by Peter Høeg
And there are the two professors, Johannes Loyen and Andreas Fine Licht. Two men about whom we don’t know an awful lot, except that their names are associated with both expeditions to Gela Alta. Two expeditions, about which we really don’t know anything either.
“My father,” I say, “was once a professor. Now that he isn’t one anymore, he says that in most cases the people who become professors are clever without being too clever.”
“So what happens to the ones who are too clever?”
I hate quoting Moritz. What can you do about people you don’t want to quote but who are still the ones who have said it most succinctly?
“He says that they either rise up to the stars or they go to the dogs.”
“Which of the two happened to your father?”
I have to think about that for a moment before I come up with an answer. “It’s more like he’s split in half,” I say.
Silently we listen to the sounds of the city. The cars on the bridge. The sound of pneumatic tools from the night shift at one of Holmen’s dry docks. The chimes of Our Saviour’s Church. They say that anyone can get permission to play the bells in the tower. That’s also the impression you have from listening. Sometimes it sounds like Horowitz, sometimes as if they picked up some obscure drunk at Café Høvlen.
“The Trade Commission,” I say. “Lübing said that if you want to find out who controls a company or who sits on a board, you can look it up at the Trade Commission. Supposedly they have the balance sheets for all companies in Denmark listed on the stock exchange.”
“It’s on K-Kampmanns Street.”
“How do you know that?” I ask.
He gazes out the window. “I paid attention in school.”
3
There are mornings when it feels as if you rise up to the surface through a mud bath. With your feet stuck in a block of cement. When you know that you’ve expired in the night and have nothing to be happy about except the fact that at least you’ve already died so they can’t transplant your lifeless organs.
Six out of seven mornings are like that.
The seventh is like today. I wake up feeling crystal-clear. I climb out of bed as if I had some reason to get up.
I do the four yoga exercises I managed to learn before I received the eightieth reminder from the library, and they sent a messenger, and I had to pay such a big fine that I might just as well have bought the book.
I take a shower in ice-cold water. Put on leggings, a big sweater, gray boots, and a fur hat from Jane Eberlein. It’s made in sort of a Greenland style.
I usually tell myself that I’ve lost my cultural identity for good. And after I’ve said this enough times, I wake up one morning, like today, with a solid sense of identity. Smilla Jaspersen—pampered Greenlander.
It’s seven o’clock in the morning. I walk down to the harbor and out onto the ice.
The ice in Copenhagen Harbor is not a place where you’d recommend parents send their children out to play, even in a hard frost such as this one. Even I have to be careful when I go out there.
About forty yards out I stop. Here the surface is slightly darker. One more step and I would fall through. I stand there, bobbing up and down. Sea ice is porous and elastic, the water seeps up through it, forming around my boots two mirror surfaces that reflect the scattered lights in the darkness.
A man is standing on the dock. A black silhouette against the white walls of the buildings. Fear spreads out like a vibrating tone. The mortal danger of the seal when it’s lying on the ice. So sensitive, so visible, so immobile. Then the tone dies out. It’s the mechanic, stooped, rectangular, like a big rock. I haven’t seen him for two days. Maybe I’ve been avoiding him.
You get so used to looking at the city from certain angles that from here it seems like some foreign capital never before seen. Like Venice. Or Atlantis. A city which, wrapped in snow and the night, could be made of marble. I walk back toward the dock.
He could have been someone else. I could have been someone else. We could have been young lovers. Instead of a dyslexic stutterer and a bitter shrew who tell each other half-truths and are walking together along some dubious path.
When I’m standing in front of him, he takes me by the shoulders. “That’s dangerous!”
If I didn’t know better, I could have sworn there was something almost pleading in his voice.
I shake off his hands.
“I have a good relationship with ice.”
When we disbanded the Young Greenlanders’ Council to form IA, and had to position ourselves in relation to the social democrats in SIUMUT and the reactionary Greenlandic upper class in ATAS-SUT, we read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. It was a book I grew quite fond of. For its trembling, feminine empathy and its potent indignation. I know of no other book with such a strong belief in how much you can accomplish if you simply have the will to change.
Unfortunately, I’m not that confident myself. I’ve been given a great deal, and I’ve wanted a lot. And I’ve ended up not really having anything and not really knowing what I want. I’ve acquired the basics of an education. I’ve traveled. Occasionally I’ve felt that I’ve done what I wanted to do. And yet I’ve been directed. Some invisible hand has had me by the scruff of the neck, and every time I thought that now I was taking an important step up toward the light, it has pushed me farther into a network of sewer pipes running beneath a landscape I cannot see. As if it had been determined that I would have to swallow a specific amount of wastewater before I would be allowed a breathing hole.
As a rule I swim against the current. But on certain mornings, like today, I have enough surplus energy to surrender. Now, as I’m walking along beside the mechanic, I am strangely, inexplicably happy.
It dawns on me that we could eat breakfast together. I can’t remember how long it’s been since I ate breakfast with someone. It has been my own choice. I’m sensitive in the morning. I need time to throw cold water on my face and put on my eyeliner and drink a glass of juice before I’m feeling sociable. But this morning has taken care of itself. We met, and now we’re walking along side by side. I’m just about to suggest it.
Suddenly I’m floating.
He has picked me up and carried me over to the scaffolding. I think it’s a joke and am about to say something. Then I see what he sensed and keep quiet. The stairwell is dark on all floors. But a door is opening. It floods yellow light out into the darkness. And two figures—Juliane and a man. He’s talking to her. She staggers. Whatever he’s saying falls like blows. She drops to her knees. Then the door shuts. The man takes the outdoor stairway.
Juliane’s friends don’t leave at seven in the morning. At that hour they haven’t even come home yet. And if they do leave, they don’t walk with the nimble ease of this man. They crawl.
We’re standing in the shadow of the scaffolding. He can’t see us. He’s wearing a long Burberry raincoat and a hat.
At the end of the building facing Christianshavn the mechanic gives my arm a squeeze, and I continue on alone. The hat in front of me gets into a car. When he pulls away from the curb, the little Morris stops right next to me. The seats are cold and so low that I have to stretch to see out the windshield. It’s iced over, so we drive peeking through a strip, barely able to see from the hood ornament to the red taillights in front of us.
We drive across the bridge. Turn right before Holmens Church, past the National Bank, across the King’s New Square. Maybe there’s other traffic, maybe we’re the only ones. It’s impossible to tell through the windshield.
He parks the car at Krinsen Park. We drive past and stop across from the French Embassy. He doesn’t look back.
He walks past the Hotel d’Angleterre and turns down Strøget, the walking street. We’re twenty-five yards behind him. Now there are other people around us. He walks up to a doorway and lets himself in with a key.
If I had been alone, I would have stopped here. I don’t need to go over to the door to know what it says on the namep
late. I know who the man is that we’ve been following, as surely as if he had shown me his credentials. If I had been alone, I would have strolled home and thought things over along the way.
But today there are two of us. For the first time in a long time we are two.
One moment he’s standing at my side, and the next he’s over by the door, sticking his hand in before it closes.
I follow him. When you’re playing ball or some other game, sometimes there is a moment like this of spontaneous, wordless, mutual understanding.
We enter an archway with a vaulted ceiling of white and gold bronze, marble panels, soft yellow light, and a door with glass panes and a brass handle. The archway leads into a garden courtyard with evergreen shrubbery, little Japanese ginkgo trees, and a fountain. Everything is covered with the snow of the last two weeks, which once started to melt but now has a thin, frozen crust on the surface. From somewhere up above, the first light of day drifts downward, like dust.
An electric cord is lying inside the stairwell. It goes around a corner. From there comes the sound of a vacuum cleaner. In front of us is a janitor’s cart, with two buckets, mops, scrub brushes, and a couple of roller contraptions for wringing out wet rags. The mechanic grabs the cart.
There are footsteps above us. Light steps, muted by the blue runner held down by brass rods the width of the stairs. There’s a pleasant scent surrounding us. A scent I recognize but can’t identify.
We reach the third floor the moment the door shuts behind him. The mechanic carries the cart under his arm as if it were nothing.
The gilding and the cream-colored inlay from the doorway are repeated in the stairwell and on the doors. There are engraved brass nameplates. The plate in front of us is placed above an extra-wide mail slot. So that even the largest checks can get through. LAW OFFICE, it says. Of course. Law Office of Hammer & Ving. The door isn’t locked, so we go in. The cart comes along.
We enter a large foyer. One door is open, leading to a series of offices that are extensions of one another, like the reception rooms in the photographs of Amalienborg Palace. And there are photographs of the Queen and the Prince, and shiny parquet floors, and paintings in gilt frames, and the most elegant office furniture I’ve ever seen. There is the same scent as in the stairwell, and now I recognize it. It’s the scent of money.
Not a soul is around. I pick up a rag and wring it out, and the mechanic picks up a big mop.
At the end of the offices there is a closed double door. I knock on it. He must have a control panel near him, because when the door opens, he’s sitting at the opposite end of the room, in an office with a window facing the courtyard.
He’s sitting behind a black mahogany desk which stands on four lion’s feet and is so big that you can’t help wondering how they managed to get it up here. On the wall behind him hang three gloomy paintings of the Marble Bridge in heavy frames.
It’s difficult to judge his age. From Elsa Lübing I know that he must be over seventy. But he looks healthy and athletic, as if every morning he walks barefoot across his beachfront and down to the sea, where he saws a hole in the ice and takes a refreshing dip, then runs back and eats a little bowl of gladiator muesli with skim milk.
It has kept his skin smooth and ruddy. But it hasn’t been beneficial for hair growth. He’s as bald as a peeled egg.
He’s wearing glasses with gold frames that give off so many reflections that you never really get to see his eyes.
“Good morning,” I say. “Quality control. We’re checking on the morning cleaning.”
He doesn’t say anything, merely looks at us. As clearly as if he had spoken, I remember his voice—dry and proper—from a telephone conversation a long time ago.
The mechanic withdraws to a corner and starts mopping. I take the windowsill closest to the desk.
He looks down at his papers. I wipe the sill with the rag. It leaves striped traces of dirty water.
Soon he’ll start to wonder.
“There’s nothing like having a proper cleaning done,” I say.
He frowns, now mildly annoyed.
Next to the window hangs a picture of a sailing ship. I take it down and wipe the back of it with the rag.
“What a nice picture this is,” I say. “I’m rather interested in ships myself. When I get home after a long work day among rubber gloves and disinfectants, I put my feet up and leaf through a good book about ships.”
Now he’s wondering whether I’m deranged.
“We all have our favorites, of course. Mine are the ships that sailed to Greenland. And, as chance will have it, when I saw your name on the fancy nameplate, I said to myself, My God, Smilla, I said. Ving! That nice man who once gave one of your friends a model ship for Christmas. The good ship Johannes Thomsen. To a little Greenlandic boy.”
I hang up the picture again. The water wasn’t good for it. All cleaning has its price. I think about Juliane, on her knees before him, in the doorway.
“The other thing I never get tired of reading about is ships chartered for expeditions to Greenland.”
He’s sitting perfectly still now. Only in the reflections of his glasses is there a faint movement.
“For example, the two ships that were chartered in ’66 and ’91. For the expeditions to Gela Alta.”
I go over to the cart and wring out the rag.
“I hope you’ll be satisfied now,” I say. “We have to move on. Duty calls.”
On our way out we can look back through the long series of rooms all the way into his office. He’s sitting behind the desk. He hasn’t moved.
A middle-aged woman in a white smock is standing at the bottom of the stairs. She’s standing there patting her vacuum cleaner, her expression sorrowful. As if she’s been discussing how the two of them are going to manage in the big world without that janitor’s cart.
The mechanic puts it down in front of her. He’s not very happy about taking someone else’s equipment. He wants to say a few words. From one working person to another. But he can’t think of anything to say.
“We’re from the firm,” I say. “We’ve been checking your work. We are very, very satisfied.”
I find one of Moritz’s spanking new 100-krone bills in my pocket and balance it on the edge of the bucket.
“Please accept this bonus. On such a fine morning. To buy a piece of pastry for your coffee.”
She looks at me with melancholy eyes.
“I’m the proprietor,” she says. “There’s only me and four employees.”
We stand there a moment, staring at each other, all three of us.
“So what?” I say. “Even proprietors eat pastry with their coffee.”
We get into the car and sit there for a while, gazing out across the King’s New Square. It’s too late for us to eat breakfast together. We agree to meet later. Now that the tension is past, we talk to each other like strangers. After I get out, he rolls down the window.
“Smilla, was that wise?”
“It was an impulse,” I say. “And besides, have you ever done any hunting?”
“A little.”
“If you’re hunting shy animals, like reindeer, you let them catch sight of you a few times on purpose. You stand up and wave the butt of your rifle. In all living creatures, fear and curiosity are closely related in the brain. The deer comes closer. It knows that it’s dangerous. But it has to come and see what’s moving like that.”
“What did you do when it came close?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve never been able to make myself shoot. But maybe you’re lucky enough to have someone nearby who knows what has to be done.”
I walk home across Knippels Bridge. It’s eight o’clock, the day has hardly begun. I feel as if I’ve accomplished just as much as if I had a paper route.
A letter is waiting for me, a rectangular envelope of heavy stationery. It’s from my father. It’s a lined envelope from the United Paper Companies with his initials embossed on it. His handwriting looks as i
f he has taken a course in bragging about himself calligraphically. Which he has. That was while I was living with him. After two evening classes he had forgotten his old handwriting. And still hadn’t learned a new one. After three months he wrote like a child. I had to forge his signature on the bills he sent out. He was afraid his patients would have a relapse when they saw the great medicine man’s wobbly signature.
Later it became more controlled. The world admires it. To me it simply seems snobbish.
But the letter is friendly enough. It consists of one line on a piece of paper with a watermark, which I know costs five kroner per sheet. And a bunch of photocopies of newspaper clippings, held together with a paper clip.
“Dear Smilla,” it says. “Here’s what Berlingske Tidende’s archives had on Loyen and Greenland.”
There is one more sheet.
“A complete list of his scientific publications,” it says in Moritz’s handwriting. The list is typed.
Underneath it says that the information is from something called Index Medicus, acquired from a database in Stockholm. There are articles in four languages, including Russian. Most of them are in English. I can’t even understand the titles of half of them. But Moritz has added a brief explanation in the margin. There are articles on crash injuries. On toxicology. A co-authored article on the difficulties in assimilation of vitamin B12 by the stomach as a complication of gunshot wounds. They’re from the forties and fifties. In the sixties the articles start dealing with Arctic medicine. Trichinosis, frostbite. A book about influenza epidemics around the Barents Sea. There is a long list of shorter articles on parasites. Many on the use of X-rays. His work has been multifaceted.