Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  Strict order reigns in every one of the cabins. The crew understands—as I did to survive the boarding schools in my life—that when you have only a few cubic yards to yourself and your innermost feelings, that private space must be subjected to the severest discipline if it is to withstand the dissolution, destruction, and pressure to yield coming from all sides.

  In his own way Isaiah had this fastidiousness, too. The mechanic had it. The crew of the Kronos has it. Surprisingly enough, Jakkelsen has it, too.

  On his walls Jakkelsen has banners, postcards, and little souvenirs from South America, the Far East, Canada, and Indonesia. All the clothes in the closet are meticulously folded and stacked up.

  I feel around among the stacks. I take off the mattress and vacuum out the cubbyhole for the bed linen. I pull out the desk drawers, I get down on my knees and look under the desk, I carefully examine the mattress. His closet is full of shirts. I touch every one of them. Some of them are raw silk. He has a collection of aftershave lotions and eau de toilette that smell expensive and sweetly alcoholic; I open them and put a dab of the fragrance on a paper napkin, which I then roll into a ball and put in the pocket of my smock, to flush down the toilet later on. I’m looking for something specific, but I don’t find it. Or anything else of interest, either.

  I put the vacuum cleaner back and go downstairs, past the second deck, past the cold storage and the supply rooms, and on down the stairs, bordered on one side by the smokestack housing and on the other by a wall labeled DEEP TANK. At the bottom of the stairs is the door to the engine room. I’m carrying in my hand a bucket and scrub brush as a ready excuse, and if that’s not enough, I can always fall back on the tried-and-true story that I’m a stranger who’s gotten lost.

  The door is heavy and insulated, and when I open it the noise is deafening at first. I’m out on a steel platform from which a gallery extends, running around the entire perimeter of the room.

  On the deck thirty feet below me on a slightly raised platform in the middle of the room, the engine looms up. It’s in two sections: the main engine with nine exposed cylinder heads and a six-cylinder auxiliary engine. The shiny valves move rhythmically like parts of a beating heart. The entire engine block is about sixteen feet high and forty feet long, and the whole thing gives the impression of an overwhelming, tamed savagery. There’s not a soul in sight.

  The steel of the walkway is perforated, my canvas shoes are walking right over the drop beneath me.

  Everywhere signs prohibit smoking in five languages. Several yards up ahead there’s an alcove. A blue veil of tobacco smoke is seeping out. Jakkelsen is sitting on a folding chair with his feet up on the worktable smoking a cigar. Half an inch under his lower lip there’s a blood blister running the whole width of his mouth. I lean against the table, in order to discreetly put my hand on the 13-inch monkey wrench lying there.

  He takes his feet off the table, puts down the cigar, and gives me a big smile. “Smilla. I was just sitting here thinking about you.”

  I let go of the wrench. His restlessness has been temporarily stowed away.

  “I’ve got a bad back, you know. On other ships they take it easy while they’re at sea. Here we start at 7:00 a.m. Chipping off rust and splicing mooring cables and painting and scraping off oxide scale and polishing brass. How am I supposed to keep my hands looking presentable if I have to splice cable every single day?”

  I don’t reply. I try silence on Bernard Jakkelsen. He has very little tolerance for it. Even now when he’s in good spirits, you can sense his underlying nervousness.

  “Where are we off to, Smilla?”

  I simply wait.

  “I’ve been sailing for five years, and I’ve never seen anything like this before. Alcohol prohibited. Uniforms. No one allowed on the boat deck. And even Lukas says that he doesn’t know where we’re going.”

  He puffs on his cigar again. “Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen. That must be a Greenlandic middle name …”

  He must have looked at my passport. Which is in the ship’s safe. That’s something worth thinking about.

  “I’ve had a good look at this ship. I know everything about ships. This one here, she’s got a double hull and icebreaker cables running the whole length of the ship. Up front the plates are thick enough to withstand an anti-tank grenade.”

  He gives me a sly look. “In the stern, over the propeller, there’s an ice cutter. That engine produces at least 6,000 ihp, enough to sail at 16 to 18 knots. We’re on our way up to the ice. I’m sure about that. You don’t think we’re heading for Greenland, do you?”

  I don’t have to reply to keep him talking.

  “Then there’s the crew. They’re a pile of shit. And they stick together. They all know each other. And they’re scared; can’t get them to talk about why. And there are the passengers that we never see. Why are they coming along?”

  He puts down his cigar. He hasn’t really been enjoying it. “Then there’s you, Smilla. I’ve sailed on lots of 4,000-ton ships. None of them ever had a cabin attendant. Certainly not one who acts like she’s the Queen of Sheba.”

  I pick up his cigar and drop it in my bucket. It goes out with a little hiss.

  “I’m cleaning up,” I say.

  “Why did he let you on board, Smilla?”

  I don’t give him an answer. I don’t know what to say.

  It’s not until the door to the engine room shuts behind me that I realize how enervating the noise was. The silence is refreshing.

  Verlaine, the bosun, is standing on the lowest platform, leaning against the wall. I involuntarily turn sideways as I go past him.

  “Get lost?”

  He pulls out a clump of rice from his breast pocket and puts it in his mouth. He doesn’t drop a single grain, and nothing sticks to his hands; it’s a purely automatic movement.

  Maybe I should make up an excuse, but I hate being interrogated. “Just took a wrong turn.”

  Several steps up, I happen to remember something.

  “Mr. Bosun,” I add. “Just took a wrong turn, Mr. Bosun.”

  3

  I hit the alarm clock with the side of my hand. It shoots through the cabin like a projectile, slams against the hooks on the door, and drops to the floor.

  I don’t do well with phenomena that are supposed to last for life. Prison sentences, marriage contracts, lifetime appointments. They’re attempts to pin down segments of life and exempt them from the passage of time. It’s even worse with things that are supposed to last forever. Like my alarm clock. My “eternity clock.” That’s what they called it. I pried it out of the smashed instrument panel of the second NASA moon vehicle after it was totaled on the ice cap. The vehicle was as incapable as the Americans of withstanding minus 67°F and winds that went off the Beaufort scale.

  They didn’t notice that I took the clock. I took it as a souvenir, to prove that no everlasting flowers can survive in my company, that even the American space program couldn’t survive three weeks with me.

  The clock has lasted for ten years. Ten years in which it has received nothing but brutality and harsh words. But they expected great things from it back then. They said you could stick it in the flame of a blowtorch and boil it in sulfuric acid and sink it to the bottom of the Philippine Trench and it would keep time as if nothing had happened. This claim was a flagrant provocation for me. In Qaanaaq we thought that wristwatches were cute. Some of the hunters wore them for decoration. But we would never dream of being regulated by them.

  That’s what I told Gil, who was driving. (My job was to sit in the observation cockpit and report when the color of the firn got too dark or too white, which means that it won’t hold but will open up, allowing the earth to swallow a 15-ton, idiotic American dream of reaching the moon, letting it fall into a 100-foot-deep, brilliantly blue-and-green crevasse, which narrows at the bottom and wedges everything that falls in into a tight embrace at minus 22°F.) In Qaanaaq we are guided by the weather, I told him. We are guided by the animals.
By love. And death. Not by a piece of mechanized tin.

  I was only in my early twenties. At that age you can lie—you can even lie to yourself—with greater self-confidence. In reality, European time had come to Greenland a long time ago, long before my birth. It came with the Greenland Trading Company’s opening and closing times, payment schedules, church hours, and hourly wages.

  I’ve tried pounding on the clock with a sheet-metal hammer. It made dents in the hammer. By now I’ve given up. Now I make do with knocking it onto the floor, where it lies, electronically beeping, unperturbed, saving me from showing up on the bridge without having splashed cold water on my face and put on eyeliner.

  It’s 2:30 a.m. It’s the middle of the night in the Northern Atlantic Ocean. At 10:00 p.m., with no prior warning except a green wink of light, Lukas’s voice had issued from the loudspeaker over my bed. Like an invasion of my little room.

  “Jaspersen. At 3:00 a.m. we need coffee served on the bridge.”

  Not until the clock hits the floor does it emit any sound. I woke up on my own, awakened by a feeling of abnormal activity. Twenty-four hours is enough to make the ship’s rhythm my own. A ship at sea is quiet at night. The engine thuds, of course, the long, high swells slosh against the side, and now and then the stern crushes a fifty-ton block of water into a fine powder of fluid. But those are normal sounds, and when sounds are repeated often enough, they become part of the silence. The watch is changed on the bridge, somewhere a ship’s clock strikes. But the people are asleep.

  Now there is commotion against this familiar backdrop. Boots in the corridor, doors slamming, voices, sounds on the loudspeaker, and a distant rumbling from hydraulic winches.

  On my way up the stairs to the bridge, I stick my head out on deck. It’s dark. I can hear footsteps and voices, but no light is on. I step out into the darkness.

  I’m not wearing any outdoor clothes. The temperature is about freezing, the wind is blowing astern, the cloud cover is low and dense. The waves are visible only right next to the ship, but the troughs of the waves seem as long as a soccer field. The deck is slippery and slick with salt water. I duck under the sea rail to seek shelter and make myself as unobtrusive as possible. Near the tarp I pass a figure in the dark. Up ahead there is a faint light. It’s coming from the cargo hold farthest forward. The hatches have been slid aside and a railing put up around the opening. Two wires extend through the opening from the two backward-facing cranes on the forward mast. Over the railing, both in front and in back, lies a heavy blue nylon hawser. There’s no one in sight.

  The cargo hold is surprisingly deep and illuminated by four fluorescent lights, one on each bulkhead. Thirty feet down, on the lid of a huge metal container, sits Verlaine. At each corner of the container is a white fiberglass holder, like the ones for inflatable life rafts.

  That’s all I manage to see. Someone grabs my clothes from behind.

  I yield, not out of resignation, but to retaliate with even greater force. At that moment the ship rolls on an oblique swell, and we lose our balance and fall backward against the control panel for the winches, and I catch a scent of aftershave that I recognize.

  “Idiot! You idiot!” Jakkelsen fights to catch his breath after his exertion. There’s something in his face and voice that wasn’t there before. The beginnings of fear.

  “This ship is run like in the old days—you keep to your own area.” He gives me an almost pleading look.

  “Beat it. Get lost.”

  I walk back. He half whispers, half shouts after me into the wind. “Do you want to end up in the big wet closet?”

  The tray rams into one side of the door frame and then the other before I manage to get my bearings and stand there clattering in the dark room.

  No one speaks to me. After a moment I push my way backward and find room for the cups and the pastry on the table among rulers and calipers.

  “Two minutes, eight hundred yards.”

  He’s merely an outline in the dark, but it’s an outline that I haven’t seen before. He’s bending over the green digits of the electronic log.

  The pastry dough smells of butter. Urs is a meticulous cook. The aroma is whisked away because the door is standing open. On the bridge wing, I can make out Sonne’s back.

  Above a sea chart, a faint red bulb is turned on, and Sigmund Lukas’s face appears out of the darkness.

  “Five hundred yards.”

  The other man is wearing a coverall with the collar turned up. Next to him, on the navigation table, there is a flat box the size of a stereo amplifier. Two slender telescope antennas stick up out of the sides of the box. Nearby stands a woman, wearing the same kind of coverall as the man. Her long dark hair flowing loosely over her turned-up collar and curling down her back seems oddly out of place with her work clothes and air of concentration. It’s Katja Claussen. Instinctively I know that the man is Seidenfaden.

  “One minute, two hundred yards.”

  “Hoist it up.”

  The voice comes from the intercom on the wall. I release my grip on the tabletop behind me. My palms are sweaty. I’ve heard that voice before. On the phone in my apartment. The last time I was there.

  The red light goes off. Out of the night a gray shape rises up, emerging from the forward cargo hold, and swings, swaying slowly, over the side of the ship.

  “Ten seconds.”

  “Lower it, Verlaine.”

  He must be sitting in the enclosed crow’s nest at the top of the forward mast. We’re listening to his orders to the crew.

  “Pull it tight. Slack off now.”

  “Five seconds. Four, three, two, one, zero.”

  A ray of light behind us bores a tunnel through the night. The container is lying in the water, fifteen feet from the stern. It’s apparently riding a bow wave. From one of its corners, a blue hawser runs forward along the side of the ship. Maria and Fernanda, Hansen, and the deckhands are standing at the railing. They’re keeping it away from the hull with what looks like a very long boathook. In the light I can see that there are two narrow, inflatable white rubber strips along its sides.

  “Release it, Verlaine.”

  I move over to the bridge wing. The light is coming from one of the spotlights mounted on the sea rail. Sonne is manning it. He searches with the spotlight across the water. The container is free of the hawser now, already forty yards astern, and is starting to sink.

  There’s a muted bang. The five fiberglass shells on the surface of the water are cast off, and like five enormous lily pads, five self-inflating gray flotation balloons spread out above the big metal container. Then the spotlight goes out.

  “One yard, five hundred gallons.”

  It’s the woman’s voice.

  “Three thousand, four thousand. Two yards, thirteen hundred gallons. Two yards. Two and a half. Two point three. Thirteen hundred gallons, and two point three.”

  I stand next to the serving tray. In my place. On the instrument in front of her, several displays are now lit up red.

  “I’m letting it out. Twelve hundred and two and a half. Three, three-twenty, four, four and a half, five. Fifteen hundred gallons and five yards. The list is zero. Temperature 31°F.”

  She turns a dial and a sound fills the room, as if they had brought in my alarm clock.

  “Directional signal, ten-four.”

  She switches off the intercom. The man in front straightens up from the log. The tension has been released. Sonne enters the room and shuts the door. Lukas is standing right next to me.

  “You can go back to bed.”

  I gesture toward the coffee. He shakes his head. They don’t even want me to pour it. I’ve been summoned up here to carry a tray twenty feet from the kitchen dumbwaiter to the bridge. It doesn’t make sense. Unless he wanted me to see what I’ve just witnessed.

  I gather up the tray. The woman in front of me puts out her hand to caress the man. She doesn’t look at him. Her hand rests for a moment on the back of his neck. Then she twists a
little strand of his hair around her fingers and pulls it out. They haven’t noticed me at all. I wait for him to react to the pain. But he stands there, motionless, his back erect.

  Urs’s face is shiny with sweat. He tries to gesture with his hand and balance the big three-gallon pot at the same time.

  “Feodora, the only one mit 60 prozent cacao. Und the whipped cream must be ein bisschen frozen. Ten minutes in icebox,” he says to me.

  All eleven of them are here. There are no questions hovering in the air. As if I’m the only one who doesn’t understand what’s been going on. Or as if they have no need to understand.

  I slurp up the scalding chocolate through the lightly frozen whipped cream. The effect is instant intoxication, starting in my stomach and rising up, hot and pulsating, to the top of my skull. I wonder what a wizard like Urs is doing on board the Kronos.

  Verlaine stares at me thoughtfully. But I avoid his eyes.

  I’m the next to the last to leave. In a corner Jakkelsen is brooding over a cup of black coffee.

  Maria is in the bathroom, standing in front of the mirror. At first I think they’re some kind of prosthesis, then I see that they’re little hollow aluminum cones. She has one on each fingertip, and now she cautiously removes them. Underneath her nails are red, an inch and a half long, and perfect.

  “I support my family,” she says. “In Phuket. On my salary. I came to Denmark as a whore. In Thailand you’re either a virgin or a whore.”

  Her Danish is darker than Verlaine’s, less distinct.

  “Sometimes I had thirty customers a day. I’ve worked my way out of that.”

  She stretches out her forefinger, puts her nail on my cheek, and rests it against my skin.

  “I once scratched out the eyes of a policeman.”

  I stand there, leaning against her fingernail. She gives me a searching look. Then she lowers her hand.