Names for the Sea, page 15
That binary again, us and the foreigners. They don’t run the towns. He’s not going to say anything newsworthy about Icelandic racism.
‘How does the financial crisis affect this?’ I ask. There’s a little plane coming in to land outside the window. ‘People are talking about selling off natural resources to foreigners.’ I mean, partly, what about ‘foreigners’ who aren’t itinerant migrant labour, what about ‘foreigners’ who might occupy positions of power, might, for example, buy up your high street chains and take over your banks?
Arni shakes his head. ‘That would be a very, very bad idea. But the lessons of this crisis are not yet learnt.’
There is, I think, general agreement that regulating the financial sector would be a good idea, and that allowing people in government to privatise national services and sell them to themselves causes certain difficulties a few years down the line; some consensus that loans against depreciating assets in currencies irrelevant to the transaction get people into trouble. Among other things. ‘What are those lessons?’ I ask.
‘Well, I hope that Icelanders will take more notice of second opinions, get less carried away by the mood. On a political level, we’re in a vacuum, fighting about whose mistake it was. And we may have to rethink our position in the world, for example in relation to NATO and the EU. EU membership was such a non-issue here before the crisis, because we were really the masters of the universe at that time. All the statistics looked good and we received a lot of international recognition for that and not everyone recognises that now. But of course these changes make you think about such things: can such a very tiny nation get by on its own?’
But those statistics, I don’t say, were lies, because most of the money turns out to have been imaginary, a fiction of dishonest accounting. He continues, summarising the Icelandic debate about EU membership, with detours into fisheries policy and the future of the EEA. He makes scant reference to his own views (‘we need to reconsider this question now’), none to the party line.
‘What do you think the domestic responses to the crisis should be?’ I ask.
‘We need to stop playing the blame game and move on. There are very interesting things going on here now. It used to be that all the talented people here went into banking, and now they’ve lost their jobs or quit and they’re building things of their own, really interesting things. So I think if we take the right stance and move out of this crisis in the right direction we will see a very different landscape in five or ten years, and a much healthier one. We’ve always had this problem here: what should the industry be? We had fishing, we went into aluminium in a big way, and then the huge banking sector. I would like to see more small enterprises. We have such opportunities here, we are well-educated, we are energetic, we are hugely creative. This is a big chance for Iceland.’
Although my instincts are to disagree with anyone speaking from the right-wing, and although he hasn’t said anything interesting or unpredictable about the kreppa, my spirits lift at the last bit. Being ‘energetic’ and ‘hugely creative’ with banking hasn’t worked, but there is something appealing as well as deeply irritating about a country that doesn’t recognise rules. Whatever Iceland does next, whether led by Tómas Gabríel’s friends or Arni’s, it is likely to be interesting.
8
Spring
Winter goes on a long time. Matthew warned me, back in September when I was eagerly awaiting the first snow, that mid-winter is the easy bit. December and January bring parties, fireworks and aurora, early nights and late mornings. It’s March and April, he said, when people start to get depressed. The light is back and it looks as if you should be able to go out, but it’s still damn cold, the roads are still icy, the snow is grubby and stained by exhaust fumes and you lose hope that summer is really going to come back. Matthew doesn’t have children, who wake at seven on Saturdays just the same as on school-days. Seven looks like midnight except that there are no aurora. We have four hours to fill before daybreak. Many Icelanders enjoy these weeks, time to read and knit and curl up on the sofa with a blanket and a DVD. In the Icelandic memoirs I’ve been reading, winter is the time when friends can stay for hours, lingering over coffee and cake because there’s nowhere they need to be and nothing they need to be doing. People used to sing together, read the sagas aloud to groups of knitters and, in later years, since there have been ovens and wheat flour and butter and eggs even though the cows are dry and the hens aren’t laying, embark on complicated baking. I like the idea of this, but the reality of two waffle-fuelled little boys in an open-plan flat has nothing to do with curling up or lingering. I remember a scene from Iceland’s ‘national novel’, Hallðór Laxness’s Independent People, in which a child wakes before anyone else on a winter morning:
The first faint gleam on the horizon and the full brightness on the window at breakfast-time are like two different beginnings, two starting points. And since at dawn even this morning is distant, what must this evening be? Forenoon, noon and afternoon are as far off as the countries we hope to see when we grow up, evening as remote and unreal as death . . .
The boy waits, desperate for his breakfast of half a piece of bread smeared with tallow and cod-liver oil. His mother is bed-bound for the winter, and the family live on porridge and dried fish; ‘Never did the children long so much for a nice juicy piece of meat or a thick slice of rye-bread and dripping as when they had finished eating.’
A bit of seasonal hunger, I think, sticking down a collage of animals cut from our Saturday Guardian archive because Tobias has lost interest and run off to start a fight with Max at the other end of the flat, would have its functional aspects. I wouldn’t mind at all if the boys had less energy at weekends. Icelanders deal with this problem with lots of organised sports. The leisure centres are full of little girls doing gym and little boys playing ball-games, but these activities, reasonably enough, are conducted in Icelandic, and Max is sure he couldn’t get by, not yet. We never see Icelandic toddlers in winter. They don’t swim. They are not at the zoo. Nobody takes children walking, winter or summer. They are not on the buses or downtown, although there are still small babies sleeping in large prams outside shops and cafés all along Laugavegur, snow settling into the creases in footmuffs and hoods. They are not in the museum. (I ask my students: the toddlers, they say, are at nursery for eight hours every week-day and many spend one day at the weekend with their grandparents. This information, each of the parents adds, pertains only to other families. They themselves spend a great deal of time with their own children.) Perhaps, suggests Max, Icelandic toddlers hibernate, and he and Tobias go off to play at hibernating, although spring comes after fifteen minutes.
And at last the sky pales, although the sun isn’t over the horizon, and going out begins to seem less arduous than staying in. There are two possibilities: swimming or the zoo. The underground car park is heated, and I fire up the heated seats and the warm air before we leave the building, so although there’s a foot of greying snow on the ground, making gritty fortifications along the pavement where it’s been shovelled off the road, and although the roadside digital thermometers insist that it’s minus seven out there, we don’t have to confront the reality until we park. I take the keys out of the ignition and start to wrap my shawl around my woollen cardigan, wriggle into my coat and gloves, pull my hood over my hat. No-one else has moved. Max turns a page. Come on, I say, maybe they’ll be feeding the seals! Anthony pulls his sleeves down over his hands and stares out at the icy car park. I changed my mind, remarks Tobias. I want to go home now. Me too, says Max, I don’t like the zoo anyway. Anthony and I exchange glances. We could just drive home. We left the building, which was a lot of the point. We passed time putting everyone’s shoes and coats on and finding all the gloves and hats and snacks and water-bottles. I squint up at the windows of the Range Rover parked next to us, its sides rising past our windows like an oil tanker passing a yacht. There’s a family of five sitting in there, listening to music and passing around crisps. Maybe driving around and parking is a normal way to pass winter weekends. I open the door.
Your feet, I find, go numb almost immediately, but hands take longer and hurt more. I hold my hands out to the children. Come on, I call, if we move fast we’ll soon get warm! Tobias wants to be picked up so he can see into the field where there were cows in summer, to make sure they haven’t come back. Reykjavík Zoo limits itself to native and sub-Arctic fauna. The Arctic foxes are performing the crazed waltz of caged animals. Next come the seals, too many of them in a concrete pond smaller than most swimming pools. At feeding time, children are allowed to enter the enclosure with the keeper and throw fish from a bucket, while a cat slides around their legs. (Just as well they don’t have tigers, Anthony mutters.) Then we can visit the hens, which is a treat because they are kept inside and there are heat-lamps for chicks fresh from the incubator. Tobias names rabbits, chickens, pigeons, teaching me Icelandic, and I spin out the conversation as long as possible, but at last it’s time to go see the reindeer, who move like dancers, shimmying across the snow to a syncopated slow beat. They sigh companionably, not interested in us but not surprised that we’re there, and I hold Tobias up against the railings so he can watch them slouching away. Storybook reindeer, Donner and Blitzen, aren’t reindeer but something fleeter, lighter, modern and European. These reindeer nose at the snow and then sit down with weary dignity, as if waiting, like the rest of us, for spring. Below the reindeer, there’s a caged hawk, a bird meant to survey our ant-like scurrying as it drifts on the wind, hopping from its perch like an oversized sparrow. (No sparrows in Iceland, no robins or blue tits. Sometimes they blow in on a south-easterly gale, hurled along the Vikings’ Atlantic route, and die of exposure and exhaustion, of lack of trees, in Seyðisfjörður.) Max’s lips are turning blue but he won’t wear a hat. Back to the aquarium, where cod and skate nose the glass and there’s shelter from the wind even though the doors stay open, and then over to the stalls, where pigs lie as if dead on the concrete floor, so fat they look as if they might split open. Sometimes there are piglets, and when there aren’t Tobias wants to know where they’ve gone. To stay with their grandparents, I say, on the farm. On past empty paddocks (they go inside, we explain, for the winter, and think lovingly of the Volvo’s heated seats) to admire a large wooden sculpture of a goat, which I imagine to have a hollow belly and a trapdoor, Trojan style. The nerves in my arms twang like plucked strings in the cold. Past the pond, where in summer there are pedalos, now frozen solid, to the adventure playground, which is the final test of willpower. Tobias runs up ramps, slides down the metal slide, impervious in his snowsuit and balaclava. Max swings and swings. Anthony stamps his feet and swings his arms. Tobias reappears on the deck of a pirate ship, small feet pattering over the bridge. I glance around and start to do small star jumps with my feet. The sinews in my arms have stiffened and I cannot think about movements that would disturb my coat. I pull my scarf over my nose and blow into it, but the brief warmth leaves the wool damp and chill over my face. Max swings, feet swooping as if he can’t feel the wind around his ankles. Tobias comes down the slide with an expression of intense concentration, as if gravity works only as long as he thinks about it. It’s getting dark again.
My head of department at home sends another e-mail, this time with a red flag. Am I teaching next year or not? After the children are in bed, whispering because in this bare, open-plan flat there are no secrets, Anthony and I consider our position. Tobias, of course, would want to stay. For almost half his waking hours, he’s an Icelander, and he doesn’t care at all whether his clothes are patched and there isn’t much fruit. The International School is a good place for Max, better than his English school with its sub-clauses about the colour of children’s socks and a curriculum determined by a regime of standardised tests unthinkable in the Nordic countries. But in Iceland we can’t afford the books he wants, or music lessons, or a printer for his homework. He can’t have skis, or trips to the ice-rink, and new shoes have to wait until we next leave the country. Money wins, in the end. Anthony looks out into the dark, which depresses him. In summer, we’ll be going home.
Every night, Max and I check the online aurora forecast, run by the University of Alaska but also covering ‘Europe’ where, roughly, we are. The scale for auroral activity goes up to ten, which never happens, but we’ve found that on a clear night, anything over three is usually visible, even if only as a green wavering on the northern horizon. I check both the forecast and the sky just before going to bed, and we have a pact that I’ll wake him for anything over a five. And one day it happens: a six on the scale, and purple flames licking the sea. It’s only half past ten. I shake Max awake and put out layers of clothes: thermal underwear, socks, trousers, thicker socks, over-trousers. T-shirt, polo-neck, jumper, gloves, coat, hat, hood. We creep out and ease the door shut, scurry like excited children into the car park and bundle ourselves into the car. This time, we’re going to look properly, not blocking out the city lights by crouching behind the builders’ rubble on the headland.
I drive out across the isthmus to the Álftanes peninsula. There’s no thermometer in the car, which is probably just as well, but the warm air coming out of the exhaust fills the rear-view mirror and there’s ice on the gritted road. There are no other cars, and the settlement ahead lies silently under the street lights and the curtains of green and pink light. I turn right, northwards, and we’re bumping along a gravel track behind the last houses before the breakwater. I stop when I realise that I have no idea how we’ll turn round and get back in the dark, and we get out. We should have brought a torch. We stumble towards the sea wall. I climb it, and haul Max up behind me, and we sit there. The sea is still rough after the last storm, refracting oblongs of lime and violet framed by white foam, and the upper half of the world is festooned with light, swaying in figures and swathes that remind me one minute of a crowd of ball gowns hanging to dry, the next of searchlights coming from above. The aurora are unsettling partly because they show the depth of the space, the falsity of our illusion that the sky is two-dimensional, and partly because it’s hard to convince your instincts that something bigger than you and grabbing at the sky isn’t out to get you. Salt spray spatters against my coat, and suddenly the lights are all around us, between us and the yards on the other side of the car, sweeping the sea at our feet. I clutch Max and we keep still, as if they might take us for rocks, these bright forms coming out of the sky. Max talks about aliens all the way home, and for once I can see why.
At the beginning of March, there’s daylight at breakfast time and I’m cooking supper at sunset. It’s not a treat to be outside in the light any more, and for several weeks it’s not much of a treat to be outside at all. Rain falls on snow. I walk along the coast path to pick up the bus to work at Kópavogur. There are cycle tracks and a few boot-marks along the path, but on the pavements mine are the only footprints for days. The walls of snow shovelled off the roads rise higher, covering more of the pavement, and there are trenches in the slush where people drive in and out of their garages. But nobody, evidently, leaves any of these houses on foot from one week to the next.
The children have a day off school – there seem to be a great many bank holidays in Iceland – so I take them swimming. The sea is freezing again, as if there’s a layer of silk lying on top of the water, and by the shore the waves wobble under the silk as if trying to get out. We hurry into the pool, and then the clouds part and for the first time in months there is sunlight in the water, translucent sunbursts and flames of light. Look, I say to the children, look, and Tobias comes over and tries to catch the darts of brightness. The old people are sitting on the steps, huddled like animals in the patch of sun, silent, heads tilted back and eyes closed as if waiting for death-masks to be made. When they leave, I take their place. The sun is so low it shines straight into my face and I close my eyes, seeing my eyelids’ red as if for the first time. I lift my face to the light, the wind chill around my chin. I had faith, I think, and it is rewarded.
The bulbs I smuggled back after Christmas do nothing for a long time. Pétur, who gardens enthusiastically although his house is so close to the sea that the windows are marine-quality and in winter storms he finds shells thrown over the house into the back garden, has given me some spare plant pots. We fill them with a mixture of expensive potting compost and soil stolen from the abandoned building site across the road. One dark weekend, when it’s too cold even to go out on the balcony, Tobias and I carpet the kitchen with newspaper and squat there with spoons, ladling soil and nestling the bulbs. I hang over them assiduously, moving them around the flat as direct sunlight comes back and again as its angles change. They spend mornings in the laundry room, moving to the bookcase after lunch and then at last, one happy day when the sun makes it round to the other side of the building before it sets, to the dining table. By the end of February, green blades have appeared. Don’t touch them, I tell Tobias, if you poke them they won’t grow, and we cradle them through the weeks of frost that persist long after the light is back. Oh, to be in England, I say, now that April’s there, and whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, unaware, that the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf. We were made to memorise it at school, as if we might be bound for the Raj, and even at the time I thought that there were a lot of places in England where you could wake any day of the year without seeing elm trees and brushwood, including the parts of Manchester where we were in fact living. We tramp along the beach, faces aching with cold, hopping from foot to foot as we wait for Tobias to finish watching the geese, who have come back, now that April is almost here.
We’ve been waiting to go to Hveragerði all winter, waiting for a day when it’s warm enough to go more than a few minutes from home and dry enough for the idea of voluntary time outside to be appealing. Hveragerði, the tourist brochure promises, is in an area of geothermal activity where hot springs boil out of the ground and you can swim in a warm river. There’s a hot springs hiking trail, and a bakery! A swimming pool and a pizza restaurant! Best of all, it’s not Reykjavík, and so lets us feel as if we’re travelling, at least gesturing towards intrepidity. In spring, we’re going to explore all the places we’ve collected leaflets about, use the long days to visit archaeological sites and climb mountains and see geysers leap for the sky. It’s not as if we’ve been snowed in all winter, but when the temperature’s above zero it tends to rain and when there’s a clear sky it’s usually icy. In sheltered places, such as the patches of lawn between buildings at the university, there are needles of green poking through the yellow grass, and a couple of the houses down by the lake in the city centre have crocuses and snowdrops budding under leafless shrubs. If you went out without gloves, you’d come back in again. There’s still a frost every night, and the roadside thermometers show minus numbers in the mornings, but there is the occasional jogger on the coast path again and ducks with bright plumage bobbing on the waves. And then one Saturday the infallible Icelandic Met Office promises nothing worse than showers, and by the time we’ve finished breakfast the real-time online road map shows that although the temperature over the mountain pass is minus four, the road is frost-free and fifty-two cars have passed through since midnight. If not now, when?
