‘There is no fish-gutting experience needed for this job.’
I asked her not to take it. It would be horrible. She took it.
‘I’m not spending the rest of the winter indoors,’ she told me.
After a week of cancellations, came a break in the weather, a window of an hour or so between the storm finishing up in the north and starting up in the south. We needed to get to the airport quickly—three planes would leave together in the space of half an hour. Rut rushed us to a terminal building straining with Westfjorders, including half-a-dozen teachers bronzed with Canary Island tans.
The pilot was unnaturally cheery, and this worried me. He conceded that it would be a bumpy flight with a rough descent, especially when we turned into the Djúp, the long fjord that ran the length of the smaller ones. This is where we’d start to feel the wind. Getting the plane down would, he said, depend on the last couple of minutes, especially as we took on the less predictable winds that came off the mountains of our fjord. We weren’t to be worried by the plane’s heaving motion. Any sign of a major problem and we’d return to Reykjavík.
‘What’s a major problem going to be?’ asked Olanda.
‘I suppose he means a crash,’ I replied. ‘That would be a major problem.’
The turbulence was actually terrible the whole way, but as we got down into the Djúp and towards the mountains it was simply extraordinary. We were rattling, and bouncing violently, as though in the grip of the trolls that had once made the hollows in the fjords. We heard the strain of full throttle, and we pulled out of the fjord, heaving back over the mountains. Around us there was lots of crying and vomiting, and a bitter, ‘God help us,’ from a colleague.
‘What’s happening?’ asked Olanda.
‘We’re going around, I think.’
She reached for her vomit bag with one hand and my arm with the other.
‘No, it’s okay, I think we’re going back,’ I said. The aircraft banked, and was hit by a hard gust. There was a loud bang, a car crash sound, and we lurched to the left.
‘Well,’ said the pilot. ‘Sorry about that. We’ll have another go, and if it’s as bad again, we’ll return to Reykjavík. The plane ahead of us seems to have made it down okay.’ I reminded myself that pilots were wealthy, happy people—they had families, no reason to die.
Again we bounced down into the fjord. Olanda was crying, the woman in the seat behind us had begun to wail. But we landed, and the plane itself seemed to breathe a sigh of relief as it did so. There was no round of applause. To clap wouldn’t have been right. We wanted to evacuate.
Our street, when we got to it, was still open but barely reachable. The taxi driver wouldn’t stop the car for fear of being stuck, and so he asked us to get out while the car continued to creep along. Our front door was buried under seven feet of snow. Alma, our landlady, handed me a shovel and said it was time to moka, ‘to clear the snow’. I called Rúnar for help and for an hour we dug our way inside. The next morning, I spent two more hours digging a second path to one of our windows so we could get some light into the apartment.
Only the main road into town was kept clear, and for over a week no-one in Ísafjörður could drive—in fact, most of the cars in town were buried. No matter what time of the day you went out, you found your neighbours hobbling along the firming snow, or clutching onto walls, pushing through mounds of drift snow. The town graveyard, which had at first been buried up to its walls, finally began to re-emerge with its Christmas lights more or less intact, presenting a puzzle of reflected headstones across the packed snow in the evenings.
As the snow melted, streams formed across the ice that had lay beneath it, and it became almost impossible to stay on our feet. One morning on the way to school I turned out of our street and down a short hill, and lost my footing. It began as a slow slide along the gutter—I was in a little river of my own, and it carried me calmly away from the corner I had just passed. I hooked out an arm, but this did no good. The pavement was close, but each time I reached for it I moved further towards the middle of the road. Eventually I joined a main current that ran down the centre of the street. It was hopeless.
With some horror I felt the headlights of a car settle on my back. I spread myself out, and tried to get my legs to cycle me to the side. But I simply couldn’t get my arms high enough into the air to signal for the car to stop. I was in for a slow death.
But no. A door opened at my side.
‘Pull yourself in,’ said a woman’s voice. I grasped the step up to the passenger door and dragged myself towards the warmth of the cabin.
‘Going up or down?’ she asked.
The storm had been terrible, but a repeat of the disaster of 1995 was averted. An avalanche in the nearby village of Hnífsdalur destroyed a number of farm buildings, but the owners had escaped in time. In fact, the most disturbing news of the winter break emerged from the school. Ólína had issued Ingibjörg an official warning over her marking of the December exam papers—apparently there were errors, and overall the marks were much too high. In reply, Ingibjörg went to the Teachers’ Union who, it was whispered, was fed up with Ólína. They stated their full support for Ingibjörg, and the fight that Olanda had felt coming during our first volleyball game began in earnest.
The two husbands, I now learnt, were cousins; so this was in part a family dispute. People said that when Hermann and Ingibjörg had first come to live in the town, there had been a great show of warmth between the couples, and that they’d socialised regularly. There had followed a bad falling out; no-one was quite sure what it was over. Another rumour said that it was only now, when I was at hand as an alternative head of English, that the dispute had moved into the workplace.
It had all the makings of a saga feud: family conflict, a clash of outlooks, a minor triggering incident, and preparedness on the part of the protagonists to destroy everyone around them. In the months that followed, that was how it played out. In the place of the sagas’ verbal duelling and poetic insults came tit-for-tat appeals to the national press, which consumed the fight with glee and published weekly, sometimes daily updates on the life of the school, including loud and ugly rows in the coffee room and at every staff meeting from February to May. The staff split into two camps, those for epic and those for romance, and the school went toxic.
The daily grind of gossip and paranoia made work life outside the classroom unbearable. No-one could think of anything but the dispute, and every comment was interpreted in its light. I couldn’t quite shake the thought that the whole thing was provincial in a way that Iceland had turned into an art form: the leads had long-standing enmities that were almost impossible to understand, while the side-players were often as implicated in the history of past grudges as the main adversaries. As such, I didn’t think there was any point in taking sides and, if I thought it could have helped, I would have thrown my saga editions at them all. I liked just about everyone at the school, and despised the way they were fighting.
So instead of fighting, I joined Olanda each day on her morning walks to work, and to some extent these moments of quiet along the fjord redeemed the early months of 2005 from the turmoil at work. We left home at six-thirty and followed the smell of gutted fish along the northern side of the spit to the harbour area. Few others walked to work, but we were never entirely on our own. Even in the worst weather, some rode their bikes and fell over in slow motion whenever they hit snow.
We gained half an hour’s light each week and so our morning walks became brighter. By March, they were in full daylight again and the town celebrated with its Sun Coffee Festival. It was like rejoining the world.
Olanda loved her job at the sushi factory. The tasks were menial, and she came home with a backache, but the others who worked there were, she said, beautiful—mainly immigrants from Thailand, Poland and Germany. They laughed through the whole shift, while my colle
agues, who spent their days embroiled in the conflict at the school, found it hard to believe that the migrant community was as open as Olanda said.
‘I don’t know how you can be friends with the migrants,’ said one teacher. ‘They only come here for the work, they send their money home, and keep to themselves the whole time they’re here. They don’t bother learning the language.’ The students, I found, were just as resolute in their prejudice.
I could have replied that she got along with them because she was a migrant herself, but I suppose that would have been a disingenuous line. We had it much easier than the other new arrivals. Instead I replied that this was a classic case of the locals not seeing what was obvious to every traveller: Iceland was a small, closed society.
One of the teachers, Valdimar, was keen to improve relations between the migrants and locals, and he ran the local migrant group. He asked me to play some songs for the group’s social meetings—anything, he said, to get the numbers up. I went along and sang, with no effect on the numbers. Those who came obviously wanted to be pleased and they smiled and made jokes. But as the meeting was conducted entirely in Icelandic and English, both incomprehensible to most of them, over the course of the morning the expressions on the participants’ faces turned from goodwill to vacant irritation.
I see now I was experiencing something that I hadn’t really prepared for. Iceland was in many respects a country just like all others. It cherished its borders, and its right to protect them. Many people didn’t want anything to change, and clung to an Iceland that did more to exclude than include.
19
PARTING NOTES
Kolbrún, Bergur’s older daughter, picked us up from the airport and drove us out to the hospital in Keflavík.
‘We’re not sure how much longer she’s got,’ she said as we followed the airport road. ‘It could be days or hours. But not weeks any more.’
‘Is she distressed?’ I asked.
‘She’s had a lot of visitors. And she’s had the chance to say goodbye to just about everyone she wants to.’
‘That’s good. I have a letter from Mum.’
The first thing Patricia said to me when we arrived at the hospital was that she was the first person Mum had told about her pregnancy.
‘We’d only met a short while before,’ she added. ‘I think your mother confided in me almost as a stranger would.’
‘I admit I have sometimes wondered why she was so open with you,’ I replied. ‘The two of you are so different.’
‘It was Iceland,’ said Patricia. ‘We were both hopeless about Iceland.’
Theirs had been a bumpy friendship. When my mother had come to Iceland for her sixtieth birthday, they’d fallen out again, another of the long line of fallings-out among the army of secretaries. This time it had been over a trivial matter. My mother hadn’t wanted to spend the night at Patricia’s, and this had offended Patricia, who attributed some hostility to the refusal. My mother, like many of Patricia’s friends, was afraid to tell her the truth, which was that she couldn’t bear the thought of a night with all of Patricia’s pets. But they’d been friends for too long for one of them to die with this rift left unhealed, and that’s why I was here, in part, as Mum’s emissary.
It was 2005, but I still saw Patricia through the rather glamorous frame of the 1970s ex-pat girls in Iceland. Marriage had pinned most of them down here but Patricia, like my mother, had loved the place, and felt at home here and only here. There had been no crisis to drive her either to Iceland or away again, no wanderer’s curse—she was simply one of those who saw Iceland as inevitable.
I handed her Mum’s letter. It was a short note saying that Mum hoped the two of them could be friends again. Patricia took it well and folded the letter into a book to read again later. I felt a desperate need to press pause. Soon the note would cease to be alive between her and my mother; it would become part of the other belongings she left behind—an odd bookmark in the last thing she read.
But I wasn’t after the past anymore, I saw that. I didn’t want to rewind, or recreate the world as it had existed during my childhood. What I wanted was a childhood sensation. The one where your surroundings—your Iceland—are simply an implicit part of action, unreflective and living inside you rather than around you. The one where you aren’t making sense of Iceland, because Iceland is woven in. Patricia still had that. She said she was happy that she would die in the place where the sensation had always existed.
Back home, Rúnar called me the next day to say he’d bought himself a new kayak, which he claimed was better than the old one because it was easier to turn over in the water. The purchase meant that he could lend me his old one, which he said was good, because it was less likely to roll. I was told to dress warmly and meet at the canoe shed at the end of the spit at seven-thirty on Sunday.
At eight, while the town was still coiled in a deep sleep, Rúnar and his father pushed me out into the fjord. After Rúnar had made a few of the rolls he so liked he joined me in the deep. We slipped through still water, paddling inland towards Tungudalur. Ours was the only human noise in the fjord.
The water was dark brown and silky, but it flickered with the bird life of the fjord. Deflections of white wings crossed our bows. Out in the middle, I again got a glimpse of the fisherman’s view of the town and the mountains that I’d had during our practices for the rowing race. It was the default perspective of a thousand years of settlement, and it made the mountains less intimidating, the sound more welcoming—a retreat from the open waters beyond. The fjord became a circumference, a shelter, and not a place of avalanches and storms.
When I got back in, I wrote an email to Patricia telling her that we’d seen early arriving puffins flying low across the water. She replied an hour later that she could picture them, and that she’d begun to feel much better. Who knew, perhaps there would be some time yet. The next email came from Kolbrún, on the following day, to say that Patricia had died.
Again I flew south, this time for the funeral. Kolbrún helped with the service, Kári was one of the coffin bearers, and I joined Bergur, Rut and Rakel in the front row; in the end it seemed that we were as close as Patricia had come to having an Icelandic family. Judith brought Gestur, who as far as I knew still had the largest collection of Elvis records in Iceland. Molly and Nanci were too sick to come. The rest of the congregation were locals from Vogar, Patricia’s village for thirty years, or workers from the American Base, once Patricia’s employer, the source of beer, cheap cigarettes and the other minor luxuries from the Cod War period, before the northern Puritanism had eased a little.
The army of secretaries was, I felt, much diminished by Patricia’s passing and by the illness of the others. Theirs had once been a perfect universe, like a good book; they suited each other so well, especially in the isolation of the new Iceland. And for a while I had been one of their projects—my isolation had matched theirs, and they had become more than my friends.
The coffin was placed in the ground and a line of mourners formed to stand above it to make the sign of the cross. It didn’t seem quite right for Patricia, even if she was religious. It was all too serious, sombre, and Scandinavian. The army’s faith had always been in laughter, gossip and disgruntlement, and in the bond of the outsiders who knew they could never leave.
My flight back to Ísafjörður was crowded with musicians. It was time for the town’s annual rock festival, Aldrei fór ég suður, or ‘I never went south’. The title came from a song by Bubbi Morthens—Iceland’s working hero musician—about a man who stays in his village too long. He can’t move, or escape the fixed patterns of fishing, salting and bunking down for the dark winters. Year after year he is left to make the most of the bleakness.
I was not so defiant, I was not an extremist, and I didn’t believe in the death or honour creed of those around me who were holding on in the Westfjords. I would b
end to the situation on the ground, and the Viking warriors Ólína and Ingibjörg could have it, and fight until they buried themselves. Olanda and I were heading south the minute we could.
Suddenly, the dead grass of winter was being pushed out of the way by new shoots, almost mint green at their base. The sound of heavy water falling down from the heaths returned, and the noise of people touching up their summerhouses echoed through the fjord. Bumblebees arrived and patrolled the daffodils and tulips. The whole of May was cloudless.
My last-year students, dressed in farewell sumo-wrestler outfits, finished a rowdy morning call at our place and headed off to wake up the next victims. It was the annual ritual of waking up the teachers on the students’ last day. Many were wearing mittens, and some liberties in the costume had been taken in other areas—the coolest wouldn’t be seen without retro police sunglasses. Halldór, now my friend and very much the musician in the group, led them down the hill in front of our place as they took what were really their first steps to Reykjavík, and mine.
‘Oh Dr Kári, oh Dr Kári,’ they sang as a goodbye. All that was left to do was to climb the troll’s seat, the hollow in the mountain that I’d been looking at from my office since the day we arrived.
Olanda and I rode our bikes around the fjord and past the airport, and rested them against a sign that pointed to a thin track that followed one of the growing hillside streams. It was only half an hour to the base of the hollow, and we stopped by a residue of snow and set up a picnic.
It wasn’t really warm enough—about six degrees Celsius—but the sun was out and we found shelter from the wind in the walls of the great hollow around us. Below us in the valley lay the runway and the end of the spit. Above us a steep slope of scree and boulders. Now and then, we heard the scattering of stones as they tumbled down the face of the scree.
The Promise of Iceland Page 20