Names for the Sea, page 4
Mads smiles at me. Some people are, he says. At first it was just an upper-class trend, typical of people who travelled a lot and were much more interested in Italian artisanal food than anything Icelandic farmers could produce. But it’s changing now, partly because of the financial crisis, the kreppa. The króna’s collapse has made imported food much more expensive, and Iceland has been importing more and more of its food since trade restrictions were lifted in the 1970s. Almost all fruit and vegetables have always been imported, and while the economy was booming everyone could afford it and it was the Icelandic farmers who were struggling. Consumers’ habits are shifting now. People are buying more local produce, meaning that farmers are able to invest in increasing the supply of local produce, and also buying the traditional foods again, switching back from chicken to lamb, picking up the blood puddings and liver sausage and sheep’s heads again.
Is that, I ask, a patriotic response to the crisis, a willingness to support the local economy, or just because it’s cheaper? There is no free-range chicken available in Iceland, free-range eggs are hard to find, and pork and beef are intensively farmed. There are organic vegetables and dry goods, but they are all American imports. It’s rare to find anything labelled with its country of origin. There’s little in the marketplace to suggest that this is a country that thinks much about where food comes from. From abroad, from útlönd, the foreign world.
Maybe some of each, Mads says. People say both, but of course really they buy the cheapest thing. Icelanders have a higher consumption of ready meals than any other Nordic country. They are less critical of American models of consumption than other Europeans. But he is hopeful; he calculates that, with the right government policies, Iceland could be ninety per cent self-sufficient. There is no reason why fruit trees as well as salad leaves and tomatoes shouldn’t grow in geothermally heated greenhouses. At the moment, farmers pay more for geothermal energy than Alcoa, the American company that runs the aluminium smelters and was highly favoured by the overthrown government, and a law forbidding farmers to sell their produce directly to the public has only recently been repealed. But things are changing, and Mads thinks there is a new willingness to develop shorter food chains. The gardens of Reykjavík won’t foam with cherry blossom any time soon, but there will be Icelandic apples, new cheeses, winter cabbage, more than three kinds of fish (haddock, cod, salmon). In any case, he adds, most Icelanders still think of ‘fish’ as haddock. Cod is for when you can’t get haddock and it’s unusual to have a taste for salmon. But if we would like to come to dinner on Friday, he and Mæja would be delighted to show us some Nordic home cooking. We would love to, I say. Thank you.
We meet Mæja for a swim in their neighbourhood pool before dinner. We’ve swum a couple of times in our local pool in Garðabær, because the novelty of outdoor swimming in a heated pool is fun and because swimming is almost free and within walking distance of the flat and both children enjoy it, but I’m still learning the rituals of Icelandic swimming. Within the separate changing rooms for men and women, there are no cubicles, and no stalls for the showers. You remove your shoes in an ante-room and leave them on shelves, proceed to the main changing room where you strip naked and leave all your clothes in a locker. Then you walk through the changing room to leave your towel in the drying area, and then walk through to the showers, where signs in Icelandic, English, German and French instruct you to wash all over with soap and pay special attention to your underarms, genitals and feet. There are cartoon illustrations as back-up. Then you may put your swimming costume on – Icelandic women always do this under the shower – and go outside to the pool. The tradition of communal nakedness was one of the things I found liberating when I was nineteen. For the first time, I saw women’s bodies that had not been airbrushed and arranged to present an ideal form, and for the first time I understood that the perfection I knew from magazines and films wasn’t the norm. I even had the glimmer of a sense that my own active nineteen-year-old body was, comparatively, aesthetically acceptable. I am sure that it’s important for the new generation of teenage girls to see bodies that have been stretched by child-bearing, scarred by surgery, over- or under-fed, shaped by exercise or by a life spent in the courtroom or the library or on the shop floor. I am less sure that I want to expose myself, my uncertain foreign self, to the gaze of Icelanders at home in their own pools, especially while Tobias likes to run off towards the water as soon as I’ve stepped out of my knickers.
Being with Mæja helps. She doesn’t seem to notice that we’re taking our clothes off as she tells me that the children will soon learn Icelandic, that I will enjoy my job, that she and Mads will take us around the city and show us the best food shops. She tells me about how Mads settled in here, that it took time, and of course sometimes he misses Copenhagen, but together they have found pleasures and discoveries they couldn’t have anywhere else. Their summer project has been to learn to ride Icelandic horses. They spent the weekend picking blueberries out in the national park, which is barely ten minutes from our apartment in Garðabær. Mæja intercepts Tobias as he runs for the door, and smiles at me so that it feels like a hug. Let’s swim, she says. Mads has been cooking all afternoon, we’ll need our appetites.
The next week, we are able to reciprocate. I have begun to bake again. (I must be settling in.) We have an English afternoon tea party for Max’s seventh birthday at the beginning of August, and Pétur and his wife Messíana bring bilingual grandchildren who play on the beach with Max and Tobias and Hulda Kristín’s children while the grown-ups – admittedly sitting on cushions on the floor, and admittedly using mugs they brought themselves – drink Earl Grey and eat cucumber sandwiches and toast with Patum Peperium, which I brought for its Englishness even though we don’t usually eat it at home. I find birthday candles in Hagkaup, and balloons, and we take two buses to get to a Toys R Us in a building like an aircraft hanger under a flyover, to buy a pogo stick on which Max can bounce on the coast path outside the flat. We have been here three weeks, and twelve people sing ‘Happy Birthday’/Til Hamingu over my pirate ship cake.
Darkness doesn’t fall. I stay up later and later, because there’s no particular reason to go to bed, and because I want to see what happens. On the field on the peninsula across the inlet, people start to play football at 11 p.m., and are still playing two hours later. In May, I didn’t believe the woman who told us that people go out to wash their cars at midnight in summer, but I find my own evenings stretching. The children go to bed late, around 9 p.m., and then I work on my book for a couple of hours, and then read for an hour or so, and then decide to go for a walk before bed. Icelandic children, out in unsupervised tribes as if it were the 1970s, swirl around the development and along the coast paths until midnight. Joggers come past in the early hours of the morning. We’re south of the Arctic Circle here, and it’s already July, a month past the solstice, so around 1 a.m. the light dims, the birds fall silent, the wind drops. It’s not a sleep but a holding of breath, a sudden thought of death that gets longer each night.
Anthony and I each go for a walk every evening, taking it in turns to have the sunset slot, which is a few minutes earlier every day. The shore path from the city out to Hafnarfjörður passes our apartment, and I take the same walk every day, will continue to take the same walk every day as the nights lengthen and sunset slips along the horizon, further south and earlier day by day, and the warm breath on the air in July is replaced by a screaming wind that tears at my skin. I pass the blocks of half-finished and empty flats by which we are surrounded. Automatic doors glide open as I walk by, as if there are invisible New York doormen to go with the ghosts of wealthy Icelanders who never came into being and never bought these apartments, big enough to park a freight truck in the living room and with triple-glazed windows of a size to admit several. I glance in to see wires hanging out of the walls and hardwood kitchen units stacked on the (heated) floors. Ramps lead into heated basement garages, cavernous as mausoleums from which imperial bodies have been stolen. Obese SUVs jostle on Reykjavík’s freeways, but here, in the cages built for them, there are none. The abandoned yellow crane reaches above the penthouses at the top, high as a holy statue set to watch over our folly. Reykjavík is ringed by these untenanted suburbs, whole townships built with imaginary money for people who never existed. There was a building boom but no housing shortage, a drive to cover the lava fields with more and more and more open-plan kitchens and steel-railed balconies and underground carports that reminds me of Max, aged about five, covering the floor with wooden train track that looped endlessly back on itself, going nowhere via flyover bridges and turntables and level crossings, a baroque engineering that was its own justification. I discover when autumn brings us darkness again that these Icelandic ghost towns blaze with light by night, even when the city council decides to turn the street lights on later and off earlier across Reykjavík to save money. They have to keep hot water running through the pipes, Pétur tells me, to stop the plumbing and sewage systems freezing in the winter. The doors open and close, like a museum diorama animated by the presence of an observer.
I go on, past the nursery beside the beach covered in imported pale sand. Icelandic sand is black, made by waves pounding cold lava, but some Icelanders – the non-existent rich Icelanders who were meant to buy these flats – want the pink sand they’ve seen abroad. Foreigners’ sand. So they imported it in sacks and spread it along the edge of the Arctic Ocean, where the sea gradually pulls it away. Past the artificial beach, the real shoreline is rocky, with turf and reeds growing right down to the sea. There are more blocks of expensive apartments on my left, a few years older and therefore at least half occupied. Every balcony holds a gas barbecue the size of a bed. I play at fantasy apartment shopping. Even the most desirable places, the ones with cathedral ceilings and glass walls over the foreshore, have large china elephants, dancing shepherdesses and gilt vases along the window-sills. Inside, I can see stuffed foxes, reproduction late-Victorian furniture and embroidered tablecloths. Some of them have net curtains blocking their view of the sea. Not all Icelanders, I remind myself, live in the paradise of Nordic interior design about which I fantasise. Being Icelandic does not oblige people to bin their china figurines in order to conform to my stereotypes.
On my right, across the sea, there are mountains that are visible only at sunset and – I will learn in winter – sunrise, sharp, snow-covered mountains pink in the low light. They fade as the sun goes down. Nearer, there are filaments of cloud drifting in front of Esja, bright against a hillside matt as sugar paper. Curlews call across the water, and the Arctic terns flicker shrilling over my head, beaks and wings pencil-sharp in the soft sky. Geese are beginning to mass on the waves, their low conversation the bass line to the seagulls’ fish-wife screaming on the headland. I’d like to walk on the headland, where there are paths leading to the President’s official residence, which looks like a Danish farmhouse deposited in a lava field on the shores of the Arctic sea, but every time I try, the skuas come and mount guard, hanging low over my head and shouting at me to go away, and the seagulls land on the rocks by the faint path and swear as I approach. They’ve never attacked me, and a braver person would press on, but I am not a braver person and I don’t. The sun rests on the horizon, and is already beginning to slip away. I try to memorise the light against a time when it will seem unimaginable, even though that time itself is at the moment unimaginable to me.
3
Vestmannaeyjar
If we want to travel, Pétur says, we should go now. Summer is passing. The geese are gathering for their winter migration and the blueberries are already over. Term starts at the end of August. Sometimes when I wake in the night there is darkness, and on late nights I need a bedside light for reading. We are beginning to stuff coats under the pushchair for days out, although most days it’s still warm enough to find a hollow in the lava field and sit among the rowan bushes for a picnic of flatkökur and cheese. If you leave it much longer, Pétur warns, it will be too late. It’s only weeks later that I understand what he’s telling me. It’s not that it’s impossible to leave the city in autumn and winter, but you wouldn’t do it without a good reason and a four-wheel drive car. The weather in the city tells you nothing about the weather over the mountains, and most roads beyond Reykjavík can be officially or practically closed at any time. Even if you set out on a clear day, blizzards can move across the skies faster than a car travels, and the roads outside the city aren’t gritted. We don’t understand yet that for several months the only way out of Reykjavík for us will be on a plane.
In any case, real travel will have to wait for next summer. We have recognised that we will need a car; bumping groceries over the lava field in the pushchair is all very well in summer, but we have already had a couple of days so windy that Tobias couldn’t walk outside, and once there’s snow on that wind we will not want to walk two miles for food. It’s not only financial considerations that daunt us, nor alarm at the idea of trying to buy a second-hand car in Icelandic. Icelandic driving is terrifying. Nobody indicates. Even bus drivers accelerate towards junctions and then jump on the brakes at the last minute, sending passengers and shopping crashing to the floor. People swerve across lanes to leave the freeway from the inside. Icelanders have one of the highest rates of mobile phone ownership and usage in the world, and they don’t stop when they’re driving. Max and I, waiting for a bus, conduct an informal survey: at the junction outside Kringlan shopping mall, where two eight-lane highways intersect, one afternoon in mid-August, six in ten drivers are texting or talking on their phones, four in ten are eating – usually skyr with a spoon – and one has a laptop open on his lap. In one month we have seen four major accidents, the kind that write off cars, trigger airbags and leave glass and blood, and in one case a baby’s car-seat, on the road. It’s the only area of Icelandic life where I feel that I, a foreigner, can say with certainty that they are mad and I am sane. I am in no hurry to get my children on the roads of Reykjavík. But you can fly to the Westman Islands.
The Westman Islands are the tops of volcanoes sticking out of the sea, along the same fault as the volcanoes Eyjafjallajökull and Katla. The largest island, Heimaey, has been inhabited since Irish slaves took refuge there early in the settlement period, and in the seventeenth century it was raided by Algerian pirates who took most of the inhabitants back to Algeria as slaves. (We heard the same story in Baltimore, Cork, two years ago; like the Vikings, Arab sailors found the North Atlantic sea-road, with its isolated farms scattered along deep water, highly profitable.) One of the women kidnapped made her way home overland from Algeria to Denmark, and so back to Iceland where she married the poet Hallgrímur Pétursson, after whom the church that dominates Reykjavík’s skyline is named.
One dark and stormy night in January 1973, the volcano on Heimaey which had been sleeping for around five thousand years woke up. There were just under five thousand people sleeping in their houses on the island’s lower slopes. There had been some tremors during the evening of Monday 22nd January, but the occasional rumble causes no-one in that part of Iceland to pause. Storm-winds had confined the fishing fleet to harbour, so all the island’s men were home. Just before 2 a.m., someone called the town police to say that there was an eruption of lava above the church farm, to the east of the town. The police drove up to look, and found the mountainside opening up, a fissure stretching down into the sea. Molten lava had begun to pour down the hill. The police returned to town, sounded the community’s fire alarm and drove the streets with their sirens sounding. Within half an hour, the first boats were leaving, carrying children still in their pyjamas and parents who had not waited to pack a case. By dawn, everyone but emergency workers had left, ferried across forty miles of rough sea to the harbour on the mainland at Þorlákshöfn.
I imagine a wall of flame sweeping through the town, a settlement left burnt-out and desolate. I imagine Pompeii, but what happened was more gradual, a partial apocalypse with wisps of good news. The boats returned the next day, and repeatedly over the following weeks, carrying men who worked through the abandoned houses, salvaging cars, refrigerators and sofas as well as toys and jewellery. There were teams of emergency workers on Heimaey throughout the eruption, spraying the lava with seawater, building a dam meant to hold it back above the town, trying to save the electricity station and the fish-processing factories, trying to keep the airport and the harbour open. Ash fell across the island, to a depth of several metres, so the men reinforced the roofs of schools and houses to bear the extra weight. Lava flowed over the dam and, inevitably, towards the houses on the eastern side of town, and then over them, and down towards the harbour. The harbour was vulnerable. Heimaey was, and remains, the base of southern Icelandic fishing. The island was so populous – five thousand people on an island four kilometres by seven – because it had a natural harbour sheltered from all winds and deep enough for the largest ships. But the harbour was so sheltered because it had a narrow entrance, and the lava was flowing towards the harbour mouth, layering new rock into the sea. Without the harbour, Heimaey would have no reason to exist. Even without the ash and smoking lava, there isn’t enough land for more than half a dozen farms. The water supply has always been problematic, the mountainside being too steep and rocky to hold much of the abundance of rain, and access to the island, by air or sea, remains unreliable. Pétur’s daughter, a vicar who regularly substitutes for her colleague on Heimaey, always arranges overnight care for her daughter before taking the twenty-minute flight, because the schedule depends on the weather in a particularly stormy corner of the Atlantic.
