The Fish Can Sing (4 page)

He grew his whiskers in a collar round his chin, like those Dutch or Danish fishermen you see in pictures, and his hair hung in long white locks cut square at the bottom. When he was not wearing his sou’wester, he had on a broad-brimmed black hat of the kind that is called a clerical hat in Germany but an artist’s hat in Denmark, with a shallow crumpled crown and red silk lining. This hat was never new, as far as I can remember, but it never became old either, and the creases in it always remained the same. It blew off once, and after that he got my grandmother to sew on two tapes, which he would then tie under his chin when the weather was windy.

In our fish-shed, half of which was used for storing fishing-gear, the lumpfish would be hung until late spring, along with dried catfish, halibut, and haddock. Sometimes my grandfather would boil fish-liver over an open fire to the south of the fish-shed; and the rancid smell of the lumpfish, mixed with the odour of liver-oil and sediment, would blend with the scent of growing grass and tansies and angelica, and the peat-smoke from grandmother’s chimney. About the time that the bluebottle was laying her eggs the stockfish had to be fully cured, for this was the time for the fish-shed to be emptied. Every single stone in the walls of our cottage glistened with fish-scales, as did the spars of the fish-shed and the peats in the stack to the north of the shed. You could also see the glint of scales in the mire that formed between the shed and the cottage when it was wet; and every single thing within our plot of land was smeared with liver and oil, right out to the turnstile that revolved horizontally on its axle in the garden gate behind our cottage. In the southern-most corner of our plot, farthest from the cottage, was grandfather’s store-shed; it, too, was divided into two compartments, with a deal floor in one of them where all sorts of supplies were stored, for it was our custom to buy all our household necessities at half-yearly intervals; the meat we salted down ourselves in a barrel to last the whole year. At the other end of the shed lived Gráni and Skjalda; so the smell of oil and the tang of smoke at our place was mixed with the scent not only of grass, but of a horse and cow as well.

And still this day of high summer continued to pass …

And now, as I sat there in the vegetable garden playing by
myself on this summer day, with the bluebottle buzzing and the hens clucking and grandfather’s net-hut half open and the sun shining from a sky with as much brightness as a sun can have in this mortal world, I saw a man come walking past the wall of the churchyard, staggering beneath a monstrous load on his back, a cram-full bushel sack. He jostled his way with the sack through our turnstile-gate, which was only about two feet wide, so there was no mistaking that he was on his way to visit us. I really cannot remember whether I knew him then, but I always knew him when I saw him thereafter. He was one of those odd-job-men who lent a hand occasionally; he went out in the boat with grandfather sometimes, or helped him clean the fish. He had a little place in the Skugga district, I think, and a brood of starving children, but that does not concern us here. I think he was called Jói of Steinbær. I am only telling what happened to him at Brekkukot because I have never been able to get it out of my mind, and because my own story would somehow not be complete if I did not record it here. But before I tell this story, I want above all to warn people against thinking that they are about to hear something epic or spectacular.

The man laid his sack down on the paving at the cottage and seated himself upon it, wiping the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. He addressed himself to me, a mere boy at this time, and said, “Is your grandfather, Björn the skipper, at home?”

When my grandfather came out of the net-hut and round to the paving where the sun sparkled on the fish-scales, the visitor rose from the sack and fell to his knees beside his burden, took off his cap and began to wring it, lowered his head and said, “I stole these peats from you last night, Björn, from your peat-stack over there next to the wall of the shed.”

“Is that so?” said my grandfather. “That was a wicked thing to do. And it’s only about a week since I gave you a sack of peats.”

“Yes, and I’ve scarcely slept a wink all night because of my conscience,” said the thief. “I didn’t even have any appetite for my coffee this morning. I know I’ll never have another day’s happiness until you have forgiven me.”

“Quite so,” said Björn of Brekkukot. “But at least you can try to
stand up straight while we are talking. And put your cap on.”

“I feel as if I will never be able to stand up straight again all my life,” said the thief, “let alone put my cap on.”

My grandfather solemnly took a pinch of snuff:

“Yes, it’s hardly to be expected that you would be feeling light-hearted after a deed like that,” he said. “Can I offer you a pinch of snuff?”

“Thank you for offering,” said the thief, “but I feel I scarcely deserve it.”

“Have it your own way,” said my grandfather. “But in a case like this I need to do a little thinking. Won’t you come inside and have a cup of coffee while we discuss this?”

They left the stolen goods in the middle of the paving and went inside. And the sun shone on the sack of peats.

They went into the living-room.

“Have a seat and show us some cheer,” said my grandfather. The thief put his crumpled cap beneath the chair and sat down.

“Yes, it’s wonderfully fine weather we’re having now,” said my grandfather. “I do believe there has been fishing-weather every single day since April.”

“Yes,” said the thief, “it’s wonderfully fine weather.”

“I have seldom set eyes on such spring haddock as this year’s,” said my grandfather. “Rosy-fleshed, and fragrant.”

Yes, such blessed haddock,” said the thief.

“Or the growth in the meadows!” said my grandfather.

“Yes, you can certainly say that,” said the thief. “What growth!”

My grandmother served them. They went on discussing the season on sea and land while they swilled their coffee. When they had finished the coffee the thief stood up and said thank you and shook hands. He picked his cap up off the floor and made ready to take his leave. My grandfather accompanied him back out to the paving, and the thief went on wringing his cap between his hands.

“Are you perhaps going to say anything to me before I go, Björn?” said the thief.

“No,” said my grandfather. “You have done something which God cannot forgive.”

The thief heaved a sigh and said in a low voice, “Ah, well, Björn, you have my warmest thanks for the coffee; goodbye, and may God be with you now and for ever.”

“Goodbye,” said my grandfather.

But when the visitor was on his way out through the turnstile-gate with his cap, my grandfather called out to him and said, “Oh, why don’t you just take that sack with you and whatever’s in it, poor chap. One sack of peats doesn’t matter a damn to me.”

The thief turned back at the gate and came and shook my grandfather’s hand in gratitude again, but could not say a word. He turned his head away while he put on his cap. Then he shouldered the sack of peats once more and edged himself with it through the turnstile the way he had arrived in that fine weather.

I have now described how my grandfather was a man of orthodox beliefs without its ever occurring to him to ask God to model Himself upon men, in accordance with that strange passage in the Lord’s Prayer which says: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.” My grandfather said plainly to the fellow from Steinbær: “God cannot forgive you, but to me, Björn of Brekkukot, it doesn’t matter a damn.” So I cannot help suspecting that my grandfather had a special scale of standards for most of the things that happen in the life of a fisherman.

To corroborate this, I shall now mention briefly the question of fish as we saw the matter at Brekkukot – or rather, the moral law relating to fish. It could be said that my grandfather’s ideas about the fishing industry had only a limited relevance in the rapidly evolving society that during my boyhood was developing beyond the turnstile back-gate of Brekkukot; on the other hand,
we had not yet reached the stage of becoming palpably aware of that society which was beginning to ferment all around us. At any rate I can assert that I was brought up with an assessment of money very different from normal banking values.

I think that our own standard had its origins in my grandfather’s conviction that the money which people consider theirs by right was unlawfully accumulated, or counterfeit, if it exceeded the average income of a working man; and therefore that all great wealth was inconsistent with common sense. I can remember him saying often that he would never accept more money than he had earned.

But what does a man earn, people will ask? How much does a man deserve to get? How much should a fisherman accept? The devil alone can tell. Nowadays anyone who rejects the bank’s valuation would have to solve complicated moral puzzles on his own several times a day. But these problems never seemed to baffle my grandfather nor cause him any anxiety; difficulties which in most people’s eyes would have led to endless complications were disposed of by my grandfather almost without thinking, with the easy assurance of a sleepwalker who strolls along a ledge halfway down a hundred-foot precipice – yes, I am tempted to say with the same disregard for the laws of nature as a ghost passing through locked doors.

I was not very old when I got an inkling that some of the fishermen felt aggrieved at my grandfather because he sometimes sold fresh fish for the pot cheaper than others did; they called it underhand to compete at cut prices against good men. But how much is one lumpfish worth? And what is the value of a pound of haddock? Or plaice? One could answer just as well by asking, What does the sun cost, and the moon, and the stars? I assume that my grandfather answered it for himself, subconsciously: that the right price for a lumpfish, for instance, was the price that prevented a fisherman from piling up more money than he needed for the necessities of life.

In accordance with the economic law of supply and demand, people were inclined to raise the price of fish when catches were meagre or the weather unfavourable – all except Björn of
Brekkukot. If anyone came to him and said, “I shall buy everything you have on your wheelbarrow today at twice or even three times the usual price,” he would just look blankly at the person who was making such an offer, and continue to weigh one pound after another in his scales, or to hand people one lump-fish after another from his wheelbarrow according to what each person needed for his pot – and at the same price as usual.

But then came the days when catches were plentiful and the weather was fine and there was an abundance of all kinds of good-quality fish; and those days came more and more often as time passed, especially after the decked ships had begun to shovel fish out of Faxaflói by the boatload – not to mention the trawlers. Yet when supplies were plentiful and most fishermen felt compelled to lower their prices in the streets, it never occurred to my grandfather to lower his; he sold his catch at the same price as he always did, and then the fish on his barrow became by far the most expensive. In this way my grandfather Björn of Brekkukot rejected all the fundamental rules of economics. This man kept in his heart a secret money-valuation of his own. Was this standard right or wrong? Was the bank’s standard perhaps more right? Or the standard at Gú
múnsen’s Store? It may well be that my grandfather was wrong, yet not wrong enough to discourage most of the regular customers at his wheelbarrow from trading with him also on those days when his fish was more expensive than anywhere else. Everywhere in town, even as far as Árnapóst and all the way up to Mosfell district, what’s more, one could hear people maintain that Björn of Brekkukot’s fish tasted better than other fish; people believed that Björn of Brekkukot in some mysterious way hauled better and finer fish from the sea than other men could. And for that reason everyone wanted to buy from Björn of Brekkukot, even on the days when his fish was more expensive than anywhere else.

I have now said something about fish, but I have not said anything yet about the Bible. I cannot leave this subject without referring briefly to the price of the Bible in our house.

My grandfather Björn of Brekkukot was no bookman. I never knew him to read anything other than the family
Book of Sermons
by Bishop Jón Vídalín – unless one counts that he sometimes ran his eye over the advertisements in the
Ísafold
. He read aloud from Vídalín every Sunday just after noon. He usually read correctly (although he sometimes made mistakes) but never really well, and he always laid special emphasis on two things: to get the proper pulpit drone into his reading, and not to skip any of the figures which gave book, chapter and verse references to scriptural citations – sometimes several times in each sentence. But he never expanded these abbreviations when he read them; instead he would say, for instance, Mark, Rom, Cor, and Hab. Nor did he ever use ordinals among the numbers that accompanied these references, and he paid no attention to commas or other punctuation marks between the numbers. Instead of reading, for instance, “First Corinthians, thirteenth chapter, fifth verse” (written as I. Cor, 13: 5), he would read out “One Cor a hundred and thirty-five”. But he never deviated from the special manner of reading that people in Iceland once used for God’s Words, a monotonous and solemn chant in a high-pitched tone that dropped a fourth at the end of a sentence. This style of reading bore no trace of worldliness, although it had certain affinities with the mumblings of some of the mentally deranged. The artist is no longer born in Iceland who knows this particular chant.