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

intricate and important things are unarticulated, partly because intricacy doesn’t need to be spelt out in a place where everyone has always known how things are done, and partly because it is unIcelandic to explain yourself. Self-explanation suggests some entitlement on the part of your audience to know your interior life. Icelandic drivers don’t indicate, Pétur once told me, because they don’t see why anyone else needs to know where they’re going.

‘Though people were very shy of the fact that they were on a more primitive level of civilisation than they thought I was,’ Pétur says, following my thoughts.

They still are. It’s one of those contradictions in Icelanders’ collective ideas about foreigners; Icelanders want to be seen as tough, as people who take no nonsense, with centuries’ experience of going without (without salad, fruit, waterproof shoes, paved roads, trees, Father Christmas and all the other luxuries pertaining to effete foreigners). But at the same time, there’s a need to prove that Iceland can have anything it wants, that Icelanders know what to do with salad and pizza dough and Christmas trees just as much as anyone else. More than anyone else. It’s typical, I find, generalising as I am generalised, for Icelanders simultaneously to despise foreigners’ judgement and to go in fear of being found inferior.

‘And were they on a more primitive level?’ I ask. It seems probable that Icelandic farms in the 1960s were at least technologically behind suburban Sussex. There’s a plane taking off outside the window, and a skein of geese going the other way. It’s one of those Icelandic mysteries, that having a runway beside a wetland nature reserve seems to be unproblematic.

‘Well, in some respects, yes. Table manners, for example. I’d just come from Cambridge, where you use the right fork, and you tilt the spoon to get your soup, and no-one knew about any of that in Iceland. I remember watching them putting soup spoons in their mouths and thinking, why do they do it like that? And then one day I thought, because it’s not as stupid as the way I do it. And none of this please and thank you. Pass the salt, and here comes the salt. It was unnerving, but of course there were things I wasn’t doing correctly. I found it very hard to stand up at the end of the meal and say takk fyrir matinn, the same way I couldn’t say takk fyrir mig when I left.’

Takk fyrir mig means literally ‘thank you for me’, which is what Pétur’s ten-year-old granddaughter says in English with startling grace when she has been round for tea. I, too, know these phrases but feel horribly awkward about using them. The artificiality of another culture’s set phrases is painful where my own, similarly rehearsed, praise for the cook and requests to be ‘excused’ for reaching across the table, are entirely natural. It’s just so false, says one of my students, all this thanking people and apologising all the time when there’s nothing to be grateful or sorry about. It’s like Americans telling you to have a nice day when they’ve never even met you and they really don’t give a damn about your day.

‘There were manners of course, but the manners were sometimes not to say anything. So I’d say, “Excuse me, but please would you pass the potatoes.” They’d pass them and I’d say, “Thank you.” And they’d look at me, because you don’t say thank you when someone gives you a potato. That’s why you’re there, and why the potatoes are there, so you can eat them, and you know that and they know that you know that so why would you say thank you? There’s not very much of that kind of thing in Icelandic, it’s at a lower level in the same way that the flowers in the fields and the trees on the hills are at a lower level. They’re smaller and more subtle and they make more sense.’

The flowers and trees are smaller than at home because they grow more slowly so far north, because it’s harder to live here in the cold and dark.

‘So there were often guests?’ I ask. ‘As well as all the networks, the milk lorry and shouting over the river?’

‘There were,’ he says. ‘But the networks were often where you found out what mattered. The phone was very important. There was one line between farms – it only changed about twenty years ago – so there was a code for each house, one long ring and two short, or whatever, and when it rang you’d pick up and hear click, click, click, all down the line, and this watery noise and you’d have to shout, “Put down the phone, everyone. I can’t hear!” I was there during the winter, when the farmer’s wife was having her fifth child, so they moved down to the village and I stayed alone up there with the old man and his wife. It was amazing; you milked the cows, you were out doing a lot of work during the day, and then in the evening you’d come in and read and write – I wrote so much during those weeks – and the first thing the old man would say when he came in and sat down at the table, he’d say to his wife, “So, what did you hear today?” Because she’d been at the phones, listening. And she’d always reply on the intake, “Nothing.”’

Icelandic women – though not, as far as I know, men – do indeed speak on the in-breath. Tobias has picked it up from the staff at nursery. I find myself practising at moments of solitude, but I can’t really do it. Not like an Icelander. It’s a kind of feminine Icelandic woodwind technique.

‘And we’d start eating and after a while she’d say, “Guðmundur was phoning Siggi.” And then there’d be a pause and we’d eat some more and she’d say, “I couldn’t hear all of it.” It was