Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

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,