Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  I could tell Jakkelsen all this, but I don’t.

  “Tonight I’m going to fix everything for us,” he says.

  “That will be wonderful.”

  “You don’t believe me, man, but just wait and see. The whole thing is crystal-clear to me. They’ve never been able to fool me. I know this ship. I’ve got it all worked out.”

  When he steps into the light from the bridge, I see that he’s not wearing any outdoor clothes. He’s been standing here in 14°F weather, conversing with me as if we were indoors.

  “Get your beauty sleep tonight, Smilla, and tomorrow everything will be different.”

  “The prison kitchen provided einzigartige opportunities for baking sourdough.”

  Urs is leaning over a rectangular shape wrapped in a white dish towel.

  “Die vielen Faktoren, the many factors. The sourdough starter, the yeast, and finally the bread dough. How long should it rise, and at what temperature? What types of flour? How hot an oven?”

  He unwraps the bread. It has a dark brown, shiny, glazed crust broken in places by whole grains of wheat. An overwhelming aroma of grain, flour, and pungent freshness. Under different circumstances it might have made me happy. But something else interests me. A time factor. Every event on a ship has its first portent in the galley.

  “Why are you baking now, Urs? It’s ungewöhnlich, unusual.”

  “The problem is the balance between the Säuerlichkeit and the rising power.”

  Ever since he discovered me in the dumbwaiter and we stopped talking to each other, I’ve thought there was something rather doughlike about him. Something elastic, unspoiled, simple, and yet sophisticated. And at the same time, much too soft.

  “Are you serving an extra meal?”

  He tries to ignore me.

  “You’ll end up in the slammer,” I say. “Right back in jail. Here in Greenland. And there won’t be any kitchen work. No time off for good behavior. They don’t make much of a fuss about meals here. When we meet up again, in three or four years, we’ll see whether you’ve retained your good humor. Even if you’ve lost sixty-five pounds.”

  He slumps like a deflated soufflé. He couldn’t possibly know that there aren’t any prisons in Greenland.

  “At eleven o’clock. For one person.”

  “Urs, what were you sentenced for?”

  He gives me a stony look.

  “It only takes one call. To Interpol.”

  He doesn’t reply.

  “I called them before we sailed,” I tell him. “When I saw the crew list. It was heroin.”

  Beads of sweat form on the narrow edge between his mustache and his upper lip.

  “It wasn’t from Morocco. Where was it from?”

  “Why are you hounding me?”

  “Where was it from?”

  “The airport in Geneva. The lake is so close. I was in the military. We unloaded the crates along with the food supplies, via the river.”

  When he starts to talk, I understand a little about the art of interrogation for the first time in my life. Fear alone isn’t what makes him talk. It’s just as much a longing for contact, the burden of a guilty conscience, and the loneliness of the sea.

  “Crates full of antiques?”

  He nods. “From the Far East. On the plane from Kyoto.”

  “Who brought them out? Who was the shipping agent?”

  “You must know that.”

  I don’t reply. I know what he’s going to say before he says it.

  “It was Verlaine, natürlich.”

  So that’s how they’ve manned the Kronos. With people so compromised that they had no choice. Not until now, after all this time, do I see the ship’s mess for what it really is: a microcosm, a manifestation of the network that Tørk and Claussen created earlier. Just as Loyen and Ving used the Cryolite Corporation, they have also made use of an organization that already existed. Fernanda and Maria from Thailand. Maurice, Hansen, and Urs from Europe. All part of the same organization.

  “Ich hatte keine Wahl. I had no choice. I couldn’t pay.”

  His fear no longer seems exaggerated.

  I’m on my way out, but he follows me.

  “Fräulein Smilla, sometimes I think you’re bluffing. That maybe you’re not from the police, after all.”

  Even two feet away, I can feel the heat from the bread. It must have just come out of the oven.

  “And if that’s the case, there wouldn’t be any risk if one day I served you a portion of trifle, shall we say … full of glass shards and bits of barbed wire.”

  He’s holding the bread in his hand. It must be over 400°F. Maybe he’s not so soft, after all. If he was exposed to high temperatures, maybe he’d develop a crust as hard as glass.

  A breakdown doesn’t necessarily have to be a collapse; it can also take the form of a quiet slide into resignation.

  That’s the way it happens to me. On my way out of the galley, I decide to escape from the Kronos.

  Back in my cabin I put on underwear made of new wool. Then I put on my blue work clothes, blue rubber boots, blue sweater, and a thin navy-blue down jacket. In the dark it will be almost black, and it’s the least obtrusive thing I can find at the moment. I don’t pack a suitcase. I roll up my money, toothbrush, an extra pair of panties, and a little bottle of almond oil in a plastic bag. I don’t think it would be possible to slip away with anything else.

  I tell myself that it’s the loneliness that’s getting to me. I grew up in a community. If I’ve desired and sought out brief periods of solitude and introspection, it has always been in order to return to the social group as a stronger person.

  But I haven’t been able to find that group. I seem to have lost it, sometime during that autumn when Moritz first brought me out of Greenland by plane. I’m still searching; I haven’t given up. But I don’t seem to be making any progress.

  Now life on this ship has turned into a travesty of my existence in the modern world.

  I’m no hero. I had affection for a child. I would have put my tenacity at the disposal of anyone who wanted to understand his death. But there wasn’t anyone. No one but me.

  I go up on deck. At every corner, I expect to meet Verlaine. But I meet no one. The deck seems deserted. I go over to the railing. The Greenland Star looks different than when I stood here several hours ago. Then I was still numb from the preceding days. Now it represents my way out, my escape route.

  At least two of the piers are half a mile long. They’re strangely motionless in the long swells rolling in from the dark. Up near the buildings I can see small, illuminated electric cars and forklifts.

  The gangway of the Kronos is down. Big signs on the dock say: ACCESS TO PIER STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.

  At the bottom of the gangway I’ll have to walk across six or seven hundred yards of pontoon dock bathed in light. There probably isn’t any guard. The lights are out in the control towers, from which they direct the pumping of the oil. But it’s likely that they have the area under surveillance and that they’ll see me and pick me up.

  That’s what I’m counting on. They may be obligated to return me to the ship, but first they’ll take me somewhere to an officer and a desk and a chair. Then I’ll tell them about the Kronos. Nothing bordering on the truth that I know. They wouldn’t believe me. But something else. Something about Jakkelsen’s drugs, and that I feel threatened by the rest of the crew and want to leave the ship.

  They’ll have to listen to me. Technically and legally, desertion no longer exists. A sailor and a cabin stewardess can go ashore anytime they like.

  I go down to the second deck. From there the gangway is visible. There’s an alcove where it adjoins the deck. That’s where Jakkelsen once waited for me.

  Now someone else is waiting. Hansen has propped his rubber boots up on the low steel box.

  I could reach the end of the gangway before he was even out of his chair. I’d be the certain winner in a 150-yard sprint down the dock. But then I would run out of ste
am and collapse.

  I retreat to the deck to reconsider my options. I’ve come to the conclusion that there aren’t any, when suddenly the lights go out.

  I had just closed my eyes, trying to find an answer in the sounds.

  The rolling of the waves along the dock, the hollow sound of the water slapping against the fender beams. The gulls screeching in the darkness, the wind howling low against the control towers. The sigh of the links of the pontoons rubbing against each other. A distant, faint hiss from great turbine generators. And more disheartening than all these sounds put together: the feeling that all noise is being sucked out into the emptiness above the vast Atlantic Ocean. That the entire complex, along with the docked ships, is a vulnerable miscalculation that will be swept away at any moment.

  These sounds have no advice to give me. In a place like this, the only way to leave a ship is by means of the gangway. I’m a captive on the Kronos.

  That’s when the lights go out. When I open my eyes, they seem blinded by the darkness at first. Then a series of red lights appear, approximately a hundred yards apart, on the dock. Emergency lights.

  The lights have been turned off on the pier where the Kronos is moored and on the ship itself. The night is so dark that even things close at hand seem to vanish. The distant part of the platform looks like a yellowish-white island in the night.

  I can see the dock. I can also see a figure down there. Heading away from the Kronos. A mixture of fear and hope and old habit stops me from hitting my head on the mast or a capstan. At the bottom of the stairs I pause for a moment. There’s no one around. But even if there was, I wouldn’t be able to see him. Then I take off running.

  Out of the ship and down the gangway. I don’t see anyone, and no one calls after me. I turn and run along the pier. The pontoons seem alive and unsteady beneath my feet. Down here the emergency lights seem painfully bright. I keep to the side away from the lamps and increase my speed every time I approach a patch of light, catching my breath when I’m back in the dark. Only six days have passed since I watched Lander sail off into the fog, on his way back to Skovshoved, and in every sense of the word, I’m still at sea. But I share some of the joy a sailor must feel when he sets foot on land again after a long voyage.

  A figure appears in front of me, moving with the faltering, swaying gait of a drunkard.

  It has started to rain. The dock is marked off for traffic, like a street, which is lined with the windowless sides of ships, rising up like skyscrapers 150 feet high. In the distance the aluminum of the barracks glistens. Everything vibrates dully from big, invisible engines. The Greenland Star is a deserted town on the edge of the empty heavens.

  The only living thing is the wobbly figure in front of me. It’s Jakkelsen. The silhouette against the lamp is indisputably Jakkelsen. Far ahead of him there’s someone else heading off somewhere. That’s why Jakkelsen is wavering. Like me, he’s trying to avoid the light. He’s trying to make himself invisible to the person he’s following.

  There doesn’t seem to be anyone following me, so I fall back, not wanting to gain on the two in front of me, but still moving forward.

  I make a turn at the last tower. Before me lies a vast open area. A square in the middle of the ocean. In the dimness, the only light comes from a single fluorescent lamp way up high.

  In the center of the square, inside a series of concentric circles, slouches the outline of a large dead animal. A Sikorsky helicopter with four slightly bowed, drooping blades. Near one of the barracks someone has left a little pump wagon for extinguishing fires and an electric bus. Jakkelsen has vanished. It’s the most desolate place I’ve ever seen.

  As a child I sometimes dreamed that everybody was dead and had left me behind with the euphoric freedom of choice in an abandoned adult world. I’ve always thought of it as a pleasant dream. At this moment, on this square, I realize that it has always been a nightmare.

  I walk forward toward the helicopter, and then on past it, into the faint light tinted dark green by the non-skid surface of the pontoons. The whole place is so deserted that I have absolutely no fear of being discovered.

  At the point where the platform seems to meet the water there are three barracks and an open shed. Jakkelsen is sitting in the shadow, just outside the light. For a moment I feel uneasy. Just minutes ago he was moving as quick as a rabbit; now he’s all hunched up. But when I put my hand on his forehead, I feel the heat and sweat from his run. When I try to shake some life into him, there’s the clink of metal. I fish around in his breast pocket and pull out his syringe. I remember the expression on his face when he assured me that he could take care of himself. I try to pull him to his feet, but he’s too limp. What he needs is two strong orderlies and a hospital gurney. I take off my jacket and put it over him, pulling it up over his forehead so that it won’t rain on his face. I slip the syringe back in his pocket. You have to be younger or at least more idealistic than I am to try to fix people who are determined to kill themselves.

  As I straighten up, a shadow glides away from the open shed and takes on a life of its own. It’s not heading toward me; it’s on its way across the square.

  It’s a person carrying a small suitcase and wearing a flapping overcoat. But the suitcase isn’t really small. The person is big. From this distance I can’t see very well, but I don’t need to, either. It doesn’t take much for me to recognize him. It’s the mechanic.

  Maybe I knew it all along. Knew that he was the fourth passenger.

  When I recognize him, I realize that I’ll have to return to the Kronos.

  Not because it suddenly doesn’t matter whether I live or die, but because the problem has been taken out of my hands. It no longer has to do with Isaiah alone. Or with me. Or with the mechanic. Or even with what there is between us. It’s something much bigger. Maybe it’s love.

  When I walk back along the dock, the lights have come on again. There’s no use trying to hide.

  The tower in front of the Kronos is manned. The figure behind the glass looks like an insect. Close up you realize this is because of his hard hat with two short antennas attached.

  Two hoses have been connected up. The Kronos is taking on fuel.

  Hansen is sitting at the top of the gangway. He freezes when he sees me. He had been sitting there because of me. But he was expecting me to come from the other direction. He’s not prepared for this situation. He slowly shifts gears; he’s no good at improvising. He starts to block my way, trying to evaluate the risk of attempting something aggressive. I fumble for the screwdriver and put my hand into my plastic bag. On the stairway behind him Lukas comes into view. I stretch out my clenched fist toward Hansen.

  “From Verlaine,” I say.

  His hand closes around what I give him. With the automatic obedience prompted by the bosun’s name. Then Lukas is standing right behind him. He surveys the situation with a single glance. His eyes narrow.

  “You’re wet, Jaspersen.”

  He blocks my way up the stairs.

  “I had to run an errand. For Hansen.”

  Hansen tries to find words to protest. He opens his hand, looking for a possible answer there. On his broad palm there’s a crumpled ball. It unfolds as we watch. It’s a pair of panties—tiny, pure white, with lace.

  “They didn’t have a bigger size,” I say. “But I’m sure you can get them on, Hansen. They’ll probably stretch.”

  I walk past Lukas. He doesn’t try to stop me. All of his attention is directed at Hansen. His face is full of amazement. Lukas is having a hard time. Nothing but unanswered questions all around him.

  As I head up the stairs I hear him give up on this puzzle, too.

  “First the baggage,” he says. “Then the sternmost capstan. We sail in fifteen minutes.”

  His voice sounds hoarse, astonished, annoyed, and harried.

  I take off my wet work clothes and sit down on my bunk. I think about Jakkelsen.

  Through the hull I can tell that the oil pumps have stoppe
d. The hoses have been removed, the hawsers taken in. The deck is being made ready for sailing.

  Jakkelsen is sitting somewhere outside in the dark, about half a mile from here. I’m the only one who knows that he’s left the ship. The question is whether I should report his absence.

  The gangway is lifted. On the deck the posts at the mooring lines are manned.

  I stay on my bunk. Because maybe Jakkelsen was on to something. I keep going back to something about his voice on the deck, something about his self-confidence and conviction. If it’s true that he’s discovered something, there must be a reason why he wanted to go ashore. He must have thought that whatever had to be done had to be done from there. Maybe he can still help me. Even though I have no idea how or why. Or by what means.

  There is no blast of the horn. The Kronos leaves the Greenland Star as anonymously as it arrived. I didn’t even notice the engine revving up. It’s a change in the movements of the hull that tells me we are sailing.

  Our cruising speed is 18 knots. Between 400 and 450 sea miles every twenty-four hours. This means that it will take about twelve hours for us to reach our destination. If I’m right. If we’re on our way to the Barren Glacier on Gela Alta.

  Something heavy is being dragged down the corridor. When the door to the quarterdeck closes, I go out in the hallway. Through the window in the door I can see Verlaine and Hansen moving the mechanic’s baggage aft. Black cases, the kind that musicians keep their instruments in, placed on dollies. He must have had excess baggage on the flight over. It must have been expensive. I wonder who paid for it.