Falling Off the Map (10 page)

It is, of course, the changes that one notices first whenever one comes back to any place, and it did not take me long to find that beer is legal now and that there are two television stations, broadcasting even on Thursdays. I saw an
I Was a Teenage Zombie
album amidst the slabs of strange fish and jars of bee pollen in the Reykjavik Flea Market (held every Saturday in an underground garage beneath the central bank); and Filipino women in flowing Islamic robes were walking down the street. The Holiday Inn has come to Reykjavik, and the Hard Rock Café; there is karaoke, too, and neon. Yet still, again and again, I felt I was in a kind of Alice Wonderland. Soon after arrival, I rang up to ask about a day trip to Greenland; the eight-hour tour cost $460. I called for a cab and was picked up by a hearty, shining matron driving a Mercedes. I walked into the Hotel
Loftleidir for lunch and there was Anatoly Karpov, former chess champion of the world, sitting in a ring of light at one end of an auditorium, above a tiny chessboard, watched by eight old men in anoraks. Two hours later, I was being harassed by a Greenlandic dancer with black stripes down his face and a clothespin in his mouth, which he kept pushing in and out at me.

By any standards other than the Icelandic, Reykjavik is still a quaint and quiet place, as silent as a photograph. It resembles, like most of the settlements in Iceland, a kind of Lego town—rows of tiny, clean white boxes set out in geometric grids, with roofs of red and blue and green. Much of the country feels as if it were made for children—even the ponytailed boys and ring-nosed girls are pushing baby strollers—and Reykjavik might almost be a small child’s toy, as clean and perfect as a ship inside a bottle. Iceland is famous for having no mansions and no slums (“There is no architecture here,” complained W. H. Auden), in much the same way as its language has no accents and no dialects: with a population smaller than that of Colorado Springs, uniformity is not hard to achieve. And because nearly all the houses are geothermically heated, the city whose name means Smoky Bay shines silent in the smokeless air, as clear as if seen through panes of polished glass. Reykjavik is one place where it really is worth climbing the steeple of the highest church to see the city, mute and motionless, laid out against the silver sea.

Yet it is not because of the capital but in spite of it that most visitors come to Iceland, and it is desolation that they seek and find. More than 80 percent of the country consists of ice fields, tundra, lava fields, and barren mountains, and huge stretches are as blank and inhospitable as anything in the Australian Outback. Such settlements as do exist look like suburbs in search of a city—a solitary farmstead here, a lonely lighthouse there, occasionally an isolated steeple: a small huddle of concrete
inside a giant’s rough paw. Nature adores a vacuum here. And the ground itself is like nothing so much as a geologist’s textbook, a pockmarked mess of volcanic craters and hissing plumes of smoke till it looks as if the earth itself is blowing off steam, and the soil in parts is so hot that, only a few inches down, you can actually boil an egg. In Iceland, in John McPhee’s happy phrase, “the earth is full of adjustments, like a settling stomach.”

The largest glacier in Europe (more than three times the size of Luxembourg) is somewhere in this nothingness, and the largest lava field in the world; the oldest parliament in Europe was set up on this youngest soil. Samuel Johnson used to boast of reciting a whole chapter of
The Natural History of Iceland
from the Danish of Horrebow. That was Chapter LXXII, “Concerning snakes.” It reads, in its entirety: “There are no snakes to be met with throughout the whole island.”

The other factor that accentuates the bleak and weather-beaten beauty is the climate: in October there is already a wild white quilt swaddling the countryside, and the sun shines silver over silver lakes, the view from a bus identical to that from a plane thirty thousand feet above the Pole. Icelanders will tell you that, because of the North Atlantic Drift, the country has no extremes of temperature: many years see no snow at all in Reykjavik, and the lowest temperature recorded in the capital in thirty years is — 15° Fahrenheit. But no extremes of temperature, in my book, means that it is never, ever warm. In summer, when I visited, people were complaining of a heat wave when the temperature hit a chilly 54°; by early fall, bitter winds were whipping through the silent streets, slapping my face and almost knocking me off my feet. A local friend told me that he had been to Stockholm once and almost suffocated in the sweltering 64° heat. He couldn’t wait, he said, to “get back to my cold Iceland.”

In such an unaccommodating world, it is not surprising that visitors are often as unorthodox, in their way, as locals. (“Whenever I meet a foreigner here,” an Icelandic girl told me in a disco, “I ask him, ‘Why do you come to Iceland?’ It is cold; it is expensive; and the people, they are closed.”) Yet the country seems to bring out something pure in visitors, something a little bit out of the ordinary. The most luminous translations of modern Icelandic poetry into English, for example, were composed by a recent U.S. ambassador to Iceland, Marshall Brement, who has written beautifully of how Icelanders were the great European poets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and how even now, on one night a year, every member of Parliament must speak in rhyme. And though the island’s attraction to photographers (Eliot Porter) and to poets (from Auden and MacNeice to Leithauser) may be self-evident, it seems to evoke something poetic even in an everyman. I once asked a young Danish student, who had chosen to live here for a year, what was the most exciting thing to do in Reykjavik. He thought for a long, long time. Then, a little sheepish, he replied, “Well, for me, I like walking at night in the Old Town, seeing the old houses. Or if you can go a little bit out of Reykjavik, if it is cold, like tonight, you can see the northern lights.” The most beautiful place he had ever seen, he said, was Greenland. “It is so rich, in many ways. When you walk there, you see more clearly, you think more easily. Here it is a little bit the same.”

That kind of calm transparency is, inevitably, harder and harder to maintain as the villages of Iceland get drawn into the shrinking global village. For ten centuries now, the island has preserved its own culture and its Old Norse diphthongs by living apart from the world, remote from changing realities. For centuries, Iceland has been a kind of hermit among nations, a private, inward-looking Lonely Place of fishermen and visionaries
and poets. The pursuits for which it has been famous are largely solitary ones, made to ward off months of winter dark: thus the land with a population smaller than that of Corpus Christi, Texas, boasts six chess grandmasters and recently placed first in the World Contract Bridge Championship. The most famous Icelander in England, Magnus Magnusson, is, appropriately enough, the host of a fiendishly difficult quiz show,
Mastermind
(there are now fifty-three Magnus Magnussons in the country’s phone book). Iceland is a kind of conscientious objector to modernity, out of it in all the right ways and priding itself on being a sort of no-man’s-land in the middle of nowhere (and nowhen), a quiet neutral zone far from superpower rivalries: midway between Moscow and Manhattan, halfway between medievalism and modernity, it had its two moments of ambiguous fame—in 1972, when it was the site of the Boris Spassky-Bobby Fischer chess championship, and in 1986, when it was the safe house where Reagan and Gorbachev met and almost abandoned nuclear weapons. The miracle of Iceland is not just that, as Auden wrote, “any average educated person one meets can turn out competent verse” (and a kitchen maid he met gave “an excellent criticism of a medieval saga”) but that the verse itself is devilishly complex, bristling with alliteration and internal rhyme, trickier than a sonnet. That tangled, palindromic, old-fashioned kind of rime has become almost a model for the country.

Now, though, increasingly, that legacy is threatened. Scarcely a century ago, only 5 percent of Icelanders lived in towns; today, the figure is more than 80 percent. For nine centuries almost, the population scarcely rose (it hit six figures only in this century); and as recently as 1806, there were only 300 citizens in Reykjavik, of whom 27 were in jail for public drunkenness. Today, however, 145,000 of the country’s 255,000 people live in or around the suburb-sprouting capital. And the
single fact of television alone has inevitably cast a shadow over a world in which lighthouse keepers read Shakespeare to fishing fleets and families wax Homeric in the dark. Though the government has worked overtime to protect its culture (hence the longtime ban on daytime television, and no broadcasting in the month of July), its efforts have often been in vain: Iceland (which seems to lead the world in leading the world in categories) now boasts more VCRs per household than any other country. In the Westman Isles, the rock formation that used to be called Cleopatra is now known by some as Marge Simpson, and the fishing crates nearby are decorated with portraits of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Even young couples, when not talking of their holidays in Spain and their dreams of seeing the Pyramids, will tell you that purity is to be found now only in the countryside; that Reykjavik is dangerous and full of drugs; that, sadly, people use the word “cassette” instead of its Icelandic equivalent.

Iceland is also more and more full of foreign faces and less militantly blond than even four years ago. There is a Thai restaurant now in Reykjavik, and a Thai snack bar (complete with Buddha, picture of King Bhumibol, and sign for Coke in Thai); there are Somalian refugees, adopted kids from Sri Lanka, even immigrants from North Africa (whose children must—by law—be given names like Bjorn and Gudrun). In one factory alone, there are ten “mail order brides,” three of them cousins from the Philippines. None of this would seem exceptional except in a country where, until recently, many people could hardly imagine Somalia, or Sri Lanka, or even California. When I was here in 1987, I found myself an object of dark fascination to people who could hardly tell an Indian from a Indianan; now, when I went to restaurants, I was greeted with a polite, unsurprised
Godan dag
in Icelandic.

The zealously maintained racial purity of the people has, of
course, a shadow side: Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
appears in the window of a local bookstore, and
D.
ÜBER
ALLES
has been scribbled up on walls downtown. Many Icelanders draw their imaginations tightly round themselves. One day an emaciated young ship’s cook with nicotine-stained teeth leaned over to me in a café. He had been to Japan, he said, and China, and Baltimore. Which was his favorite place? He thought for a long time. “Holland. Is okay. And Norway and Denmark. Okay, but expensive.” Was he preparing now for his next trip? “No,” he said matter-of-factly. “I am an alcoholic. And on the ship I cannot go to A.A. meetings.” Some Icelanders in the countryside still live in fear of a Turkish attack (there was one as recently as 1627).

At the same time, of course, the isolation that is so transporting to the foreigner is desperately confining to the would-be with-it teenager, and if Iceland seems very far from the world, the world can seem very far from Iceland. In Iceland, again by law, most shops and offices must bear Icelandic names, and the hotels—aimed at foreigners—are duly given unpronounceable names like Esja, Gardur, Ódinsvé. Yet more and more of the names used for recreation—aimed at the locals—bespeak a longing for abroad. The famous discos in Reykjavik have been Berlin, Hollywood, Casablanca, and Broadway; the new places to eat are Asia, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Siam. One of the trendiest joints in town is the L.A. Café; people downtown gather round the Texas snack bar. None of this would have much significance except in a culture that sees its identity reflected in its names.

One day an old man who was loitering outside a video arcade came up to me near the entrance of Tomma Hamborgarar. “There is so much new here,” he declared. “It is almost as if Iceland was built in 1900 and not ten centuries ago. I remember
when I was a child, hearing about the fairies who lived in the fields and everywhere. And the ghosts.” The ghosts, he added, “sometimes follow a family for two hundred years.”

For visitors, however, there are still enough ghosts to fill another planet. A middle-aged matron invited me one night into her solemn, sepulchral parlor. The first things I saw when I entered were a book on the Gestapo and a picture of a sea-blue sprite hiding inside a waterfall. Her grandchildren came out to stare at me, and when I explained that I was from India, they confessed that they did not know if that was near Pluto or Neptune. Then I was asked what kind of music I would like to hear. Icelandic, I replied, and on came a blast of local heavy metal.

There is, in fact, a deafening strain of rock ‘n’ roll in Iceland, and it is the voice of kids banging their fists against the narrow limits of their culture. With so few people in so vast a space, both elements are intensified, extreme: “wild” applies as much to society as to nature here. Iceland, then, is an inspired setting for the Hard Rock Café. It is not just that the island used to have the two largest discos in Europe; or that its most famous recent export is the eccentric dance band the Sugarcubes (“I’d never been in a skyscraper place before,” said their lead singer recently, after her first trip to Manhattan); or even that Amina, the belle of Carthage, was recently performing in Reykjavik. It is, rather, that rock ‘n’ roll is an almost primal statement of rebellion here, a spirit of release. It is the way the young advertise their impatience with the old ways and their hunger for the new. Garage bands are sizzling in Reykjavik, and local magazines are full of articles on such local heroes as Deep Jimi and the Zep Creams. The radio was blasting “Leader of the Pack” when I drove one night to Kringlan, the glittery new yupburb where the Hard Rock is situated, and inside which blondes in
dark glasses and boys in ties were clapping along to “The Wall” and shouting out, in English, “Unbelievable!” and “Give me five!”