Names for the Sea, page 26
‘I noticed when you showed me the names,’ I begin. ‘There are lots of foreigners, aren’t there?’
He breaks a box over his knee. He’s wearing scuffed jeans and a T-shirt with a bomber jacket open over it. ‘Yup.’
‘Do you notice differences in the way they relate to the charity?’
‘Yeah.’
Another box. We’re watching him work.
‘Tell me about it.’
He throws the box onto the heap.
‘Most of the foreigners that come are from Poland and the Baltic countries, where they are obviously used to establishments like these, so they consider it their right to come here and get whatever they want. They’re really aggressive, they won’t say thank you.’ He breaks another box. ‘It’s frustrating when you’re trying to do something like this. Everyone here is a volunteer, and they won’t even say thank you when they walk out the door. They argue with us, they’re pissed off when they think they don’t get enough food. Sometimes when we’re getting close to closing time we run out of something and the foreigners come and argue with us, basically just being very boring.’
I shift my feet. He breaks another box.
‘Why is that, do you think?’
‘No idea. Must be a cultural difference.’
‘Do they have a different approach to queuing?’ asks Einar, dangerously.
‘Yes they do. We’ve been trying different approaches. At the beginning, we just got people to line up outside and then one of us came out and distributed tickets with numbers on them, and then they could leave and come back in an hour or whenever their number would be called.’ Because, I think, the shame of simply waiting your turn is even greater than the shame of needing a food parcel. Because in Iceland it’s not decent to expect people to wait in line. ‘But after a couple of weeks we found that one guy from Poland was turning up at the front, and the line would form behind him, but just before we handed out the tickets a whole bunch of foreigners would come and join the man at the front, fifty people or more. So the person who’d been second in the queue until then would be number sixty or whatever. So we gave up that system. I tried a few different versions, but the one we’ve got now seems to be working.’
‘Just one queue for everyone?’ I suggest.
‘Yep. Just one queue. You show up, you wait your turn, and you walk straight through. It works much better. I tried to divide the queue between the computers, so people could register quicker, but the foreigners just ignore me, go where they want, walk right over my toes.’
‘Is that because they don’t understand the system?’ I’m wondering how many people’s toes I’ve walked right over in the last ten months.
‘I don’t know. They can see that I’m directing the lines and they completely ignore it. It’s so dumb.’
‘Well, it’s your system,’ I say.
‘Yes.’ He chucks the last box. ‘No matter how dumb they are, it’s my rules.’
Einar and I sit in his car. He’s staring out of the window, keys still in his hand. I’m shocked by his shock, struggling to understand why Iceland should imagine itself exempt from the economic inequality that characterises every other capitalist society. We all knew, I thought, we all accepted a deal, that there is poverty for some and wealth for others.
‘Not in Iceland,’ says Einar, his gaze still locked on the sky over Perlan. ‘Not in my country. I had never imagined, it had never crossed my mind, that there were hungry families in Iceland. Not people needing help from strangers.’
I remember all the hungry families in Hallðór Laxness’s fiction, and the pride taken in a sparse diet by later writers. Hunger seems as foreign to Einar as excess was to his grandparents’ generation. Young Icelanders keep telling me that there’s no class system in Iceland, that inequality is a foreign phenomenon, but the fact of many of my students’ alienation from poverty seems to prove Icelandic social inequality. I remember a colleague in Sociology telling me that not only is there a difference between the middle class and the poor, but the difference is so great that the existence of the poor is news to some of the middle class. Einar starts his car. ‘I did not know,’ he says. ‘That is the worst thing. I did not know.’
Maybe, I think. Or maybe the worst thing is that I’ve known about poverty all my life and I’m not shocked.
14
Knitting and Shame
Teaching is over for the year. My students drift away, many into jobs (although there aren’t meant to be any jobs), some abroad to seek their fortunes or find themselves. My colleagues are reaching the lower floors of their towers of marking, and the piles of books to read over the summer are growing on their desks. There are plane tickets in the shared printer at the end of the corridor, people going to libraries in Paris and Copenhagen and conferences in the USA. Our tickets, our one-way tickets, were booked last month, and these final weeks seem to blur into each other. The nights are brief again now, each day blending with the next, and the sea flickers under the sun, the light in the sky electric, too bright, after winter’s candle-light glow. I flutter around Reykjavík, trying to make the most of it, restless as a bird not quite ready to migrate. I talk to an archaeologist who worked on the Skálholt dig and to an expert in eighteenth-century northern European ceramics. I invite new people to dinner, as if there’s any point in making friends now, as if I can concentrate our aborted Icelandic future and take it home with me.
I have been unable to get to Singapore, although I packed and went as far as Keflavík airport twice to find my flights cancelled because of the volcano. I have, however, reached Cornwall, albeit by a circuitous route, and I have been offered that post. My prospective new employer in Cornwall, reasonably enough, won’t wait for the volcano to subside so I can visit Singapore before making a decision and so, in the end, Eyjafjallajökull decides for us. I like Cornwall. The job will suit me well, and there are good schools. The imagined smell of flowers heavy with tropical rain, the imagined suddenness of tropical nightfall, the imagined taste of chilli with fresh lime and coriander, drifts in my mind like the perfume of someone who has left, a future that won’t happen.
I’ve meant to find out more about Icelandic knitting all year. Icelanders knit everywhere. On buses, in restaurants, during meetings, in class. In the first week of term, several students came into the classroom, put down their cups of coffee, took off their coats, hats and scarves and pulled out laptops, power cables, poetry anthologies, knitting needles and wool. I didn’t, I decided, mind. (Not that I would have dared, then, to say if I did.) I can crochet while watching a film. Women in Shetland and St Kilda used to knit, often rather complicated patterns involving several colours, while walking miles with toddlers over rough ground to milk the cows. Icelandic undergraduates, it turned out, can knit while drinking coffee, taking notes on their Apple Macs and making enlightening contributions to discussion of Lyrical Ballads. I watched the pieces grow from week to week, comforted, somehow, by the progress of socks and matinee jackets as we worked our way through from Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ towards The Prelude, as if the knitting were a manifestation of accumulating knowledge. Colleagues knit in meetings, which seems a far more constructive use of time than the doodles produced in the English equivalents. I wonder if anyone would say anything if I tried it in committees at home, instead of drawing borders of trees and wonky geometrical patterns around the minutes. A couple of cafés have a kind of free-range knitting, left in baskets for anyone to continue, although the results aren’t as exciting as you’d hope. Every Icelandic girl, the students tell me, has to make at least one Icelandic sweater. It’s a rite of passage, a step on the road to full Icelandic status.
Icelanders also wear their knitting. The people on the streets of Reykjavík wearing handmade Icelandic sweaters are not tourists. When it’s possible to go out without wearing a coat (it’s never sensible, never Icelandic, to go out without carrying a coat), you can see that the next layer down is an Icelandic sweater. My mother had a phase of making them when I was a child, and I remember the multiple balls of wool and the special needles, connected to each other by a plastic filament so you don’t make rows but just keep going round and round, following her around like a loyal pet. The finished jumpers had intricate patterns in soft shades of grey and purple – no chemical dyes in my childhood – and they kept us warm on the hills, although it could be hard to move our arms and I still shudder at the memory of the wool against my neck. Icelandic wool is as thick as a pencil but so soft you can easily pull it apart, still smelling of sheep and coming out almost waterproof if you knit it tightly. The high-end yarn shop on Laugavegur offers the odd Danish or even Japanese import for specialist tastes, but in general it is un-Icelandic to use foreign wool and all the supermarkets – which have a knitting aisle after the loo paper and washing-up liquid – carry the standard range of three kinds of Icelandic yarn.
I’m not a knitter. I like the idea. I can make a square, or at least a quadrant, but the arcane language of knitting patterns, the need to be forever counting things, puts me off. I flick through my mother’s and my friends’ patterns, admiring the pictures, and occasionally get as far as buying wool, once or twice beginning to knit until I come to instructions I don’t understand. I will never be able to carry out an instruction to ‘Sl 1, k2, k2tog, k to last 5 sts, ssk, k3.’
Instead, I crochet. (I suspect crochet may be un-Icelandic.) My friend Kathryn, who can make gloves and skirts and fitted sweaters so fine you think they would drift towards the ground if you dropped them, gave me as a parting gift a box of cards detailing increasingly complicated lace stitches. Of course you can do it, she said, and she was right. Given a long winter’s evening and the box set of Mad Men which she also pressed into my hands, I can. I’ve learnt to do Blackberry Puff Stitch and Double Shell Stitch. Crochet is mostly holes, and therefore cheap on wool. I find that the finest Icelandic wool, loðband Einband, which feels like something you might use to snare rabbits, is fine enough to show off my precision and wiry enough to hold its shape. I graduate to Picot Double Fan Stitch, and embark on a shawl in dark grey. You could use the resulting mesh to catch large, angry fish or restrain lemmings, but it has an Edwardian intricacy and is eventually received with convincing pleasure by Kathy.
Early in May, when I’ve tracked down some traitorous Danish mercerised cotton and begun on a scarf I might wear myself, my student Mark comes to see me. He’s taking my Food and Literature class as part of his MA, one of a group of teachers from Menntaskóli who are now required to have an MA and therefore relieved of teaching to attend the university part-time. Icelanders tend to translate Menntaskóli as ‘high school’ but that misrepresents it; Menntaskóli is a college for sixteen- to twenty-year-olds which prepares people for university, further vocational training or employment. Mark, who is Canadian, here because he married an Icelander, teaches English. He stopped coming to class half-way through term, e-mailing to explain that he and his wife had a new son and he was taking some time to learn fatherhood. He’s kept up, and handed in a memoir about his childhood diet that makes me want to chat, for the unprofessional reason that his parents seem to have taken the 1970s denial of sugar and passion for wholegrains even further than mine. While I’m left feeling deprived by any meal that doesn’t include dessert, he is distressed by the idea of boiling rather than steaming vegetables.
Mark’s response to ‘how are you?’ is a jolting reminder of why not to have kids. He’s tired. Very tired. Maybe not as tired as his wife, with whom he has argued. There have been no meals for some time. None of the things he normally does, likes doing, are possible, and he cannot imagine how he will ever be able to do them again. I try to explain that life will become possible, bearable, even pleasurable again, albeit on new terms. I remind him that parents do write books, climb mountains and take long-haul flights. Maybe, he says, red-eyed, hollow. It’s not the kind of thing you can tell people, so instead I admire his sweater, which is a particularly fine example of the craft, in shades of green that aren’t part of the usual Icelandic palette.
His face changes. Really, he says, you like knitting? I explain about me and knitting, and he explains about his sweater. Yes, he knitted it himself but he also worsted the wool. His wife Sigrún María has a spinning wheel. They live out in Mosfellsbær – the last settlement out towards Esja on Route 1 – in a, well, a sort of cabin, really. He rebuilt it himself out of an old summer house. Sigrún María spins and weaves and they both knit, and they’re growing vegetables and working on the fruit and thinking of hens next year, Settlement Hens. He’s making a henhouse with lumber from the dump. They don’t have central heating, relying instead on a wood-burning stove.
He glances up at me, gauging the real extent of my enthusiasm, and then goes on. He and Sigrún María got much of their furniture from the dump, too. I didn’t know you could, I say, and recount our attempts to find unwanted furniture, the way we thought we’d be able to pick it up second-hand or free and found that that market doesn’t exist here, certainly not for foreigners. No, he agrees, it’s crazy. Every time he goes to the dump he sees useful and valuable things thrown away: garden furniture, sideboards, tables and chairs, a cement mixer he thought he could use. Televisions and computers. So after a couple of times he asked the guys there if he could take some of it. It was only going to landfill. They said no. He asked why not. They glanced at each other – crazy foreigner! Because, they explained slowly, someone’s thrown it out. It’s someone else’s trash. Mark didn’t mind. No, they said. No way. Imagine if you take it and someone sees that you’re using their trash! Imagine it!
Mark imagined, and was untroubled. He could see some prime building timber and a set of garden chairs. What if I just take it, he asked, what would you do? You can’t, they told him. Mark pulled out his phone and offered it to them. OK, he said, if there’s a law against taking other people’s trash, call the police and get that law enforced. Otherwise, I’m taking that wood and those chairs.
They didn’t call the police. He took what he wanted, and since then he’s been back, until their house is furnished with other people’s trash. But when he recounted this experience in the staff-room at Menntaskóli, most people couldn’t see his point, and one of his colleagues said the idea of taking things from the dump disgusted her. When she’d bought a new sideboard, she’d smashed up the old one before throwing it out. Why? Mark asked. Because I wanted it gone, obviously, she said. I don’t want someone else using it when I’ve decided it’s trash.
Mark and I marvel at his story, both of us having grown up with furniture from auctions and junk shops, pulled out of skips or passed on by elderly relatives, and continued these methods in independence, both of us liking the past lives of the things we live with. The Icelandic horror at the idea of the second-hand seems to be partly to do with the impossibility of anonymity here, the fear of ‘strangers’. The risk is one of disclosure, that the person who classified the object as ‘trash’ might see the same object reclassified by someone else, though it seems that it would be the new owner who should feel ashamed. Maybe, it occurs to me, this is why second-hand clothes are so terrible, because the anonymity of charitable giving might be broken, you might recognise your child’s outgrown coat on someone else and thus have to acknowledge some kind of hierarchy. One of the most widely held beliefs among Icelanders is that there is no hierarchy here. I remember Gunnar Karlsson, one of the first people to whom Pétur referred me when I started asking about the old days. Gunnar is a historian in his seventies who grew up on a remote farm and went on to take his PhD at University College London in the 1960s. In his view the Icelandic conviction of absolute social equality was partly responsible for the crisis. ‘In Iceland, everyone compares him or herself with everyone else. No-one thinks, I am a common person and this car or this telephone or this computer is for the rich and not for me. I think we have not realised that when the rich in our society get richer, everyone spends more money because we cannot acknowledge a divide between the rich and the ordinary. When we put the children of rich people in the same state-run schools as everyone else, we exert pressure on poorer families to spend beyond their means to keep up. Because they will not tell their children, “We are poor and they are rich.”’
I wonder if this idea explains the apparently disproportionate outrage at Mark’s and my interest in used clothes and furniture. We are poor and they are rich. Coming from Canada and the UK we find nothing unusual or disruptive in this idea, nothing that affects our self-esteem, but in Iceland such a statement threatens national identity.
You should come to our place, says Mark suddenly. If you’d like to. I don’t invite Icelanders much. We like the way we live but sometimes I’m ashamed. Most of our friends live in houses with so much plastic and glass and chrome, and we know people who are horrified by our place, but you–
I’d like to come, I tell him. It sounds like a nice place to live.
It takes us a few weeks, with his new son and my repeatedly postponed trip to Singapore, but late in May we manage it. I meet Mark at Álafoss wool mill, which he says I will like. ‘Foss’ means ‘waterfall’; it’s an early twentieth-century building on the river, where Icelandic wool was first processed industrially. The river is fed by hot springs and warm enough that they used to wash the wool in it as well as using its energy to power the carding and spinning machines. There’s still one central yarn factory processing almost all Icelandic wool into one of four weights, but it has moved and the mill is now a shop and a kind of tourist attraction, although only tourists with a passion for knitting or old knitting machinery are likely to be much excited by it. Mark lingers over the hardcore stuff, the sort of wool you have to twist with your fingers as you knit, while I flutter around the Danish imports. There are big buttons and toggles made of horn and bone, and stripy wooden knitting needles. Mark shows me around the rest of the store, part shop and part museum. There are handmade sweaters knitted in soft colours according to traditional patterns, and cheaper, machine-knit ones in bright shades. There are sealskin slippers and silver fox fur hats, and sheepskin gloves which I would want if we were staying for another winter. The original knitting machines, looking like the wartime telegraph equipment at Dover Castle, are out back, facing over the river towards the green slopes of Esja. They date from the 1890s, still, Mark remarks casually, a couple of generations older than the Icelandic sweater.
