The Blind Spot
The only sound still audible at night is the slapping of the hal-yards against the flagpoles. That’s how it all began: a noise in my head, and a mood to match. Inspired by the urge to hear it, I set off. The landmark I longed to experience, then, was a noise, dispersed in a wind that carried the taste of snow. Add to this my predilection for unlovely things, and for the clammy feeling you get when gusty squalls buffet your body. Even the summer on Iceland is still overshadowed by the long winter, and by the demands of having to doggedly fill the time somehow in a general state of torpor. People’s temperaments seem in the process of thawing, but outside of Reykjavik no one’s going around freaking out just because the sun’s getting stronger by the day.
Beyond the capital, the solitude of life forms is maintained in the desolate landscape. These are contemplative places that invite you to disappear, places that have also been shaped by the concessions that we grant to nature, to its spirit and spirits, as compared to civilization. Icelandic villages squat in this landscape like so many micro-organisms which blossom only briefly after a long period of dormancy.
Living on the outskirts of Reykjavik as I was, I couldn’t hear the halyards smacking on the flagpoles. But among the people around me, I could hear how words fluttered away into the gaps between associations. Among their vocabulary, I found as few imports as I did among the goods on the island, though the antique shops had portraits of National Socialist bigwigs hanging on their walls and their shelves full of the Nazi book collections of former Party members. Many of them had once fled here, to the land of the old Icelandic epic, the Edda. Occasionally, I’d run across eccentric forms of amusement, for instance, really obscure board games I’d never seen or silent children’s charades. Here, then, I was confronted with a country of barely a million inhabitants, but which had its own trade journal for national show requisites, a country that preserved its own individuality by venturing into the realms of the whimsical, and which had once been governed by a woman president who began her term of office with the words: ‘The hand that rocks the cradle can rock the system.’
Here I encountered people who were still unpolished by any basic social conventions: relationships began with them staring fixedly, literally gazing at you without batting their eyelids even once; this was accompanied by a bare minimum of gesticulation or facial animation. Only on meeting someone for a second time did you begin to establish connections, born of recognition and a recollection of the dumb-show that had gone before. Only the children tended to remain stand-offish.
Before the world ends, it will heave a sigh and emit a blue burp. Tourists call the first of these ‘seismic activity’ and the second a ‘geyser’. They stare in awe at the spectacle, wallowing in sulphurous pools and expecting the water to act like some fount of eternal youth.
The best thing you can do is leave them lying there and get away from the central massif of Iceland; dispense with your travel guidebooks, too, where there’s no mention of the end of the world. In the rear-view mirror of the 4×4, you can still see how the land soars up to a high mountain range in the southeast or bunches itself up into little towns, before the road goes snaking off across the narrow orchid-neck of the isthmus that lies in the northwest of the island, heading for Westfjords, that desolate region that has been blighted by rural depopulation but which was once supposedly viable farming land. Nowadays, nowhere else on Iceland do you see so many abandoned farmhouses as in these hills. The first port of call for those migrating from the countryside was the provincial capital Isafjördur, but before long most of them preferred to head off to Reykjavik or out into the wide world beyond.
The formations in the skies are echoed on the ground, behind the humps of the female or the male mountains, as they are designated here, in the igneous rocks and the beds of moss. Now a stiff wind is blowing the spray back up the waterfall, and people are peering out of their windows with faces as white as snow, or bleached by the long nights. Here, too, the drowsiness of a hard winter lies heavily across the summer landscape.
If you walk into an inn round here, a few of these ice-bound faces will be raised from strange games to look at you, and everyone falls silent for a moment. Then a waitress swings by, her legs clad in thick woollen socks, and thumps down an album with four hundred Polaroids in front of you:
‘So, here you can see how a building site became the guesthouse you’re in today.’
I really must see this. At least, that’s what she solemnly tells me, quite unaware of how grating such forced chumminess is. So there’s nothing for it but to knuckle down to earnestly studying the photographic record of the build, like you’re reading the small print on the leaflet that comes with a medicine. You dutifully express surprise at the right junctures while you eat your hard-boiled egg and leave those present to their fond memories. No sooner have you disappeared than you become one such memory yourself.
The road obeys the wilfulness of the fjords, which have eaten impractically deep into the coastline. It’s a long drive to get anywhere. Sometimes, a sheep appears round a corner, sometimes there’s not a soul in sight. Nature lays claim to older rights than civilization, which as a result still strikes a defensive posture. Unhurriedly, you move back down the evolutionary scale, to a state where everything still consisted of ice, fire, ash, sand and magma. Harbour installations stand rusting in the inlets, with plaster flaking off the walls and children staring out at empty streets.
Isafjördur is situated at the end of all the roads, and all the fjords. This isn’t a town; it’s a deposition of things that the icy sea has washed up. This settlement even has the fjord in its name, which means ‘ice fjord’. It’s been built in the form of a semicircle on a sandbank, which has constantly had to be raised and now juts far out into the fjord. In the ninth century, the town’s founder, a man called Helgi, supposedly found a harpoon here, which he named ‘Skutull’. Apart from that, he hadn’t done much, it seems. He was followed by traders from other regions of Iceland, as well as Norway and Denmark, and, later still, merchants from Germany and England also established commercial settlements in this area.
What was life like here back then? The town records for the year 1656 note that one Jón Jónsson Jr. was burned at the stake in Isafjördur, alongside his father, for possessing books of witchcraft and also because the younger man had allegedly used magic symbols in order to make a girl break wind.
There’s no doubt that a state of isolation makes you susceptible to messages from the ‘other side’. For two whole months in winter, the sun skulks dejectedly below the level of the mountain ridge that surrounds the town, which lies in a basin, on three sides. The town’s streets are often covered in snowdrifts and are impassable, while even journeys across country, along the numerous gravel tracks that meander along the shores of the fjords, become extremely arduous. There are guardian spirits who help ward off the challenges of cosmic and human nature, and who hover above the hospital, the school, playgrounds and the old people’s home, and you can also follow footpaths leading to the realms of the fairies and the elves on maps specially produced for the purpose.
Today, this centre of the Westfjorde has fewer than 4,000 inhabitants. From the eighteenth century on, this region, which was rich in cod stocks, grew relatively prosperous on the profits of drying and curing the fish. Isafjördur was also formerly the site of Iceland’s largest shrimp processing plant. But over time this factory switched to producing deep-frozen sushi, and because fishing became subject to restrictive quotas from the 1980s on, people started leaving the town and life here isn’t like it used to be. As a rule, Icelanders aren’t keen on working in local industries anymore, so their place has been filled by immigrants from around forty different countries, who eke out a living hereabouts. Here you can find workers from the Balkans and Poland, but also from Asia and Africa, and the first of April even witnesses celebrations for the Thai New Year.
Hardly anyone notices that this is where the world comes to an end, for the simple reason that hardly anyone ventures here, except for a few travelling salesman, who wolf down their ‘continental breakfast’ in the town’s only hotel and don’t know where to go from there. It’s even said that a blonde woman tourist stayed here for weeks without any complaint. After her departure, a local crank rented the room she’d stayed in for one night and was discovered rubbing himself against the shower curtain that must have been clinging, just the day before, to her blonde body. The town’s sole policeman was notified, but he couldn’t find any law relating to this particular misdemeanour.
The town has a post office staffed by women who earn a living from putting the gum on the back of postage stamps. They are very straight-faced and reluctant to connect phone calls through to Europe. ‘Telephone’ in Icelandic is Sími, which literally means ‘wire’, in the same way that ‘television’ is Sjónvarp, literally ‘picture transmitter’. It’s as though modern technology has been translated into the vocabulary of the early days of tool use, though if truth be told, television is less about transmitting pictures than tranches of information. Isafjördur also boasts a small airport. From here you can fly down to Reykjavik, sure, but most of the traffic goes north, to a place that was once romantically and wholly inappropriately ‘the endless realm of ice’, that is, to Greenland, to nothingness.
During the day, Isafjördur is a remarkable little place full of shy individuals who think nothing of walking for miles carrying a garden fork or a plastic bag, who are always on the move, and who take a kindly view of village idiots. In the café, people fortify themselves with slices of layer cake, while the local youths drive their cars up and down the couple of hundred metres of main drag at their disposal, wind the windows down, crank up their car stereos and strut their stuff – but to impress who? If only it was the first week in August, when the annual swamp football tournament takes place!
As evening draws in, the town’s only cinema is showing some film or other from some far-flung country abroad. The sound wafts out onto the street. People living next door even open their windows and lean out, staring at the outside of the building and listening to the movie soundtrack. In summer, by the time the picture’s finished, the sky’s still light, but the streets are deserted.
Even at the weekend, by ten o’clock in the evening a deathly hush reigns over the town. Your gaze is drawn heavenwards; today, it’s an ochre-grey colour. In the cemetery, the children’s graves stand in rows like cots made from wood or stone, neatly enclosed like the little ones were being tucked back into the security of their sleep.
But if you step out onto the street just an hour later, it’s jam-packed and there’s a deafening roar of motorbikes. A fairground ride has even been installed on the square, a Loop-o-plane to be precise, which shakes up the drinks in the stomachs of those riding it into cocktails. Drinking yourself into a state of complete stupefaction is now the order of the day, and it’s only in the cold light of dawn – but when is that, given that it’s half-light here the whole time? – that everyone finally rolls home. Then the place reverts to playing dead once more.
The following day, it’s early afternoon before people open their curtains again, and look out once more into nothingness, to where the snowfields are waiting somewhere on Greenland’s east coast. A picket fence and a flowerbed, and beyond them the jetty and rusty boats exuding a stench that’s a blend of algal bloom and rotting fish. The entire town consists of maybe three rows of houses. Some of them have been clad against the weather with corrugated iron, while others are painted defiantly brightly. But the sea air eats away at everything. Beneath the peeling façades, a few flower borders still brave the elements, but then the place capitulates, and your eye roams out across a natural hollow unbroken by any vegetation or roads, and you catch sight of a crystal-cold strip of water, and beyond it, in silhouette, a range of hills. Hidden in its snowy valleys are animals with white coats, while in the blue waters of the sea lurk blue fish.
The world comes to a definitive end in Isafjördur. Every day here, it draws its last breath and suggests to the visitor that he should make himself scarce. On a permanent basis, mind.
When the dance music in the inn faded away, and a window casement yielded to the wind and flew open, then at last I was able to hear the flag halyard slapping against the pole. The face of the policeman, who was sitting beside me, took on a deeply reflective air. The last murder around these parts had taken place over twenty years ago. But for the boisterous drunks, he’d have nothing to do. And if it hadn’t been for the fact that, a while ago, a polar bear had drifted into the sound on a stray iceberg from Greenland, or for the arrest of the man in the shower curtain, he wouldn’t have had a great deal to talk about. As it was, he spent most of his time just looking out of the window.
‘So, you’re a lonely person,’ I said, feeling it was the right moment to get personal.
‘Why should I be lonely?’
‘Because you’re too smart not to be.’
He looked at me without really seeing me. His eyes filled with tears, which was a shame because it instantly made him withdraw inside his hard shell.
‘Alone,’ he answered, ‘did you know it comes from “all one”?’ And saying this, he swigged down the dregs of his beer, tottered in a quite un-policeman-like way onto the stage and began belting out a rumbustious version of ‘C’est la vie, c’est la vie’. I closed the window so the sound of the halyards wouldn’t put him off his singing.