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

not allowed to go to the Faroe Islands, and they asked, “Are we allowed to come?” Everyone heard that a trawler from Bremerhaven had come in, all the fishermen there, and everyone heard that the Germans were not fighting any more, they were back at sea. And everyone went to the quay and, oh, this was a rickety-rack ship, all in disorder, and full of youngsters, fine youngsters. And the women put on huge pots of meat soup and fed those men, and the men took the trawler and started to mend what needed to be mended so they could fish. And before they went off they all had a marvellous meal and new clothes and everyone stood to watch as they went off, because they were back, back at sea from Bremerhaven.’

The Nazis liked Iceland, or at least liked the idea of Iceland, an island of pure Nordic genes where Wagner’s gods hung out.

‘So the Germans felt more like friends than the Americans?’

‘Icelanders had always liked the Germans. And it was very painful when they went on being like that. But we didn’t have any Jews, we didn’t know anything about the Jews, there weren’t any Jews in Iceland. There were many in Denmark and King Christian the Tenth did everything he could to save the Jews when the Germans came.’ Vilborg puts her cup down and sits forward, almost takes my hand. ‘But, you, you are not British!’

And it’s back, something I haven’t thought about since I was an undergraduate. I am British. I have a British passport (and an American one, tucked away at the back of my sock-drawer, because when I was born my parents thought it was a good idea for a child with my parentage to have an escape route from Europe). I was born in Glasgow, grew up in Manchester, spent ten years in Oxford and five in Canterbury. These months in Iceland are the longest time I’ve spent outside the UK, although when I was a teenager I had a German friend and used to spend summers in Germany and people there, older people, sometimes told me I wasn’t British. Then they tried to apologise for the Holocaust, usually while we were all in the outdoor pool between the gardens in suburban Düsseldorf for an early morning swim, and I felt doubly fraudulent; not only had my father’s family left Europe early in the 1930s, but I’m not Jewish even by the lights of people who see Britishness and Jewishness as mutually exclusive. Judaism passes down the maternal line. As a student, I used to flirt with the idea of conversion, but more for the appeal of joining the club of over-achieving outsiders that was the student Jewish Society than because of any particular spiritual yearning.

‘My father’s Jewish,’ I say.

Vilborg laughs. ‘I did notice this. I noticed it as soon as I saw you. I am a Protestant and I was of course a communist, a Protestant communist, but I’ve been to Israel and I do like the Jews, wherever I’ve been I’ve had Jewish friends.’

‘I’m not really Jewish,’ I point out. ‘My mother’s not Jewish. And my father doesn’t practise. He eats bacon.’

‘But you need to have some customs,’ she reasons.

‘We went to church more often, actually. Christmas and Easter.’

‘Synagogue?’ she asks hopefully.

‘No,’ I say firmly. ‘Church.’

‘I think it’s the same God. Allah, Jahweh. Have you been often in Israel?’

‘Once. For two days. I didn’t like it.’

Then Vilborg tells me about her own trips to the Middle East, weeks spent touring kibbutzim and then on the other side, working with Palestinian writers. She remembers seeing children with tuberculosis in refugee camps, and reminds herself of her dead sisters. ‘We – I am part of a time when there was much tuberculosis in Iceland. We are the last ones. You see, my sisters, they were beautiful young women and they died all three of them in 1941. In some families all the young people died of tuberculosis. Now it’s gone. It’s all away now.’

She’s getting tired, I’m almost overwhelmed by stories. I have the same feeling as when I swim to the surface after hours in a novel, a change of element. We part affectionately, and I walk back into town towards the bus, thinking about Vilborg and about listening. Iceland has an oral culture much closer to the surface than in most of Europe. The sagas were told for centuries before they were written down. Impromptu poetry-making is an important part of after-dinner speeches and sometimes political protest; at formal dinners there is often an open mic where people compete to translate limericks from one language to another without losing the rhyme or scansion. Icelanders buy more books per capita than anywhere else in the world. Literary historians tend to see the written word replacing the spoken, books as an evolution of storytelling, but maybe in Iceland narrative is important in either form. Maybe, it occurs to me as I cross the harbour, where the sunlit slopes of Esja hang like a curtain behind the first of the year’s cruise ships, I shouldn’t turn Vilborg’s stories into writing.

11

The Hidden People

Pétur stops by my office for a chat. I planted some of the bulbs brought from home here, in an ice-cream tub that I’ve kept on the window-sill, turning it assiduously as the buds lean and harken to the pale sun. They bloomed, at last, narcissi like balled tissue paper and miniature daffodils a hesitant shade of yellow, and for a week my office with its bare walls and wipe-down lino floor breathed flowers as well as orange-peel and central heating. But the heavy heads have sickened, the petals are browning and fruit-flies have been issuing from the compost for the last few days. I don’t feel able to throw them away. It would be worse than ungrateful, perhaps hubristic, when it’s minus four outside and they have done what they are meant to do at home despite air