Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  We put our heads up close to the X-rays.

  “I thought so,” says Lagermann. “I thought it must be some kind of worm.”

  “The article in Nature,” says Moritz, “is about diagnosing this sort of parasite by X-ray. It’s quite complicated if it’s not calcified in the tissue. Because the heart is no longer beating, it’s very difficult to make the contrast fluids disseminate through the body.”

  “But this is about Greenland,” I say. “Not the tropics.”

  Moritz nods.

  “But you had underlined the article in your letter. Loyen wrote it. It’s one of his main specialties.”

  Lagermann taps on the negative. “I don’t know anything about tropical diseases. I’m a forensics specialist. But something has bored its way into these two people. Something that might be a worm or might be something else. Something that has left a channel sixteen inches long and at least two millimeters in diameter. Straight through the diaphragm and the soft organs. Something that stops in areas exploded by infection. For these two gentlemen the TNT didn’t make any difference. They were already dead. They died because something—whatever the hell it was—had stuck its head into the heart of one man and the liver of the other.”

  We stare at the X-rays in bewilderment.

  “The right man to solve this problem,” says Moritz, “might be Loyen.”

  Lagermann regards him with his eyes narrowed.

  “Yes,” he says, “it would be interesting to hear what he has to say. But if we wanted to be sure of an honest answer, it looks as if we’d have to tie him to a chair, give him sodium pentothal, and hook him up to a lie detector.”

  6

  I would like to understand Benja. At this moment more than ever.

  It wasn’t always this way. I didn’t always have to understand things. At least I tell myself that it wasn’t always this way. When I came to Denmark for the first time, I experienced phenomena. In all their gruesomeness, or beauty, or gray drabness. But without feeling any great need to explain them.

  Often there was no food when Isaiah came home. Juliane would be sitting at the table with her friends, and there were cigarettes and laughter and tears and an enormous abuse of alcohol, but there wasn’t as much as five kroner to go out and buy some French fries. He never complained. He never yelled at his mother. He never sulked. Patient, silent, and watchful he would wrench himself away from the outstretched hands and go on his way. In order to find, if possible, some other solution. Sometimes the mechanic was home, sometimes I was. He could sit in my living room for an hour or more without telling me he was hungry. Persisting in an extreme, almost stupid, Greenlandic politeness.

  Occasionally I would feel the urge to explain things after I had cooked for him, after I had boiled a mackerel and put the whole fish, weighing three pounds, on the floor on a newspaper because that’s where he preferred to eat. Without uttering a word, using both hands, he would devour the entire fish with methodical thoroughness and eat the eyes and suck out the brain and lick the backbone and crunch on the fins. I would try to understand the difference between growing up in Denmark and growing up in Greenland. To comprehend the humiliating, exhausting, monotonous emotional dramas with which European children and parents are bound together in mutual hatred and dependence. And to understand Isaiah.

  Deep inside I know that trying to figure things out leads to blindness, that the desire to understand has a built-in brutality that erases what you seek to comprehend. Only experience is sensitive. But maybe I’m both weak and brutal. I’ve never been able to resist trying.

  Benja seems to have been given everything. I’ve met her parents. They’re trim and subdued and play the piano and speak foreign languages, and every year, when the Royal Theater’s school closed for the summer and they went south to their house on the Costa Smeralda, they always took the best French ballet tutor along to badger Benja on the terrace between the palm trees every morning, because that’s what she herself wanted.

  You might think that someone who has never suffered or lacked anything worth mentioning would be at peace with herself. For a long time I misjudged her. I thought she and Moritz were playing a game when she walked through the room in front of us, dressed only in her little panties, and placed red silk scarves over the lamps because the light hurt her eyes, and made an endless series of appointments with Moritz and then canceled them because, she said, today she needed to see someone her own age. I thought that on some mysterious wave of self-confidence she was testing her youth and beauty and attractiveness on Moritz, who was almost fifty years older than her.

  One day I witnessed her ordering him to move the furniture so that she would have room to dance, and he refused.

  At first she didn’t believe him. Her pretty face and slanted, almond-shaped eyes and smooth brow beneath corkscrew curls glowed with the awareness of a victory already won. Then she realized that he was not going to yield. Maybe it was the first time in their relationship. First she turned pale with rage, and then her face cracked. Her eyes became despairing, empty, abandoned; her mouth closed on smothered, infantile, despairing tears which refused to flow.

  Then I realized that she loved him. That under that appealing coquettishness was a love like a military operation that would tolerate anything and fight any necessary tank battles and demand the world in return. Then I realized, too, that she might always hate me. And that she had lost in advance. Somewhere inside Moritz there is a landscape she will never reach. The home of his feelings for my mother.

  Or maybe I’m wrong. Right now, at this very moment, it occurs to me that she might have won, after all. If that’s the case, then I’ll grant her that she put her nose to the grindstone. She didn’t just leave it at wiggling her little fanny around. She didn’t settle for sending lovesick glances from the stage to Moritz in the first row, hoping that it would all work out in the long run. She didn’t put her trust in her influence at home in the bosom of her family. If I didn’t realize it before, I know it now. That there is a raw energy in Benja.

  I’m standing in the snow, pressed up against the wall of the house, peering down into the pantry. There Benja is pouring a glass of milk. Enchanting, lithe Benja. And she’s handing it to a man who now steps into view. It’s the Toenail.

  I’m walking along Strand Drive from Klampenborg Station, and it’s a wonder that I notice it at all, because I’ve had a hard day.

  That morning I couldn’t stand it any longer; I got up, tucked my hair and bandage—which is now only a Band-aid over the wound—under a ski hat, put on sunglasses and a Loden coat, and took the train to the main station, and there I called the mechanic’s number, but no one answered.

  Then I stroll along the docks, from the Customs Wharf to Langelinie, trying to gather my thoughts. At the North Harbor I make several purchases and pack up a box that they will deliver to Moritz’s villa, and from a phone booth I make a call that I know is one of the crucial actions in my life.

  And yet it’s strange that it means so little. Under certain circumstances the fateful decisions in life, sometimes even in matters of life and death, are made with an almost indifferent ease. While the little things—for instance, the way people hang on to what is over—seem so important. What’s important today is to see Knippels Bridge once again, where I rode with him, and the White Palace, where I slept with him, and the Cryolite Corporation, and Skudehavns Road, where we walked together, arm in arm. I call him again from the phone booth at North Harbor Station. A man answers. But it’s not him. It’s a controlled, anonymous voice.

  “Yes?”

  I hold the receiver to my ear. Then I hang up.

  I page through the phone book. I can’t find his car repair shop. I take a taxi out to Toftegårds Square and walk along Vigerslev Avenue. There is no garage. From a phone booth I call the mechanics’ association. The man I talk to is friendly and patient. But there has never been a car repair shop registered on Vigerslev Avenue.

  I’ve never noticed until now how e
xposed phone booths are. Making a call is like putting yourself on display for instant recognition.

  The phone book lists two addresses for the Center for Developmental Research, one at the August Krogh Institute and one at Denmark’s Technical High School on Lundtofte Slope. At the latter address there’s apparently a library and office.

  I take a cab to Kampmanns Street, to the office of the Trade Commission. The boy’s smile and tie and naivete are unchanged.

  “I’m glad you came back,” he says.

  I show him the newspaper clipping. “You read foreign papers. Do you remember this one?”

  “The suicide,” he says. “Everybody remembers that. The consular secretary jumped off a roof. The man they arrested had tried to talk her out of it. The case raised a fundamental question about the legal rights of Danes abroad.”

  “You don’t happen to remember the secretary’s name, do you?”

  He has tears in his eyes. “We studied international law at the university together. A wonderful girl. Ravn was her name. Nathalie Ravn. She applied for a job with the Ministry of Justice. They said—in local circles—that she might become the first female police commissioner.”

  “There’s nothing ‘local’ left anymore,” I say. “If something happens in Greenland, it’s connected to something else in Singapore.”

  He gazes at me, uncomprehending and mournful.

  “You didn’t come here to see me,” he says. “You came about this.”

  “I’m not worth getting to know,” I say, meaning it.

  “You remind me of her. Secretive. And not someone you would picture behind a desk. I couldn’t understand why she suddenly became a secretary in Singapore. That’s a different Ministry.”

  I take the train to Lyngby Station and then catch a bus. In a way, it feels like when I was seventeen. You think that the despair will stop you cold, but it doesn’t; it wraps itself up in a dark corner somewhere inside and forces the rest of your system to function, to take care of practical matters, which may not be important but which keep you going, which guarantee that you are still, somehow, alive.

  Between the buildings the snow is three feet high; only narrow corridors have been cleared.

  They haven’t finished remodeling the Center for Developmental Research yet. In the lobby they’ve put in a counter, but it’s covered up because they’re in the process of painting the ceiling. I tell them what I’m looking for. A woman asks me whether I have computer time reserved. I say no. She shakes her head, the library isn’t open yet, the center’s archives are kept on UNI C at Denmark’s Data Processing Center for Research and Training, the computer system for institutes of higher learning, which is not accessible to the general public.

  I walk around among the buildings for a while. I was here many times in my student days. Our classes on surveying were held here. Time has changed the area, made it harsher and more alien than I remember it. Or maybe it’s the cold. Or just me.

  I walk past the computer building. It’s locked, but when a group of students comes out, I go in. In the central room there are maybe fifty terminals. I wait for a while. When an elderly man comes in, I follow him. When he sits down, I stand behind him and pay attention. He doesn’t notice me. He sits there for an hour. Then he leaves. I sit down at a free terminal and press a key. The machine writes: Log on user ID? I type LTH3—just as the elderly gentleman did. The machine replies: Welcome to the Laboratory for Technical Hygiene. Your password? I type JPB. The way the elderly gentleman did. The machine replies: Welcome Mr. Jens Peter Bramslev.

  When I type Center for Developmental Research the machine replies with a menu. One of the topics is Library. I type in Tørk Hviid. There is only one title. “A Hypothesis on the Eradication of Submarine Life in the Arctic Sea in Conjunction with the Alvarez Incident.”

  It’s a hundred pages long. I scroll through them. There are timelines. Pictures of fossils. Neither the pictures nor the captions are legible in the poor resolution of the screen. There are various charts. Some diagrammatic, geological maps of the present-day Davis Strait in various stages of its creation. The whole thing seems consistently incomprehensible. I press on to the end.

  After a long list of references there is a brief abstract of the article.

  This article is based on the theory of physicist and Nobel Prizewinner Luis Alvarez from the 1970s. He proposed that the iridium content in a layer of clay between the chalk and tertiary sediments at Gubbio in the northern Apennines and at Stevn’s Klint in Denmark is too big to be anything but the result of an extremely large meteor impact.

  Alvarez theorizes that the impact occurred 65 million years ago, that the meteor was between four and nine miles in diameter, and that it exploded on impact, releasing energy comparable to 100 million megatons of TNT. The resultant ash cloud totally blocked out the sun for a period of at least several days. During this period several food chains collapsed. The result was that a large portion of the marine and submarine microorganisms were annihilated, which in turn prompted further consequences for the large carnivores and herbivores. On the basis of discoveries made by the author in the Barents Sea and Davis Strait, the article discusses the possibility that the radiation resulting from the explosion on impact might explain a series of mutations among marine-based parasites in the early Paleocene periods. The article also discusses whether such mutations might be the reason for massive extinctions of the larger sea animals.

  I scroll through it again. The language is clear, the style clean, almost transparent. But 65 million years still seems like a very long time ago.

  It’s dark by the time I take the train back. The wind carries a light snow with it, pirhuk. My mind registers it as if through an anesthetic.

  In a big city you adopt a particular way of regarding the world. A focused, sporadically selective view. When you scan a desert or an ice floe, you see with different eyes. You let the details slip out of focus in favor of the whole. This way of seeing reveals a different reality. If you look at someone’s face in this manner, it starts to dissolve into a shifting series of masks.

  With this way of seeing, a person’s breath in the cold—that veil of cooled drops that forms in the air in temperatures under 46°F —is not merely a phenomenon twenty inches from his mouth. It’s something all-encompassing, a structural transformation of the space surrounding a warm-blooded creature, an aura of minimal but definite thermal displacement. I’ve seen hunters shoot snow hares in a starless winter night at a distance of 270 yards by aiming at the fog around them.

  I am not a hunter. And I’m asleep inside. Maybe I’m close to giving up. But I sense him when I’m fifty yards away, before he hears me. He’s standing between the two marble pillars which flank the gate leading from Strand Drive to the stairs.

  In the city, in the Nørrebro district, people stand on streetcorners and in doorways; it doesn’t mean anything. But on Strand Drive it is significant. And besides, I’ve grown hypersensitive. So I shake off my resignation, take several steps backward, and go into the neighboring yard.

  I find the hole in the hedge that I used so often as a child, squeeze my way through it, and wait. After several minutes I see the other one. He’s positioned himself at the corner of the porter’s lodge, where the driveway curves up toward the house.

  I walk back to the place where I can approach the kitchen door from an angle so I’m not visible to either of them. The visibility has started to deteriorate. The black soil beneath the roses is hard as a rock. The birdbath is swathed in a big snowdrift.

  I walk along the wall of the house, and it occurs to me that although I have so often felt persecuted, I actually might not have had anything to complain about until now.

  Moritz is alone in the living room; I can see him through the window. He’s sitting in the low oak chair, his hands gripping the armrests. I continue around the house, past the main entrance, along the back to where the bay window juts out. There’s a light on in the pantry. That’s where I see Benja. She’s po
uring a glass of cold milk. Refreshing on a night like this, when you have to stand guard and wait. I take the fire escape. It leads up to the balcony outside what was once my room. I go inside and feel my way forward. They’ve delivered the box; it’s on the floor.

  The door to the hallway is open. Downstairs in the foyer Benja is seeing the Toenail out.

  I can see him walking across the gravel, like a dark shadow. Over to the garage and in through the little door.

  They’re parked in the garage, of course. Moritz moved his car a little so there was room for them. Citizens must assist the police in every way possible.

  I tiptoe down the stairway. I know it well, so I don’t make any noise. I reach the foyer, go past the coat closet and into the small parlor. There is Benja. She doesn’t see me. She’s standing there looking out across ∅resund. Toward the lights at Tuborg Harbor, toward Sweden and Flakfort. She’s humming. Not particularly cheerful or relaxed. But intent. Tonight, she’s thinking, tonight they’ll nab Smilla. The fake Greenlander.

  “Benja,” I say.

  She twirls around in a flash, like when she’s dancing. But then she freezes.

  I don’t say a word, just motion with my hand, and with bowed head she precedes me into the living room.

  I remain standing in the doorway, where the long drapes prevent me from being seen from the road.

  Moritz raises his head and sees me. His expression doesn’t change. But his face becomes flatter, more careworn.

  “It was me.” Benja has gone over to stand next to him. He is hers.

  “I was the one who called,” she says.

  He rubs his hand across the stubble on his chin. He hasn’t shaved tonight. The stubble is black with flecks of gray. His voice is low and resigned.

  “I never said I was perfect, Smilla.”

  He’s said that thousands of times, but I don’t have the heart to remind him. For the first time ever, I see that he is old. That someday, maybe not so far in the future, he’s going to die. For a moment I fight it, then I give up and am filled with sympathy. At this pathetic moment.