Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  The room to starboard was also formed by combining three cabins. There are more ladders and ropes and a fire chest marked EXPLOSIVES, which Jakkelsen’s key unfortunately will not open. In three big cardboard boxes there are three identical examples of Danish quality craftsmanship: 20-inch manual winches with three gears from Sophus Berendsen, Inc. I don’t know much about mechanical gear ratios, but they’re as big as barrels and look as if they could lift a locomotive.

  I pace off the hallway at eighteen feet. At the end a stairway leads up to deck level, where there’s a toilet, a paint room, a metal shop, and a little mess hall used as a shelter when they’re working on deck. I decide to postpone my inspection to another time.

  Then I change my mind.

  I had left the door through which I came ajar. Maybe because the hallway and the small rooms would feel like a rat trap otherwise.

  Maybe to see whether a light would be turned on behind me.

  There’s a sound now. Not much. Just a little noise that almost disappears in the sound of the propeller and the seething crash of the sea along the hull.

  It’s the sound of metal on metal. Cautious, but enhanced by the harsh echo of the room.

  I head up the stairs to reach the deck. At the top there’s a door. The key makes the latch click back, but the door doesn’t open. It’s battened down from the outside. I turn back.

  In the darkness of the between decks, I withdraw to the side, squat down, and wait.

  They arrive almost at once. There are at least two of them, maybe more. They move slowly, inspecting the space around them along the way. Discreet, but without making an effort to be quiet.

  I put my flashlight on the deck. I wait for the Kronos to roll on a high swell. Then I turn on the flashlight and let it go. It starts rolling to starboard as its beam flickers across the pillars.

  I run forward, along the side.

  It doesn’t distract them. In front of me is something that feels like a curtain. I try to push it aside, but it wraps around me. Then another flutters around my chest and face, and I scream, but the sound is muted by the heavy fabric and becomes merely a ringing in my own ears, along with the taste of dust and wool in my mouth. They’ve wrapped me up in fire blankets.

  It was done deliberately, without violence or drama.

  They lay me down and put pressure on the blankets, and there is a new smell of mildew and jute. They’ve pulled a sack over the blankets, over my head—one of the sacks I saw so many of in the cargo hold.

  They lift me up, still taking care; I’m lying across the shoulders of two men who carry me along the deck. Irrationally, the vain thought strikes me that I must look ridiculous.

  A hatchway is opened and closed. On our way down the stairs they hold me stretched out between them. Blindness leads to an increased awareness in my body, but not once do I hit the stairs. If it hadn’t been for the wrapping and the circumstances, they might have been carrying a patient on a stretcher.

  A sound that is both muffled and close at hand tells me that we’re outside the door to the engine room. The door is opened, we pass the engine room, and the sound dies out again. Time and distance seem longer. I feel as if we’ve been walking for an eternity before they take the first step upward. In reality, it can’t have been more than eighty feet to the bottom step.

  Now there’s only one shoulder under me. I try to get my arms free.

  I’m placed carefully on the floor; there’s a slight vibration of metal somewhere above my head.

  Now I know where we’re going. The opened door doesn’t lead anywhere; it opens onto the little platform where Jakkelsen and I stood, forty feet from the bottom.

  I don’t know why, but I’m positive that they’re going to throw me from that platform into the bottom of the tank.

  I’m in a sitting position. A fold in the blankets allows me to pull my left arm up along my chest. I have the screwdriver in my hand.

  When he lifts me up from the floor, my chest rests against his. I try to feel my way to where his ribs end, but I’m shaking too hard. Besides, the cork is still on the screwdriver.

  He leans me against the railing and kneels in front of me, like a mother about to lift her child.

  I’m sure that I’m going to die. But I push the thought aside. I refuse to accept this humiliation. There’s a degrading coldness about the way they must have planned it. It was so easy for them, and now here I am: Smilla the Greenlander, about to go splat.

  As he gets his shoulder underneath me, I shift the screwdriver into my right hand. As he slowly stands up, I put it to my mouth, bite down on the cork, and pull it off. He rolls me around 90 degrees to get me free of the edge. With the fingers of my left hand I find his shoulder. I can’t reach his throat, but I can feel the soft, triangular hollow between his collarbone and trapezius muscle, where the nerves lie exposed beneath a thin layer of skin and tissue. That’s where I jab the screwdriver. It goes through the blanket. Then it stops. The surprisingly elastic resistance and solidity of living cells. I put the palms of my hands together, and with a jerk I lift my body free so that all my weight rests on the handle of the screwdriver. It slides into place.

  He doesn’t utter a sound. But all movement ceases, and for a moment we stand there swaying together. I wait for him to release me; I’m already anticipating the impact with the grating in the darkness beneath me. Then he drops me onto the platform.

  I hit my head on the railing. Dizziness spreads over me, increases, and then disappears. The sack and the woolen blankets protected my head enough for me to remain conscious.

  Then a ram batters me in the stomach. He’s kicking me.

  My first impulse is to vomit. But since the pain keeps coming, I can’t manage to catch my breath between each kick. I’m about to suffocate. I think that it’s too bad I couldn’t get any closer to his throat.

  The next thing I notice is the screaming. I think it’s him screaming. Someone takes me by the shoulders and I think that now I’ve used up all my own resources and my luck, and I just want to die in peace.

  But he’s not the one who’s screaming. It’s an electronic screech, the sine wave of an oscillator. I’m being dragged up the stairs. The small of my back thuds against every single step.

  A feeling of coldness reaches me, along with the sound of rain falling. Then a hatch is opened and I’m released. Next to me an animal is coughing up its lungs.

  I work the sack up over my head. I have to roll back and forth to get free of the blankets.

  I emerge into a cold, pouring rain, to the electronic screech, a blinding electric light, and to the retching breathing of the creature beside me.

  It’s not an animal. It’s Jakkelsen. Soaking wet and white as chalk. We’re inside a room that I can’t immediately identify. Above our heads the sprinkler system is sending wildly rotating cascades of water over us. The sound of the smoke alarm is rising and falling, monotonous and nerve-racking.

  “What else could I do? I lit a cigar and put my mouth up to the sensor. Then the shit hit the fan.”

  I try to ask a question but can’t manage a sound. He guesses what I want to ask.

  “Maurice,” he says. “His days as a heartthrob are over. He didn’t even notice me.”

  Somewhere overhead there’s the sound of running footsteps. They’re coming down the stairs.

  I’m incapable of moving. Jakkelsen gets to his feet. He has dragged me up the stairs to the next level. We must be on the between decks, under the foredeck. The exertion had made him collapse.

  “I’m not in very good shape,” he says.

  Then he runs unsteadily into the darkness.

  The door flies open. Sonne steps in. It takes me a moment to identify him. He’s carrying a big foam extinguisher, and he’s dressed in full firefighting gear with an oxygen tank on his back. Behind him stand Maria and Fernanda.

  As we gaze at each other, the alarm stops and the water pressure tapers off in the sprinkler system and finally halts altogether. Amid th
e trickling of drops along the walls and the murmuring of streams on the ceiling and floor, the distant sound of waves breaking against the bow of the Kronos seeps into the room.

  7

  Falling in love has been greatly overrated. Falling in love consists of 45 percent fear of not being accepted and 45 percent manic hope that this time the fear will be put to shame, and a modest 10 percent frail awareness of the possibility of love.

  I don’t fall in love anymore. Just like I don’t get the mumps.

  But of course anyone can be overpowered by love. The last few weeks I’ve allowed myself to think about him for a few minutes each night. I give my mind permission and then watch how my body yearns and how I still remember him from the time before I really noticed him. I see his solicitude, remember his stutter, his embraces, and the awareness of the enormous core of his personality. When these images start to radiate too much longing, I cut them off. At least I try to.

  I haven’t fallen in love. I see things too clearly for that. Falling in love is a form of madness. Closely related to hatred, coldness, resentment, intoxication, and suicide.

  Occasionally—not often, but occasionally—I’m reminded of the times in my life when I’ve fallen in love. That’s what’s happening now.

  The man they call Tørk is sitting across from me at the table in the officers’ mess. If this encounter had taken place ten years ago, I might have fallen in love with him.

  Sometimes a person’s charisma is such that it slips right through our façades, our essential prejudices and inhibitions, and goes straight to our guts. Five minutes ago a clamp locked around my heart, and now it’s getting tighter. This sensation is linked to a rising fever which is my body’s response to the stress it’s been under, and it brings on a piercing headache.

  Ten years ago this headache might have led to a strong desire to press my mouth on his and watch him lose his self-control.

  Today I can observe what is happening to me, full of respect for the phenomenon, but completely aware that it’s nothing more than a short-lived, lethal illusion.

  The photographs had captured his charm but made it lifeless, like a statue. They couldn’t reproduce his personal presence, which has two sides to it. Both an emanation out into the room and an attraction toward him.

  Even when he’s seated, he’s quite tall. His hair is almost metallic white, pulled back into a ponytail.

  He looks at me, and the heavy pounding in my foot and my back and the base of my skull grows louder. A number of the boys and men in my life who have affected me in this way pass hazily through my mind like the patches of ice formations we were expected to recognize during exams at the university.

  Then I take hold of reality and pull myself back on shore. The hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end, telling me that, no matter who else he might be, he’s the one who stood three feet away from me in the cold night while we both waited in front of the White Palace. The halo around his head was his extraordinary white hair.

  He gazes at me attentively.

  “Why on the foredeck?” says Lukas, who is sitting at the head of the table. He’s talking to Verlaine, sitting diagonally across from me, slouching and amenable.

  “To get warm. Before I had to go back to working on the runners.”

  Now I remember. Kista Dan and Maggi Dan, the Lauritzen Line ships used for trips to the Arctic—the ships of my childhood. Before the American base, before the flights from South Greenland. For extreme conditions, such as a hard freeze, they were equipped with special aluminum lifeboats that had runners screwed on underneath so they could be pulled across the ice like sleds. That’s the kind of runners Verlaine had been attaching.

  “Jaspersen.”

  Lukas glances down at the paper in front of him. “You left the laundry room half an hour before your shift was over, at 1530 hours, to take a walk. You went down to the engine room, saw a door, opened it, and followed the tunnel to the stairway. What in hell were you doing there?”

  “Wanted to find out what was down below.”

  “And?”

  “There was a door. With two handles. I touched one of them, and the alarm went off. I thought at first that I was the one who did it.”

  He looks from Verlaine to me. Anger clouds his voice. “But you can barely stay on your feet.”

  I look straight at Verlaine. “I fell. When the alarm went off, I took a step back and fell down the stairs. I must have hit my head on the steps.”

  Lukas nods, slowly and bitterly. “Any questions, Tørk?”

  He doesn’t shift his position. He simply cocks his head slightly. He might be in his mid-thirties or his mid-forties.

  “Do you smoke, Jaspersen?”

  I remember his voice clearly. I shake my head.

  “The sprinkler system is turned on by section. Did you smell smoke anywhere?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Verlaine. Where were your people?”

  “I’m looking into that.”

  Tørk gets up. He stands there leaning on the table, looking at me thoughtfully.

  “According to the clock on the bridge, the alarm went off at 1557 hours. It stopped three minutes and forty-five seconds later. During that time you were in the activated section. Why aren’t you soaking wet?”

  My previous feelings have vanished. The only thing I notice through the fever is that one more person with power is persecuting me. I look him straight in the eye.

  “Practically everything rolls right off me.”

  8

  Hot water is soothing. I, who grew up with milky-white baths in glacial meltwater, have grown addicted to hot water. One of the few dependencies I acknowledge. Like my occasional need to drink coffee, or to see the sun shining on the ice.

  The water in the faucets on board the Kronos is boiling hot. I mix it with cold to just about scalding, and then I let the shower wash over me. It makes the flames burst out from my back, at the base of my skull, the bruises on my pelvis, and especially my foot, which is still swollen and sprained. The fever and shaking grow worse; I stand there until it all goes away, leaving me listless.

  I get a thermos of tea from the galley and take it back to my cabin. In the dark, I put it down, lock the door, take a deep breath, and then turn on the light.

  Jakkelsen is sitting on my bunk, wearing a white jogging suit. His pupils seem to have receded into his brain, giving him a quartzlike gaze of artificial self-confidence.

  “You realize that I saved your life, don’t you?” he says.

  I wait for the terror to let go of my limbs so that I can sit down.

  “Life at sea is too brutal for Smilla, I tell myself. So I go down to the engine room and wait. If somebody wants to find you, he just has to go below. Sooner or later you’ll come past on your way to the bottom. And right behind you come Verlaine and Hansen and Maurice. But I stay where I am. I’d locked the doors up to the deck, you know. You would all have to come back the same way.”

  I stir my tea. The spoon clatters against the cup.

  “When they come back with you in the bag, I’m still sitting there. I’m familiar with their problem. Dumping garbage from the mess and tossing people you don’t like overboard is a thing of the past. There are always two on watch on the bridge, and the deck is lit up. Anyone who drops something bigger than a toothpick over the railing will face trouble and a marine inquiry. We’d have to put in at Godthåb and have little bowlegged Greenlanders in police uniforms running around like ants.”

  It occurs to him that I’m one of those little bowlegged ants he’s talking about.

  “Sorry,” he says.

  Somewhere a clock strikes four bells, the measure of time at sea, a time that doesn’t distinguish between night and day but only the monotone changeover of four-hour watches. These bells reinforce the feeling that we’re at a standstill, that we’ve never left port but have remained stationary in time and space, merely twisting ourselves farther down into meaninglessness.

  �
��Hansen stays next to the hatch in the engine room. So I saunter up on deck and over to the port stairway. When Verlaine comes up, I see what’s going on. Verlaine keeping watch on deck. Hansen at the hatchway. And Maurice alone with you down below. What does that mean?”

  “Maybe Maurice wants a quick fuck,” I say.

  He nods thoughtfully. “That’s possible. But he prefers young girls. An interest in mature women comes later, with experience. I’m positive that they’re going to drop you into the cargo hold. What a great plan, man! It’s forty feet down. It’ll look like you fell. All they have to do is take off the sack afterward. That’s why they were carrying you so carefully. So there wouldn’t be any marks.”

  He beams at me. Pleased that he figured out their plan.

  “I go down to the between decks and over to the stairs. Through the steps I can see Maurice lugging you through the door. He’s not even breathing hard. But he goes to the weight room every day. Four hundred pounds on the bench press and fifteen miles on the exercycle. I have to make a decision. You’ve never done anything for me, have you? In fact, you’ve given me trouble. And besides, there’s something about you that’s so … so damned …”

  “Old-maidish?”

  “Exactly. On the other hand, I never could stand Maurice.”

  He pauses dramatically.

  “I’m a fan of the ladies. So I light the cigar. I can’t see you anymore. You’re out on the platform. But I put my mouth on the smoke detector and blow, and it goes off.”

  He gives me a searching look.

  “Maurice comes toward the stairs, covered with blood. The sprinklers wash it down the steps. A small flood. It makes me want to throw up. Why are they going to so much trouble? What have you done to them, Smilla?”

  I need his help. “They’ve put up with me until now. Things started going wrong as soon as I got too close to the stern.”

  He nods. “That’s always been Verlaine’s territory.”