Falling Off the Map (11 page)

It is, in fact, easy to feel in Iceland that one is caught up in some homemade Arctic version of
American Graffiti
. The first time I visited the country, I could not believe the “cruising” rituals that filled even the tiniest places on every weekend night; in the small northern town of Akureyri I watched a whole procession of Pontiacs, Range Rovers, and Porsches circling the tiny central square till 4:00 a.m., teenagers hanging out of their windows; motorcycle gangs (called Sniglar, or Snails) revving up along the sidewalks; twelve-year-old boys crying out
Gledileg Jól
(Merry Christmas) in the golden evening light. But this was in the middle of the saturnalian summer, when everything is topsy-turvy, and golf tournaments start at midnight, and three-year-old toddlers caper around till one in the morning each night (or one at night each morning). This was the time of midsummer madness, when people believe that rolling naked in the dew will cure you of nineteen separate ailments and that you will be granted a wish if you walk naked in the grass or cross seven fences, collecting a flower at each one of them.

When I returned to Iceland in the dark, though, I found that the same furious rites were taking place even in the freezing cold, bodies jamming the narrow streets of Reykjavik, “Jumping Jack Flash” pouring out of their windows, the streets packed at 2:00 a.m., muscle cars burning rubber in the parking lots. Reykjavik on a Saturday night is a reeling madhouse of people puking, people barking, people lying flat out on the street, their beautiful faces shining with illicit glee. A local band was playing “Runaway” in the Gaukar á Stöng pub, and the girls at their tables were lip-synching every word, and when the group went into “Break on through to the other side …” the girls got up and started flinging their naked arms around, whirling themselves
into a bacchic frenzy, long hair and short skirts flying, like nothing so much as the Dionysian revelers in Oliver Stone’s
The Doors
.

Sex? asked Auden in
Letters from Iceland
. “Uninhibited.” And that was fifty-five years ago! Iceland discos, it seems safe to say, are not for the faint of heart. “I started smoking when I was ten, gave up when I was eleven, started again when I was twelve,” a hard-drinking girl of nineteen told me, while her friend started raving about her holiday in Bulgaria; around us, various boys were burping, dancing on the table, and pursuing rites of courtship in which solicitations came well before introductions. “These men do not have any behavior,” a young Danish boy standing near me remarked. “They are not even having a funny time.” Later, I found there was a subtext to his complaint. “I went with four girls to the Moulin Rouge,” he reported, “and all the men were blinking at me.” After the discos close, at 3:00 a.m., everyone who is not in somebody else’s arms (and even some who are) staggers off to swim naked in one of the city’s open-air pools,
I’M
ICELANDIC
, says a local T-shirt.
WHAT’S
YOUR
EXCUSE
?

Yet still, for all these odd eruptions, there is a kind of innocence in Iceland—an innocence almost betrayed by that longing for sophistication—and it is one of those places that are difficult to dislike. Even now, it seems to belong as much to Hans Christian Andersen as to Tolkien, and Peer Gynt’s angels are as much in evidence as Axl Rose’s. The most elegant hotel in Reykjavik puts a single lighted candle on its reception desk at nightfall. The waitress at the Shanghai restaurant is a classic Nordic beauty, with long Godiva tresses falling over her Chinese page-boy suit. (“The good children do get ice-cream as dessert,” promises the menu, “with regards from Shanghai.”) Many telephone numbers here have only five digits, and a child’s painting of a rainbow that I saw in the National Art
Gallery had only four (not very vibrant) colors. Sometimes you’re walking down the main street in the capital, and out of nowhere you come across a statue of a bear, dukes up, above the legend
BERLIN
2380
KM
. Everything’s out of context here, simply because there is no context.

Much of Iceland still has the phlegmatic, Spartan style of the laconic north. The best hotels in Reykjavik offer little more than a bed, perhaps a TV, and a Bible in Icelandic (with a separate New Testament in German, French, and English); in rural areas, visitors generally stay in boarding schools. The museum in Akranes, the finest I saw in the country, displays a dentist’s drill. On Saturday nights, couples in cocktail dresses and suits munch on sheep’s heads, ram’s testicles, reindeer, and ptarmigan; Auden and MacNeice gnawed, less happily, on “half-dry, half-rotten shark.” One Westman Islander told me that during the terrible volcano eruption of 1973, he went with his grandmother to the harbor, just in time to see the last fishing boat fleeing to the mainland. “Oh, well,” the grandmother said as lava poured toward her, about to bury five hundred houses, “the last boat’s gone. Let’s go home and have a coffee.”

Iceland has yet to lose this never-never quality; it is a cozy, friendly, Christmas-tree kind of place: even the chic black-leather girls who come into the cafés on Saturday afternoons are carrying bundles of babyhood in their arms. My old friend Kristín, now studying African dance, told me eagerly about her nine-year-old daughter’s class in karate, and how both of them kept strong with regular doses of “fish oil” (Icelanders, by some counts, are the longest-living people in the world). “Families are so important here,” I said. She looked surprised. “They are not everywhere?”

And somehow, in the windswept silences, so bare and broad that the mind takes flight, the close-knit purity of the people can work a curious kind of magic. Chill Lutheran bells awakened
me one ringing Sunday morning, and I went out into the quiet, rainy streets, empty save for a few children, and the smell of fresh-baked bread, and an old crone in earflaps, delivering the
Morgunbladid
. From inside the most modern church in town, I heard choirs singing hallelujahs in the cool, severely tall white nave. Hallgrimskirkja has the whitest, chastest interior I have ever seen, snow-capped islands misty through the windows behind its altar’s cross. Across the street is the Einar Jónsson House, which opens up for two afternoons a week to disclose the late artist’s mythopoeic sculptures and Blakean visions of angels and ascents to heaven, all white, but muscular and rugged.

And in the sepulchral silence and unearthly calm of Iceland, the religious impulse has room to stretch out and take wing and pick up light. The only thing I could find inside the reading pocket on an Icelandair domestic flight was a copy of the New Testament, and Van Morrison was singing “Whenever God Shines His Light” above the sober businessmen’s breakfast at the Hotel Holt. The figure of Jesus in the Skálholt church is one of the most haunting apparitions I have ever seen, a dim blue figure, hardly corporeal, faint as a half-remembered dream, emerging from the wall to look out upon an ice-blue stained-glass window. One of my favorite Reykjavik restaurants is a medieval cavern underground, lit entirely by candles, its waiters wearing friars’ robes as they serve you pan-fried puffin in the dark. If countries were writers, Iceland would, I think, be Peter Matthiessen (whose very name and face suggest the elemental north): craggy, weathered, close to earth and sea, yet lit up from within by a high fierce restlessness. And as we sailed through large caverns near the Westman Islands, the captain of my ship stopped our vessel and got out a flute and started playing Bach toccatas and “Amazing Grace.” The high, angelic sounds echoed round and around the empty space.

Sometimes, I knew, the strangeness I found in Iceland existed only in my head. The flaxen-haired girls I took to be paragons of Icelandic purity turned out to be from Iowa, or Essex. I did, finally, spot a dog one day, though whether he had—by law—an Icelandic name, I do not know. Every day, in the lobby of my hotel, I saw an old man marching up and down in red ceremonial costume, carrying a huge bell. When I asked an Icelandic friend what arcane custom he embodied, she, not surprisingly, shrugged—unaware that he was, in fact, the Town Crier of Lambeth, in London, sent here by the British Department of Trade and Industry.

Other times, though, I knew that there was something going on in the chilly, haunted silences. After a while the preternatural stillness of the treeless wastes can get to you, and inside you, and you can feel a Brontëan wildness in the soil. With its uncommonly beautiful people, its island curiosity, its closeness to traditions and tales, Iceland resembles nowhere so much as Java, its spellbound air charged with an immanence of spirits. Cold winds whistle through rows of white crosses in the black moor outside Akranes. The distinctive feature of the Icelander, for Sir Richard Burton, was “the eye, dark and cold as a pebble—a mesmerist would despair at the first sight.” From my bed, at night, I could see nothing but a white cross shining in the dark.

Something in Iceland arouses the most passionate feelings in me, and picks me up, and will not let me go. On my first trip to the island, disoriented by the never-ending light, I stayed awake all night in my hotel, uncharacteristically writing poems. But this time, too, in the emptiness and dark, I could not sleep, and found myself alone at night with feelings I could not scan, the wind so fierce outside my window it sounded like the sea. Sometimes it feels as if the forty miles or so that people can see across the glassy air here they can also see inside themselves,
as if, in this penetrating emptiness, you are thrown down and down some inner well. Sometimes it feels as if the land itself invites you almost to see in its changing moods a reflection of your own and, in the turning of the seasons, some deeper, inner shift from light to dark.

“Especially at this time of year, people have many different feelings here,” a car mechanic called Oluvi explained to me one night. “In the dark they have much time to think of God—and of other things in that direction.”

The baying of dogs woke me up my first morning in Bhutan. Otherwise, the main town square outside my room was empty, and silent. A huge full moon sat atop the golden mountains in a sky already blue. To the west, strips of mist snaked in and out of the hills as if to heighten an air of unreality. Below, workers in hoods, carrying scythes—like refugees from some biblical tale—were marching towards the fields, and schoolchildren too, in their traditional gray-and-purple jerkins. Around the golden stupa at the edge of town there was already a loud muttering of monks, and old women in turquoise beads and plaits circling around, counting their rosaries as they walked, and candles fluttering in musty antechambers. Already, the warm Himalayan sun was bathing the medieval buildings in light.

Thimphu is the only real town in Bhutan, yet its population is no bigger than a crowd at Shea Stadium when the place is half empty. It takes just a morning to explore the capital. There is only one main street, and all its shops are numbered. One reason for the numbers, perhaps, is that all the names are identical. As soon as I walked out of the Druk Hotel, I came across the Druk Liquor Shop. Also the Druk Variety Corner. Just around the corner, Druk Jewelleries. A little farther down, the Druk Medical House (which specializes in shoes).

Just past the huge display of 1988 Thai Air advertisements that guards the Druk Hotel was the office of Druk Air, the national airline of Druk Yul (or the Land of the Thunder Dragon). Inside, however, there was little decoration. Just a Thai Air ashtray, a whole display of Thai Air destinations, and a life-size cardboard cutout of a Thai Air stewardess joining her hands together in the traditional Thai
wai
of greeting. I went into Yu-Druk Travel, but it was empty—save for a huge cardboard cutout of another Thai Air girl. I passed through a dark archway, over a plank placed above some sludge, up a narrow, unlit staircase, and past an enormous padlock, into the office of Tee Dee U Car Rental. Its main feature was a pretty picture of a Thai Air hostess bowing her respects. By eleven-fifteen on this weekday morning, a sign was already up outside Druk Consult:
CLOSED FOR LUNCH
1–2:30.

Thimphu, I would later find, is a roaring, crowded, feverish metropolis by Bhutanese standards. By any other standards, it is a miracle of calm. Shopkeepers sat outside their stores, serenely knitting in the sun. Monks rested their heads on green benches in the plaza, soaking up the rays under a tall Swiss clock. At the town’s main intersection—its only intersection, in fact—a policeman directed traffic with the straight-arm precision of an archer, hands extended toward the occasional car as if he were holding a bow. The only talkative things in Thimphu were the trash cans.
WHOEVER YOU MAY BE
, announced one receptacle of dirt,
USE ME TO KEEP THE AREA CLEAN
.

Under the startling blue of heady winter skies, I took in the exotic roll call of store names in what may well be the world’s most indigenous land: Dolly Tshongkhang Shop No. 15, Sonam Rinchen Beer Agency cum Bar, Llendrup Tshongkhang Cement Agent (Shop No. 31, Thimphu), Tipsy Tipsy (Deals in Tipsy Extra Special; Tipsy Strong Beer). Many of them had a curious kind of offbeat innocence: Tshewang Fancy Store,
S
PARK
Fashion Corner, Etho Metho Handicrafts, Hotel Sam Druk (“Fooding and Lodging”). S
ALESMAN: MUST LOOK HONEST
, pleaded a less than reassuring sign in one shop.

And though the most famous fact about the Forbidden Kingdom was its young king’s love of professional basketball—the “Fearless Lion” could traditionally be seen almost every afternoon practicing jump shots in the middle of town, while dressed in ceremonial robes—there was not much hoop action in sight. The liveliest thing in town, in fact, seemed to be the posters of Phoebe Cates—Phoebe Cates pouting, Phoebe Cates smoldering, Phoebe Cates smiling. A local video store was advertising
Paradise
, starring Phoebe Cates. (If only, I thought, Phoebe Cates worked for Thai Air, how simple Bhutanese decoration would be!) And then, a little farther on, up a small rise, I saw an octagonal white cottage with a spotted red toadstool outside and cacti around its walls. Inside was a chuckling mechanical monkey that announced the time, a set of dollhouse chairs, a sign that said
MODUS: CASH-DOWN
, and a pink button with which one could summon the proprietor, a white-haired Swiss man who looked as if he were on his way to see the Brothers Grimm. Here at last was the most famous establishment in the “Land of Hidden Treasures”: its only Swiss bakery!