From the Mouth of the Whale (19 page)

A lighthouse at the edge of the world …

Here I stand, swaying on my feet, imagining myself almost grand …

CORAL:
coral is the name of a stone which, when it comes to the surface, loosened from the seabed by the tides or fierce storms, is as green as a tree or growing shoot, but afterwards hardens to stone, turning red or variegated according to the colours of the sea floor. It allays storms and bad weather, and is effective against trolls and thunder: wise men say that if it is carried on the person, lightning will not harm the bearer, nor the ship, house or field in which it is found. Nor will the person who carries it be harmed by black magic, for it counteracts sorcery and all wicked spirits avoid it. Some say that those who own it will prosper and always be well liked. If it is scattered in a vineyard or in other such places there will be a prolific harvest. Worn about the neck it wards off all ailments of the stomach. And it has been well proved that if coral is heated until it glows, then quenched in warm milk, and afterwards drunk by the man who has no appetite or a gripe in the guts, he will be cured. Some claim that coral must be what the ancients referred to as the work of mermen or dwarfs.

After midday it began to pour with rain, thanks and glory be to the merciful Lord … There is hope that this terrible winter is coming to an end … Well, perhaps … If I am not mistaken, the deathly cold fleet of icebergs still looms outside the bay to the north … But in this as in other things the good Lord will weigh up the deeds of His children and allot us our condition and fortune according to which side is more crowded when He closes the gates of the soul-pens … One cannot be certain of an early spring – and yet … At the summer court gathering last year that kindly, noble man Brynjólfur Sveinsson was elected Bishop of Skálholt, so now he is to be addressed as My Lord Bishop, along with all the other fine titles descriptive of his wonderful benevolence and charity … As a result, some of the electors have moved from the Creditum pen over to the better, which is known as Debitum … The sheep fled the downpour, huddling together in the shed, all except the black sheep which galloped around in the cloudburst until his fleece had soaked up so much of the rainwater that he staggered home, haunches dragging, to join the rest … There will be a fine stench of wool when he starts steaming … I leave them to it; my sheep look after themselves, so to speak … I feed them in the yard in the depths of winter, let them out in spring, spread the remaining tufts of hay in the fields, leave the doors of the shed open … Of course this is no sort of husbandry, but then I am no farmer, I have no time for that … I myself seek shelter in my human shed … I blow on the fire, add a fistful of driftwood kindling, put the small clay pot on the flames and boil the last of the vetch in a splash of milk … At times I wish I knew the art of smoking tobacco leaves, which seems to me a pleasant pastime for those who have the means … When I was in the Blue Tower there was a Dutchman who used to smoke tobacco after dinner every evening and would willingly instruct his fellow prisoners in the art … Before long they were communing alone with their pipes, eagerly drinking in the smoke, saying little, wrapped up in their thoughts … I could not afford to join the Dutchman’s school; ah yes, there are many things I have had to miss out on … I stir the vetch milk together with a little porridge left over in my bowl from this morning and sit down on the bed … The mouse now pays me a visit … She seeks out the warmth, hoping for a crumb, courtesy of Jónas’s bad table manners … She is welcome, I owe her a debt of gratitude … The little mouse sailed here on the wreckage of a house after the big storm in November … Where she came from I do not know, but it was clear that a farmhouse had been blown out to sea, and the mouse had guided the flotsam here … Tatters of the former inhabitants’ clothing were sadly tangled with the broken timbers: knee stockings, a coat, undergarments, swaddling bands, but no body parts … The mouse herself was riding on a battered bed post, quite decently carved, on which one could make out inscribed in plain lettering:

‘ … NSDOTTIR
THE LORD’S …’

I perceived immediately that this was an example of the riddle known as Anagramme, which can be used to predict the future, although I have still come no closer to solving it than: ‘STRID NOT’, ‘NID STORT’ … Neither of which satisfies me … The enigmatic board now hangs over the door inside my hut, while other bits of the flotsam came in useful for firewood or draught-proofing the walls and roof … This saved my life when the weather was at its coldest in February … I take a spoonful of vetch porridge from my bowl and shake it out on the floor in front of the fire … The mouse is there in a flash. Squatting on her haunches like a toddler, she sets about devouring the porridge, raising it to her mouth in her front paws … Afterwards, she must fastidiously clean her snout, for the porridge sticks to her whiskers as it does to mine … I burst out laughing, because we are both ridiculous … She flinches, pauses in her toilette and waits, listening … I laugh again, a forced laugh this time … Now the mouse knows that it was only old Jónas and carries on with her ablutions … My hand lifts of its own accord and gently pats the blanket beside me, reminding us that Sigrídur is not here … When we used to sit together on the bed, when the wind was blowing a gale, for example, or the snow had drifted over the hut, there were times when this same hand would steal under my wife’s shift … There it would flatten out and slide its palm up the small of her back in a slow caress, proceeding from there up between the shoulder blades to the neck bone, and rubbing the knotted muscles … Sigga used to enjoy this after a day’s toil, for she was always harder working than I and never begrudged me the fact … In her absence I miss being able to fondle her like that … ‘You have such hot hands,’ she used to say when my hand was on its travels, looking at me from her gentle, stone-grey seal’s eyes … Then my hand would want to move lower, down from the shoulder blades, rubbing the poor flesh beside the armpits where the weariness could be sorest … From there it would slide down her spine, pressing the tips of its long fingers here and there into the muscles that lie beside it … After this my hand would rest on her hip, where it would lie still for a long while … Back and palm would draw warmth from one another …. With that my hand’s proper business was finished, but there were times when, before slipping back out, it would pause at the sacrum where the spine disappears between the buttocks … A soft place on a woman … At that point I always grew thoughtful, and always thought the same thing: this could just as well be the place for a tail, whether furry, feathery or scaly … And before I knew it I would be investigating and probing the spot … Mistress Sigrídur used to react quickly, shooting out a hand behind her to grab mine tightly and pull it from under her shift … She would kiss me on the back of the hand and palm and say: ‘Thank you, my dear, that’s quite enough …’ For my touch was no longer aimed at pleasing my wife, instead it had turned into a medical probing, in support of the thoughts that had begun to rage in my head: in Tartary there grows a plant called Boramez, the fruit of which is a lamb … Each plant bears a single lamb on a tall stalk that grows up from the middle of the bush, like a rhubarb flower from a rhubarb patch … The lamb foetus grows inside the bud, as white and furry as fulled wool, until it reaches maturity and wakens to life with a piercing bleating … Then the farmers of Tartary harvest their sheep … They go up on to the moors, their scythe blades flashing, and snip the lambs from their stalks, to which they are attached by the navel like the umbilical cord on human babes … It must be a noisy job but well rewarded, for the meat of the Boramez lamb tastes like fish, its blood like honey … This form of generation is similar to that of the little bird called the sea-speckle here in Iceland, which is said to be born from leaves of seaweed, though we do not harvest it … It is also well known that in Finnmark it rains rodents of the species known as
Mus norvegicus
, which the Finns call lemmings, that do not breed like most other species of furry animals but quicken to life from seeds in storm clouds … I myself have laid eyes on and handled the dried skin of this creature in the Museum Wormianum … The tirelessly searching, ever resourceful curator had managed by sheer force of will to have a specimen sent to him from Bergen in Norway, though it is hard to find even in its native haunts, for it suffocates in the meadows at midsummer when the grass grows over its head and its corpse quickly rots away … In England they reap the benefit of barnacles that give birth to geese, which they were allowed to eat during Lent in papist times because the Church classed them as fish … It is also widely written that the Egyptians endure plagues of mice, born from the clays of the River Nile, which attack their cornfields and eat up every grain … Thus we have examples of damp air, plants of land and sea, and river silt engendering living creatures with warm blood … Not to mention the extraordinary origins of several creatures with cold blood, or else little or no blood at all: sponges grow from the stony sea floor, pearls from shellfish, flies from amber … As I was reflecting on this, inspired by the feel of my wife’s sacrum, it seemed to me that the great strides that natural history has taken over the past few decades have left us confronted with the notion that it is doubtful the Creator placed unbreachable barriers between the species that he scattered around the Earth in the beginning … Now it seems to us natural philosophers that not only is a connection possible between living beings through various portals in their diversely composed bodies – once I saw a hawkweed growing and thriving in a man’s ear – but the Lord has placed in the haversack of every single creature a book containing recipes for all the rest … From a philosophic standpoint every single species of animal, vegetable or mineral is capable of engendering the rest, and although more often than not physical constraints render such a thing absurd – size difference and the like – the same versatile sap of life flows through them all as that which flows deep down in the earth, taking on the petrified forms of shells, leaves and feathers … Indeed, if you stroke your finger over the fur of a honey bee and a rat, the feeling is the same, they are sisters in that both are short-haired … But this merely tells me that rodent and bee come from the same workshop, bear the same hallmark … More remarkable by far is the rarest expression of this nature, which most closely affects mankind and is abhorrent to all God-fearing people – but which the naturalist must, with God’s permission and the strength that He grants him in his mercy, confront, examine, research and investigate – and that is the fact that human women can give birth to cats or indeed lay monstrous eggs …