Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  He’s not a talker. In the last five minutes he has said more to me than in the past year and a half. He’s left himself so vulnerable that I can’t look him in the eye; I stare down at my coffee. A film of tiny, clear bubbles has formed on it, catching the light and breaking it up into red and purple.

  “From that day on, I have the feeling that he’s afraid of something. What you said about the footprints keeps on going through my mind. So I sort of keep my eye on you. You and the Baron understand … understood each other.”

  Isaiah arrived in Denmark a month before I moved in. Juliane had given him a pair of patent-leather shoes. Patent-leather shoes are considered stylish in Greenland. They couldn’t get his fanshaped feet into a pair with pointed toes. But Juliane managed to find a pair with rounded toes. After that, the mechanic called Isaiah “the Baron.” When a nickname sticks, it’s because it captures some deeper truth. In this case, it was Isaiah’s dignity. Which had something to do with the fact that he was so self–sufficient. That there was so little he needed from the world to be happy.

  “By accident I see you go up to Juliane’s apartment and leave again. I sneak after you in the Morris. Watch you feed the dog. See you climb over. I open the other gate.”

  That’s how it all fits together. He hears something, he sees something, he follows somebody, he opens a gate, gets bashed in the head, and we sit here. No mysteries, nothing new or disturbing under the sun.

  He gives me a crooked smile. I smile back. We sit there drinking coffee and smiling at each other. We know that I know he’s lying.

  I tell him about Elsa Lübing. About the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark. About the report lying in front of us on the table in a plastic bag.

  I tell him about Ravn. Who doesn’t exactly work where he works, but somewhere else instead.

  He sits there looking down as I talk. His head bent, motionless.

  It’s hidden, lying out there on the edge of consciousness. But we both sense that we are participating in a barter. That, with profound, mutual suspicion, we are trading information that we have to reveal in order to get some in return.

  “Then there’s the l-lawyer.”

  Outside, above the harbor, a light appears, as if it had been sleeping in the canals, under the bridges, and is now hesitantly rising up onto the ice, which grows brighter. In Thule the light returned in February. For weeks ahead of time we could see the sun while it was still far beneath the mountains and we were living in darkness; its rays fell on Pearl Island, hundreds of miles out to sea, making it glow like a shard of rose mother-of-pearl. I was positive, no matter what the adults said, that the sun had been hibernating in the sea and was now waking up.

  “It all started when I noticed the car, a red BMW, on Strand Street,” he says.

  “Yes?” It seems to me that the cars on Strand Street change every day.

  “Once a month. He picks up the Baron. When he got home, the Baron was impossible to talk to.”

  “I see.” You have to give slow people all the time in the world.

  “Then one day I open the car—I have a tool with me—and look in the glove compartment. Belongs to a lawyer. Name of Ving.”

  “You might have been looking in the wrong car.”

  “Flowers. It’s like flowers. When you’re a g-gardener. I see a car once or twice and I remember it. The way you are with snow. The way you were up on the roof.”

  “Maybe I was mistaken.”

  He shakes his head. “I watched you and the Baron play that jumping game.”

  A large part of my childhood was spent playing that game. I often still play it in my sleep. You jump across an untouched expanse of snow. The others wait with their backs turned. Afterward—on the basis of the footprints—you have to reconstruct the way the first person jumped. Isaiah and I played that game. I often took him to kindergarten. Sometimes we arrived an hour and a half late. I got in trouble. They warned me that a kindergarten couldn’t function if the children came drifting in late in the day. But we were happy.

  “He could leap like a flea,” says the mechanic, daydreaming. “He was sly. He’d turn halfway around in the air and land on one foot. He’d walk back in his own footprints.”

  He looks at me, shaking his head. “But you guessed right every time.”

  “How long were they gone?”

  The jackhammers on Knippels Bridge. The traffic starting up. The seagulls. The distant bass sound, actually more like a deep vibration, of the first hydrofoil to Sweden. The short toots on the horn of the Bornholm ferry as it turns in front of Amalienborg Palace. It’s almost morning.

  “Maybe several hours. But a different car brought him home. A cab. He always came back alone in a cab.”

  He makes us an omelet while I stand in the doorway telling him about the Institute of Forensic Medicine. About Professor Loyen. About Lagermann. About the trace of something that might be a muscle biopsy, taken from a child. After he fell.

  He slices onions and tomatoes, sautés them in butter, whips the egg whites until they’re stiff, blends in the egg yolks, and cooks the whole thing on both sides. He takes the pan over to the table. We drink milk and eat slices of a moist black rye bread that smells of tar.

  We eat in silence. Whenever I eat with strangers—like now—or if I’m very hungry—like now—I am reminded of the ritual significance of meals. In my childhood I remember associating the solemnity of companionship with great gustatory experiences. The pink, slightly frothy whale blubber eaten from a communal platter. The feeling that practically everything in life is meant to be shared.

  I get up.

  He’s standing in the door as if to block my way.

  I think about the inadequacy of what he has told me today.

  He steps aside. I walk past. With my boots and my fur coat in my hand.

  “I’ll leave part of the report. It’ll be good practice for your dyslexia.”

  There’s a look of mischief in his eyes. “Smilla. Why is it that such an elegant and petite girl like you has such a rough voice?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “if I give you the impression that it’s only my mouth that’s rough. I do my best to be rough all over.”

  Then I close the door.

  11

  I slept all morning and got up a little late, so I only have an hour and a half to take a shower, get dressed, and put on my funeral makeup, which is far too little time, as anyone who has tried to make herself look good will confirm. That’s why I’m feeling flustered when we arrive at the chapel, and after the service I still feel that way. As I’m walking along beside the mechanic, I feel as if someone had screwed off my lid and plunged a big bottle washer up and down inside.

  Something warm falls over my shoulders. He has taken off his coat and put it around me. It reaches all the way down to my feet.

  We stop and look back toward the grave and our own footprints. His are big, run over at the heels. Apparently he’s slightly bowlegged, though it’s hardly visible. Tiny perforations from my high heels. They look rather like deer tracks. A slanted, downward-sloping movement, and in the bottom of the track black marks where the hooves have pierced through the layer of snow to the ground.

  The women walk past us. I see only their boots and shoes. Three of them are holding up Juliane; the tips of her shoes drag across the snow. Next to the pastor’s robes there is a pair of black boots made of embroidered leather. Above the gate out to the road there is a streetlight. When I look up, the woman lifts her head and tosses it so that her long hair flies to one side in the darkness and her face catches the light, a white face with big eyes, like dark water amid the pallor. She’s holding the pastor by the arm and talking to him earnestly. Something about those two figures next to each other freezes the image and makes it stick in my mind.

  “Miss Jaspersen.”

  It’s Ravn. With friends. Two men wearing coats as big as his, but who can fill them out. Underneath they’re wearing blue suits and white shirts and ties, and sunglasses so th
at the winter dusk at four o’clock in the afternoon won’t hurt their eyes.

  “I’d like to have a word with you.”

  “At the office of the fraud division? About my investments?”

  He listens without reacting. He has a face which, over the years, has seen so much that nothing really leaves a mark on it anymore. He motions toward his car.

  “I’m not sure I feel like it right now.”

  He doesn’t budge an inch. But his two lodge brothers ooze imperceptibly closer.

  “Smilla, if you don’t f-feel like it, I don’t think you should go.”

  It’s the mechanic. He’s blocking the men’s path.

  When animals—and almost all normal people—face a physical threat, their bodies go rigid. From a physiological standpoint it’s not efficient, but it’s the general rule. Polar bears are the exception. They can lie in wait, perfectly relaxed, for two hours without once releasing the heightened readiness of their muscles. Now I realize that the mechanic is also an exception. His posture is almost loose. But there is a physical ferocity in his focus on the men in front of him which reminds me once again how little I know about him.

  It has no detectable effect on Ravn. But it makes the two men in blue suits take a step back, as they unbutton their jackets. It could be that they’re too hot. It could be that they share a nervous tic. It could also be that they both have a blackjack with a lead core.

  “Will I be driven home?”

  “Right to your door.”

  In the car I sit in the back with Ravn. At one point I lean forward and take off the driver’s sunglasses.

  “I’m silent as the grave, you little shit,” I say. “My lips are sealed with seven seals. Ravn won’t hear from me that you were sleeping on the job. At six-thirty in the morning on Kabbeleje Road.”

  At the Police Headquarters we drive in between the red brick buildings where the Division of Motor Vehicles has its offices. We’re heading for a low red barracks facing the harbor.

  There’s no sign on the building. We meet no one. There’s no tapping of typewriters. There are no nameplates on the doors. There is simply peace and quiet. Like in a reading room. Or in the morgue beneath the Institute of Forensic Medicine.

  The two blue choirboys have vanished. We enter a dark office. There are venetian blinds on the windows. Through the blinds you can see the electric lights, the docks, the water, the Iceland Wharf.

  It’s a room that must get a lot of light in the daytime. There’s nothing much else in it. Nothing on the walls. Nothing on the tables. Nothing on the windowsills.

  Ravn turns on the light. In the corner a man is sitting on a chair. He has been sitting and waiting in the dark. Sinewy, with close-cropped, almost plush black hair, distant blue eyes, and a harsh mouth. He is meticulously dressed.

  Ravn sits down behind the desk.

  “Smilla Jaspersen,” he introduces me. “Captain Telling.”

  I am facing the two men with my back to the windows.

  There are no cigarettes, no coffee in plastic cups, no tape recorder, and no bare light bulb, no mood of interrogation. There is only an atmosphere of waiting.

  In this atmosphere I withdraw into myself.

  Into the silence steps a woman carrying a tray with tea, sugar, milk, and lemon slices, all on white porcelain. Afterward the abandoned building swallows her up and she is gone. Ravn pours the tea.

  He takes a folder out of a drawer. It’s pink. He reads it slowly. As if he wants to try—again—to experience it for the first time.

  “Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen. Born June 16, 1956, in Qaanaaq. Parents: Ane Qaavigaaq, hunter, and Dr. Jørgen Moritz Jaspersen, physician. Attended grade school in Greenland and Copenhagen. Graduated from Birkerød High School, 1976. Courses at the H. C. ∅rsted Institute and the Geographical Institute in Copenhagen. Glacial morphology, statistics, and fundamental problems of mathematics. Trips to West Greenland and Thule in ’75, ’76, and ’77. Planned the outfitting of Danish and French expeditions to North Greenland in ’78, ’79, and ’80. In 1982 employed by the Geodetic Institute. From ’82 to ’85 scientific participant in expeditions to the ice cap, the Arctic Ocean, and Arctic North America. Various references are attached. One from Major Guldbrandsen, who led the Sirius Patrol. It dates back to ’79. He complains that you won’t drive a dog team. Are you afraid of dogs?”

  “Just cautious.”

  “But he adds that he would recommend any civilian expedition to take you along as navigator, even if they have to carry you on their backs. Then there are your scientific articles. A dozen or so, several published abroad. With titles that go over the heads of Captain Telling and me. ‘Statistics on Glacial Graphology.’ ‘Mathematical Models for Brine Drainage from Seawater Ice.’ And a compendium for students that you once wrote: Main Characteristics of the Glacial Morphology of North Greenland.”

  He closes the report.

  “There are various other references. From teachers. From colleagues at the U.S. Army’s Cold Water Laboratory in some place called Pylot Island. All of them state unanimously that if you want to know anything about ice, you will benefit by consulting Smilla Jaspersen.”

  Ravn takes off his coat. Underneath he’s as thin as a pipe cleaner. I take off my shoes and pull up my legs to sit cross-legged on the chair so I can massage my toes. They’re numb from the cold, and there are still clumps of ice in my stockings.

  “This information is largely identical with the curriculum vitae you submitted when you applied for a visa to North Greenland in connection with the Norwegian Arctic Institute’s expedition to tag polar bears. We’ve sniffed around a little. The information is absolutely correct. On this basis, I think we have to assume that we are dealing with a very independent young woman who has unusual resources which she has administered with ambition and talent. Don’t you agree that’s the conclusion one ought to arrive at?”

  “You can arrive at any conclusion you like,” I say.

  “I’ve also obtained several other pieces of information, however.”

  This folder is quite thin, and dark green.

  “This is largely identical with the report that Captain Telling and his office had at their disposal when they stamped DENIED on your last application for a visa to North Greenland. It starts off by summarizing several private matters. Your mother reported missing on June 12, 1963, while hunting. Presumed dead. Your brother commits suicide in September of ’81 in Upernavik. Parents married 1956, divorced 1958. Custody transferred to the father after the mother’s death. Contested by the mother’s brother but denied by the Ministry of Justice in May 1964. To Denmark in September 1963. Reported missing, searched for, and found by the police six times between ’63 and ’71, twice in Greenland.

  “Danish grade school for immigrants, 1963. Skovgårds School in Charlottenlund, ’64–’65. Expelled. Stenhøj Boarding School in Humlebæk, ’65–’67. Expelled. Then come brief terms at smaller private schools. Graduated from junior high after private instruction at home. Then high school. Took the senior year over. High-school diploma 1976 after private instruction. Admitted to Copenhagen University. Drops out in 1984 without a degree. And then there’s the political activity. Arrested several times during the occupation of the Ministry of the Environment by the Council of Young Greenlanders. Active in the founding of IA after the CYG split.”

  He gives Captain Telling an inquisitive look.

  “Inuit Ataqatigiit. ‘Those who will succeed.’ Aggressive Marxism.” This is the first time the captain has spoken.

  “Leaves the party the same year because of numerous disagreements. Since then unaffiliated. Then there are some minor infractions. Three unresolved cases dealing with breaches of Canadian territorial law on Peary Sound. Why?”

  “I was tagging polar bears. Bears can’t read maps, so they don’t respect national boundaries.”

  “Several minor traffic violations. A verdict of defamation of character in connection with an article entitled ‘Ice Research and the P
rofit Motive in Denmark in Connection with the Exploitation of Oil Resources in the Arctic Ocean.’ As a result excluded from the Danish Glaciology Society.”

  He looks up.

  “Is there any institution you haven’t been thrown out of, Miss Jaspersen?”

  “As far as I know, I’m still listed in the national registry of citizens.”

  “In addition, we have also had a look over the shoulders of the tax authorities and public administration. A little comes in from your articles, sporadic jobs, and state support. But it doesn’t seem to match your expenses. We wonder if you have a patron. How’s your relationship with your father?”

  “Warm and respectful.”

  “That might explain a lot. Captain Telling has had a look at his tax returns, you see.”

  For me, it’s no news that they know all this. Ever since the establishment of Thule Air Base, there has been a limit to how many civilian passengers each aircraft could take to Greenland. To give the intelligence service time to investigate whether everybody had been confirmed in the Lutheran Church, came from a good family, and had been ideologically immunized against the red fever from the East. What’s astonishing is that they’re telling me what they know.

  “This information presents a more complicated picture. It paints a portrait of a woman who has never finished a course of study. Who is unemployed. Who has no family. Who has created conflict wherever she has been. Who has never been able to fit in. Who is aggressive. And who vacillates around political extremes. And yet you have managed to take part in nine expeditions in twelve years. I don’t know Greenland, but I imagine that if you’re frustrated with your life, it would be easier to hide out on the ice cap.”