Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  Lukas is leaning against the railing of the bridge wing. In front of the bow of the Kronos a skyscraper of red polyenamel grows out of the sea. It looms over the foredeck and well beyond the tops of the masts. If you tip your head way back you can see that somewhere high in the gray sky even this phenomenon comes to an end. It’s not a building; it’s the stern of a supertanker.

  When I was a child in Qaanaaq in the late fifties and early sixties, even the European clock moved relatively slowly. Changes occurred at a rate that allowed people time to register a protest against them. This rebellion first took form in the concept of the “good old days.”

  Nostalgia for the past was then a completely new feeling in Thule. Sentimentality will always be man’s first revolt against development.

  The times have made this reaction obsolete. Now a different kind of protest is needed than the lachrymose mourning for native soil. Things are happening so rapidly now that at any moment the present we’re living in will be the “good old days.”

  “For these ships,” says Lukas, “the rest of the world doesn’t exist anymore. If you meet them on the open sea and try to raise them on the VHF to exchange weather reports and positions, or to ask about the ice conditions, they won’t answer. They don’t even have their radio on. When you displace 340,000 cubic yards of water and produce horsepower like a nuclear reactor and have a computer as big as an old-fashioned ship’s chest to calculate your course and speed and maintain them or diverge from them slightly if necessary, then your surroundings cease to interest you. The only thing left in the world is your departure point and your destination and who’s paying you when you reach it.”

  Lukas has lost weight. He has started smoking.

  He might be right. One of the syndromes of development in Greenland is that everything seems to have happened recently. The Danish Navy’s new heavily armed, high-speed inspection ships were recently introduced. The vote to join the Common Market and the narrow majority to withdraw as of January 1, 1985. Not long ago the Defense Ministry restricted entry permits to Qaanaaq for military reasons. And at the spot where we’re now standing, everything has been newly built. The large floating oil platform, the Greenland Star, outside of Nuuk, consists of 25,000 linked metal pontoons anchored to the sea floor 2,500 feet below us. A quarter of a mile of desolate, windblown, green-painted metal, ugly as sin, twenty sea miles from the coast. “Dynamic” is the word the politicians use.

  It has all been created with the goal of coercion in mind.

  Not the coercion of Greenlanders. The presence of the army and the direct violence of civilization are almost at an end in the Arctic. It’s no longer necessary for development. The liberal appeal to greed in all its aspects is sufficient today.

  Technological culture has not destroyed the peoples of the Arctic Ocean. Believing that would be to think too highly of culture. It has simply acted as a catalyst, a cosmic model for the potential—which lies in every culture and every human being—to center life around that particularly Western mixture of greed and naivete.

  What they want to coerce is the Other, the vastness, that which surrounds human beings. The sea, the earth, the ice. The complex stretched out in front of us is an attempt to do that.

  Lukas’s face is haggard with distaste.

  “Previously, up until 1992, there was only Polar Oil at Færingehavn. A little place. A communications station and a fish cannery on one side of the fjord. The plant on the other. Managed by the Greenland Trading Company. We could dock stern-fast, up to 50,000 tons. When we got the floating hoses out we would go ashore. There was only one building for living quarters, a galley, and a pumphouse. It smelled of diesel. Five men ran the whole place. We always had a gin-and-tonic with the manager in the galley.”

  This sentimental side of Lukas is new to me.

  “That must have been nice,” I say. “Did they have clogging and concertinas, too?”

  His eyes grow narrow.

  “You’re wrong,” he says. “I’m talking about power. And about freedom. In those days the captain was the highest authority. We went ashore, and we took the crew along with us, except for the anchor watch. There was nothing at Færingehavn. It was just a desolate, godforsaken place between Godthåb and Frederikshåb. But in the midst of that nothingness, you could take a walk if you wanted to.”

  He gestures toward the complex of pontoons in front of us, and toward the distant aluminum barracks.

  “Here they have three tax-free shops and regular helicopter service to the mainland. There’s a hotel and a diving station. A post office. Administrative offices for Chevron, Gulf, Shell, and Exxon. In two hours they can put together a landing strip that can handle a small jet. The gross tonnage of that ship in front of us is 125,000 tons. There is development and progress here. But no one is allowed ashore, Jaspersen. They come on board if you want anything. They check off your requests on a list, and they bring a portable chute and load your order on board. If the captain insists on going ashore, a couple of security officers show up with a landing bridge and hold his hand until he’s back on board. They say it’s because of the danger of fire. Because of the risk of sabotage. They say that when the piers are full, there are 250 million gallons of oil here.”

  He searches for a new cigarette, but the pack is empty.

  “That’s the nature of centralization. Under these conditions the shipmasters have virtually disappeared. Seamen don’t exist at all.”

  I’m waiting. He wants something from me.

  “Were you hoping to go ashore?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Even if this was your only chance? If this was the end of the line? If we only had the return trip left?”

  He wants to find out how much I know.

  “We’re not taking on any cargo,” I say. “We’re not unloading anything. This is nothing but a rest stop. We’re waiting for something or other.”

  “You’re guessing.”

  “No,” I say, “I know where we’re going.”

  His body is still relaxed. But now he’s on guard. “Tell me.”

  “If I do, you have to tell me why we’re docked here.”

  His complexion doesn’t look robust. It’s quite pale and chapped in the relatively dry air. He licks his lips. He’s been counting on me as a form of insurance. Now he’s confronted with a new, risky contract. It demands a trust in me that he doesn’t feel.

  Without a word he walks past me. I follow him inside the bridge. I shut the door behind us. He goes over to the slightly raised navigational table.

  “Show me,” he says.

  It’s a map of Davis Strait on a scale of 1:1,000,000. Toward the west it shows the outermost point of Cumberland Peninsula. To the northwest it includes the coast along Great Halibut Banks.

  On the table, next to the sea chart, is the Ice Center’s map of ice formations.

  “Since November the field ice has stretched 100 sea miles out and no farther north than Nuuk,” I say. “The ice forced farther north by the West Greenland current has moved out to sea and melted because Davis Strait has had three mild winters and is relatively warmer than normal. The current, now free of ice, continues up along the coast. Disko Bay has the world’s highest concentration of icebergs. During the last two winters the glacier at Jakobshavn has moved 130 feet a day. That produces the largest icebergs outside of Antarctica.”

  I point to the map of ice formations.

  “This winter the icebergs were forced out of the bay as early as October and directed out along the coast with a ridge of turbulence between the West Greenland current and the Baffin current. Even in sheltered water there are icebergs. When we leave here, Tørk will set a northwesterly course until we’re free of this belt.”

  His face is expressionless. But there is the same air of concentration about him that I saw at the roulette table.

  “Since December the Baffin current has carried western ice down to the 67th parallel. It has frozen together with the new ice somewhere
between 200 and 400 sea miles out in Davis Strait. Tørk wants us somewhere in the vicinity of that edge. From there we’ll be given a course due north.”

  “You’ve sailed here before, Jaspersen?”

  “I have hydrophobia. But I know something about ice.”

  He bends over the map. “No one has ever sailed farther north than Holsteinsborg this time of year. Not even in sheltered waters. The current packs field ice and western ice into a floor of cement. We might be able to sail north for two days. What does he want us to do at the edge of the ice?”

  I straighten up. “You can’t play without chips, Captain.”

  For a moment I think that I’ve lost him. Then he nods.

  “It’s like you said,” he replies slowly. “We’re waiting here. That’s what they’ve told me. We’re waiting for a fourth passenger.”

  Five hours earlier the Kronos shifted course. Outside the mess a dull sun hung low in the sky; by its position I could tell we had changed course, but I had already noticed.

  In the dining hall of the boarding schools, students seemed to take root in their chairs. In any unstable situation, the few fixed points take on special meaning. In the mess of the Kronos, we sit glued to our chairs. At the other table Jakkelsen is eating, introspective and wan, his head bowed over his plate. Fernanda and Maria try to avoid looking at me.

  Maurice is eating with his back to me. He’s only using his right hand. His left hand is in a sling around his neck that partially covers a thick bandage on his shoulder. He’s wearing a work shirt with one sleeve cut off to make room for the bandage.

  My mouth is dry with a fear that won’t let up as long as I’m on board this ship.

  On my way out the door, Jakkelsen comes up behind me. “We’ve changed course! We’re on our way to Godthåb.”

  I decide to clean the officers’ mess. If Verlaine follows me, he’ll have to pass the bridge. If we’re on our way to Nuuk, he’ll have to come. They can’t permit me to go ashore in a large port.

  I stay in the mess for four hours. I clean the windows and polish the brass trim and finally rub the wooden paneling with teak oil.

  At one point Kützow comes by. When he sees me, he hurries off.

  Sonne appears. He stands there for a while, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. I’m wearing a short blue dress. Maybe he takes that as an invitation to stay. He has misread me. I’ve put on the dress so I’ll be able to run as fast as possible. When he gets no encouragement, he leaves. He’s too young to make a move, and not old enough to be pushy.

  At four o’clock we drop anchor behind the red wall. Half an hour later I’m called to the bridge.

  “At this time of year,” says Lukas, “there’s only one way to get farther north. Unless you have an icebreaker along. And even then it might not be possible. What you have to do is go farther out to sea. Otherwise you’ll get caught in a bay, and suddenly the ice will close around you, and there you’ll sit.”

  I could lie to him. But he’s just about the only straw I have left to cling to. He’s a man on his way down. Maybe sometime in the near future, he’ll end up down there where our paths could cross.

  “At 54 degrees west longitude,” I say, “the ocean floor drops off. That’s where a branch of the western current turns away from the coast. There it meets the relatively colder northern current. West of the great fishing banks there is an area of unstable weather.”

  “‘The Sea of Fog.’ Never been there.”

  “A place where the largest chunks of ice from the east coast are carried and can’t escape. Similar to the Iceberg Cemetery north of Upernavik.”

  With the corner of the ruler I find a dark area on the ice map. “Too small to be clearly marked. It often takes the form of a long bay, like a fjord in the pack ice—maybe it looks like that now. Risky but navigable. If the journey is important enough. Even the small Danish inspection cutters occasionally went in there, chasing British or Icelandic trawlers.”

  “Why sail a 4,000-ton coaster with a couple of dozen men up toward Baffin Bay to enter a dangerous opening in the pack ice?”

  I close my eyes and call up an image of a magnified plant embryo, a little shape curved around its own center. The same images that were superimposed on the sea chart on the boat deck.

  “Because there’s an island. The only island that far from the coast before you reach Ellesmere Island.”

  Under my ruler it’s a dot so small that it’s almost invisible.

  “Isla Gela Alta. Discovered by Portuguese whalers during the last century.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” he says thoughtfully. “A bird refuge. The weather is too bad even for the birds. It’s forbidden to go ashore. Impossible to drop anchor. No reason in the world to go there.”

  “I’ll still bet that’s where we’re headed.”

  “I’m not sure that you’re in a position to make any bets,” he says.

  While I’m still on my way down from the bridge I think that the world may have lost a nice person in Sigmund Lukas. It’s a phenomenon that I’ve often observed without understanding it. Inside someone another person can exist, a fully formed, generous, and trustworthy individual who never comes to light except in glimpses, because he is surrounded by a corrupt, dyed-in-the-wool, repeat offender.

  Out on deck, dusk has fallen. A cigarette is glowing in the dark.

  Jakkelsen is leaning against the railing. “This is incredible, fucking incredible!”

  The complex below us is lit up by lights on poles lining both sides of the piers. Even now, bathed in this yellow light, painted grass green, with lights on in the distant buildings, and little electric cars and white traffic markings, the Greenland Star looks like nothing more than several thousand square meters of steel plunked down in the Atlantic Ocean.

  To me it seems so obviously a mistake. To Jakkelsen it’s a magnificent union of high technology and the sea.

  “Yes,” I say, “and the best part about it is that the whole thing can be taken apart and packed up in twelve hours.”

  “With this place they’ve won out over the sea, man. Now it doesn’t matter how far it is to the bottom or what the weather’s like. They can put down a harbor anywhere. In the middle of the ocean.

  I’m no teacher or Boy Scout leader. I’m not interested in setting him straight.

  “Why do they need to be able to take it apart, Smilla?”

  Maybe it’s nervousness that makes me answer him, after all. “They built it when they started bringing oil up from the sea floor off North Greenland. It took ten years from the time they discovered oil until they could extract it. Their problem was the ice. First they built a prototype of what was supposed to be the world’s largest and most solid drilling platform, the Joint Venture Warrior, a product of glasnost and Home Rule, a cooperative venture between the United States, the Soviet Union, and Denmark’s largest shipping company A. P. Møller. You’ve sailed past drilling platforms. You know how big they are. You can see them fifty sea miles away, and they get bigger and bigger, like an entire universe floating on posts. They’ve got bars and restaurants and offices and workshops and movie theaters and fire stations, the whole thing mounted forty feet above the surface of the ocean so even the worst storm waves will pass underneath it. Just think about the way they look. The Joint Venture Warrior was supposed to be four times as big. The prototype was sixty feet above the water surface. It was supposed to provide jobs for 1,400 people. They constructed the prototype in Baffin Bay. After it was erected, an iceberg came along. They had expected that. But this iceberg was a little bigger than usual. It was calved somewhere on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. It was 325 feet tall and flat on top, the way icebergs are when they’re that high. It had 1,300 feet of ice below the surface, and it weighed about 20 million tons. When they saw it coming, they did get a little nervous. But they had two big icebreakers on hand. They fastened them to the iceberg to pull it onto a different course. There was hardly any current and no wind. Still, nothing happen
ed when they started up the engines. Except that the iceberg continued straight ahead, as if it didn’t notice anything was tugging at it. And the iceberg rolled right over the prototype; there were no traces of the proud model for the Joint Venture Warrior left behind in the water except for some patches of oil and pieces of debris. Since then, they’ve made all Arctic Ocean equipment so that it can be dismantled in twelve hours. That’s how much warning the Ice Center can give them. They drill from floating platforms that can be cut loose. This magnificent harbor is nothing more than a tin tray. When the ice came by, it would carry the platform off as though it had never been here. They only put it up during mild winters when the field ice doesn’t reach this far north or the pack ice this far south. They haven’t conquered the ice, Jakkelsen. The battle hasn’t even begun yet.”

  He puts out his cigarette. He has his back to me. I can’t tell whether he’s disappointed or indifferent.

  “How do you know all this, Smilla?”

  When they were still deliberating whether to put the Joint Venture Warrior on the ice, I was working a six-month stint at the American cold-water laboratory on Pylot Island, conducting experiments to measure the elasticity of sea ice. I was part of an enthusiastic team of five. We knew each other from the first two ICC conferences. When we had parties and got drunk, we would give speeches about the fact that this was the first time five glaciologists of Inuit origin were gathered. We told each other that we represented the highest concentration of expertise anywhere in the world.

  We gleaned our most important data from plastic washbasins. We would pour salt water into the basins, put them in a laboratory freezer, and freeze the water to ice of a standard thickness. Then we took these sheets outdoors, placed them between two tabletops, loaded them down with weights, and measured how much they sagged before they broke. We made little electric motors vibrate the weights and proved that the vibrations from the drills wouldn’t affect the structure or elasticity of the ice. We were full of the pride and enthusiasm of scientific pioneers. It wasn’t until we were writing the final report, in which we recommended that A. P. Møller, Shell, and Gospetrol begin exploiting the Greenland oil reserves from platforms built on the ice, that we realized what we were doing. By then it was too late. A Soviet company had designed the Joint Venture Warrior and won the contract. All five of us were fired. Five months later the prototype was pulverized. Since then they haven’t tried anything more permanent than floating platforms.