Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  We don’t meet a soul. The light above the quarterdeck is off. When I let us in, we both realize that we’re standing a few yards away from the deck platform where we waited less than twenty-four hours ago to observe Jakkelsen’s last journey. This awareness means nothing in particular. Love arises when you have a surplus; it disappears when you’re reduced to the basic instincts: hunger, sleep, the need for security.

  On the lower level I turn on the light, a flood of light compared to the beam from my flashlight. Maybe I’m being rash, but there’s no time for anything else. We’ll reach our destination in a few hours at the most. Then the deck lights will be lit and these deserted rooms will be full of people.

  We stop in front of the wall at the end of the room.

  I’m betting everything on my curiosity. I want to know why, according to my measurements, the wall has been moved more than five feet away from the hydraulic rudder system. Why there’s some sort of generator behind the wall.

  I glance at the mechanic. Suddenly I can’t understand why he’s come with me. Maybe he doesn’t know why, either. Maybe because of the lure of the improbable. I point at the door to the metal shop.

  “There’s a mallet in there.”

  He doesn’t seem to hear me. He seizes hold of the molding around the edge of the wall and pulls it off. He examines the nail holes. It’s fresh wood.

  He slips his hands in the gap between the paneling and the bulkhead and pulls. It won’t budge. There are about fifteen nails in each side. Then he yanks at it sharply and the wall comes away in his hands. It’s a piece of plywood half an inch thick and six yards square. In his hands it looks like a cupboard door.

  Behind it is a refrigerator that’s six feet tall and three feet wide, made of stainless steel. It reminds me of the dairy shops in Copenhagen in the sixties, where for the first time I saw people using energy to keep something cold. It has been secured against the rolling of the ship with metal fittings that must have been attached to the original wall of the room and then screwed onto the base of the refrigerator. It has a cylinder lock on the door.

  He gets a screwdriver and unscrews the fittings. Then he takes hold of the refrigerator. It seems immovable. He braces himself. Then he tugs it into the room. There’s something insightful about his movements, a knowledge that you should give it your all only for fractions of a second. He tugs three more times, and the refrigerator now has its back to us. He has a Phillips screwdriver on his knife. There must be fifty screws all around the back covering. He inserts the screwdriver, supporting the screw with the forefinger of his left hand, turning counterclockwise smoothly, not in spurts. The screws seem to leave the holes of their own accord. It takes less than ten minutes for him to remove all of them. He carefully stores them in his pocket. He lifts off the entire back covering with its cords, cooling grid, compressors, and fluid tank.

  Even under these circumstances, I note that what we’re looking at is both banal and out of the ordinary: we’re looking inside the back of a refrigerator.

  It’s full of rice. The square boxes are carefully stacked up from top to bottom.

  The mechanic takes out a box and opens it, lifting the boiler bag free of its container. I have time to think that I didn’t have much to lose, after all. Then I notice the muscles in his face contract. I take another look at the bag. It’s almost opaque. It’s not rice. It’s a vacuum pack around a substance that is dense and yellowish like white chocolate.

  He opens a knife blade and slices open the bag. With a little sigh it takes in air. Then a lumpy dark powder pours into his hand; it has the consistency of melted butter mixed with the kind of sand used in an hourglass.

  He chooses a few more boxes at random, opens them, looks inside, and then carefully returns them to their place.

  He screws the back covering on and shoves the refrigerator back. I don’t help him; I can’t touch him anymore. He puts up the plywood and presses the wall into position. He gets a hammer and meticulously pounds it into place. His movements are absentminded and robotlike.

  Not until then do we look at each other.

  “Mayam,” I say. “A stage between raw opium and heroin. With a high oil content; that’s why it has to be refrigerated. Tørk developed it. Ravn told me about it. It’s part of the agreement between Tørk and Verlaine. It’s Verlaine’s piece of the pie. We’re supposed to pull into some port on our way back. Maybe Holsteinsborg, maybe Nuuk. Maybe he has connections on the Greenland Star. Only ten years ago they were smuggling liquor and cigarettes up here. That’s already a thing of the past. That’s already the good old days. Now there’s lots of cocaine in Nuuk. There’s a Greenland upper class that lives like Europeans. There’s a big market up here.”

  His eyes are dreamy, remote. I have to reach him.

  “Jakkelsen must have discovered it. He must have found out about it. And then he gave himself away. He must have been high and he overestimated his own abilities. He put pressure on them. That forced them to act. Tørk took care of the telegram for them. He had to do it. But he and Verlaine hate each other. They come from two different worlds. They only work together because they can use each other.”

  He leans down toward me and takes my hands.

  “Smilla,” he whispers, “when I was a kid I had a wind-up tank with caterpillar treads. If you put it down in front of something, it would climb straight over it because it had such low gears. If the object was perpendicular the tank would turn around and crawl along the edge until it found some other way over. You couldn’t stop it. You’re like that tank, Smilla. You were supposed to be kept out of all this, but you kept on getting involved. You were supposed to be left behind in Copenhagen, but suddenly you wound up on board. They lock you up—that was my idea, it was the safest thing for you. They lock the door; that’s the end of Smilla. And then suddenly you’re out again. You keep popping up. You’re like that tank, Smilla.”

  Irreconcilable emotions are battling in his voice.

  “When I was a kid,” I say, “my father gave me a teddy bear. Until then we’d only had dolls that we’d made ourselves. The bear lasted a week. First it got dirty, then the fur fell out. It got holes in it and the stuffing came out; otherwise it was hollow inside. You’re like that teddy bear, Føjl.”

  We’re sitting next to each other on the bunk in his cabin. On the desk is one of those flat flasks, but he’s the only one drinking.

  He’s huddled up with his hands between his thighs.

  “It’s a meteorite,” he says. “Some sort of stone. Tørk says that it’s ancient. It’s wedged into a kind of saddle in the cliff beneath the ice. We’re going to pick it up.”

  I think about the photographs among Tørk’s papers. I should have guessed then. The ones that looked like X-rays. The Widmannstätten structure. It’s in every textbook. The manifestation of the relationship between nickel and iron in meteorites.

  “Why this one?” I ask.

  “Whoever finds something of interest in Greenland has to report it to the National Museum in Nuuk. From there they’ll c-call the Mineralogical Museum and the Institute for Metallurgy in Copenhagen. The find will be registered as something of national interest and will be confiscated.”

  He leans forward.

  “Tørk says it weighs fifty tons. It’s the biggest meteorite ever found. They took along oxygen and acetylene in ’91. They cut off several fragments. Tørk says there are diamonds in it. Substances not found on earth.”

  If it hadn’t been for the perverse situation, I might have almost thought there was something touching and boyish about him. A child’s enthusiasm at the thought of the mysterious substances, the diamonds, the gold at the end of the rainbow.

  “What about Isaiah?”

  “He went along in ’91. He was with his f-father.”

  Of course that’s the way it happened.

  “He ran away from the ship in Nuuk. They had to leave him behind. Loyen found him and sent him home.”

  “And you, Føjl? What did y
ou want with him?”

  When he understands what I’m asking, his expression becomes stony and hard. Now, when it’s all too late, anyway, I manage to reach into the far corners of his soul.

  “I never touched him, of course. Up there on the roof. I loved him, in a way I’ve n-never …”

  His stuttering strangles his sentence. He waits for the tension to subside.

  “Tørk knew that Isaiah had taken something. A c-cassette tape. The glacier had moved. They searched for two weeks without finding it. Finally Tørk chartered a helicopter and flew to Thule. To find the Inuits who had been on the expedition in ’66. He found them, all right. But they d-didn’t want to come back. So he got a description of the route from them. That’s the tape the Baron took. That’s what you found.”

  “So how did you happen to move into the White Palace?”

  I know the answer.

  “Ving,” I say. “It was Ving. He put you there to keep an eye on Isaiah and Juliane.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Then it was the other way around, of course,” I say. “You were there first. Ving moved Isaiah and Juliane in to have them near you. Maybe to find out how much they knew or remembered. That’s why Juliane’s request to move to a lower floor wasn’t approved. They were supposed to be near you.”

  “Seidenfaden hired me. I had never heard of the other two. Not until you uncovered them. I had been a diver for Seidenfaden. He’s a transport engineer. At that time he was dealing in antiques. I dived for idols for him, in Liai Lake in Burma, before the state of emergency.”

  I think about the tea he made for me, how it tasted of the tropics.

  “Later I ran into him in Copenhagen. I was unemployed. Had no p-place to live. He suggested that I might keep an eye on the Baron.”

  There’s not a single human being who doesn’t find it a relief to be forced to tell the truth. The mechanic is not a natural liar.

  “And Tork?”

  His gaze becomes remote. “Someone who carries through with whatever he sets out to do.”

  “What does he know about us?” I ask. “Does he know we’re sitting here right now?”

  He shakes his head.

  “And you, Føjl? Who are you?”

  His eyes are empty. It’s the one question he has never found an answer for. “Someone who wants to make a little money.”

  “I hope it’s a lot of money,” I say. “Enough to compensate for the death of two children.”

  His mouth tightens.

  “Give me a swallow,” I say.

  The flask is empty. He takes another one out of the drawer. I catch a glimpse of a round blue plastic container and a yellow cloth wrapped around something rectangular.

  The liquor has a real kick to it.

  “Loyen, Ving, Andreas Licht?”

  “They were excluded from the start. They’re t-too old. This was supposed to be our expedition.”

  I can hear Tørk’s voice behind his clichés. There’s something charming about naivete. Until it’s seduced. Then it’s simply depressing.

  “So when I started making trouble, all of you agreed that you should be the one to follow me?”

  He shakes his head. “I never heard about any of this, or about Tørk and Katja. That came later. Everything you and I found out together was new to me.”

  Now I see him for what he is. It’s not a disappointing sight. It’s just a more complex picture than I originally had. Infatuation always simplifies things. Like mathematics. Seeing him clearly means becoming objective, dropping the illusion of a hero and coming back to reality.

  Or maybe I’m already drunk after a few sips. That’s what comes from drinking so seldom. You get drunk as soon as the first molecules are absorbed by the mucous membranes inside your mouth.

  The mechanic stands up and goes over to the porthole. I lean forward. With one hand I pick up the bottle. With the other I pull out the drawer and touch the cloth inside. It’s wrapped around a rounded, ridged metal object.

  I look at him. I see his weight, his slowness, his vigor, his greed, and his simplicity. His need for a leader, the danger he represents. I also see his solicitude, his warmth, his patience, his passion. And I see that he is still my only chance.

  Then I close my eyes and wipe my internal slate clean. Gone is our mutual lying, the unanswered questions, the justifiable and the morbid suspicions. The past is a luxury we can no longer afford.

  “Føjl,” I say, “are you going to dive near that stone?”

  He nodded at my question. I didn’t hear whether he said anything or not. But he nodded. For a moment this affirmation blocks out everything else.

  “Why?” I hear myself ask him.

  “It’s lying in a lake of meltwater. It’s almost covered. It’s supposed to be close to the surface of the ice. Seidenfaden doesn’t think it will be difficult to get to it. Either through a meltwater tunnel or through the cracks in a crevasse right next to the saddle. The problem is getting it out. Seidenfaden thinks we should enlarge the tunnel that drains the lake and bring the stone out that way. It will have to be enlarged with explosives. It will all be underwater work.”

  I sit down next to him.

  “Water,” I say, “freezes at 32°F. What reason did Tørk give you to explain why there’s water surrounding the stone?”

  “Isn’t there something about the pressure in the ice?”

  “Yes. There’s something about the pressure. The farther down you go in a glacier, the warmer it gets. Because of the weight of the ice masses above. The ice cap is—10°F at a depth of 1,600 feet. Sixteen hundred feet farther down it’s 14°F. Since the melting point depends on the amount of pressure, water actually exists at temperatures below freezing. Maybe even at 29°F. There are temperate glaciers in the Alps and the Rocky Mountains in which meltwater exists at a depth of a hundred feet and below.”

  He nods. “That’s what Tørk explained to me.”

  “But Gela Alta isn’t in the Alps. It’s a so-called cold glacier. And it’s quite small. At the present time its surface temperature must be 14°F. The temperature at its base is about the same. The melting point under that pressure is around 32°F. Not a drop of liquid water can form in that glacier.”

  He looks at me as he takes a drink. What I’ve said doesn’t bother him. Maybe he didn’t understand it. Maybe Tørk provokes a sense of trust in people that locks out the rest of the world. Maybe it’s just the usual problem: ice is incomprehensible to those who were not born to it. I try another approach.

  “Did they tell you how they found it?”

  “The Greenlanders found it. In prehistoric times. It was in their legends. That’s why they got Andreas Fine Licht involved. In those days it might have still been on top of the ice.”

  “When a meteor enters the atmosphere,” I say, “the first thing that happens, at about ninety miles out, is that a blast wave goes through it, as if it had rammed into a concrete wall. The outer layer melts off. I’ve seen black stripes like that strewn on the ice cap. But this decreases the speed of the meteor and the heat. If it reaches the earth without breaking up, it typically has the earth’s median temperature of 41°F. So it doesn’t melt down. But it doesn’t just sit there either. The force of gravity calmly and quietly presses it down. No meteorites of any size have ever been found on top of the ice. And none ever will be. Gravity presses them down. They become encapsulated and with time are carried out to sea. If they get caught in a crevice underground, they’ll be pulverized. There’s nothing delicate about a glacier. It’s a combination of a stone crusher and a gigantic carpenter’s plane. It doesn’t create enchanted caves around objects of geological interest. It files them down, mashes them to powder, and empties the powder into the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “Then there must be warm springs around it,” the mechanic says.

  “There’s no volcanic activity on Gela Alta.”

  “I’ve seen the photographs. It’s lying in a lake.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen those
photographs, too. If the whole thing’s not a hoax, it’s sitting in water. I sincerely hope that it’s a hoax.”

  “Why?”

  I wonder whether he’ll be able to grasp it. But there’s no other alternative than to tell him the truth. Or what I suspect is the truth.

  “I don’t know for sure, but it looks as if the heat might be coming from the stone. It’s emitting some kind of energy. Maybe in the form of radioactivity. But there’s also another possibility.”

  “What’s that?”

  I can tell by looking at him that these are not new ideas for him, either. He, too, knew that something was wrong. But he pushed the problem aside. He’s a Dane. Always choose the comfort of suppressed information rather than the burdensome truth.

  “The forward tank of the Kronos has been rebuilt. It can be sterilized. It’s equipped with supplies of oxygen and compressed air. It’s constructed as if they were going to transport a large animal. It has occurred to me that Tørk may believe that the stone you are going to pick up is alive.”

  The bottle is empty.

  “That was a good idea with the fire alarm,” I say.

  He smiles wearily. “It was the only way to put the papers back and at the same t-time explain why they were wet.”

  We’re sitting at opposite ends of the bed. The Kronos is moving more and more slowly. A gloomy and lively battle is raging inside my body between two kinds of poison: the crystal-clear unreality of the amphetamines and the fuzzy pleasure of the alcohol.

  “It was when Juliane told you that Loyen had regularly examined Isaiah that I decided it might have something to do with a disease. But when I saw the X-rays, I was convinced. X-rays from the expedition in ’66. Lagermann got them from Queen Ingrid’s Hospital in Nuuk. They didn’t die from the explosion. They were attacked by some kind of parasite. Maybe some sort of worm. But bigger than any I’ve ever seen. And faster. They died within a few days. Maybe in a few hours. Loyen wanted to find out whether Isaiah had been infected.”