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

the waitress has just laid the tables for a Norwegian bus tour that will be stopping here for lunch and she doesn’t want us messing it up, so we take our drinks out onto the stairs and compare and contrast the rudeness of waitresses in Russia, Germany and France. We’re acting like tourists, like bad tourists, and it makes me feel good.

We drive on, the windscreen wipers marking time. We’re the only people going this way, winding through wide valleys with white, red-roofed farmhouses scattered along the rivers. The fields are a lifeless shade of yellow-green, grasses bowed by wind and rain. We pass barns, their red roofs darkened by rain, and horses hanging their heads in resignation. Two lines from Auden’s ‘Journey to Iceland’ murmur at the back of my mind: ‘A narrow bridge over a torrent,/ a small farm under a crag.’ I can’t remember the rest of the poem, or why it suddenly matters now. On. There are summer houses, and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to spend their summer surrounded by agricultural land with Borgarnes as the only source of amusement. I can’t, anyway, imagine how people pass the time, weeks and weeks of summer, in Icelandic summer houses, although many remote hillsides and valleys are sprinkled with wooden huts. There is an enduring distrust of the city here, despite the almost complete urban drift of the population over the last twenty years, a widespread instinct that real life is in the countryside that now has very few permanent inhabitants. Are we nearly there yet, I ask Alec. We have to pass the university, he says, the university of Bifröst, and after a while it appears on the hillside ahead, a set of low white buildings raked across the slope like a barracks or a prison. Imagine going to university there, I say. Like the tower block in Garðabær, the university has a Soviet air, as if a few blocks of downtown Minsk had appeared on an Icelandic mountainside. There’s no-one moving around, no cars, and we sweep past it and on, at last, to Hraunsnef, where two wooden watchtowers, like something out of a low-budget Dungeons and Dragons film, guard the track. I turn between them. There’s a new building to the left, with a patio and rain pouring off a striped awning over a barbecue, and a house that looks deserted on the right, lace curtains hanging askew and cracks across the pebble-dash walls. A Labrador comes bounding from the older building. Alec distracts it while I sidle out of the car, keeping Kathy between me and the dog, and after we’ve walked around the old house Brynja comes out of the new one. I understand immediately what Messíana meant about Brynja being more familiar than Þórunn; she’s dressed, like us, in jeans and a coat, but there’s something about her brisk walk and her smile that feels uncomplicated, as if, despite the elves, she’s just a busy woman working like the rest of us. The dog rushes, but Brynja catches it and makes it go away somewhere. She ushers us into the bar, which is so clean that our wet coats and shoes are an insult. The tablecloths hang in ninety degree folds, with second tablecloths making exact margins. The white-tiled floor shows no sign of having ever been touched, and there is a straight row of Icelandic chocolates across a white plate. Rain runs down the windows, and piped music plays. There are carpentry noises off; Brynja’s husband is hurrying to get the noisy work done during the day while the guests are out. Out where, I wonder, and doing what?

Brynja and her husband moved here from Reykjavík in 2004, she tells us. She used to be an occupational therapist and he was a car-salesman, working all hours, never home. They used to go on holiday and fantasise about running a hotel, and then one day they decided to do it. They offered on a place in Akureyri, near the ski-slopes, but then the vendor found a hot spring on the land and put the price up. They were upset about that, had had their future all set up. Then they looked to the east of Reykjavík, out past Hveragerði, where there are a lot of hotels, but then there was the earthquake and they were a bit worried about all the volcanoes round there, and then they found this place, just along from the university which gets a lot of visitors, and it’s close to the city and not particularly close to any volcanic activity. So they bought it, and moved, and that’s when they started to hear that there were a lot of elves on the property.

‘And at first we were like, yeah, there’s lots of elves everywhere. And then what happened was that my husband’s mind kept turning to these beings while he was working out there.’ She gestures up the hill, where we saw some low outbuildings. ‘His mind kept thinking about these things. And he thought he should do something about it, so he came in and told me, “Please call Erla. Ask her to come and tell us what we should do about this.” You know Erla?’ Brynja asks.

I nod. I haven’t met Erla, but everyone I’ve been asking about elves has mentioned her. Erla is the national elf expert, now abroad.

‘I asked Erla and she came at the end of August that year, and she told us that these gnomes who live round here are really after the publicity, they want the world to know about them, and that’s why my husband had such strong thoughts of them while he was working up there. And we thought that could be the beginning of something big. So my aunt helped us, we started to make a map of the property with drawings of all the elves and other creatures on it, so that people can get some sense of what Erla is seeing around