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

cars, because Icelanders have almost a car each, because many of the cars are huge 4x4s and because some of them drive around for seven months of the year on nailed tyres, doubling their petrol consumption, even though the city roads are gritted as soon as snow falls and so far there have been five icy days in seven months. Most of the time, there’s enough wind to carry the resultant pollution away from the city, off to fall as acid rain somewhere else, but when the wind drops we sit in our own waste, asthmatics wheezing and the rest of us tasting exhaust fumes deep in our throats. But you should be used to it, the students tell me. London’s always in smog. I don’t think they believe me when I say that we have, at least, whatever our sins and failures elsewhere, dealt with that problem.

My head of department in England sends me an e-mail. He is planning next year’s teaching, and asks me to confirm my return at the end of the year. I don’t reply. I know what the answer is, really. I know that we are surviving on my Icelandic salary only by acts of self-denial to which no sane person would commit herself in the long term when there is an alternative on offer. The obvious and responsible choice is to return to the life we left, pick up the car from Anthony’s sister at the airport and go home as if we’d never left. I will tell Anthony that it’s time for us to make this decision. Later.

The Icesave Thing rumbles on through January and February. The debate, in theory, is over the interest rate and speed at which Iceland repays the governments of the UK and the Netherlands for their compensation of British and Dutch Icesave investors. There are protests in the parliament square, low-key Icelandic protests in which people pass around hot drinks and talk to their friends. Colleagues speak of ‘going to protest for an hour’ between classes or on Saturday afternoons, but even they can’t explain to me exactly what they are protesting for. They don’t like the situation, they are frustrated with the new government that replaced the Independence Party which had been in power from 1944 until the coalition it dominated collapsed in the Pots and Pans Revolution of 2009. Some don’t think that the state should bear responsibility for debt incurred abroad by privately owned banks, but no-one seems to have a plan for the kind of action that might result from this or any other principle. Early in March, two months after the President refused to sign an agreement that had passed through parliament, and thus triggered a national referendum, the voting papers go out. It’s a very Icelandic affair; the Law department at the university, charged with writing the pamphlet to explain the issue and procedure to all Icelandic voters, postponed doing so because they expected the referendum to be cancelled, which wasn’t unreasonable because the agreement at issue had been superseded by one that’s better for Iceland. But once the process has begun, there is neither a mechanism nor a popular will to abort it. So Iceland conducts a referendum over a paper that is already acknowledged by all concerned to be defunct and irrelevant, and ninety-eight per cent of Icelanders, reasonably enough, reject it. All the English language sources of Icelandic news and opinion concur that the referendum was nevertheless worthwhile because people feel good about having voted and it makes them feel better about the situation to have been consulted. I can’t help wondering if they wouldn’t have felt better yet had the money spent on organising the vote been given to the voters instead.

The same news sources offer daily stories of Icelanders having homes and cars repossessed and seeing their debt repayments rise far in excess of their income, partly because people took out mortgages and car loans in foreign currencies during the boom years and are still having to repay them in foreign currencies now the value of the króna has halved. I can see food getting more expensive week by week; turnips are now a treat and the sacks of frozen fruit and vegetables on which we rely, which came from Belgium in July and Poland in October, are now imported from China. But I can’t see Icelandic poverty. Mine seem to be the only children in Iceland with patches on their trousers. It’s rare to see anyone old enough to drive on a bus. Very few of my students and colleagues bring their own food to work. There are the cars, and the fireworks, and the absence of a second-hand market for anything but vehicles. Mine is among the oldest laptops on campus, although I make common cause with a student whose screen works only when she places clothes pegs at exact intervals along the edge. Max is given homework, which is actually homework for me, of eating meals made only from ingredients grown in tropical rainforests for a week. (This in a country about as far from a tropical rainforest as it’s possible to be, where imported food is highly taxed as well as expensive because of the transport costs. We make cocoa.) I’ve been wondering for a while, but now I begin to ask people why I can’t see the kreppa, offering the possibility that I’m just a stupid foreigner who doesn’t get it and can’t see what’s staring her in the face. No, say the students. Many of them have been wondering the same thing. No, say my colleagues, though if you’d seen the boom you’d be able to see the bust. So where is it, I ask, where is this crisis?

It’s the first time I feel able to ask a stupid question in public. You should talk to my grandson, says Pétur, his face softening as it does when he thinks of any of his grandchildren. Ása Björk’s boy, you know?