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

they were on the floor in a cubicle with a toilet. It had a very heavy iron door, and as the boat rocked she was trying to keep the door open to keep her children warm, because there was some heat coming from all the people and the children weren’t really dressed. But the waves got bigger, and then one time she couldn’t keep it open and it slammed on the finger of her two-year-old and snapped the top right off his finger. My grandfather tried to wrap something around the finger, to stop the bleeding. The child was screaming and screaming, so my grandfather mashed up some painkiller and gave it to him in a drink. The kid drank it and went out, unconscious. So my grandfather was a little bit worried and he called up a doctor, on the radio, and the doctor said, no, it’s OK, it’s better the child sleeps through this. So that’s one of the things he remembers best, trying to bandage this small finger and then the child going out like that. It was rough, a very rough trip.’

Theódór nods, rests his hand on Margrét’s shoulder and tells his grandson some more of the story. ‘And then after that week, after those six trips to take everyone’s possessions, the captain said it was time to go out fishing again. So he was away for the next month after that, fishing and in and out of harbours all over the place to unload the fish. And then towards the end of the month they had unloaded at Grindavik, and although the weather was getting bad the captain wanted to go out again. So they went out again, but the storm grew and the ship stranded and broke up on the shore. That was the twenty-second of February, and it had come into harbour at Heimaey on the twenty-second of January.’

Margrét breaks in, contradicting something, and they all laugh. Theódór replies soothingly, reminding me again of my grandfather, who grew in calm in direct relation to my grandmother’s fluster, as if there were a limited amount of anxiety in the house and she had hoarded it all. Margrét shakes her head and pours more coffee and then Teddi translates. As everyone squashed onto the boat in the early hours of 23rd January, Theódór went back to the house. ‘Even though they hadn’t taken anything with them, he went back for his gun and his stamp collection. And my mother got really mad at him, wanted to know what he wanted the gun for.’ Across the table, Theódór sips, twinkles, shrugs. His gun, he wanted it. ‘And of course he took almost all his things, his clothes and his gun and his stamp collection, with him afterwards, to the fishing. But when the ship stranded, there was no chance to take anything, so he went to his cabin and put the gun and the collection into a special bag, a waterproof bag that they have for such times. And the cabin had used to belong to a man who had passed away, so as he left, as the ship broke up, he asked that man to take care of the bag for him and promised to come back and get it. And then he went out from the ship. Most of the men lost everything they had during that stranding, but my grandfather managed to get back to the wreck a few days later. He went to his cabin, and everything was completely upside down. The gun was bent and broken. But the stamp collection was in the bag, hanging on a hook, and the stamps were fine. Dry.’

Theódór still has the stamps, not here in the city but safe in his house on Heimaey.

‘So you lost everything?’ I ask. ‘Between the volcano and the shipwreck?’

Theódór nods, pats his wife’s hand. ‘A lot was destroyed.’

I wonder if I am beginning to understand why Icelanders seem unperturbed by economic collapse, the swine flu epidemic which has swept Europe over the winter and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. Amalia Lindal’s theory about fishing makes more sense after talking to Theódór. Fishing means that all plans and livelihoods are always dependent on the whims of North Atlantic wind and weather, and the alternative is farming on land that explodes from time to time. A limited sense of both responsibility and agency could be the only way of remaining sane in such a place; you can’t live in Iceland without discovering the limits of human power, and it’s not intelligent to try to take responsibility for what you can’t control.

‘Four hundred houses were destroyed,’ says Theódór. ‘And another three hundred filled up and covered over with ash. Two million tonnes of ash and seven million tonnes of lava went over the town. And then we had to clean it up. They took the ash away to the north, to make a new runway.’

‘What was it like while you were waiting to go back?’ I ask. I can imagine the night voyage, the emigrant ship making its way into harbour. But those months of limbo, watching television to see if your house is still there, if you’ll ever be able to go home . . .

‘We were one of the first families to go back–’ says Theódór.

Margrét interrupts, listing families who returned before them.

‘I said one of the first,’ protests Theódór. ‘We were among the first. Because our children were not happy at school in Keflavík. The people there were not glad to have families from the Westman Islands among them.’

Margrét speaks, telling something painful. Teddi translates. ‘The children got picked on while we stayed in Keflavík. Because the kids there had heard their parents saying that the people from the Westman Islands who were losing their houses and their livelihoods were going to get compensation, so they’d be rich. So the children were bullied and they really didn’t want to go to school there.’ I meet Teddi’s eyes. He knows about