Names for the Sea, page 18
Hveragerði is less than half an hour’s drive from Þorlákshöfn, where the ferry goes to the island. You can see the Westman Islands, and would certainly have been able to see the eruption, from Hveragerði.
‘I was away,’ says Theódór. ‘Working.’
‘At first, it was really cold.’ Teddi is translating for Margrét again. ‘We were staying in the summer houses. They weren’t meant for winter. We all had to get used to being cold. But the children were very happy there. Of course it was a strange time, but we had our community there, the islanders, together for those months.’
The Westman quarter of Hveragerði. It takes fifteen minutes to stroll with a toddler from one side of Hveragerði to the other.
‘You must have been able to follow what was happening on Heimaey while you were away.’
Margrét nods. ‘There was a programme on the radio every single day, telling us what was happening. Because there was someone there on the island all the time.’
I’ve been holding back this question, although I think I know the answer. ‘Was your house destroyed?’
‘No. Our house was standing but it took seventy trips with a pick-up truck to remove the ash. There were five hundred tonnes of ash in my house.’
‘What was it like?’ I ask. ‘When you got back and saw it?’
Theódór frowns, turns his cup. ‘This was very dark.’
There is a pause, which tells me that the darkness was metaphorical.
‘Many of the people who were there at the beginning, trying to make progress with their houses, slept in boats in the harbour,’ says Teddi. ‘Some of the houses were undamaged, but people preferred to be on boats. That way, if something happened, you could just go. Start the engine and go.’
I turn to Margrét, who was always home, who was raising those six children while Theódór was at sea. (I would rather be at home, I think, even with six children, than fishing those waters.) ‘What was it like for you when you saw your house again?’
She looks at her grandson. ‘For the first days and weeks, I went many times to the window. We were busy cleaning, but I made many trips to the window, to see if anything was happening.’
‘There was always smoke coming from the lava,’ says Theódór. ‘We could go up there to cook our eggs! And we used the volcano for our heating systems. It stayed warm for the longest time, so we pumped the cold water up through the lava and then into our houses.’
‘How long did it take you to stop checking?’ I ask Margrét.
‘As people started to move back, and things became normal again – you could see there were lights in the houses and people on the streets . . . The children were so happy to be back.’
‘Do you ever worry about it now?’
I know what Theódór is going to say.
‘No. I don’t think about it at all.’
But Margrét does.
10
Vilborg
I have been applying for jobs again. It’s a dreamer’s tic, like lingering in front of estate agents’ windows. What would it be like to have a different life? What would my story be if we lived in a house with apple trees in the garden, or if we moved to Denmark, or Japan? It’s the same instinct that brought us to Iceland in the first place, and being here, having left England, I want to hold on to our emigrants’ freedom. Going back to Canterbury now would feel like aborting a journey. I accept that we have to leave Iceland, I tell Anthony, but let’s keep going. We know we can do it now, being foreigners. Let’s stay foreign. I apply to universities in Switzerland, Singapore and Australia. I haven’t yet told anyone at Háskoli Íslands that I’m going to resign at the end of the year, as if I think the elves might double academic salaries and allow us to stay. I keep listening to Icelandic stories, acting as if we won’t leave.
You know, says Pétur, you should talk to Vilborg. We’re in his office, and I’m distracting him from marking by asking for more tales about Iceland in ‘the old days’. I’m like a child who doesn’t want to go to sleep – just one more. Tell me the one about the rubber boots. Vilborg, he says, remembers the Second World War, and she’s a gifted storyteller. I’ll get her to phone you, but it might take a while. She’s busy, travels a lot.
I scent some more first-hand history. Before we left England, I read the memoirs and journals of some British soldiers occupying wartime Iceland. Iceland seems, for many, to have been a relatively safe and easy posting, where the weather and the land were more dangerous than the enemy. But despite their physical safety, anxiety sings through some of the soldiers’ writing. The North Atlantic was a deathly place in the early 1940s, known intimately by both sides. Towards the end of the war, Iceland’s mid-Atlantic location, its potential as a stepping-stone from North America to Europe, made other nations’ hunger for power swirl around it like an Atlantic storm. I would like to hear a first-hand account of the Icelandic wartime experience.
I wait. Vilborg is busy. And then one Sunday afternoon when we’ve all gone round to Pétur’s house for gluten-free waffles with whipped cream and French jam, she phones. Pétur’s not saying much, but the call goes on. The rest of us wander up to Messíana’s studio to play with the bags of feathers she uses in her costume design and to watch rainbows over the sea. (Is it not magnificent, Pétur said to me once, is it not more than a man could hope, to be married to a woman who buys coloured feathers by the kilo?) After about twenty minutes Pétur comes upstairs. Will you listen to this, he says, holding the phone out. She’s talking about what the American soldiers thought when they first arrived in Seyðisfjörður in 1943. Amazing woman, amazing. And such beautiful Icelandic. He puts the handset back to his ear, reverent as an eavesdropper.
I’ve never heard a British person say that someone speaks ‘beautiful English’, not unless in patronising approbation of second language acquisition (‘you’d never know she’s French, she speaks beautiful English’). Anglophones merely talk, but several people here have mentioned someone’s excellent speaking, as if conversation in the right hands is a recognised form of performance. But of course, says Pétur, there is an art of speech, of rhetoric, that isn’t just about standing on a platform and going on or trying to persuade or convince. I hope it comes over in her English, he adds. Vilborg uses the language better than anyone.
It takes a few weeks before Pétur pops his head round my door at work and says Vilborg would like to meet a young English writer. I hope you two get on, he says. You’ll either love each other or hate each other. She’s a lot like you. A lot like me how, I demand, although I know it’s a compliment of sorts. In a nice way, of course, he says, and he and Matthew, who’s stopped by to explain the latest developments of Eyjafjallajökull and the Icesave Thing, look at each other and laugh. The answer, I think later, might be that we both talk a lot.
On the appointed day, late in April, Pétur e-mails me a map, as he does every time I’m going somewhere new. I walk from work into the city centre, around the lake. There are drifts of what look like miniature violets, or maybe some kind of gentian, under the bushes, and the first few Arctic terns of the summer slicing the air. We’ve all been waiting for them, the kríur. They follow the earth’s wavering, winging the globe to avoid the dark. Northern summer in the Arctic, southern summer in the Antarctic, an annual round trip of nearly 60,000 miles that means the polar summers are always theirs. I’m not sure I like the terns. I admire their fish-like flitting through the air, the fine-line delicacy of their pointed shapes, birds that could be drawn only in the finest pen-and-ink, but I am afraid of their speed and sharpness, the way they share our seaside space and would razor open anyone who put a foot out of line. Sharing the walking paths with the summer birds again reminds me too vividly of last summer’s disabling sense of foreign-ness, of knowing only that I didn’t know the rules and didn’t know either how anyone, any bird, might react to my ignorant mistakes. I don’t, I think, identifying the terns overhead by their cries, feel like that any more.
I come out by the National Gallery, which I have still failed to visit, vicariously traumatized by Anthony’s account of trying to take the children there on a day when they didn’t like each other. I turn up one of the warren of streets behind Laugavegur, into the oldest part of the city where painted houses sit at companionable angles behind wooden fences, in gardens where there are trees and fountains and sometimes even a flowerbed. If we stayed, I always tell myself, we would live here. Sometimes Anthony and I pick out our favourites, and it’s true that if we sold the Canterbury house we could have one of these, one with wooden lace over the porch on a road too narrow for stupid Icelandic cars. We could walk with Tobias to the pre-school by the lake and we’d have the French bakery and the bookshops and the Vietnamese noodle bar right on the doorstep (though Max would still have to get out to school in Garðabær, somehow). I check my map. Vilborg’s house is one of a row that runs parallel to the street. It’s made of corrugated steel, painted sky-blue. I pause on the doorstep, suddenly nervous about turning up at a stranger’s house with the intention of taking her childhood memories. I smooth my hair, wipe my nose, and ring the bell. The door buzzes, I open it, and there’s Vilborg, less of an old lady than I was expecting, leaning down a flight of narrow, twisted stairs towards me. She has long hair, the colour of Regency powdered wigs, swinging over high cheekbones. Come in, she says. I am Vilborg and you are?
Sarah, I say. Sarah, and you’re expecting me, aren’t you? Pétur said?
She ushers me in. On the coffee table, there’s a plate of chocolate digestive biscuits and a steel salver in the shape of a lily pad, the sort my grandmother used to use to offer sausage rolls to the Masons’ wives, holding slices of green and red pepper. There’s a coffee pot and two cups and saucers on a tray. Young women, Vilborg says, often don’t eat chocolate biscuits, so she has prepared the vegetables for me. She hopes I will take whatever I would like. Would I like to look around the house? She and her husband bought the house in the 1960s to save it from demolition. (Her husband, Pétur told me, was a major figure in twentieth-century Icelandic history, a publisher, film-maker, playwright and poet, and I have a sense of his ghost here. He’s the person who’s not sitting in the chair by the window, not in the studio at the back, its windows filled like those of a bookshop with his work, not wearing the decorations framed on the wall. I claim my foreigner’s licence not to care; I’m here for Vilborg.) Moving around this Hansel-and-Gretel house poses problems for someone who needs a stick to walk, but they’re problems Vilborg solved long ago, albeit in ways alarming to the beholder. She swings a little down the stairs, backs through narrow doorways. The paint on the walls shows where things used to stand. Old wiring loops across the ceilings, taking light to the right places for reading. The furniture shows where people’s heads have rested and legs stretched out, and books crowd walls and sideboards and cupboards. It’s probably the oldest decor I’ve seen in Iceland, and it makes me homesick, not exactly for our house but for the clutter of households of books and pictures in grimy frames and mis-matched plates acquired or inherited three at a time and chairs that no-one in living memory has chosen to buy.
We return to the sitting room and settle down, me on the sofa and Vilborg in an armchair, surrounded by books. Coffee and biscuits, and there are footsteps on the stairs. My grandson, says Vilborg. He’s studying for his exams. At the university.
He comes in, takes a cup. I’m here to visit Vilborg, I say. Oh, he says, are you a poet? No, I say apologetically, only a novelist.
My son is in America, Vilborg explains. He used to run the genome project here in Reykjavík but then they cut the funding and now he is in Berkeley, California. (The Icelandic Human Genome Project lives in the black glass building, curved and shiny as a lake in the dark, that overshadows Alvar Aalto’s Nordic House on the marsh in front of the university. They have the DNA of every Icelander and are thus able to conduct research impossible in countries with more sensitivity to issues of privacy and data protection.) So my grandson is living here with me while he takes his examinations.
I am confused by the grandson’s name; he was introduced under one name but is referred to as someone quite different.
Ah yes, says Vilborg, our names are not easy for foreigners. No, I tell her. Your nicknaming makes it impossible to know whose essay I’m marking. Someone I’ve known for six months as ‘Disa’ turns out to be ‘Hrafnhildur Auður’ in writing. The bloke whose essays say ‘Steingrimur’ has always been called what sounds like ‘Tinni’ in my hearing. (Later, I learn that this is because it’s the custom to name babies at around six months. Naturally, you have to call them something in the meantime, and equally naturally, what you call them in the meantime tends to stick. Babies, in my experience, get called some pretty daft things in the first six months, even when they have perfectly serviceable names registered at birth.)
Vilborg laughs. It’s good when Vilborg laughs.
‘My son was called Goggur! Everyone calls him that.’
‘He’s named after a cat, isn’t he?’ asks Goggur’s son, as if he hasn’t heard the story dozens of times before.
‘He was like a cat,’ agrees Vilborg. ‘He was born two months too early and he was just like a little cat. Or a chicken. It’s a very common name for a rooster, you know, Goggur.’
Are there common names for roosters in English?
‘But there was a cat,’ Goggur’s son reminds her. ‘A special cat that survived an avalanche.’
‘He was just like a wild animal,’ says Vilborg. ‘He used to roam from one house to another and then he went up into the rocks and he was living there and we were all afraid of it.’
Her English is clear, slightly careful, the kind of thing one might have learnt from the BBC in the 1950s, but the plosive consonants carry Icelandic weight. Uppp. Ittt. You could write a musical score for her sentences.
‘When Goggur was a kitten, there came an avalanche on the house. The people left in time and the house was carried away, leaving just a corner of the wall with a window, and there sat the kitten. And because of that, even when he was coming down from the mountain and stealing food, nobody wanted to kill Goggur. He was a giant. Somehow, he was holy. Once, my brothers had been hunting – everybody went hunting then, in Seyðisfjörður – for birds for our suppers. You have to wait before you take the feathers off, so they left the birds outside and came in for coffee. And when they came out, the birds were all spoiled and the biggest one was gone, because Goggur had been! And my brother said I’ll take the gun and shoot that bastard but he never did, no-one did, because it was holy, that tomcat. I think the last time he was seen he was twenty years old. More coffee?’
‘Tell me more,’ I say greedily. ‘Tell me what it was like. No-one’s been able to tell me about those years.’
So she does. I go back to her house two more times, leaving on each occasion full of stories, sated with an eye-witness account of Iceland through the second half of the twentieth century. Vilborg’s memories stretch from childhood on a small-holding in pre-war Seyðisfjörður to staying with Aria Ben Gurion in Israel in the 1970s and with a women’s group in Palestine ten years later. She refers to a friend in Prague, a professor who disliked cooking and lived in a flat so small that even the oven was full of books, to a distinguished lawyer, an elderly Polish Jewish refugee, who befriended her and took her out to dinner when she was a poor student in Edinburgh in the 1950s. Vilborg talks in arcs, swooping to Israel, finishing the story about childcare on the kibbutz and reminding herself of the time her little brother nearly died in the care of the village doctor, going off to find a photo of the doctor’s now deserted house and explaining why so many coastal villages were abandoned when Route 1 came through and the coastal supply ships stopped coming, remembering the international guests of the Icelandic writers’ union, of which she was the chair for many years.
‘You are, of course, a member,’ she says. ‘But then surely I would have met you earlier?’
I know I should have tried to join. I know of other Anglophone writers who have done so and found the camaraderie, advice on tax breaks and access to residential writers’ retreats greatly beneficial. I have envied these writers. ‘No,’ I admit, ‘I didn’t think they’d want me.’
I don’t think Vilborg recognises this, the sore conviction of my own inadequacy, bruised again by the experience of being foreign. She’s looking back on opportunities taken, adventures welcomed, a life, I think, enviably lived. She begins with her childhood in the late 1930s.
‘When I was seven it was my duty to drive the cows to the field. There was a boy of my age in the village and we were the only two who were seven, so when the spring came and it was time for the cows to go out we took turns, me one week and him the next, all through the summer. It wasn’t really very far, perhaps half an hour, but it seems long to a child. It was pleasant in fine weather, but I had to pass many stones and rocks where there were hidden people, and I was afraid of the Devil. It was a village where everyone who could afford a cow kept one, because they needed the milk. When there was no milk in the cow, there was no milk in the house. There were sheep, too. My father had thirty sheep, but we had no horse. There were very few horses because the ground was too steep for them, but we all had boats, we learnt to row just as we learnt to walk because that was how we always travelled. When I first went to Reykjavík I went on the boat and it took a whole week, because the boat stopped everywhere, for post and supplies, three or four hours in each village and this was splendid. But then they stopped that and put all the transport on cars and trucks, and in the villages with no roads, where they needed the boats, or where they needed at least two or three ships in the winter when the roads were blocked, the people just couldn’t live there when the boats stopped. There are just empty houses now, big, beautiful houses, because people had money when the boats came and they built good houses. Our house stood in the homefield, and we had to walk a very narrow path to the gate, because the grass was very precious and you had to save it. And at the gate there was water under the grass, you know, so it was muddy and boggy? We used to run over it in a row, and I was afraid that if my foot went in, a hand would grab me and pull me down, because you know there is a nursery rhyme that is not nice at all: “There was a child in a valley, who fell into a hole. And the monster beneath held his feet and pulled him down.”’
