by Sjón
He presses record, pulls the machine closer and makes sure the microphone is pointing his way. The cassette buzzes in chorus with the last evening flies. A golden plover pipes in the distance. The neologism ‘portatape’ was his own invention.
‘That’s the crackling noise you heard – the machine being dragged across the table top.’
The geneticist clears his throat and starts again:
— This is where I became the man I am. A little to the east of Sandey …
He gestures towards the island.
— By mid-July a big shoal of trout tends to form there – Arctic char weighing one, one and a half, up to two kilos – and my father’s family used to fish for them with nets every summer for as long as they lived on the tenant farm at Bláskógar. After they gave up farming and the last generation had moved to the city, my father was the only one of his brothers and sisters to keep up the custom of ‘bringing in the char’, as he called those fishing trips – because it wasn’t a formal business, not like the kind of angling practised today by milk-fed middle managers who turn queasy at the thought of eating the fish the guide has lured on to their hooks – and my brothers and I joined him on the trips once we were considered grown-up enough.
Taking another sip of his drink, he murmurs:
— Twelve thousand krónur …
Then continues in a carrying voice:
— As I was saying, I came into being on my first ever trip to bring in the char. Once we had reached the fishing ground to the east of the island I was given the job of sitting in the bows and guiding the whole enterprise. I felt it a great honour that Dad should entrust me, the youngest member of the crew, with such a responsible job, which consisted of my pointing down at the water and yelling incessantly: ‘Fish, fish!’, while he and my elder brothers dragged in the net. How successful the catch was I couldn’t say, though as far as I remember it was good, in excess of what we needed. But when my brothers tipped the char out of the net and they formed a frantically wriggling mass in the bottom of the boat, I snatched away my feet with a screech of terror. It was the first time I’d ever seen a fish fighting for its life; up to then I had always waited with my mother in the cove below the boathouse to welcome Dad and my brothers ashore with their catch already dead. My brothers laughed at my shrieks, taking out their pocket knives and bloodying the trout with practised movements, stabbing the well-sharpened blades through the top of the gills and cutting down to the throat, since the fish weren’t to be knocked on the head; their skulls had to be kept intact to ensure the proper taste when the Bláskógar siblings gathered for the annual ‘head-feast’ at Dad’s house, the day after we got back to town. I looked at Dad as he sat in the stern, quietly rolling up the net, with the inevitable Udarnik, or Bulgarian worker’s cigarette, in the corner of his mouth. His silence and the bittersweet blue smoke blowing over to me on the breeze had a calming effect, so I stopped my howling, although by now the fish were not merely writhing but writhing in their own blood. As we rowed back to shore, the twitching of the tails at my feet grew gradually more sporadic and I summoned up the courage to inspect our catch, this pile of dying fish with their trembling gills and sudden death spasms, which all looked exactly alike. And I remember thinking in time to the rhythmic gurgling of the oars that this explained why …
He stops talking and we hear him drag the whisky bottle closer, unscrew the top, lift it off the table and pour some into his glass, then screw the top back on, replace the bottle on the table, push it away and pick up the glass.’
‘Ah! I know that sound: that creaking and singing is a flock of swans flying past.’
The geneticist watches the swans’ singing progress over the lake, holding the whisky in his mouth until the flock has vanished behind Raudukusunes Point and his tongue has begun to sting. Only then does he swallow.
— Eleven thousand krónur.
He sips his drink again, muttering:
— Thirteen thousand.
Then, putting down the glass, he leans back in his chair and stretches with a cracking of collar-bones and shoulder-blades: where had he got to in his account of the fishing trip?
— The char …
Before the geneticist can pick up the thread, he breaks off, jerks upright, flexes his shoulders, runs his fingers quickly through his white crew-cut, strokes the grizzled hair on his cheeks, looks around in bemusement, claps his hands and clasps his fingers, and only then does he work out the cause of his restlessness: his palms and fingers are missing the worn leather of the American football that he usually fiddles with whenever he needs to free up his mind for deep concentration – squeezing it, spinning it on one finger and tossing it from hand to hand – which keeps his old sack of bones occupied in the world of terrestrial mechanics, allowing his inner man to kick off from the dirt patch of habit and soar heavenwards into a world where imagination is the only law of nature that matters.
The geneticist glances at his hands. With their position, the distance between them, the curve of his fingers, he has unconsciously sketched the outline of the ball.
What was he about to say?
He chucks the imaginary ball at the rotting boat.
What was the moral of the story?
The ball strikes noiselessly against the hull, bouncing off the flaking paint where wind and weather have obliterated all but the last three letters of the name: R-N-A.
How did he become the person he is on that fishing trip fifty-five years ago?
He catches the ball on the rebound.
And a play on a book title pops into his mind:
The Fish is Always Alone.
Yet he still can’t find the words to express the thought he remembers dawning on him, as a child in charge of the catch, when he saw the bloody heap on the bottom of the boat, a heap in which, except in size and colour, every fish was identical to the next – like his three brothers who strangers were always telling him were spitting images of the same man, their father, whereas he himself took after his mother: how there at last he had found the explanation for his father’s habit of always referring to ‘the fish’, ‘the trout’, ‘the char’ in the singular, when it was obvious that he was referring to a whole shoal of the creatures: yes, for the same reason that he always avoided the plural when referring to the human race, the future socialist MP talked about the fish of Lake Thingvellir in the singular. Just as humankind was ‘Man’, so the fish were one entity, one species: ‘the Trout’, as in ‘the Trout does this’ or ‘the Trout does that’. But the comparison couldn’t be pushed any further because unlike ‘the Trout’, which has perfected the ability to live as both one and many, ‘Man’ is badly afflicted with a sense of individualism that distinguishes him from all other creatures on earth: an unhealthy resistance to the instinct of putting the interests of the collective before his own, of sharing what he acquires with others, of taking no more than he needs, of adapting to society as best he can. In this way the gift of ‘Knowledge’ had corrupted ‘Man’ – since all gifts are accompanied by their antithesis and the antithesis of ‘Knowledge’ is ‘Capitalism’. The geneticist knocks back sixteen thousand krónur worth of whisky and snorts:
— Damn it, as if I’d have been capable of thinking like that at five years old.
First there’s silence, composed of birdsong, lapping water and whispering leaves, then a single remark:
— Damn it, as if I’d have been capable of thinking like that at five years old.
Then there’s a summer’s night and a man being silent again. He kneads the air between his hands. If he’d learned any important lesson on that long-ago summer’s day, it was neither that the trout was a true socialist nor that it was a homogeneous ingredient in fish-head soup. The nearest the future geneticist came to grasping a ‘big truth’ on that fishing trip was when his father shifted from the stern to the centre thwart and took up the oars, turning the boat in the water until the sun was behind him, then setting a course for the cove by the boathouse, where hi
s youngest son is now sitting, nearly six decades later, remembering with a shiver the sudden chill he experienced when his father’s shadow fell on the stiffening bodies of the char and on himself, huddling in the bows. He understood then that as long as one individual was big enough to overshadow them, it didn’t really matter if ‘Man’ and ‘Trout’ were plural or singular, individualists or community-minded.
But he couldn’t offer up this lesson as his answer to the question posed by the magazine about how he – as one of five famous individuals – ‘had come into being’.
Besides, the answer lay elsewhere.
At the end of June 1962, the summer he turned thirteen, he had been on his way home from a trip to town with his fellow workers at the Reykjavík Freezing Plant – they’d been to the nine o’clock showing at Stjörnubíó of The Woman Eater, a film about a mad scientist called Dr Moran who, with the help of the drummer Tanga, son of the king of the rainforest, feeds young women to a flesh-eating Amazonian tree and uses the resin to develop a serum to bring the dead back to life – when he came across his parents sitting in ‘the Green Goat’, their Russian GAZ-69 jeep, which was parked in front of the house. This was their usual refuge when they wanted peace and quiet to ‘talk things over’, as they called it, since neither of them would ever admit that they had rows. The brothers were old enough by now to notice how shaken up their parents seemed after these ‘discussions in the car’, and how, increasingly often, one of them would remain sitting in the front seat long after their conversation was over.
There was a knot in his stomach as he ducked out of sight behind the garage of the house opposite. From his hiding place he saw, through the jeep’s dirty rear windscreen, the silhouette of his mother holding an open newspaper in her clenched fists and thrusting it in her husband’s face. His father’s silhouette firmly removed the paper from her hands and put its arms around her. After a while she freed herself from his embrace and wiped her face. The driver’s door opened and his father got out, then he opened the passenger’s door for his wife and helped her up the steps to the house. Once the front door had closed behind them, the future geneticist hesitated a moment before running over to the Goat and quietly climbing in.
On the floor lay a crumpled spread from Morgunbladid, the mouthpiece of his father’s political opponents – a lying rag that was never allowed over their threshold – and his first reaction was the childish idea that his mother must have provoked the quarrel by bringing the paper home from the bookshop. He smoothed out the spread. Across it was printed in large letters:
Sleeping pill thalidomide
— thousands of children left with birth defects
The article was accompanied by a photograph of two newborn babies, a boy and a girl. They were lying on their backs on a white sheet, their bodies slightly out of alignment with their heads, as is common when infants are posed for photographs, but instead of arms and legs, or hands and feet, they had tiny stumps, each bearing a fin that looked more like feathers or a fringe than fingers or toes. One of the children had its eyes screwed shut in a grimace, the other wore a puzzled look.
Two weeks later, his mother went to Denmark for an operation on her leg.
The geneticist raises his glass and peers through the whisky at the lake and the island of Sandey, so radiantly black against the midnight sun.
— Thirteen thousand …
III
Childhood
(27 August 1962–3 September 1972)
6
— Thirteen …
The geneticist’s voice echoes tinnily from the small speaker of the dictaphone until a neatly manicured feminine hand picks the machine up off the coffee table in Jósef Loewe’s sitting room and stops the recording with a long, blue-varnished nail, causing the tape to stutter, the voice to hiccup on the last word:
— … thoug-shunD.
In the ensuing silence the woman sits holding the dictaphone while she studies the man dozing on the sofa opposite her: Jósef Loewe is lying at an awkward angle, a pile of large, embroidered cushions supporting his spine, the high sofa-back curving around him like the outstretched, dirt-brown, velvety wings of a swan mother rearing up in defence of her young. But it would be hard to imagine anyone less like a cygnet than this man.
He is middle-aged, borderline soft in the body, dressed conservatively in a red-checked flannel shirt, a large, moss-green V-necked jumper, loose, pale khaki trousers, brown socks and grey felt slippers. His face is smooth and beardless, his cropped hair greying and thinning on top, his round head presently drooping between collar-bone and shoulder, his pale hands resting in his lap – not relaxed but stiff as if they belonged to a ventriloquist’s dummy – and at first sight he’s just a man dozing a little crookedly on his sofa at home. But the eye needn’t rest long on Jósef Loewe before it perceives what his posture, clothes and hair are concealing: on the crown of his head, his forehead and jaw, the skin is stretched tight over strange bony excrescences. And the same bony growths, only larger, are visible on what can be seen of his arms, ribcage and legs.
This is not the first time he has nodded off during the silence-punctuated soliloquy from Thingvellir. The woman has played the tape to him more than once. She feels Jósef has a right to hear the recording of the man who has booked this interview with him.
The sounds of the summer night are soporific.
* * *
THE NET
When Hrólfur Zóphanías Magnússon was a boy living out in the suburb of Laugarnes, it was common knowledge that there was a whorehouse in Fischersund. None of his friends actually knew what a whore was, or what they got up to in their houses, but the word, with its hint of a wicked woman (that much they suspected), was wreathed in such mystery that there was an absolute taboo on entering the short lane that connected the centre of town to the west end; no one dared set foot there.
The braver boys in his group went on an expedition to the town centre to see for themselves but all the women they spotted in the vicinity of Fischersund – and spied on from a safe distance in the hope of getting closer to the truth about the nature of a whore – turned out to be so like the boys’ own mothers, sisters, aunts and even grandmothers that they concluded whores must either be different in the head from ordinary women or else be hiding some physical deformity under their clothes: a possibility they didn’t dare think about, especially after the doctor’s son came up with the theory that they were hermaphrodites.
In those days the Goldfish Bowl was the only shop in Reykjavík where you could buy tropical fish. Hrólfur was ten going on eleven and fish-mad according to his family: in his room he had three large tanks (holding 30, 60 and 120 cubic litres) as well as any number of jam jars and bowls serving as hatcheries and nurseries, accommodated wherever they would fit on bookshelves, floor or window sill. So when the Goldfish Bowl relocated from Laugavegur to Fischersund, this presented him with something of a headache.
Hrólfur was on notice with the fish: if he didn’t shoulder the entire responsibility for their upkeep and cost – which he did by delivering the socialist paper the People’s Will and by hawking Vikan in the street – they would be flushed down the loo. By faking illness he had twice prevailed on his father to drop into the shop on his way home from work and buy food and weed for the gouramis to spawn in. And another time he had talked his eldest brother’s girlfriend into buying a filter for the guppy tank by claiming that he’d been picked on by some rough kids who hung around at the bottom of the street, in the car park by Steindór’s Taxis. He felt he must be a bad boy to send her to a terrible place like Fischersund but justified it by telling himself that if she got trapped there and turned into a whore, he would go down and rescue her – though not until they were both grown up and his brother had forgotten all about her.
When the girlfriend discovered that there weren’t any bullies loitering in the car park and told him that from now on he could look after his own ‘disgustingly smelly fish’, the moment arrived when he had to go
to the Goldfish Bowl himself: his swordtails had developed fin rot and he needed the owner’s advice on the right medicine – and anyway he couldn’t have trusted an amateur with a veterinary matter of this gravity.
He got off the bus at Lækjartorg Square and set off along Austurstræti in the direction of Fischersund. But there was suddenly so much to see along that 250-metre stretch: East German liquorice at the Coop, new piggy-banks at the Agricultural Bank, hand-knitted mittens and scarves at Thorvaldsensbasar. Having frittered away half the morning like this, lingering so long in the shops that the staff had begun to eye him with suspicion, Hrólfur Zóphanías finally reached the cab company at the bottom of Fischersund. He found a place round by the dustbins that allowed him to see five metres or so up the lane and waited for his chance.
When it looked to him as if the lane was likely to remain whore-free for the next few minutes, he sprinted across the road, making a beeline for the door of the Goldfish Bowl, which luckily turned out to be located right at the bottom, almost on the corner of Adalstræti.
