Names for the Sea, page 22
The ghosts made him drink, I think, and I’m attended by spirits who tell me to check my e-mail every ten minutes when I’m writing and eat chocolate all afternoon. Why not? Something makes us fail, something uninvited. Hidden.
‘So they look so human that you couldn’t tell the difference between the guy drinking and the guy telling him to drink?’
‘When I looked closely there was a difference. The dead guy was wearing clothes that weren’t modern, and the colours weren’t as bright. His hair wasn’t a specific colour.’
These are Icelandic beings, then. They live in rocks around town, dance attendance on men who get drunk alone in bars. People don’t see elves in Canterbury, say, or Verona or Chicago. Has Þórunn ever seen them outside Iceland?
She brightens up. She used to be married, and her husband was a keen golfer. She went with him to Hawaii and there were the elves, more lightly dressed than the Icelandic ones but just the same. The Swedish ones, though, in the forest, were slimmer than Icelandic elves, and the Italian beings were more like angels. Maybe, I suggest, it’s because Iceland and Hawaii are both volcanic islands. Þórunn half-closes her eyes, tilts her head. She’s hearing something.
‘I just asked my guide, and he’s telling me –’ She pauses, like someone waiting to translate. ‘He’s telling me that both Iceland and Hawaii have connections to the middle of the earth, where there is a floating, something floating like lava . . . It’s like the hidden people are connected to the lava, but not every kind of lava. Just this kind.’
So there are different kinds of hidden people connected to different geologies?
Þórunn attends to her guide, and then looks at me again. I don’t know if the guide, who seemed to be standing at her left shoulder, is still present. I don’t believe in any of this, I remind myself, but I’m looking at the space beside her and fear strokes my neck and ruffles my hair. ‘I was too curious once when I met a being I had never seen before on a mountaintop. It’s the only time I have been harmed – well, not harmed, but the only time it didn’t do me good. I gave them access to me for about two years and it made me sick, it drained me. I just got sicker and sicker, and then I stopped communicating with them.’
It doesn’t sound as if it’s all about peace and love.
‘So there are some beings with whom it’s dangerous to communicate?’ I ask.
‘Well, love and nourishing, that’s my thing. But there was no love from them, it was all calculated. I was so eager, so curious, and I just didn’t notice that they didn’t have a heart. But they weren’t evil, not demons or anything like that.’
But they weren’t, I think, particularly friendly.
‘So are these ancient beings? Were they here before people?’
Þórunn smiles slowly. She tells me a story that ‘the old men’ told her, that there were hidden beings in Norway, ‘two or maybe three thousand years before Iceland was settled’. The people in Norway then were given to evil, greedy, almost as materialistic as we are now, thuggish. (I’m not sure if these are human or hidden people.) There were four families of hidden people who survived a particularly violent raid (can humans then kill hidden people?), and one good man among the Norwegian villains helped them and their livestock to escape in four shells. The shells drifted out to sea and came at last to shore in the north, south, east and west of Iceland, and the families multiplied, divided into slaves and landowners, and populated the earth. And then, a thousand years later, the people arrived from Norway and Britain.
Þórunn talks for a while about how she knows this, about the old man in 1950s clothes who told her these ‘beautiful facts’. But I don’t need convincing; we’ve known this story from Genesis and before. It’s a settlement legend, as if the hidden people are the indigenous inhabitants missing from more conventional accounts of Icelandic history, in which the island remains uninhabited until the medieval Norse colonization of the ninth century. There is a version of national history in which Iceland was an egalitarian democracy from the moment in 872 when the first settler Ingólfur Árnarson cast his house-pillars from his boat as a kind of augury and saw them come to rest on the shore where his statue now stands in Reykjavík. Revisionist histories have proved the presence of Celtic slaves who were not equal to their Nordic masters, but there’s still a popular idea that Icelanders have never oppressed anyone, that Iceland is a guiltless nation. From what Þórunn is saying, it seems that in the absence of an oppressed aboriginal population it is necessary to invent one. The hidden people were here before we were, they know how to live in harmony with Mother Earth, and instead of honouring their wisdom we steal their land to make golf courses. The hidden people bear the sins of the world, although unlike Christ they can also personify what we like least about ourselves. I see the appeal. And I’m hungry; Þórunn invited me for noon, which is after lunch for many Icelanders, and we’ve been talking for over an hour.
I look around. The house feels peaceful to me, scattered with handmade objects, formed around its owner’s sense of the necessary. ‘Finally,’ I ask, ‘tell me what you can see now that is invisible to me.’
Þórunn looks around, smiles at someone who must be either sitting with us at the table or just outside the window. ‘Well, she is out there, and she’s very, very curious.’
I strain to see. I would like to catch the suspicion of a glimpse, at least an intimation of something. I see wooden decking on the verandah, rowan trees. And the volcano. ‘Where your reflection is?’ I ask.
Þórunn nods enthusiastically. ‘It’s good you said reflection. Sometimes it’s just like that, like a reflection, or even just a shadow, and other times I see her the way I see you now.’ She stands up and crosses to the other window. There are birch trees, a pine dark against the watercolour greens of Icelandic spring, and the Volvo waiting for me on the gravel track. ‘They’re just waking up out there. There’s a tree-elf, here, he’s always the first to show himself in the spring, and a beautiful little being here in the Christmas tree.’
She turns back into the house, holds out her hand as if to a toddler coming out of the second bedroom. ‘And I have this little one here, a house-elf. His name is Oli. He’s very playful, sometimes he’s taking things from me. He’s shy now, I don’t know why. He’s been playing in my bedroom.’ She smiles at Oli, who is smaller than Tobias. ‘I love this little guy, I wouldn’t be without him.’
As I move to put my shoes on, Þórunn says, now you drive carefully, get safely back to your boys. Thanks, I say, I will. I dislike it when people say ‘drive carefully’, calling into being the possibility of accidents, of twisted metal and bloodied windscreens. Goodbye, I say, and thank you again, thank you for so much time on this lovely day. She follows me to the door. You go safely now, she says, take care on our Icelandic roads, drive safely. I walk over the stones across the turf to the metal gate. There are chimes hanging from the trees, and fibreglass toy houses under them. Is there a throng of unseen beings watching me go? I manage not to glance back to see what frisks behind me. I get in the car and close the door quickly, as if I could stop it getting in, coming home with me. But once I set off, I’m fine. It’s easier driving on gravel than I thought; I don’t need to creep along as I did on the way in. It’s like steering a boat down the waves: you know how it’s going to slide, when to pull round before it goes too far. I can do this. I speed up, begin to sing to myself, the kind of thing that privately-educated British women sing when alone. And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England’s– and there’s a Hummer coming over the brow of the hill in front, going too fast and far over onto my side of the road, and now that I look down my own speedometer’s showing nearly a hundred. It’s not really a near-death experience. I slow down, pull over, and he passes with at least ten centimetres to spare, the kind of thing that happens several times on any Icelandic journey. And still, I find, I haven’t learnt my lesson. All the way back to Route 1, the needle creeps up, and the Volvo swoops over the hills, as if there’s an imp in the passenger seat saying, go on, you can do it, you’re not scared. It’s a bright day, a good road. See if you can take that corner at ninety. Wheee!
12
A Small Farm Under a Crag
At the end of term, I take a group of students from my writing class to the National Museum. Most of them, they confess, have never been there, even though it’s on campus and offers free admission on Wednesdays. Even with your kids? I ask, because although I lived in Oxford for eight years without going to the Ashmolean from one season to the next, once Max could walk we went every week. And to the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Natural History Museum, not because I imagined that a toddler would learn from the exhibits but because it was something to do, somewhere to go, a change from the flat and the playground and feeding the ducks. I still don’t know what Icelandic families do. Oh no, the students say, we wouldn’t take children to a museum.
We’ve been writing about objects, and about the way objects have stories. The curators here don’t like visitors to use pens and paper, or even laptops, and while I negotiate with the woman on the desk I think about the groups of primary school children with clipboards who roost on the floor of every museum in London. At last I prevail, and I ask each student to find one object and write about it, first a still-life exercise in description and then an account of the object’s journey. I wander with them at first. Some exclaim over the national dress costumes, remembering their grandmothers wearing such outfits on feast-days, looking forward to their own graduation ceremony when those who have them will wear the black woollen floor-length skirt, embroidered white lace petticoats, bodice and head-dress passed down the generations. One woman has already become fascinated by a carved chair from a seventeenth-century farmhouse, its arms worn by the hands of the woman for whom it was made, and two of the men settle beside the axe and bloodstained block used at the last execution in Iceland in the late nineteenth century. Someone else stands in the replica turf hut, his head bent to fit under the ceiling. He could, if he tried, reach the beds that line the walls on both sides at once. Despite the flicker of the synthetic ‘fire’, it’s too dark to write in there. Whole families used to spend the winter in those houses.
I wander off to visit the object that called to me last time I came, a Chinese porcelain tea-bowl that was found in the eighteenth-century layer at Skálholt in the north. Skálholt is a cluster of buildings that was once the episcopal centre of Iceland, the dwelling of bishops and site of an important church, but by the eighteenth century it was a school serving the elite families of the area, the big farmers and landowners. The tea-bowl is broken, and you can see the point of impact on the side, where the fragments get smaller, like an eggshell newly knocked against the bowl. Some smaller pieces are still missing, leaving jagged holes. It is a sandy, reddish brown on the outside, glazed white on the inside with blue flowers, maybe some kind of blossom on a stem, painted where it would waver under milkless tea. There is no blossom in Iceland. Fashionable across Europe in the C18, the label says, but with no explanation of how or why this particular piece crossed the North Atlantic at the end of its journey from China. It was made for export, mass-produced, but still, of course, hand-painted; transfer-printing came later. These flowers were painted quickly, on some kind of assembly line. I have little sense of who and where in China was making this stuff, but some hand cupped that bowl, dipped a brush and shaped a stalk, a few blooms, put it down and picked up another. And then the bowl made its way across to the nearest port, and over the sea, almost certainly to England, and then back to sea, to Iceland, to the see of Skálholt, where it was used (probably) and dropped (certainly) and lay in the ground until 2002. There’s no reason, I remind myself, why eighteenth-century Icelanders shouldn’t have had porcelain and tea just as in the drawing rooms of Regency London, and the same layer held broken Dutch clay pipes, jet rosary beads and signet rings, making it clear that Icelanders had plenty of imported goods. But none of them, I think, are things that you would lose lightly, or without remembering, and being upset. Someone must have sworn, and prodded the bruise of his or her clumsiness in the night.
In the next case, from the floor of the first printing house in Iceland, less than a century after Gutenberg, there is what the label calls a ‘knitted sock’. It looks more like a slipper than a modern sock, boat-shaped, heavy enough to hold its rounded shape three hundred years later in a glass case. It is worn through at the heel. Not where modern socks wear out, where the top of the shoe rubs, but under the heel, where the foot falls first and heaviest. The stitches are tiny, dense; it must have been knitted on very small needles, and the wool is thick enough that this would have been difficult. I remember the easy, swimming motion of Icelandic knitters, and think that this was harder work than that. The sock is a grubby beige now, darker around the sole, dark with sweat three centuries old. When it was made it was a creamy brown, oatmeal. Everything, then, was made for someone, for and by a particular person. The sock is smaller than my outstretched hand, about Max’s size.
Back in the classroom, I ask the students what they thought of the museum. It made me proud, says Arni, because I was thinking about these museums in Europe, the Louvre and especially the British Museum, and most of the exhibits don’t come from those countries. European museums are full of stuff stolen from other countries. Ours is simpler, we don’t have the Roman statues or the Egyptian scrolls or whatever, but we made it all ourselves. There is no stealing. Yes, says Hrafnhildur, at first I was a little ashamed. I was remembering the big museum I saw in New York and thinking that we have nothing so important, but that is because we are a small nation and we have never had any colonies or empire and we have not wiped out anyone who was here before us. I was looking, she says, at this carved door from the thirteenth century, from a church. She holds up a postcard. It is – she pauses at a new word – Romanesque. I do not know what that means, but it is like the European carving at that time, and it was done here in Iceland, look, with a knight, and a falcon, and a dragon. A French story, told in an Icelandic way by an Icelandic craftsman, because even then we knew what was happening in Europe but we did things our own way. Everyone nods and murmurs agreement. Yes, says Rosa, I liked the carvings from the eighteenth-century church. If you think of St Paul’s in London or of course the churches of Venice from this time, these are nothing, they are the scribbles of a young child. But they are not made to intimidate. They are to please, not to make you feel small, and these were buildings to hold perhaps four or five families from the valley when they could come together. No great nobleman paid and no great artist was commissioned, and in a way I am proud of this.
I like the way they’ve come up with a post-colonial reading of great museums, but I notice again that the first reaction is shame or pride, fear of losing face in the eyes of the world and then pride in independence and simplicity. I’ve sometimes looked at the Victoria and Albert and the British Museum and thought that they are nothing but heaps of loot, but I don’t feel enough ownership to be ashamed. My national identity seems to me accidental, a source of neither pleasure nor pain. Everyone must have one. I associate the kind of national feeling which seems normal for Icelanders with earlier ages in Britain. None of the English people I know would hear ‘unpatriotic’ as an insult.
I still have not had my job interview in Singapore. I explain to the professor across the world the difficulties of leaving Iceland at the moment, that the ash blows either over Iceland, so I can’t get to a European hub to fly to South East Asia, or over Europe, so that I can get to London but not from London to Singapore. Anthony and I spend several evenings trying to piece together flights the long way round, Reykjavík – New York – San Francisco – Tokyo –Singapore. And back. We also spend quite a lot of time reading the blogs of expats in Singapore, trying to imagine ourselves in a world without seasons, on a campus planted to provide shade and cool, eating spicy street food and fresh mangos and ice cream. There are, we gather, excellent international schools. I wander Reykjavík, enlisting incredulous shop-assistants in my search for affordable interview clothes in which I might look employable in temperatures twenty-five degrees higher than the Iceland summer average. Meanwhile, I am also called for interview in Cornwall. My students, and some of our Icelandic friends, tell us to go for Singapore. Keep going, follow the money, raid foreign shores. I know what Pétur would say. He doesn’t approve of money.
I don’t ask his advice. Instead, over waffles, I recount my trip to see Þórunn. I don’t believe it, I say, I didn’t change my mind. You are not saying she is making it all up, surely, says Messíana. You know these things are important to many people here. No, I say, of course not, I never doubted that she is in good faith, that she has the experiences she describes. And I was, I admit, a bit spooked by the end, alone with the seer and her spirits in that strange landscape. But there must be rational explanations. Pétur and Messíana look at each other. I do agree with you, says Pétur, but one night when Þórunn came to dinner she began speaking in a strange voice and held forth about many things, political and economic things, about which she knows nothing at all, using words that couldn’t be in her usual vocabulary. And then she fell silent, and then became herself again and cried a little. It was odd, very odd. Messíana shrugs. It must be a cultural difference, she says. You two did not understand each other. You should go see Brynja.
Messíana has a friend who made an elf-map of Brynja’s farm out to the north-west, beyond Borgarnes. In her studio overlooking the fjord, Messíana shows me postcards based on the map. They show humanoid couples, coloured in bright pencil crayon, superimposed on photographs of a lava field with cliffs behind it. Some of the couples are squat with bulbous faces vaguely reminiscent of medieval squalor, others are elongated like cartoon characters stretched out and about to ping back into shape. Most of these beings stand in front of dwellings rather smaller than their inhabitants, which are canopied with blue and red rainbows. You might find her more familiar than Þórunn, says Messíana.
