The Fish Can Sing Read Free

you listened hard enough you could sometimes make out a singing note in its workings, or something very like an echo.
    How did it ever come about, I wonder, that I got the notion that in this clock there lived a strange creature, which was Eternity? Somehow it just occurred to me one day that the word it said when it ticked, a four-syllable word with the emphasis on alternate syllables, was et-ERN-it-Y, et-ERN-it-Y. Did I know the word, then?
    It was odd that I should discover eternity in this way, long before I knew what eternity was, and even before I had learned the proposition that all men are mortal – yes, while I was actually living in eternity myself. It was as if a fish were suddenly to discover the water it swam in. I mentioned this to my grandfather one day when we happened to be alone in the living-room.
    “Do you understand the clock, grandfather?” I asked.
    “Here in Brekkukot we know this clock only very slightly,” he replied. “We only know that it tells the days and the hours right down to seconds. But your grandmother’s great-uncle, who owned this clock for sixty-five years, told me that the previous owner had said that it once told the phases of the moon – before some watchmaker got at it. Old folk farther back in your grandmother’s family used to maintain that this clock could foretell marriagesand deaths; but I don’t take that too seriously, my boy.”
    Then I said, “Why does the clock always say: et-ERN-it-Y, et-ERN-it-Y, et-ERN-it-Y?”
    “You must be hearing things, my child,” said my grandfather.
    “Is there no eternity, then?” I asked.
    “Not otherwise than you have heard in your grandmother’s prayers at night and in the
Book of Sermons
from me on Sundays, my boy,” he replied.
    “Grandfather,” I said. “Is eternity a living creature?”
    “Try not to talk nonsense, my boy,” said grandfather.
    “Listen, grandfather, are any clocks other than ours worth taking seriously?”
    “No,” said my grandfather. “Our clock is right. And that is because I have long since stopped letting watchmakers have a look at it. Indeed, I have never yet come across a watchmaker who understood this clock. If I cannot mend it myself, I get some handyman to look at it; I have always found handymen best.”

2
FINE WEATHER
    When I was not in the living-room listening to the strange creature in the clock, I was often outside playing in the vegetable garden. The tufts of grass between the paving-slabs reached to my waist, but the dockens and tansies were as tall as I was, and the angelica even taller. The dandelions in this garden were bigger than anywhere else. We kept a few hens, whose eggs always tasted of fish. These hens would start their clucking when they were pecking for food around the house early in the morning; it was a comfortable sound and I never took long to fall asleep again. And sometimes, around noon, they would break into their clucking again as they strutted about in their hen-run, and once again I would fall into a doze, entranced by this brooding birdsound and the scent of the tansies. Nor must I forget to thank thebluebottle for its share in this midsummer trance; it was so blue that the sunshine made it glint green, and the joyful note of earthly life vibrated ceaselessly in its well-tuned string.
    But whether I was playing in the vegetable garden, or out on the paving, or down by the path, my grandfather was always somewhere at hand, silent and omniscient. There was always some door standing wide open or ajar, the door of the cottage or the fish-shed or the net-hut or the byre, and he would be inside there, pottering away. Sometimes he would be disentangling a net on the drystone dyke; or else he would just be tinkering with something. His hands were never idle, but he never seemed to be actually working. He never gave any sign of knowing that his grandchild was nearby, and I never paid much attention to him either, and yet somehow I was always involuntarily aware