Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  The moment I step out onto Hejre Road, the building intercom buzzes.

  “Would you please come back up for a moment?”

  Her voice is hoarse. But that might be the fault of the underwater intercom.

  So I ride up in the elevator again. And she receives me again in the doorway.

  But nothing is as before, as Jesus says somewhere.

  “I have a ritual,” she says. “I open the Bible at random when I am in doubt. To get a sign. A little game between God and me, if you like.”

  With someone else this ritual might have seemed like one of the little functional tics that Europeans get when they’re alone too much. But not with her. She is never alone. She is married to Jesus.

  “Just now, when you closed the door, I opened the Bible. It was the first page of Revelation. Which you mentioned. ‘I have the keys of Hades and of Death.’”

  We stand there looking at each other.

  “The keys of hell,” she says. “How far will you go?”

  “Try me.”

  For a moment something still struggles inside her.

  “There’s a double archive, in the basement, in the building on Strand Boulevard. In the first one are the accounts and correspondence. The supervisors, the bookkeepers, I myself, and sometimes the department heads all have access. The other archive is behind the first one. That’s where the expedition reports are kept. Certain mineral samples. There is a whole wall full of topographical maps. A case of drilling cores, geological core samples about the size of a narwhal tusk. Technically, access is granted only with the permission of the board or the director.”

  She turns her back to me.

  I sense the appropriate solemnity. She is about to commit one of her life’s (without doubt very few) breaches of the regulations.

  “Naturally I cannot mention that there is a passkey system. Or that the Abloy key over there on the board is for the main entrance.”

  I slowly turn my head. Behind me there are three brass hooks, three keys. One of them is an Abloy.

  “The building itself does not have a security system. The key to the archives in the basement is hanging in the safe in the office. An electronic safe with a six-digit code, the date on which I became the Chief Accountant: 05-17-57. The key fits both the first and second basement rooms.”

  She turns around and comes over to me. It’s my guess that this proximity is the closest she ever comes to touching another human being.

  “Do you believe?” she asks.

  “I don’t know whether I believe in your God.”

  “That doesn’t matter. You believe in a Supreme Being?”

  “There are mornings when I don’t even believe in myself.”

  She laughs for the second time that day. Then she turns around and walks over toward her panoramic view.

  When she’s halfway across the room, I put the key in my pocket. With the tips of my fingers I make sure that Rohrmann’s silk lining hasn’t shredded, at least in that pocket.

  Then I leave. I take the stairs. If there is divine providence, one of the great questions is how directly it intervenes. Whether it is the Lord Himself who saw me at 6 Hejre Road and said, “Let there be a break,” and there was a break. In one of his own angels.

  When I turn the corner onto Due Road I have a ballpoint pen in my hand. There is a license plate I feel like jotting down on my hand. Nothing comes of it. When I reach the corner, there is no car in sight.

  10

  From the earth have you come.

  Occasionally gyrfalcons would appear when we were hunting for auks. At first they would be nothing but two tiny dots on the horizon. Then the mountain seemed to dissolve and rise up into the sky. When a million auks take off, space turns black for a moment, as if winter had returned in a flash.

  My mother would shoot at the falcons. A gyrfalcon dives at a speed of 125 miles per hour. She usually hit them. She shot them with a nickel-plated, small-caliber bullet. We would pick them up for her. One time the bullet entered one eye and lodged in the other, as if the dead falcon were staring at us with a shiny, piercing gaze.

  A taxidermist on the base stuffed them for her. Gyrfalcons are a protected species. On the black market in Germany or the United States you can sell a baby falcon for $50,000 to be bred for hunting. No one dared to believe that my mother had violated the ban on hunting them.

  She didn’t sell them. She gave them away. To my father, to one of the ethnographers who sought her out because she was a female hunter, to one of the officers from the base.

  The stuffed falcons were both a gruesome and a dazzling gift. She would ceremoniously present them with an apparent display of absolute generosity. Then she would drop a remark about needing a pair of tailor’s shears. She hinted that she was in need of eighty yards of nylon rope. Or she let it be known that we children could certainly use two pairs of thermal underwear.

  She got whatever she asked for. By wrapping her guest in a web of fierce, mutually obligating courtesy.

  This made me ashamed of her, and it made me love her. It was her response to European culture. She opened herself to it with a courtesy full of pallid premeditation. And she closed around it, encapsulating what she could use. A pair of scissors, a coil of rope, the spermatozoa that brought Moritz Jaspersen into her womb.

  That’s why Thule will never become a museum. The ethnographers have cast a dream of innocence over North Greenland. A dream that the Inuit will continue to be the bowlegged, drum-dancing, legend-telling, widely smiling exhibition images that the first explorers thought they were meeting south of Qaanaaq at the turn of the century. My mother gave them a dead bird. And made them buy half the store for her. She paddled a kayak that was made in the same way they were made in the seventeenth century, before the art of kayak building disappeared from North Greenland. But she used a sealed plastic container for her hunting float.

  To the earth shall you return.

  I can see how others are successful. But I can’t find success myself.

  Isaiah was on the verge of success. He could have gotten ahead. He would have been able to absorb Denmark and transform it and become both a Dane and a Greenlander.

  I had an anorak made for him out of white silk. Even the pattern had been passed down by Europeans. The painter Gitz-Johansen once gave it to my father. He had gotten it in North Greenland when he was illustrating his great reference work on the birds of Greenland. I put the anorak on Isaiah, combed his hair, and then I lifted him up onto the toilet seat. When he saw himself in the mirror, that’s when it happened. The tropical fabric, the Greenlandic respect for fine clothes, the Danish joy in luxury all merged together. Maybe it also meant something that I had given it to him.

  A second later he had to sneeze.

  “Hold my nose!”

  I held his nose.

  “Why?” I asked. He usually blew his nose into the sink.

  As soon as I opened my mouth, his eyes found my lips in the mirror. I often realized that he understood things even before they were expressed.

  “When I’m wearing annoraaq qaqortoq, this fine anorak, I don’t want snot on my fingers.”

  And from the earth shall you rise again.

  I try scanning the women standing around Juliane to see if any of them might be pregnant. With a boy who could be given Isaiah’s name. The dead live on in their names. There were four girls who were named Ane after my mother. I’ve visited them many times and sat and talked with them, in order to find, through the woman before me, a glimpse of the one who left me.

  They’re pulling the ropes out of the eyelets on the side of the coffin. For a brief moment my yearning feels like madness. If only they would open the coffin for a moment and let me lie down beside his cold little body that someone has stuck a needle into, that they have opened up and photographed and cut slices out of and closed up again; if only I could just once feel his erection against my thigh, a gesture of intimated, boundless eroticism, the beating of a moth’s wing against my ski
n, the dark insects of happiness.

  It’s so cold that they will have to wait to fill the grave, so when we leave, it lies open behind us. The mechanic and I walk side by side.

  His name is Peter. It’s less than thirteen hours since I said his name for the first time.

  Sixteen hours ago it was midnight. On Kalkbrænderi Road. I’ve bought twelve big black plastic bags, four rolls of duct tape, four tubes of super glue, and a Maglite flashlight. I have slit open the bags, doubled them up, and glued them together. Then stuffed them into my Louis Vuitton handbag.

  I’m wearing a pair of high boots, a red turtleneck sweater, a sealskin coat from Groenlandia, and a skirt from Scottish Corner. I’ve learned that it’s always easier to explain things if you’re nicely dressed.

  What happens next lacks a certain degree of elegance.

  The entire factory area is surrounded by a fence twelve feet high, which has a single strand of barbed wire along the top. In my mind I imagine a door in the back, facing Kalkbrænderi Road and the train tracks. I’ve seen it before.

  What I didn’t see was the sign saying that Danish Watchdogs are on guard here. That might not mean anything. So many signs are put up for no other reason than to maintain the proper atmosphere. So I give a trial kick at the door. Within five seconds a dog is standing at the gate. He might be a German shepherd. He looks like something that was lying in front of the door for people to wipe their feet on. That might explain the foul mood that he’s in.

  There are people in Greenland who have a way with dogs. My mother did. Before nylon ropes became common in the seventies, we used harnesses made of sealskin as towlines. The other dog teams chewed through their harnesses. Our dogs didn’t touch theirs. My mother had forbidden it.

  Then there are those born with a fear of dogs who never overcome it. I’m one of those people. So I walk back along Strand Boulevard and take a cab home.

  I don’t go up to my apartment. I go to Juliane’s. I take a pound of cod liver out of her refrigerator. Her friend at the fish market gives her free liver if it’s split. In her bathroom I pour half a bottle of Halcion pills into my pocket. Her doctor prescribed them for her recently. She sells them. Halcion is marketable among junkies. She uses the money to buy her own medicine, the kind that customs officers charge duty on.

  In Rink’s collection there is a story from West Greenland about a bogeyman who can’t fall asleep but must keep watch for all eternity. But that’s because he hasn’t tried Halcion. When you take it for the first time, half a tablet can put you into a deep coma.

  Juliane lets me forage. She has given up on almost everything, including asking me questions.

  “You’ve forgotten me!” she shouts after me.

  I take a taxi back to Kalkbrænderi Road. The cab starts to smell like fish.

  Standing beneath the streetlight under the viaduct facing the Free Harbor, I crush the pills into the liver. Now I smell like fish, too.

  This time I don’t have to call the dog. He’s standing there waiting, hoping that I would come back. I toss the liver over the fence. You hear so much about dogs’ keen sense of smell, I’m afraid he might smell the pills. My worries are for naught. The dog sucks up the liver like a vacuum cleaner.

  Then we wait, the dog and I. The dog is waiting for more liver. I am waiting to see what the pharmaceutical industry can do for sleepless animals.

  A car pulls up. A station wagon from Danish Watchdogs. There’s no place to make yourself invisible or even discreet on Kalkbrænderi Road. So I just stand there. A man wearing a uniform gets out of the car. He looks me over but can’t come up with a satisfactory explanation. Solitary woman wearing a fur coat at one in the morning on the outskirts of the ∅sterbro district? He unlocks the gate and puts the dog on a leash. He brings him out to the sidewalk. The dog growls nastily at me. Suddenly his legs turn to rubber and he’s about to fall over. The man stares at the dog anxiously. The dog looks at him mournfully. The man opens the back of the wagon. The dog manages to get his front paws in, but the man has to shove him the rest of the way. He’s mystified. Then he drives off. Leaving me to my own thoughts about the way Danish Watchdogs works. I come to the conclusion that they put the dogs out as a kind of random sampling, every once in a while, and for only a short time at each place. Now the dog’s on his way to the next place. I hope there’s something soft for him to sleep on.

  Then I stick the key in the lock. But it doesn’t open the gate. I can just picture it. Elsa Lübing has always arrived at work at a time when a guard opened the gate. That’s why she didn’t know that the entrances on the outer periphery are on a different key system.

  I’ll have to go over the fence. It takes a long time. I end up throwing my boots over first. A piece of sealskin gets caught in the process.

  I only have to look at a map once and the landscape rises up from the paper. It’s not something that I learned. Although, of course, I had to acquire a nomenclature, a system of symbols. The ridged elevation peaks on the topographical maps of the Geodesic Institute. The red and green parabolas on the military maps of the ice pack. The discus-shaped, grayish-white photographs of X-band radar. The multi-spectrum scans of LANDSAT 3. The candy-colored sediment maps of the geologists. The red-and-blue thermal photographs. But in the truest sense it has been like learning a new alphabet. Which you then forget about as soon as you start reading. The text about ice.

  There was a map of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark in the book at the Geological Institute. A cadastral map, an aerial photograph, and a floor plan. Now, standing on the grounds, I know how it all once looked.

  It’s a demolition site now. Dark as a cave, with white spots where the snow has been blown into drifts.

  I’ve entered the grounds where the rear of the raw cryolite building once stood. The foundation is still there. An abandoned soccer field of frozen concrete. I look for the railroad tracks, and at that very moment stumble over the ties. The tracks of the train that brought the ore in from the company’s dock. Silhouetted in the darkness is the workers’ shed where the smithy, the machine shop, and the carpentry shop once were housed. A cellar full of bricks was once the basement under the cafeteria. The factory grounds are bisected by Svaneke Street. On the other side of the road is the residential district with lots of electric Christmas stars, lots of candles, and all those nuclear families. And outside their windows: the two rectangular laboratory buildings which haven’t been torn down yet. Is this a portrait of Denmark’s relationship to its former colony? Disillusionment, resignation, and retreat? While retaining the last administrative grip: control of foreign policy, mineral rights, and military interests?

  In front of me, against the light from Strand Boulevard, the building looks like a small castle.

  It’s an L-shaped building. The entrance is at the top of a fanshaped, granite staircase, in the wing facing Strand Boulevard. This time the key works.

  The door opens onto a small square foyer with black and white marble tiles and acoustics that reverberate, no matter how quietly you move. From here one stairway leads down to the darkness and the archives below, and another goes five steps up to the floor where Elsa Lübing, for forty-five years, has exerted her influence.

  The stairs lead up to some French doors. Beyond them is one large room, which must run the full length of the wing. There are eight desks, six bay windows facing the street, file cabinets, telephones, word processors, two copy machines, metal shelves with red and blue plastic file folders. On one wall a map of Greenland. On a long table a coffee machine and several mugs. In the corner a big electronic safe with a little window glowing with the word CLOSED.

  One desk is set apart from the others and slightly larger. It has plate glass on top. On the glass stands a little crucifix. No private office for the Chief Accountant. Merely a desk in the regular pool. Just like in the first Christian congregation.

  I sit down in her high-backed chair. In order to understand what it was like sitting here for forty-five years amo
ng the erasers and bank stationery, with part of her consciousness elevated to a spiritual dimension, where a light burns with a strength that makes her shrug cheerfully at earthly love—which for the rest of us is a mixture of the cathedral in Nuuk and the potential for a third world war.

  After a moment I get up, none the wiser.

  There are venetian blinds on the windows. The yellow light of Strand Boulevard is zebra-striped in the room. I punch in the date when she became Chief Accountant: 05-17-57.

  The safe hums, and the door opens outward. There is no handle, only a wide ridge to take hold of and lean your weight against.

  On the narrow metal shelves are the account books of the Cryolite Corporation since 1885, when it was separated from the ∅resund Corporation by government charter. About six ledgers for each year. Hundreds of volumes in gray moleskin with red stamping. A piece of history. About the politically and economically most profitable and most important investments in Greenland.

  I take out a book marked 1991 and page through it at random. It says: salary, pension, harbor fees, labor costs, room and board, tonnage charges, laundry and dry cleaning, travel expenses, shareholders’ dividends, paid to Struer Chemical Laboratory.

  Rows of keys are hanging to the right, on the wall of the safe. I find the one marked ARCHIVES.

  When I push the door of the safe closed, the numbers disappear one by one, and when I leave the room and go downstairs in the dark, it once again says CLOSED.

  The first room in the archives is the entire basement under one wing of the building. A low-ceilinged room with countless wooden shelves, countless quantities of ledger paper wrapped in brown paper, and filled with the air that always hovers over vast paper deserts, enervating and drained of all moisture.

  The second room is perpendicular to the first. It has the same kind of shelving. But it also contains archive cabinets with flat drawers for topographical maps. A hanging file with hundreds of maps, some of them clamped onto brass rods. A locked wooden cabinet, like a coffin ten yards long. That must be where the drilling cores sleep.