Names for the Sea, page 10
Winter comes, though I don’t feel as if we’ve had autumn. I’m not sure you can have autumn without trees. In mid-October, I buy a bicycle. I tried all summer to find a second-hand one, but even with Hulda Kristín and Matthew’s help couldn’t do it. The manager of one bike shop asked Hulda Kristín why on earth anyone would want a used bicycle. Matthew said there were bikes in the storage area of his apartment block that hadn’t moved for a couple of years and he was sure the owners had moved out months ago, but neither of us quite had the stomach for that. This still feels like a place of excess to me, like a country where everyone has more stuff than they know what to do with. (Rich words from one who has left her own country to escape Great-grandma’s embroidered linen tablecloths.) New bicycles cost about twice what they do at home, until October when Hagkaup sells off all the things Icelanders buy in summer, patio heaters, ride-on lawnmowers and jet-skis, to make room for skis, winter tyres and snowmobiles.
I start riding to work, ten kilometres along the coast path. At first, the sun rises around the time I drop Max at school. On a clear day, the frost feathering the pavement and dusting the grass glistens pink as the sun comes hesitantly over the hill behind the city. Other days, it feels as if there’s no convincing source for the grey pallor of the sky, as if the sun is a rumour like the kreppa or the swine-flu pandemic. I cycle past marshland, where there were geese a few weeks ago and now are none, along the side of the freeway, where I see more accidents requiring ambulances and leaving broken glass and bits of car thrown up the embankment. Up a hill, along a quiet road lined with houses the size of aircraft hangars, each surrounded by a pool of grass and concrete. There are no flowers in the gardens here, no trees, certainly no vegetable plots or currant bushes, although the people in the painted wooden houses in the city have found ways of coaxing most of these through the winter. Each of these houses has three or four cars, each about the size of the sitting room in an ordinary British house, beached on the drive in front of the garage door, and there’s often a pram parked out there as well. Two of these houses, the two white ones with terraced circular patios lapping like waves at the French doors, have tinted windows, which don’t stop me peering in. I glide back down to the shore, the path squeezed between the freeway and the sea. Although the traffic is loud here and exhaust smoke heavy in the air, it’s where the birds congregate. There are always sea gulls, screaming and fighting, but the others come and go as the autumn passes. I greet various kinds of Arctic duck, some with curled feathers on their brown heads, some black and white, visible as navigation buoys against the water on a blue day. I labour up the hill, past a retirement home which has a gym on the ground floor where I often see a nurse helping old ladies to use the machines, and a sitting room with a glassed-in verandah where the residents sit in velvet armchairs, lifting their faces to the sun. I usually get off and push the bike up this hill, trying not to mind when the real cyclists, men with proper Arctic cycling clothes and balaclavas under their helmets, ring their bells at me to get out of the way. I pass through Kópavogur, a cityscape more comfortable than Garðabær, a town with smaller cars and a gathering of shops around a series of car parks, with a church perched high on the end of the peninsula. It’s a church that appears to be inspired by the shells of the Sydney Opera House and it’s floodlit through the dark, making a surreal landmark visible across the city and far out towards Hafnarfjörður. Down the hill on the other side of the church, checking the brakes because the slope is as steep as the slide in the school playground and then I’m on the road again, around drivers who don’t encounter cyclists from one month to the next and use the mirrors only for applying make-up. I cross the road and freewheel back down to the shore, and from here the ride is a reliable pleasure, half an hour of my day stolen from both my employer and my children. The track passes below the graveyard, one of only two burial grounds for the whole city, its stones spreading out along the hillside like suburban sprawl as the population grows. Icelanders don’t do epitaphs, only names and dates. And then I’m in the parkland under Perlan, pine trees rising on one side and the water in the inlet usually placid on the other. It’s always windy here, sometimes a fight to keep going up the hill and to balance the bike against the gusts, and windier as I round the headland and pass the end of the runway at the little airport. Planes come down so low that it feels as if I could touch them if I stood on the sea wall, and the two-seaters are often parked on the other side of the chain-link fence, where I can see men tinkering with them the way dads used to play with their cars at weekends, all boiler suits and oily rags. There’s a hole in the fence and the tarmac is temptingly smooth; I wonder what would happen if a foreign woman cycled along the bit that says ‘Civilian Apron C’.
I ride along the ends of the gardens of houses overlooking the sea. There are no fences here. Anyone could wander off the path and up to the windows. These are older houses than the ones in Garðabær, although still expansive as cruise ships, docked between the city and the shore. Their eccentricities are pleasing: a vaguely Mexican place, with a scattering of blue tiles set in its apricot painted walls, a white house built bunker-like into a slope, with a hot tub, swaddled now in tarpaulin, set at its feet; a glass cube three storeys high which, despite my growing nostalgia for Victorian brick curlicues, I find myself coveting. The króna is still weak enough that if we did decide to move here permanently, we could sell our terrace in Canterbury and buy one of these, put up swings and a trampoline in the garden and let our books spread out along hundreds of metres of concrete walls. It’s open sea on my left now, buffeting the stones, and I slow down and don’t look where I’m going because sometimes I see seals here, hauled out onto inshore rocks. It’s hard to tell in the half-light of mid-morning which dark bulk is a seal and which is weed-covered rock or a huddle of cormorants, and I don’t know exactly why it matters, but seal mornings are better days. Nearly there now, past the wooden fish-drying hut from which I still catch a whiff in an on-shore wind, and round at last to the road. There’s the only few metres of bike-lane in Iceland here, along the side of a dual carriageway that doesn’t go anywhere in particular and isn’t much used. The students keep telling me I should stick to the pavement, which is legal here. It has to be, they say. Because it’s only foreigners who cycle and they’d just get killed if they went on the road. (The men in Proper Cycling Gear, I think, don’t count, because their cycling is a sport rather than a means of transport, rather as the few Icelanders walking the coast path do so with Nordic walking poles and Lycra rather than shopping bags and city shoes. It’s one thing if your chosen form of sport chances to cover distance, quite another to choose not to drive.)
And a left turn – get off and walk over the pedestrian crossing – and I’m on campus. I lock the bike to the railings, which is apparently unnecessary but a lifelong habit I can’t break, and go upstairs to my office. I’m back on the radar – teacher, colleague, employee, mother and wife at the end of the phone – but in a few hours I’ll get back on my bike and disappear again.
I’d like to know more about the olden days, the pre-vegetable years before the Americans came. I should talk to some more people, but I can’t, not yet. On bad days, I still choose to go hungry rather than go into a shop and have to talk to Icelanders. I am ashamed to require Icelanders to speak English and too embarrassed to try to speak Icelandic, even though I know the words. I am afraid I can’t pronounce them properly, afraid people will laugh at me, afraid of the paralysing horror of standing there in a shop making incomprehensible noises. Sometimes I don’t swim because I can’t face the mortification of buying a ticket for the pool. There are days when I don’t use the staff lunchroom because I think Icelanders will resent feeling obliged to talk to me. I hadn’t expected to find my foreign-ness so disabling. I come from a wandering, academic family and spent almost all my childhood summers outside England. I have the usual British diffidence about imposing myself, but I’ve never before been unable to summon the nerve to buy a sandwich. Pull yourself together, I tell myself, but often I can’t.
So I take refuge in narrative. I take out all the Icelandic fiction in translation from the National Library, barely a shelf, and more in German and French than English. There’s a film archive, above the Culture House where the saga manuscripts are venerated. I can do libraries and museums. I know how to keep quiet. The film archive holds every film ever made in Iceland or by an Icelandic producer, and there are booths where you can sit in a leather chair, put on headphones and pass the afternoon in front of the screen. It’s warm up there, above the sex-shops and neon-lit bars off Laugavegur, and snow swirls past the low windows. I begin at the beginning, with the jerky sepia-and-white of the interwar years which need no subtitles because there are no words, and work my way through the headscarves and sharp-cornered cars of the 1960s towards the echoing footsteps and blood-sprayed walls of contemporary Icelandic film. I will be indiscriminate, I promise myself. I will watch everything. And when I’ve done that, armed with whatever it teaches me, I’ll talk to some people from beyond our circle of fellow-strangers.
Many of the films are set in the Middle Ages. They blur in my mind with the documentaries of Icelandic life in the first half of the twentieth century; both show people wrapped in grey and brown wielding rakes on rainy hillsides, their hair and clothes whipping in the wind. Lines of heavily-laden horses snake over mountain passes with people trudging at their tails. Rain drips from everyone’s hair. Children run in and out of turf houses through low doorways, like rabbits emerging from and disappearing into burrows, and every so often one of the men says something apparently proverbial, like ‘the dark horse runs longest’ or ‘the fog hides many secrets’ and hits another man on the head with an axe. Then there is another procession of wet horses, sometimes carrying a coffin. It’s like listening to a tale told by a drunk; I am fascinated, mostly by the landscape, but have no idea what the narrative logic might be. The subtitles are little help because there seems to be no relationship between what people say (not much, mostly about farming) and what they do (mostly farming but sometimes murder).
Over the weeks, as darkness draws back through the afternoon and snow becomes a fact of life rather than a special effect, I progress through the decades. The settings change a little. Mid-century, the films are all about people leaving the farm for the city, or not leaving the farm for the city, or occasionally leaving the city for the farm. I imagine Pétur going, as ever, against the flow, appearing from Cambridge on one of these bleak mountainsides and settling down for the winter as if Borgarfjörður were where all the twenty-two-year-olds wanted to be in 1964. Wet horses are still important, but there are also wet buses. There is usually a father who stays on the farm and at least one son who wants to leave. Cameras go inside now, and there is chipped Formica, dirt-floored rooms with a few wooden chairs, and women who knit and cook but say even less than the men. Two or three times in each film, one of the men says something like ‘the folk over the fells are fleet of foot’ and then stabs his brother or son with a butcher’s knife or clubs him with an agricultural implement. I begin to play a kind of Icelandic film cricket, guessing who is going to do what to whom. I always lose. I watch some of them again, hoping for retrospective insight into the motives for violence, but even in hindsight I can’t imagine why, or see any narrative build-up or tension. I cannot make connections between actions and words, can’t recognise motive or discern character. I feel stupid; I’ve found a genre I can’t read.
6
Winter
By November, it’s been winter for a while. We recognise winter not just because the colours of land and sky and sea have changed, although the greens and blues have turned to shades of grey, but because there is less light, even in the middle of the day. The sun rises at a shallower angle every day, every day the zenith is a little lower, every day sunset is a little further south, as if the sun is running out of power. Winter is like watching film shot by natural light, like watching Lars von Trier after Spielberg’s summer. There is snow, and then rain again, and then more snow. The Christmas holiday is shorter in Iceland than at home, and there are no half-term breaks from school, although the International School, true to its American roots, closes for Thanksgiving. Icelanders work now, putting their heads down, getting things done so that when summer returns, when the days begin to lengthen again, we will be able to go out and sit in the sun. I try to remember the midsummer light, and to know that as the days are shortening now they will lengthen after the solstice. Life will come as surely as death. It’s hard to believe, my Arctic theology. Anthony has moments of despair as dark falls earlier and earlier, 4 p.m. at the beginning of November, 2.30 by December. We’re losing, he says, five minutes a day. But those times are sunset, I remind him, not darkness. Winter sunsets, like summer sunrises, go on for hours. The sun sidles over the horizon, but the sky stays pale for a long time. I walk the coast path long after the last light has drained from the sky and think about darkness, and I like it. I like the way it’s impossible to ignore the passing of time. Today is darker than yesterday, tomorrow will be darker than today. Dust we are and to dust we shall return. It makes me feel alive, makes me feel my life like heavy cloth on my hands.
I’m still cycling to work, past the digital thermometers at the roadside reading minus four, minus five, minus six. Sometimes its hard to keep moving fast enough to keep warm enough to keep moving, and I know I’ll have to stop soon, but there’s such pleasure in moving silent and solitary along the edge of the Arctic sea that I want to keep going. The track has down-lights at waist-height, so I can see ice and puddles and stones under the wheel but there’s no glare in my face as I watch the darkness pale and deepen. It’s never really dark, even on a cloudy night. I find myself coming to know the phases of the moon as I know the days of the week or time of the month. I know how the stars wheel through the days and nights.
My last ride is the week before Thanksgiving. It’s nearly 9 a.m. and sunrise is still a couple of hours away. There’s pallor in the south-eastern sky, but out to the north-west, over the sea, the sky is navy, full of cold stars. A full moon seems to have been circling the city for a few days and it rolls out, heading south along the horizon, throwing a shifting pathway over the sea. Everything has a shadow, for the first time in weeks, but they are moonshadows, black on white, and they all point due south, towards that false pink promise behind the mountains.
I’m getting to know my students well now, but there are still surprises. I’m teaching a course on contemporary travel writing. The students aren’t used to studying non-fiction, or contemporary literature, and we’re all enjoying thinking about how much where you come from shapes what you see when you leave. Home, I tell them, is the paper on which travel writes. Travel writers are always writing home. They tell me that the Icelandic for stupid is heimskur, one who stays at home, and that there is a saying: ‘He is as stupid as a child reared at home.’ This is a nation where travel is the precondition of intelligence. But there’s another saying they told me right at the beginning: ‘Iceland is the best in the world.’ Unemployment is highest among ‘foreigners’ because immigrants were the first to be sacked when the kreppa began. The university is on an official mission to enter the top one hundred in the world, and staff and administrators like to hear how things are done in universities that are already in this category, but – as in most large institutions – there are always reasons why nothing can actually change. I find that I am becoming frustrated by the absence of exactly the regulations I thought I was escaping. I don’t understand how the students are supposed to know how to do well when there are no marking criteria, no public statement about the difference between a bare pass and an excellent mark. I am shocked that one of my colleagues assesses his literature courses by multiple-choice exams, so they can be marked by a computer. There is, I discover, after weeks of teaching my own courses by discussion, no tradition of student participation here. My colleagues don’t usually expect the students to use class time for discussion, and spend the weekly hour-and-a-half standing at the front lecturing to rows of quiescent faces. Icelandic students won’t speak in class, my colleagues tell me. It’s not in the culture here, people are too afraid of making fools of themselves. They do for me, I reply, and then realise that since nobody told me otherwise, I have required Icelandic students to behave like British ones. They’ve shared their writing and argued about the meaning of Kubla Khan and fought over Austen’s feminism. If Háskóli Íslands wants to play with Europe’s universities, some things will have to change, and everyone is interested to know what those things are. As soon as anyone mentions ‘abroad’, útlönd, the outlands, in a meeting, people fall silent and take notes, as if it’s self-evident that what happens í útlöndum is exemplary, as if Iceland’s self-esteem depends on its ability to mimic foreign ways. But when I suggest that we might actually follow examples of other practices – double marking, for example, or a system of external examination so that someone from another institution would confirm that what we are doing meets accepted standards – I’m told that it’s not possible to do things differently here, because this is Iceland, and the reason I don’t understand this impossibility must be that I am a foreigner. Foreigners may know how to do things abroad, but only Icelanders understand Iceland. This country seems both outward-looking and insular, a nation of deeply provincial voyagers. ‘Insular’, Pétur reminds me, is the adjectival form of ‘island’, and not incompatible with ‘well-travelled’. I try, and fail, to explain to the students why English has two words for ‘foreign’ and ‘outlandish’.
