Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  “They’re waiting for you outside,” says Benja. “They’re going to take you away. You don’t belong here.”

  I can’t help admiring her. You find some of this same madness in female polar bears defending their cubs.

  Moritz doesn’t seem to hear her. His voice is still low, introspective. As if he’s talking mainly to himself. “I wanted peace and quiet so badly. I wanted to have my family around me. But I never achieved that. It never worked out. Things got out of control for me. When I saw that box they delivered this afternoon, I realized that you were leaving again. Like all the times you ran away. I’m too old to bring you back home again. Maybe it was wrong to do it in the past.”

  His eyes are bloodshot when he looks at me. “I don’t want to let you go, Smilla.”

  Every life contains within it a potential for clarification. He has lost that chance. The conflicts that are now pressing him down in his chair are the same ones he had in his thirties, when I got to know him, when he became my father. The only thing age has done is to whittle away his ability to confront them.

  Benja licks her lips.

  “Will you go out to them yourself,” she says, “or should I go get them?”

  For as long as I can remember, I have been trying to escape this house, this country. Each time, life has used him as its unresisting instrument to call me back. At this moment it becomes more obvious than it has been since I was a child that freedom of choice is an illusion, that life leads us through a series of bitter, involuntarily comical, and repetitive confrontations with the problems that we haven’t resolved. At some other time I might have smiled at this. Right now I’m too tired. So I bow my head and prepare to give up.

  Then Moritz stands up.

  “Benja,” he says. “Stay here.”

  She gives him a startled look.

  “Smilla,” he says, “what can I do?”

  We measure each other with narrowed eyes. Something has slipped inside him.

  “Your car,” I say. “Drive your car up to the back door. As close as possible, so you can put the box in it without them seeing you. And so I can get in and lie on the floor in back.”

  When he leaves the room, Benja sits down in his chair. Her face is expressionless and remote. We hear him start up the car and drive it out; we hear the crunching of the tires in the gravel in front of the door. The sound of the door. Moritz’s cautious, burdened steps as he carries the box out.

  When he returns, he’s wearing rubber boots, an oilskin coat and cap. He simply stands in the doorway for a moment. Then he turns around and leaves.

  When I get up, Benja slowly follows me. I go into the little parlor where the telephone is and dial a number. It’s instantly answered.

  “I’m coming,” I say. Then I hang up.

  When I turn around, Benja is standing behind me. “After you drive off, I’ll go out and send them after you.”

  I step closer to her. With my thumb and forefinger, through her leotard, I grab her crotch and squeeze. When she opens her mouth, I put my other hand around her throat and cut off her windpipe. Her eyes grow big and terrified. She falls to her knees and I go with her, so we are both kneeling across from each other on the floor. She is taller and heavier than I am, but her level of energy and treachery are of a different kind. At the Royal Theater they don’t learn to express their anger physically.

  “Benja,” I whisper. “Leave me alone.”

  I pinch harder. There are drops of sweat on her upper lip.

  Then I let her go. She doesn’t utter a sound. Her face is empty with fear.

  The door to the foyer is open. The car is waiting right outside. I crawl in the back on the floor. My box is on the back seat. A blanket is pulled over me. Moritz gets into the front seat.

  Outside the garage the car stops. The window is rolled down.

  “Thank you so much for your help,” says the Toenail.

  Then we drive off.

  Skovshoved Water Ski Club has a wide wooden ramp that slopes down into the water from a high dock. That’s where Lander is waiting. He’s wearing a one-piece, waterproof sailing outfit tucked into his boots. It’s black.

  The tarpaulin on the roof of his car is black, too. It’s not the Jaguar but a Land Rover with the body high off the ground.

  The rubber boat tied on under the tarp is black, too. A Zodiac made of heavy rubberized canvas with a wooden bottom. Moritz wants to help but doesn’t move fast enough. With a swift jerk the small man tips the boat off the car, catches it on his head, and shoves it down the ramp with one fluid movement.

  He takes an outboard motor out of the back of the car, lands it in the boat, and fastens it to the stern.

  All three of us lift the boat to get it into the water. In my box I find rubber boots, a balaclava hood, thermal gloves, and a sou’wester that I pull on over my sweater.

  Moritz does not go out on the ramp with us but stays at the railing. “Can I do anything for you, Smilla?”

  It’s Lander who answers. “You can get out of here fast.”

  Then he pushes off and starts up the motor. An invisible hand takes hold of the boat from below and pulls us away from land. The snow is falling heavily. After a few seconds Moritz’s figure disappears. Just as he turns around and goes back to the car.

  Lander has a compass strapped to his left wrist. In a corridor of visibility momentarily appearing in the snowfall, we can see Sweden. The lights of Tårbæk. And, as lighter, floating spots in the dark, two ships at anchor between the shore and the central navigation channel. Northwest of Flakfort.

  “The starboard one is Kronos.”

  I’m having a hard time separating Lander from his office, his liquor, his high heels, his elegant clothes. The authority with which he maneuvers the boat between the swells, which get bigger the farther we are from shore, is unexpected and foreign.

  I try to orient myself. It’s one sea mile out to the channel. Two shoal markers along the way. The channel lights to Tuborg Harbor. To Skovshoved Harbor. The masthead lights on the hills above Strand Drive. A container ship on its way south.

  When the snowfall blocks out the view, I correct his course twice. He gives me a searching glance, but he obeys. I don’t try to explain anything to him. What would I say?

  A slight wind comes up. It blows cold, hard drops of salt water into our faces. We huddle in the bottom, leaning against each other. The heavy Zodiac dances on the choppy waves. He puts his mouth to my balaclava hood, which I’ve pulled up.

  “Føjl and I were in the navy together. In the Seals. We were in our early twenties. If you’re a thinking person, then you have to be that age to put up with that kind of shit. For six months we would get up at 5:00 a. m. and swim half a mile in ice-cold water and run for an hour and a half. We had parachute jumping at night over the sea, three miles off the coast of Scotland, and I’m practically night-blind. We dragged that crappy rubber boat around on our heads through the Danish woods while the officers pissed on us and tried to rearrange our psyches to make fighting men out of us.”

  I put my hand on his arm holding the throttle and correct the course. Five hundred yards ahead the container ship cuts across our course in the form of a green starboard light and three running lanterns up high.

  “It’s usually the small ones who do best. Guys my size. We were the ones who could keep it up. The bigger guys could manage one lift and then they were finished. We had to put them in the rubber boat and carry them along. But Føjl was different. Føjl was big. But as fast as if he were small. They couldn’t wear him out. They never cracked him in the interrogation courses. He would just give them that friendly stare; you know how he is. And then he wouldn’t budge an inch. One day we were diving under ice. It was winter. The sea was frozen solid. We had to dynamite a hole in it. There was a strong current that day. On my way down I passed through a cold belt. That happens sometimes. The condensed water from the exhaled air freezes to ice and blocks the small valves in the air tank. I hadn’t attached the safety
line yet. That’s how you can find your way back to the hole in the ice. That’s what diving under ice is like. From six feet away the hole is a dark edge. From fifteen feet away you can’t see it any longer. So I’m seized with panic. I lose the line. I don’t think I can see the hole anymore. Everything is green and brilliant and neon-colored under the ice. I feel as if I’m being sucked into the realm of the dead. I can feel the current grabbing me and carrying me down and away. They tell me that Føjl was watching. So he picks up a lead belt in one hand and jumps into the water without any oxygen tank. With only a line in his hand. Because there wasn’t time. And he dives down to me. He catches me forty feet down. But he’s diving in a dry suit. This means that the water pressure presses the rubber against his skin. With an additional one atmosphere of pressure for every thirty feet. About thirty feet down the rubber edge cut through the skin of his wrists and ankles. What I remember about our passage up to the surface was clouds of blood.”

  I think about the scars around his wrists and ankles.

  “He was also the one who forced the water out of my lungs. And gave me artificial respiration. We had to wait a long time. They only had a little gas turbine helicopter, and the weather was bad. He gave me heart massage and artificial respiration all the way back.”

  “Back to where?”

  “To Scoresbysund. We were on exercises in Greenland. It was cold. But that suited him fine.”

  The snow closes around us in a chaotic gridwork, a wild confusion of slanted stripes.

  “He’s disappeared,” I say. “I tried to call him. Some stranger answered the phone. Maybe he’s in jail.”

  One minute before the ship appears, I can sense its presence. The pull of the hull against the anchor chains, the slow shifting of the entire vast, floating hulk.

  “Forget about him, honey. That’s what the rest of us have had to do.”

  On the port side there is a short floating platform at the bottom of a steep ladder beneath a single yellow light. He doesn’t turn off the motor but steadies the boat by holding on to an iron girder.

  “You can go back with me, Smilla.”

  There’s something touching about him, as if he hadn’t realized until now that we stopped playing games a long time ago.

  “The thing is,” I say, “that I don’t have anything in particular to go back to.”

  I sling the box onto the platform myself. When I step up onto it and turn around, he stands there for a moment, gazing at me, a small figure, rising and sinking, the big rubber boat lending him a dancing movement. Then he turns away and pushes off.

  The Sea

  PART ONE

  1

  My cabin is 8 by 10 feet. But they’ve still found space for a sink and mirror, a closet, a bunk with a reading light, a shelf for books, a chair, and under the porthole a little desk with the big dog on top.

  He stretches from one bulkhead all the way across to the bed and is about six feet long. His eyes are sad, his paws dark, and with every list of the ship, he tries to touch me. If he succeeds, I will instantly disintegrate. My flesh will fall off my bones, my eyes will run out of their sockets and evaporate, my intestines will force their way out through my skin and explode in clouds of methane.

  He doesn’t belong here. He doesn’t belong in my world at all. His name is Aajumaaq and he’s from East Greenland, and my mother brought him home from a visit to Ammassalik. After seeing him once down there, she realized that he must have always been present in Qaanaaq, too, and after that she saw him regularly. He never touches the ground, and here, too, he floats a little above the desk. He’s here because I’m on a ship.

  I’ve always been afraid of the sea. They never got me into a kayak, even though it was my mother’s greatest wish. I have never set foot on the deck of Moritz’s Swan. One of the reasons I’m fond of ice is that it covers the water and makes it solid, safe, negotiable, manageable. I know that, outside, the waves and the wind have picked up, and far forward the bow of the Kronos is pitching through the waves, splintering them, and sending loud cascades of water along the gunwale until, outside my porthole, they disperse into a whistling mist shining white in the night. On the open sea there are no landmarks, there is only an amorphous, chaotic shifting of directionless masses of water that loom up and break and roll, and their surface is, in turn, broken by subsystems that interfere and form whirlpools and appear and disappear and finally vanish without a trace. Slowly this confusion will work its way into the chambers of my inner ear and destroy my sense of orientation; it will fight its way into my cells and displace their salt concentrations and the conductivity of my nervous system as well, leaving me deaf, blind, and helpless. I’m not afraid of the sea simply because it wants to strangle me. I’m afraid of it because it will rob me of my orientation, the inner gyroscope of my life, my awareness of what is up and down, my connection to Absolute Space.

  No one can grow up in Qaanaaq without going to sea. No one can live as I have, as a professional student and expedition outfitter and guide in North Greenland, without being forced to go to sea. I’ve been on more ships and for much longer periods of time than I care to remember. If I’m not actually standing on a deck, I’ve usually managed to repress it.

  The process of disintegration started the moment I came on board several hours ago. There’s a boiling in my ears, a strange, internal displacement of fluids. I can no longer discern the points of the compass with certainty. Aajumaaq sits on my desk waiting to catch me off guard.

  He waits right inside the doorway leading to sleep, and every time I hear my own breath grow deeper and know that now I’m asleep, I don’t slip into that peaceful obliteration of reality that I need. Instead, I fall into a dangerous new clarity beside that guiding spirit, the floating dog with three claws on each paw, amplified by my mother’s imagination; ever since I was a child, he has been grafted into my nightmares.

  It’s been about an hour since the engines started up, and from a great distance I sensed rather than heard the play of the anchor and the clattering of the chain, and I’m too tired to stay awake and too tense to sleep, and in the end I just wish for some kind of diversion.

  It comes with the opening of my door. There’s no knock, no warning footsteps. He tiptoes up to the door, jerks it open, and sticks his head inside.

  “The captain wants to see you on the bridge.”

  He stands in the doorway, trying to make it difficult for me to get out of bed and put on my clothes, trying to make me expose myself. With the quilt around my shoulders I slide down to the foot of the bunk and give the door a kick so that he just manages to pull back his head in time.

  Jakkelsen. His name is Jakkelsen. He might have a first name, too, but on the Kronos only surnames are used.

  I stand there in the rain until the rubber boat with Lander’s silhouette disappears. Since there’s no one in sight, I try to lift my box by myself, but have to forget about getting it up the ladder. I leave it behind and climb into the darkness beyond the single light.

  The steps end at an open cargo door. Inside, a dim bulb illuminates a green corridor on a level with the second deck. Sheltered from the rain, with his feet up on a cable-end box, a boy sits smoking a cigarette.

  He’s wearing black steel-toed shoes, blue work pants, and a blue wool sweater, and he’s too young and much too gaunt to be a sailor.

  “I’ve been waiting for you. Jakkelsen. We use last names here. Captain’s orders.”

  He scrutinizes me. “Stick with me, because I can do things for you, know what I mean?”

  He has a dusting of freckles across his nose, his hair is red and curly. Above the cigarette his eyes are half-closed, lazy, inquisitive, insolent. He could be seventeen.

  “You can start by getting my baggage.”

  He gets up reluctantly, letting his cigarette fall to the deck, where it continues to glow.

  He barely manages to get up the ladder with the box. He puts it down on the deck. “I have a bad back, know what I mean?”
/>   He walks on ahead, sauntering, with his hands behind his back. I follow with the box. A deep, continuous vibration of giant engines passes through the hull, like a reminder that departure is imminent.

  A stairway brings us to the level of the upper decks. Here the smell of diesel fuel dissipates, the air tastes of rain and cold. One corridor has a white wall on the right, a long row of doors on the left. One of them is mine.

  Jakkelsen opens it, steps aside so I can enter, follows me in, closes the door, and stands in front of it.

  I shove the box aside and sit down on the bed.

  “Jaspersen. According to the crew list, your name is Jaspersen.”

  I open the closet.

  “How about a quick fuck?”

  I wonder whether I’ve heard right.

  “Women are crazy about me.”

  A certain eagerness and excitement has come over him. I stand up. It’s important to avoid being caught by surprise.

  “That’s a good idea,” I say. “But let’s wait until your birthday. Your fiftieth birthday.”

  He looks disappointed. “By then you’ll be ninety. So I won’t be interested.”

  He gives me a wink and goes out the door. “I know the sea, remember. Stick with me, Jaspersen.”

  Then he shuts the door.

  I unpack. The bathroom is down the corridor. The water from the hot-water tap is scalding. I stand under the shower for a long time. Then I rub my skin with almond oil and put on a jogging suit. I lock the door and lie down under the quilt. The world can come and get me if it needs me. I close my eyes and sink down. Through the gateway. On the desk, Aajumaaq slowly appears. In my dreams I know that it’s a dream. It’s possible to reach a certain age and a point in your life when even your nightmares start to have a halfway soothing and familiar sense to them. That’s about the stage that I’ve reached.