Free The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness Page A

kingdom.”
    At this point in the conversation the Minister all but woke up, and he answered almost with force and conviction: “To tell you the truth, Hogensen, I myself am so short of rope that words cannot describe it.
Quite
frankly I have my hands full finding enough rope to bind the hay that is mown here in the Ministry’s meadows. And it was only on Christmas Day that I decided, in agreement with the proper authorities, and gave orders to that effect, that this royal ministry should make every effort to supply itself with the necessary ropes from the horses it has been allotted, and I have taken steps to have the prisoners make these required ropes. On the other hand, here is a newly minted two-
krónur
piece I would like to offer you, and there’s ten
aurar for
the boy. Goodbye.”
    In February, it so happened that Captain Hogensen was able to send me to see the Minister again and present him with a set of hay-ropes.

10
TALK AND WRITING AT BREKKUKOT
    In certain ancient musical scales there are different intervals than those to which people are now attuned, and for that reason they seem to us to lack certain notes; and yet some of the loveliest melodies which are ever sung in Iceland have been written in these modes, such as
Iceland, Land of the Blest
and
Oh, my Beautiful Bottle
.
    At home in Brekkukot we did not acknowledge all the concepts which are now all the rage, and indeed had no words for them. All sorts of talk that was in common currency outside the turnstile-gate at Brekkukot struck us as mental illness; words which were commonplace elsewhere sounded not only strange to our ears but were downright embarrassing to us, like smut or other shameless chatter.
    For instance, if someone used in conversation the word “charity”, we thought of it as some sort of frivolous, irrelevant, or untimely quotation from the
Book of Sermons
. “Charity” was called “kind-heartedness” in our house, and a charitable person, as one would say in spiritual language, was simply called “kind-hearted”, or “good”. The word “love” was never heard in our house either, except if some inebriate or a particularly stupid maidservant from the country happened to recite a verse by a modern poet; and moreover, the vocabulary of poems like these was such that if ever we heard them, cold shivers ran down our spines, and my grandfather would seat himself on his hands, sometimes out on the garden wall, and would grimace and jerk his shoulders and writhe as if he had lice and say, “Tut tut!” and “Really!” On the whole, modern poetry had the same effect on us as canvas being scratched.
    “Falling in love” did not exist with us; instead it was said that someone “liked the look of” a girl, or that a boy and a girl were“becoming close”. “Courtship” could be mentioned, but that was as far as one could go. I can swear on oath that while I was growing up I never heard the word “happiness” except on the lips of a crazy woman who lodged in the mid-loft with us for a time and who is not mentioned in this book; I never came across the word again until I was almost grown up and beginning to do translation at school. Even after I was fully grown I still believed that the word “weeping” was borrowed from Danish. On the other hand I can remember that when my grandfather was once asked, sympathetically, how the people at Akurgeri who had lost their breadwinners at sea the previous year were keeping, he answered at once, “They have plenty of salt-fish.” In the same way, if someone asked how anyone was, we invariably replied: “Oh, he’s fat enough” – which meant that he was well, or, as they would say in Denmark, that he was happy. If someone was not well, one said: “Oh, you can see it on him”; and if the person under discussion was more dead than alive, one said: “Oh, he’s a bit low.” If someone was dying of old age, one said: “Yes, he’s off his food these days.” About someone who was