The Fish Can Sing Read Free Page A

of him in the background. I would hear him blowing his nose with long pauses between each blow, and then taking another pinch of snuff. His constant silent presence was in every cranny and corner of Brekkukot – it was like lying snugly at anchor, one’s soul could find in him whatever security it sought. To this very day I still have the feeling from time to time that a door is standing ajar somewhere to one side of or behind me, or even right in front of me, and that my grandfather is inside there, pottering away. So I think it only right, if I am to talk about my world, that I should first of all give some account of my grandfather.
    The late Björn of Brekkukot was born and bred in this part of the world; his father had been a farmer here in Brekkukot in the days when it had been a farm with its own meadows on the south side of the Lake, where, later, peat-pits were dug to supply this future capital city with fuel. In those days there were Danish governors ruling over Iceland. But by the time my story starts, an Icelandic governor had been appointed; he was called the King’s Minister because he was under the thumb of the Danish king in just the same way as was the Althing we had for a so-called Parliament. When my grandfather was born there were barely two thousand people living in the capital; in my own childhood there were nearly five thousand. In grandfather’s childhood the only people who counted were a few governmentofficials (who were called variously “the gentry”, or simply “the authorities”), and a few foreign merchants, mainly Jews from Schleswig and Holstein who spoke Low German and called themselves Danes; for in those days Jews were not allowed to do business in Denmark itself, only in the Danish duchies and colonies. The rest of the town’s inhabitants were cottagers who went out to the fishing and sometimes owned a small share in a cow, or had a few sheep. They had little rowing-boats, on which they could sometimes hoist a sail.
    In my grandfather’s boyhood everyone was self-sufficient as far as fish was concerned, except for the gentry and the merchants, who lived on meat, for the most part anyway. But as the community grew and began to develop into something like a town, with some basic divisions of labour, and there began to be artisans and harbour-workers who had no opportunity of going to sea for themselves, and as a little money began to circulate, one or two people started to make a livelihood by catching fish for their neighbours’ larders.
    One of those who made his living in this way was my grandfather. He was not a ship-owner in the sense of being in big business; nor did he own shares in a boat with others. He was never one of those who dried fish on a scale large enough to trade with merchants and accumulate gold and silver in a chest and then suddenly start buying up land or plots of ground or taking shares in a decked ship, as was then becoming the fashion. Nothing like that. When the weather was fine it was his custom to row out to sea early in the morning from the landing place at Grófin or Bótin, with one or two helpers in his boat, and put his nets out somewhere just beyond the islands – or at the very most, perhaps, they might paddle the boat out as far as
Svi
. When he returned, grandmother and I would be waiting at the landing place with a bottle of coffee wrapped in a sock and a slice of ryebread in a red handkerchief. Then grandfather would go off with his catch in a wheelbarrow and sell it in the town for ready money, either in the street or from door to door. During the winter season, or late on in the summer, he would catch mainly cod and haddock, and sometimes also plaice and smallhalibut; no other fish counted. If any of the fish were not sold at once, my grandfather would clean them at home and hang them up on spars in the fish-shed, for drying into stockfish.
    During the last few months of winter he would stop going out to the fishing, as it was called, and