Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  I’m waiting inside my cabin with the door slightly ajar. Jakkelsen shows up a moment later. His cabin is a little farther down the corridor. He locks his door behind him. I walk over to his door barefoot. He’s working on something. There’s a faint scraping noise, the door handle is pulled upward. He’s wedging his desk chair under the door handle.

  He’s barricading himself inside. Maybe he’s scared of the door being forced open by some of the women who are chasing him.

  I tiptoe back to my cabin. I get undressed, take my pink terry-cloth bathrobe and my hemp mitt out of my box, and noisily walk to the bathroom, whistling. I scrub myself with the mitt, dry myself off, rub my skin with lotion, and go back down the corridor, my bath slippers slapping. Then I creep back to Jakkelsen’s door.

  It’s quiet inside. Maybe he’s manicuring his nails or tending to his delicate hands in some other manner. But I doubt it.

  I knock on the door. There’s no reply. I knock harder. Total silence. I have my own key in my bathrobe pocket. I unlock his door. But I still can’t open it. I start wiggling the door handle up and down. After a minute the chair falls to the floor. I wait for the panic to subside. Then I push open the door, after glancing down the hall in both directions. The situation might be misunderstood.

  I stand there in the dark. Not a sound. I decide that the cabin must be empty. Then I turn on the light.

  Jakkelsen is sleeping in Thai silk pajamas in delicate pastel colors. His skin looks waxen. There are bubbles of saliva at the corners of his mouth that move with every faint, labored breath. One arm protrudes over the edge of the bed. His wrist sticking out of the pajama sleeve is frighteningly skinny. He looks like a sick child—and in a way, that’s what he is.

  I give him a shake. His eyelids open slightly. His eyeballs roll upward so the whites of his eyes give me a blind, dead look. He doesn’t utter a sound.

  The ashtray next to his bunk is empty. There’s nothing on the table. Everything is neat and tidy.

  I roll up his pajama sleeve. Along the inside of his arm there are between forty and sixty little yellowish-blue pricks with a black center, a fine pattern along his swollen veins. I pull out the drawer for the bed linen. He had dropped everything in there. Foil, matches, an old-fashioned glass hypodermic, fast-drying glue, a syringe, an open pocketknife, a plastic container for sewing machine needles, and a piece of black rubber packing cord.

  He’s not planning to wake up for a while. He’s sleeping a powder sleep, completely relaxed, worry-free.

  Before Home Rule, there were no customs officers in Greenland. The police and the harbor authorities were in charge of customs matters. I met Jørgensen the year I was posted at the meteorological station in Upernavik.

  He was the harbormaster. But he was rarely at work. He was constantly being taken to Thule by the Americans or he was on board one of the navy’s inspection ships. He held the Greenland record for helicopter rides.

  They would come to get Jørgensen whenever they were on to something but couldn’t quite locate it. When they had a suspicion but couldn’t find the hiding place. The narcotics patrol at Thule Air Base had dogs and metal detectors and a team of lab assistants and technicians. In Holsteinsborg the navy had several tracking experts, and in Nuuk they had a mobile X-ray apparatus from the Welding Center.

  And yet they would all send for Jørgensen. He’d been a licensed welder at Burmeister and Wain, and since then he had studied to be an officer in the merchant marine, and had now ended up as a harbormaster who never showed his face in the harbor.

  He was a little man, gray, bent, his hair bristly like a badger’s. He spoke the same nasal, one-syllable Danish to Greenlanders and Russians and all the military people, regardless of rank.

  They would bring him on board the seized ship or plane, and he would mumble a little at the crew and captain, and gaze around with his nearsighted eyes, and rather absentmindedly knock with a knuckle on the iron plates here and there, and then they’d call over one of the navy’s locksmiths, who would bring an angle grinder and remove the plate. Behind it they would find five thousand bottles or 400,000 cigarettes, and as the years passed, more and more often, blocks of paraffin-coated white powder stacked up.

  Jørgensen told us that when you’re tracking something, a systematic approach will take you only so far. “Whenever I lose my glasses,” he said, “first I search for them systematically. I look in the john and next to the coffee machine and under the newspaper. But if they’re not there, I stop thinking and sit down on a chair and survey the scene to see whether an idea will come to me, and it always does; an idea always comes to me. We can’t just go around breaking everything into pieces whether we’re looking for a pair of glasses or for bottles; we have to think things through and take note, we have to discover the crook inside ourselves and figure out where we might have stashed them.”

  In February 1981 he was shot on one of the outposts in Disko Bay by four young Greenlanders who, on his recommendation, had been given unreasonably harsh sentences for smuggling alcohol. For some reason he was fond of me. Greenlanders in general he never tried to understand.

  Now I’m reminded of Jørgensen, and I try to find the junkie in myself.

  I would take my time hiding the stuff. I wouldn’t be sloppy. I would be tempted to hide it outside my cabin. But I wouldn’t be able to stand having it physically very far away. The way mothers are said to feel about their infants.

  There’s the air conditioner. The Kronos has a high-pressure ventilation system that even now is humming softly. The intake vent is behind the perforated panels on the ceiling. There are at least forty screws in each panel. Forty screws would seem insurmountable every time I wanted to get to my baby.

  For the second time today I go through his drawers. With still no results. They hold writing paper, blue putty of the sort you use to hang up postcards, a few thick glitzy issues of Playboy, an electric razor, several decks of cards, a box of chess pieces, four clear plastic boxes each containing a flashy silk bow tie, quite a lot of foreign currency, a clothes brush, and a few extra gold chains like the one he wears around his neck.

  On the shelf there is a Spanish-Danish dictionary, a Berlitz Turkish phrasebook, a handbook on contract bridge published by British Petroleum, a couple of books on chess. A dog-eared paperback with an illustration of a naked corn-fed blonde on the cover, entitled Flossy—Sweet Sixteen.

  I’ve never been seriously interested in books that aren’t reference books. I’ve never claimed to be particularly cultured. On the other hand, I’ve always thought that it’s never too late to start a new life of learning. Maybe I should start with Flossy—Sweet Sixteen.

  I take the pocketknife out of the drawer. On the edge of the blade are a few bottle-green specks. I open his closet and go through his clothes one more time. There’s nothing in that color. In his bed, Jakkelsen gurgles softly.

  I take the box of chess pieces out of the drawer. I pick up a white king and a black queen and put them on the desk. They are meticulously carved out of some kind of heavy wood. The chessboard is on the desk, covered with a thin metallic plate. On board a ship it’s practical having a chessboard that’s magnetic. There are magnets on the bottom of the chess pieces, a lead-colored disk at the base with a piece of green felt attached. I stick the knife blade in between the metal disk and the base of the king. It resists, but it comes off. A little dab of glue has been applied on each side. I put the disk on the desk. A little speck of felt remains on the knife, a few minuscule green fibers that you wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for them.

  The chess piece is hollow. It’s about three inches tall and filled with a cylinder a half inch in diameter. It’s probably not something Jakkelsen did; they were originally produced this way. But he has taken advantage of it. On top is a lump of putty. Underneath are three clear plastic tubes. I shake them out. There are four more under them.

  I put them back in place, seal them up with the putty, and glue the magnet onto the ches
s piece. I could have searched the rest of the pieces. To see whether you could fit two or three vials in each of the pawns. To figure out whether he had enough for four or six months’ use. But I feel like getting out of there. A single woman shouldn’t stay too long in a strange gentleman’s cabin.

  4

  “That was my first trip. So I went to see a colleague. ‘How do I navigate to Greenland?’ I asked him. He said, ‘You sail to Skagen and turn left. When you get to Cape Farewell, turn right.’”

  I twist the corkscrew into the cork. It’s a bottle of white wine, its color yellowish-green, and Urs has let it travel alone in the dumbwaiter at the last minute, as if it were a temperature-sensitive icon. When I pull up the corkscrew, half the cork stays in the bottle. I’ll have to screw it in again. Then the cork disintegrates and falls into the liquid. Urs said that Montrachet is a great wine. So a little cork shouldn’t hurt.

  “Then he took out a sea chart, placed one end of a ruler at Skagen, arched it up to Cape Farewell, and drew a line along the curve. ‘Follow this,’ he said, ‘and you’ll be sailing the great circle. And don’t sleep the last forty-eight hours before you reach the cape. Drink black coffee and keep a look out for icebergs.’”

  Lukas is doing the talking. Turned away from his audience. But his air of authority holds their attention.

  There are three people besides him in the officers’ mess: Katja Claussen, Seidenfaden, and engineer Kützow.

  This is the first time in my life that I’ve waited on a table.

  “In those days we sailed in April. We tried to hit the so-called Easter easterly. If you did, you’d have a tailwind the whole way. It was unheard of for anyone to choose the period between November and the end of March voluntarily.”

  There are rules about the order in which you’re supposed to serve wine. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with them. So I take a chance and serve the woman. She swirls the inch of liquid around in her glass, but her eyes are fixed on Lukas and she doesn’t taste what she’s sipping.

  I try alternating from the right side to the left as I serve. To make sure everybody’s happy.

  They’ve dressed for dinner. The men have white shirts on, the woman is wearing a red dress.

  “We can expect the first ice twenty-four hours out of Cape Farewell. That’s where the Greenland Trading Company’s Hans Hedtoft went down in 1959, and ninety-five passengers and crew perished. Have you ever seen an iceberg, Miss Claussen?”

  I serve the cauliflower and Urs’s sourdough bread. Everything goes tolerably well at the table. But out by the dumbwaiter I drop the rest of the cauliflower all over the poached salmon. It’s lying there whole, its skin still on, staring at me expectantly. Urs explained that a Japanese chef taught him not to poach the eyes but to set them aside and then put them back in after the flesh is tender. And lightly brush the whole fish with egg whites so that it has a slimy sheen, as if it has come straight from the net to the table. I don’t think much of this technique. I think the fish looks as though it died from natural causes.

  I scrape off the cauliflower and carry in the fish. They’re not looking at what they eat, anyway. They’re looking at Lukas.

  “Icebergs are pieces of glaciers that float down from the ice cap to the open sea and break off. If they’re solid, the relationship between the part above water and the part below is one to five. If they’re hollow, it’s one to two. The latter are the most dangerous kind, of course. I’ve seen icebergs 130 feet tall, weighing 50,000 tons, that could be capsized by the vibrations from a ship’s propeller.”

  I burn my fingers on the potatoes au gratin. Lukas hasn’t seen anything yet. In a rubber raft near the Antarctic, I’ve slipped past partially melted table icebergs that were 300 feet tall, weighed a million tons, and might explode if you whistled the first few bars of “In the Lovely, Joyful Summertime.”

  “The Titanic struck an iceberg in 1912, southeast of Newfoundland, and sank three hours later. Fifteen hundred people died.”

  In my cabin I placed a piece of newspaper in the sink, leaned over it, and cut eight inches off my hair so that it was all the same length as the part that grew out after the fire. For the first time since I came on board, I can take off my scarf. That’s all I can do to prevent the woman from recognizing me.

  I could have spared myself the trouble. I’m a fly on the wall; she doesn’t see me. The man is looking at Lukas, the engineer is looking at his glass, and Lukas isn’t looking at anyone or anything. For a moment the woman’s eyes fall on me, giving me an appraising look. She’s at least eight inches taller and five years younger than me. She’s brooding and wary, and there’s a slight tension around her mouth that tells a story—maybe the story of what it costs (contrary to popular opinion) for a woman to look good.

  I hold my breath. It was dark at Isaiah’s funeral. There were twenty other women there. And she was there for a different reason. She was there to warn Andreas Licht. He should have listened to her warning.

  It takes her a fraction of a second to categorize me. Internally, she opens the drawer labeled “servant” and “five foot two” and drops me inside and forgets about me. She has other things to think about. Under the table she has put her hand on the man’s thigh.

  He hasn’t touched the fish.

  “But we have radar on board,” he says.

  “The Hans Hedtoft had radar on board, too.”

  No experienced captain or expedition leader would consciously frighten his fellow travelers. If you’re familiar with the risks of sailing through ice, you know that once a trip has started, you can’t afford to increase the external risk with inner fear. I don’t understand Lukas.

  “But the icebergs are the least of our problems. They’re the layman’s image of the Arctic seas. Much worse is the field ice, a belt of pack ice that floats along the east coast, rounds Cape Farewell in November, and stretches all the way up past Godthåb.”

  I’ve managed to get the cork out whole from the second bottle. I fill Kützow’s glass. He drinks as he absentmindedly regards the label on the bottle. It’s the percentage of alcohol that interests him.

  “Where the pack ice stops, the western ice begins. It’s formed in Baffin Bay and forced down into Davis Strait, where it freezes together with the winter ice. It forms an ice field that we’ll run into near the fishing grounds north of Holsteinsborg.”

  Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions. Whenever we left Qaanaaq to set out hunting, to go visiting, or to go to Qeqertat, the latent feelings of love, friendship, and animosity would all explode. Between Lukas and his two passengers and employers, a mutual, solid feeling of antagonism is in the air.

  I look at Lukas. He hasn’t said or done anything. And yet without a word he demands that they look at him. Once again I have that vague, uneasy feeling of having witnessed a performance that has been staged partially for my benefit, but which I don’t understand.

  “Where’s Tørk?” the captain asks.

  “He’s working,” replies the woman.

  If you fly from Europe to Thule, you’ll step out of the plane and think that you’ve entered a freezer that’s under several atmospheres of pressure, as an invisible icy cold forces its way into your lungs. If you fly in the opposite direction, you’ll think you’ve landed in a Finnish sauna when you arrive in Europe. But a ship sailing for Greenland does not sail north; it sails west. Cape Farewell lies on the same latitude as Oslo. The cold doesn’t come until you round the cape and sail due north. The wind that picks up during the day is raw and damp, but no colder than a storm in the Kattegat. The waves, on the other hand, are the long, deep swells of the North Atlantic.

  The deck is swimming in water. The hatch to the forward cargo hold is now closed. I pace it off. It’s 18 by 20 feet. It wasn’t originally that size. At both ends there’s a white, newly painted border two and a half feet wide. And there’s a welding seam on the deck. The opening has recently been enlarged by almost three feet in both directions.

  For Eur
opeans the sea symbolizes the unknown, and sailing is both a journey and an adventure. This image has no relation to reality. Sailing is the movement that comes closest to standing still. To feel that you are actually moving requires landmarks, it requires fixed points on the horizon and ice heaves that disappear beneath your sled runners, and the sight of mountains seen across the napariaq, the upright at the back of the sled, ice formations that loom up and pass by and vanish on the horizon.

  All this is missing at sea. A ship seems to stand still, to be a fixed platform of steel, framed by a permanent circular horizon with a cold gray winter wind blowing across it, placed on top of a moving yet always uniform abyss of water. Convulsed by the monotonous exertion of its engines, the ship pounds in vain on one spot.

  Or else it’s just me who’s gotten too old to travel.

  With the fog from outside, depression drifts in over me.

  To travel you have to have a home to leave and come back to. Otherwise you’re a refugee, an exile, a qivittoq. At this very moment in North Greenland they’re all huddling in the huts in Qaanaaq.

  I ask, as I have so many times before, why I have ended up here. I can’t bear the entire blame alone, it’s too heavy a burden. I must have had bad luck as well. The universe must have somehow pulled away from me. When my surroundings give way, I retreat into myself like a live mussel sprinkled with lemon juice. I can’t turn the other cheek, I can’t face hostility with even greater faith.

  One time I hit Isaiah. I had told him that when we were children and the ice broke up near Siorapaluk, far inside the bay, we would leap from one ice floe to another, knowing full well that if we slipped we would slide under the ice and the current would carry us to Nerrivik, the mother of the sea, never to return. The next day he wanted to wait outside the grocery store, near the Greenlander statue on the square, but when I came out, he was gone. And when I went over to the bridge, I saw him down on the ice —thin, new ice, disintegrating from below because of the current. I didn’t shout, I couldn’t shout. I walked over to the urinal by the bulwark and called gently to him, and he came, hesitantly, skipping over the ice, and when he was standing on the cobblestones, I hit him. The blow was probably a distillation of my feelings for him, the way violence sometimes is. He barely managed to stay on his feet.