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

‘Well, the people who suffered most from the crisis are people who had good jobs, big loans, big cars, big TVs. We had so many people who were in a really tight situation, knowing that as long as they had their job, their overtime, they could keep up the repayments. Just. People who just trusted that things would go as they go.’

Þetta reddast, I think. It will sort itself out.

Tómas Gabríel reads my mind. ‘Yes, it’s very Icelandic. But I wasn’t raised like that. I don’t take loans. I drive a twenty-one-year-old car, I study, I play sport and I work a few hours a week to buy gas and food. That’s the way we should be, less extravagant, and I think this crisis will bring more people to that mindset. I hope so. I hope we don’t just find new loans, pay it all off, party it up for five more years and then find ourselves here again.’

It’s not the first time I’ve had a glimpse into the frustration of Icelanders who have been considered weird and even deviant for the last few years, people who throughout the boom eschewed debt of any kind, disdained shopping, reduced, reused, recycled, grew and made their own (potatoes, socks, garden sheds), not out of poverty but as acts of principle. They stand now as exemplars, Puritans, hoping a purged Iceland will see the light and join them in the City on a Hill. But people who have always seen themselves as mainstream consumers have also said to me that Iceland needed a lesson, that the kreppa is the overdue punishment for a decade of greed and arrogance. Matthew, who was raised in a broadly right-wing American tradition and owns the biggest television I have seen in a private house, says that we all have to take responsibility. He and his partner saved up to buy their television, but he is, he says, still partly to blame. He delighted in the new foods coming into Iceland, in the Israeli coriander and American cranberries. He loved to sit in glossy cafés with his new laptop and a cappuccino. When fresh spinach began to be imported five years into his time in Iceland, he went wild for it, and didn’t ask what economic current had carried it to his table. It’s time to go, and I walk back through the rain to the bus stop, hoping that the future holds something as good as the past for Tómas Gábriel.

*

I keep wondering about the other side of the argument, because at the moment I can’t imagine how anyone could begin to defend the bankers or the Independence Party. I’m sure my friends are right – or at least sure that I share their politics – but it seems a good idea at least to look over the fence at the other camp. English language sources of Icelandic news are rare and brief; the Iceland Review, mostly for tourists, has a rather Chinese policy on current affairs, carrying headlines about wildflowers and ski-resorts on days when the Icelandic papers are all writing about the IMF. Morgunblaðið, now owned by one of the corrupt bankers, offers a few sentences of English summary. Otherwise, it’s blogs – mostly left-wing – my students – mostly left-wing – and my friends – mostly left-wing. I should try talking to the other side. One of my students has a friend who knows Arni, the head of the youth division of the Independence Party. We agree to meet one Monday in March. I suggest my office, which is warm, quiet and central. No, he says, at the National Museum. We can talk in the café. The café has wooden floors, high ceilings, glass walls – a pleasant space where groups’ chat, small children’s play and the hysteria of coffee machines reverberates around the walls. It’s not a good place for a nuanced conversation. Another café, I suggest? His office? No, he says, we will meet at the museum.

It is ‘window weather’, bright but cold. I notice the shortness of my shadow as I cross the car parks between the university and the museum. It’s minus five and I pull my scarf up over my face, but my eyelids and forehead sting in a wind so sharp it finds its way between my gloves and my sleeves, around the tops of my socks under my trousers. I can see from the car park that there is no-one in the café. There are a couple of tourists trying the heavy copper doors. Of course. Monday. The museum is closed. I pull back my glove and check my watch. I am, as always, five minutes early. Icelanders are always late, at least five minutes, for everything, but I can’t adapt, because what if the time I’m late is the one time an Icelander is punctual? I back into the corner of the porch and the main building, where I’m well sheltered from that wind, and find that I can almost feel a breath of warmth in the sun on my face. I watch birds coming in to land on the marsh in front of the airport, because the birds are coming back now, and a jogger in a balaclava, head bowed into the wind, crossing the pedestrian bridge that arches cat-like over the eight-lane highway out of town. The painted houses downtown are bright in the sun, and after ten minutes Arni appears, a tall man with a red face darker than his blonde hair, hand outstretched in greeting. We apologise to each other for the museum’s day off. Arni suggests the campus canteen as an alternative. I conduct him to the coffee room at the top of the Foreign Languages building, and make coffee while he sits texting. He can’t put his phone away, sends and reads texts throughout our conversation. I can’t really get Arni to say anything. He’s wary,