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

across it by ‘bagels’ so un-bagel-like that even the children have rejected them, and the ducks crash through it as they come to the edge. Watching ducks fall through ice is unreasonably funny, slapstick without the cruelty. Tobias likes the idea of jumping in too. At last, after eleven, the sun comes over the horizon and the ice shines pale yellow, with the standing ducks’ shadows cast in black.

On Sundays, when everything else is closed, we swim, usually at Garðabær but sometimes at Hafnarfjörður, which has a bigger set of outdoor pools. I drive tentatively over hardening frost. The indoor pool is crowded; I can see people’s heads in the steam rising from the outside pool, so Tobias and I scurry across the concrete and hurl ourselves into the toddler pool, which is pleasant enough as long as we keep our necks and shoulders submerged and occasionally splash warm water over our tingling faces. Anthony and Max join us after some persuasive waving and beckoning and Max sticks a foot into the bigger pool but says it is too cold. I should take his word – he’s almost impervious to cold – but can’t believe all the people swimming with serene expressions are secretly shivering so after a while I steel myself to rush across and try too. Max is right, although that doesn’t stop him, twenty minutes later when we are about to leave, making a rush for the slide and swooping down, his body steaming as he runs up the stairs but cooling to air-temperature as he comes down the slide wearing an expression of pure glee.

Our perception of cold has changed, although Reykjavík is much warmer than other settlements on the same latitude because of the Gulf Stream, and it’s a relatively mild winter; the temperature is rarely below minus ten. English winter coats are just about adequate, at least for the adults. It’s not that cold, I keep telling friends at home. And then one day in early December the temperature rises to two degrees. The warmth is as surprising as an electric blanket when you were expecting frosty linen sheets. My cheeks and chin don’t go numb, even though the bus to work is late and I have to stand still for more than five minutes. My hands still hurt with cold, but my feet, in woollen socks and leather boots, remain comfortable and it doesn’t feel as if I’ve been slapped when my scarf slips down my face. The ground, though, is glazed from two days of snow followed by overnight rain and a hard frost. I spend the day marking, watching the moon set, the sky pale, and, somewhere around midday, the shadow of my office building begin to creep up the building opposite, first a soft pencil line of pink and then, for perhaps an hour, a sharper, yellower outline. Going to get coffee, I glimpse through Pétur’s window the marsh between the university and the airport steaming, and Esja, revealed for the first time in several days, covered in snow and pink as a raspberry meringue.

At night, I take long baths, glorying in cheap hot water and the underfloor heating in our tiled bathroom. I always check the sky on my way across the flat to bed, and at midnight one night in early December see bright green clouds hanging over the northern horizon, visible even through our windows mottled by dust from the abandoned building site. I put long socks, a cord skirt, jumper, scarf, coat and hat over my pyjamas and slither along the road to the pile of builders’ rubble at the end of the peninsula and yes, there they are, higher in the sky and brighter than usual. The bath was hot and I am able to stand there for nearly half an hour, watching the green curtain reach across the sky and contract, like the convulsive grasping of a palsied hand. It is the movement that makes them uncanny, as if there must be some consciousness directing the stroking and grabbing of the sky. I stand, and watch, and shiver, and watch some more. I want to stay until the end, but after a while find that there is a limit to how long an intelligent adult can be enthralled by green lights, and go home.

Mæja recommends the Advent celebration at Árbæjarsafn, the outdoor museum outside the city. Árbæjarsafn has a collection of wooden houses moved from the city centre as the concrete office blocks went up. Each house has been reassembled and furnished to represent the domestic life of a particular trade or class in a particular decade of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In summer, high-school students dress up in breeches or aprons and long skirts and practise their English and German on tourists, but the museum is usually closed in winter, opening only for the three weekends of Advent when Icelandic families come to celebrate Icelandic Christmases past. You’ll see all our traditions, Mæja says. The leaf bread and the special singing and maybe even the Yule Lads. She doesn’t mention the birth of Christ, and nor does anyone else. Christmas in Iceland seems so far to have no religious content at all; at the heart of the fairy lights, advertising and office parties is an apparently atheist celebration of the solstice, dogged by the thirteen Yule Lads. Max is learning about the Yule Lads in school and remembers far more about them than he does about conversational Icelandic or basic arithmetic. The Yule Lads seem akin to trolls or the Faroese huldufólk, ‘hidden people’ living secretly around farms and settlements and coming out at night to steal and harm anyone who catches their attention. They come in the dark weeks to take away the Christmas food, steal the candles, peer through windows, slam the doors. Occasionally their parents come too, and then you have to be especially careful because they have left their mountain fastness to snatch