Names for the Sea, page 30
It’s raining when we land. The bareness of the landscape between the airport and the outside of the city is startling again: fifty kilometres of lava, a cold desert the colour of tarmac that stretches towards the horizon, where dark mountains loom. The ugliness of the industrial buildings that line the road into Hafnarfjörður is still upsetting, though they are no worse than what you see from most of the M25. The sea below the road seems like a different element from the Cornish coast, although Cornwall has a darkness of its own in winter. It’s all the North Atlantic, the Viking and Celtic sea-road, but comparing Iceland’s sea and Cornwall’s is like comparing a cello with a violin, oil painting with watercolour. Every port has a name for the sea. There are flowers in the cracks in the lava, and rowan trees gathering in the hollows. Esja is monochrome in the rain, its top blotted by cloud. Tobias leans on my shoulder, watching out of the bus window, until we come into Hafnarfjörður, when he turns to me as if with a question. We used to come here, I say. Do you remember? There’s a swimming pool up there, he says. I fed the ducks on that pond. He sits up now, intent as if the windows are showing a film he can hardly follow. We bought kleinur there once, he says, pointing to a bakery. Kleinur are cardamom-flavoured doughnuts, and we have not mentioned them, so far as I know, since we left Iceland. There’s my old school, says Max, turning away as if from the scene of an accident, not wanting to see that what he has lost is still there. And my Lundaból nursery, Tobias adds, pointing out of the other window. Am I going back there? No, I say, watching as my bike-route to work begins to unfurl along the beach. No, this is just a holiday, remember?
I can see Pétur before the bus pulls into the station, and we’re the first ones off. We hug. Tobias remembers him, and remembers his car, and remembers that there was a different child-seat in it last time. He takes us to the university flat where we stayed when we came house-hunting two years ago, and that hasn’t changed either. The small planes are still taking off over the hedge, and the northern sea at the end of the road is still reflected in the sky. Pétur takes me to the big Bonus in the industrial park by the harbour, and even the sight of the oil storage tanks and the corrugated iron warehouses in front of Esja lifts my heart.
Bonus has changed. There is coconut milk and wholewheat noodles and agave syrup, and miso powder in sachets and Earl Grey tea, all at prices comparable to those at home. No, Pétur says, things haven’t got cheaper, it’s just that British prices have risen so much that ours seem normal to you now. And our salaries haven’t gone up either. But maybe there’s a wider range of food again. You were here at a strange time for Iceland, you know. Look, we’ve got four kinds of apple now. And Spanish peaches and air-freighted American basil, and look at the cheese! We stand together in the chiller aisle, looking at the cheese. There are perhaps a dozen kinds of Icelandic soft cheese, and several blue cheeses, many of them named after the farms from which they come. Some of these, I remind myself, were available a year ago, but we couldn’t afford them then. I choose one, and a leg of Icelandic lamb to celebrate our return, and barley flatkökur and a pot of skyr, and when we come to the checkout I find that I still can’t say the Icelandic words I have in my head, and still can’t bear the arrogance of asking people to speak English for me, and still, therefore, mutter and smile as if I had no language at all.
We’ve been travelling since before dawn and it’s ten o’clock by the time the children are fed, washed and settled in bed, but there’s a candy-pink light coming out of the west onto the concrete buildings between our flat and the coast. I’m just going out for a minute, I say to Anthony, who is trying to keep his eyes open long enough to brush his teeth and find his pyjamas. You’re mad, he says, and I’ll probably be asleep when you get back. I know, I say. I slip my shoes on, take my coat, ease the door open and step out. The evening smells of rain and turf, of the wildflowers that are scattered wherever there is grass, making the most of the brief summer. I have to admit that it’s cold. If I had gloves, I would put them on. I put my hands in my pockets and walk across campus and down one of the streets lined with big, mid-twentieth-century houses to the sea. This is a wealthy part of town, but there are only a couple of SUVs, and most of the cars parked along the road are European. I pull my hood up. There’s no-one else out. I take the path between the gardens that leads via a playground to the shore. There are flowerbeds in some of the gardens, filled with poppies and lupins and daffodils, and children’s tricycles scattered on the lawns where they can stay all night. The sea gleams across the road, where the bike track passes a sculpture of fish on the pavement that Tobias has always liked, and when I get there, around eleven, the sun is just slipping below the church on the hill in Seltjarnarnes, and the shoreline and the hills behind Garðabær reflect the sunset. A handful of birds skim the waves, and the lights of Álftanes across the bay are beginning to twinkle over the water. I sit on a rock and watch night coming across the sea.
We have another three days in Reykjavík. We swim, and see friends, and one afternoon I drift around the city centre and buy a few of the things I coveted but couldn’t afford on a local salary. Downtown feels different. Vacancy spread like mould along Laugavegur and its side streets during the kreppa, and several people mentioned these empty shop-fronts as one of the first and most painful signs of crisis. They are tenanted again now, mostly by designers and craftspeople for whom Laugavegur would have been too expensive during the boom years. There are more Icelanders than tourists in the cafés, which wasn’t usually the case last year. The woman running the shop where I buy a new raincoat is comfortable chatting about what’s changed in Iceland: yes, she says, people are more relaxed than they were. And more humble, she adds, because we needed this, this correction. Iceland was out of control and we needed a lesson and it’s better now.
I wander out and up a side street towards the cathedral. It seems to me today that even the street fashion is more playful than last year. Hulda Kristín and I used to discuss Icelandic women’s proclivity for head-to-toe black, whether it was because a black uniform is easy to put together or because of a fear of being seen to be different, or maybe just because winter coats and boots need to match everything and blondes look good in black. The tourists are still wearing climbing gear on Laugavegur as if they think the whole country is a hiking trail, oblivious to Icelanders’ mockery, but I see Icelandic women in bright shoes and tights, layering skirts in shades of sage and terracotta, wearing patterned dresses over leggings, and even men wearing coloured T-shirts with their black jeans. Maybe it’s just a seasonal variation, but I remember noticing the black in May 2009 as well as 2010. There are flowers in hanging baskets. I cross the city, heading to Mads and Mæja’s new house for lunch. I don’t know if the new happiness is mine or Reykjavík’s.
We go back to Perlan with Matthew. Perlan is one of the city’s landmarks, pleasant although in itself pointless, a collection of disused water-towers, which, with the addition of a large dome, have somehow become an attractive destination. There’s an artificial geyser on the hillside just below the dome, and a commanding view of the city from the top. We climb up and the children rush around, peering through the telescopes at each cardinal point as they always did, and the adults stand watching flurries of rain blowing in across the mountains and out over the sea. I circle the dome slowly, greeting the tower block in Garðabær where we almost lived, the church at Kópavogur, the domestic airport and the National Library and the hospital, Esja, the hills where Route 1 climbs out towards Hveragerði, and around it all the sweep of mountains and sky. I look back down into the city. They finished the concert hall! I exclaim. Sure did, says Matthew. I’d love to know what you think, shall we go see it?
The concert hall down on the harbour was conceived at the peak of the economic boom. It was going to be Iceland’s Eiffel Tower, Iceland’s Statue of Liberty or Leaning Tower or Brandenburg Gate. The former owner and chairman of Landsbanki, Björgólfur Guðmundsson, took over the project during the boom years, intending to present the nation with a jewel that reconfigured the capital’s waterfront. The kreppa came when the hall was a hole in the ground and steel rods, a project planned to be spectacular at any cost, and for a few months the building site froze like so many others across the city, arrested at a stage where it seemed equally impossible that it could stop existing and that it could ever be finished. Landsbanki collapsed, the wealth of the Icelandic banks was revealed to be imaginary, and the money needed to finish Harpa turned out not to exist. The assets Landsbanki had funnelled into the project were not theirs to spend; there is British and Dutch Icesave money in those shimmering windows. Some city-dwellers said Harpa should be left unfinished to remind Icelanders of their folly every time they glanced up, others said it was too shameful that foreigners and tourists should see a city branded by its own greed and that it would be better to complete it even if it pushed a bankrupt city further down the spiral of debt, even though amenities much more fundamental to daily life than a new concert hall were closing for lack of funds. After a few weeks, no-one really wanted to talk about it, although given the size and position of the half-built hulk, it was impossible not to think about it. The new government decided, in the end, to go ahead, and the building rose black across Reykjavík’s horizon, scribbled with yellow cranes. When we left, the scale of the place was becoming clear, the way it blocked half of Esja from the harbour-front and flashed its fish-scale windows across town. From where I’m standing on Perlan now, it glistens between the city and the sea, towering over the wharves like the cruise liners that sometimes dwarf the Victorian terraces of Falmouth. Do you mean we can just go in? I ask Matthew. Of course, he says, it’s a public building. We can go now if you like.
But first the children want to see the geyser, and look for rabbits in the woodland that runs down to the sea. The rabbit colony developed from escaped pets, though I still don’t understand how they survive the winter. We wander down the tracks, hoods up against the rain which has been not so much falling as congregating in the air for the last three days, and come out by what I remember as another building site, the new campus for the University of Reykjavík. Háskólinn í Reykjavík is a private institution, specialising in Business and Computer Studies, and for all of the time we lived in Iceland there were rumours (at least in Háskóli Íslands) that Háskólinn í Reykjavík was on the point of bankruptcy, had been born of the economic boom and was dying in the collapse. The new buildings, it was said, would push it over the edge. But apparently not. Háskólinn í Reykjavík, Matthew reminds me, recruits internationally by offering salaries two or three times those paid by the national university, but also keeps academics on short-term contracts and offers none of the benefits of public sector employment (in Iceland, these include highly subsidised holidays in summer houses owned by the union, free adult education classes in anything from knitting to advanced software design, and meal tickets for use in the university café). Most staff at Háskóli Íslands see its competitor’s approach to human resources as distasteful, un-Icelandic or perhaps un-Nordic, driven by commerce rather than intellectual value. I see the point, and Háskólinn í Reykjavík has no interest in the unprofitable Humanities anyway, but for a building like this I could probably bring myself to prostitute my talent. It’s Sunday afternoon and even HR is closed, but we peer through the windows to see a circular atrium brimming with diluted sunlight, although it’s still drizzling outside and the sea gleams no more than creased leather. Stairs lead off this atrium like the warp of a spider’s web. All the external walls are glass. We go round to the café on the shore, which I also saw taking shape week by week. It was finished before we left, a granite and glass cube where people richer and less anxious than I was sat sipping coffee and chatting over new laptops. I used to feel like a stray cat looking through a fishmonger’s window. We can go in, says Matthew, so we do. Hot chocolates all round. It looks too smart for children, full of couples of a certain age with well-arranged hair, dressed in shades of beige and black. The couples have cream-smeared plates and foamy coffee cups, the end of a Sunday treat. Nonsense, says Matthew, this is Iceland, children rule, and then the waitress brings over pencils and colouring blocks with our drinks, and they do fine. I like it here. There is a single gerbera in a white vase on each black table, and the white walls reflect the sea’s glimmer. If we lived here, I too would come with my laptop. We treat Matthew, being at last in a position to return favours, and leave with another ghost laid.
And so to Harpa. Matthew drives into an underground car park lit like a 1980s disco. Coloured lights splatter the walls with pink and green and red, and the zebra crossings are beamed from the ceiling onto the asphalt. We make our way to sliding glass doors with the hall’s emblem etched across them, over a black stone floor that shines like still water and up broad escalators that remind me of the Moscow underground. We ascend, and come out into a space taller than St Pancras, taller than the British Library, whose floor stretches from our feet like a frozen lake. One wall is the matt black of old lava, the other those fish-scales, which turn out to be hundreds of prisms, each the size of a person, stacked up the height of many generations. Pale concrete stairs snake up to the sky, and the stairs are lined with concrete terraces where there are black sofas and purple stools. We go up, Tobias running ahead, Max daunted by the space, to the very top, where there’s a bar and more seats and you can see out across the docks to Esja. In the atrium far below, children run and call. At Harpa’s feet, the ground is scarred and steel rods grow out of puddles and churned mud. That, says Matthew, was meant to be another underground car park, over which there would be a plaza with trees and benches and an infinity pool. I guess it’s just going to sit there like that, an eyesore, for the foreseeable future. We turn back and look down into Harpa’s depths.
So, says Matthew, what do you think?
I think it’s spectacular, I say. I think it’s very Icelandic, an outrageously ambitious project that hasn’t been compromised in the execution. No-one’s tried to cut corners or scale things down. Wherever the money comes from, Icelanders are good at spending it.
We begin to stroll down the upper slopes. There are groups of friends chatting on the sofas, a few solitary adults lounging in the floor-level prisms with books or notebooks or laptops, families congregated around the tables. People are using it like an indoor park, like a real public amenity. In the middle are the concert halls, of all sizes, and some meeting rooms. It will never pay its way, says Matthew, it’s mostly for classical music and the audiences just aren’t there on this scale. I might feel differently if these were my taxes, I admit, before remembering that, one way or another, between Icesave and my Icelandic contributions, some twinkle of Harpa’s scales does come from my purse. I can’t imagine any part of the British public sector ever building anything like this. Maybe it is always easier to love the place that isn’t home.
Pétur has lent us his summer house. It’s in Stykkishólmur, a village on the northern side of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, behind a chain of mountains that’s occasionally visible from Reykjavík on a clear day. We drive the familiar route to Borgarnes, and then branch off from Route 1’s circuit, over the hills and down the other side. This area, Pétur says, was one of the first to be settled when the Vikings arrived in Iceland. There are twelfth-century road-works over some of the ravines. I look up the valley at a track winding across the hillside, thinking about a time when people walked these fells every day. As promised by Pétur when we left the damp city, there is sun here, and the shadows of clouds play across the birch scrub. When we stop for a break, the children find the first blueberries ripening on a south-facing slope, and sheep watch as we follow their track down to the river-bank. I think about taking my coat off. Wind rustles through the bushes and ruffles the water where a flotilla of swans rides as though at anchor. Pétur names the mountains for me as we drive: Drápuhlíðarfjall, the ‘Poem Slope Mountain’, Írafell, the Irish mountain (lots of Celtic settlers round here in the ninth century, Pétur says), Helgafell, the Holy Mountain, where Guðrun from Laxdæla saga, the woman Auden quotes in his Iceland poem, is buried. He that I loved the best, to him I was worst. Those lines, Pétur tells me, are already a quote, from an early Irish poem that must have been known to the saga-makers. He found them one day when researching something else, evidence of Norse and Celtic cultural integration at the beginning of Icelandic history. Max repeats the lines, wondering what they mean, as we pass Guðrun’s grave.
Stykkishólmur is visible for miles before we reach the cluster of red-roofed buildings tumbling down the hillside to the harbour, partly because it has a new white church on the prow of its hill, overlooking the dozens of islands dotting the sound between Snæfellsnes and the Westfjords across the water. Pétur’s summer house turns out to be as small as he promised. You can stand in the middle and see out of the windows in all four walls. From the outside, the building seems too small to enclose a kitchen, bedroom, sitting area and shower-room, the essence of domesticity. It’s not possible to make a mess. No-one could expect any serious cooking. The work of family life is reduced to essentials and everything else must happen outside, overlooked by the mountains and in sight of the sea. Maybe this is the point I’ve been missing about summer houses. Where do I play, asks Tobias. Max shows him the turf garden outside, with a slope for rolling and a hillock for jumping and some rocks for clambering. On neighbouring plots, children younger than either of them freewheel down the grass on tricycles and stagger over footballs, but the plots are unfenced, big cars lumber by and I know, now, that there’s no magic force-field keeping Icelandic children safe from the usual perils. I take my crochet outside and sit, keeping an eye on children and traffic and strangers and asteroids that might fall from the sky, until it’s time to make them go inside so I can cook supper. Icelandic children swirl around the gardens and roads, enjoying the kind of neighbourhood play that shaped my childhood. Mine sit at the table and draw while I chop vegetables, continually distracted by the view through all four windows. It feels as if the village, despite being on the sea, is cupped by hills. The harbour is sheltered by a small, conical island, garnished with a lighthouse like the cherry on top of a cake. To one side is the church on its hill, and to the other another hill, topped by a building that reminds me of a paddle-steamer, with a wall of windows curving out over the sea. There are glimpses of sea between the hills, and real mountains appearing over the clouds, higher up the sky than seems probable. When the slow northern sunset begins, long after the children’s bedtime, Max and I walk down through the village and around the harbour, over the bridge to the lighthouse island, where we climb steps cut into the hillside and find the hilltop crowded with people in hiking gear speaking German, French, Spanish and Italian and taking photos as the sun drops behind the Westfjords across Breiðafjörður and the lighthouse begins to scythe the sky. People smile at each other, share multilingual comments about the wind, stand back to let other people up or down the stairs. An un-Icelandic crowd.
