Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  Jakkelsen is staring at his plate. His bunch of keys is lying on the table next to him. I put down my knife and fork, stretch, put my right hand on his keys, move them slowly across the table, and let them drop into my lap. Under the shelter of the table edge I move them through my fingers, one by one, until I find the key marked with three Ks and a seven. It’s the standard utility key on the Kronos; I have one myself. But Jakkelsen’s also has an H. The ship was repaired in Hamburg. The H stands for Hauptschlüssel, a passkey. I twist it off the key ring. Then I put the rest of the keys back on the table and stand up. Jakkelsen hasn’t moved.

  In my cabin, I put on warm clothes. Then I go out on the quarterdeck.

  I saunter along with my hand on the sea rail. It’s supposed to look as if I’m taking a stroll.

  In North Greenland distances are measured in sinik, in “sleeps,” the number of overnights that a journey requires. It’s not a fixed distance, because the number of sinik can vary, depending on the weather and the time of year. It’s not a measurement of time, either. Under the threat of a storm, I’ve traveled with my mother non-stop from Force Bay to Iita, a distance that should have taken two overnights.

  Sinik is not a distance, not a number of days or hours. It is both a spatial and a temporal phenomenon, a concept of space-time that describes the union of space and motion and time that is taken for granted by Inuits but that cannot be captured by ordinary speech in any European language.

  The European measurement of distance, the standard meter in Paris, is quite different. It’s a concept for reshapers, for those whose primary view of the world is that it must be transformed. Engineers, military strategists, prophets. And mapmakers. Like me.

  The European system of measurement didn’t really become part of me until I took a course in surveying at Denmark’s Technical College in the fall of 1983. We surveyed the Deer Park. With theodolites and tape measures and normal distribution and equidistances and stochastic variables and rainy weather and little pencils that had to be sharpened constantly. And we paced off areas. We had a teacher who repeated over and over that the alpha and omega of surveying is that the geodesist must know the length of his own stride.

  I knew my own pace measured in sinik. I knew that when we ran behind the sled because the sky was black with pent-up explosions, the space-time around us would be half the number of sinik required when we let the dogs pull us over smooth new ice. In fog the number would double, in a snowstorm it might be tenfold.

  In the Deer Park I translated my sinik into feet. Ever since, no matter whether I’m walking in my sleep or secured to a line, whether I’m wearing boots and crampons or a tight skirt that forces me to shuffle along two inches at a time, I’ve always known exactly how much distance I’m covering when I take a step.

  I’m not taking this stroll on the quarterdeck for fun. I’m measuring the Kronos. I’m gazing out across the water, but all of my energy is focused on remembering the measurements.

  I saunter eighty feet past the mast farthest astern and its two winches, down to the aft superstructure. Forty feet along the superstructure. At the railing I lean over and estimate the height of the freeboard to be sixteen feet.

  Someone is standing behind me. I turn around. Hansen fills the doorway to the metal shop. Massive, wearing huge, wooden-soled boots. In his hand he’s holding what looks like a short dagger.

  He regards me with that indolent, brutal satisfaction that physical superiority makes some men feel.

  He raises his knife. Then he puts his left hand up to the blade and, with a circular motion, starts polishing it with a little rag. It leaves a white soapy film on the blade.

  “Viennese chalk. You have to polish them with Viennese chalk. Or they won’t hold an edge.”

  He doesn’t look at the knife. His eyes are fixed on me as he talks.

  “I make them myself. Out of old cold chisels. The hardest steel in the world. First I set the edge with a diamond wheel. Then I polish it with carborundum and oilstone. Finally I polish it with Viennese chalk. Very, very sharp.”

  “Sharp as a razor?”

  “Sharper,” he says with satisfaction.

  “With a point like a nail file?”

  “Much more pointed.”

  “Why is it then,” I ask, “that you’re in such desperate need of a shave, and you show up in the galley that I’ve just cleaned with such incredibly filthy nails?”

  He glances up toward the bridge and then back at me. He licks his lips. But he can’t come up with an answer.

  Isn’t this an example of history repeating itself? Hasn’t Europe always tried to empty out its sewers in the colonies? Isn’t the Kronos a repeat of the prisoners on their way to Australia, the foreign legion off to Korea, and British commandos going to Indonesia?

  Back in my cabin I take out the two folded pieces of paper that I’ve been carrying in my jacket pocket. I’ve stopped leaving anything important in my cabin. While I remember them, I record the numbers I’ve paced off onto the sketch I’m in the process of drawing of the Kronos’s hull. In the margin I write down the other figures; some I know, the others I guess at.

  Overall length: 345 feet

  Length p.p.: 318 feet

  Height of upper decks: 31 feet

  Height of second deck: 20 feet

  Cargo capacity (second deck): 100,000 cubic feet

  Cargo capacity (in hull): 125,000 cubic feet

  Total: 225,000 cubic feet

  Speed: 18 knots, comparable to 4,500 BHK

  Diesel consumption: 14 tons per day

  Range: 10,000 nautical miles

  I look for an explanation for the restrictions that have been placed on the movements of the Kronos’s crew. When the Inuit Hans sailed with Peary to the North Pole, the sailors were not allowed on the officers’ deck. It was part of the exercise, an attempt to bring along the security of a feudal hierarchy to the Arctic. On ships today the crew is too small for these types of regulations. And yet they exist on the Kronos.

  I start the washing machines. Then I leave the laundry room.

  When you’re part of an isolated group of people—whether in a boarding school, on the polar ice cap, or on a ship—your individuality dissolves and is partially replaced by a sense of unity. Unconsciously, at any given moment, I can place everyone else in the universe of the ship. By their footsteps in the corridor, by their breathing when they’re asleep behind closed doors, by their whistling, the rhythm of their work, and my knowledge of their work shifts.

  Just as they know where I am. That’s the advantage of the laundry room. It sounds as if I’m there even when I’m not.

  Urs is eating. He has pulled out a folding table next to the stove, spread a cloth over it, set the table, and lit a candle.

  “Fräulein Smilla, attendez-moi one minute.”

  The crew’s mess on board the Kronos is a Tower of Babel of English, French, Tagalog, Danish, and German. Urs drifts helplessly among fragments of languages he has never learned to speak. I sympathize with him. I can hear that his mother tongue is disintegrating.

  He pulls up a chair for me and puts down a plate.

  He likes company when he eats. He eats as if he’d like to unite the peoples of the world around his pots and pans, with the optimistic knowledge that we all have a need to feed ourselves despite wars and rape and language barriers and differences in temperament and the Danish military’s exercise of sovereignty over North Greenland, even after Home Rule.

  On his plate he has a portion of pasta that is big enough for two.

  He gives me a melancholy look when I decline. “You are too thin, Fräulein.”

  He grates a big piece of Parmesan cheese; the dry golden dust drifts down over the pasta like snow flurries.

  “You are ein Hungerkünstler, a hunger artist.”

  He has slit his homemade baguettes lengthwise and warmed them up with butter and garlic. He stuffs four inches at a time into his mouth, chewing slowly and with pleasure.

  �
�Urs,” I say, “how did you happen to sign on?”

  I can’t imagine being on more formal terms with him.

  He stops chewing. “Verlaine says that you’re Polizist.”

  He considers my silence. “I was im Gefängnis, in prison. For two years. In der Schweiz.”

  That explains the color of his skin. Prison pallor.

  “I was on a driving tour of Morocco. I thought that if I took five pounds along, I’d have enough for two years. At the Italian border they pulled me over at random. I got three years. Released after two. In October of last year.”

  “How was prison?”

  “Die beste Zeit meines Lebens.” Emotion has made him switch over to German. “The best time of my life. No stress. Only Ruhe, peace. I did voluntary kitchen duty. That’s why I got Strafermässigung, a reduction in sentence.”

  “And the Kronos?”

  Once again he considers my intentions. “I did my military service in the Swiss Navy.”

  I wonder whether this is supposed to be a joke, but he stops me with a gesture of his hand.

  “Flussmarine, the river patrol. I was a cook. One of my colleagues has connections in Hamburg. He recommended the Kronos. I did part of my apprenticeship in Denmark, in Tønder. It was difficult. It’s hard to find work when you’ve been in prison.”

  “Who hired you?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Who is Tørk?”

  He shrugs. “I’ve only seen him once. He stays up on the boat deck. Seidenfaden and die Frau are the ones who come out.”

  “What are we going to pick up?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m just the cook. It was impossible to find work. You have no idea, Fräulein Smilla …”

  “I want to see the walk-in coolers and the storage rooms.”

  There is fear in his expression. “But Verlaine told me that Jaspersen would …”

  I lean across the table. In this way I force him away from his pasta, away from our previous intimacy, from his trust in me.

  “The Kronos is a smuggler ship.”

  Now he’s panic-stricken. “Ahh, ich bin kein Schmuggler. I couldn’t stand going back to jail.”

  “Wasn’t it the best time of your life?”

  “Once was enough.”

  He takes me by the arm. “I don’t want to go back. Bitte, bitte. If we’re caught, tell them I’m innocent, that I don’t know anything.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The food storerooms are right under the galley. They consist of a meat locker, a freezer for eggs and fish, a double-cooler kept at 36°F for other perishable goods, plus various cupboards. The whole area is well stocked, clean, orderly, functional, and subject to such constant use that it would be no good as a hiding place for anything.

  Urs shows me the area with equal parts professional pride and fear. It takes ten minutes to inspect. I’m on a schedule. I go back to the laundry room, spin dry the clothes, stuff them in the dryer, and turn the dial back to Start. Then I sneak out again. And head below.

  I don’t know a thing about engines. And what’s more, I have no intention of learning about them, either.

  When I was five years old, the world was incomprehensible. When I was thirteen, it seemed to me much smaller, much dirtier, and depressingly predictable. Today it still seems muddled, but once again—although in a different way—as complex as when I was a child.

  With age I have voluntarily chosen certain limitations. I don’t have the energy to start over again. To learn new skills or fight my own personality or figure out diesel engines.

  I rely on Jakkelsen’s off-hand remarks. This morning I surprised him in the laundry room, sitting with his back against the insulation on the hot-water pipe, with a cigar in his mouth and his hands in his pockets so the salt air won’t sneak in and damage his peach-soft skin that’s supposed to be used for stroking the ladies’ inner thighs.

  “Smilla,” he says when I ask him about the engine, “it’s enormous. Nine cylinders, and each is 18 inches in diameter, with a 29-inch stroke. Burmeister and Wain direct reversible, with supercharger. We’re sailing at 18 to 19 knots. It’s from the sixties, man, but it’s been renovated. We’re outfitted as an icebreaker.”

  I stare at the engine. It’s looming up before me; I have to walk past it, with its injection valves, fuel cocks, radiator pipes, springs, polished steel and copper, its exhaust manifold, and its lifeless yet dynamic motion. Like Lukas’s little black telephones, the engine is a distillation of civilization. Something that is both taken for granted and incomprehensible. Even if I had to, I wouldn’t know how to stop it. In a certain sense, maybe it can’t be stopped. Temporarily interrupted perhaps, but not permanently brought to a standstill.

  It may give this impression because, unlike a human being, it has no individuality; it’s a replica of something else, the soul of the machine or the system of axioms underlying all machines.

  Or maybe it’s a mixture of loneliness and fear that’s making me see visions.

  But I still can’t explain the essential thing: Why was the Kronos outfitted two months ago in Hamburg with a vastly oversized engine?

  The hatch in the bulkhead behind the engine is insulated. When it falls shut behind me, the noise of the engine vanishes and my ears ring deafly. The tunnel goes down six steps. From there the corridor stretches twenty-five yards, straight as an arrow, lit by wire-wrapped lamps—an exact copy of the stretch that Jakkelsen and I covered less than twenty-four hours ago, although now it feels like the distant past.

  The diesel tanks below deck are marked with numbers on the floor. I pass numbers 7 and 8. On the wall, next to the location of each tank, there is a foam extinguisher, a fire blanket, and an alarm button. It’s not pleasant being reminded about the dangers of fire on board ship.

  At the end of the tunnel a spiral stairway leads upward. The first hatch is on the left-hand side. If my provisional measurements are right, it goes to the smallest cargo hold farthest aft. I move past it. The next hatch is ten feet higher up.

  The room is different from what I’d seen before. It’s no more than twenty feet high. The sides don’t go all the way up to deck level but stop at the between decks, where the beam of my flashlight disappears in the darkness.

  The room is a peeling, spotted, and much-used cargo hold. Wooden wedges, hemp ropes, and sacks used for moving and securing cargo are piled up against one bulkhead.

  Against the other bulkhead about fifty railroad ties are stacked up and strapped down.

  One level up, a door opens onto the between decks. My flashlight finds distant walls, the high ridge where the cargo hold juts up, the bracing under the spot where the aft mast must stand. Clusters of white-painted electrical cables and the outlets of the sprinkler system.

  The between decks is as wide as the ship, and is actually a single vast low-ceilinged room supported by columns; behind one end of the room are the coolers and storage rooms. The opposite end vanishes aft into the darkness.

  That’s the direction I head. After twenty-five yards there is a railing. Ten feet down my light strikes bottom. The aft cargo hold. I remember Jakkelsen’s statistics: 1,000 cubic feet, as opposed to the 3,500 in the hold I’ve just looked at.

  I take out my sketch and compare it with the space beneath me. It seems somewhat smaller than I’ve drawn it.

  I go back to the spiral staircase and down to the first door.

  Seen from the floor of the hold, it’s understandable why it seems smaller than in my drawing. It’s half filled with a rectangular shape five feet high under a blue tarp.

  With my screwdriver I make two punctures and a rip in the canvas.

  Keeping in mind the railroad ties, you might think we were on our way to Greenland to lay seventy-five yards of track and start up a rail company. Under the tarp there is a stack of rails.

  But you wouldn’t be able to attach them to the ties. They’re welded together in a huge, rectangular construction with an iron bottom.

&n
bsp; It reminds me of something. Then I let the thought pass. I’m thirty-seven years old. With age everything starts reminding you of something else.

  Back on the between decks I glance at my alarm clock. By now the laundry room must be quiet. Someone might have called me. Someone might have come by.

  I walk farther aft.

  The vibrations in the hull tell me that the propeller must be somewhere below, right in front of my feet. According to my diagram, about fifteen yards away. Here the deck is cut off by a bulkhead with a door. Jakkelsen’s key fits the lock. Inside, there is a red emergency light with a switch. I don’t turn on the light. I must be on the floor beneath the low aft superstructure. It’s been locked ever since I came aboard.

  The hatch leads to a short passageway with three doors on either side. The key opens the first one on the right. No doors are closed to Peder Most and his friends.

  Until not very long ago this room was one of three small cabins on the port side. Now the dividing walls have been torn down to create one room. A storeroom. Along the walls are rolls of blue 2-inch nylon hawsers. Woven polypropylene rope. Eight sets of quarter-inch Kermantel double rope in fluorescent alpine safety colors, an old friend from the ice cap. Every set costs 5,000 kroner, can handle up to five tons, and it’s the only rope in the world that can stretch 25 percent of its own length.

  Under straps there are aluminum ladders, firn anchors, tents, lightweight shovels, and sleeping bags. Metal hooks screwed into the walls hold ice axes, climbing hammers, pitons, carabiners, dynamic brakes, and ice screws—both the narrow ones that look like corkscrews and the wide ones: you screw a cylinder of ice into the core and they can hold an elephant.

  Inside several metal cabinets along the wall, opened at random, I find wedges, glacier goggles, a crate of six Tommen altimeters. Frameless backpacks, Meindl boots, safety harnesses. Everything straight from the factory and wrapped in clear plastic.