‘But we have the time to be busy,’ one said to me.
To my surprise I was becoming more and more involved in the pleasing busyness of rural life. Ingibjörg, I felt, was a little wrong about the place. I found myself robbed of my long-held preference for solitary pursuits by joining all of the group activities I could—volleyball, indoor soccer, walking groups, kayaking, and even the local music scene—half of which seemed to be organised by one of my students, Halldór. He and I did some gigs together at the town’s one and only café bar, Langi Mangi, and the miracle of my existence, as already reported in the local and national media, was confirmed again: a man who sings has moved to Ísafjörður, went the reports.
There was a lot of heavy drinking. Both the teachers and the students had a reputation for unruly behaviour on social nights. I found this a rather quaint idea, mainly because the students in Iceland struck me as too kind for wildness, until Ólína suspended seventy of them for drunkenness during the annual school camp. Apparently, their behaviour had been so crazed that the camp supervisor, fearing what the students would do to him if they had their way, locked himself in a cabin and wouldn’t come out until late the next morning.
The reaction of the townsfolk seemed on the side of the students. What did Ólína expect young people to do? What did she think students at the other schools did? It was a non-argument, but I wondered too whether we teachers were any better. Our social evenings all began with the same respectable dinner of lamb, potatoes and beans, and perhaps a little wine. It was the penance for what was to come: a descent into drunkenness and Icelandic pop songs as steady and unforgiving as the fall of the mountains. By midnight, we were singing our way through the unsteady streets of Ísafjörður to Langi Mangi café and still more Bubbi Morthens covers.
The students came back from their suspensions, not chastened but not embittered by the experience, either. They seemed to accept that this was how the school would be under Ólína, and that the old days of rural leniency were over. It’s just that they weren’t yet ready to change how they behaved. That there was more fighting to come was inevitable, and yet few of us, guessed that it would be a fight between the teachers that would define this year in the school’s life.
By October, the nights were becoming long but the fjord was at its most intensely clear. It became a landscape of sharp contrasts: the water, the brown cliffs, the snow, and the sky, as always pinched by a narrowing fjord. Excited by the arrival of snow, Olanda and I rode with hangovers along an old road, following it in the direction of where most of the snow had seemed to fall. Chasing one false summit after another, we finally gave up and settled on some flat, sheltered ground, and lay in the sun with a wide view of the fjord beneath us.
‘How long do you think you could live here?’ I asked.
‘We both wanted to come,’ replied Olanda. ‘I just need to get some work. I’ll go mad sitting at home all day.’
‘What would you be prepared to do?’
‘Just about anything now. I’ll ask at the fish factories.’
‘Please don’t do that.’
‘Why not? I could do it until the summer and then stop in time for the tourist season.’
‘But not the fish factory. What will I tell your parents, that I brought you all this way just so that you could gut fish?’
The school’s commemoration of the old, harsh life of fishing was the annual boat race between teachers and students, held each year on Sjómannadagur, or ‘Seaman’s Day’. The long rowing boats had once been used on the open waters of the North Atlantic, and they would race from the spit to an imagined finishing line near the school buildings.
A men’s and women’s team was organised; during evening practices in the lead-up to the big day, we called out across the water to each other. My male colleagues were full of rosy-cheeked confidence, but our gibes at the women’s team seemed defensive to me. Their boat looked much better in the water than ours. It was being run by Ólína, after all, whose stroke-counting cut through the evening air with a determination that our helmsman Jóhann noted with awe. She was every bit the magistrate’s daughter.
Siggi, Ólína’s husband, was the most experienced of our crew, and he assured us that the women had the better, lighter boat. And of course were lighter in it, too. In any case, he continued, where were the students? They were going to be our competition on the day, and they weren’t even practicing yet. It may have been years since the teachers had won, but the students’ complacency gave us a chance.
I wasn’t so sure. Jóhann’s stroke-counting only ever satisfied one person at a time, and our boat was so end-heavy that Siggi in the bow was raised a foot clear of the water. We spent much too long debating technique. The debate, rather than airing important issues, suggested that we didn’t actually have a technique. The question, ‘How do we start the race without stopping or going around in circles?’ marked a low point.
‘You stick the oar into the water as deep as possible and then take a great, long stroke,’ said Stefan, the German teacher.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Take short, sharp strokes and gradually extend to longer ones.’
‘No, no,’ said the others. ‘No more from the Australian, please.’
By race day, we were beginning to show the results of all of our training: we were rubbish. But perhaps this was the year, after all. The students still hadn’t trained, not even once. We cruised through the early rounds, and in the final, lined up against seven eighteen-year-olds, whose combined body weight was about the same as mine.
‘We need consistent rowing. Don’t worry too much about power. Technique is everything,’ Siggi said.
‘Well, we’ll never beat these guys on fitness,’ said Rúnar.
‘They are fit but they haven’t practised,’ added Jóhann. Siggi looked from Jóhann to the rest of the group.
‘Whatever you do, you must keep to the tempo that Jóhann sets. And Jóhann, you mustn’t count too fast. Don’t get excited. Keep it slow and steady, and we might manage this.’
We were off. Almost fantastically, we got a clean start. Jóhann led on with measured, audible counting. The students were winded, and lagged. I looked across and even noticed a touch of panic. They thought we were going to be tired, old men. The day was ours. But then, as perhaps was always going to be the case, disaster struck.
Excited by the possibility of victory, Jóhann raised the tempo. We began to flap. We were thrown out of rhythm, stuck still on top of the sea, plunging hopelessly deep. Behind me, Rúnar’s handle dug into the small of my back, and my cry of pain released an explosion of abuse from the others.
‘What the hell are you doing, Jóhann!?’
‘Gradual build-up, gradual build-up,’ came the call from a desperate cox.
‘They haven’t practised,’ cried Siggi.
‘Yes, they have. You can see it,’ replied Stefan. ‘They have.’
‘It’s okay,’ called Jóhann. ‘We can still do this.’
No, we couldn’t. The students, sensing our distress, put in a late push for the line. And won.
Sjómannadagur was the first of many such rituals that we joined. Icelanders are rather taken with formal expressions of shared nostalgia for the old days, and as the returning native it was expected that I participate. It was the formal part of my education and initiation. In an Icelandic academic year I was to undergo the privations of centuries, from the sheep herding and rowing to the vile delicacies of the winter festival.
It was also clear to me that they were showing off; that part of the appeal of having me there was the presence of foreign eyes. It had been the same when Gísli took me to the president’s lodge at Bessastaðir, and showed off his farm-life childhood. At the same time as I was being introduced to my heritage, I was reminded of its distance, and of a question common to all returning migrants: at what point were you too far o
ut of the culture to make a meaningful return?
18
DIGGING
One of the other teachers said the soft light of winter suited her. She lived in Flateyri, the nearby village of Bergur’s ancestry, and each day she commuted through a long tunnel that had been cut through the mountains to Isafjörður. Flateyri sat on the edge of a wider fjord than ours, and even in mid-winter it still had direct sunlight on the clear days. I envied her, as I did those with cars who could at least drive to the top of the mountains for a peek at the sun. Now that it was November, the sun was completely invisible from us and wouldn’t, it was said, return until February.
Sharp frosts and snow storms arrived, coinciding with the Christmas holidays and an exodus of the professionals in town, many of them geologists and ichthyologists. The inbound flights were busy, too, with locals returning from their jobs in Reykjavík. The weather worsened yet more, then came flight cancellations. People had to brace themselves for long, dangerous drives across the heaths to the south. Rán, an Icelandic teacher, who didn’t at all like the soft light of winter and had booked a holiday in Spain in order to escape it, looked out over the fjord with a scowl.
‘It’s only the thought of sunshine that’s getting me through the semester,’ she said. ‘Even if I have to drive for two days, I’m going to make that flight.’
Ingibjörg was less determined but just as excited about her trip, which this year would take her to France, a spiritual home for her. She’d been asked to chaperone a niece to a music school there. It would mean getting through her exam papers quickly, generally a good thing for teachers, who otherwise dragged out their marking. She too watched the weather more carefully than usual. Olanda and I shared a little in their fate, as we had organised to spend Christmas with Bergur and Rut in Reykjavík. During a break in the storms, we and half a dozen other teachers had calls from the airport to get to the plane for a quick escape from the fjord.
Beneath us the countryside of the western coastline was brown and frozen, the dams and lakes shattered by lines of cracked ice. It was a life even more isolated than ours, on farms on the low-lying islands of Breiðafjörður and on the thin, rocky peninsulas that lined Snæfellsnes. In summer, I knew, they would have glorious days of seclusion and separateness. But what did you tell yourself in winter?
Reykjavík was as cold as Ísafjörður, but it hadn’t snowed, and the days seemed much longer now that we saw the sun again. A protracted sunrise began at ten and ended, just after lunch, with the start of an equally long sunset. The pond downtown was frozen solid, and the surface had been smoothed out for skaters—towards dark, families came down and put on their skates, using their car headlights as torches. Orange spotlights lit a skating arena about the size of a football field, but kids, animals, and calm parents were spread across the entire pond. Clusters formed here and there, a scene atypically open and relaxed, Australian even. People mingled.
Laugavegur was carnivalesque too. With darkness coming on so early, the small shops and cafés of the main street, which sometimes looked a little tired, took on the cosy, even glamorous appearance of a side street in Copenhagen. It was a pleasant deception, especially after the remoteness of Ísafjörður. We walked from shop to shop, stopping here and there for drinks. Lights from above blurred in the cold night air, as though they’d been photographed by a shaking hand. The Christmas decorations had their desired effect, drawing in a constant stream of happy-looking people who walked or drove slowly through the night.
The festivities peaked on the night of Thorláksmessa, ‘The Day of St Thorlák’, the patron saint of Iceland. It fell on the 23rd of December, the anniversary of his death. The Icelandic reserve and seriousness seemed less present tonight than on any other—it didn’t take an expert eye to see that everyone was out flirting, gossiping, and exchanging information that did more for their personal honour than the general good of the community, or its religious virtue. It was, in a way, summer at Thingvellir, and the year Gunnar and Hallgerð met and sat down to talk about Gunnar’s trip to Norway, and about the fine things he’d brought back to Iceland. It was the hundred conversations that had surrounded me and my mother, and the mystery of my father.
As always, Kári suggested a drive to Thingvellir—there had been heavy snowfalls and he wanted to see it while the snow was still fresh and yet to be trodden. The nearby ski runs were open; the snow buggies were out. As we passed the outskirts of town and began the climb into Mossfellsheiði, we joined a line of big men in big coats and big cars. Through their tail-gates shone the reflections of shovels and heavy-weather gear, and Kári said that for many of them the idea was to get stuck on purpose so that they could test out their equipment. I joked that this sounded a lot like me, and that I was always looking for ways of getting stuck in Iceland.
We had left Reykjavík in the dark, but gradually as we approached the park the in-between light of the northern winter broke in among the white mountains. We entered a landscape of rifts, coated to the edges in the pure snow of morning, with the sky and the ground joined by rice-paper light. It was Iceland, but it was also a place that lay beyond it, in a locked-away landscape that offered your own disappearance into the indecisive play of the light. You came here to think about fewer things, but also to think about them more clearly.
While we were in Reykjavík, our friends in Ísafjörður had to bunker down—reports were coming in of the heaviest snowfalls in ten years. The last time it had snowed as much, in 1995, avalanches had devastated the villages of Súðavik and Flateyri; thirty-four people had died. Since then barriers had been built around the most dangerous areas—our afternoon rides in the autumn had taken us along an earth wall that had been erected around Tungudalur. But nervousness remained. The most precarious combination, soft snow on top of ice, was again in place. The papers said it would only be a matter of time before people were evacuated.
It was a relief to be away from the worst of the storms, but it was also somehow wrong to be safe and comfortable at Bergur and Rut’s. We’d only lived in the Westfjords for a few months, but not being there during the storms felt traitorous. The northerlies that were causing so much trouble in the Westfjords brought only clear days to Reykjavík.
While we waited for flights to resume, Bergur filled me in on the various weather catastrophes that had visited his life of touring Iceland. Between his tales of sliding off the roads, most of which were only funny, came a more dispiriting refrain about the recent lack of real winters. In the context of year after year of mild, wet weather, the severity of this Christmas was welcomed. Bergur, I knew, lived as much in his recollections of past adventures as he did in his present life, a tamed routine of visiting the office in the mornings, coming home for lunch, and making a slow return to work in the afternoons. Beneath his nostalgia was an urgent need to reconnect with something in his past.
Perhaps that was the reason we were such good friends, and why I had come to love him and his family so deeply. His conjuring of the past was as central for him as it was for me. A dozen or so narratives circled him constantly. He often spoke about his mother and father and their move from Flateyri to Reykjavík. This connection with the Westfjords seemed crucial: it made him more than a mere Reykjavíkingur. A plaque, Bergshús, or ‘Bergur’s House’, had been placed on one of the older line of sea-facing houses in the village. It was a source of great pride—his father’s old house was being commemorated through the son, and more than once he asked whether I’d been to see it. I would reply that I had, and the story and his father’s departure from Flateyri would begin again.
Such were the divides in his life. The Westfjords, it seemed, remained in the corner of his mind. It was a home of sorts. Flateyri was to him what Reykjavík was to me: a place to be in love with, an origin myth. But what did that mean?
Partly it meant this question, ‘Will you stay in Iceland?’, which I was being asked nearly every day, by Bergur and Ru
t, their children, my sisters, colleagues, and strangers at the swimming pools. The question I asked myself, though, had changed, and I was becoming less concerned about what I would do. The task was to understand how this feeling for Iceland was to exist within me—not, so much, how I was to exist in Iceland. Was there a difference between feeling at home and being home?
Love was a vague term, I knew. But many people, I gathered, were used to feeling at home in the country of their birth, but not always being in love with it. I seemed to have it the other way around: I was forever falling more deeply in love with Iceland, at the same time as I seemed as far away from knowing how to stay.
The truth was, I missed something about Brisbane that in fifteen years of living there I hadn’t ever properly registered. I missed its openness. When people sat outside to eat and drink, they didn’t always talk about very much in particular—to do so wasn’t quite the Brisbane way. But they talked about their nothings in a generous way, and presented them with such a self-effacing irony that in the course of a night you came nearer to serious topics. In Brisbane, the canopies were tall and evergreen, and I hadn’t before realised what that must mean about the undergrowth that sustained them.
In the mornings we checked for updates, but the flights to Ísafjörður were always cancelled. One morning, after Rut read out the weather report from Morgunblaðið, she turned to the astrology section.
‘Look at yours, Olanda,’ she called out. ‘It says a business opportunity is coming up.’ Sure enough, a little later that morning the phone rang. It was the Ísafjörður Sushi Factory, calling to ask if she’d like a job.
‘You will be making sushi to be snap-frozen and exported to our foreign customers,’ the manager told her. It wasn’t exactly a business opportunity, but they made a point of explaining that this would be a step up from regular fish factory work.
The Promise of Iceland Page 19