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

accounting. He continues, summarising the Icelandic debate about EU membership, with detours into fisheries policy and the future of the EEA. He makes scant reference to his own views (‘we need to reconsider this question now’), none to the party line.

‘What do you think the domestic responses to the crisis should be?’ I ask.

‘We need to stop playing the blame game and move on. There are very interesting things going on here now. It used to be that all the talented people here went into banking, and now they’ve lost their jobs or quit and they’re building things of their own, really interesting things. So I think if we take the right stance and move out of this crisis in the right direction we will see a very different landscape in five or ten years, and a much healthier one. We’ve always had this problem here: what should the industry be? We had fishing, we went into aluminium in a big way, and then the huge banking sector. I would like to see more small enterprises. We have such opportunities here, we are well-educated, we are energetic, we are hugely creative. This is a big chance for Iceland.’

Although my instincts are to disagree with anyone speaking from the right-wing, and although he hasn’t said anything interesting or unpredictable about the kreppa, my spirits lift at the last bit. Being ‘energetic’ and ‘hugely creative’ with banking hasn’t worked, but there is something appealing as well as deeply irritating about a country that doesn’t recognise rules. Whatever Iceland does next, whether led by Tómas Gabríel’s friends or Arni’s, it is likely to be interesting.

8

Spring

Winter goes on a long time. Matthew warned me, back in September when I was eagerly awaiting the first snow, that mid-winter is the easy bit. December and January bring parties, fireworks and aurora, early nights and late mornings. It’s March and April, he said, when people start to get depressed. The light is back and it looks as if you should be able to go out, but it’s still damn cold, the roads are still icy, the snow is grubby and stained by exhaust fumes and you lose hope that summer is really going to come back. Matthew doesn’t have children, who wake at seven on Saturdays just the same as on school-days. Seven looks like midnight except that there are no aurora. We have four hours to fill before daybreak. Many Icelanders enjoy these weeks, time to read and knit and curl up on the sofa with a blanket and a DVD. In the Icelandic memoirs I’ve been reading, winter is the time when friends can stay for hours, lingering over coffee and cake because there’s nowhere they need to be and nothing they need to be doing. People used to sing together, read the sagas aloud to groups of knitters and, in later years, since there have been ovens and wheat flour and butter and eggs even though the cows are dry and the hens aren’t laying, embark on complicated baking. I like the idea of this, but the reality of two waffle-fuelled little boys in an open-plan flat has nothing to do with curling up or lingering. I remember a scene from Iceland’s ‘national novel’, Hallðór Laxness’s Independent People, in which a child wakes before anyone else on a winter morning:

The first faint gleam on the horizon and the full brightness on the window at breakfast-time are like two different beginnings, two starting points. And since at dawn even this morning is distant, what must this evening be? Forenoon, noon and afternoon are as far off as the countries we hope to see when we grow up, evening as remote and unreal as death . . .

The boy waits, desperate for his breakfast of half a piece of bread smeared with tallow and cod-liver oil. His mother is bed-bound for the winter, and the family live on porridge and dried fish; ‘Never did the children long so much for a nice juicy piece of meat or a thick slice of rye-bread and dripping as when they had finished eating.’

A bit of seasonal hunger, I think, sticking down a collage of animals cut from our Saturday Guardian archive because Tobias has lost interest and run off to start a fight with Max at the other end of the flat, would have its functional aspects. I wouldn’t mind at all if the boys had less energy at weekends. Icelanders deal with this problem with lots of organised sports. The leisure centres are full of little girls doing gym and little boys playing ball-games, but these activities, reasonably enough, are conducted in Icelandic, and Max is sure he couldn’t get by, not yet. We never see Icelandic toddlers in winter. They don’t swim. They are not at the zoo. Nobody takes children walking, winter or summer. They are not on the buses or downtown, although there are still small babies sleeping in large prams outside shops and cafés all along Laugavegur, snow settling into the creases in footmuffs and hoods. They are not in the museum. (I ask my students: the toddlers, they say, are at nursery for eight hours every week-day and many spend one day at the weekend with their grandparents. This information, each of the parents adds, pertains only to other families. They themselves spend a great deal of time with their own children.) Perhaps, suggests Max, Icelandic toddlers hibernate, and he and Tobias go off to play at hibernating, although spring comes after fifteen minutes.

And at last the sky pales, although the sun isn’t over the horizon, and going out begins to seem less arduous than staying in. There are two possibilities: swimming or the zoo. The underground car park is heated, and I fire up the heated seats and the warm air before we leave the building, so although there’s a foot of greying snow on the ground, making gritty fortifications along the pavement where it’s been shovelled off