The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness Read Free Book Online

everyone else had retired; and no matter how early anyone rose in Brekkukot, she was always up and about already and had made the coffee or even cooked the porridge. And I can remember, too, with absolute certainty that the fire in her hearth never went out during all the time that I was my grandfather’s and my grandmother’s son there at Brekkukot.
    I have already described how this woman impressed upon me never to kill flies in other people’s houses. Now I just want to mention one or two other doctrines that she taught me.
    When Skjalda was put out each morning late in the summer and I had to drive her to the pastures, this cow had the bad habit of putting her head over the bit of fencing round the swede-patch and starting to eat the leaves off the swedes. The fencing was actually rather old and dilapidated by then, rotting and moss-grown, and in several places did not reach as high as the tansies and angelica and the docken clumps, so it was not perhaps the animal’s fault that she paid no attention to such a fence; but if she managed to get at the swedes she became so enthusiastic that she paid no heed to me even when I whipped her with all my might and main with a docken-switch. I had just learned a few swearwords by then from various good people, and when the cow refused to budge despite all the beating, I used to shout, “You damned old cow, Skjalda!” and a few other sentiments of that kind.
    That summer a man from Borgarfjörur on his spring trip to the capital had left his dog with us at Brekkukot by mistake. The wretched cur stayed with us all summer, waiting for his master to come and fetch him on his autumn trip. He looked just like any other old sheep-dog. He was very bored at Brekkukot, because he was always thinking about his master and wondering how on earth the man had managed to forget him. He often lay with his head on his paws at our turnstile-gate or on the paving at the door of the cottage, with his eyes open and that rather pathetic expression of doggy melancholy on his face; and it did not help matters that the dratted cat was always prowling somewhere around him – a brindled stray who had also settled in with us.The dog was a guest himself and could not bring himself to chase cats on an alien farm. My grandmother would sometimes toss him some fish-skin and bones if she happened to pass near him, and always with the same words: “Here you are, creature!” or else, “Help yourself, you brute!”
    The dog was the only animal I ever heard her address disrespectfully apart from the cat, and she never mentioned the cat without a slight grimace of distaste, as if this creature were some abominable family fetch which had dogged her and her kin from time immemorial. The cat was called Brand, and never had other than four titles of address: “that devil”, “that disgrace”, “that pest”, or “that bane”. Never on any occasion did my grandmother pat the dog or stroke the cat; yet she had a constant supply of fish-skin and bones in the pocket of her skirts. I should add that she was nevertheless the only person in the house to whom these two stray creatures attached themselves unconditionally and unreservedly. Wherever she went around our plot of land, even if it was only to the clothes-rope, they were both round her at once and almost on top of her, the dog with boisterous affection while the cat rubbed herself against my grandmother’s leg with her tail held straight up in the air and ending in a handsome hook at the tip. Whenever my grandmother had to slip over to see Kristín at Hríngjarabær the animals were always at her heels until she reached the churchyard gate, which she never allowed them to pass through, of course.
    And now to return to the point where I left off, with the cow standing with her head inside the fence eating the new-grown swedes – this was a good opportunity, I thought, now that we had a dog around the place; and I set the dog on the cow.
    As the day wore on