Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  “So you’ve given up.”

  “I think,” he says slowly, “that yesterday was a test. The thing is, it’s not that easy to drop a heavy cargo over the side. You want to hit the precise coordinates so you can find the goods later. You want to avoid getting it caught in the propeller. You don’t want it to sway too much if there’s a wind and a high sea, or you’ll risk smashing it up. And you know that even small movements will change your relative speed on the coast guard’s radar. It would be preferable to stop and carefully ease the container into the water. But that won’t work. They make a note of all changes in speed. You’d have the customs people on the VHF immediately. So if you really want to put something big and heavy into the water and do it discreetly and without drawing attention, you’d need to do a dry run. To test your flotation balloons and your transmitting equipment, and to give the sailors a chance to rehearse their maneuvers on deck. To set up the boom and the winch and the forward guy wire properly. That container yesterday was a test, a dummy. It was dropped at that point to see whether we were out of radar range. It was really just a preview.”

  “For what?”

  “For the real goods, man. What we’re on our way to get. Take my word for it. I know everything about the sea. This is costing them a fortune. The only thing that would pay off would be dope.”

  At the end of the tunnel a narrow spiral stairway winds around a steel girder no thicker than the base of a flagpole. Jakkelsen places his hand on the white enamel. “This supports the forward mast.”

  I think about the loading boom and winch. They’re both marked for a maximum weight of forty-five tons.

  “It’s so skinny.”

  “Vertical pressure. The weight on the mast produces a pressure downward. There’s no lateral pressure of any significance.”

  I count fifty-six steps, and estimate that we’ve ascended to a height comparable to a three-story house. My injured foot just manages to make it.

  We come to a landing on the stairs against a bulkhead. There’s a circular hatch on the bulkhead, five feet across. There are two compression wheels on it, making it look like the entrance to a bank vault in a cartoon. The hatch doesn’t fit in with its surroundings. The Kronos looks as if it was built about the same time as the Lauritzen Shipping Company’s Kista Dan, which was my first encounter with a big diesel ship as a child—an overwhelming experience. That was in the early sixties. This hatch looks as if it was made the day before yesterday.

  It’s loosely closed. Jakkelsen turns both wheels a half revolution and pulls. It must be heavy, but it moves outward without resistance. Inside a heavy, three-ply, black rubber flange acts as a seal.

  Behind the door is a platform jutting out over dark nothingness. Somewhere next to the door Jakkelsen finds a big battery lantern. I take it from him and turn it on.

  From the sound—the distant echo from the walls far away—I already had a sense of the room’s size. Now the beam of light strikes the bottom, which seems dizzyingly far below us. In reality it’s about thirty or forty feet down. The hatchway is about fifteen feet above us. I move the light all the way around its perimeter. It has the same kind of rubber flange. I shine the light on the bottom. It’s a stainless-steel grating.

  “It’s lower now,” he says. “When the container was in here, it was higher up.”

  Under the grating the floor slopes down toward a drainage outlet.

  I find a corner and move the light all the way up the wall.

  The walls are of polished steel. Partway up, light falls on something jutting out. It looks like a shower head. But it’s pointed straight down. A little higher up there’s another one. And then another. The same on the opposite wall. A total of eighteen in the room.

  I examine the wall. In the middle, at the top, and at the bottom of each wall there’s a built-in grating 20 by 20 inches square.

  The platform we’re standing on sticks out a foot and a half into the room. On the left there’s some sort of instrument panel. It has four lights, a power switch, a meter labeled OXYGEN, another labeled AIR PRESSURE, a thermostat with a scale from + 68°F to — 76°F, and a hygrometer.

  I hang the lantern back in its place. We go out, and I close the hatch. There’s a white door in the wall to the left. I try Jakkelsen’s key, but it won’t open. That doesn’t matter so much. I can guess what’s behind it. A panel identical to the one inside the tank. Plus some control buttons.

  We walk back, Jakkelsen in front. His energy is dissipating. He’s almost burned out.

  I make him wait in his cabin while I get his chess pieces for him. There’s no one around. My alarm clock says it’s 3:30 a.m. I feel as if I’ve aged.

  I take a shower. When I come out of the bathroom, he’s standing in the doorway. Full of energy. With a transfigured look on his thin young face.

  “Smilla,” he whispers, “how about a quick fuck?”

  “Jakkelsen,” I say, “tell me something. Was that Peder Most a junkie, too?”

  6

  I stick my head inside the dryer and bury my hands in the dish towels, still burning hot. I can feel the skin on my face and hands start to dry out at once.

  If you’re homeless, you’re always looking for connections, similarities, little smells and colors and sensations that remind you of a place where you felt at home, where you once felt settled. The air inside a clothes dryer is desert air. I once felt at home in a desert.

  We were walking across a plain at the bottom of a valley; around us stretched flat, lifeless steppes; overhead was the hot sun. As if a mercilessly curious god had pointed his microscope and laboratory light at us because we were the only living creatures in an otherwise dead world. We walked through sand dunes and across salt pans, through a yellowish-brown and ashen-gray and yet incredibly beautiful hell of heat. At the end of the day a sandstorm came up and we had to lie flat on the ground with scarves over our faces. We didn’t have any water left, and one of the participants, a young man, became delirious and screamed that he was going to die of thirst. When the storm let up, a curtain of blowing sand hung between us and the sun for a moment. It shone from inside, as if it had encircled the sun, as if a great, glowing swarm of bees were about to rise up into the sky with it. I felt clear-headed and happy, for no explicable reason.

  The time was 11:30 at night, the burning light was the midnight sun, and the place was Schuckerdt Valley in Northeast Greenland, an Arctic desert where, during a very brief summer, the polar sun heats up the cliffs to 95°F, creating a mosquito-plagued landscape of dried-out riverbeds and a rocky surface shimmering with heat. It took two days to cross it, and ever since I’ve often wished I could go back. My brother was on the expedition as a hunter. That was the last time he and I took a long journey together. We felt like children, as if the time when Moritz forced me to go to Denmark had never existed, as if we had never experienced twelve years of separation. At this moment, in front of the clothes dryer, I hang on to that inexplicable memory of my youth, whose sweetness I will never again share with anyone. The bad thing about death is not that it changes the future. It’s that it leaves us alone with our memories.

  I pull the screwdriver out of its cork and rip open the big black garbage bag.

  It was the night before last that Jakkelsen showed me the cargo hold. Since yesterday I haven’t gone anywhere without the screwdriver.

  Yesterday around noon I left the laundry room to go back to my cabin and change my clothes.

  My life as a whole might seem rather messy. But my clothes are always neat. I’ve brought along trouser hangers for my pants, inflatable hangers for my blouses, and I always fold my sweaters in a particular way. Your clothes will seem new and yet comfortable if they’re properly ironed, folded, hung up, brushed, or stacked up in their place.

  There’s a T-shirt in my closet that’s not folded the way it should be. I examine the pile. Someone has gone through it.

  I sit down next to Jakkelsen in the mess. I haven’t seen him since the night before. Fo
r a moment he stops eating, then he bends over his plate.

  “Did you search my cabin?” I ask him quietly.

  A touch of fear appears in his eyes, like a slight fever. He shakes his head. I ought to eat something, but I’ve lost my appetite. Before I report for work in the laundry room after lunch, I put two thin strips of tape on my door.

  When I come back before dinner, they’re broken. Since then I’ve carried the screwdriver with me everywhere. It might not be a rational reaction, but people use so many odd objects to buck up their courage. A Phillips screwdriver is no worse than so many other things.

  A heap of men’s clothing spills out of the bag onto the floor. Net undershirts, shirts, socks, jeans, underpants, and a pair of heavy pants made of cavalry twill.

  What I have here is the first batch of laundry from the off-limits boat deck.

  A small amount of women’s clothing. A cardigan, stockings, a cotton skirt, towels labeled THE JUTLAND DAMASK MILLS and made of thick terry cloth, embroidered with the name Katja Claussen. She hasn’t sent me anything else. I understand her quite well. Women don’t like having others see or handle their laundry. If I wasn’t the only one in charge of the laundry, I’d wash my own clothes in the sink and dry them over the back of a chair.

  There’s one other pile of men’s clothing: T-shirts, shirts, sweatshirts, linen pants. There are three things worth noting. That everything is new, expensive, and size extra large.

  “Jaspersen.”

  In every room on board the Kronos there are small black plastic telephones that can be activated from the bridge, allowing whoever’s standing watch to interrupt and give orders whenever he likes. For me—at least at this moment—it’s a manifestation of what has come out of the last forty years of technological development: brilliant, sophisticated, slightly despotic, and grotesquely superficial.

  “Please serve coffee on the bridge.”

  I don’t like being watched. I hate punch cards and flex time. I’m allergic to cross-referenced lists. I detest passport control and birth certificates. Obligatory school attendance, mandatory disclosure of information, legally required financial support, legal liability, oaths of confidentiality—the whole rotten monstrosity of government controls and demands that fall on your head when you come to Denmark. All the things that I normally sweep out of my mind but which may still confront me at any moment, perhaps manifested in a little black telephone.

  I hate it even more because I know that it’s also a kind of backhanded blessing: all the Western mania for control and archives and cataloging is meant to be helpful.

  In the thirties, when they asked Ittussaarsuaq—who as a child had wandered with her tribe and kinfolk across Ellesmere Island to Greenland during the migration when Canadian Inuit had their first contact in seven hundred years with the Inuit of North Greenland—when they asked her, an eighty-five-year-old woman who had experienced the entire modern colonization process, moving from the Stone Age to the radio, how life was now, compared to the past, she said without hesitation, “Better—the Inuit very rarely die of hunger nowadays.”

  Emotions must flow purely if they’re not to become confused. The problem with trying to hate the colonization of Greenland with a pure hatred is that, no matter what you may detest about it, the colonization irrefutably improved the material needs of an existence that was one of the most difficult in the world.

  The intercom has been turned off. I lean against the wall next to it.

  “I was just standing here,” I say, “waiting for a chance to do my utmost.”

  On my way up, I step out onto the deck. The Kronos is rolling on long transverse waves, old swells formed by some distant storm that has disappeared, leaving behind nothing but this moving, matte-gray carpet of energy bound in water.

  But the wind is blowing from the bow, a cold wind. I breathe in the air, open my mouth, letting it find a resonance, a deep upright wave, like when you blow across the top of an empty bottle.

  The tarp has been taken off the landing vessel. Verlaine is working with his back to me. He’s fastening long teak slats onto the bottom with an electric screwdriver.

  Lukas is alone on the bridge. With his hand on the tiller. The automatic pilot is off. Something tells me that he prefers to steer manually, even though it results in a less precise course.

  He doesn’t turn around when I come in. Until he speaks, there’s nothing to show that he knows I’m here.

  “You’re limping.”

  He has developed an ability to see everything without looking directly at anything in particular.

  “It’s my varicose veins.”

  “Do you know where we are, Jaspersen?”

  I pour him a cup of coffee. Urs knows exactly how he likes it. Thick and black and poisonous, like a thimble of boiling tar.

  “I can smell Greenland. Today, out on the deck,” I say.

  His back emanates suspicion. I try to explain. “It’s the wind. It smells of earth. At the same time, it’s cold and dry. There’s ice in it. It’s the wind from the ice cap that blows along the coast and reaches us out here.”

  I put the cup down in front of him.

  “I can’t smell anything,” he says.

  “It’s a scientific fact that chain smokers burn out their sense of smell. Strong coffee doesn’t help, either.”

  “But you’re right. Tonight, around 2:00 a.m., we’ll pass Cape Farewell.”

  He wants something from me. He hasn’t spoken to me since the day I came on board.

  “It’s customary that when you pass the cape, you make a report to Greenland Ice Center,” he says.

  I’ve spent three hundred flying hours in the Ice Center’s Havilland Twin Otter, and three months in the barracks at Narsarsuaq drawing ice maps on the basis of aerial photos, which were then faxed to the Meteorological Institute, which in turn forwarded them to the shipping industry via Skamlebæk Radio. But I don’t tell Lukas any of this.

  “It’s voluntary,” he says. “But everyone takes advantage of it. They sign in and then report back every twenty-four hours.”

  He downs the coffee like swallowing an aspirin. “Unless you’re on a mission that’s not legal. And you want to hide your movements. If you don’t report to the Ice Center, no word is sent to the Danish inspection vessels, either. Or to the police.”

  Everybody seems to be talking to me about the police. Verlaine, Maria, Jakkelsen. And now Lukas.

  “We’ve made an agreement with the shipowner that the telephone on board would not be used during the trip. I’m willing to make one exception.”

  At first the offer takes me by surprise. I didn’t think I’d given the impression that I needed to gab on the phone, whinning with my relatives via Lyngby Radio.

  Then it dawns on me. Too late, of course, but all the more obvious. Lukas thinks I’m from the police. Verlaine thinks so, too. And Jakkelsen. They think I’m here undercover. That’s the only explanation. That’s why Lukas took me aboard.

  I glance over at him. There’s nothing evident, but it must be there: fear. It must have been there at our first meeting, in his face, turned away but reflected in the windowpanes of the casino. He must have made quite a few questionable voyages in his life. But there’s something special about this one. This one scares him. So much that he took me on board, believing that I was on the trail of something. And that his reluctant cooperation would give him some sort of alibi if the hand of the law should fall on him and the Kronos and her passengers.

  It’s apparent in the rigidity of his back, in the way he tries to keep watch over everything, to be everywhere at once. In the discipline he maintains.

  “Is there anything you … need on board?”

  The question doesn’t come to him naturally. He’s not a welfare worker or a personnel director. He’s a man who gives orders.

  I move up behind him. “A key.”

  “You have a key.”

  I’m so close that I can breathe on the back of his neck. He doesn’t tur
n around.

  “To the boat deck.”

  “It’s been confiscated.”

  His bitterness lashes at me, at my request. But mostly at the fact that they’ve taken away his omnipotence as the commander in chief of the ship.

  Then I ask him the question that Jakkelsen asked me. “Where are we headed?”

  His finger jabs at the sea chart at his side. It’s a map of South Greenland. Over it a clear plastic facsimile has been placed of lines, circles, cross-hatching, and inky black triangles of the transmitter at Julianehåb, indicating ice concentrations, the visibility, and the position of icebergs. A course has been marked out north along the coast, around Cape Thorvaldsen, and then north by northwest. The course stops near Vestland, at a spot in the middle of the ocean.

  “That’s all I know.”

  He hates them for this. For keeping him on a short leash like an infant.

  “But the western ice stretches south to Holsteinsborg. And it’s no picnic. A little north of Søndre Strømfjord. That’s as far as they’ll get me to take them.”

  I’ve sat down next to Jakkelsen. Fernanda and Maria are sitting on the other side of the table. They’ve permanently joined forces against the male world surrounding them. They ignore me, as if they were rehearsing for the way it will be when, quite soon, I no longer exist.