Names for the Sea
Names for
the Sea
Names for
the Sea
Strangers in Iceland
SARAH MOSS
COUNTERPOINT
BERKELEY
Copyright © Sarah Moss 2012
First published in Great Britain by Granta Books 2012
This edition published 2013
The moral right of Sarah Moss to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Map copyright © Leslie Robinson and Vera Brice
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1988. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available
ISBN 978-1-61902-217-1
Cover design by Emma Cofod
Typeset by M Rules
COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For all our friends in Iceland
Contents
Map
Prologue
1 Iceland First Seen
2 Leave of Absence
3 Vestmannaeyjar
4 Back to School
5 Pétur’s Saga
6 Winter
7 The Icesave Thing
8 Spring
9 Eyjafjallajökull
10 Vilborg
11 The Hidden People
12 A Small Farm Under a Crag
13 In Search of the Kreppa
14 Knitting and Shame
15 Last Weekend
16 Beautiful is the Hillside
Acknowledgements
Prologue
The steam rising from the pool glows with reflected light. To passengers on the plane coming in overhead, the typography of the city’s night, the snaking headlights and pin-prick street lights, must look like a jeweller’s setting for the eleven turquoise pools. Garðabær, Kópavogur out on the headland, Álftanes with a slide, Seltjarnarnes filled with salt water, Laugardalur so big you can’t see across it for steam on a cold day. At home I navigate by food shops and booksellers. There are perhaps half a dozen independent food shops left in Reykjavík, and only chain bookshops, but every pool is distinctive. I’m at the deep end in Garðabær now, and the water’s colder. There is a faint smell of sulphur. I’m swimming slowly, more concerned to keep as much of my body as possible under water and out of the cold air than to reach the end of the lane any time soon. The branches of the pine trees around the pool are pressed against their trunks by the wind, black against a sky brown with light-pollution reflecting off snow. There’s no-one else swimming at the moment, only groups of adults congregated like hippopotamuses or perhaps Roman senators in the shallow pool, chatting and drifting in the warmer water. I keep going; I’d feel like Banquo’s ghost there, a lone foreigner, wearing glasses and the wrong kind of swimming costume, barely able to follow a conversation. I pause instead at the deep end, bring my feet down through the warm layers of water to the cold at the bottom, turn and stretch out my arms. And there, with my face below ground level, I see the light in the north, where the sky is veiled by the arc lights on the basketball court behind me and by the headlights of the SUVs I can hear ploughing through slush on the freeway over the wall. The northern sky, dark over the sea, is mottled with green that spreads like spilt paint, disappears and spreads again. I turn my head, wisps of wet hair chill as seaweed on my neck, to see a paler light flickering out like a flapped sheet in the north-west. The green and the white reach towards each other and then lunge away like opposing magnets forced together. I tread water, and watch.
Aurora borealis. Reykjavík, November 2009.
1
Iceland First Seen
I cannot remember the beginning of my longing for northerly islands. It may be hereditary; the childhood holidays that weren’t spent driving across Eastern Europe took place in Orkney and the Hebrides. My grandfather, growing up in Leeds in the 1920s, found his way onto an Iceland-bound fishing trawler at the age of sixteen, not because he had any interest in fishing but because he’d always wanted to go North. My grandmother went camping with her friends on Mull in the 1930s, and returned there in the 1950s with my mother and in the 1980s with me. It’s not the real, white Arctic, the scene of centuries of bearded latitude competitions, that sets me dreaming, but the grey archipelago of Atlantic stepping-stones. Scilly, Aran, Harris, Lewis, Orkney, Fair Isle, Shetland, Faroe. Iceland, southern Greenland, the Canadian Maritimes; a sea-road linking ancient settlements, travelled for centuries. The Arctic is just over the horizon, the six months’ darkness always at the back of the mind, the summer-long day impossible to believe in winter and impossible to doubt when it comes. Here, just below the Earth’s summit, there are towns and villages, a tangle of human lives, in the shadow of Arctic eschatology. I keep going back to the North Atlantic, working my way north and west as the Celts and Vikings did, as if I’m heading for the Vikings’ westernmost point at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. When we finish our A-levels, a friend and I rent a cottage on Rousay in Orkney, and spend two weeks walking the rocky shore and the moorland, climbing down the ladders into Neolithic tombs, and trying not to think about our pending – pendant – adult lives. As students, another friend and I embark on an ill-advised cycling trip around Shetland, where we have to pedal downhill into the wind but see a wilder, stranger landscape than the roundedness of Orkney. I make it to the Faroes, where some of the islands are no more than cliffs rising from the sea, and the Norse who once ruled Orkney and Shetland too are still, more or less, there. At university, I take an Old Norse class, expecting to be fascinated by the sagas, and plan to spend the summer of my first year in Iceland. I win an award given to undergraduates for ‘the advancement of knowledge relating to the beauty of scenery’, and buy a bus ticket that takes me once around Route 1, the one road circling the country. My friend Kathy, fellow lover of northern islands, agrees to come too.
There is a tradition of English travellers to Iceland, mostly nineteenth-century, mostly on the trail of the medieval sagas. I read W. G. Collingwood, who left a trail of watercolours in Iceland’s museums of local history, and William Morris, who went to Iceland in 1871 and again in 1873, and wrote a series of rambling poems inflected by Old Norse, as if thinking of undoing the Norman Conquest’s contribution to the English language:
Lo from our loitering ship a new land at last to be seen;
Toothed rocks down the side of the firth on the east guard a weary wide lea,
And black slope the hillsides above, striped adown with their desolate green:
And a peak rises up on the west from the meeting of cloud and of sea,
Foursquare from base unto point like the building of Gods that have been,
The last of that waste of the mountains all cloud-wreathed and snow-flecked and grey,
And bright with the dawn that began just now at the ending of day.
Ah! What came we forth for to see that our hearts are so hot with desire?
Is it enough for our rest, the sight of this desolate strand,
And the mountain-waste voiceless as death but for winds that may sleep not nor tire?
Why do we long to wend forth through the length and breadth of a land,
Dreadful with grinding of ice, and record of scarce-hidden fire,
But that there mid the grey grassy dales sore scarred by the ruining streams
Lives the tale of the Northland of old and the undying glory of dreams?
(William Morris, ‘Iceland First Seen’, 1891)
Firth, strand, dale; there’s a self-consciousness about this linguistic re-making that bothers me. It is not necessary, certainly not honest, to pretend that we’re all Vikings really. I am going to Iceland, but not because I have a secret desire to wear a horned helmet or drink mead out of a skull, nor even to wear twisted silver brooches and speak in runes. I dislike Tolkien, another Oxonian Old Norse obsessive, with his war games and made-up languages in a world without women. Whatever I’m looking for in Iceland, it’s not in the tradition of English writing about the place.
In July 1995, Kathy and I board the MS Norröna, the passenger ship linking Scotland with the Faroe Islands and Iceland, following the Viking route at five times Viking speed. We stand on the deck, watching sailors cast off cables, and then watching the coast of Aberdeenshire slipping over the horizon. Other people go inside, but other people have cabins and can afford to eat in the restaurant. As the sky dims, north of Scotland in midsummer, the ship begins to lurch. The last people go inside. We stay on deck, shivering and watching the foam streak dark waves, until I’m so cold and sea-sick that lying on a plastic berth in a communal cabin seems better than retching over the railings. Kathy stays on deck, hood up, stoical.
I wake up hours later. I’m still sick. It’s so dark that opening and closing my eyes makes no difference. Nothing makes any difference. Men lodged in the bunks around me are snoring, and there’s a smell of vomit and sweat. I can’t swallow. I bury my nose in the pink-flowered down sleeping bag I had as a child for camping holidays, which
smells of old dust and feels dry as paper against my skin. I want to die. (This thought has been reappearing in my mind like a goldfish coming back round the bowl every few minutes since I left the deck.) The engine throbs and my bunk sways, up and down, up and down. I know I’m not going to be sick again, not really, because there’s nothing left, and I stopped trying to sip water around the same time as I stopped trying to sit up. Up and down – and down – and down. I hope we do sink. I want to die. The cabin is far down inside the hull. There is water up above my head, and if we started to sink the water would come into the cabin and rise and rise and even if I tried to find the door it’s heavy and metal and there’d be a weight of water on the other side, and anyway I’ve seen where the iron doors in the corridors would lock, stabilising the ship but trapping people who can’t afford proper cabins in cold sea that would come up and up, waists and shoulders and – not that it matters, because I want to die.
There is a rip in the darkness. It makes my eyes hurt.
‘Sarah?’ whispers Kathy. ‘Sarah, come outside. You can see it. Iceland. And the sun’s coming up.’
I turn away. I don’t care.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘You’ll feel better on deck. It’s enough to make anyone sick down here. I’m going back out.’
I don’t believe her. I’m beyond fresh air.
‘The sun’s rising,’ she says. ‘And it’s shining on a glacier. It looks like one of those Japanese mountains. I’m going to paint it.’
So I sit up, and it is worse. But I can, just about, imagine that there might be a future in which I would regret not having seen sunrise on a glacier from the sea. I stand up and grab her, and Kathy helps me up the bucking stairs, spattered with vomit, over the metal ledge and out. And she’s right. (Kathy is usually right.) There’s a neon pink sunrise behind us, and a triangular snow-covered mountain coming up over the horizon to the north-west. The sea is still black, the waves foaming white in the new light. I sit down and Kathy wraps my shawl around me and finds a piece of Kendal mint cake for me to contemplate. ‘It’d taste about the same on the way up as down,’ she observes, pulling a small artist’s block, her watercolours and a screw-top bottle of water out of her cagoule pocket. Later, I start trying to write a paragraph or a poem for every painting, but for now I’m content to sit there licking my Kendal mint cake and watching as a little mountain appears on either side of the big one. As the sun comes up, the spaces between the triangles fill up with green fjords. Soon the fjords have a scattering of white houses with red roofs and then sheep safely grazing and cars rushing around like ants, even though it’s about four o’clock in the morning. Maybe I don’t want to be dead.
We were nineteen – we celebrated Kathy’s nineteenth birthday with an afternoon in a jacuzzi on a mountainside in Akureyri and a cake covered with a simulacrum of marzipan – and we spent six weeks making our way around Iceland, camping rough because we couldn’t afford campsites and living on an increasingly sparse and eccentric diet because we couldn’t, really, afford food either. In 1995 students didn’t have mobile phones and the internet was for geeks, some of whom checked their e-mail several times a week. (Why not just talk to people, we wondered. Or write a nice letter.) We were out of touch, gone, for the whole six weeks. It was towards the end of the years in which Radio Four would occasionally broadcast requests for Mr and Mrs Framlington of Ely, presently on holiday in the Ardèche, to contact their son Henry, but we had no radio and wouldn’t have been able to get Radio Four anyway. We wrote letters but stamps had to wait until we were back home and could spare money for postage. We each had a bus ticket taking us all the way round the island and back to Egilsstaðir for the ferry home. We had a tent and a Primus stove, a paperback Complete Shakespeare, root ginger, garlic and a few herbs. The Kendal mint cake went in the first two days, and after that we prowled the mini-marts trying to maximise calories per króna without actually drinking vegetable oil (though subsidised butter would have been nicer, and scarcely more expensive). I found a discounted jar of American peanut butter once, but after that we settled on Icelandic cream cheese with peculiar flavourings and the occasional bag of crisps. The bus stopped at petrol stations – roughly every thirty miles – but apart from that you just shouted to the driver when you wanted to get off. Sometimes we planned it, but more often we saw a likely spot and sang out. We camped foolishly on a cliff top and almost blew over in the night, ran out of meths for the stove and discovered that we were too young to buy it legally in Iceland. (Older German backpackers came to the rescue, but not until we’d been without cooked food or hot water for a couple of days.) We walked through a lunar landscape, where cracked black rock interspersed with white flowers spread to the horizon, and through orange and pink mud that boiled under our feet, and around a volcanic crater from which we could see to the Arctic sea. We saw puffins falling off cliffs onto the black sand beneath, and miniature turquoise icebergs calving off a glacier. It was light all the time, a summer day that lasted six weeks, and I woke and slept at whim like a baby, my lifelong insomnia for once seeming natural. I could piece together bits of modern Icelandic, enough to read signs and the odd headline, but we didn’t try to talk to anyone. Why should they want to talk to us? The local teenage girls – who had access to bathrooms and washing machines and clothes intended for indoor use – were more glamorous and confident than we were. And anyway, we weren’t there for the people. There were plenty of people, too many people, at home. We’d come for the landscape, for the pale nights and dark shores, rain sweeping over birch scrub, the whole circle of a flat world empty but for ourselves.
I always meant to go back to Iceland. Kathy and I finished our degrees, and took some more degrees, and married and found jobs. I had two sons, she moved to the Netherlands. We met often, talked regularly, and, late at night, over the end of the bottle or after our husbands had come past for the fourth time muttering about international phone calls, we remembered Iceland. The time I ran out naked in heavy rain to tighten the guy-lines (because I didn’t want to get my pyjamas wet). The time Kathy, out painting, found some blueberry bushes warm and heavy in the sun, and then there was a whole mountainside of blueberries which we grazed like famished sheep, having had no fruit or vegetables since we left home. The time an Icelandic child on the bus delivered the whole of the Dead Parrot Sketch, in English and with precisely copied intonation. It was the landscape of our coming of age that we were remembering, not the people who lived there.
I envied Kathy’s new life in the Netherlands, her gradual mastery of a new language, her appreciation of a new place and discoveries in a new culture. My husband and I had always meant to live ‘abroad’, as if abroad were a place, defined only by not-Englishness. Scotland might have done, France would have been better, Denmark or especially Sweden, headquarters of Nordic social democracy, would have been ideal, but meanwhile I kept an eye on academic jobs in the US, Canada and Australia. We settled in Kent, less than ten miles from where Anthony had grown up. We owned a house. The children started school. We had interesting jobs at comfortable salaries. It was all perfectly nice, and there was no reason why it shouldn’t continue to be perfectly nice for the next thirty years. Then Anthony lost his job. Max was unhappy at school. Iceland, sang a newspaper feature read late one night while the children slept, was the happiest country in the world, a Nordic paradise of gender equality, fine schooling and public art. It wasn’t landscape that pulled us this time – or not only landscape – but the idea of a better society. According to the website of the National University which I chanced to encounter at work the next day, Iceland needed an expert in nineteenth-century British literature.
2
Leave of Absence
Six months later, I stand in Iceland’s National Museum, under the flat-screen television showing rolling news at the end of the exhibition of twentieth-century Icelandic material culture, when the International Monetary Fund steps in to save Iceland from sovereign default. It’s November 2008, and I’ve just finished my interview and verbally accepted the job. Over lunch, my future colleagues were talking about arranging new courses around texts available on Project Gutenberg, because they were expecting the import of books to halt. The headmistress of the international school is frank about her concern that all the foreign families are about to leave the country. The value of my proposed salary drops by a third during the week. Well, we reason, Icelanders aren’t going to starve, so there’s no reason why we would. I don’t know why the collapse of the Icelandic economy, the kreppa, doesn’t put us off; I think it seems important not to fear poverty. I think it seems likely to be interesting.