Sjon - The Blue Fox

‘I-is it Danish?’

‘No, it’s from the mountain Himalaya, which is so high that if you climbed our mountain thirteen times, you still wouldn’t have reached the top. Halfway up the slopes of the great mountain is the parish of Darjeeling. And when the birds in Darjeeling break into their dawn chorus, life quickens on the paths that link the teagardens to the villages: it’s the tea-pickers going to their work; they may be poorly dressed, yet some have silver rings in their noses.’

‘I-is it thrushes singing?’ asks the eejit.

‘No, it’s the song sparrow, and under its clear song you can hear the tapping of a woodpecker.’

‘N-no birds I know?’

‘I expect there are wagtails,’ answers Fridrik.

Halfdan nods and sips his tea. Meanwhile Fridrik twists up his moustache on the left-hand side and continues his tale:

‘At the garden gate they each take their basket and the day’s work begins. From then until suppertime the harvesters will pick the topmost leaves from every plant, and their fingertips will be the tea’s first staging post on the long journey that may end, for example, in the teapot here at Brekka.’

So this morning hour passes.

It is daylight when Fridrik and the eejit Halfdan come out of the farmhouse with the coffin between them. They carry it easily; the dead woman was not large and the coffin is no work of art, knocked together from scraps of timber found around the farm — but it’ll do and seems sound enough. The mare Rosa waits out in the yard, sated with hay. The men place the coffin on a sledge, lash it down good and hard, and fasten it either side of the saddle with long spars, which lie along the horse’s flanks and are tied firmly to the sledge.

After this is done, Fridrik takes an envelope from his jacket. He shows it to Halfdan and says:

‘You’re to give Reverend Baldur this letter as soon as the funeral is over. If he asks for it before, tell him I forgot to give it to you. Then you’re to remember it when he has finished the ceremony.’

He pushes the envelope deep into the eejit’s pocket, patting the pocket firmly:

‘When the funeral’s over…’

And they say goodbye, the man who owned Abba and her sweetheart — former sweetheart.

***

Brekka in the Dale, 8 January 1883

Dear Archdeacon Baldur Skuggason,

I enclose the sum of thirty-four crowns. It is payment for the funeral of the woman Hafdis Jonsdottir, and is to cover wages for yourself and six pallbearers, carriage of the coffin from the farm to the church, lying in state, three knells and payment for coffee, sugar and bread for yourself and the pallbearers, as well as any mourners who may attend.

I do not insist on any singing over the woman, nor any address or recital of ancestry. You are to be guided by your own taste and inclinations, or those of any congregation.

I have seen to the coffin and shroud myself, being familiar with the task from my student days in Copenhagen, as your brother Valdimar can attest.

I hope this now completes our business with regard to Hafdis Jonsdottir’s funeral service.

Your obedient servant,

Fridrik B. Fridjonsson

P.S. Last night I dreamt of a blue vixen. She ran along the screes, heading up the valley. She was as fat as butter, with a pelt of prodigious thickness.

F. B. F.

***

Now the foolish funeral procession lacks for nothing. It sets out from the yard, that is to say, it slides headlong down the slopes, until man, horse and corpse recover their equilibrium on the riverbank. One could skate along it up the valley, all the way to the church doors at Botn.

Herb-Fridrik goes into the house. He hopes that Halfdan, eejit that he is, won’t break open the coffin and peep inside on the way.

On Saturday 18 April 1868 a great cargo ship ran aground at Onglabrjotsnef on the Reykjanes peninsula, a black-tarred triple-master with three decks. The third mast had been chopped down, by which means the crew had saved themselves, and the ship was left unmanned, or so it was thought. The splendour of everything aboard this gigantic vessel was such an eye-opener that no one who hadn’t seen it for himself would have believed it.

The cabin on the top deck was so large that it could have housed an entire village. It was clear that the cabin had originally been highly decorated, but the gilding and paint had worn off, and all was now squalid inside. Once it had been divided up into smaller compartments but now the bulkheads had been removed and sordid pallets lay scattered hither and thither; it would have resembled a ghost ship, had it not been for the stench of urine. There were no sails, and the remaining tatters and cables were all rotten.

The bowsprit was broken and the figurehead degraded; it had been the image of a queen, but her face and breasts had been hacked away with the sharp point of a knife: clearly the ship had once, long ago, been the pride of her captain, but had later fallen into the hands of unscrupulous rogues.

It was hard to guess how long the ship had been at sea or when she had met with her fate. There were no logbooks and her name was almost entirely obliterated from bow and stern; though in one place the lettering ‘… Der Deck…’ was visible and in another ‘V… r… ec…’ — so people guessed she was Dutch in origin.

When this titanic ship ran aground the surf was too rough for putting to sea; any attempt at salvage or rescue was unthinkable. But when an opportunity finally arose, the men of Sudurnes flocked on board and set to in earnest. They broke up the top deck and discovered, to general rejoicing, that the ship was loaded entirely with fish-liver oil. It was stored in barrels of uniform size, stacked in rows, which were so well lashed down that they had to send out to seven parishes for crowbars to free them. This served well.

After three weeks’ work the men had unloaded the cargo from the upper deck on to shore; it amounted to nine hundred barrels of fish-liver oil.

Experiments with the oil proved that it was excellent lighting fuel, but it resembled nothing the people knew, either in smell or taste; though perhaps a faint hint of singed human hair accompanied the burning. Malicious tongues in other parts of the country might claim that the oil was plainly ‘human suet’, but they could keep their slander and envy — nothing detracted from the joy of the folk in the south-west over this windfall that the Almighty Lord had brought to their shore so unlooked for, and involving so little effort, loss of life or expense to themselves.

They now broke open the middle deck, which contained no fewer barrels of oil than the upper; and although the unloading was carried out with manly zeal, they seemed to make no impression. Then, one day, they became aware of life on board. Something moved in the dark corner by the stern, on the port side, accessible by a gangway running between the hull and the triple rows of barrels. There came a sound of sighing and moaning, accompanied by a metallic clanking.

These were uncanny sounds and men were filled with misgiving. Three stout fellows volunteered to enter the gloom and see what they should see. But just as they were preparing to pounce on the unlooked-for danger, a pathetic creature crept out from under the stack of barrels, and the men very nearly stabbed and crushed it to death with their crowbars, so great was their shock at the sight.

It was an adolescent girl. Her dark hair fell like a wild growth from her head, her skin was swollen and sore with filth; her nakedness was covered by nothing but a torn, stinking sack. There was an iron manacle around her left ankle, which chained her to one of the great ship’s timbers, and from her miserable couch it was not hard to guess what use the crew had made of her. Then there was a bundle that she held in a vice-like grip and would not be parted from.