The Fish Can Sing Read Free Page B

turn his attention to lumpfish, which he would look for among the seaweed either in Skerjafjörur or out at Grandi. I am not sure if it is generally known that there is a distinct contrast between the male and female lumpfish; the male is one of the most beautifully coloured fish to be found, and tasty to match, but the female is less highly thought of and is usually salted down. In the south, out on the Nesses, spring is said to have arrived when the lumpfish season starts and the bark-coloured sails of the Frenchmen are glinting out in Faxaflói.
    Towards the end of March my grandfather would be down in the town with his wheelbarrow every morning, just as people were getting up, to sell fresh lumpfish. Those who row such a short distance out to sea are not usually reckoned as fishermen at all in Iceland – I doubt whether my grandfather ever saw the open sea in his whole life. Nor would it be correct to say that he ran a fishing business, even though he dabbled about in the seaweed with a helper or two, or put out a net a stone’s throw away from the shore. In other countries, someone who rowed out in a small boat early in the morning and had fish at your door by breakfast-time would certainly be called a fisherman; indeed, my grandfather himself looked a little like those fishermen in foreign paintings, except that he never wore boots, let alone clogs, but always the traditional home-made moccasins of treated hide known as “Icelandic shoes”, or “thin-shoes”. When he was out rowing in rain or heavy seas, he would put on trousers and smock made of hide treated with train-oil. But when he was going round the town he always wore those green Icelandic thin-shoes, and blue woollen stockings with a white border on top, made by my grandmother; if it was wet he would tuck his trouser-ends into his stockings, but however much mud or mire there was in the streets, there was never a spot to be seen on grandfather’s stockings or shoes.
    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