Names for the Sea, page 27
What? I didn’t think Icelandic sweaters went back to the sagas, though only because the research for my most recent novel involved some investigation of the early history of knitting, but I thought they were at least pre-industrial. Nope, says Mark, they’re not even part of the invention of national tradition in the late nineteenth century. Post-war.
Oh, I say, and then inadvertently administer a return shock. You mean it’s a twentieth-century version of Walter Scott and kilts?
We stand there, me holding more balls of stripy sock wool than I can quite control, and discuss nationhood and myth-making among the mittens. Icelanders, says Mark, generalising grandiloquently as foreigners do, believe the whole lot. They think revisionist history is a form of treachery. Well, I say, that’s kind of the point.
We get in the Volvo and Mark directs me to his house. We’re driving along gravel roads and I’m equally worried about making a fool of myself by driving idiotically slowly or skidding off the road, but when I remember to look around I can see exactly why he chose to live here. The track runs between a steep rocky hillside and the lake, which is ruffling in the wind and dotted with birds. More birds flicker around the cliffs up the hill. There are stands of spruce trees and a couple of wooden cabins. No street lights, no traffic. We jolt and lurch over the gravel. Here, he says, park here. You can’t get a car up to the house. We get out. I hear wind, lapping water, the chatter of birds. The air smells of trees and turf. Max and I heard a new bird while walking in Heiðmörk at the weekend, something with a curlew’s beak and fast-beating wings that ascends until you can hardly see it and then drops in swoops, once each swoop calling a piccolo phrase that doesn’t sound avian at all. Hrossagaukur, said Einar. A kind of snipe, Pétur glosses. There are two above us, waltzing in three dimensions, their clear notes echoing off the cliff. We walk up a steep track, through a painted wooden gate and under tall spruce trees into a garden neat as Mr McGregor’s. There are vegetable beds, edged with turf, terraced up the hill in semi-circles, a pear tree in a greenhouse, some flowering trees that aren’t coping with the wind, a sheltered area for sitting, and at the top, under the trees and looking out over the lake, Mark’s latest work in progress, a study for Sigrún María who is working on a PhD and needs a room of her own. Sigrún María texts from the house; she’s trying to get the baby to sleep and would rather we didn’t come in until he’s down. So we go into her study. It’s perfect: away from the house, with a view of trees and hills and water, and the inside made of perfectly jointed wood, double-glazed against the climate. Envy nibbles my fingers.
The study seems to be more of a spinning-shed at the moment. There are bags of raw wool and baskets of spun hanks. There’s a wooden spinning wheel, not the ancient artefact I’d been expecting but newly made of birch, with rounded treadles that invite touch. It reminds me of the heavy wooden toys we left at home, the garage and the push-along caterpillar with the same pale curves. Mark offers me some yarn to feel, dark and shiny. It’s cool and soft to the touch. Dog hair, he says.
I recoil. I wouldn’t voluntarily touch a dog unless it was attacking my children. Even dog-owners think dog hair is dirty, don’t they? I remember Mark’s colleague talking about ‘trash’ and take the dog yarn into my hand. Sigrún must have washed it, anyway. Sigrún asked her friend to collect it when he combed his dog, Mark explains. Here, this one’s goat hair.
It’s coarser than the dog hair, though both of them would knit into the silkiest clothes. There are skeins of unworsted wool too – carded roving, Mark says – and he shows me how to worst as you knit, twisting the strands as you wind them round the needles. Sigrún María texts again; the baby is asleep and we can go in.
Mark has another flurry of worry as we cross the garden. He hopes I won’t think it’s poor and makeshift. He’s always anxious about bringing people back here. My kids, I remind him, play with cardboard boxes. We’ve been using garden chairs as dining chairs all year; we’re all sleeping on air-mattresses on the floor. We go in, through a long lobby designed to keep warmth in and muddy boots out. It’s all wood inside, warm and comforting as an old sweater. People, I realise, aren’t meant to live in concrete, they’re meant to live like this. There are plaited rag-rugs on the floors, not trodden into grey anonymity because no-one wears shoes in Icelandic houses, and books, books in Icelandic and English and Danish, jostling each other off floor-to-ceiling shelves. Steely ligh floods through the windows, which face over the lake. There’s a kitchen area, with wooden shelves and counters, and armchairs gathered around a wood-burning stove.
Sigrún María comes through one of the doors leading off to the bedrooms. She has short honey hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones, carries herself like someone riding the waves and watching the horizon. I thank her for letting me visit, tell her I won’t mind at all if she wants to go rest while the baby sleeps. No, she says, just at the moment she needs adult company even more than she needs sleep. Mark makes tea, and we all sit down by the fire and talk about knitting, while outside the spruce branches sway and the wind moves across the lake like a magnet over iron filings. I curl up in my chair, which is covered by a blanket, and warm my hands on my mug. Well, Sigrún María is saying, when I used to work as a crime reporter–
I sit up. A crime reporter? In Iceland? ‘I thought there was hardly any crime,’ I blurt.
‘We have about the same rates of violent and sexual crime against women as you do in the UK,’ she says. ‘Domestic violence is endemic, just like in the UK, and a quarter of women report sexual assault in anonymous surveys.’
I stop myself dropping my tea.
‘Well,’ she says. ‘OK. Actually all the Nordic countries report fairly high rates, though we’re the highest. It’s partly that there are fewer taboos about reporting sexual violence here than in the UK, for example.’ Sigrún María also has nursing qualifications, and spent a few years working in London hospitals. One year, there was a rapist who preyed particularly on nurses in uniform making their way to and from the Tube during the night. ‘A lot of our police force is female and there’s no bullying of women who’ve been attacked. It’s not clear if Icelandic women report a higher proportion of rape or suffer more rapes. Of course there are reasons why you’d get higher reported rates that might not mean a higher incidence.’ There surely are. I’ve discussed this with my friends at home. None of us, a completely unrepresentative sample of middle-class working mothers in their thirties, would report rape in the UK. Sigrún María pours more tea, picks up her knitting. ‘But anonymous surveys and police records together suggest that our rates are pretty high, especially domestic violence. Basically, Icelandic men damage Icelandic women, especially at home and especially when they’re drunk. Which is rather a lot.’
‘But it’s meant to be the most egalitarian society in the world,’ I protest. ‘You know, lesbian prime minister, almost full employment among mothers, shared nine-month parental leave, a majority of women at university –’ Only at undergraduate level, I remember, not among lecturers and most certainly not among professors; I have not yet seen a portrait of a woman among the dozens displayed around the university.
‘Some people say that’s partly why. That Icelandic men find it very hard living in a feminist society and take it out on their partners behind closed doors.’
We look at each other, not knowing where to start with this idea. I remember reading about a survey showing that Icelandic men do less housework than the men of any other northern European nation (though still more than the Portuguese and Italians; the further south you go, the greater the sexual inequality – blame the Pope), and various friends complaining that their partners won’t entertain the idea that people with penises can clean bathrooms. Anecdote, and easy enough to find English women sharing the same complaints, but I don’t know any thirty-something professional men in England who deny the principle of equality, whatever happens in practice.
‘Also, of course, there are drunken fights among men. A lot of those. And recently we’ve had a spate of drug-dealers having someone beat up the families of people who owe them money.’
I remember Hulda Kristín telling me back in August that Iceland had no drug problem until immigration rose in the boom years.
‘I never read about it,’ I say weakly. ‘None of it. And people keep telling me how safe it is here.’
‘It is,’ says Mark. ‘Compare it to London, or Vancouver. It is. But we have crime like everywhere else.’
Not in the English-language media. Yesterday Pétur told me that, at the same time as a violent molester of children had been given a five year prison sentence, a group of young people who entered the parliament building – which every Icelander has the right to do – during the demonstrations, has been told to expect seven years in prison. The headlines in the English language Iceland Review and on the English pages of Morgunblaðið were about a cycle-to-work scheme and Eyjafjallajökull’s most recent contribution to international airspace. I don’t think there’s any conspiracy; these sites are meant for and used by tourists, who want Iceland to be green and geologically interesting and have little interest in the workings of the judicial system. The crime rate is another thing, an important thing, I’ve missed by being foreign and in particular by not making enough effort to learn Icelandic.
‘I still find it easier being a woman here than in the UK,’ says Sigrún María. ‘I found it really upsetting the way men would open doors and hold my chair. I was like, “Get off, stop it!”’
I think about this.
‘It was really intrusive,’ she says. ‘As if I wasn’t just like them. Manipulative.’
‘It’s just training,’ I tell her. ‘My husband could no more go through a door first than I could start eating before everyone’s sitting down, or take the last piece of something.’
‘Icelanders don’t have that either,’ Mark points out.
Mark makes comparisons with violence and alcoholism in British Columbia, where he taught in a Native American village before coming to Iceland, and then I notice exactly how Sigrún María is knitting. It’s completely different from the English way. Her fingers are doing something I’ve never seen before, and the whole dance of yarn and needles and hands is unfamiliar. And much faster. Maybe if I could knit like that . . .
‘Show me,’ I demand.
‘Oh, this is how we do it,’ she says. ‘I’ve seen the British way. It’s weird.’
But then the baby wakes up, and we all stop what we’re doing and admire him, because he’s that kind of child, until he reminds me of my own admirable kids. Time to go.
Mark’s directions were plain enough, and all I need to do is go down the valley until I come to the sea and then turn left to follow Route 1 along the coast back into the city, but somehow I get lost. I find myself on a tarmac road, with markings down the middle, punctuated by mini-roundabouts every few hundred metres. Up and down hill, with rocky turf on both sides. At the tops of the hills, I can see the sea straight ahead, so I keep going. There are street lights but no traffic, no pavements, as if the road was built just for me. I glimpse Route 1 over to the west and take the next turn towards it. There are houses ahead, but when I come to them – after a couple more mini-roundabouts – I see that they are unfinished. There are walls and roofs, and in most cases windows, but some are no more than foundations with steel rods sprouting into the sky, and none are inhabited. I slow down, peer down side streets. It’s a whole suburb, abandoned as if the bomb had fallen one night after the builders and plumbers and electricians had gone home. It reminds me of Heimaey, of Clearance villages in Scotland, entombed settlements, stories cut short, a broken history, and as I keep going, guessing my way out, it begins to be alarming. What if I never get out of here, what if I keep coming to more roundabouts and making more wrong decisions and driving through more of this aborted town? I come to a crossroads, with a traffic light and a pedestrian crossing. The light is at red. I check the mirror, want to reach out and lock the doors, as if fearing an elvish car-jacking. I am English; I stop, and am relieved when there is no beeping. No invisible hand has pressed the button, and as I breast the next hill I can see a slip-road onto Route 1.
Next day, I start checking my facts. Checking my assumptions. Statistics are a blunt tool, especially when dealing with a population as small as Iceland’s, and especially in inexpert hands, but it takes me only a couple of hours on the websites of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and Statistics Iceland to find numbers seeming to suggest that Iceland is much more like the UK in quantifiable ways than I, and most of my friends here, believed. Iceland’s murder rate between 2003 and 2008 averages just under 1 per 100,000 against England’s 1.4 (and the United States’ 5.6: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html). There are 1,068.2 burglaries per 100,000 English and Welsh people, and 865.7 per 100,000 Icelanders, which suggests that the basis for Icelanders’ tendency to go out leaving the windows open and the British interest in discussing when it’s OK to shoot a burglar is not statistical. Denmark reports 1,715 over the same period and France a mere 480.6: England and Iceland are both near the European average for the incidence of most kinds of crime, including sexual assaults and crimes against children. I feel safer in Iceland than I do in England (except on the roads), and I feel that my children and my possessions are safer in Iceland than in England (except on the roads). All the Icelanders I know feel safer in Iceland than they do anywhere else, and most will say that Iceland is a safer country than any other. The differences are real, but not, for the most part, quantitative.
I keep exploring, though I’m no longer sure that I want to know what I’m learning. Maybe I’m about to find that Icelandic roads are safer than those at home and that Brits own more cars. I am relieved to find that according to the World Health Organization, Iceland reported 10 road deaths per 100,000 people in 2006, the latest year for which statistics are available, compared to the UK’s 5.4. Iceland beats both Serbia and Italy at killing people on the roads, a particularly impressive feat given the new age and large size of cars in Iceland (http://apps.who.int/ghodata/?vid=51310). And Icelanders own 645 cars per 1,000 inhabitants against the UK’s 457, a smaller difference than living in university towns in the UK and the wealthiest suburb in Reykjavík had led me to expect. I go on playing with numbers, comparing the pay gap between men and women in the UK and in Iceland (about the same, despite the highly subsidised childcare; perhaps early child-bearing makes a difference, after all), the percentage of household income spent on vegetables, life expectancy, dental health, number of televisions per capita . . . The next week, I talk to the director of the rape crisis centre, who confirms that Icelandic women are subject to levels of violence similar to those in the rest of Europe, and to the Minister for Social Affairs, who describes levels of poverty and deprivation similar to those at home. The stories told by numbers and research are quite different from the stories we tell ourselves and each other. This is not to say that either is wrong.
I go back to the yarn shops, pretending to myself that I might make an Icelandic sweater. Everyone does, says my student Anna. I made two when I was a teenager. Do you still knit? I ask her. I want her to prove my ideas about the way Icelandic women don’t conform to Euro-American norms and say yes, but she shakes her head. Not really. Not any more. She’s still, of course, a member of her sewing circle, the same ten women meeting every few weeks at someone’s house since they were all in primary school, but they don’t really sew. I have a wave of envy. Women keep mentioning their sewing circles, and these meetings were background events in some of the Icelandic films I watched over the winter. A couple of the creative writing students have turned in stories in which women returning from abroad don’t fit into their sewing circles any more. Sewing circles seem to be established in adolescence and continue until death, although some are inter-generational and therefore, presumably, infinite. Many women are members of more than one, which is probably part of the answer to my question about what Icelanders do in winter. Yes, confirms Anna, it is lovely. We’re all doing different things now – a doctor, a banker, a teacher, a shop-worker, and most of us have spent time living abroad – but we still get together and it’s still the same. Don’t you still have friends from school? Anyway, if you’re interested in knitting you should go talk to Ragga. She’s the goddess of Icelandic knitting.
So I go talk to Ragga. Ragga works in the Hugmyndahús down on the harbour. The University of Reykjavík, which is mostly a business school, runs the Hugmyndahús in collaboration with the Icelandic Academy of Arts. The Hugmyndahús, the ‘House of Ideas’, is a real house, an old fish-processing unit that was a shop selling the sort of furniture that only bankers could afford during the boom years. The furniture shop went bust when the bankers fled Iceland in 2009, and now people who are trying to set up new creative businesses in Iceland can apply for free workspaces in what used to be the showroom and talk through their plans with experts from the university. There’s a café where anyone can go and sit with a laptop for as long as she likes without any pressure to buy coffee or move on. I’ve known about it since the summer and thought that I ought to have used the café as a place to write, especially on the days when I found myself arguing with Max over who got to use the car parked outside the flat as a reading-room. I was too shy.
