Names for the Sea, page 11
We’ve been reading Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory and talking about how to write about rivers. Raban takes a small boat down the Mississippi, inspired by his childhood reading of Huckleberry Finn. I talk about Three Men in a Boat, and about the rivers in The Waste Land. The students discuss the idea of the river as highway and border, taking people and goods up and down but keeping them apart. I know by now to assume no limit to their geographical experience. Juliána, who lived in Paris for a year, talks about city rivers, the Rive Gauche: the river as socio-economic boundary. Ólafur remembers how New York used to pretend its river wasn’t there when he was a child: the river as sewer, taking away sins. Jón fishes in the river that crosses his family farm every summer, joining his father, brothers and male cousins in a ritual of returning to the land and to primitivist masculinity after nine months of urban professional life: a river of (seasonal) plenty. The discussion is going well, but they’re ignoring Raban’s encounters with people on and near the river, and I realise that we’ve talked a lot about landscape this term and hardly mentioned inhabitants. What about the way he writes about meeting strangers? I ask. How does that feel, when you’re travelling and you start to hear people’s stories? How does Jonathan Raban use strangers’ tales?
There’s a silence. I wait. The silence goes on. Find an example, I suggest, and they ruffle pages obediently. But they are exchanging glances, in a way that usually means the crazy foreigner is at it again. Maybe we should write about encounters with strangers this week, I say, practise telling second-hand stories. I can hear the intake of breath. OK, I say, tell me. What have I said? The Danish student and the Americans are looking around, as puzzled as I am. Yeah, says Rosa, it’s weird, isn’t it, the way some people will just, like, talk to strangers. Like, people they’ve never met before in their entire lives. Oskar nods. My great-aunt’s like that, he says. But then she is Danish. She’ll just start talking about the weather or something. In a shop. He shudders. Really? asks Disa. Really people she’s never even met? In the city? Yeah, says Oskar, shaking his head, as if the Danish great-aunt is in the habit of pinching policemen’s bottoms or drinking on the steps of parliament. Like in America, adds Ólafur, they’ll tell you anything. It’s just embarrassing.
Icelanders, it turns out, don’t chat to shopkeepers, or complain to each other when the bus is late (though it isn’t, usually), or exchange comments about the weather. There is outright mutiny when I suggest that those who have never spoken to a stranger should go out and do so as part of this week’s writing exercise. In the end, the international students all turn in elegant little vignettes about finding that the other person on the train was going to the same ballet for the same reason, or about being invited to stay with the person in the next seat on the plane, while the Icelanders write about rivers. I wonder if part of the anxiety about ‘strangers’ is that Icelandic social and familial bonds are so dense that there aren’t many strangers, that, like Jewish people from the same English town or Oxford graduates of the same cohort, any two Icelanders will eventually be able to name a common acquaintance and so the only true ‘strangers’ are foreign. In any case, I am gratified to have found people keener on minding their own business than the British.
One of my students comes to find me after class, a British woman who, like most of the immigrants we know, fell in love with an Icelander in London and found, a few years later, that he couldn’t conceive of raising a family outside Iceland. (I sometimes think that all these beautiful, intelligent, multilingual twenty-something Icelanders with a sideways take on the world ought to come with a health warning when they arrive in London and New York and Buenos Aires: marry at your peril, for the útlönd years are just a phase. The rest of the world is only a finishing school for Icelandic graduates.) Charlotte’s outsider status in Reykjavík is doubled because she is black. The first few times she visited her husband’s family, she says, people used to turn around in the street to watch her go past. Children would hide and point. When she was driving one day and saw another black driver at a traffic light, they waved and smiled in astonishment and it took her only two days to find out who the other person was. That was ten years ago, she says, and it’s better now. She wouldn’t have come to live and raise her children here if things hadn’t changed. Anyway, says Charlotte, there’s a book I found very comforting when we first came to live here, and I wanted to lend it to you. Reading it was a big thing for me when I first arrived; it made me feel that someone had been through it all before. She presses a worn paperback into my hands and goes off to run her business for a few hours before taking her daughters swimming.
Ripples from Iceland, by Amalia Lindal, was first published in 1962. Lindal was an American who came to live in Reykjavík with her Icelandic husband when they were ready to have children in the 1950s, and wrote about her painful assimilation. It is partly the story of the narrator’s own erosion, where the damage of motherhood overlaps with the emigrant’s loss of identity. As in so many travel books, writing seems to be therapy for the trauma of alienation. It’s a trauma that takes familiar, domestic form for Lindal:
I think one of the most difficult things for newcomers to Iceland to adjust to is the food. Such items as bacon, ham, pork, veal and beef immediately disappeared from our menu when we arrived because of the high prices . . . Icelandic lamb is our staple meat: fresh, ground, salted, smoked, or in sausages or frankfurters, and mixed with spice and potato flour in a meat paste which can be fried up into stiff meatballs.
A recent United Nations report listed Iceland as having the highest protein and calorie consumption of western Europe and the United States. The conclusion was drawn therefore that Icelanders eat very well. I agree that the protein intake is high, with all the fish, meat, skyr, dried peas and eggs used in baking . . . The carbohydrate consumption is also high, with potatoes, bread and cakes daily, and much use of sago, cornstarch and potato flour for thickening. Icelanders are well filled, but not well nourished, unless they take vitamins and cod-liver oil, or are wealthy enough to afford imported fruits and expensive fresh or canned vegetables daily.
Lindal writes a lot about vegetables. She dreams of American supermarkets and wakes up as she pays for trolleys full of peaches. Get over it, I find myself unfairly thinking, able to identify someone else’s whingeing where my own complaints are obviously those of a normal person presented with weirdness. Go watch the light on Esja and remember why you came, but of course that’s not why she came. She came for love, which is less reliable than mountains.
It’s not just the vegetables that annoy Lindal. Coming from an American Protestant background, she has no patience for the Icelandic attitude to money:
In the fishing industry, one may make 100,000 krónur in a season whereas another, not so lucky, makes only 10,000. It’s always a gamble, and so the fishermen and the merchants engaged in exporting and importing think in terms of big money and the big chance and have no feeling for a relatively stable and dependable income. The farmers, on the other hand, have an attitude about money much closer to that of large industry, but modern Iceland’s economy is based on the elusive herring rather than farming.
This is clearly what is known in our house as a Grand Unifying Theory of Everything, a kind of key to all mythologies that finds one explanation for a complicated and ongoing process, but the idea is appealing. The banks fell because Icelanders have fishermen’s attitude to risk. Big money and big chances. It’s not true – many of the people who have lost houses and cars claim to have had no idea of the risks the banks were taking, and in any case Icelandic fishing is going rather well because the boats are landing their catches in Norway and Scotland and selling their fish for pounds and Norwegian kroner – but there’s a storyteller’s logic that works. The bankers are known in Iceland – even by the majority who disapprove of their actions – as ‘Viking Raiders’, stripping assets from útlönd. Vikings, fishermen, men who treat money like fish.
The winter weekdays are full, and mostly happy. I work, Max goes to school, Tobias goes to nursery and Anthony bakes a lot of bread – but then there are weekends. Icelanders, we gather, spend winter weekends visiting their extended families. With nearly eighty per cent of Icelanders living in the Greater Reykjavík area, almost everyone has parents, grandparents, cousins and a proliferation of step-children, ex-partners and in-laws within a few minutes’ drive. (It’s one of the reasons Icelandic marriages don’t last, a sociologist at work tells me. With such dense social and familial networks, there is no chance of keeping an affair secret. He might have been joking.) Grandparents, we learn, often take the children at weekends; we suspect this may be one of the reasons why Icelandic couples are so relaxed about parenthood. My students tell me that in most families, one household, usually the grandparents’, will hold a weekly open house on Sunday afternoons, with coffee and a table of cakes and the expectation that everyone will attend or send a convincing reason for absence. It sounds comforting, I say, envying the idea of a nuclear family buoyed on a sea of other people’s interest and concern, because it feels as if Anthony and I must paddle hard to keep ours afloat until Monday morning. Sometimes, Pétur and Messíana let us pretend to be theirs, and Anthony and I can sip coffee and talk to their real children while Messíana reads to Tobias and her two-year-old granddaughter and Max plays with their nine-year-old grandson, jumping from behind a wall into the wind coming off the sea into the garden and then taking shelter again behind the house. But most weekends, Icelanders live their Icelandic lives and we roll up our sleeves, trying not to count down the hours until the outside world opens again.
We invent arts and craft projects using the previous weekend’s newspaper, of necessity since prices are still rising in Iceland and the weekend Guardian, on subscription, is now the only thing coming into the house that isn’t eaten within a few days. You can make lots of things with old newspaper, we find, not just papier mâché which uses up flour we can’t always spare. We have themed collage competitions, spelling games with letters cut from the headlines. We decorate caterpillars made from egg-boxes with pictures from the gardening pages. We roll out play dough and cut out endless horses and elephants. The plastic smell of play dough is still on my hands at bath time. We make paper snowflakes and Blu-Tack them to the window, though it’s clear that everyone else in the block has decided at one of their meetings that we will all hang white star lanterns in the windows this winter. (I tell one of the students about our joke that the residents of each block get together every year and agree on co-ordinated Christmas decorations. Yes, he says, they do. Yes, new ones each year, that’s right.) We have wheelbarrow races across the grey carpet, Anthony wheeling Max, me wheeling Tobias.
I bake as if I’m the pastry chef in an Edwardian stately home, because butter and cream are cheap, it makes me feel I’m doing something productive and the rest of my cooking is now no more than an attempt to make it possible to eat the available ingredients. Swede and turnip are our only fresh vegetables, and we eat wizened apples, shipped from Central America on the slow boat and picked from a slimy heap in Bonus, more as an act of faith in the principle of fruit than because we believe them to have any real nutritional properties. Sometimes there are oranges, big, shiny oranges which are pale and dry when opened, the flesh hanging in bloodless strands. So I make brownies with chocolate from home, sour-cream vanilla cake with a skyr-based icing of which I am rather proud, gingerbread with Danish glucose syrup instead of treacle. Icelandic supermarkets, we discover, sell all the sweets at half-price on Saturdays. It’s called Nammidag, ‘yummy day’, and the candy section is Nammiland. When Max studied the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child at school, his class put ‘candy on Saturdays’ high on their list of children’s rights. Icelanders eat more kilogrammes of sugar per capita than almost anyone else in Europe (although dental health is relatively good, a contradiction that reminds me of their high meat, low vegetable diet and good cardiac health). Nammiland is the only place in Iceland to see a winter crowd. Early in the day, young children push and whine, stuffing carrier bags from the pick-and-mix while their parents stand back by the baking goods. Later on, the aisle is full of teenagers shoving and shrieking, shovelling Icelandic chocolate liquorice and Polish cola gums into plastic bags until they’re each cradling a haul the size of a well-grown baby. Late on Sunday nights, when the frenzy is over, the floor is scattered with crushed sweets, bright as stained glass, and gobs of caramel feel like pebbles under my shoe. Some weekends, Max and I enter the fray, looking for alternatives to expensive Danish chocolate chips to put in our cookies. Baked goods and painting; bread and circuses, though for whom I am not sure.
But there comes a time, every day, when we have to get out, when the children are not just chasing each other up and down the flat but chasing each other with forks and malicious intent. We go for walks. We go to the Zoo and Family Park, which has to stay open all year because, like children, the animals need feeding even when there’s no other reason to get out of bed. We swim several times a week. There is, I think, a slow pace to Icelandic winter weekends that I can’t match. Only the thought of Monday morning quiets my panic.
*
In early November dawn comes at around nine-thirty. One Saturday there is sun. Esja turns gold, and from the table where we’re having second cups of tea we can see an oddly straight-edged dusting of snow on the top third of the mountain. Winter sunshine commands our presence in the same way as the late-night sun did in July. Get it while it’s here. Don’t waste your chances. You’ll want to remember this day when the wind is so strong the children can’t walk down the street and you haven’t seen Esja all week. We know now how fast the weather changes, that by the time we’ve made a real plan and got everyone into the car we’ll be too late for the sun, so we head for the lava field. The land glows like well-polished furniture in candle-light, the sea glinting an almost Mediterranean blue, and frost melting except where the shadows of street lights and boulders block the sun, a shadow theatre on the ground. There are swans in the bay, and sharp-winged gulls move so fast through the air that at first I imagine the terns, kríur, have come back, winter is cancelled. But it is only the beginning.
We drive into town, to the market by the harbour for fish and flatkökur. We park at the university and walk down to the lake so the children can feed the ducks, but there isn’t the usual gang of geese menacing passing toddlers and we hear the whooper swans fluting from the other side of the lake. When we come closer we can see why: the lake is opaque as milk, the ducks confined to one side by ice that stretches across the water towards where the swans occupy the other unfrozen area by the bridge to the town hall. It is duck-ice, so thin that it bends and creaks when a few brave or hungry birds are enticed across it by ‘bagels’ so un-bagel-like that even the children have rejected them, and the ducks crash through it as they come to the edge. Watching ducks fall through ice is unreasonably funny, slapstick without the cruelty. Tobias likes the idea of jumping in too. At last, after eleven, the sun comes over the horizon and the ice shines pale yellow, with the standing ducks’ shadows cast in black.
On Sundays, when everything else is closed, we swim, usually at Garðabær but sometimes at Hafnarfjörður, which has a bigger set of outdoor pools. I drive tentatively over hardening frost. The indoor pool is crowded; I can see people’s heads in the steam rising from the outside pool, so Tobias and I scurry across the concrete and hurl ourselves into the toddler pool, which is pleasant enough as long as we keep our necks and shoulders submerged and occasionally splash warm water over our tingling faces. Anthony and Max join us after some persuasive waving and beckoning and Max sticks a foot into the bigger pool but says it is too cold. I should take his word – he’s almost impervious to cold – but can’t believe all the people swimming with serene expressions are secretly shivering so after a while I steel myself to rush across and try too. Max is right, although that doesn’t stop him, twenty minutes later when we are about to leave, making a rush for the slide and swooping down, his body steaming as he runs up the stairs but cooling to air-temperature as he comes down the slide wearing an expression of pure glee.
Our perception of cold has changed, although Reykjavík is much warmer than other settlements on the same latitude because of the Gulf Stream, and it’s a relatively mild winter; the temperature is rarely below minus ten. English winter coats are just about adequate, at least for the adults. It’s not that cold, I keep telling friends at home. And then one day in early December the temperature rises to two degrees. The warmth is as surprising as an electric blanket when you were expecting frosty linen sheets. My cheeks and chin don’t go numb, even though the bus to work is late and I have to stand still for more than five minutes. My hands still hurt with cold, but my feet, in woollen socks and leather boots, remain comfortable and it doesn’t feel as if I’ve been slapped when my scarf slips down my face. The ground, though, is glazed from two days of snow followed by overnight rain and a hard frost. I spend the day marking, watching the moon set, the sky pale, and, somewhere around midday, the shadow of my office building begin to creep up the building opposite, first a soft pencil line of pink and then, for perhaps an hour, a sharper, yellower outline. Going to get coffee, I glimpse through Pétur’s window the marsh between the university and the airport steaming, and Esja, revealed for the first time in several days, covered in snow and pink as a raspberry meringue.
