The Promise of Iceland

by Kári Gíslason

  Then, I would retrace the path back to Bergur and Rut’s for dinner and a beer in their open, bright living room. I walked along the sea path to their home, where my bedroom faced out to Skerjafjörður and Álftanes, where the president’s lodge, Bessastaðir, stood out against the backdrop of the volcanic range. It was a symbol of lawfulness and national unity, and it was also a farm. Little wonder Gísli wanted to meet me there on my last visit; for him it stood for a rural aristocracy of which my family on his side had once formed a part. It was above all beautiful, and I loved to watch it glow in the afternoon light.

  I also found myself wanting an alternative symbol. The office of president, after all, was such a recent invention, a role that had come only in the twentieth century. This was a country of stories much older than that.

  In the living room, I would sit and meditate on a landscape painting that hung on Rut and Bergur’s back wall. It was a study of Thingvellir, the national park near Reykjavík, by the Icelandic expressionist Johannes Kjarval. The perspective he’d adopted was along the ground, along the coloured rocks and the mosses, the berries and small flowers; a close and intimate point of view that told you that he loved the place he was painting, because he was so amongst it. The famous Thingvellir Lake and the bluffs around it are left aside for a moment, given over for the spaces between the rocks, where the minute life of damp, sheltered coves takes over.

  I had met Thingvellir dozens of times in the sagas, but couldn’t remember ever having gone there. It was the site of the first parliament, established in 930. It was also where the country adopted Christianity in 1000. And, in the thirteenth century, during the crisis years leading to Iceland’s loss of independence, it was the place where it became obvious that the idea of an Icelandic nation was in disarray—the victim of a century of internal fights between the most powerful families. Thingvellir wouldn’t fully re-emerge as a national ideal until the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century, when sovereignty began to be reclaimed.

  It was an impressive and deeply symbolic history, but Thingvellir existed within a geology that spoke to you more profoundly than even human history could. In a series of deep rifts, Thingvellir revealed the meeting of the American and European continental plates, and the park surrounded a lake that had sunk during the area’s seismic shifts. In a way, you could say that geology and history were at odds here—a breach in the earth’s crust had become the symbol of national unity—yet, the result seemed inspiring rather than confusing.

  I spent so much time sitting in front of Bergur and Rut’s painting that, when I eventually got to visit the site with them, I found myself adopting Kjarval’s point of view almost entirely. I wanted to walk among the crevices, the sheltered areas where travellers built their temporary booths and where people like Gunnar and Hallgerð might have met for the first time, and fallen in love. This was where she had asked him about his travels, and somewhere among the rifts he had asked her to sit down with him for their talk about court life in Norway.

  Over the course of a very long day trip, we travelled to the area with the Canadian family who was also staying with Bergur and Rut. They were West Icelanders, a term given to the Canadian descendants of those who’d left Iceland in the nineteenth century. Our group filled two four-wheel drives, with Bergur taking me and the teenagers, whose optimistic parents told them to listen to us talk about the sagas, while in the other truck Rut travelled with the grandmother Mildred, her friend from a distant childhood year in Canada, Mildred’s daughter, Carol, and son-in-law, Ralph.

  Bergur, like me, wasn’t going to launch into saga summaries if he thought that the two in the back were listening out of good-willed politeness. That seemed cruel. Instead, we offered them the front seat, and they took it in turns to sit with Bergur and guide us through their impressions. They noticed the small horses and the luxuries of life. Everyone, they said, dressed well, and everyone drove nice cars. It seemed such a rich country.

  Bergur laughed. It was true, he said, Icelanders were rich. Now. But their comments took him back to the relative austerity of his youth, and of course its greater glamour. It seemed he had danced, fished, or been drunk at every farm in the southwest. His favourite horse used to walk him home. Once, during a storm, he got locked out of the fishing hut and his friends were too drunk to wake up to let him in.

  ‘I nearly died that night,’ he said with horror.

  More pleasing, though, was that as the day went on these recollections came to mingle with history, despite our good intentions of sparing the young from saga stories. Eventually I found myself being tested on the minor characters who’d lived at this or that farm. Bergur knew them all, because they were connected at some level to his own youthful misadventures, and to a sense of this countryside as the custodian of the past: his and Iceland’s—the two weren’t entirely separable. When he pointed out saga sites, the car lurched towards them, following the line of his distracted hands. We, too, nearly became part of the landscape.

  At Thingvellir, Bergur and Rut, practiced in the art of the golden circle, a triangle of tourist traps near Reykjavík, left us at the top of the path and met us at the bottom. As we walked down, we looked for the outlines of the booths that had once populated the grass ledges. In among the thick clumps of summer grass, we found their nineteenth-century replicas. As with the Kjarval painting, history was best located at ground level.

  We left Thingvellir for the road at the other side of the lake, bound for Laugarvatn, a small village with a school and surroundings of low woodlands and summerhouses—what the locals called a sumarhúsasvæði or ‘summerhouse district’. We stopped for a swim in the school’s training pool and then joined the busier road to Selfoss until we were at the turn-off for the wide valley of Thórsmörk. The glacier, Eyjafjallajökull, which all day had been an island of white light drawing us southwards, suddenly loomed above us, dirty and grey.

  In a ruinous area of debris and broken ice, we met a line-up of cars waiting to ford a deep river. A small conference was in progress next to a bus fortified with enormous tyres and protection for the windows; the owners of the smaller vehicles were asking the bus driver for advice. Bergur went ahead to eavesdrop, and watched with a frown when the bus driver drew an S-shape through the air, the best route to take.

  Mildred was telling us she was feeling the heat, and Ralph, who was driving their car, was not at ease with the idea of driving through the water. But Bergur had done it all before.

  ‘Well,’ Bergur asked, ‘tell me, Ralph, do you have any experience driving across rivers?’

  ‘Oh no, nothing to speak of. You think it’ll be okay?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m sure. It’s not at all difficult. Of course, there are a few things you have to think about.’ He took a moment to gather his thoughts together. ‘Quite often, the rocks underneath the truck will slip. This can upset the truck’s hold and make it more likely to tip.’

  ‘Gosh.’

  ‘Naturally, once the truck is off-balance, it’ll be carried by the current. It’s hard to know what to do when that happens. The truck may just get out, or you might just end up in the next underground lake.’ This, I sensed, was a joke. ‘Be especially careful about braking. And you’ll find gear changes tricky. Don’t let the speed of the current worry you. Take the crossing very slowly, and if you feel you’re slipping, don’t jerk the truck.’ And with that Bergur got into his truck to move on.

  The bus crossed first and two other four-wheel drives in front of us followed its trail of silver water, and then Bergur crunched his gears. We slipped and shuddered, and then crossed rather gently over the face of the smooth rocks beneath us. Bergur didn’t check to see if the others had made it, having already resumed his story about milk deliveries in the pre-war years, but I turned around in time to see the rigid face of our Canadian telecommunications expert, who felt he had been thrown into a fight with a glacier, re-emerge with a smil
e.

  Low clouds had gathered around the mountains when we came into Thórsmörk, so it was like we were entering a vast hall. A short walk would take us up to its ceiling, but Bergur and Mildred waited below. Mildred had at least discovered the source of all that heat, the car’s bum warmer had been left on.

  ‘It wasn’t me, after all,’ she said with relief. But she felt she was too old to make the trek. Bergur, for his part, said that he hadn’t come all this way just to enjoy himself, and once again feigned a despair that had accompanied his humour of suffering and self-sacrifice since Mum had first met him thirty years before.

  The summit was only half-an-hour’s climb away, but even that brief ascent allowed us entry onto a roof of dark rocks covered in a crystal spray from the afternoon showers that had followed us into the valley. When we got back down, Bergur declared, ‘The next stop is for us, Kári: Hlíðarendi.’ Apparently, it wasn’t that far away. We took the road inland to the other side of Markarfljót, a wide floor of glacial stones and streams. Out of it emerged the slopes of Hlíðarendi, the ones that had so moved Gunnar a thousand years before.

  They were as fair and golden as the saga had promised, and I had to catch my breath at the sight of them. It was our last stop of the day, and although we had encountered some of the most beautiful landscapes of the south, I felt that it was only now, with the old stories as companions, that we truly saw Iceland. Stories made the landscape real, and added to the poet’s light an energy that was as palpable to me as the energy that lay beneath the hot springs of the valley we had just left.

  Ralph and I walked past the modern farm and a small church close by. Gunnar’s farm, Bergur had told us, must have lain a little further up. As we reached the flat spot that Bergur thought was a possible site for it, Ralph and I sat down on a large stone and watched the others milling around the church below. In an adjoining field, a farmer and his daughter jumped a fence and walked even further up the slope. They were followed by a bounding dog that had found its own, rather long way around the fence. The clouds cleared over Eyjafjallajökull, revealing it as a white coat of snow.

  As we sat looking out over the landscape, Ralph asked me about the story behind the place. I stressed Gunnar’s sudden conviction to stay in Iceland, and how Gunnar’s decision to stay had disappointed his closest friend, Njál, and his brother, Kolskeg, but had delighted his wife Hallgerð.

  ‘But you’re on his side, right?’ asked Ralph. ‘You think he did the right thing staying?’

  ‘Oh, yes, definitely. Njál was a lawyer. His was a lawyer’s advice.’

  ‘But it would have saved his life.’

  ‘The good thing about being a Viking,’ I replied, ‘was the afterlife. Gunnar was buried in a mound nearby. But he wouldn’t sit still. He bothered the district for ages.’

  ‘We don’t get that option anymore, do we?’ said Ralph.

  I wasn’t so sure. I rather hoped we did—wasn’t that why I was here again, to see if I could have another go at bothering the district?

  13

  FAMILY NAMES

  ‘So you’re little Kári,’ said my namesake, big Kári. He’d just returned from his summer holidays, very brown and not all that pleased to be back.

  ‘You’re not so little anymore,’ he went on to observe. We were in the kitchen. I was cooking an omelette for dinner, and he stood close to the pan.

  ‘Has my father been boring you with his stories, yet?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, relentlessly,’ I replied. ‘But I’m a very willing victim.’

  ‘Just don’t mention the sagas. And please don’t listen to any more of his stories. He won’t stop if you do.’ Kári took out a ladle and began to stir my omelette.

  ‘I’ll take you for a drive. There’s more to Iceland than where Begur Jónsson first milked a cow.’ He suggested a second trip to Thingvellir, probably towards the end of the week, when he’d have caught up with his backlog of tasks at the family company Skórinn, where he worked with Bergur and, presumably, had heard many stories about the old days on the farms.

  It would be the first of many drives that the two of us would take there and, even now, more than ten years on, whenever I am in Iceland we drive there together. With each trip I become more addicted to the place, and more familiar with the smaller spaces that open up alongside the major faults in the earth. On that visit in 1999, I began to think I understood why the settlers had chosen it as their first parliament. It was a liberating landscape, but also sheltered. You walked from the windless bends of the river up to the top of the ridge, where the view expanded to take in the lake and a wide stadium of mountains. The combination of intimate, damp groves and wide, geological expanses created calmness, at least in me.

  In a strange sort of way, it was the same at Bergur and Rut’s. Their house was a collection of very intimate rooms around the enormous living area upstairs, which looked over the sea. Maybe that’s what all great houses did, offered a contrast between closed and expansive space, and allowed the thoughts you had in each room to refine or expand the ones you had in others. But it was a first for me—I had never lived in a house big enough to have contrasts, moods.

  Bergur and Rut were happy to take me in, and in tipsier moments would speak of me as one of their own. But in gentle ways they also demanded that I contact my family. They asked me who my father was, and I told them. From then on, Rut would remind me, even pointing at the calendar to reiterate it, that another week in Iceland had passed without me being in touch with Gísli. Bergur, meanwhile, was discretely asking around about Gísli and his connections.

  ‘You must tell me when to stop,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to look into this any more than you want me to.’

  All I could think about was how lucky I was to be guided in this way. He didn’t know my father himself, but had heard of my family and its ancestral farm, Mýrarhús, or ‘Marsh House’. It was, he explained, a Reykjavík family with plenty of well-known descendants, including my Uncle Björn, who now lived and worked in Paris, and my Uncle Pétur, who had apparently been something of a character about town during his youth.

  ‘Of course, it doesn’t mean anything to be well-known in Reykjavík,’ Bergur added.

  Bergur and Rut said I should call Pétur. He would know my father’s situation better than we could discover from a distance, even in Reykjavík. I agreed and was, I could see, perilously close to actually doing something about it. But still I waited and waited. Rut would again remind me that the days were passing by, and Bergur told me again that he wouldn’t be able to find out much more on his own. And I really think that, if I had asked them, they would have made the phone call for me.

  At long last, in the first week of September, I picked up the phone and called Pétur. He said he wanted to see me straight away.

  ‘How long have you been in Iceland?’ he asked.

  ‘Just over a month.’

  ‘And you haven’t called until now!’

  ‘Yes, I know, but I’ve been very busy at the university.’

  ‘But we are family, Kári. You must always call your family when you first arrive.’

  I offered my work as an excuse, but I was perplexed. How on earth was I to know I could ring?

  Never mind, he’d said, telling me he’d meet me in an hour near the church at Seltjarnarnes. This worried me. Nine years on from meeting Gísli in the car yard, I wondered if I was in for another of those secret meetings.

  I left a note for Bergur and Rut on the kitchen bench, saying I was going out to see Pétur and might not be home for dinner. I’d never left a note for them before, and I don’t know what made me write one, then. I suppose I was apprehensive about meeting Pétur, afraid even of what might eventuate.

  The sun was shining and, as I had an hour to get there, I decided to walk. I followed the length of the bike path to rows of new apartment blocks,
where the atmosphere was suddenly suburban, with its typical emptiness of a weekday. There were few other pedestrians, and I must have been visible to Pétur for some time before I saw him. If I’d known that, I might have approached from the side, such were my nerves that afternoon.

  He was leaning against a railing at the top of a small hill near a church. He was smiling, calling me over. He threw out his arms and pulled me in for a long hug. It was forceful, and consisted in good part of bristles and his woollen jumper. But there was no doubting it. He was delighted to see me.

  ‘I could tell it was you,’ he yelled close to my ear. ‘You look just like us!’ He had a point. Before me, was another version of my dipping chin, puffy cheeks, slight mouth.

  ‘Don’t you like this weather?’ he asked. And, before I replied, ‘You don’t get good wind like this in Australia. This freshness! This is why you live in the North, Kári! Come on, let’s go and talk.’ He grabbed my shoulders and drew me towards the church. ‘My house is just over there, on your family’s old land. We’ll find a spot in the sun.’

  We left the road for a path that ran through plush lines of quiet homes, and then cut down to his street. Most of all, he seemed to want to show me his garden. So we spent quite some time looking at potatoes and other cold-weather vegetables. I didn’t mind, but I didn’t understand. It was as though I’d just seen him the summer before and he wanted to show me how the garden was coming along. Eventually, we settled down onto a thin, wooden bench.

  ‘We can take in the sun here,’ he said. ‘Better to be outside, don’t you think?’ Again, I wondered why. Didn’t he want me inside his house? I guess my thoughts reflected my preparedness for an offence of some kind.