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

or teachers or the rhythms of the academic year. There’s a stirring of the air, a fluttering of pages, a sense of something beginning to seep along the corridors and lap at office doors. I’ve spent afternoons in the National Library without seeing anyone but a soft-footed librarian, but now there are murmured conversations somewhere on the other side of the modern languages section, a mobile phone ringing, doors swinging, and, once, fresh bloody handprints on the door at the top of the stairs. (In England I would, I think, have called over a librarian if not actually the police. Here, I assume someone had a nosebleed or a menstrual disaster and hope the cleaners will be along soon; I am not thinking like a citizen.)

The university had planned to demolish the building that houses the Faculty of Foreign Languages, because it’s old and single-glazed and you have to use your hands to open the doors, because it’s un-Icelandic. All state building programmes are now suspended, and we will have to make do with what we’ve got. I taught for several years at a mid-ranking English university in a Portakabin erected as a temporary measure in the 1970s, which, thirty years later, had not only a rotten floor and leaky roof but pigeons and the occasional squirrel in residence, and I can see nothing wrong with Nýi Garður. There are four floors, each with a bathroom at each end – for both men and women, which I find unreasonably disconcerting, as if it’s worse to be heard peeing or seen putting on mascara by male colleagues – and offices off long corridors. It’s warm and smells faintly of floor polish and clean clothes, and my office is across the corridor from Pétur, next door to Matthew and two down from Hulda Kristín. I feel buttressed there, surrounded by friends and people who know where I’m coming from. It’s the only place in the country where I feel entitled to be. None the less, I leave my office plain, its lino floor and white walls echoing at each other. I bring in a shelf of books, only what I need to teach, because I need the others to help us feel at home in the Big Flat (named by the children to distinguish it from the hotel room where we spent the first days in Iceland). Then I sit there and do my job, in a white box that looks out onto a wall, where on bright days I watch the shadow of my own building creep up and then down the other building. Other offices along this corridor are thoroughly inhabited, with oak desks, velvet sofas, indoor trees, oil paintings, for these jobs are for life. British academics are a mobile bunch, tending to move hundreds of miles with every promotion, and most departments include several people who commute from the other end of the country, or even from another country, because their families have refused to move again or because their partner specialises in a kind of medieval history or neuroscience that happens at only one institution. People’s offices usually have a few boxes in the corner, full of things that never got unpacked or that are awaiting the next move. It’s not surprising to see a suitcase under the desk. There is no sense of this provisional, conditional way of living at Háskóli Íslands, no flicker of sideways glances at other institutions offering other jobs that might be nearer home or have a better library or saner colleagues. There is the University of Iceland, and, unless you work in Business Studies or Computing in which case there is the private University of Reykjavík, that is The University. All the MPs went there, all the lawyers (by definition, for where else would you read Icelandic law?), almost all the doctors and social workers and teachers. They all know each other. Until recently, doctors were required to complete their clinical studies abroad, partly because Iceland’s population isn’t big enough to provide sufficient teaching cases of unusual illnesses, traumas and complications, and until recently Háskóli Íslands offered doctoral degrees only in Icelandic Language, Literature and History, but now you can go from kindergarten to professoriate without leaving Reykjavík 101. Some people don’t think this is a good idea: I’m beginning to recognise the usual Icelandic tension between independence and insularity.

As teaching approaches, I wake earlier, take longer to go to sleep, need to extend my evening walks out beyond the Álftanes peninsula before the chatter in my brain goes quiet and I can see the wind on the water and the city lights over the bay without having to hold back a curtain of egotistical anxiety. My usual late-summer nightmares start up again, a month earlier than usual. I dream, annually, that all educational qualifications lapse after ten years and that I therefore need to retake every exam. I scramble for GCSE Latin, Biology, Religious Studies, for my lost A-level surefootedness around the treaties that ended the War of the Spanish Succession, for the French pluperfect subjunctive, for undergraduate Anglo-Saxon and the point of The Faerie Queene. I rediscover every September that I have forgotten my education, just as I am supposed to begin again to pass it on. But this time it’s worse; not only do I not know exactly what was changed by the Act of Union or the Corn Law Reform but nor do I know whether I am supposed to take a register, if the students are expecting lectures or seminars, or indeed how to find the lecture hall.

The university, like most, has older and newer buildings, but here they are linked by a web of surface and underground corridors that I never come to understand. There is no campus map, a state of affairs that begins to feel typically Icelandic: if you already know your way around, you don’t need one, and if you don’t know your way around, you shouldn’t be there anyway. Sometimes Matthew