The Fish Can Sing (31 page)

“I live at Brekkukot in Reykjavík here,” I said

“You come from old Björn of Brekkukot?” said the hotel-keeper. “What makes you think that you can talk to the opera singer?”

“I am mo-more or less related to him,” I said.

“One never knows here,” said the hotel-keeper. “What can I do for you?”

I told him once again what I wanted.

“If you know Gar
ar Hólm, then you ought to know that it is not just anyone who can come and talk to opera singers,” said the hotel-keeper, and he was now speaking entirely in Danish. “If one were allowed to see him, the whole town would follow. They think they own him. You claim to be related to him, and I have no ready way of disproving that, I have to take your word for it; but I give myself leave to doubt whether the kinship is matched by close friendship, if you seriously think you can burst in on your kinsman as casually as ordering a ham sandwich. Certainly, this is his address while he is staying in Iceland. I have the honour of receiving his letters on his behalf and saying that he is not in; and now and then he gives me a genuine gold coin. But naturally no letter ever arrives, because he has no friends who hold him in such low esteem as to think that he actually stays at the Hotel d’Islande. He calls us a
pension de famille
. If he ever happens to
come in here on some urgent errand he runs away again as fast as he can whenever he hears the canaries singing.”

“Could you not please tell me, then, where he is living,” I said.

“Living!” echoed the hotel-keeper. “Gar
ar Hólm is not living anywhere. Obviously he is staying out on the French warship that brought him to Iceland two nights ago; it’s anchored just off the islands. But during the day when he’s ashore, he is naturally at the Governor’s house.”

A few days later, yet another vagrant was being buried; or perhaps just a sea-scorpion. Anyway, I received a message from Pastor Jóhann asking whether I could be persuaded to sing at the graveside for thirty
aurar
or so.

I went up to the churchyard at the appointed time. Pastor Johann and the coffin and the policeman were there, and the usual municipal grave-diggers leaning on their shovels. As always, sorrow manifested itself chiefly in the lamp-black. Pastor Johann sprinkled the earth and promised the deceased due resurrection on Doomsday according to the manual, and after that a signal was given and I began to sing. But whether it was because I was becoming bored with Hallgrímur Pétursson’s psalm
Just as the One True Flower
and wanted a change in the churchyard, or because I thought to myself that it was better to do for oneself than ask of one’s brother, I took my courage in both hands and sang Schubert’s
Der Erlkönig –
“Who rides so late through night and wind …”

As everyone knows,
Der Erlkönig
is really only
Ólafur rode beneath the cliffs
, except that the elf-maidens in the German poem do the enticing of Ólafur through the mouth of a third person, and a man at that, namely the Elf-king himself, whereas in our folksong, death comes in the guise of the last elf-maiden. But even though it is a non Icelandic idea, and irreconcilable with life in Brekkukot, that a man should want to tear a boy from the arms of another man, this ballad nevertheless touched some hidden chord within me. Was it perhaps these triolets from a terror-stricken tambourine that had been hidden somewhere deep in the night over Álftanes when grandfather and I were out catching lumpfish?

“I have never been against the new tunes,” said Pastor Johann, when I had finished singing
Der Erlkönig
in German over the vagrant’s grave. “And that is because the old tunes do not become any worse simply because the new ones are good. Here are twenty-five
aurar
, but that isn’t enough.”

“I wanted to try this tune,” I said. “I knew anyway that there would not be very many listening to it.”

“Quite right,” said Pastor Johann. “Everyone here in the churchyard is deaf, except God. And God thinks the new tunes just as good as the old tunes. I really think my purse must be beginning to leak. But here we are, here are two
aurar
at last.”

“Thank you very much indeed, Pastor Johann,” I said. “And now you must not pay me any more. I know that you yourself get nothing for burying destitute people like these.”

“I could naturally get something for burying them, just like the others,” said Pastor Johann, “if I claimed it from the authorities. But to be honest it has always given me greater satisfaction to bury the poor than the rich. And that stems from the fact that the more humble they are, the larger the place they have in the Saviour’s heart. And now here’s another stray
two-aurar
piece at last. I really must be getting myself a decent purse. I am not even going to manage to scrape together these thirty
aurar
I more or less promised you. I must ask you to let me owe you one
eyrir.”

I sat down on the tombstone of the late Archangel Gabriel with my funeral-song fee in my palm, after Pastor Johann had gone. All was quiet again, apart from the grave-diggers who were hastily shovelling earth on to the stranger, not far away. And then, before I knew it, a man sat down beside me. He took off his hat, for the weather was warm, and smoothed his hair out from the parting with the palms of his hands. He had greyed considerably, and there were deep furrows across his brow. Then he looked at me hard.

“How have you found that note?” said Gar
ar Hólm.

“What note?” I said.

“You have a note,” he said.

“I sometimes try to sing a little for Pastor Johann,” I said.

“You had better be careful,” he said.

“I went to see you the other day,” I said. “But you were out on the French warship.”

“Why did you stand so close to the edge of the grave while you were singing? Do you think that the singer should push himself forward past the widow?” he asked.

“There was no widow,” I said. “I am never asked to sing for people who have widows.”

“One should not sing for one’s own enjoyment,” he said.

“If I had seen you, I would have called on you to sing,” I said.

He stood up as if he were almost annoyed. Was he angry at me? Or was this aloofness of behaviour something which fame thrust on people?

“There is the one note,” he said, almost like a continuation of Pastor Jóhann’s words. “But he who has heard it, never sings again.”

While I was contemplating his clothes and shoes, which were as spotless and uncreased as ever, I suddenly caught sight of a wisp of hay clinging to one of his trouser-legs just behind the knee. Now, he had not really been particularly pleasant to me on this occasion, even though he had paid me these rather ambiguous compliments; but nevertheless I thought it would be little less than a disaster if any speck were to be seen on such a man, to say the least of it. I stood up and brushed the wisp of hay off him.

“What’s wrong?” he said, rather irritably, when I started to brush him.

“It was a wisp of hay,” I said.

“Ah, I’ve been sitting on the ground,” he said, and smiled at me in gratitude, albeit condescendingly, shook hands, bade me farewell, and disappeared among the tombstones.

In Löngustétt one could see signs that something was afoot, this time at the
Ísafold
offices. The editor was not going to rest content with a mere coat of paint; he had also hired a carpenter to spruce up his balcony with a lathe-turned balustrade. At this time the editor of the
Ísafold
was considered to be the most likely person to become the King’s Minister after the next elections. Now the rumour spread that this leader of men was going to give a banquet on Saturday evening, to which were invited all the more important shopkeepers and the most distinguished consuls in the country, as well as the officers of any Danish naval vessels in Icelandic waters at the time; but the special guest of honour was to be the man who had come to Iceland in a French warship, Gar
ar Hólm the opera singer. On this occasion nothing was printed in the newspapers in advance, for people had learned by experience that it was best to be on the safe side when talking about celebrities. But although there were no advertisements or articles this time, the populace of the town guessed that the balcony had been balustraded so that Gar
ar Hólm might be able to step out on to it and greet the country with song when he had eaten.

It was a late-summer morning in Su
urgata. The sea-breeze had not yet started to breathe over the Nesses; the Lake was calm and beautiful apart from an occasional ripple. As usual I was up and about at first light to let the cow nibble the tufts of grass between the paving-slabs. I had her on a halter so as to keep her away from the rotting fence round the vegetable garden. I sat on the stone dyke at the roadside and listened to the cow grazing in the stillness of the dawn as my grandmother’s chimney was beginning to smoke.