Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  I let him go first. A person’s power is usually diminished when he steps outdoors. But not Tørk’s. He fills the space and the watery gray light around us with his own radiance. I’ve never been so afraid of anyone.

  Out on the platform I suddenly know that he was up on the roof with Isaiah. That he saw him jump. This certainty comes to me like a vision, still without details, but absolutely unshakable. At that moment, across time and space, I share Isaiah’s terror; at that moment I’m up on the roof, too.

  Standing with his hands on the railing, Tørk looks into my eyes.

  “Step back, please,” he says.

  Our mutual understanding is complete; words are hardly necessary. He had imagined a possibility—that he would take a step down the ladder and I would come forward, tear his hands away, and kick him in the face, letting him fall backward, plunging the sixty-five feet to the deck below, which looks so small from here, as if he might not even hit it.

  I step back until I’m up against the railing. I’m almost grateful to him for taking this precaution. The temptation would have been too great.

  Twice I’ve made trips to Greenland when I didn’t look in a mirror for six months. On the trip home I would carefully avoid mirrors on the plane and in the airports. When I finally stood in front of a mirror in my apartment I clearly saw the physical manifestations of the passage of time. The first gray hairs, the network of wrinkles, the ever deepening and sharpening shadows of the bones beneath my skin.

  Nothing was more reassuring to me than the knowledge that I would die. In these moments of clarity—and you see yourself clearly only when you see yourself as a stranger—all despair, all gaiety, all depression vanish and are replaced by calm. For me death was not something scary or a state of being or an event that would happen to me. It was a focusing on the now, an aid, an ally in the effort to be mentally present.

  Sometimes on summer nights Isaiah would fall asleep on my sofa. I don’t remember exactly what I would be doing; I probably sat there watching him. At some point I would touch his neck and feel that he was too hot. Then I would cautiously unbutton his shirt and pull it away from his chest. I would get up and open the window to the harbor, and at that moment we would be somewhere else. We were at Iita, in the summer tent. Light is seeping through the canvas, as if from a full moon. But it’s the fabric of the tent that colors the light blue, because when I open the tent flap it’s the dull red light of the midnight sun that falls over him. He doesn’t wake up; he hasn’t slept for twenty-four hours. We haven’t been able to sleep in the endless light, but now he has collapsed. Maybe he’s my child; that’s how it feels. And I look at his chest and his throat, and watch his breathing and his rapid pulse beneath the brown flawless skin.

  Then I would step in front of the mirror and take off my shirt and look at my own chest and throat and realize that someday it would all be over, even my feelings for him would someday die with me. But he would still be here, and after him would come his children or other children, a wheel of children, a chain, a spiral winding into eternity.

  This experience of the mortality and continuity of all things always made me happy.

  I feel somewhat the same way now. I’ve taken off my clothes and am standing in front of the mirror.

  Anyone interested in death would benefit from looking at me. I’ve taken off my bandages. There’s no skin on my kneecaps. Between my hips there is a wide yellowish-blue patch of blood that has coagulated under the skin where Jakkelsen’s marlinespike struck me. The palms of both hands have suppurating lesions that refuse to close. At the base of my skull I have a bruise like a gull’s egg, and a spot where the skin is broken and contracted. I’ve been modest enough to keep on my white socks so you can’t see my swollen ankle; and I won’t even mention all the black-and-blue marks, or my scalp, which still throbs now and then from the burn.

  I’ve lost weight, going from gaunt to emaciated. Lack of sleep has made my eyes sink into their sockets. And yet I smile at the stranger in the mirror. There’s no simple arithmetic for life’s distribution of happiness and sorrow, no such thing as a standard share. One of the few people who make life worth living is on board the Kronos.

  He calls me at exactly five o’clock. This is the first time I feel affection for the intercom system.

  “S-Smilla, meet you in the sick bay in fifteen minutes.”

  He feels the same way about telephones as I do. He barely manages to state his message before he’s gone.

  “Føjl,” I say. His name tastes sweet in my mouth. “Thanks for yesterday.”

  The system clicks off, the light goes out.

  I put on blue work clothes. It’s not a haphazard decision. There’s nothing haphazard about the clothes I choose to wear. I could dress up, of course. Even here I could dress up. But the blue clothes are the uniform of the Kronos, symbolizing the fact that we are now meeting under different circumstances, that the world is against us more than ever before.

  I listen at the door for a long time before I venture out into the corridor.

  I can’t imagine that anything like the Christian image of hell actually exists. But lately I’ve been wondering about the ancient Greenlandic realm of the dead. If you consider all the unpleasantness you encounter while you’re alive, it seems improbable that it would all come to an end simply because you’re dead.

  If there are clandestine meetings between lovers in the realm of the dead, the prelude would be something like this. I move from doorway to doorway. I no longer see the Kronos as merely a ship, but rather as a field of dangers. I try to figure out in advance whether a specific danger might solidify into something life-threatening.

  When someone comes out of the exercise room, I dash into the bathroom before the door has closed behind them. From the crack in the doorway I watch Maria go past. Swift and stony-faced. I’m not the only one who knows that the Kronos is the underworld.

  I meet no one on my way up the stairs. The door to the bridge is shut, the chart room empty.

  In front of the sick bay I stop. I straighten my clothes. My face feels naked without makeup.

  The room is dark, the curtains drawn. I close the door behind me and lean against it. I feel my lips. I want him to come out of the dark and kiss me.

  A cool, delicate floral fragrance reaches me. I wait.

  It’s not the ceiling light that someone turns on but the lamp above the examination table, a kind of operating light. It makes yellow patches of light on the black leather, leaving the rest of the room in shadow.

  Tørk is sitting on a chair, with his feet propped up on the bunk. Near the wall, in semi-darkness, stands Verlaine. Katja Claussen is sitting on the end of the table with her feet dangling. There’s no one else in the room.

  I watch myself from a distance. Maybe because it’s too painful to be inside my own body. I don’t care about the three in front of me; I don’t care about myself. It was the mechanic that I talked to a moment ago. He was the one who summoned me here.

  We all have our limits. A certain limit to our perseverance, to how many overtures we can make in our lives. And to how many rejections we can stand.

  “Empty your pockets.”

  Verlaine does the talking. This is my first opportunity to observe the division of labor between the two men. I can guess that Verlaine takes care of the rough stuff.

  I step toward the light and put my flashlight and keys down on the bunk. I wonder what the woman is doing in the room. In the next moment I have my answer. Verlaine nods to her, and she comes over to me. The men look away as she searches me. She’s much taller than I am, but still agile. She starts below my knees, feeling my ankles and then working her way up. She finds the screwdriver and Jakkelsen’s hypodermic case. Then she takes my belt away from me.

  Tørk does not look at what she’s found. But Verlaine weighs the objects in his hand.

  How will it come? Will I see it coming?

  Tørk stands up. “Formally, you are under arrest.”

&nb
sp; He doesn’t look at me. We both know that any reference to formalities is part of the same illusion as our mutual courtesy. They are the only pretexts left.

  He looks down. Then he slowly shakes his head, and something like amazement passes over his face.

  “You’re a spectacular bluffer,” he says. “I’d much rather sit up in the crow’s nest listening to your lies than walk around among all these mediocre truths.”

  All three of them stand there for a moment. Then they leave.

  Verlaine is the one who locks the door. He stops in the doorway. He looks tired. There’s something honest about his silence. It tells me that this isn’t a cell and I haven’t been arrested. This is the beginning of the conclusion, which will happen sometime soon.

  The Ice

  1

  In Sunday school they taught us that the sun was Our Lord Jesus; at boarding school we learned for the first time that the sun was supposed to be a continuously exploding hydrogen bomb.

  For me the sun has always been the Heavenly Clown. In my first conscious memory of the sun, I have my eyes scrunched up and I’m looking right at it, fully aware that this is forbidden. I’m thinking that the sun is both menacing and full of laughter, like a clown’s face when he paints himself with blood and ashes, bites down on a stick, and—alien, gruesome, and joyous—approaches us children.

  Now, just before the orb of the sun reaches the horizon, where it momentarily evades the black cloud cover, casting fiery light across the ice and the ship, the clown’s strategy becomes manifest—to evade the darkness by ducking as low as possible. The lethal striking force of humiliation.

  The Kronos is on its way into the ice. I can see it in the distance, veiled by half-inch-thick safety glass fogged up by the salt crystallized on the outside. That doesn’t make any difference. I can feel the ice as if I were standing on it.

  It’s dense field ice, and at first everything is gray. The narrow channel broken by the Kronos is like a gutter of ashes. The ice floes—most of them as long as the ship—are like huge pieces of rock, slightly swollen and cracked by the cold. It’s a world of absolute lifelessness.

  Then the sun drops beneath the cloud cover, like ignited gasoline.

  The ice cover was formed last year in the Arctic Ocean. From there it was forced out between Svalbard and the east coast of Greenland, carried down around Cape Farewell, and pushed up along the west coast.

  It was created in beauty. One October day the temperature drops 50 degrees in four hours, and the sea is as motionless as a mirror. It’s waiting to reflect a wonder of creation. The clouds and the sea glide together in a curtain of heavy gray silk. The water grows viscous and tinged with pink, like a liqueur of wild berries. A blue fog of frost smoke detaches itself from the surface of the water and drifts across the mirror. Then the water solidifies. Up out of the dark sea the cold now pulls a rose garden, a white blanket of ice blossoms formed from salt and frozen drops of water. They may last for four hours or two days.

  At this point the structure of the ice crystals is based on the number six. Surrounding a hexagon, like a honeycomb of solidified water, six arms reach out toward six other cells, which in turn—as seen in a photograph taken with a color filter and greatly enlarged—dissolve into new hexagons.

  Then frazil ice is formed, grease ice, and pancake ice, whose plates freeze together into floes. The ice separates out the salt, the seawater freezes from below. The ice breaks; surface packing, precipitation, and increased cold give it a rolling appearance. Eventually the ice is forced adrift.

  In the distance is hiku, the permanent ice, the continent of frozen sea along which we are sailing.

  Around the Kronos—in the fjord which the local current conditions have created (only partially understood and recorded)—different types of ice floes, hikuaq and puktaaq, are everywhere. The most dangerous are the blue and black floes, pure meltwater ice, which lie heavy and deep in the water; because of their transparency, they take on the color of the water surrounding them.

  It’s easier to see the white glacier ice and the gray sea ice, colored by air particulates.

  The surface of the ice floes is a wasteland of ivuniq, packs of ice forced upward by the current and the collision of the plates; of maniilaq, ice knolls; and of apuhiniq, snow which the wind has compressed into hard barricades.

  The same wind has blown agiuppiniq across the ice, snowdrifts that you follow with the sled when fog covers the ice.

  As things now stand, the weather and the sea and the ice are allowing the Kronos to slip through. Lukas is sitting up in the crow’s nest, coaxing his ship through the channels, looking for killaq, air holes, and letting the bow slide up onto the new ice, where it’s less than twelve inches thick and the weight of the ship can crush it. He’s making progress. Because the current is the way it is. Because the Kronos is built for it. Because he’s an experienced captain. But we’re just barely making headway.

  Shackleton’s ice-reinforced ship, the Endurance, was crushed by pack ice in the Weddell Sea. The Titanic sank. The Hans Hedtoft did, too. And so did the Proteus when it was attempting to rescue Lieutenant Greely’s expedition during the second International Polar Year. There are no statistics for the numbers of people lost on Arctic voyages.

  It doesn’t make any sense to try to conquer the ice—there’s too much resistance in it. Right now I can see how the impact of collisions has splintered the edges of the floes, forcing them up into barriers sixty-five feet high; underneath, the floes extend a hundred feet down in the water. It’s freezing up all around us. At this moment I can feel how the sea wants to close us in, how it’s merely because of a coincidental, passing constellation of water, wind, and current that we’re allowed to continue. A hundred sea miles north, the pack ice forms a wall that nothing can penetrate. Toward the east are the solidly frozen icebergs that have broken off from the Jakobshavn Glacier; in a single year it has calved a thousand icebergs, totaling over 140 million tons of ice, standing between us and the land like a rigid chain of mountains seventy-five sea miles from the coast. At any given time floating ice covers a fourth of the earth’s ocean area. The drift ice belt in Antarctica is 8 million square miles; between Greenland and Canada it’s between 3 and 4 million square kilometers.

  Yet they still want to conquer the ice. They want to sail through it and build oil drilling platforms on it and tow table icebergs from the South Pole to the Sahara to irrigate the deserts.

  These are schemes whose interim projections do not interest me. It’s a waste of time calculating impossibilities. You can try to live with the ice. You can’t fight it or change it or replace it.

  In some ways ice is so transparent. It carries its history on its surface. Ice packs, knolls, and slush form when the ice melts and then freezes again. The blend of various ice ages in mosaic ice: the black fragments of sikussaq, ancient ice formed in protected fjords, released over time and forced out to sea. Now, in the last rays of the sun, a fine veil of qanik, snow flurries, falls from the clouds that the sun had evaded.

  A reed stretches from the white surface straight into my heart. Like an extension of the saltwater tree within the ice.

  When I wake up, I realize I’ve been asleep for some time. It must be night.

  The Kronos continues to move forward. Its movements tell me that Lukas is still having to break through new ice.

  I try the drawers in the medicine cupboard. They’re locked. I wrap my sweater around my elbow and push in the glass. On the shelves there are scissors, clamps, and tweezers. An otoscope, a bottle of ethanol, iodine, sterile-wrapped surgical needles. I find two disposable scalpels with plastic handles and a roll of Leuco bandages. I put the thin plastic handles together and wrap them with tape. Now they have some cutting strength.

  There are no warning footsteps. The door simply opens. The mechanic enters carrying a tray. He looks more tired and more stooped than when I saw him last. His eyes fix on the broken glass.

  I hold the scalpel against my thigh.
My palms are sweaty. He looks down at my hand. I lay the knife on the bunk. He puts down the tray.

  “Urs has outd-done himself.”

  I feel as if I’m going to throw up if I look at him. He goes over and shuts the door. I move away. Self-control is so fragile.

  The worst thing is not the anger. The worst thing is the desire behind the anger. It’s possible to live with pure emotion. What truly frightens me is my secret need to cling to him.

  “You’ve been on expeditions yourself, Smilla. You know there c-comes a time when you have to let it proceed, when you can’t stop it anymore.”

  Somehow I think that I don’t know him, that I’ve never made love to him. On the other hand, there’s a coldly dignified consistency in his lack of regret. As soon as the opportunity presents itself, I’m going to kick him out of my life. But right now he’s the only frail, improbable chance I have.

  “I want to show you something,” I say. And then I tell him what it is.

  He laughs tensely. “Impossible, Smilla.”

  I open the door for him, so that he’ll leave. We’ve been whispering, but now I give up on talking softly.

  “Isaiah,” I say. “In some way you’re part of it now. You’re up on the roof with him, too.”

  His hands grip my arms and he lifts me back toward the examination table. “How c-can you be so sure, Smilla?”

  His stuttering has gotten much worse. There’s fear in his eyes. There may not be a single person on board the Kronos who isn’t afraid.

  “You won’t run away, will you? You’ll c-come back with me afterward?”

  I almost laugh.

  “Where would I go, Føjl?”

  He doesn’t smile.

  “Lander told me that he saw you walk on water.”

  I take off my socks. At the base of my toes there’s a piece of bandage. It holds Jakkelsen’s passkey in place.