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

decorations framed on the wall. I claim my foreigner’s licence not to care; I’m here for Vilborg.) Moving around this Hansel-and-Gretel house poses problems for someone who needs a stick to walk, but they’re problems Vilborg solved long ago, albeit in ways alarming to the beholder. She swings a little down the stairs, backs through narrow doorways. The paint on the walls shows where things used to stand. Old wiring loops across the ceilings, taking light to the right places for reading. The furniture shows where people’s heads have rested and legs stretched out, and books crowd walls and sideboards and cupboards. It’s probably the oldest decor I’ve seen in Iceland, and it makes me homesick, not exactly for our house but for the clutter of households of books and pictures in grimy frames and mis-matched plates acquired or inherited three at a time and chairs that no-one in living memory has chosen to buy.

We return to the sitting room and settle down, me on the sofa and Vilborg in an armchair, surrounded by books. Coffee and biscuits, and there are footsteps on the stairs. My grandson, says Vilborg. He’s studying for his exams. At the university.

He comes in, takes a cup. I’m here to visit Vilborg, I say. Oh, he says, are you a poet? No, I say apologetically, only a novelist.

My son is in America, Vilborg explains. He used to run the genome project here in Reykjavík but then they cut the funding and now he is in Berkeley, California. (The Icelandic Human Genome Project lives in the black glass building, curved and shiny as a lake in the dark, that overshadows Alvar Aalto’s Nordic House on the marsh in front of the university. They have the DNA of every Icelander and are thus able to conduct research impossible in countries with more sensitivity to issues of privacy and data protection.) So my grandson is living here with me while he takes his examinations.

I am confused by the grandson’s name; he was introduced under one name but is referred to as someone quite different.

Ah yes, says Vilborg, our names are not easy for foreigners. No, I tell her. Your nicknaming makes it impossible to know whose essay I’m marking. Someone I’ve known for six months as ‘Disa’ turns out to be ‘Hrafnhildur Auður’ in writing. The bloke whose essays say ‘Steingrimur’ has always been called what sounds like ‘Tinni’ in my hearing. (Later, I learn that this is because it’s the custom to name babies at around six months. Naturally, you have to call them something in the meantime, and equally naturally, what you call them in the meantime tends to stick. Babies, in my experience, get called some pretty daft things in the first six months, even when they have perfectly serviceable names registered at birth.)

Vilborg laughs. It’s good when Vilborg laughs.

‘My son was called Goggur! Everyone calls him that.’

‘He’s named after a cat, isn’t he?’ asks Goggur’s son, as if he hasn’t heard the story dozens of times before.

‘He was like a cat,’ agrees Vilborg. ‘He was born two months too early and he was just like a little cat. Or a chicken. It’s a very common name for a rooster, you know, Goggur.’

Are there common names for roosters in English?

‘But there was a cat,’ Goggur’s son reminds her. ‘A special cat that survived an avalanche.’

‘He was just like a wild animal,’ says Vilborg. ‘He used to roam from one house to another and then he went up into the rocks and he was living there and we were all afraid of it.’

Her English is clear, slightly careful, the kind of thing one might have learnt from the BBC in the 1950s, but the plosive consonants carry Icelandic weight. Uppp. Ittt. You could write a musical score for her sentences.

‘When Goggur was a kitten, there came an avalanche on the house. The people left in time and the house was carried away, leaving just a corner of the wall with a window, and there sat the kitten. And because of that, even when he was coming down from the mountain and stealing food, nobody wanted to kill Goggur. He was a giant. Somehow, he was holy. Once, my brothers had been hunting – everybody went hunting then, in Seyðisfjörður – for birds for our suppers. You have to wait before you take the feathers off, so they left the birds outside and came in for coffee. And when they came out, the birds were all spoiled and the biggest one was gone, because Goggur had been! And my brother said I’ll take the gun and shoot that bastard but he never did, no-one did, because it was holy, that tomcat. I think the last time he was seen he was twenty years old. More coffee?’

‘Tell me more,’ I say greedily. ‘Tell me what it was like. No-one’s been able to tell me about those years.’

So she does. I go back to her house two more times, leaving on each occasion full of stories, sated with an eye-witness account of Iceland through the second half of the twentieth century. Vilborg’s memories stretch from childhood on a small-holding in pre-war Seyðisfjörður to staying with Aria Ben Gurion in Israel in the 1970s and with a women’s group in Palestine ten years later. She refers to a friend in Prague, a professor who disliked cooking and lived in a flat so small that even the oven was full of books, to a distinguished lawyer, an elderly Polish Jewish refugee, who befriended her and took her out to dinner when she was a poor student in Edinburgh in the 1950s. Vilborg talks in arcs, swooping to Israel, finishing the story about childcare on the kibbutz and reminding herself of the time her little brother nearly died in the care of the village doctor, going off to find a photo of the doctor’s now deserted house and explaining why so many coastal villages were abandoned when Route 1 came through and