Names for the Sea, page 25
There was an article in the Iceland Review a few weeks ago, reporting that ‘the charity Fjölskylduhjálp Íslands (Icelandic Family Aid), which distributes food packages to those who cannot afford groceries, has begun prioritising native Icelanders above Icelandic residents of foreign origin.’ MPs, including the Minister for Social Affairs, have expressed their revulsion. I would like to know more: this sounds like an unusually explicit articulation of Icelandic racism, coupled with a more concrete kreppa story than most. Food packages? In Iceland? I poke around on the internet and discover that my favourite Icelandic bloggers have already tried to investigate this story and been told that the charity does not speak to foreigners (‘foreigners’ in this case including ‘Icelanders who blog in foreign languages’), which seems to confirm the director’s xenophobia, but also constitutes a dead end as far as I’m concerned. Given my customary inability to make unusual requests of Icelanders because I feel stupid and foreign and as if I have no right to be making a nuisance of myself, I cannot possibly phone a woman who does not speak English and is known to avoid foreigners in order to prove a perfectly reliable report. Stalemate.
Then I mention my interest in this story to Einar, who is taking a couple of my classes, writing a polished prose in his fourth language. Einar is a photographer, who left Iceland at twenty to train in Copenhagen, and then made a freelance career in Amsterdam. He planned to stay in Amsterdam, he says. He had an apartment and was gradually moving all his stuff to the Netherlands, an extra suitcase every time he came home. His career was going well. And then one day everything changed. That was it. It was time to come home. Why, I ask him, how did you know? He shrugs. He just did. Nothing happened, it was just time to go home. He sold what he couldn’t carry and returned to Reykjavík, where he still takes photographs, some of which become postcards and calendars for tourists, and is taking a second BA in English. He’s also a jazz musician. Sometimes the trombone comes to class too, and I like having it there, lolling at the back, as I like having another student’s new baby, who sleeps through discussions of Wordsworth in a way Wordsworth would have enjoyed. Einar knows everyone, has photographed everything. I’ll talk to the manager, he says. Leave it to me.
I haven’t yet learnt the extent of Einar’s powers and am therefore surprised when he calls me a few days later to say that he has arranged for us to visit Fjölskylduhjálp Íslands’ headquarters next Wednesday, when the week’s food parcels are being distributed, and furthermore that the director has instructed everyone to show me everything and answer all my questions without reserve. How did you do that, I ask, and Einar shrugs and smiles, blue-eyed. I just asked her, he says.
Einar comes with me, to translate Icelandic and to translate Icelanders. He collects me from work in his car and drives, more like a Dutch person than an Icelander, across town. I understand, now, why there is sometimes a huddle of people on the embankment above the dual carriageway when I pass on the bus home. They’re waiting for food parcels. Usually Icelanders don’t queue, don’t stand around in groups. Even at bus stops, people position themselves as far apart as possible, one behind the shelter, one a few metres along the road, another the other way, as if they’ve all been dropped from a height. When the bus comes, everyone saunters towards it, not acknowledging either each other or the fact that the bus driver has the power in this situation, and boards in order of arrival at the doors. I’ve never seen people congregating outside, not even teenagers on summer evenings.
There is a queue already when we arrive, although the doors won’t open for nearly an hour. Einar finds Ásgerður Jona, the director, and introduces us. You are welcome, she says, looking me in the eye. Come. Ásgerður Jona takes us into a large room like a village hall, with a lino floor and high windows. Tables are arranged in a U-shape at the end opposite the doors, and there are people, mostly young people in jeans and boots like those worn by my students, taking food out of large cardboard boxes and arranging it on the tables. There are crates piled as high as my head. There is milk, bags of sliced bread, bags of potatoes, boxes of eggs, skyr, yoghurt, buttermilk. The basics of the Icelandic diet. Some frozen chickens, and then oddments; a few packs of sliced mushrooms, something in a sachet claiming to be ‘guacamole mix’. Behind the counter at the end of the tables are some mini Easter eggs, children’s toothpaste and baby-shampoo. Ásgerður Jona calls for silence and tells everyone that they are to speak freely to me. Then she takes us into a back room, crowded with more crates and boxes, where other people are sitting around a table drinking coffee and sharing home-made cake, and says it again. Einar and I wander around, chatting to busy people. Almost everyone speaks English. The charity has to buy the food, so several of the volunteers spend most of the week trying to source the cheapest bulk deals. The number of people coming has risen steadily for a couple of years; last year, it was a busy week in which they gave out 200 parcels. Now, especially at the end of the month, it’s usually over 400. The numbers are small, I think, 400 households in a city of around 200,000 people, but if these are people who can’t afford to eat and need to be given potatoes, then something has indeed gone badly wrong. The needy get benefits, but the benefits aren’t enough to live on, not by the time people have paid their foreign currency mortgages and car loans. About half of them can’t work because of disability. Fjölskylduhjálp aims to give each family about half of their weekly food. There’s nothing fresh, I murmur to Einar, no fruit or vegetables. They probably can’t store them, he says. Onions, I think, apples. Easier to store than milk. I’m distracted by the kinds of food available, by what it says about the Icelandic idea of necessities, how different it might be in China or Nigeria or France. For Icelanders, the answer seems to be dairy produce and potatoes.
We meet the man who manages the logistics of distribution. He takes us over to his computer and shows us his spreadsheet. There are social security numbers, names, numbers of adults and children in each household. Data protection, I think, identity theft! But no-one in Iceland worries much about data protection. You have to give your social security number, your kennitala, to the vendors of electrical goods to validate basic consumer rights. (The kennitala incorporates your date of birth and also gives access to tax records, held in real time and online using information supplied by the bank, the Icelandic version of the DVLA, the insurance company, the Ministry of Immigration and your employer.) Bank tellers often request my PIN. Students hand in assessments blazoned not only with their names but with their kennitala. CVs, I will discover, routinely state not only age but marital status and number and age of children. You can’t be anonymous in Iceland anyway, says Matthew, when I complain about this state of affairs. There’s no point pretending people don’t know who you are, and who you’re married to, and who you slept with when you were in high school and how your degree was classified and why you crashed your car. But identity theft would be impossible for the same reasons. No, I think, impersonation might be difficult but the theft of someone’s official identity would be rather easy.
‘We give cards to the regulars,’ the man explains. ‘People present themselves at the desks where the computers are, we print out a list of what they can have and then they are given it at the tables.’
‘In what state are the people who come here?’ I ask. ‘Are they really starving?’
‘Several people I know have been hungry for quite a while before coming here. Months. It’s been changing a little because of all the media coverage of this place. People are a little less ashamed. But no-one wants to be seen here.’
‘Are you carrying them through a short-term crisis, or are they dependent on you for a long time?’
He begins to unpack cheese. ‘Quite a lot of the Icelanders who come here are disabled, so that’s not going to change. Most of the foreigners are unemployed, and that’s not going to change either. Unless they go home.’
‘Migrant workers probably wouldn’t be here if there were jobs at home,’ I point out. This is not the moment to argue that for some of the ‘foreigners’, this is home.
He shrugs. ‘OK. So that’s not a short-term problem either. And we’ve no steady income, it’s just donations. We’re a charity with no state support. And food prices are going up, and there are more and more people coming here. We’re running out of money. We’ll probably be closed by December.’
‘Do the supermarkets give you anything?’ Einar asks. ‘Do you have to buy it all?’
The man explains about food distribution chains, in which supermarkets have to return unsold produce to the supplier. But the supermarkets give them whatever discounts they can. ‘It’s a lot of work, chasing these bulk buys and special deals, and there’s only one person here full-time, everyone else just volunteers two or three days a week.’
‘How far do people come?’ I ask. ‘I noticed on your database, there are people from outside the city.’ From towns over a hundred kilometres away.
‘Yes, from all over. We’ve been giving people who come from more than fifty kilometres away one-and-a-half times the usual amount.’
‘Doesn’t the petrol to get here cost more than the food would?’ I wonder, knowing the prices of both.
‘Yes, the price of gas is ridiculous now.’
The question I always ask in Iceland, and one that clearly doesn’t make sense in some way I don’t understand: ‘What about people who don’t have cars? Or can’t afford the petrol?’
‘Exactly. The poor things are going by the buses!’
Taking the bus here seems to be the last word in shame and deprivation, an equivalent to burning the furniture to keep warm, and yet the buses are cleaner, more frequent and more punctual than in European cities where catching a bus is perfectly normal behaviour for salaried adults.
‘I take the bus,’ I say firmly. ‘But fifty kilometres away there isn’t a bus.’ There’s no public transport outside Reykjavík and Akureyri, Iceland’s ‘second city’ in the north.
‘That’s true.’ He opens a new box of cheese.
‘So they just sit there in the villages and starve?’
‘Yep.’
‘How many people are we talking about? Have you any idea how many people are starving and can’t get to the free food?’
‘Nope.’
Einar and I look at each other.
‘So there could be hundreds of families all over Iceland who have no money and no food and no way of getting either?’
‘Yup.’
It’s only later that I think this isn’t really very likely. It’s hard enough to keep a secret in Reykjavík, and must be almost impossible in the smaller communities. People would know if a neighbour were starving, and if they knew they would do something about it, however strong the sense of shame. I think. Probably.
Einar and I wander outside, towards the queue. I put my gloves on. If it’s too cold to stand around here in May, what is it like in December?
‘Shall we talk to them?’ Einar asks.
I feel my insides knotting with shyness. We should, of course. It’s what we came for. I’d make a terrible journalist.
Einar approaches a couple, explains that I’m a visiting academic and am interested in the effect of the kreppa on ordinary people. ‘No,’ they say. ‘No, thank you.’
He tries someone else, a woman in her mid-twenties with teased hair, heavy make-up, and a three-year-old without a coat who keeps wandering off and scrambling up the embankment separating Fjölskylduhjálp’s yard from the dual carriageway. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘I’m an unemployed single mother of two. There’s no more to say.’ She pulls up her hood and turns away. Her friend shouts at the child, the first time I’ve heard someone yell at a child in Iceland.
Ashamed of our curiosity – and cold – we go into the clothes store, where they sell donated clothes for token sums, which are used to subsidise the food parcels. ‘We used to give the clothes away,’ the woman there confides, ‘but teenagers were coming and taking the best items just for fun.’ It’s as if Icelanders don’t know how to do this, second-hand stuff, as if they lack a blueprint for poverty. Which is bizarre, considering the stories I’ve heard from Vilborg and Pétur and a few others with long memories. It’s as if there’s been a collective forgetting, as if Icelandic poverty were as shameful as French wartime collaboration or the British concentration camps of the Boer War. A woman comes in and begins to rummage through the children’s clothes which I’ve been trying not to regard with a covetous eye, although there’s a pair of trousers that would fit Max, who has outgrown almost everything, and a coat that would be good on Tobias. I noticed this woman earlier, because she’s wearing a skirt I admire and has blonde plaits wound Heidi-style around her head. She looks as if she’s popped out of one of the downtown art galleries, or come straight on from a launch party. She looks like the kind of person I can talk to. She pulls out a pair of waterproof trousers to fit a boy smaller than Max and taller than Tobias. She’s not making eye contact, angling away from us. Einar goes up to her, explains again why we’re here. The woman looks at me with loathing, spits something at Einar in Icelandic which makes him redden, look away and stride out of the building. I follow.
‘What did she say?’ I ask, worried that I’ve caused offence.
‘She said it’s bad enough having to come here without talking to us about it,’ says Einar, avoiding my gaze. ‘Did you see what she was doing?’
‘Buying trousers?’ I hazard.
‘The poor woman,’ says Einar, recovering himself. ‘She was ashamed. Imagine the shame, buying her little boy’s clothes here.’
‘But I buy second-hand clothes for my kids,’ I protest. ‘I always have. Everyone does. It’s obvious, kids outgrow things before they wear out. What are you meant to do, throw things away just because your child has grown?’
I remember the queues outside twice-yearly NCT jumble sales in Canterbury, the way academics and lawyers and architects assemble outside the church hall before it opens on a Saturday morning to buy other people’s second-hand Boden. I remember a few treasured garments worn by both children, a pair of red-and-white striped OshKosh dungarees and a Petit Bateau Breton top, which came from the British Heart Foundation and went back to Oxfam six years later. Is it pretentious, I wonder, is there something odd about the English middle-class pleasure in thrift? We could all afford new Petit Bateau, and probably buy it for ourselves, but somehow it’s better to clothe children on the cheap. Is there cultural capital in the rejection of consumer imperatives?
‘You do?’ asks Einar. ‘Really? You buy things from charity shops?’
I shrug. ‘Yes. Why not? Especially things like waterproof trousers, they don’t get much wear before they’re outgrown.’
‘Oh, you’re right,’ he says. ‘Of course, you’re right. There’s no reason. But people don’t do that here. Nobody buys their children’s clothes from the Red Cross. They’d be so ashamed. Things get passed around families, but no-one would buy a stranger’s cast-offs.’
‘But why?’ I ask.
There isn’t an answer. I wasn’t expecting one.
We go back out, towards the queue, which has got longer, curving round the building into the car park, and doesn’t seem to have moved much. ‘Shall I try again?’ asks Einar. I dither, remembering the blonde woman’s expression. Einar’s photographic projects have included sequences of images of homeless women and hospice patients in the Netherlands, but he’s finding this uncomfortable, going up to his own people in his own city and asking them to give me their shameful tales. I watch him square his shoulders to approach a couple standing with their arms wrapped around each other, perhaps because their padded coats are flimsy and threadbare. They are both in their fifties, she with dyed hair, make-up, handbag and jewellery that even I can see are cheap imitations of the Russian mafia bride look that prevails among mothers at the International School, he with a two-day shadow and smoker’s skin in a cracked fake-leather jacket and baseball cap. She used to own a business, she tells Einar, until she had an accident and couldn’t work. He used to earn too, not a lot but enough, until he got sick. They try to keep their spirits up, but there are debts left from the business and yes, if they didn’t come here they would be starving. Before they came here they were hungry most days. They’ve looked into taking some courses – English, maybe, or Computer Studies (the two tickets out, I think) – but you had to pay and they can’t. No, they don’t see things changing any time soon, but you have to have hope, don’t you, or you’d really have nothing left. Einar rests his hand on the woman’s arm and thanks them, but round the corner, out of sight, his body stiffens. This isn’t Iceland, he says; this isn’t my country. We thought we were the best country in the world and everyone was happy. There’s no such place, I tell him. The poor are always with us.
Without discussing it, we leave the queue and go back to the store-room to talk to the staff. Round the back, one man is chucking cardboard boxes to another, who is breaking them up for recycling. I manage not to ask for one for the kids, who played for months with our removal cartons. It’s still cold but the sun has come out, and over the roar of traffic on the ring road I can hear the little planes leaving for Greenland. Right, I think, ask the real question.
