Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  A little reading lamp is on the desk. Behind the desk sits professor and museum curator Andreas Licht with his head cocked, smiling at me broadly.

  When I walk around the desk, the smile does not leave his face.

  He is gripping the seat of his chair with both hands. As if to hold himself upright.

  Close up I can see that his lips are pulled back from his teeth in a grimace. And he isn’t gripping the chair. His hands are bound with thin cords of copper wire. I touch him. He’s warm. I put my fingers on his neck. There’s no pulse. He has no heartbeat, either. At least none that I can feel.

  He has cotton in the ear facing me. Like a small child with an inner-ear infection. I walk around him. He has cotton in the other one, too.

  I am no longer curious. Now I want to go home.

  At that moment the hatch door over the stairs is shut. There is no warning, no sound of footsteps. It is simply closed, quietly and calmly. Then it is locked from the outside.

  Then the light goes out.

  Only now do I realize why there was so little light in the room. Blind people have no need for light. It’s absurd to think about that now, but that’s my first thought in the dark.

  I get down on my knees and crawl under the desk. That may not be a good idea. That may be the ostrich’s strategy. But I have no desire to stand there towering in the darkness. Down on the floor I can feel the curator’s ankles. They are warm, too. And they are also bound to the chair with wire.

  There’s a movement on the deck above my head. Something being dragged. I fumble around in the dark and get hold of a telephone cord. I follow it and suddenly wind up with the end in my hands. It has been ripped out of the jack.

  Then the ship’s engine starts up, a big diesel engine’s slow awakening. It remains idling.

  I run out into the darkness. Twenty-four hours ago I oriented myself to the room. So I know where there’s a door. I reach the bulkhead right next to it. It’s not locked. As I step through, the engine noise grows louder.

  The room has small portholes high up and facing the dock. A faint light shines through them. This room explains how the curator solved his commuting problem. He lived on board. It was furnished as a bedroom for him. A bed, a nightstand, a built-in wardrobe.

  The engine room must be behind the far wall. It’s insulated, but there is still a distinct thudding. When I try to look out the porthole, the noise becomes a roar. The ship slowly swings away from the dock. The engine has been put into gear. There’s not a soul in sight. Only the black contour of the disappearing wharf.

  There’s a spark on the dock. Only a glint of light, like someone lighting a cigarette. The glow rises and floats in an arc toward me. Trailing a dripping tail of embers after it. It’s a firecracker.

  It explodes not far above my head with a muted bang. The next instant I am blind. A vicious white flash flings itself at me from the wharf and the water. At the same moment the fire sucks all the oxygen out of the air, and I throw myself to the floor. It feels as if I have sand in my eyes, as if I’m breathing in a plastic bag that someone is blowing on with a hair dryer. It’s the barrels of gasoline, of course. They poured gasoline over the ship.

  I crawl over and open the door to the room I came from. Now there is all the light you could ask for. The covering over the skylights has burned away, and the room is illuminated by what seems like a gigantic sun lamp.

  On the deck there is a series of muffled explosions, and the light outside flickers blue and then yellow. Then the air is filled with burning epoxy paint.

  I creep back to the bedroom. It’s as hot as a sauna. Against the whiteness of the portholes I can see the smoke that has started to seep inside. The fire vanishes from one of the panes for a moment. The silo of the soybean factory lights up as if it’s sunset, the windows along Iceland Wharf glow like molten glass. It’s the reflection from the fire all around me.

  Then a web of cracks spreads across the glass and the view vanishes.

  I wonder whether diesel oil burns. I seem to remember that it depends on the temperature. At that instant the diesel tank blows up.

  There isn’t any explosion, it’s more like a whistle that turns into a roar, that grows and turns into the shrillest sound that ever existed on earth. I press my head against the floor. When I look up, the bed is gone. The wall to the engine room is gone, and I’m looking into a world of fire. In the middle of this world the engine is a black rectangle with a tooled network of pipes. Then it starts to sink. It breaks away from the ship. When it reaches the sea, it causes explosive boiling. Then it vanishes. Over the water tongues of burning diesel fuel weave a tapestry of flames.

  The stern of the boat now forms an open gateway facing Iceland Wharf. As I stand there looking out, the whole ship slowly turns, away from the burning oil.

  The wreck starts to list. The water has made its way into the hull and is pulling it backward. I’m standing in water up to my knees.

  The door behind me bangs open, and the professor comes in. The careening of the ship has made his office chair roll. He slams into the bulkhead next to me. Then he rides through what once was his bedroom and plunges into the water.

  I take off my clothes. The suede coat, sweater, shoes, pants, shirt, panties, and finally my socks. I put my fingers to my hat. I have only a circle of fur on my head. The spurt of flames from the diesel engine must have burned it away. I feel blood on my hands. The top of my skull has been singed bald.

  It’s maybe two hundred yards to the dock at Svajer Wharf. I have no choice. On the other side is the fire. I jump.

  The shock of the cold forces me to open my eyes while I’m still underwater. Everything is gleaming green and red, lit up by the fire. I don’t look back. In water less than 42° F you can survive only for a few minutes. The number of minutes depends on your condition. Swimmers of the English Channel were in good shape. They could last a long time. I’m in very poor shape.

  I swim almost vertically, so that only my lips are above water. The problem is with the weight of the part of your body that’s above water. After a few seconds the shaking starts. While your body temperature drops from 98.6° to 95° F you shake. Then the shaking stops. That’s when your temperature falls to 86° F. This temperature is critical. That’s when apathy sets in. That’s when you freeze to death.

  After a hundred yards I can’t straighten out my arms anymore. I think about my past. That doesn’t help. I think about Isaiah. That doesn’t help. I suddenly feel as if I’m not swimming anymore but standing on a slope and leaning into a stiff wind, and that I might just as well give up.

  Around me the water is a mosaic of bits of gold. I remember that someone has tried to kill me. And that they’re now standing somewhere and congratulating themselves. We got her. Smilla. The fake Greenlander.

  That thought carries me over the last stretch. I decide to take ten more strokes. At the eighth one I bang my head against a tractor tire hung as a bumper on the berth of the Northern Light.

  I know that I have only a few seconds of consciousness left. Next to the tire is a platform right over the water. I try to scream myself up onto it. Not a sound comes out. But I manage to pull myself up.

  If you fall into the water in Greenland, you run when you get out, to keep from freezing. But there the air is cold. Here it’s wonderfully mild, like in the summer. At first I don’t understand why. Then I realize it’s because of the fire. I lie there on the platform. The Northern Light is now in the middle of the harbor entrance, a coal-black skeleton of wood in a white ball of fire.

  I crawl up the stairs on my hands and knees. The dock is deserted. There’s not a soul around.

  I’m about to collapse, basking in the warmth of the burning ship. I can see my own naked skin glowing. The little hairs, singed black and curling. Then I start walking. I have hallucinations, fragmentary, incoherent. From when I was little. A flower I found, knotweed, with buds. A convulsive fretting about whether Eberlein has more brocade like the kind my hat was made
of. The feeling of being sick and wetting my bed.

  There are headlights, and I don’t care. The car stops, and it doesn’t make any difference. Something is wrapped around me. Nothing could interest me less. I lie down. I recognize the holes in the roof. It’s the little Morris. It’s the back of the mechanic’s neck. He’s driving the car.

  “Smilla,” he says. “Smilla, damn it …”

  “Shut up,” I say.

  In his apartment he wraps me up in wool blankets and massages me until it hurts too much. Then he makes me drink one cup of milk tea after another. The cold won’t go away. It feels as if it has penetrated my whole skeleton. At some point I also accept a glass of liquor.

  I cry a lot. Partly out of self-pity. I tell him about Isaiah’s hiding place. About the cassette tape. About the professor. About the phone call. About the fire. I feel as if my mouth is going while I stand somewhere else looking on.

  He doesn’t comment.

  At some point he fills the bathtub with water for me. I fall asleep in the tub. He wakes me up. We lie side by side in his bed and sleep. A few hours at a time. I don’t really feel warm until it starts to get light.

  It’s morning when we make love. I guess I’m not quite myself.

  PART THREE

  The City

  1

  I change cabs twice and get out at Farum Road. From there I take the path through Utterslev Marsh, and I look back 250 times.

  I call from Tuborg Road.

  “What is Neocatastrophism?”

  “Why do you always call from those insufferable phone booths, Smilla? Is it money? Have they disconnected your phone? Shall I get it hooked up again?”

  For Moritz, a New Year’s Eve party is the king of all parties. He suffers from a cyclical, recurrent delusion that it’s actually possible to start afresh, that you can build a new life on resolutions. On New Year’s Day the pounding in his head is so bad that it’s audible over the phone. Even a pay phone.

  “There was a conference on the topic in Copenhagen, in March of ’92,” I say.

  He stifles a groan as he tries to make his brain function. What finally gets it going is the fact that my question turns out to have something to do with him.

  “I was invited,” he says.

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  “There was too much to read.”

  He has been saying for years that he has given up reading. First of all, it’s a lie. Second, it’s an insufferable way of intimating that he has grown so smart that the rest of the world has nothing more to teach him.

  “Neocatastrophism is a collective term. It was coined by Schindewolf sometime in the sixties. He was a paleontologist. But all kinds of scholars in the natural sciences have taken part in the debate. What they agree on is that the earth—and, in particular, its biology—has not evolved at an even pace but in leaps, which have been directed by great natural catastrophes that favor the survival of specific species. Meteor showers, comets, volcanic eruptions, spontaneous chemical disasters. The core of the debate has always been the question of whether these catastrophes occur at regular intervals. And if they do, what determines the frequency? An international association was established. Their first meeting was in Copenhagen. At the Falkoner Conference Center. Opened by the Queen. They spared no expense. They get money from left and right. The unions contribute because they think it’s research about environmental disasters. Those in the industrial sector contribute because they think that at least it’s not about environmental disasters. The research councils contribute because the association has some big names to flaunt.”

  “Does the name Hviid mean anything in that connection? Tørk Hviid?”

  “There was a composer named Hviid.”

  “I don’t think he’s the one.”

  “You know I can’t remember names, Smilla.”

  That’s true. He can remember bodies. Titles. He can reconstruct every golf stroke in every sizable tournament he has played in. But he regularly forgets the name of his own secretary. It’s symptomatic. For the truly self-centered person, the surrounding world pales and becomes nameless.

  “Why didn’t you go to that conference?”

  “It was too much of a hodgepodge for my taste, Smilla. With all the opposing interests, all the politics. You know I avoid politics. They didn’t even dare use the word ‘catastrophe’ when it came right down to it. They called it the ‘Center for Developmental Research.’”

  “Can you find out who Hviid is?”

  He takes a deep breath, full of his unexpected power. “Then I can count on you coming out here tomorrow,” he says.

  I’m about to tell him to send the information to me. But I’m feeling weak and rather soft. He can tell.

  “You can meet me and Benja at the Savarin tomorrow.”

  It sounds like an order, but it’s meant as a quick compromise.

  One of the children opens the door.

  I’m among the first to admit that a cold weather climate is unpredictable. But I’m still momentarily surprised. Outside, it’s five o’clock in the evening. The first stars have appeared in the navy-blue, cloudless sky. But inside, around the child, it’s snowing. A fine layer covers her red hair, her shoulders, her face, and her bare arms.

  I follow her. In the living room there is flour everywhere. Three children are kneading dough right on the hardwood floor. In the kitchen their mother is greasing cookie sheets. On the kitchen table a little girl is kneading something that looks like pastry dough. Now she’s trying to knead an egg yolk into it. With her hands and feet.

  “The bottom fell out of the flour sack in the living room.”

  “I see. The floor will be wonderfully clean.”

  “He’s out in the conservatory. I’ve forbidden him to smoke in here.”

  She has an authoritative strength, like my childhood image of God. And an unflappable gentleness like Santa Claus in a Disney film. If you want to know who the real heroes of world history are, just look at the mothers. In the kitchens, with the cookie sheets. While the men are sitting on the toilet. Out in the hammocks. Out in the conservatory.

  He’s brushing off the cactuses. The air is thick with cigar smoke. He has a little brush, as narrow as a toothbrush but with long bristles, curved, and maybe twelve inches long.

  “It’s so the pores won’t clog up. That would prevent them from breathing.”

  “All things considered,” I say, “that might be an advantage.”

  He gives me a guilty look. “My wife won’t let me smoke around the children.”

  He shows me the stump of his cigar.

  “Romeo and Giulietta. A classic Havana. And it tastes damn good. Especially the last inch. When you’re just about to singe your lips. That’s where it’s saturated with nicotine.”

  I hang my yellow down jacket over the back of one of the white wrought-iron chairs. Then I take the scarf off my head. There’s a piece of gauze underneath. I take that off, too. The mechanic cleaned the wound and rubbed chlorhexidine ointment on it. I bend my head down so he can see it.

  When I lift my head up, his eyes are hard.

  “A burn,” he says thoughtfully. “You were in the vicinity, perhaps?”

  “I was on board.”

  He washes his hands in a deep stainless-steel sink.

  “How did you manage to survive?”

  “I swam.”

  He dries his hands and comes back. He touches the wound. It feels as if he’s sticking his hands into my brain.

  “It’s superficial,” he says. “You’re probably not going to be bald.”

  I called him at University Hospital earlier that day. I don’t give my name, but it’s not necessary, anyway.

  “The ship that burned in the harbor,” I say. “There was a man on board.”

  It was the lead story on the radio. The newspapers had it on the front page. The photo was taken at night, in the light of the fire department’s spotlights. In the middle of the harbor three charred masts loom o
ut of the water. The rigging and yardarms are gone. But nothing was mentioned about any casualties.

  He says very slowly, “Is that right?”

  “I must have the results of the autopsy.”

  He’s silent for a long time.

  “Hell and damnation,” he says. “I have a family to feed.”

  I have nothing to say to that.

  “This afternoon. After four.”

  He sits down across from me, taking off the cellophane and paper ring of a cigar. He has a box of extra-long matches. He uses one to bore a hole in the conical, curved end of the rounded, rolled tobacco leaf. Then he lights it, carefully and meticulously. When it’s burning evenly, he fixes his gaze on me.

  “It wasn’t you, by chance, who killed him, was it?” he says.

  “No.”

  While he talks, he continues to stare at me, as if trying to examine my conscience.

  “If a person drowns, the first thing to happen is that he tries to hold his breath. When he can’t hold it any longer, he takes a couple of deep, desperate breaths. That pumps water into the lungs. This motion creates whitish protein material in the nose and throat, based on the same principle as when you beat egg whites. It’s called froth. This person—whom I ought not to discuss, and particularly with someone who might be involved in the crime—this person has no trace of it. So he didn’t drown, at any rate.”

  He carefully taps the ash from his cigar.

  “He was already dead when I went on board.”

  He hardly hears me. His thoughts are still on that morning and the autopsy.

  “First they tied him up. With pieces of copper wire. He put up a hell of a fight, but they finally got him tied up. There must have been a couple of them. He was a strong man. An elderly gentleman, but strong. Then they bent his head to one side. You’re familiar with sodium hydroxide—lye. An extremely caustic base. One person held him by his hair. Several clumps were torn out. And then they dripped lye into his right ear. Nice and easy, just like that, damn it all.”