Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  The engine noise grows louder and they weigh anchor. Then the Kronos sets off. And Jakkelsen opens my door.

  I’m positive that I locked it. I make a note that he must have a key. It’s a small thing that’s worth remembering.

  “Your uniform,” he says outside the door. “We wear uniforms here.”

  In the closet there are blue pants that are too big, blue T-shirts that are too big, a blue smock that’s too big and as shapeless as a flour sack, and a blue wool sweater. On the floor there’s a pair of short rubber boots with plenty of room to grow into. About five or six sizes, if they’re really going to fit.

  Jakkelsen is waiting for me outside. He inspects me over his cigarette but doesn’t say a word. His fingers drum against the bulkhead; there’s a new restlessness about him. He walks on ahead.

  At the end of the corridor he turns left to the stairs leading to the upper levels. But I take a right, out onto the deck, and he has to follow me.

  I stand by the railing. The air is dripping with ice-cold moisture, the wind is strong and gusty. But you can see lights straight ahead.

  “Helsingør-Hälsingborg, the strait between Denmark and Sweden. The world’s busiest channel, you know. Swedish car ferries, Danish train ferries, a giant marina, container traffic. Every three minutes a ship crosses. There’s no other place like it. The Strait of Messina, for instance, I’ve been there lots of times, it’s nothing. This is really something. And in this kind of weather there are disturbances on the radar, it’s like taking a submarine through buttermilk soup.”

  His fingers are drumming nervously on the railing, but his eyes are staring out into the night with what looks like enthusiasm.

  “We came through here when I was in the merchant marine school. On board a fullrigger. Sunshine, Kronborg Castle on the port side, and the little girls in the marina got all excited when they saw us.”

  I go first. We climb up three levels to reach the navigation bridge. To the right of the stairs is the chart room behind two big glass windows. It’s dark, but faint red light bulbs glow above laid-out sea charts. We step inside the wheelhouse.

  The room is dark. But below us, in the light of a single deck lamp, 250 feet forward in the night, lies the deck of the Kronos. Two 60-foot masts with heavy cargo booms. At each mast four cargo winches; at the entrance to the short, elevated foredeck, a control box for the winches. Between the masts, on the deck, is a rectangular shape under a tarp where several small blue figures are working to secure long, criss-crossed rubber straps. Maybe it’s the LMC, the navy’s surplus landing vessel. On the foredeck, a huge anchor winch and a hatch in four sections over a cargo hold. Every three feet along the sea rail there’s an upright white floodlight. In addition, fire hydrants, foam fire extinguishers and rescue equipment. Nothing else. The deck is clear and shipshape.

  And now empty as well. While I’ve been surveying the deck, the blue figures have disappeared. Now the light is turned off and the deck vanishes. Far forward, where the bow chops through the waves, white protuberances of displaced water suddenly appear. On both sides of the ship, surprisingly close, the lights of the shores can be seen. The little passenger ferries cross behind and in front of us. In the rain the yellow floodlights make Kronborg Castle look like a drab modern prison.

  Two slowly rotating green radar images glow from the darkness of the room. A red dot of dull light in a big liquid compass. In front of the window, with one hand on the manual tiller, stands a man, his back partly turned toward us. It’s Captain Sigmund Lukas. Behind him a straight-backed, motionless figure. Next to me Jakkelsen is rocking restlessly on the balls of his feet.

  “You can go.” Lukas speaks softly, without turning around. The figure behind him slips out the door. Jakkelsen follows him. For a moment his movements show no reluctance.

  My eyes slowly grow used to the dark, and out of nothingness appear the instruments; some I recognize, some I don’t, but I’ve always kept my distance from all of them because they belong to the open sea. And because, for me, they symbolize a culture that has inserted a layer of lifeless instruments between itself and its attempt to determine its location.

  The liquid crystals on the SATNAV computer, the shortwave radio, consoles for LORAN C, a radio location system that I’ve never understood. The red numbers on the sounding device. The console of the navigational sonar. The inclinometer. A sextant on a tripod. Instrument panels. The phone to the engine room. Visibility dials. A radio locator. The automatic pilot. Two panels full of volt meters and control lights. And above all of it Lukas’s alert, expressionless face.

  The VHF emits a continuous crackle. Without shifting his gaze, the captain reaches over and turns it off. There is silence.

  “You’re on board because we needed a cabin attendant. A stewardess, as it’s now called. Not for any other reason. That conversation we had was an employment interview, nothing else.”

  In my floppy sea boots and much too large sweater I feel like a little girl being disciplined in school. Not once does he look at me.

  “We haven’t been able to find out where we’re going. We’ll be told later. Until then we’re following our noses due north.”

  There’s something different about him. It’s his cigarettes. They’re gone. Maybe he doesn’t smoke at sea. Maybe he sails to get away from the gambling tables and the cigarettes.

  “First Mate Sonne will show you around and point out your work areas. Your duties include light cleaning, and you’re responsible for the ship’s laundry. You will also occasionally wait on the officers.”

  The question is why he’s taken me along at all.

  When I reach the door he calls after me, his voice bitter and low. “You heard what I said, didn’t you? You understand that we’re sailing without knowing our destination?”

  Sonne is waiting for me outside the door. Young, polite, his hair close-cropped. We go down one level to the boat deck. He turns toward me, lowers his voice, and looks at me gravely.

  “We have representatives from the shipping company with us on this trip. They live in the forecastle on the boat deck. There’s no admittance whatsoever. Unless you’re called on to serve a meal. Otherwise no. No cleaning, no little errands.”

  We continue down. The laundry, the drying room, and the linen supply area are located on the promenade deck. On the upper deck, along with my cabin, there are living quarters, offices for the engineer and electricians, the galley and the crew’s mess. On the second deck are the cold storage rooms and freezer for foodstuffs, storerooms, two workshops, the CO2 room. All of this is located in and below the superstructure; just in front of it and farther forward are the engine room, tanks, tunnels, and the cargo holds.

  I follow him up to the upper deck. Along the corridor past my own cabin. Farthest back on the port side is the mess. He pushes open the door and we step inside.

  I take my time and count eleven people in that little room. Five Danes, six Asians. Two of the latter are women. Three of the men look like little boys.

  “Smilla Jaspersen, the new stewardess.”

  It’s always been this way. I stand alone in the doorway, the others in front of me. Sometimes it’s a school, sometimes a university, sometimes it’s some other kind of gathering. They may not have anything in particular against me, they might be more or less indifferent, but almost every time they look as if they’d rather not be bothered.

  “Verlaine, our bosun. Hansen and Maurice. The three of them are in charge of the deck. Maria and Fernanda, ship’s assistants.”

  In the doorway to the galley stands a tall, heavyset man with a full reddish-brown beard, wearing a white cook’s outfit.

  “Urs. Our cook.”

  The hostility is stronger in the eyes of the women than of the men. But there is also a raw directness which has managed to thwart the rule dictating the use of surnames.

  There’s something subdued and disciplined about all of them. With the exception of Jakkelsen. He’s leaning against the wall, under the NO
SMOKING sign, with a cigarette in his mouth. He has one eye closed against the smoke while the other regards me quizzically.

  “That’s Bernard Jakkelsen,” says the first mate. He hesitates for a moment. “He also works on deck.”

  Jakkelsen ignores him. “Jaspersen is supposed to keep our cabins clean,” he says. “There’ll be plenty of work mucking out for eleven men and four officers. I seem to have a tendency to just drop things all over the floor, if you know what I mean.”

  My socks have slipped down around my heels because my rubber boots are too big. You can’t live like a human being when your socks are drooping. Not when you’re tired and scared besides. And now they’re laughing, not a hearty laughter. But a feeling of dominance emanates from the gaunt figure of Jakkelsen, affecting everyone in the room.

  I lose my temper. I grab hold of Jakkelsen’s lower lip and pinch it hard. I pull it away from his teeth. When he takes hold of my wrist, I grab his little finger with my left hand and bend back the top joint. He drops to his knees with a whimper like a woman. I increase the pressure.

  “Do you know how I’m going to clean your cabin?” I say. “I’ll open the porthole. And then I’ll pretend that I’ve opened a big closet. And then I’ll put all your things inside. And then I’ll wash it down with salt water.”

  I let him go and step aside. But he doesn’t try to grab me. He stands up slowly and goes over to a framed photograph of the Kronos in front of a flat-topped iceberg in the Antarctic. He mournfully examines his face in the glass.

  “I’ll get a blood blister, damn it, a blood blister.”

  No one in the room has moved.

  I straighten up and look around at them. People don’t like saying “I’m sorry” in Greenlandic. I’ve never bothered to learn the phrase in Danish.

  In my cabin I pull the desk over to the door and wedge Bugge’s Greenlandic dictionary under the door handle. Then I go to bed. I have every reason to believe that tonight the dog will leave me in peace.

  2

  It’s six-thirty in the morning, but they’ve already eaten and the mess is empty except for Verlaine. I drink a glass of juice and follow him to the storage room for work clothes. He looks me over and then hands me a pile of clothes.

  Maybe it’s the work clothes, maybe it’s the surroundings, maybe it’s the color of his skin. But for a moment I feel the urge for some contact.

  “What’s your native language?”

  “You mean, what’s your native language, sir?” he corrects me gently, using the formal form of address.

  His Danish has a faint lilt to each word, the way it’s spoken on the island of Fyn.

  We look each other in the eyes. He has a plastic bag in his breast pocket. He takes a clump of rice out of it. He stuffs it in his mouth, chews it slowly and thoroughly, swallows, and rubs his palms together.

  “Bosun,” he adds. Then he turns around and leaves. There’s nothing under the sun as grotesque as cold European courtesy manifested in the third and fourth worlds.

  I change into work clothes in my cabin. He has given me the correct size. As much as work clothes can ever be the right size. I try putting a belt around the smock. Now I no longer look like a mailbag. Now I look like an hourglass five feet two inches tall. I put a silk scarf over my hair. I have to clean, and I don’t want to get dust in the fine down that is starting to cover my bald spot. I take out a vacuum cleaner. I put it down in the corridor, and then I quietly drift into the mess. Not to resume my breakfast—I couldn’t get a bite down. During the night the sea outside my porthole seeped down into my stomach and joined forces with the smell of diesel fuel and with the awareness of being on the open sea, and coated my insides with tepid nausea. There are those who claim that you can fight seasickness by standing on deck in the fresh air. That may work if the boat is docked or on its way through the Falsterbo Canal, where you can go up and look at the solid land that you will soon have under your feet. When Sonne wakes me up this morning by knocking on my door to give me a key, and I get dressed and stand on deck wearing a down jacket and ski cap, and gaze out into the pitch dark of winter, and realize that now I will have to continue because I’m on the open sea and there’s no way back, that’s when I first feel truly sick.

  In the mess the two tables have been cleared and wiped off. I stand in the doorway to the galley.

  Urs is stirring a pot of boiling milk. I estimate him to be about 250 pounds. But solidly built. All Danes are pale in the winter, but his face borders on green-tinged. Covered with a light mask of sweat in the heat of the galley.

  His movements are forceful and impatient. But he possesses a warmth and charisma in his role as keeper of the larder. They don’t call him by his last name either.

  “A superb breakfast.”

  I didn’t touch it. But you have to start a conversation somewhere.

  He gives me a smile and turns back to the milk as he shrugs his shoulders. “I am a Schweizer.”

  I’ve had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I’m also helpless in two or three other languages.

  “Frühstück,” I say in German. “Impressive. Like a first-class restaurant.”

  “I had such a restaurant. In Geneva. On the lake,” he continues in German.

  He has prepared a tray with coffee, steamed milk, juice, butter, and croissants.

  “Can I take it to the bridge?”

  “Nein. Breakfast isn’t served. It’s sent up in the dumbwaiter. But if you come back at 11:15, Fraülein, there’s the officers’ lunch.”

  “How do you like cooking on a ship?”

  The question is an excuse to stay there. He has put a tray into the dumbwaiter and pushed a button labeled NAVIGATING BRIDGE. Now he’s preparing the next one. This is the one that interests me. It consists of tea, toast, cheese, honey, jam, juice, and softboiled eggs. Three cups and three plates. On the boat deck, to which the stewardess is forbidden access, the Kronos has three passengers. He puts the tray in the dumbwaiter and presses BOAT DECK.

  “Not bad. Besides, I had no choice. Eleven-fifteen, then,” he says in German.

  The scenario for the end of the world is firmly established. It will begin with three extremely cold winters and then the lakes, the rivers, and the seas will freeze over. The sun will cool down so it can no longer create summer, the snow will keep falling for a merciless white eternity. Then one long endless winter will arrive and, finally, the wolf Skoll will devour the sun. The moon and stars will be extinguished, and a fathomless darkness will reign. The Fimbul winter.

  In school they taught us that this was the way northerners imagined the end of the world before Christianity taught them that the universe would perish in fire. I’ve always remembered this, not because it was any more personally relevant than so much else I learned, but because it dealt with snow. When I heard it for the first time, I thought that it was a distorted picture created by people who had no understanding of the nature of winter.

  Opinion was divided in North Greenland. My mother, along with many others, preferred winter. Because of the hunting on new ice, because of the deep sleep, because of the handicrafts, but most of all because of the visiting. Winter was a time for community, not for the end of the world.

  In school they also told us that Danish culture had made great progress since ancient times and the theory of a Fimbul winter. There are moments when it’s difficult for me to believe this is true. Like now, when I’m wiping down the tanning bed in the ship’s weight room with alcohol.

  The ultraviolet lights from a tanning bed split small amounts of the oxygen in the air, creating the unstable gas ozone. Its sharp smell of pine needles is found in the summer in Qaanaaq, too, with its almost painfully bright sunshine in the glare off the snow and sea.

  One of my duties is to wipe off this thought-provoking apparatus with alcohol.

  I’ve always enjoyed cleaning. Even though they tried to teach us laziness
in school.

  For the first six months we were taught in the village by the wife of one of the hunters. One summer day they came from the boarding school and wanted to take me to town. A Danish pastor and a West Greenlandic catechist. They issued orders without looking at our faces. They called us avanersuarmiut, people from the north.

  Moritz forced me to go. My brother had grown too big and too obstinate for him. The boarding school was in Qaanaaq, in the town itself. I stayed for five months, until my fighting spirit had matured sufficiently that I could refuse.

  In school we had all our meals served to us. We had a hot bath every day and clean clothes every other. In the village we had bathed once a week, much less often when hunting or traveling. Every day, from the glacier above the cliffs, I had collected kangirluarhuq, big blocks of freshwater ice, and carried them home in sacks and melted them over the stove. At the boarding school you turned on a faucet. When summer vacation arrived, all the students and teachers went out to Herbert Island and visited the hunters, and for the first time in a long while we had boiled seal meat and tea. That’s when I noticed the paralysis. Not just in me but in everybody. We could not pull ourselves together anymore; it was no longer a natural thing to reach out for some water and brown soap and the package of Neogene and start rinsing the skins. We weren’t used to washing clothes, we couldn’t pull ourselves together to cook. At every break we would slip into a daydreaming state of waiting. Hoping that someone would take over, would relieve us, free us from our duties, and do what we ourselves ought to have done.

  When I understood where things were heading, I rebelled against Moritz for the first time and went home. It was also a return to relative contentedness with my work.

  This same contentedness comes over me now as I’m vacuuming the cabins in the crew’s quarters on the upper deck of the Kronos. The same sense of calm as when I repaired nets in my childhood.