The Fish Can Sing (33 page)

Did I happen to mention that it was raining?

Time passed, and we stood outside in the late-summer rain. Occasionally a face would peer out of a window, or a shadow would pass across a curtain, and something like a swift gust went through the crowd waiting in the street: It’s Him.

But always it turned out not to be Him.

What were we expecting of this singer? Were we perhaps some singer-race which had been shipwrecked here on a silent shore long ages ago and had been waiting ever since for this one thing, generation after generation?

But I shall not keep the reader waiting any longer for the story. Very late that evening, when most of the people were wet and some soaked through and the town was in darkness, the balcony doors of the
Ísafold
were thrown open and a shaft of light streamed out, thick with the fumes of guests, steaks, and tobacco; and then out stepped an elegantly clad gentleman, and many of the people started clapping. It was the owner of the house. He signalled for silence, and then started speaking. The burden of his speech was that he urged everyone to go home, because the invited guest of honour had not turned up, they had been waiting for him all evening; but a letter from him had just arrived, saying that the French warship, the vessel on which he was the guest of the commander, was putting out to sea at that very moment. Gar
ar Hólm was gone, and sent his greetings; he sent his greetings to all Icelanders, both high and low, and wished that the Icelandic nation might live, thrive, and flourish.

And now the expectant throng of people who had long been waiting for the singing, tortured by silence, began to disperse in the rain with an air of patient resignation that suggested that this was
not by any means the first time that they had suffered disappointment. I turned my cap round so that the peak faced backwards, to prevent the rain from pouring straight down the back of my neck, and began to plod home after the fiasco of the evening. As I said earlier, this was so early in the autumn that the street-lamps were not yet lit, although here and there light spilled from a window. When I had reached Su
urgata, just below the Melsted building, I could just make out a woman keeping well out of my way, wrapped up in dark shawls almost the colour of the night.

She was very unsteady on her feet, this woman, and she was almost criss-crossing the street like a helpless drunk. Finally I saw her wander right off the edge of the road and tumble into the ditch in a heap. I made haste to go and help her if I could and then I saw that it was our Kristín of Hríngjarabær.

“Did you hurt yourself, Kristín dear?” I said and lifted her to her feet and helped her back on to the road; she was obviously rather wet and muddy from the ditch.

“I’ve become so terribly night-blind, somehow,” she said apologetically, as if we did not all know how badly her eyesight was failing. But even though I had lifted her to her feet she was still stooping down and feeling around her on the ground. At last we found what she was looking for. It was her basket.

“I just popped out to Fri
riksen’s,” she said.

That was certainly true, because a powerful aroma of cloves and cinnamon and other bakery confections was coming from her basket. I offered to guide her home and she accepted this and took my arm. I soon realized that she was soaked through and must have been standing out in the rain at least as long as I had been.

“My goodness, how wet it is,” she said. “Fancy getting soaked just from popping out to Fri
riksen’s bakery!”

I helped her up the slope all the way home to Hríngjarabær. The windows were in darkness, of course, and there was no sign of life about the house, for the bell-ringer had been dead for twenty-five years, and the cow too.

“Bless you for letting me lean on you, my child,” said the woman – she never noticed how tall I had grown, except that she had stopped giving me the customary ten
aurar
as she used
to, worse luck. “Come inside now and have a sip of coffee.”

Hríngjarabær lay in the farthest north corner of the churchyard, right at its highest point. It was a tarred wooden cottage, jointed or ribbed, as it was called; it had a living-room and a small kitchen with a range downstairs, and two rooms in the loft upstairs. The old bell-ringer had lived here for several generations, and Kristín had benefited from that by being allowed to stay on there after his death. The patch of grass round the house had for the last few years been mown by the town council for hay for the hearse-horses. But behind the cottage still stood the late bell-ringer’s cow-shed, now used by the churchyard authorities for storing their junk; and the hay from the grass-patch, these ten or twenty trusses, was hauled up through the hatch of the hayloft and stored there until late winter, when it would be fetched by the man who looked after the town council’s horses.

“There is no point in offering you milk,” the woman said. “It’s your own milk from Brekkukot, anyway. But I’ve got a little cold coffee here, that’s always refreshing; and you can have something with it.”

She lit the little lamp over the kitchen range and poured some coffee for me into a thick cup; then she dipped into her basket, where the cakes from the bakery still seemed to be in good shape, judging by the smell, despite the mishaps of the journey. But she did not offer me a Danish pastry; she gave me a bun instead. For myself, I would rather have chosen a Danish pastry with green sugar icing and raspberry jam; but buns were good, too – they had currants in them, which you don’t find in Danish pastries, and often a lot of cinnamon right in the centre.

But then it turned out that she had only bought one Danish pastry; and I had no doubt that she had bought it for a particular purpose, for although there was no lack of hospitality at either end of the churchyard, nothing was ever wasted and nothing was ever bought at random. The old woman now sliced some bread, spread it with butter and meat-paste, put the slices on one side of a decorated cake-dish, then divided the pastry into three triangular pieces and laid them on the other half of the plate. Then she poured some milk from a little tub into a jug, and said,

“Since I’m now so night-blind, I want to ask you to encourage my laziness and go over to the cow-shed for me and put this plate and this jug of milk up through the hatch into the hayloft for the poor mouse.”

“What mouse?” I said.

“What mouse?” she echoed. “One cannot even begin to answer a question like that, Álfgrímur dear. And be careful of fire if you strike a light.”

“I’m afraid the mouse won’t be able to reach the milk in the jug,” I said. “And if it ever managed to get up to the rim, I think it would topple in and drown. When I leave milk for mice, I always give it to them in a saucer.”

“Just listen to the child!” she said. “Fancy thinking that the mouse hasn’t learned the knack of drinking out of jugs! Off you go now and stop your nonsense, little one. And take care not to frighten the poor creature; everyone is always trying to destroy it, not just people but dogs and cats as well.”

I struck a match, and found a stump in the candlestick. Then I started up the steps, going as carefully as I could so as not to spill the milk, and not to scare the mouse either. But I could not resist putting my candle up through the trap-door to see if I could catch a glimpse of this strange mouse which it was unseemly to serve with anything less than Danish pastry and bread with meat-paste, and a whole jug of milk to boot. Or was there no particular mouse that the old woman had in mind, but the Mouse in general, the mouse-race of the world?

This loft was divided into two, a hayloft and a lumber-room, with a partition between them. The part of the loft that was nearest the hatch was almost empty; summer was almost over, and the few hay-trusses that the grass-patch at Hríngjarabær yielded had long since been stored away; and from the loft there came the smell of hay fermenting. But when I raised the candle I could see that in the nearer compartment, on this side of the partition, some hay had been spread out on the floor for a bed, and that on it lay a large bundle carefully wrapped in foreign newspapers, that is to say some copies of the London
Times
, which in my young days was called the greatest newspaper in the world and
sometimes reached Iceland as wrappings for goods from England.

What treasure could it be that old Kristín of Hríngjarabær was keeping here in the cow-shed loft wrapped in that world newspaper,
The Times?
I would perhaps have pursued the question no further if, just as I was about to take the candle downstairs again, I had not caught sight of a shining pair of shoes standing beside this bundle, with a stiff collar laid neatly on top of them, and a spotted tie. Then I began to shine the light over it more carefully. And now, if I was not mistaken, it seemed to me that inside the London
Times
something was beginning to stir; a rather careful movement, to be sure, as if from a realization that the newspaper was after all made of paper. And while I was studying this phenomenon, some toes appeared at the end of the bundle nearest to me! It does not really concern the story just how I felt at seeing this sight up in Kristín’s hayloft in the middle of the night, nor do I intend to try to describe it here.

“Bring the light up to the edge of the hatchway, my friend, I have to talk to you,” said Gar
ar Hólm.