The Fish Can Sing (38 page)

But now it so happened that down town the very spirit that Ebenezer Draummann championed was in the air: the
Secret Doctrine
was beginning to rear its head all over the place. Even up in the Grammar School one began to hear remarkable sentences such as “All life is
yoga”
, or “All life is
maya”
. A philosopher like Ebenezer Draummann now became a welcome guest in many houses, not only in the homes of the doctors and other healers he visited because of his wife, but also in the homes of their friends and their friends’ friends; he was considered a highly intelligent person. As time passed, he no longer had time to look after his wife except now and again, because he was too busy preaching about her all over town. Considering the woman’s state of health, it was not surprising that she grew impatient waiting for her husband when she thought he stayed away too long on some
spiritual expedition; and indeed the only words she was heard to utter from her cubicle were requests to Captain Hogensen to oblige her by having a look out of the window to see if there were any signs of her husband coming home.

In Löngustétt, where the girls promenade, a girl came towards me. By habit when I met girls I took care to look the other way; I did not feel quite safe with these creatures, and could not exactly think of them as people at all, any more than I could “the authorities”. She was tall and shapely, and I felt her looking at me. When she saw that I was going to sidle past her, she put her hand on my arm. She looked at me with that strange smile that seemed to live in the air itself but manifested itself in her face as a flash from some unknown light: the air clad in a soul, or the soul clad in air, and light – Blær. Her voice was slightly breathless as she bade me good day. I stiffened up completely, just as I had done before, and could see nothing; the world melted away in a white fog. This was the moment that I had dreaded in my innermost being ever since I had fled from her, the moment when I would meet her again.

“What beautiful shoes you are wearing,” said the girl, and gazed at me from out of the air.

I said nothing.

“Why do you avoid us? What harm have we done you?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I mumbled, almost in a whisper.

“Could you not see how much we all thought of you? Daddy says I must have annoyed you. What did I do?”

I suppose I was going to say something, and I looked at her face. Then I saw how her face quivered behind the smile when she looked at me; and I felt as if I had been seized by the throat.

“Why?” she said, and went on looking at me.

In the end I blurted out, “When you were near, I – I – I felt I could not bear it.”

“What a thing to say!” said the girl. “Am I as boring as all that?”

“Goodbye,” I said.

“Aren’t you even going to give me your hand?” she asked.

I gave her my hand.

“Goodbye,” she said. “And remember that even though I may be boring, Daddy is still waiting for you. He says that you have absorbed everything concerned with music. I have also heard from another source that you are good at everything and anything. What do you want to be?”

“I’m thinking of just staying at home at Brekkukot,” I replied.

“May I not invite you to come home with me, please?” said the girl. “I know how delighted Daddy would be. He always thinks I must have done something to you.”

“I must see to my lines,” I said.

“See to … what?” said the girl, for she did not understand fishermen’s idiom.

“My grandmother sent me to Fri
riksen’s bakery shop,” I said.

“So you’re never going to come and see us, then, so that we can have a proper talk about what I don’t understand?” said the girl.

She did not know that it was because of her that I could not speak.

Was it that same evening, or perhaps the following evening, that I went to see a certain woman down town? She was Danish. She had a black moustache. Astride her nose, which was one of the sharpest and most prominent aloft in Reykjavík in those days, there rode an immense pair of lorgnettes tethered by a black silken cord. Her name was Madame Strúbenhols, but many Icelanders called her the axe “Batde-Troll”. She was related to the Danish wife of a civil servant in the capital, and some extraordinary misfortune which I cannot account for had caused her to be left high and dry in Iceland for the last twenty or thirty years.

She managed to keep body and soul together by teaching the daughters of the gentry three or four grips on the guitar or mandolin, and was held in particular esteem socially in better class homes. This woman had also been engaged to play Liszt’s
piano rhapsodies at every single public tombola for as long as I can remember. Later I discovered that workmen and shop-assistants and even a few seamen went to Madame Strúbenhols to learn music; and this was because of something that appears to be immutable – that it was the classes which were considered uncultured or unrefined, or at the very least only half-refined, that really cared for music, while total unmusicality and a basic contempt for music went on being one of the most conspicuous characteristics of the educated and upper classes in Iceland.

It was to this woman that I made my way one evening. Madame Strúbenhols squinted at me over her lorgnettes and asked who I was and what I wanted. I told her I wanted to learn singing and instrumental music.

“Well I never!” said the woman.

She looked me over carefully, up and down, raising and lowering her head in turn because she had to study me from beneath her spectacles, through them, and over them; and this took quite a time because I was so lanky.

“Are you a joiner’s apprentice?” she asked.

“No,” I replied.

“A fisherman’s boy?” she asked.

“I fish for lumpfish,” I said.

“Can you make a living out of that?” she asked.

I was aware that she was referring to money, and that rather disconcerted me because I had not realized that music costs money.

“Well, I have to live too,” the woman said. “I hope at least that you are an honest man?”

In the end she invited me inside, into a room full of furniture upholstered in red plush with tassels. Framed family portraits stood in serried ranks on what are called
chiffoniers —
gentlemen in frock-coats and top-hats, fine ladies in pleated dresses with enormous bustles behind and carrying parasols. There was a piano against the middle of one wall, and a harmonium in the corner.

“Let me hear what you can do,” the woman said.

In this Danish room in the home of a woman with a contraption on her nose, a woman so un-Icelandic in speech that I cannot
possibly reproduce it, I had suddenly arrived in a place where no one knew me. I was no more shy with this foreign woman than if she had been a piece of wood. I went straight to her harmonium, sat down, pulled out the diapason and
vox celeste
stops, and sang
Der Erlkönig
to my own accompaniment, without the music. Madame Strúbenhols looked at me in astonishment.

“God help you!” she said when I had finished singing. But she was not all that angry, nevertheless. And she did not criticize me on that occasion beyond saying, “Well, you had better come twice a week and we shall see what we can make out of that monstrosity.”

This was my last year at school, and I really had no comrade now that my friend Grandpa Jón had left for Norway, that country where Bible story-books are bigger and better than here in Iceland and where Christianity is held in higher esteem, as was mentioned in the chapter about Thór
ur the Baptist; and where there is also more concern for the spiritual welfare of the Chinese.

I would come home with my schoolbooks tied in a scarf just after midday and my grandmother would give me something to eat. I looked in silent joy at her gnarled blue hands when she passed me meat and fish, and I tried to stretch the meal-hour as long as possible by recalling in full detail exactly how the weather had been since that morning, as if this were the thing that really mattered instead of the mere fact that she should still be there and I with her; then I went up to the mid-loft and tried to do something to pass the time, having a look at my sums or thinking about the essay I had to do for homework or else bringing out my beautiful shoes and examining them. These were Gar
ar Hólm’s shoes, and it was often difficult to believe that such precious objects, which aroused the admiration of men and women alike, could be my own; and indeed I never wore them except on special occasions. On the whole, the afternoons seemed to drag very heavily towards late winter. Captain Hogensen was now so enfeebled by old age that he had difficulty keeping awake for that particularly long part of the day, so he usually just lay down and slept. This was the time of year when we had the fewest visitors; everyone stayed at home while the land was fettered in ice; nothing really significant happened except that the blade of
grass kept on tapping ceaselessly against the little window in the bitter cold, and the star rose at night if the skies were clear. And the woman from the north groaned in her cubicle.

Truth to tell, I had at first hoped that this woman would die soon, like the other one who died in there a few years ago, the one from Landbrot. We at Brekkukot really felt a less pressing duty of charity towards this one than towards the woman from Landbrot, for she had been a widow but this one had a husband. On the other hand I felt it rather unnecessary of her husband to be constantly busying himself with miracles all over the place for anyone and everyone instead of performing the more necessary miracles on his wife, even if only to change the cold compress on her head when it was obvious that warm cow-dung had little effect.

I tried to pretend that the woman’s health did not concern me in the slightest and never looked at her on purpose even when her door happened to be open, and so I was relieved that she never in any way acknowledged my presence. I reckoned that any man could call himself lucky who was so completely involved with
tamas
, the third and lowest strand of being in the fundamental order of this couple’s philosophy, that he himself counted as nothing compared with the highly developed reincarnation that this woman was; but on the other hand I saw no particular reason to invoke special floggings for her, as Horace did when he wrote:

On one occasion, as so often in the long quiet period in the middle of the afternoon late in winter, I went up to the mid-loft as usual with my books. Captain Hogensen had put his feet up and lain down to sleep on his bed as was his custom at this time of day, and his snores doubtless drowned my footsteps and the creaking of the stair. But when I was halfway through the hatch into the loft I saw a sight that stopped me in my tracks, for I had never seen anything like it before: it was a naked woman. Despite all the Latin I had studied, I was so ignorant that I thought at first that this was some animal that had been omitted from the natural histories by oversight; or perhaps a fairy creature. I stood there
rigid in the middle of the stair and gaped at her, spellbound.