Names for the Sea, page 20
‘So people were pleased?’
Vilborg looks at the photos in her lap, pictures of young British soldiers smiling wartime smiles in front of turf and rocks. The journals I read recounted lots of bird-watching in between moving equipment around and keeping an eye on the sky for other traffic.
‘When I used to go fetch the cows for milking, late in the afternoon when it was falling dark, they would turn their light on for me. They had a station where they could light up the whole firth, floodlights, and also these small lights – spotlights – and when I was coming in the darkness all along the road I would have a light spot all the way. Because they knew I was a little girl and it was a long way for me.’
I want to see something very English in this story, in the blatant use of official resources for purposes of private chivalry.
‘Everyone talked about how girls would go and make love with the British soldiers but it wasn’t so. The youngest in the army were only sixteen years. There was one who was just a boy, and we used to play a ball game. I don’t know if you have it in England, but we children thought it a very pleasant game. He wanted to play with us, and we didn’t want to have him play, so he sat down on a stone and wept. He was not a big soldier! But they were nice men.’
‘Did people like having the British here?’
It’s a disingenuous question. I know that, by and large, with notable exceptions, Icelanders reckoned it better to be occupied by the Allies than the Nazis, but I also know that the wartime occupation figures in the Icelandic cultural imagination as the catalyst for changes which are now working themselves out in the shape of the kreppa. Europe’s wars were Iceland’s boom-times, when the price commanded by lamb, wool and fish on European markets rose and went on rising.
‘Well, of course in 1941 the Americans came, so the British were not in Seyðisfjörður very long. The day the Americans came it was very nice weather, and we were all standing looking out at the huge ship, like those tourist ships that come.’ Vilborg gestures down the hill, towards the harbour where one of the first big cruise ships of the season is blocking down-town’s view of Esja. ‘It came to deliver two thousand Americans and take away two thousand British, and there was a lot of moving around. And I was standing on the concrete steps of our house and I could see because it was on the hillside, our house. Many things were happening. The British were going, and there was a row of cars going down the road, and the soldiers took off their guns and put them away when they went in the cars. They had been saying goodbye, giving small gifts and toys they had made for the children. And then I saw a plane coming. The sky was blue. And the plane came. Of course when they were arriving they would have planes with them, so I thought it was just an American plane. And then it came low and first there came a huge bomb in the sea and then a second and then the third, and that one came down in the middle of the road, just opposite where I was on the fjord, and I could see it as it came down and there was brown where it hit the road. There was nobody at the big gun, nobody. It was just the moment between the British and Americans, just these three minutes. And then the soldiers ran out and they started to shoot and they shot and shot and the plane got away. They never got that plane, never. There were three little boys who were playing there at the coast, where the bombs came, and all of them were hurt and one of them lost his leg. This was awful. And then the Americans came and took over from the British, and this was very different. There were Canadians as well, and also a group of Norwegians, and everyone sent their girls away if they could.’
I still don’t understand why exactly Icelandic parents needed to keep their daughters away from the soldiers, nor why North Americans were more of a risk than the British. Did they fear seduction or rape, their girls’ betrayal of national identity or the savagery of foreign men? But before I can frame a question Vilborg has swept on.
‘I was sent to school in the village my mother came from, and there were only five soldiers there. The house where I lived was above the bank and the bank manager’s son got stuck in Germany at the beginning of the war, he was an engineer and he had to stay on in Germany all through the war. And of course the Icelanders used to sail to Bremerhaven and Rostock and they liked these places, and just after the war, when I was fifteen and there came this nice weather at the end of the war, then there came a German trawler and they called out to us, they didn’t come in, they called, “Are we allowed to come in?” Something needed to be mended, and they were not allowed to go to Norway, and not allowed to go to the Faroe Islands, and they asked, “Are we allowed to come?” Everyone heard that a trawler from Bremerhaven had come in, all the fishermen there, and everyone heard that the Germans were not fighting any more, they were back at sea. And everyone went to the quay and, oh, this was a rickety-rack ship, all in disorder, and full of youngsters, fine youngsters. And the women put on huge pots of meat soup and fed those men, and the men took the trawler and started to mend what needed to be mended so they could fish. And before they went off they all had a marvellous meal and new clothes and everyone stood to watch as they went off, because they were back, back at sea from Bremerhaven.’
The Nazis liked Iceland, or at least liked the idea of Iceland, an island of pure Nordic genes where Wagner’s gods hung out.
‘So the Germans felt more like friends than the Americans?’
‘Icelanders had always liked the Germans. And it was very painful when they went on being like that. But we didn’t have any Jews, we didn’t know anything about the Jews, there weren’t any Jews in Iceland. There were many in Denmark and King Christian the Tenth did everything he could to save the Jews when the Germans came.’ Vilborg puts her cup down and sits forward, almost takes my hand. ‘But, you, you are not British!’
And it’s back, something I haven’t thought about since I was an undergraduate. I am British. I have a British passport (and an American one, tucked away at the back of my sock-drawer, because when I was born my parents thought it was a good idea for a child with my parentage to have an escape route from Europe). I was born in Glasgow, grew up in Manchester, spent ten years in Oxford and five in Canterbury. These months in Iceland are the longest time I’ve spent outside the UK, although when I was a teenager I had a German friend and used to spend summers in Germany and people there, older people, sometimes told me I wasn’t British. Then they tried to apologise for the Holocaust, usually while we were all in the outdoor pool between the gardens in suburban Düsseldorf for an early morning swim, and I felt doubly fraudulent; not only had my father’s family left Europe early in the 1930s, but I’m not Jewish even by the lights of people who see Britishness and Jewishness as mutually exclusive. Judaism passes down the maternal line. As a student, I used to flirt with the idea of conversion, but more for the appeal of joining the club of over-achieving outsiders that was the student Jewish Society than because of any particular spiritual yearning.
‘My father’s Jewish,’ I say.
Vilborg laughs. ‘I did notice this. I noticed it as soon as I saw you. I am a Protestant and I was of course a communist, a Protestant communist, but I’ve been to Israel and I do like the Jews, wherever I’ve been I’ve had Jewish friends.’
‘I’m not really Jewish,’ I point out. ‘My mother’s not Jewish. And my father doesn’t practise. He eats bacon.’
‘But you need to have some customs,’ she reasons.
‘We went to church more often, actually. Christmas and Easter.’
‘Synagogue?’ she asks hopefully.
‘No,’ I say firmly. ‘Church.’
‘I think it’s the same God. Allah, Jahweh. Have you been often in Israel?’
‘Once. For two days. I didn’t like it.’
Then Vilborg tells me about her own trips to the Middle East, weeks spent touring kibbutzim and then on the other side, working with Palestinian writers. She remembers seeing children with tuberculosis in refugee camps, and reminds herself of her dead sisters. ‘We – I am part of a time when there was much tuberculosis in Iceland. We are the last ones. You see, my sisters, they were beautiful young women and they died all three of them in 1941. In some families all the young people died of tuberculosis. Now it’s gone. It’s all away now.’
She’s getting tired, I’m almost overwhelmed by stories. I have the same feeling as when I swim to the surface after hours in a novel, a change of element. We part affectionately, and I walk back into town towards the bus, thinking about Vilborg and about listening. Iceland has an oral culture much closer to the surface than in most of Europe. The sagas were told for centuries before they were written down. Impromptu poetry-making is an important part of after-dinner speeches and sometimes political protest; at formal dinners there is often an open mic where people compete to translate limericks from one language to another without losing the rhyme or scansion. Icelanders buy more books per capita than anywhere else in the world. Literary historians tend to see the written word replacing the spoken, books as an evolution of storytelling, but maybe in Iceland narrative is important in either form. Maybe, it occurs to me as I cross the harbour, where the sunlit slopes of Esja hang like a curtain behind the first of the year’s cruise ships, I shouldn’t turn Vilborg’s stories into writing.
11
The Hidden People
Pétur stops by my office for a chat. I planted some of the bulbs brought from home here, in an ice-cream tub that I’ve kept on the window-sill, turning it assiduously as the buds lean and harken to the pale sun. They bloomed, at last, narcissi like balled tissue paper and miniature daffodils a hesitant shade of yellow, and for a week my office with its bare walls and wipe-down lino floor breathed flowers as well as orange-peel and central heating. But the heavy heads have sickened, the petals are browning and fruit-flies have been issuing from the compost for the last few days. I don’t feel able to throw them away. It would be worse than ungrateful, perhaps hubristic, when it’s minus four outside and they have done what they are meant to do at home despite air travel, fluorescent light and the ice-cream tub over the radiator. Guerilla planting may be indicated, but at these temperatures I suspect it would be the same as throwing away and anyway I don’t have a trowel. So there they sit. Pétur sits beside them and talks. The flies flicker around his hair and after a bit he notices. Oh, you have flies! he cries, as if I have orchids or bottles of rare wine. It’s too cold for flies in Iceland most of the time. I know, I apologise, I need to get rid of the bulbs now the flowers have died. No, he says, how can you say that? Little sparks of life in the air? I see a solution. I stand up and present him with the ice-cream tub. He goes off, cackling, and when I stop by his office later he leans into his screen, his wild hair encircled by a halo of fruit flies. I think he is one of the most likeable people I have ever met.
At the end of April, it’s still cold. Window weather, says Mæja, meeting me stamping my feet and blowing into my gloves by the radiator in the lobby. Pretty to look at, too cold to go out. We’ve had a week of window weather, a bowl of blue sky upturned over the island, the glacier at Snæfellsnes flirting over the horizon at sunrise and sunset, sunshine in the air and on the mountains and amber in the streams that are not frozen. Winter is over, you think. You look out of your office window and think it is a shame and a sin to be inside on a day like this, after all that dark and snow and rain. Birds sing and rustle in the still-bare bushes, but there are buds of green pushing through, bright on their twigs like a child’s first teeth, a few catkins on the more sheltered willows and an abundance of light now, fourteen hours in which it would be possible to read outside. If it were possible to survive standing still outside for long enough to grasp a paragraph.
Ten weeks till we go home, says Anthony at breakfast. Max and I meet each other’s gaze, spoons arrested mid-air. Ten weeks? Three months, I say. Almost three months. Anthony shrugs. He’s counted. I shake it off, not wanting to think about the end, not wanting to lose the last three months to a count-down, but it’s time to make an effort. Get out and go somewhere. We can’t go home having spent eleven months in Reykjavík. Anthony wants to go to Geysir and I say it’s too far, the weather isn’t dependable and who wants to drive for five hours with two children in the car just to see one geyser? We’ll never see it if we don’t, he says. Later in the year, I say, when, for example, the sea isn’t frozen. The roads are dry, he says. Here they are, I say, you don’t know what it’s like over the mountain. What about Borgarnes? There’s a museum there, inside, and we haven’t been that way at all, out to the north. We should see what’s round the other side of Esja. I look in the Red Book, the Icelandic road atlas, bible of all that we are not going to do. There’s a hiking trail through some alpine forest, says Anthony, reading over my shoulder. You like trees. We can assemble the hot cross buns in the morning and go in the afternoon, forest walk and on to the museum and back in time for supper.
Even Tobias likes the forest walk, scampering goat-like up the lower slopes of Esja. There is sunlight through pine trees, some shelter from the wind, leaping streams frozen in action, icicles growing out of the moss like sea anemones, and just occasionally, in a sheltered spot, perhaps the ghost of the smell of fir, an intimation of what it might be like here in summer when it will smell of earth and trees and growing. But the afternoon is passing; we get back in the car and go on, following signs to The North. The sky over the sea turns grey, and then the horizon is swallowed by dark cloud. Snow begins to whirl over the mountains, and then to settle on the windscreen-wipers. We exchange glances. There’s no point moving to Iceland and being scared by a bit of snow. I can’t see the car in front any more, and then I can’t see the road. Damn it, I say. Let’s just go back to the flat. Window weather. It’s not charming, or wimpish, but a state of mind in which a fairly serious hope, that winter is over, that life is returning, is lost. It’s the antithesis of Easter.
Then the volcano blows again. It’s not a ‘tourist eruption’ any more, and Iceland is back on the front page. At first I think we can’t see it at all, but after a couple of days I notice that, even on a clear day, there’s always a cloud in the same place on the eastern horizon. From higher up, from Pétur’s office or from one of my teaching rooms, I can see that it’s a triangular cloud, the apex pointing below Reykjavík’s horizon. At first we keep checking the news, as if it’s a major disaster that might in some way unfold, might produce a story. It has the thrill of an international outrage without the vulgarity of suffering held up for mass consumption. Then we realise that our friend won’t be able to come from London at the weekend. If it continues past then, I won’t be able to go to Singapore for my job interview, and if it continues past then – When is it going to stop? I ask Anthony, who is refreshing the BBC website. It went on for two years last time, he says. They can’t close European airspace for two years, I protest. He shrugs. They can if the planes can’t stay up. I look over his shoulder at the map, showing the ash making its way south and east across the Atlantic and spreading out towards central Europe. Post comes that way, I think. There are at least two parcels on their way to me now, Spanish chocolate from a friend who runs a Catalan food stall in Canterbury and the US edition of my novel. Our tenant has just forwarded our voting cards for the election. No post. Perhaps we should look at ferry tickets home, says Anthony, and I say, nonsense, they’ll have sorted something out by then. But earlier I was trying, and failing, to impress on Max that there is no way of controlling a volcano. Of course, Anthony adds as I disappear with some chocolate and a DVD, we’d have to go round by Akureyri to get to the ferry anyway, drive three-quarters of the way round the island, what with the road being broken by the volcano. Except that at the moment, that section is also closed by ash. There’s no way out.
We get used to it. Visitors from England, who have been waiting until spring to visit us, cancel. Our friend Henri, who has been in Somalia for most of the time we’ve been in Iceland, gets as far as Heathrow and stays there, valiantly, for most of the day. Anthony can’t visit his father in hospital, my parents are contentedly stuck on the Amalfi Coast. After long discussion of dates, I have, at last, booked flights to Singapore for a job interview in six days’ time. We know someone who has missed his child’s birth while trying to get back from Beijing by train, and someone else who couldn’t get to her own wedding. The internet is humming with stories of people’s rage, resourcefulness and dismay. That’s when I approach the volcano again. It feels like going into the eye of the storm, the crater full of curses and howls of outrage from airports around the globe. I’m going there to meet a woman who talks to elves.
Icelanders believe in elves. Maybe. Some of them. When deciding where to build roads, the Department of Transport consults mediums who speak to the hidden people. Many people, especially in the countryside, salute the guardian spirits of particular stones and waterfalls as they drive along. Tourist information magnifies this aspect of Icelandic life until you could be forgiven for imagining a nation that reverences animated garden gnomes frolicking across the lava. The tourist shops downtown do a good line in elf-tat, plaster figurines with toadstool houses or, at the up-market end, handmade dwarves made of undyed felt from Icelandic wool. Hafnarfjörður Tourist Board produces a map of the municipality – the settlement with the highest elf-density in Iceland – showing where elves’ houses and playgrounds are scattered between the industrial estates and apartment blocks. Icelanders’ ideas about tourists can be as embarrassing as tourists’ ideas about Icelanders, and it’s so obvious to me that none of my friends and students here believe any such thing that at first I don’t ask about elves. But I do like ghost stories. The sagas have some memorable ones, so I ask around for the modern equivalents. Pétur says, oh, but you must go see Þórunn. Messíana knows her. (Messíana knows everyone.) We’ll put you in touch. It turns out that Þórunn lives in Kópavogur, the next suburb in from Garðabær, but, says Pétur, I should go see her in her mountain house. Yes, Messíana agrees, then she can show you the elves. Þórunn showed Messíana the elves, but Messíana couldn’t see anything. Although she had fun.
