The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness Read Free Book Online Page A

it became very warm. The dog lay on the paving with his head on his paws and his eyes open and was undoubtedly thinking about his master and wondering why he never came. I was sure that the poor creature could not sleep for sheer boredom. So I sat down beside him on the paving and started to pat him on the head, as people had done to me when I was small. Then I began to sing to the dog the following little poem which I had composed myself, to a tune that I made upas I went along and which was so moving that I burst into tears as I sang it:
    “Dearest blessed doggy mine,
Whom other dogs adore,
Fly with the doggy angels fine
To the doggy heaven’s door.”
    When it was nearly six o’clock my grandmother came out to have a look at the swedes in this fine weather; she walked past me as I played in the grass, and seemed not to notice me. But while she was looking at the swedes, with her back to me, I was sure I heard her say, as if she were talking to herself, “I hope I didn’t hear correctly this morning, that someone in this house was using ugly words about the cow.”
    “It wasn’t me!” I shouted.
    “At least I hope that no one has ever heard Björn of Brekkukot doing that,” she said.
    “The cow was at the swedes!” I said.
    “I know few things more wicked than speaking ill of a cow,” my grandmother said, “except perhaps setting a dog on her. The cow gives us our milk. The cow is mother to us all. ‘Little cow, little cow, have you any milk now.’ ‘The blessed beast’ is what one says about the cow.”
    I said nothing. She went on peering under the leaves to see if there were any swedes ready for the soup-pot yet. And as she stooped over them, I heard her say as if to the swedes, “I wonder who was blessing a dog out here in front of the house today?”
    “I can’t remember doing that!” I cried.
    “I thought I heard someone blessing a dog,” she said. “My ears were probably deceiving me. About dogs one says ‘the brute’, ‘creature’, or ‘wretch’. At least no one has ever heard Björn of Brekkukot saying nice things to a dog.”

7
BARBED WIRE AT HVAMMSKOT
    Our horse, Gráni, was pastured on a distant moor out at Sogin, and occasionally he had to be fetched when he was needed for work. It is no exaggeration to say that at that time, Sogin was one of the farthest points of the atlas. There is a modern town at Sogin now, and no one who enters this paradise could suspect that a few decades ago there were horse-grazings there. When Gráni had to be fetched, it was a journey that took the best part of a day. At Sogin there was a little moorland brook called the Soga Stream; it was comparatively easy to jump over it. And yet this stream for some reason or other formed a most sinister impression on my grandmother’s mind. She never really wanted me to go to fetch the horse by myself, but always in company with some other boy who was also going to fetch a horse and who could pull me out of the stream if I were to fall in.
    “Be careful of the Soga Stream”, was always the last thing she said when we were setting off. And when we arrived back with the horse or horses in the evening, the first thing she always asked was: “Was there much water in the Soga Stream today?” If there were ever a downpour when Gráni was out on the moor and there was a chance that he would have to be fetched in a hurry, the old woman could be heard muttering, “My, my, what a lot of water there must be in the Soga Stream today.”
    And now one day, as had happened so often before, I was sent off to fetch our horse out at Sogin, accompanied by a few other boys who were on the same errand.
    This was about the time, not long after the Boer War, when the Barbed-wire Age was beginning in Iceland. This special commodity, which is banned by law in most countries except for military purposes and was indeed said to have been invented during the Boer War, has pacified the Icelanders more than anyother foreign product one