The Whispering Muse: A Novel

by Sjón

  However, I felt the steward’s fooling had gone far enough so I raised my brows and gestured to the centre of the table:

  ‘In that case, would it not be more appropriate for us to sit there?’

  The steward and mate looked at me enquiringly. I moved my hand slightly to the left, just enough to indicate the empty seat at my side:

  ‘In Captain Alfredson’s absence.’

  ‘Oh, that’s what you’re driving at!’

  ‘Yes, he is our host, is he not?’

  ‘Well, of course ...’

  I need hardly explain that this exchange was with the steward since my dining companion remained persistently mute. I lost my temper with the young man:

  ‘You have still not deigned to inform us why the commanding officer’s seat is unoccupied this evening.’

  ‘Oh, I, er, he was ...’

  ‘That is no concern of ours!’

  I gave the table a sharp rap with my index finger. The steward flinched from the blow as if I had struck him.

  ‘You cannot evade your duties by gossiping about your superior officer!’

  The steward rolled his eyes like a negro, stammering something incomprehensible in his Fynen dialect. At this point Mate Caeneus spoke up:

  ‘What Mr Haraldsson means – with respect, sir – is that it’s not at all clear who has the role of host this evening. Isn’t that so, Mr Haraldsson?’

  I nodded to the mate who looked the boy straight in the eye, his expression stern:

  ‘You should of course have begun by bidding me good evening first and then Mr Haraldsson. That would have made it clear from the start that in the absence of Captain Alfredson and the first mate, I stand in the place of host.’

  The tip of the steward’s tongue protruded from between his dry lips:

  ‘Thank you, Caeneus, sir, thank you, second mate. I shall remember that next time, thank you, thank you ...’

  He approached the table, gabbling his thanks and fumbling with a shaking hand for the crystal carafe, presumably with a view to pouring our wine. But Mate Caeneus was quicker off the mark. He hastily removed the stopper from the carafe and, softening his voice a little, said to the boy:

  ‘That’ll do for the time being. Go into the galley and take a look at the book of etiquette. Then you’ll do better with the main course.’

  To me he said politely:

  ‘May I offer you a glass of bitter-sweet Alsace wine with your ham, Mr Haraldsson?’

  I accepted his offer. By establishing our respective roles at the Shrove Tuesday dinner, I had succeeded in breaking the ice between Mate Caeneus and myself. He poured my wine with a more cosmopolitan air than one would expect of a seaman, filling only a third of the glass. Then he poured one for himself and invited me please to start.

  I waited until the galley door had closed behind the steward, then whispered to my new host:

  ‘Mark my words, there’ll be something other than potatoes with tonight’s main course ...’

  ‘Is that so ...?’ he replied.

  I said no more.

  The evening passed swiftly – without any further gaffes by the boy – in amicable chat about the events of the past few days, and before I knew it we had reached the brandy, and the cigars, which I still could not accept. Ordinarily Mate Caeneus would embark on his tale at this stage, but as I couldn’t bear the thought of having to listen to him relating the next chapter for me alone, then listening to him repeat it all to the other crew members the following day, I had the brainwave of asking him about something which intrigued me, and was moreover connected to his story:

  ‘I should be fascinated, Mr Mate, to hear you relate the story of the prop, if I may call it that, which you use for your storytelling.’

  Thus I gave the appearance of taking an interest in my obsessive dining companion, who by virtue of his role as host was the highest ranking officer on board the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen that evening.

  ‘Ah, that ...’ he said, obviously pleased that I had provided him with an opportunity to discourse at length about himself. He reached into the inside pocket of his uniform jacket and took out the piece of wood:

  ‘This is a splinter from the bow timber of the Argo.’

  He balanced the splinter on his palm carefully, as if the slightest draught could blow it away, and held it up to the candlelight to give me a better view. The stick looked like nothing so much as a piece of rotten driftwood of the type that used to wash up on the shore in my youth: bored by worms, gnawed by insects, polished by wind and water, hammered by rocks. I leant forward and sniffed the wood: nothing. Or was there? Yes, there was a faint tang of salt mingled with the odour of damp soil. And to my astonishment I became aware of a once familiar stirring in a certain part of my anatomy, in the nether regions, so to speak:

  Good gracious me! I thought, dropping the napkin over my lap and straightening up in my chair:

  ‘But how does it work?’

  The mate withdrew his hand and raised the piece of wood to his right ear:

  ‘You’ve seen me listening to it, sir ...’

  He made an amateurish pretence of listening to the wood chip:

  ‘I hear something that could best be compared to the soporific hiss of our short-wave radio receiver: as if a handful of golden sand were being shaken in a fine sieve. This sound caresses the eardrum so gently that before you know it your ear has been lulled to sleep. Then I hear a faint humming through the hiss. At first I think I’m mistaken, but no, I hear it again – rising and falling, over and over, unvarying.

  ‘Once the ear has fallen asleep, the humming takes on a new form. It becomes a note, a voice sounding in the consciousness, as if a single grain of golden sand had slipped through the mesh of the sieve and, borne on the tip of the eardrum’s tongue, passed through the horn and ivory-inlaid gates that divide the tangible from the invisible world.

  ‘At first it is wordless, like crooning over a cradle, then it swells into a song. The singer is a woman.’

  ‘Now, there’s a surprise ...’ I remarked rather loudly, inadvertently interrupting Mate Caeneus.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Never mind ...’ I answered, adding, ‘I think the pork chops must have disagreed with me.’

  While the mate droned on about his piece of wood, I wondered whether oak trees had genders and whether the reason for the unexpected response in my nether regions to the smell of the splinter was that it had been split off a female tree.

  ‘As you will remember, sir, Athena fitted the bow timber into the many-nailed Argo and the nature of her gift was such that it had the power of human speech. Without it we would never have found our way through the Bosphorus, across the Black Sea to Colchis, up the Donau and her tributaries, into the Baltic and North Sea, and from there north across the Atlantic to cruise off the chill island of Thule, that strange land shrouded in eternal darkness, where the water boils of its own accord in the snow. Indeed, it was on the black sands of Ultima Thule that we Argonauts, first of mortal men, saw the gleam of Helios’ harp strings as he dwells with the Hyperboreans and tunes his instrument beneath the vault of the world. Without the guidance of the loquacious oak we would not have known to turn our ship south-south-east and thus find the way home to the civilised world of the Mediterranean.

  ‘After this journey we mortal men had somewhat humbled the pride of blue-haired Poseidon, for by our successful voyage one could say that we Argonauts had conquered great territories in his watery realm.’

  ‘Excuse me ...’

  Here I raised a finger:

  ‘Pray excuse me, good host, I have to go and spend a penny.’

  Mate Caeneus:

  ‘Of course ...’

  I hurried to the lavatory and relieved myself. ‘He’ was perhaps not quite as sprightly as the last time this fit was upon him – but he was lively enough. Yes, it gladdened my old heart to see how much vigour the scent of the precious speaking wood had injected into ‘the old chap’.

 
When I returned to the saloon I noticed that Caeneus had refilled our brandy glasses. His glass, that is to say, for I myself had been sipping my drink sparingly – not wishing to abuse Magnus Jung-Olsen’s hospitality – whereas the mate was becoming a little the worse for wear.

  I sat down beside him without comment, then ventured to suggest something that had occurred to me in the lavatory:

  ‘I was thinking: could the voice you detect in the humming of the wood be your own voice? Like the poet who obstinately believes that he is writing about the world but is in reality only telling yet another story about himself?’

  The idea was not entirely my own. My brother-in-law, the psychiatrist Dr Pázmány, had said something similar when the invisible people moved in with me during the winter of 1910–11. However, Mate Caeneus’s response to this little theory of mine – which was only a friendly suggestion – was to scowl and pout and rest his cheek on his hand while his black eyes stared into space.

  A good while passed in this manner. I kept silence with him, and it didn’t occur to me to try and explain my words or elaborate. I was becoming used to the crew members’ tendency to behave as if everything I said was incomprehensible, to remain silent for just as long as I was speaking, then carry on from where they had left off, treating me like some guano-covered rock that one must steer a course around. While we two sat in silence over our brandy glasses, I amused myself by trying to work out what the mate was staring at – no doubt he would soon take up the thread from where he had left off when I slipped out to answer the call of nature. It seemed to me that his gaze was resting halfway between the teaspoon and the crumb of French bread just above the middle of the table, a little to the right from his point of view.

  But, as it happened, the mate did not yield, any more than a chess piece that has already been played. I had, so to speak, the floor. The clock was ticking on my side. But instead of following up my previous comment by stating the obvious: ‘when your gaze is so abstracted that you seem to see beyond field and forest, you are in fact staring at what stands closest to you; yourself’, courtesy bade me say:

  ‘Has this awe-inspiring object been in your possession long?’

  Mate Caeneus’s large, curly head lifted from his hand. He looked at me enquiringly. To my horror I saw that his left eye, which had been resting on his palm, was full of tears. He cleared his throat and answered as if from the dregs of sleep:

  ‘You read my thoughts, sir. I was just recalling the terrible night I acquired this talkative stick.’

  The mate seized his brandy glass from the table, raised it to face level and looked over the brim – straight into my eyes:

  ‘Your health, shipmate Haraldsson!’

  The saloon clock struck twelve.

  VIII

  BY THE END I was having difficulty following the plot, both because the storyteller’s words had become slurred with drink and because my own head was nodding. But so much is certain: the mate told me that one night, long after the Argonauts had returned home with the golden fleece, he was down on the waterfront in the city of Corinth. The weather was bad and there were few people abroad apart from Caeneus himself and his companions, a few squawking herring gulls and a clutch of adolescent kittens that he stressed had been both ill-favoured and irksome. By this stage in the story the hero’s world had suffered such an ill wind that his errand to the boat shed was to scavenge for something to eat. There he could usually find fish guts left over from the day’s catch, rotting crustaceans and dubious scallops, if his luck was in.

  And would you know it? This time the easily pleased protagonist spotted a basket of bait that had somehow rolled over and was propped up on its side in the lee of a blue-and-white-striped fishing boat, while the shark bait – consisting mainly of mares’ intestines – lay wet and inviting in the sand. Caeneus glided into the shade and began to bolt down this feast in frenzied rivalry with the other gulls (his words), and the rapture of the competitive glut was so all-consuming that Caeneus couldn’t tear himself away from the delicacies even when an unseen bird-catcher jerked a string that was buried in the sand and tied to the end of the twig propping up the basket. The swarm of gulls whirled from under the keel of the boat like a foaming wave and Caeneus felt like the luckiest dog alive to be left alone with the mares’ bowels in the darkness of the basket.

  The bird-catcher soon put an end to the fun, however. He stuck his hairy human hand under the bait basket, seized the feather-soft bird’s neck he encountered there and extracted Caeneus, who realised belatedly that he had walked into a trap.

  Caeneus fought viciously with the hunter, pecking at his hands with his strong yellow beak, beating his head with silver-grey wings and clawing his chest with pink, fleshless feet, but the hunter tightened his hold on his prey, whirling Caeneus around hard in the hope of breaking his neck. It was an unequal struggle. The god of heaven had granted Caeneus the power of imperviousness to weapons and fists whereas the bird-catcher was the most wretched of vagabonds: a bald, haggard, pinch-bellied, shrunken-limbed old man – and as such was bound to yield to the bird in the end. But just as the bird-catcher loosened his grip and Caeneus squirmed from his hands, their eyes met:

  ‘Oh no ...’

  Grief crushed the liver-red gull’s heart as Caeneus recognised in the tramp’s burst pupils the most splendid champion the world had ever known, the man who had commanded the most famous heroes in days of yore, he who had won the love of queens and enchantresses; yes, there the gull saw the ruins of his old captain, Jason son of Aeson.

  Caeneus shrank away from this terrible revelation. He called Jason’s name, called his own name, called on Hermes to free his tongue from its fetters, but all the son of Aeson could see and hear was a herring gull squawking on a rock. Caeneus craned his neck, cocked his head back and screeched:

  ‘Arrk, arrk! Ga-ga-ga-ga! Arrk, arrk ...’

  The greybeard Jason fled down the beach and the fleet-winged Caeneus took to the air in pursuit. Although stones harmed him no more than spears or knuckles, it took energy and concentration to dodge the pebbles that Jason was throwing in his direction, and Caeneus was worn out from the fight. So he hovered at a safe height above the knock-kneed man as he ran and crawled away over the sand. But soon hunger overcame fear and Jason began to search for something else to eat; at least the crazed herring gull seemed to have stopped trying to peck him. When the decrepit hero of the seas had scraped together enough for his supper he sought somewhere safe to eat it, in peace from other vagabonds, wild dogs and rats. He found sanctuary in the fabled graveyard of ships.

  Here the sea castles of yesteryear lay rotting like beached whales on the sand, their timbers brittle, ropes rotten, nails rusty, the black and red paint that had adorned them from gunwale to keel quite worn away. Jason found a place by the prow of one of the many-nailed hulks and began to gorge himself in frantic haste, with constantly darting eyes. Once the meal was over he leant against the ship’s hull, took a deep breath and sighed as happily as after a banquet of old.

  At that the splendid timberwork behind him creaked as if the rotten ship were groaning.

  Then he heard a voice say:

  ‘Jason? Is that you?’

  The voice was hollow and cracked, yet so powerful that it fluttered the tramp’s white beard. With a shriek of terror Jason flung himself on all fours and peered around in search of the foe. The voice continued:

  ‘O Jason, have you come to take me away?’

  Jason spun round on his knuckles and yelped:

  ‘What? Where are you? Come out if you dare!’

  ‘Lord, I have awaited your coming ever since we landed at the city of Iolcus, when the harbour resounded with the cheers of the welcoming multitude for thrice nine days and nights, when the precious wine overflowed my thwarts from bow to stern, when the leafy olive branch wound up my mast, when the perfume of the vestal virgins’ incense wafted over my yards and rigging – when you disembarked, never to return.’

  For, you
see, Caeneus and Jason were not the only members of the famous quest for the golden ram’s fleece to be present in Corinth that night. That many-nailed masterpiece, the Argo, was there as well. She it was who lay there in the ships’ graveyard, gnawed through by the teeth of time, lamenting so plaintively:

  ‘Take me away. Sail me out to sea, the blue sea, where Poseidon shakes his trident at bold seafarers who steer their ships through the mountainous waves as if they were thunderbolts from the hand of supreme Zeus.’

  But Jason recognised neither the galley nor her voice, and it made no difference how softly she cajoled her old captain:

  ‘Oh, how I have missed the feel of your strong feet walking my decks ...’

  He merely raged in the sand like a fighting cur, and when the enemy failed to show itself he rolled over on his back and began to howl and lament – sure that madness had taken hold of him.

  Caeneus, who had observed the whole scene from his vantage point in the sky, now arrived on silent wings and perched on the Argo where the bowsprit met the prow.

  The weary old ship creaked:

  ‘Caeneus?’

  ‘ARRK! ARRK! ARRK!’

  The gull squawked and flapped its wings as the bow timber gave way with a groan of pain and fell to the ground, crushing the man beneath.

  And that was the end of Jason son of Aeson.

  But Corinth was not the end of the road for the herring gull Caeneus. He flew away, bearing in his claws a splinter of wood from the bow timber, which he has used for his storytelling ever since. Feeling things had become too hot for him in the Aegean, he persisted in his flight until he came all the way north to Finnmark. There a shaman took him under his wing and turned him back into the likeness of a man.