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

keep telling me I should stick to the pavement, which is legal here. It has to be, they say. Because it’s only foreigners who cycle and they’d just get killed if they went on the road. (The men in Proper Cycling Gear, I think, don’t count, because their cycling is a sport rather than a means of transport, rather as the few Icelanders walking the coast path do so with Nordic walking poles and Lycra rather than shopping bags and city shoes. It’s one thing if your chosen form of sport chances to cover distance, quite another to choose not to drive.)

And a left turn – get off and walk over the pedestrian crossing – and I’m on campus. I lock the bike to the railings, which is apparently unnecessary but a lifelong habit I can’t break, and go upstairs to my office. I’m back on the radar – teacher, colleague, employee, mother and wife at the end of the phone – but in a few hours I’ll get back on my bike and disappear again.

I’d like to know more about the olden days, the pre-vegetable years before the Americans came. I should talk to some more people, but I can’t, not yet. On bad days, I still choose to go hungry rather than go into a shop and have to talk to Icelanders. I am ashamed to require Icelanders to speak English and too embarrassed to try to speak Icelandic, even though I know the words. I am afraid I can’t pronounce them properly, afraid people will laugh at me, afraid of the paralysing horror of standing there in a shop making incomprehensible noises. Sometimes I don’t swim because I can’t face the mortification of buying a ticket for the pool. There are days when I don’t use the staff lunchroom because I think Icelanders will resent feeling obliged to talk to me. I hadn’t expected to find my foreign-ness so disabling. I come from a wandering, academic family and spent almost all my childhood summers outside England. I have the usual British diffidence about imposing myself, but I’ve never before been unable to summon the nerve to buy a sandwich. Pull yourself together, I tell myself, but often I can’t.

So I take refuge in narrative. I take out all the Icelandic fiction in translation from the National Library, barely a shelf, and more in German and French than English. There’s a film archive, above the Culture House where the saga manuscripts are venerated. I can do libraries and museums. I know how to keep quiet. The film archive holds every film ever made in Iceland or by an Icelandic producer, and there are booths where you can sit in a leather chair, put on headphones and pass the afternoon in front of the screen. It’s warm up there, above the sex-shops and neon-lit bars off Laugavegur, and snow swirls past the low windows. I begin at the beginning, with the jerky sepia-and-white of the interwar years which need no subtitles because there are no words, and work my way through the headscarves and sharp-cornered cars of the 1960s towards the echoing footsteps and blood-sprayed walls of contemporary Icelandic film. I will be indiscriminate, I promise myself. I will watch everything. And when I’ve done that, armed with whatever it teaches me, I’ll talk to some people from beyond our circle of fellow-strangers.

Many of the films are set in the Middle Ages. They blur in my mind with the documentaries of Icelandic life in the first half of the twentieth century; both show people wrapped in grey and brown wielding rakes on rainy hillsides, their hair and clothes whipping in the wind. Lines of heavily-laden horses snake over mountain passes with people trudging at their tails. Rain drips from everyone’s hair. Children run in and out of turf houses through low doorways, like rabbits emerging from and disappearing into burrows, and every so often one of the men says something apparently proverbial, like ‘the dark horse runs longest’ or ‘the fog hides many secrets’ and hits another man on the head with an axe. Then there is another procession of wet horses, sometimes carrying a coffin. It’s like listening to a tale told by a drunk; I am fascinated, mostly by the landscape, but have no idea what the narrative logic might be. The subtitles are little help because there seems to be no relationship between what people say (not much, mostly about farming) and what they do (mostly farming but sometimes murder).

Over the weeks, as darkness draws back through the afternoon and snow becomes a fact of life rather than a special effect, I progress through the decades. The settings change a little. Mid-century, the films are all about people leaving the farm for the city, or not leaving the farm for the city, or occasionally leaving the city for the farm. I imagine Pétur going, as ever, against the flow, appearing from Cambridge on one of these bleak mountainsides and settling down for the winter as if Borgarfjörður were where all the twenty-two-year-olds wanted to be in 1964. Wet horses are still important, but there are also wet buses. There is usually a father who stays on the farm and at least one son who wants to leave. Cameras go inside now, and there is chipped Formica, dirt-floored rooms with a few wooden chairs, and women who knit and cook but say even less than the men. Two or three times in each film, one of the men says something like ‘the folk over the fells are fleet of foot’ and then stabs his brother or son with a butcher’s knife or clubs him with an agricultural implement. I begin to play a kind of Icelandic film cricket, guessing who is going to do what to whom. I always lose. I watch some of them again, hoping for retrospective insight into the motives for violence, but even in hindsight I can’t imagine why, or see any