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

was open, a chicken would fly into it, and so there was wire mesh over it. So you couldn’t put your hand through, and this apparatus, this brauðskeri, was too big to pass through. And my mother wanted to cut some bread, and the brauðskeri wasn’t there. Nobody had done anything with it, but it wasn’t there, and it wasn’t on the table, and it was not anywhere. And who should steal it? No-one knew particularly where it was, and anyone who did not own such a nice thing would own a knife. And my mother’s sister was what was called skyggn, she could see things that other people could not see, and she said to my mother, “Don’t worry, it comes back. I met a woman who lives in the rock in the next field, and she was holding it, she put her apron over it when she saw me, and she will give it back.” And the next day it was back in its place! And they believed it, my mother believed it, though what it is, I don’t know. Sometimes you don’t see things, and next time you look they are there, so all this about things disappearing does happen, it does! They were telling the truth as they saw it. They believed in ghosts also, the grown-ups did, and of course we had only candle-light and lanterns, we had very nice lanterns, and you had to put them all out at night. I often think about it; we would go to the doorstep and see if they were putting out the lights in this house or that, and of course you are not allowed to leave the light on when you go to sleep. That’s how my uncle died. He forgot to put the lantern out and the house burnt down and he died. That did happen, you had to be careful with lanterns and candles.’

‘We were of course quite many in each bed. The little boys had a bed, I was sleeping with my sister and my grandmother was in the room also, and she kept the light. So when she said goodnight and put the light out, everyone had to sleep. But I put a book under my pillow and when the moon came out, I did read it, although it was forbidden. The moon shone in the window, right at me, because we didn’t have curtains up there. There were curtains for the dining room and for my parents’ bedroom and for the kitchen window, my mother was very handy with her needle and she made everything. This village, you know, there is not a house there now. Everything, it’s all away. All gone.’

Vilborg offers me another biscuit, a slice of green pepper. I wasn’t expecting her to say that, although I know many of the coastal villages are now deserted, cut off by the roads instead of connected by the boats, the people sucked out to Reykjavík as if caught in a vortex. Listening to Vilborg is like reading, and I was seeing the page on her pillow by moonlight, hearing the sighs and rustles after her grandmother had blown out the lantern, imagining her mother with a lapful of heavy curtain material and the needle gleaming by firelight. It’s all away.

‘People believed in their dreams, too, and they would tell fortunes in a coffee cup.’ She picks up her cup, half-full of cold coffee. ‘You drink the coffee three times.’ She swallows what’s left in three gulps. ‘You turn it three times.’ She swirls the dregs around the cup. ‘You turn it over, like that, and let it dry. And then you read it. They were always doing that, at home. My mother was very keen on it, telling the cups. The neighbours did so. It was very common when I was a child.’

It must be another not-very-old Icelandic tradition. Surely people in the villages didn’t regularly have coffee until not long before Vilborg’s childhood? I think about the Atlantic journeys of early twentieth-century coffee beans.

‘Did you believe it?’ I ask.

‘My mother liked to do it. She knew everybody, and she knew what was going on beneath the surface, but she thought she saw it in the cups. She didn’t see the huldukonur, only her sister saw those, but she saw ghosts and such beings and she had dreams. My great-grandfather was also like that, it runs in families. People used to come and tell her what they needed to tell, and when there was trouble in a house it was my mother who would be called. She was always there if something bad was happening. Because life was hard, you know. By the time I was fifteen, three of my brothers and three of my sisters were dead. My sisters were fifteen and twenty and twenty-four, and they died within six months of tuberculosis. Two of my brothers died very young. One was two years old, it was the year I was born, 1930, he was ill and there was a doctor there but no medicines, nothing to help. And the other was in his first year and there was a bug that was going around and it affected his lungs. The doctor wasn’t sure, he didn’t know. My brother just got very ill and they didn’t – they didn’t do anything.’

Vilborg’s voice breaks for the first time, although she’s talked to me by now about her dead husband and her abandoned village and Iceland’s betrayal of Jewish refugees and her son’s emigration to California and the financial collapse of her country (though I’m beginning to understand that Icelanders older than I am have seen more than one previous collapse and resurrection). Vilborg’s pleasure in life, her appetite for new people and new stories and new journeys, isn’t because she has nothing to cry about.

‘And then my brother Jóhann drowned in 1946. There were twenty – twenty young sailors that day.’ She breaks off, swallows. ‘We lost so many men.’