Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  “You hit me,” he said, looking around through his tears for a weapon to slit me open with.

  Then, in one simple but enormous leap, he found his way back to the unlimited reserves of his character.

  “Naammassereerpoq, I guess I’ll get used to that,” he said.

  I don’t possess such depths. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why things have gone the way they have.

  There’s no sound, but I know that someone is standing behind me. Then Verlaine leans against the sea rail, following my gaze out across the sea. He takes off his work glove and pulls a handful of rice out of his breast pocket.

  “I thought Greenlanders had short legs and fucked like pigs and only worked when they were hungry. Once when I was on a ship up there we were taking kerosene to a town somewhere in the north. We pumped it straight into the tanks standing on shore. At one point a little man in a boat came over and fired a rifle and shouted something at us. Then they all ran to their huts and came back with rifles and set off in their dinghies or fired their guns from shore. If I hadn’t been watching, the pressure would have blown the hoses off the tanks. It turned out to be because of a school of some kind of fish.”

  “What time of year was this?”

  “Maybe July or the beginning of August.”

  “Beluga,” I say. “A small whale. It must have been near the trading stations south of Upernavik.”

  “We telegraphed the trading company that they had stopped work and had gone fishing. We received the reply that this happened several times a year. That’s the way it is with primitive people. When their stomachs are full, they don’t see any reason to work.”

  I nod in agreement.

  “In Greenland they say that Filipinos are a nation of lazy little pimps, who are only allowed on ships because they don’t ask for more than a dollar an hour, but you have to keep on feeding them vast amounts of steamed rice if you don’t want a knife in your back.”

  “That’s true,” he says.

  He leans toward me so he won’t have to yell. I look up toward the bridge. We’re in full view where we’re standing.

  “This is a ship with rules. Some are the captain’s. Some are Tørk’s. But not all of them. They’re dependent on us; we’re just the rats.”

  He smiles at me. His teeth are glazed pieces of chalk against his dark skin. He notices what I’m looking at.

  “Porcelain crowns. I was in prison in Singapore. After a year and a half I didn’t have a tooth left in my mouth. My jaw was held together with galvanized steel wire. Then we organized an escape.”

  He leans even closer to me. “That’s where I found out how much I hate the police.”

  When he straightens up and leaves, I keep standing there, staring out at the sea. It starts to snow. But it’s not snow. It’s coming from the deck. I look down at myself. All the way from my collar down to the elastic at my waist, my down jacket has been cut open with a single slit. Without anything touching the lining, the padding was cut wide open so the down is tearing loose and swirling around me like snowflakes. I take off the jacket and fold it up. On my way back across the deck it occurs to me that it must be cold. But I don’t feel cold.

  5

  The Welfare Council of the merchant marine sends out packages of nine videos at a time to subscribers. Sonne has arranged to show the first one on the enlarged screen in the exercise room. I sit in back. When it fades in on a sunset over a desert landscape, I slip out.

  On the second deck, arranged in two rows of cupboards facing each other, tools and spare parts are stored. I take out a Phillips screwdriver. I rummage aimlessly. In a wooden crate I find several gray, lightly greased ball bearings made of solid steel, each a little bigger than a golf ball, wrapped in oily paper. I take one of them.

  I walk up the stairs and onto the quarterdeck. The light from the movie shines out of the two long windows up there. I crawl on my knees over to the bulkhead underneath the window and peer inside. Only after I’ve located both Verlaine’s shiny black hair and the outline of Jakkelsen’s curls do I return to the corridor. I let myself into Jakkelsen’s cabin.

  Now there is only bed linen in the drawer under the bunk. But the chess game is still in its place. I put the box under my sweater. I listen at the door for a while and then go back to my own cabin. Far away, from some indeterminate direction, I can sense the sound track of the film through the metal hull.

  I put the box in a drawer. It’s a strange feeling to be in possession of something that would probably bring its owner anywhere from three years without parole to a death sentence, depending on the port where it was discovered.

  I put on my jogging suit. I knot the steel ball into a long white bath towel that I’ve folded double. Then I hang it back on its hook. And I sit down to wait.

  If you have to wait for a long time, you have to seize hold of the waiting or it will become destructive. If you let things slide, your consciousness will waver, awakening fear and restlessness; depression strikes, and you’re pulled down.

  To keep up my spirits I ask myself: What is a human being? Who am I?

  Am I my name?

  The year I was born my mother traveled to West Greenland and brought home the girl’s name Millaaraq. Because it reminded Moritz of the Danish word mild, which didn’t exist in the vocabulary of his love relationship with my mother, because he wanted to transform everything Greenlandic into something that would make it European and familiar, and because I apparently had smiled at him—the boundless trust of an infant, which comes from the fact that she still doesn’t know what’s in store for her—my parents agreed on Smillaaraq. With the wear and tear that time subjects all of us to, it was shortened to Smilla.

  Which is merely a sound. If you look beyond the sound, you will find the body with its circulation, its movement of fluids. Its love of ice, its anger, its longing, its knowledge about space, its weakness, faithlessness and loyalty. Behind these emotions the unnamed forces rise and fade away, parceled-out and disconnected images of memory, nameless sounds. And geometry. Deep inside us is geometry. My teachers at the university asked us over and over what the reality of geometric concepts was. They asked: Where can you find a perfect circle, true symmetry, an absolute parallel when they can’t be constructed in this imperfect, external world?

  I never answered them, because they wouldn’t have understood how self-evident my reply was, or the enormity of its consequences. Geometry exists as an innate phenomenon in our consciousness. In the external world a perfectly formed snow crystal would never exist. But in our consciousness lies the glittering and flawless knowledge of perfect ice.

  If you have strength left, you can look further, beyond geometry, deep into the tunnels of light and darkness that exist within each of us, stretching back toward infinity.

  There’s so much you could do if you had the strength.

  It’s two hours since the movie ended. Two hours since Jakkelsen locked his door. But there’s no reason to be impatient. You can’t grow up in Greenland without being familiar with abuse. It’s an erroneous cliché that narcotics make people unpredictable. On the contrary, drugs make them very, very predictable. I know that Jakkelsen will come. I have the patience to wait as long as it takes.

  I lean forward to turn off the light so I can sit in the dark. The light switch is between the sink and the closet, so I have to lean forward.

  That’s the moment he chooses. He must have been standing with his ear to the door. I’ve underestimated Jakkelsen. He has sneaked up to my door and unlocked it, waiting for some audible movement inside—without my hearing him, even though I’m sitting right behind the door. Now he opens it so that it strikes me on the temple and knocks me to the floor between the bed and the closet. Then he’s inside and has shut the door behind him. He’s not going to rely on his own physical strength. He has brought along a big marline spike with a wooden handle and a hollow tip of polished steel.

  “Give it here,” he says.

  I try to sit up.


  “Stay down!”

  I sit up.

  He shifts the marline spike in his hand so the heavy end is pointing down, and with the same motion he strikes my foot. He hits the bone of my right ankle. For a moment my body refuses to believe the extent of the pain, then a white tongue of fire shoots through my skeleton to the top of my skull, and my upper body drops back to the floor of its own accord.

  “Give it here.”

  I can’t say a word. But I put my hand in my pocket, pull out the little plastic container, and hand it to him.

  “All of it.”

  “In the drawer.”

  He pauses for a moment. To reach the desk he’ll have to step over me.

  His nervousness is more pronounced than ever, but there’s something determined about him. I once heard Moritz say that you could live a long healthy life on heroin. If you could afford it. The stuff itself has an almost preservative effect. What puts junkies in their graves are the cold stairways and liver infections and the contaminated additives and AIDS and the exhausting business of getting money. But if you can afford it, you can live with your dependency. That’s what Moritz said.

  I thought he was exaggerating. The cynical, ironic, distanced exaggeration of a professional. Heroin is suicide. I don’t think it’s any better because you drag it out over twenty-five years; no matter what, it’s a form of contempt for your own life.

  “You get it out for me,” he says.

  I pull myself into a squatting position. When I try to stand, my right leg buckles and I fall to my knees. I make the fall look a little worse than it is and use the sink to pull myself up. I take the white towel from the row of pegs and wipe the blood off my face. Then I turn around and hobble a step toward the desk and the drawers, with the towel still in my hand. I turn to face the closet.

  “The key’s in there.”

  As I turn, I start my swing. An arc that starts toward the porthole, climbs toward the ceiling, and accelerates downward toward the bridge of his nose.

  He sees it coming and takes a step back. But he’s prepared only for the swat of a piece of fabric. The ball wrapped in the terry cloth strikes him right over the heart. He falls to his knees. Then I take another swing. He manages to put up his arm; the blow lands beneath his shoulder and throws him backward onto the bunk. Now he has murder in his eyes. I swing as hard as I can, aiming for his temple. He does the right thing: moves toward the blow, puts up his arm so that the towel wraps around it, and jerks it toward him. I fly forward three feet. Then he slashes with the marline spike, low and sweeping, and it strikes me in the abdomen. I seem to be watching myself from the outside as my body is lifted and flung backward across the cabin, and I realize that it’s the desk slamming into my back. He moves toward me across the bunk. I feel as if I have no body, so I look down. At first I think that a white fluid is running out of me. Then I see that it’s the towel, which I pulled along with me when I fell. He moves over the edge of the bunk. I raise the ball off the floor, shorten the length of the towel by half, put my right hand over my left, and yank my outstretched arms upward.

  It hits him right under the chin. His head snaps back, followed more slowly by his body, as he’s thrown up against the door. His hands fumble behind him briefly, trying to hang on to the door handle; he gives up and sinks to the floor.

  I stay where I am for a moment. Then I scuttle across the ten feet of floor space, leaning first on the bunk, next the closet and the edge of the sink, numb from my navel down. I pick up the marline spike. I take the little vial out of his pocket.

  It takes him a long time to come around. I wait, clutching the spike. He touches his mouth and spits blood into his hands, along with a few pieces of something more solid and a lighter color.

  “You’ve ruined my face.”

  Half of one of his front teeth has been knocked out. You can see it when he talks. The anger has ebbed out of him. He looks like a child.

  “Give me that vial, Smilla.”

  I take it out and balance it on my thigh.

  “I want to see the forward cargo hold,” I say.

  The tunnel starts in the engine room. A narrow stairway leads from the floor down between the steel beams of the engine platform. At the bottom a watertight fire door opens onto a narrow corridor less than a yard wide and just high enough to stand up in.

  It’s locked, but Jakkelsen opens it.

  “Over there, on the other side of the engine, a tunnel like this one goes under the middle and lower rooms of the quarterdeck and down to the wing tanks.”

  In my cabin he poured a short, fat line of powder onto my pocket mirror and snorted it straight into one nostril. It transformed him into a brilliant, self-confident guide. But he lisps because of the broken front tooth.

  I can barely put any weight on my right foot. It has swollen up as if from a bad sprain. I stay behind him. I’ve stuck the point of the little Phillips screwdriver into a cork and put it inside the waistband of my pants.

  He turns on the lights. Every fifteen feet there’s a bare light bulb inside a wire cage.

  “It’s eighty feet long. Runs along the whole length of the ship, up to where the foredeck starts. Up above is a cargo hold that’s 34,500 cubic feet, and above that another one of 23,000 cubic feet.”

  Along the sides of the tunnel the ribs of the ship form a tight gridwork. He puts his hand on it.

  “Twenty inches. Between the ribs. Half the normal distance on a 4,000-tonner. One-and-a-half-inch plates in the nose. That gives a localized strength that’s twenty times greater than what the insurance companies and the ship inspectors require to approve sailing in ice, you know. That’s how I knew we were on our way up to the ice.”

  “How do you know so much about ships, Jakkelsen?”

  He draws himself up. All charm and effusiveness. “You know the novel about the sailor Peder Most, don’t you? I am Peder Most. I was born in Svendborg just like he was. I have red hair. And I belong to a bygone era. To the days when ships were made of wood and sailors were made of iron. Now it’s the other way around.”

  He runs a hand through his red curls, fluffing them in the salt air. “I’m just as fashionably slim as he was, too. I’ve had several offers to be a male model. In Hong Kong there were two guys who signed a contract with me. They were in the fashion business. They had noticed my looks from far away. I was supposed to be at the first photo session the next day. That was when I had signed on board ship as a galley boy. I didn’t have time to do the dishes. So I threw all the cutlery and plates out the porthole. When I got to their hotel, they had left, unfortunately. The skipper deducted 5,000 kroner from my pay check to pay the diver who retrieved the dishes.”

  “It’s an unfair world.”

  “It sure is, man. That’s why I’m only a sailor. I’ve been sailing for seven years. I was supposed to go to navigation school lots of times. Something just always came up. But I know everything about ships.”

  “But that container we dropped into the water yesterday—you couldn’t figure that out, could you?”

  His eyes narrowed. “So it’s true, what Verlaine’s been saying.”

  I wait.

  He gestures with his hand. “I could be a valuable man to the police. They could put me on the narc squad. I know all about that world, you know.”

  There’s a water pipe running above our heads. Every thirty feet there are nozzles for the sprinkler system. Every nozzle is equipped with a dull red light. Jakkelsen takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and wraps it around the nozzle with a practiced motion. Then he lights a cigarette.

  “Each of them has a smoke detector. If you sit down in a corner to have a smoke, the alarm will go off if you don’t take precautions.”

  He fills his lungs with pleasure, squinting his eyes at the pain from his tooth. “In Denmark it’s hell getting rid of illegal cargo. The whole country is regulated; as soon as you approach a harbor you’ve got the police and the harbor authorities and the customs officials on your back
. And they want to know where you’re coming from and where you’re going and who the shipowner is. And you can’t find anyone who will take a bribe in Denmark—they’re all bureaucrats and won’t accept so much as a glass of mineral water. So you come up with the idea that one of your friends could come alongside in a smaller boat and take the crate and put it ashore on a dark beach somewhere. But that won’t work, either. Because everybody knows that in Denmark the coast guard and the customs authorities work together. At the two big military stations on Anholt Island and in Frederikshavn the naval police assign a number to all the inbound and outbound ships in Danish waters and track them by computer. They would spot your friend with the boat right away. That’s why you decide just to throw the crate overboard. With a buoy attached, or a couple of floats and a little battery-powered transmitter emitting a signal that could be located by whoever comes to pick it up.”

  I try to make some connection between what he’s telling me and what I’ve seen.

  He stubs out his cigarette. “But there’s still something that doesn’t fit. The ship came from a shipyard in Hamburg. She’s been in Danish waters for two weeks. Docked in Copenhagen. It’s a little too late to drop off the goods five hundred sea miles out in the Atlantic, isn’t it?”

  I agree. It seems incomprehensible.

  “I don’t think what happened yesterday had to do with smuggled goods. I know this business, I’m positive it had nothing to do with goods. You know why? Because I looked inside the container. You know what was in the container? Cement. Hundreds of 100-pound sacks of Portland cement. I took a look inside one night. There was a padlock on it. But the keys to the cargo area are always kept on the bridge. In case the tonnage should shift. So when I was on watch, I borrowed them. I was psyched, man. I opened the top. Nothing but cement. I tell myself it must be a joke. There must be something underneath. So I go all the way back to the galley and get a barbecue skewer. I’m about to shit in my pants at the thought of Verlaine catching me. I spend two hours in that container. Moving the sacks around and sticking the skewer into them, trying to find something. My back’s killing me. My hands are all scraped up. Cement dust is the worst. But I don’t find a thing. I tell myself it’s impossible, this whole trip. Everything is secret. Extra pay because we don’t know where we’re going, don’t know what we’re carrying. And then the only thing they take on board is a garbage container full of cement. It’s too much. I can’t sleep at night. I tell myself that it has to be dope.”