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

have included sequences of images of homeless women and hospice patients in the Netherlands, but he’s finding this uncomfortable, going up to his own people in his own city and asking them to give me their shameful tales. I watch him square his shoulders to approach a couple standing with their arms wrapped around each other, perhaps because their padded coats are flimsy and threadbare. They are both in their fifties, she with dyed hair, make-up, handbag and jewellery that even I can see are cheap imitations of the Russian mafia bride look that prevails among mothers at the International School, he with a two-day shadow and smoker’s skin in a cracked fake-leather jacket and baseball cap. She used to own a business, she tells Einar, until she had an accident and couldn’t work. He used to earn too, not a lot but enough, until he got sick. They try to keep their spirits up, but there are debts left from the business and yes, if they didn’t come here they would be starving. Before they came here they were hungry most days. They’ve looked into taking some courses – English, maybe, or Computer Studies (the two tickets out, I think) – but you had to pay and they can’t. No, they don’t see things changing any time soon, but you have to have hope, don’t you, or you’d really have nothing left. Einar rests his hand on the woman’s arm and thanks them, but round the corner, out of sight, his body stiffens. This isn’t Iceland, he says; this isn’t my country. We thought we were the best country in the world and everyone was happy. There’s no such place, I tell him. The poor are always with us.

Without discussing it, we leave the queue and go back to the store-room to talk to the staff. Round the back, one man is chucking cardboard boxes to another, who is breaking them up for recycling. I manage not to ask for one for the kids, who played for months with our removal cartons. It’s still cold but the sun has come out, and over the roar of traffic on the ring road I can hear the little planes leaving for Greenland. Right, I think, ask the real question.

‘I noticed when you showed me the names,’ I begin. ‘There are lots of foreigners, aren’t there?’

He breaks a box over his knee. He’s wearing scuffed jeans and a T-shirt with a bomber jacket open over it. ‘Yup.’

‘Do you notice differences in the way they relate to the charity?’

‘Yeah.’

Another box. We’re watching him work.

‘Tell me about it.’

He throws the box onto the heap.

‘Most of the foreigners that come are from Poland and the Baltic countries, where they are obviously used to establishments like these, so they consider it their right to come here and get whatever they want. They’re really aggressive, they won’t say thank you.’ He breaks another box. ‘It’s frustrating when you’re trying to do something like this. Everyone here is a volunteer, and they won’t even say thank you when they walk out the door. They argue with us, they’re pissed off when they think they don’t get enough food. Sometimes when we’re getting close to closing time we run out of something and the foreigners come and argue with us, basically just being very boring.’

I shift my feet. He breaks another box.

‘Why is that, do you think?’

‘No idea. Must be a cultural difference.’

‘Do they have a different approach to queuing?’ asks Einar, dangerously.

‘Yes they do. We’ve been trying different approaches. At the beginning, we just got people to line up outside and then one of us came out and distributed tickets with numbers on them, and then they could leave and come back in an hour or whenever their number would be called.’ Because, I think, the shame of simply waiting your turn is even greater than the shame of needing a food parcel. Because in Iceland it’s not decent to expect people to wait in line. ‘But after a couple of weeks we found that one guy from Poland was turning up at the front, and the line would form behind him, but just before we handed out the tickets a whole bunch of foreigners would come and join the man at the front, fifty people or more. So the person who’d been second in the queue until then would be number sixty or whatever. So we gave up that system. I tried a few different versions, but the one we’ve got now seems to be working.’

‘Just one queue for everyone?’ I suggest.

‘Yep. Just one queue. You show up, you wait your turn, and you walk straight through. It works much better. I tried to divide the queue between the computers, so people could register quicker, but the foreigners just ignore me, go where they want, walk right over my toes.’

‘Is that because they don’t understand the system?’ I’m wondering how many people’s toes I’ve walked right over in the last ten months.

‘I don’t know. They can see that I’m directing the lines and they completely ignore it. It’s so dumb.’

‘Well, it’s your system,’ I say.

‘Yes.’ He chucks the last box. ‘No matter how dumb they are, it’s my rules.’

Einar and I sit in his car. He’s staring out of the window, keys still in his hand. I’m shocked by his shock, struggling to understand why Iceland should imagine itself exempt from the economic inequality that characterises every other capitalist society. We all knew, I thought, we all accepted a deal, that there is poverty for some and wealth for others.

‘Not in Iceland,’ says Einar, his gaze still locked on the sky over Perlan. ‘Not in my country. I had never imagined, it had never crossed my mind, that there were hungry families in Iceland. Not people needing help from strangers.’

I remember all the hungry families in Hallðór Laxness’s fiction, and the pride taken in a sparse diet by later writers. Hunger seems as foreign to Einar