The Fish Can Sing (5 page)

I am quite unable to say what thoughts were aroused in my grandfather Björn of Brekkukot by these references in the
Book of Sermons
to ancient eccentrics from the far end of the
Mediterranean, enhanced by the rigidly systematic theology of German peasants, such as one finds in the Venerable Jón Vídalín. Many people would consider such a spiritual exercise as his readings to be no more than an empty formality. I can swear on oath that I never heard him make any reference to anything contained in these Sermons, nor was I ever aware of any other pious activities on his part besides those Sunday readings. Furthermore, I have not managed to find anyone who can remember having heard Björn of Brekkukot ever refer to any theological, moral, or philosophical doctrine in the Sermons. I have no idea whether my grandfather took notice of everything in it, or nothing. If he believed it all, he was just like those theologians who store their theology somewhere in a locked compartment of the brain, or rather, perhaps, like those travellers who carry a bottle of iodine in their luggage and take care to keep it tightly corked in case it leaks and ruins their belongings. To be honest, I think my grandfather Björn of Brekkukot would not have been significantly different if he had lived here in Iceland in pagan times, or if his home had been somewhere in the world where people never read Vídalín’s
Book of Sermons
but believed instead in the bull Apis, or the god Ra, or the bird Colibri.

From all this it must be obvious that we were not bookish people. Any reading that was done in our house was done chiefly by visitors who brought their own books with them. Sometimes there were stories which they read aloud for the whole household, or else they took to reciting ballads. Overnight visitors often left their books behind with us, sometimes as payment for their lodgings, and that is how our library, small and haphazard as it was, probably came into being. I shall refer to that later.

But though various books happened to land in our house, no one noticed that we had no Bible until old Thór
ur the Baptist began staying with us; and this brings me at last to the matter that was uppermost in my mind.

It is too well-known to need mentioning that according to an ancient Icelandic price-scale, the cost of a Bible is equivalent to that of a cow – and that means an early-calving cow, or else six well-fleeced lambing ewes. This price is written on the title-page
of the Bible edition that was printed in a remote mountain valley in northern Iceland in 1584, and as is known, Icelanders have never believed in any other Bible than this one; it was printed with tasteful vignettes and decorative woodcuts and weighs five pounds, and is very like a raisin-box in shape. This volume has always been available in the better churches in Iceland.

As happened so often in summer, a visitor once came to the door of Brekkukot and said that he had just arrived on the steamer. Two or three summers later, he stayed with us for several weeks at a time. I can still remember how he came walking past the churchyard wall in a clerical coat (as Prince Albert coats were called in Iceland), wearing a hard hat of the kind called a half-keg, to distinguish it from a whole-keg, or tile hat. He wore a rubber collar buttoned at the back of the neck. This was old Thór
ur, or as he called himself, Thór
ur the Baptist. But what made me sure that this was another peat-thief on the way was the strange circumstance that this frock-coated man, who seemed at a distance to be one of the gentry in every respect, was carrying on his back a gunny sack stuffed with what looked to me like peats; but to cut a long story short, it was not peats he was carrying on his back, but Bibles – and that was all the luggage he had. I shall say nothing about how it happened that a frock-coated gentleman arriving from abroad on the steamship itself should make straight for our turf cottage at the outermost edge of civilization, where dandelions grew on the roof, rather than move into the Hotel d’Islande where he would have acquitted himself well among all the officials and foreigners.

Thór
ur the Baptist was a large man of imposing presence, with the kind of face whose chin seemed to have been pushed up forcibly from below, and an exceptionally well-formed Roman nose which curved down towards the cleft in the chin. His mouth was so tightly closed when he was not holding forth that his lips disappeared somewhere inside his mouth and were nowhere to be seen; but on his upper lip, the weakest and most insignificant part of the whole person, there sprouted a short and extremely well-trimmed moustache. He always screwed up his eyes so that they seemed to be sieving the light.

What old Thór
ur’s title of Baptist was meant to signify we never really knew, nor did we care; indeed, we never saw him baptize a single living soul. It was said that he had landed up in some religious sects in Scotland and Canada and had given them his allegiance, and now received his bread from them; but there can hardly have been much left of that bread, since he chose to lay his head in one of the few free hostelries that have existed in the world in this century or the last. It was probably his business to proclaim in his native town the word of that Lord who believes in Baptists. It would never occur to me to doubt that old Thór
ur spoke from divine inspiration, if any man ever did; such was his exaltation in preaching that he never cared whether there was anyone within earshot or not when he preached, except that, if anything, I think he preferred to have no one; and indeed it seldom happened that he had any audience at all, unless some boys happened to be hiding in a nearby barrel to find out what so excellent a cleric was proclaiming with such zeal to no one. Unfortunately I had neither the intelligence nor the maturity, and perhaps not even sufficient curiosity either, to try to penetrate the kernel of Thór
ur the Baptist’s message, any more than I wanted to fathom my grandfather’s sermon-readings.

It is a matter of simple fact that Icelanders have always been notoriously indolent, and it may well be that Thór
ur both knew his countrymen all too well and was a good Icelander himself; for if it ever came about that one or two idlers happened to drift in his direction when he was standing alone in a deserted square, preaching, he invariably turned away and showed the honourable assembly his back. This he considered the most effective way of converting Icelanders. I remember walking past him down at the harbour one evening in a northerly gale of rain and fog, while he was preaching with great force and conviction at some wheelbarrows which were lying upside down a short distance away; he stamped on the ground with both feet to lend emphasis to his words and thumped the Bible with might and main to reinforce his arguments, and the froth flew from his lips in all directions. He was preaching against the unseemly and disgraceful practice of baptizing children: