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

with the papers full of tales of financial ruin and woe. Unemployment is up, to nearly ten per cent, houses are being repossessed, small businesses are in trouble. Some schools have started giving the children free porridge when they arrive, in the belief that their parents can’t afford to feed them. I read about poverty, but I can’t see it. My students are facing the three-month vacation which is not covered by their subsistence loans because Icelandic students and even school-children have always had summer jobs, helping with the harvest until recently and now in a state-funded programme maintaining community gardens and litter-picking, things that need doing only during the summer because for the other nine months of the year Icelanders don’t spend time outside. And working in tourism, where they are much in demand because they are multilingual. But this year, all those jobs have been taken by people who have lost their real jobs. The students can’t get unemployment benefit because they’re students, and so have no means of support. There are rumours of people torching their own cars because they can’t afford the loan repayments any more, substantiated by both of the Icelandic insurance companies who have begun to treat all fires as suspicious. Most of the migrant labourers whose work fuelled the building boom have gone home, causing a significant drop in Iceland’s tiny population, and there is also a steep rise in the number of young Icelandic families leaving, mostly for Norway. I don’t doubt the existence of the kreppa. I’m probably not seeing it because I don’t know where to look, maybe because I don’t know how to read what I can see, but in any case I would like to find it. We have less than a month left; I’m running out of time.

There was an article in the Iceland Review a few weeks ago, reporting that ‘the charity Fjölskylduhjálp Íslands (Icelandic Family Aid), which distributes food packages to those who cannot afford groceries, has begun prioritising native Icelanders above Icelandic residents of foreign origin.’ MPs, including the Minister for Social Affairs, have expressed their revulsion. I would like to know more: this sounds like an unusually explicit articulation of Icelandic racism, coupled with a more concrete kreppa story than most. Food packages? In Iceland? I poke around on the internet and discover that my favourite Icelandic bloggers have already tried to investigate this story and been told that the charity does not speak to foreigners (‘foreigners’ in this case including ‘Icelanders who blog in foreign languages’), which seems to confirm the director’s xenophobia, but also constitutes a dead end as far as I’m concerned. Given my customary inability to make unusual requests of Icelanders because I feel stupid and foreign and as if I have no right to be making a nuisance of myself, I cannot possibly phone a woman who does not speak English and is known to avoid foreigners in order to prove a perfectly reliable report. Stalemate.

Then I mention my interest in this story to Einar, who is taking a couple of my classes, writing a polished prose in his fourth language. Einar is a photographer, who left Iceland at twenty to train in Copenhagen, and then made a freelance career in Amsterdam. He planned to stay in Amsterdam, he says. He had an apartment and was gradually moving all his stuff to the Netherlands, an extra suitcase every time he came home. His career was going well. And then one day everything changed. That was it. It was time to come home. Why, I ask him, how did you know? He shrugs. He just did. Nothing happened, it was just time to go home. He sold what he couldn’t carry and returned to Reykjavík, where he still takes photographs, some of which become postcards and calendars for tourists, and is taking a second BA in English. He’s also a jazz musician. Sometimes the trombone comes to class too, and I like having it there, lolling at the back, as I like having another student’s new baby, who sleeps through discussions of Wordsworth in a way Wordsworth would have enjoyed. Einar knows everyone, has photographed everything. I’ll talk to the manager, he says. Leave it to me.

I haven’t yet learnt the extent of Einar’s powers and am therefore surprised when he calls me a few days later to say that he has arranged for us to visit Fjölskylduhjálp Íslands’ headquarters next Wednesday, when the week’s food parcels are being distributed, and furthermore that the director has instructed everyone to show me everything and answer all my questions without reserve. How did you do that, I ask, and Einar shrugs and smiles, blue-eyed. I just asked her, he says.

Einar comes with me, to translate Icelandic and to translate Icelanders. He collects me from work in his car and drives, more like a Dutch person than an Icelander, across town. I understand, now, why there is sometimes a huddle of people on the embankment above the dual carriageway when I pass on the bus home. They’re waiting for food parcels. Usually Icelanders don’t queue, don’t stand around in groups. Even at bus stops, people position themselves as far apart as possible, one behind the shelter, one a few metres along the road, another the other way, as if they’ve all been dropped from a height. When the bus comes, everyone saunters towards it, not acknowledging either each other or the fact that the bus driver has the power in this situation, and boards in order of arrival at the doors. I’ve never seen people congregating outside, not even teenagers on summer evenings.

There is a queue already when we arrive, although the doors won’t open for nearly an hour. Einar finds Ásgerður Jona, the director, and introduces us. You are welcome, she says, looking me in the eye. Come. Ásgerður Jona takes us into a large room like a village hall, with a lino floor and high windows. Tables are arranged in