Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  We’ve vanished for her again. She is in Hamburg, on the Elbe, in August 1946.

  “There was one word they kept asking about. It was ‘Niflheim.’ One day I looked it up. It means ‘world of mists.’ It’s the outermost part of Hel, the realm of the dead. By the end of August they must have narrowed down what they were looking for, because from then on we only received letters exchanged by the same four people. We never saw the envelopes. We only knew their names, never their addresses. At first we had eight letters. About two new ones arrived each week. The code was rather sloppy, like something learned in a hurry. But still complicated to break, because it didn’t build on normal language but on a series of agreed-upon metaphors. It ostensibly dealt with the transport and sale of goods. It was at this time that Johannes—Dr. Loyen—joined the group. He was in Germany as a forensic medicine expert, to participate in the closure of concentration camps.”

  She squints her eyes, which makes her look like a schoolgirl.

  “A very handsome man. And quite vain. Give him my greetings and tell him I said that, Captain.”

  The mechanic nods and crushes his napkin in his hands.

  “He was bitter that it was the forensic odontologists and not him who were the big stars in the identification process, also in connection with the Nuremberg trials. With our group he was supposed to serve as a consultant on medical matters. There was no need for that. At that time I discovered that Niflheim had to be an expedition to Greenland. Loyen knew something about Greenland. Perhaps he had been there. He never told us. But he was good at German. He ended up working on an equal footing with the rest of us. At the end of September we had a breakthrough. I was the one who broke the code. A letter mentioned, as a prognosis, the price of beans during the current week. Figures that rose slightly each day, culminating on Friday. I looked up the week in the Almanac that my mother had sent me. There was a full moon on Friday. I had sailed the English Channel in the Admiral’s Cup on Father’s big Colin Archer several times. It seemed to me that the numbers resembled tide tables. We looked them up in the big almanacs of the British fleet. It was the ebb and flow of the Elbe. After that it was easy. It took us three weeks to decipher our way backward through the letters. They were about finding a ship, and sailing it to Greenland. Operation Niflheim.”

  “For what?” I ask.

  She shakes her head.

  “I never found out. I don’t think the others knew, either. The letters were about negotiating for a ship—which was quite complicated because of the state of emergency. And about the possibility of sailing to Kiel and north through Danish waters. About which passages had been mineswept. About the British blockade of the Elbe and the Kiel Canal. But all the people who wrote them knew what it was about. That’s why they never mentioned it.”

  All three of us lean back at the same moment. Back to the pastry shop, The Golden Brioche, back to the smell of coffee, back to the present, to “Satin Doll.”

  “I would like a small tart,” says Benedicte Clahn.

  She has earned it. It arrives, looking like summer. With whipped cream so fresh and soft and yellowish white, as if they had a cow standing in back of the bakery.

  I wait for her to taste it. It’s difficult for people to be on their guard at the same time as their senses are being caressed.

  “Have you talked about this to anyone else?”

  She’s about to deny it indignantly. Then her reawakened memories and her trust in us and maybe even the taste of the raspberries do something to her.

  “I was brought up taking discretion for granted,” she says.

  We nod reassuringly.

  “Perhaps Johannes Loyen and I have discussed these things one or two times. But that was over twenty years ago.”

  “Was it possibly in 1966?”

  She looks at me with surprise. For a moment I’m in the danger zone. Then she tells herself that, of course, we knew this from Loyen.

  “Johannes worked for a company that was organizing a trip to Greenland. He wanted us to sit down together and try to reconstruct some of the information from the letters of’ 46. It was mainly route descriptions. A lot about anchoring conditions. We were not successful. Even though we spent a lot of time on it. I even think I received a fee for it.”

  “And again in ’90 and ’91?”

  She bites her lip. “Helen, his wife, is very jealous.”

  “What was he interested in?”

  She shakes her head. “He has never told me anything. Have you tried to ask him yourself?”

  “We haven’t had the opportunity,” I say. “But we will.”

  Something about my reply distracts her. I search for something reassuring to divert her attention. She thinks of something herself. She looks from me to the mechanic and back again.

  “Are you married?”

  Surprisingly enough, he blushes. It starts at his throat and creeps upward, like an allergic reaction to shellfish. A flaming, helpless blush.

  I notice a brief wave of heat along my inner thighs. For a moment I think someone has put something warm in my lap. But there’s nothing there.

  “No,” I say. “It’s difficult to devote yourself to the army’s archives and have a family at the same time.”

  She nods sympathetically. She knows everything about the dichotomy between war and love.

  “Two men meet,” I say, “maybe in Berlin. Loyen and Ving. Loyen knows something, knows about something in Greenland worth finding. Ving has an organization that they can use as a cover for getting it, because he’s the director of the Cryolite Corporation and its real leader. Then there’s Andreas Licht. About him we know only that he is familiar with conditions in Greenland.”

  I have no intention of telling him about Berth 126.

  “They organize an expedition, under the guise of the corporation, in 1966. Something goes wrong. Maybe there was an accident involving explosives. At any rate, the expedition fails. So they wait twenty-five years. And then try again. But this time something is different. Outside money pays for the transportation. It seems as if they’ve gotten help and allied themselves with someone. But something goes wrong again. Four men die. One of them is Isaiah’s father.”

  I’m sitting on the mechanic’s sofa. Under a woolen blanket. He’s standing in the middle of the room, about to open a bottle of champagne. There’s something distracting to me about the expensive wine here in this room. He puts it down unopened.

  “I talked to Juliane this afternoon,” he says.

  I noticed at the pastry shop, and afterward on the way home, that something was wrong.

  “The Baron was examined every month at the hospital. She got f-fifteen hundred kroner every time. Always the f-first Tuesday of the month. They picked him up. She never went along. The Baron never said anything.”

  He sits down and stares at the cold bottle. I know what he’s thinking. He’s considering putting it away again.

  He has put tall, fragile glasses in front of us. First he washed them in hot water without soap, and then dried them with a clean dishcloth until they were totally transparent. In his big hands they seem as fragile as cellophane.

  In Nuuk the waiting list for housing is eleven years. Then you get a closet, a shed, a shack. All money in Greenland is attached to the Danish language and culture. Those who master Danish get the lucrative positions. The others can languish in the filet factories or in unemployment lines. In a culture that has a murder rate comparable to a war zone.

  Growing up in Greenland has ruined my relationship to wealth for good. I see that it exists. But I could never strive for it. Or seriously respect it. Or regard it as a goal.

  I often feel like a garbage pail. Circumstances have dumped into my life the excesses of a technological culture: differential equations, a fur hat. And now: a bottle of wine cooled to 32° F. Over the years it has gotten harder for me to enjoy it wholeheartedly. If it were all taken away in a flash, I wouldn’t mind.

  I no longer make an effort to keep Eur
ope or Denmark at a distance. Neither do I plead with them to stay. In some way they are part of my destiny. They come and go in my life. I have given up doing anything about it.

  It’s night. The last few days have been so long that I’ve been looking forward to my bed, and to a sleep as all-consuming as in my childhood. In a moment, after merely moistening my lips with the wine, I will get up and leave.

  He opens the bottle almost soundlessly. He pours, slowly and carefully, until the glasses are a little more than half full. They are instantly frosted with a matte mist. From invisible irregularities on the inner, curved sides, small beaded rows of bubbles rise to the surface.

  He puts his elbows on his knees and gazes into the bubbles. His face is remote, absorbed by the sight and, at that moment, as innocent as a child’s. The same way I so often saw Isaiah view the world.

  I leave my glass untouched and sit down in front of him on the low table. Our faces are now at the same level.

  “Peter,” I say, “you know the old excuse that she was drunk so she didn’t know what she was doing.”

  He nods.

  “That’s why I’m doing this before I drink anything.”

  Then I kiss him. I don’t know how much time passes. But while it lasts, my whole body is in my mouth.

  Then I leave. I could stay, but I don’t. It’s not because of him or me. It’s out of respect for what has taken hold of me, for what hasn’t been there for years, for what I don’t think I recognize anymore, for what is foreign to me.

  It takes me a long time to fall asleep. But that’s mostly because I don’t have the heart to abandon the night and the silence, and the alert, hypersensitive consciousness that he is lying downstairs, somewhere below me.

  When sleep finally comes, I dream that I’m in Siorapaluk. There are several of us children lying on the bed. We’ve been telling stories, and now the others have fallen asleep. Only my voice is left. I hear it from outside myself, it’s trying to keep on going. But at last it staggers, wobbles, falls to its knees, spreads out its arms, and allows itself to be gathered up in a net of dreams.

  5

  The address of the Trade Commission is Kampmanns Street 1, and it appears well maintained, newly painted, efficient, reliable, helpful, and exclusive without being pretentious.

  The man who helps me is a mere boy. He is twenty-three at most, with a double-breasted, custom-made suit of thin Harris tweed, a white silk tie, white teeth, and a broad smile.

  “Where have I seen you before?” he asks.

  The papers have been put in a spiral notebook, the pile is as thick as an illustrated Bible and stamped Annual Report of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark for Fiscal 1991.

  “How can you tell who controls the corporation?”

  His hands brush mine as he turns the pages.

  “It doesn’t say directly. But according to corporate law, all share-holdings above 5 percent must be listed on the first page. Was it at a party at the Business School?”

  The list is fourteen lines long, with individual and company names mixed together. Ving is there. And the National Bank. And Geoinform.

  “Geoinform. Could you show me their annual report?”

  He sits down at the computer. While we wait for the PC he smiles at me.

  “I’ll remember where it was,” he says. “You didn’t study law, did you?”

  He has been reading a French newspaper. He follows my gaze.

  “I’ve applied to the foreign service,” he says. “So it’s important to keep up on things. We don’t have anything on Geoinform. It’s probably not a public corporation.”

  “Is it possible to find out who’s on the board of directors?”

  He gets out a volume as big as two telephone books called Green’s Danish Foundations. He looks it up for me. There are three people on Geoinform’s board. I write down their names.

  “Can I take you to lunch?”

  “I have to go for a walk in the Deer Park,” I say.

  “I could go, too.”

  I point at his loafers. “There’s two feet of snow.”

  “I could buy a pair of galoshes on the way.”

  “You’re working,” I say. “On your way into the diplomatic service.”

  He nods dejectedly.

  “Maybe when the snow melts,” he says. “In the spring.”

  “If we live that long,” I say.

  I go out to the Deer Park. It snowed in the night. I’ve taken my kamiks along. Well past the entrance, I put them on. The soles of kamiks cannot stand much wear. When we were kids we were never allowed to dance with them on if there was sand on the floor. You could wear them out in a single night. But on the snow and ice, where the friction is different, their durability is astounding. The new snow is light and cold. I walk as far away from the paths as possible. For an entire day I wade slowly and heavily among black branches glittering with snow. I follow the lurching tracks of a deer until I know its rhythm. The animal’s sudden hopscotching every hundred yards, its habit of scattering urine in small portions, a little to the right of its tracks. The regularity with which it scratches an open, heart-shaped area down to the dark earth to find leaves.

  After three hours I run into it. A buck. White, wary, interested.

  I find an out-of-the-way table at Peter Liep’s Restaurant and order hot chocolate. Then I lay out the paper with the three names in front of me:

  Katja Claussen

  Ralf Seidenfaden

  Tørk Hviid

  I take out Moritz’s envelope with the copies of the newspaper clippings. I’m looking for a specific one.

  The room fills up with a group of children and adults. They’ve parked their skis and sleds outside. Their voices are loud and full of glee. Full of the snow’s mysterious warmth.

  The clipping is from an English-language newspaper. Maybe that’s why I’ve latched on to it. It was cut out crooked, so part of the headline is missing. It was added back on by hand, with a green ballpoint. The date is March 19, 1992. “First Copenhagen Seminar on Neocatastrophism. Professor Johannes Loyen, M.D., member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, presenting the opening lecture.”

  Loyen is standing on the stage, apparently without a script or podium. It’s a large hall. Behind him sit three men at a table that curves like an arc of a circle.

  “Behind him Ruben Giddens, Ove Nathan, and Toerk Hviid, the …”

  The text has been cut off, the rest of the sentence is gone. Their typesetting machines didn’t have an ø for his name. That’s why it had caught my eye. That’s why I remembered it.

  The setting sun is glowing as I set off for home. My heart is pounding.

  The minute I step through the door, the telephone rings.

  It takes forever to get the red tape off. I think it must be the mechanic. He must have tried calling dozens of times.

  “This is Andreas Licht.”

  The voice is weak, as if he has a cold. “I suggest that you come at once.”

  I feel a surge of annoyance. Some of us never learn to take orders.

  “You mean today?”

  There’s a strangled sound, as if he’s suppressing a laugh. “You’re interested, aren’t you? …”

  He hangs up.

  I’m standing there with all my outdoor clothes on. In the dark, because I didn’t have time to turn on the light. Where did he get my phone number?

  I detest being rushed. I had other plans for the day.

  I put down the kamiks and go back out into the Copenhagen evening.

  On my way down the stairs, I stop outside the mechanic’s door. I feel tempted to take him along. But I recognize the feeling as a form of weakness.

  I have a felt-tip pen in my pocket but no paper. On a 50-krone note I write: “South Harbor, Svajer Wharf, Berth 126. Back later. Smilla.”

  This message is a compromise between my need for protection and my belief that the plans you keep secret are the ones most likely to succeed.

  I take a cab to the
South Harbor power plant. Maybe it’s the mechanic’s paranoia about phones that has infected me, but I don’t want to leave a clear trail.

  It’s a fifteen-minute walk from the plant.

  Even the machines are asleep now. The city seems far away. But there is still a shimmer of light in the deserted streets I pass through. Now and then scattered fireworks etch trails of light across the blue-black sky and explode. The distant boom takes a moment to reach me. It’s New Year’s Eve.

  There are no streetlights. The cranes are silent silhouettes against the lighter sky. Everything is closed, dimmed, resigned.

  Svajer Wharf is a white surface in the dark. The new snow on the ice gathers the scant light in the air and gleams dully. Only a solitary car has been here before me, and I walk in its tracks.

  The sign on the post is still covered with plastic. With the little rip I left behind. The dock, the gangway, and part of the deck have been cleared of snow. A few crates have been moved to make room for a pallet of red barrels. Aside from the snow and the barrels and the darkness, everything is the same as yesterday.

  There is no light on board.

  On my way up the gangway I start thinking about the car tracks. In snow, tire tread makes a slight backward slide inside the track itself. The track I had followed went down to the harbor. There was no return track. There are no other roads to or from Svajer Wharf than the one I came along. But the car is nowhere to be seen.

  The lacquered door is shut but not locked. Inside, there is a faint light.

  I know that the fiberglass Inuit will be there. The light is coming from somewhere behind the screen.