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

can buy second-hand goods, but the same network that produced the right apartment in the right place will, given time and patience, produce white goods. Thank you, I say again. Thank you.

I am grateful, but I am also uncomfortable with my gratitude. People we have not known long have given us a great deal of time and effort as well as material objects, and I have no way of reciprocating. Don’t worry, says Matthew, as we pace the sculpture garden near his flat, following the children who are hiding in bushes. You’ll have a chance sometime. That’s how it works here: you tell people you’re looking for a car and someone’s uncle’s girlfriend is moving to America so she sells it to you at a good price, and then maybe she needs someone who lives nearby to keep an eye on her apartment while she’s gone. Or you help your second cousin move house and next year he gives your daughter a summer job. (Or a bank loan, I wonder, or a stake in the public utility he’s just decided to sell off?) That’s OK, I say, if you live here and it’s your family, but none of you owes us anything. We’ve all moved here ourselves, he says. You’re right, usually it’s your extended family who looks after you, but Hulda Kristín and Pétur and I all know what it’s like when you land here and you’re a foreigner and you haven’t got anyone. You can’t do anything here without a clan, not without spending insane amounts of money. So we’ll help you and, don’t worry, sometime you’ll be able to do something for us.

Foreigner, I think. Foreigner, útlendingur. Ausländer. I have joined the Faculty of Foreign Languages. British people of my generation don’t use that word, certainly not as casually as Icelanders. ‘Foreigner’ is a word I associate with the Daily Mail and the British National Party, a term used only by people who understand the world in binary terms of Us and Them. It jars every time I hear someone educated and intelligent say the word here, but people do it all the time. I won’t, I think, however long we stay I won’t inhabit that mindset, I won’t define myself or anyone else as a foreigner. (It’s not ‘that mindset’, Pétur says. ‘That mindset’ is English, imperial, colonial, nothing to do with Iceland. But it takes me months, blinded by my own foreign-ness and by my unexamined sense that the British own English, to understand what he’s telling me: that although almost every Icelander speaks English, it’s not the same language as my native tongue; that ‘foreigner’ may not always mean in Icelandic English what it would mean at home.) Matthew says that he has heard Icelanders refer to English as útlenska, ‘foreignese’, the language of foreigners. Hulda Kristín told me that the property developer required some reassurance about letting his apartment to foreigners. It’s understandable, she adds, there were no drugs in Iceland until the immigrants started to come a few years ago, and you hear some terrible things.

So we begin to settle. The Icelandic school holiday lasts three months in the summer, long enough to go back to the farm and get the harvest in, and Reykjavík in July is like Paris in August: empty of locals, small businesses closed, only tourists moving slowly down the main streets. It’s not time to start our real Icelandic lives yet – we’re still tourists too – but we have a base now. I can take the bus to the city and work in the library when I need to, and meanwhile Anthony can walk with the children to our local pool, or to the swings on the headland along the coast path, or to the beach at the end of the road. We eat fish, which is much cheaper than at home and invariably, even from the cheapest supermarkets where the fruit and vegetables lie in mouldering heaps, perfectly fresh. Pétur tells me that when he first came to Iceland, many of his friends had a fisherman in the family and were supplied by obligation, not for cash. We learn that sticking to greenhouse-grown, Icelandic vegetables and salad is a guarantee of quality as well as being cheaper than imports (also a new situation, Matthew says; it was only during the boom, when wealthy Icelandic travellers started to demand rocket and red peppers instead of turnips and swedes, that Icelandic farmers began to grow salad leaves and greens). Icelandic lamb, we find, is a different beast from its small, fatty English cousin. The meat is like game, dense and with a flavour reminiscent of the turf growing in the sun outside. Icelandic potatoes descended from a particular strain in the nineteenth century, and are sweeter and firmer than English ones. I understand for the first time why the earliest English potato recipes are for custard tarts and puddings. So we eat simply, and notice the basics: fish and potatoes, or lamb and potatoes, with Icelandic salad, and barley flatbreads, flatkökur, with Icelandic cheese, most of which comes in yellow bricks labelled ‘kase’, ‘cheese’, and tastes like a very mild Gouda. Icelanders don’t eat much fruit, says Hulda Kristín, but if you want it, buy frozen, and we find five kilogramme sacks of frozen Polish berries and bring them home stuffed under the pushchair. We try not to think about Kentish fruit, and it doesn’t occur to us to think about what we’ll do for fresh food in winter. Pétur, who has been here forty years, no longer notices what I consider to be the fruit and vegetable problem, even though his wife is vegetarian. I bought a book about Icelandic cuisine when we came in May, and then, hopefully, a book by a Norwegian chef which I thought might help me to do intelligent and authentic things with Icelandic ingredients. The Norwegian book has an excellent pancake recipe, but is otherwise full of bright suggestions for