remember that when my grandfather was once asked, sympathetically, how the people at Akurger
i who had lost their breadwinners at sea the previous year were keeping, he answered at once, “They have plenty of salt-fish.” In the same way, if someone asked how anyone was, we invariably replied: “Oh, he’s fat enough” – which meant that he was well, or, as they would say in Denmark, that he was happy. If someone was not well, one said: “Oh, you can see it on him”; and if the person under discussion was more dead than alive, one said: “Oh, he’s a bit low.” If someone was dying of old age, one said: “Yes, he’s off his food these days.” About someone who was on his deathbed, it was said: “Yes, he’s packing his bags now, poor fellow.” Of a mortally ill youngster it was said that it did not look as if he would ever have grey hairs to comb. When a married couple separated, one used the phrase: “Yes, there’s something wrong there, I believe.” At Brekkukot every word was precious, even the little words.

My grandmother had a habit of answering people with sayings and proverbs. Often there was good-natured humour in the reply, but almost absent-minded, somehow, or as if she were talking out of an open window to someone standing behind her: the rather tuneless drawling chant she used carried a hint of compassion, almost of resignation, but never bitterness. But it was not just proverbs that she had at her command; she knew a couplet or a scrap of verse, some sort of mixture of adage and nursery rhyme, for every occasion, or else she would quote a bit of a psalm or rigmarole or folk-ballad or some other obscure old poetry. She was such a well of knowledge, in her own quiet way, that if one pressed her and tried to find out just how much she knew, one never reached the bottom. She knew whole ballads off
by heart from beginning to end. For the benefit of those who no longer know what Icelandic ballads
(rímur)
are, I shall interpolate here that they are a form of poetry about heroes of olden times and mighty deeds from the days of the epic; this poetry is composed of intricately rhymed quatrains, sometimes so intricate that each strophe is a rhyme-riddle. A medium-sized ballad, that is to say one ballad-cycle, can be thirty poems, each one of them consisting of at least a hundred quatrains. There are hundreds of
rímur
in Iceland, some say thousands. My grandmother also knew whole books of psalmody. She sometimes mumbled this stuff to herself while she was knitting, but not for anyone who was listening, and really not for herself either, for she was often quite obviously thinking about other matters. If there was something in the psalm which prompted my curiosity, such as for instance what kind of dripping one put on the Bread of Heaven, and I started to ask questions, it was as if I had roused her from a dream, and she would say that she did not really know what she had been reciting; and then she could not pick up the thread again.

I was never really aware that she preferred any one poem to another, any more than a printer does who sets the type for good and bad books alike. One could undoubtedly have recorded whole volumes from her, if anyone had bothered to write it all down. I do not believe that many universities have at their disposal teachers with any more literature at their fingertips; and yet I have met few people who were further than this woman from being what is sometimes called “literary” and is used as a term of praise for the gentry.

As is known, the ability to read and write was almost as common in Iceland before the days of printing as it has been since; and actually I think that my grandmother was closer to the people who lived before the days of Caxton. Spelling-books were never used in Iceland. My grandmother said she had learned to recognize the letters of the alphabet from an old man who scratched them for her on the ice when she had to watch over sheep during the winter. She learned writing from an old woman by making letters with a knitting needle on a piece of smoky glass; they used to tinker unobtrusively with this in the evenings sometimes,
by moonlight. When she was ninety, my grandmother wrote me a letter when I was abroad; it was fourteen lines long, like a sonnet. I lost this letter a long time ago but it still exists nonetheless; I can remember her handwriting vividly even now. She wrote not only all the more important nouns with an initial capital but all the more significant adjectives as well; and that is the very style used by Fitzgerald in the poem called
The Rubaiyat
which he re-wrote from Omar Khayyam, and which is considered by some to be one of the most adroit poems ever written in that part of the world which turns towards the bright side of the moon: “Oh, Moon of My Delight”. When I read that poem I said to myself, “This man writes like my grandmother.”

I was five years old when my grandmother took out a book from her little chest and said, “Today we shall start to learn to read, Álfgrímur dear.”

This book began with a rigmarole that goes like this:

“Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob and Jacob begat Judah and Judah begat Pharez with Tamar and Pharez begat Hezron and Hezron begat Ram and Ram begat Amminadab and Amminadab begat Nahshon and Nahshon begat Salma and Salma begat Boaz with Rahab and Boaz begat Obed with Ruth and Obed begat Jesse …”

We spent nearly all winter struggling with this rigmarole.

“What a terribly tedious rigmarole this is, grandmother,” I said.

Then my grandmother recited this verse:

“The Bible sticks in my throat like an old piece of fish-skin;

I gulped it as quick as I could,

And it hasn’t done me much good.”

When it was nearly Christmas, I said: “Why is this rigmarole so tedious, grandmother?”

“It’s in Hebrew,” said my grandmother.

But by the end of the winter I had learned to spell my way through this dreadful rigmarole, and from then on I could read any book whatsoever.

From time immemorial it has been the custom in all sizeable farms in Iceland to have a good reader available to read sagas aloud or recite
rímur
for the household in the evenings; this was the national pastime. These evening sessions have been called the Icelanders’ University. Old people who had attended this university for eighty years or more came to know the curriculum pretty well, not surprisingly. Saga-readings and
rímur
-recitations at Brekkukot were for the most part performed by visitors who stayed with us from time to time, or even just overnight, for my grandfather Björn of Brekkukot, as I have said already, was no more of a bookman than he had to be. Visitors from distant parts of the country often proved to be excellent entertainers. The best were those from the north, particularly from Skagafjör
ur; they were heroic-looking men who wore thigh-boots, whereas the people from the south contented themselves with thin-shoes. They were bursting with all sorts of poetry, good and bad alike, and their speech was much more vigorous than ours; and when someone from Skagafjör
ur was settled comfortably against our gable-wall and was launched on to the Úlfar-
rímur
set to a Skagafjör
ur chant, with that obligatory opening about King Cyrus, there opened up before us the whole wide world of heroic poetry all the way to the Orient, fitfully lit by strange flashes of illumination.