Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  The corridor is empty. But there’s movement behind the door to the mess. I open it a crack. Urs is setting the table. I slip inside the door. He puts down a basket of bread. He doesn’t notice me at first; then he does.

  I unscrew the top of a thermos. Pour myself a cup, put in some sugar, stir it, and take a sip. The coffee is almost scalding, the burned taste of the beans is nauseating combined with the sugar.

  “How long are we going to be here, Urs?”

  He’s staring at my face. I can’t feel my nose, can only sense a diffuse heat.

  “You’re under arrest, Fräulein Smilla.”

  “I have permission to stroll around.”

  He doesn’t believe me. He’s hoping that I’ll leave. Nobody likes a guaranteed loser.

  “Drei Tage. Three days. Tomorrow the provisions will be taken ashore. Then we’ll all work im Schnee, in the snow.”

  They’re going to help pull the stone down the chute made from railroad ties. That means that it must be very close to the coast.

  “Who has gone ashore?”

  “Tork, Verlaine, der neue Passagier. With bottles.”

  At first I don’t understand him. He sketches them with his hands in the air: oxygen tanks.

  I’m on my way out the door when he comes after me. The situation is a repeat; we’ve stood this way before.

  “Fräulein Smilla …”

  Urs, the man who has never dared come too close, takes hold of my arm, insistent.

  “You must sleep. You need medical treatment,” he says.

  I pull my arm away. I haven’t succeeded in frightening him. Instead, I’ve appealed to his sense of sympathy.

  At sea, as a matter of principle, you lock a door only upon exiting a room, to make the work easier during a rescue operation if there’s a fire. Lukas sleeps with his door unlocked. He’s sound asleep. I close the door behind me and sit down at the foot of his bunk. He opens his eyes. At first they’re dull with sleep, then glassy with shock.

  “I’ve temporarily discharged myself.”

  He tries to grab me. He’s quicker than you might expect, considering that he’s lying on his back and has just been sound asleep. I show him the revolver. He keeps coming. I bring the barrel up to his face and snap off the safety.

  “I’ve got nothing to lose,” I say.

  He relaxes. “Go back. Being under arrest is your security.”

  “Oh, sure,” I say, “having Maurice outside is so comforting. Put on your coat. We’re going out on deck.”

  He hesitates. Then he reaches for his outdoor clothes. “Tørk is right. You’re sick.”

  Maybe he’s right. In any case, a layer of numbness has come between me and the rest of the world. A crust in which the nerves are dead. I rinse off my nose at the sink. It’s awkward because I have to hold the gun in my other hand and keep an eye on Lukas at the same time. There’s not as much blood as I thought. Facial wounds always feel worse than they are.

  He goes first. As we pass the stairs to the upper decks, Sonne comes down. I step close to Lukas. Sonne stops. Lukas waves him on. He hesitates; then his training, years in the navy, and all his inner discipline take over. He steps aside. We continue on across the deck. Over to the railing. I stand a few yards away. This means we have to speak loudly to hear each other. But it makes it more difficult for him to grab me.

  I have spent so many days on the open sea that the island seems to me to have a dark, painful beauty about it.

  It’s so narrow and high that it looms up from the frozen sea like a tower. The rock is visible only in a few places; by and large it’s covered with ice. Like a cold Arctic cornucopia, the ice spills over the edge of the bowl-shaped top and down the steep sides. A spit is protruding through the sea toward the Kronos: the Barren Glacier. If we could see the other sides, we’d see sheer rock faces, ravaged by crevasses and avalanches.

  The wind is blowing off the island, a north wind, avangnaq. This crystallizes into another word, and at first there is only the internal sound, as if it were spoken by someone else, someone inside me. Pirhirhuq, snowstorm weather. I shake my head. We’re not in Thule; the weather is different here. My exhausted system is creating phantoms.

  “Where will you go afterward?” He gestures around the deck and at the open water. At the motorboat over at the edge of the ice.

  “Be my guest, Miss Smilla.”

  Now that he drops all pretense of courtesy, I realize that it has never really been part of him. It belongs to Tørk. Along with the justice on board. Lukas has never been anything but a tool.

  He starts walking away from me. He, too, is a loser. He has nothing more to lose, either. I let the heavy metal slip down into my pocket. Before, in the infirmary, I could have shot Maurice. Maybe. Or maybe I consciously didn’t take off the safety.

  “Jakkelsen,” I say as Lukas is leaving. “Verlaine killed Jakkelsen, and Tørk sent the telegram.”

  He comes back. He stands next to me, staring out across the island. He stays there, his expression never changing, as I talk. At one point the outlines of several large birds tear away from high up on the slopes of ice: migratory albatrosses. Lukas doesn’t notice them. I tell him everything, from the beginning. I don’t know how long it takes. When I’m done, the wind has died down. The light also seems to have shifted, although I couldn’t say exactly how. Now and then I glance over at the door. No one appears.

  Lukas has lit one cigarette after another. As if lighting up, inhaling, and then exhaling the smoke must be done with great meticulousness each time.

  He straightens up and gives me a smile.

  “They should have listened to me,” he says. “I suggested that they give you an injection. Fifteen milligrams of a strong tranquillizer. I told them you would escape. Tørk was against the idea.”

  He smiles again. This time there is madness in his smile. “It’s almost as if he wanted you to come. He left the rubber raft behind. Maybe he wants you to go ashore.”

  He waves at me and says, “Duty calls,” as he walks off.

  I lean on the railing. Tørk is somewhere in the low fog banks where the ice floats out to sea.

  Far below there is a white wreath. Lukas’s cigarette butts. They’re not bobbing up and down; they’re lying perfectly still. The water they’re floating in is still black. But it’s no longer shiny. It’s covered with a dull membrane. The sea around the Kronos is about to freeze over. The clouds overhead are being sucked up into the heavens. The air is completely still. The temperature has dropped at least fifteen degrees in the last half hour.

  Nothing seems to have been touched in my cabin. I get out a pair of short rubber boots and put my kamiks in a plastic bag.

  The mirror reveals that my nose isn’t particularly swollen. But it’s sitting crooked, pressed too far to one side.

  In a moment he’s going to start diving. I remember the steam in the photo. The water is probably 50° or 55°F. He’s only human. It’s not much. I know that from my own experience. Yet you always try to keep yourself alive.

  I put on my thermal pants, two thin wool sweaters, and my down jacket. From my box I take out a wrist compass and a flat canteen. And a woolen blanket. Sometime long ago I must have been preparing for just this moment.

  All three of them are sitting down; that’s why I don’t spot them until I’m actually up on deck. The air has been let out of the rubber raft; it’s a gray blanket of rubber with yellow markings, lying flat against the aft superstructure.

  The woman is squatting down. She shows me her knife.

  “I let the air out with this,” she says.

  She hands it back to Hansen, who’s leaning against the davits.

  She stands up and comes toward me. I have my back to the ladder. Seidenfaden follows her hesitantly.

  “Katja,” he says.

  None of them is wearing outdoor clothes.

  “He wanted you to go ashore,” she says.

  Seidenfaden puts his hand on her shoulder. She turns around and s
laps him. One corner of his mouth splits open. His face looks like a mask.

  “I love him,” she says.

  Her remark isn’t directed at anyone in particular. She comes closer.

  “Hansen found Maurice,” she says, as if in explanation. And then without transition she adds, “Do you want him?”

  I’ve seen it before, the domain where jealousy and insanity run together, erasing reality.

  “No,” I say.

  I move backward and bump into something that won’t budge. Urs is standing behind me. He still has his apron on. Over it he’s wearing a fur coat. In his hand is a loaf of bread. It must have just come out of the oven; in the cold it’s surrounded by a halo of dense steam. The woman ignores him. When she reaches for me, Urs places the bread against her throat. She falls onto the rubber raft and stays there. The burn appears on her throat like film being developed, with marks from the ridges on the bread.

  “What should I do?” Urs asks me.

  I hand him the mechanic’s revolver.

  “Can you buy me some time?” I ask.

  He looks thoughtfully at Hansen.

  “Leicht,” he says, “no problem.”

  The pontoon bridge is still out. As soon as I see the ice, I realize that I’ve come too early. It’s still too transparent to bear my weight. I sit down on a chair to wait. I prop my feet up on the cable box. This is where Jakkelsen once sat. And Hansen. On a ship you’re continually crossing your own tracks. Just as you do in life.

  It’s snowing. Big flakes, qanik, like the snow on Isaiah’s grave. The ice is still so warm that the flakes melt on it. If I stare at the snow long enough, the flakes don’t seem to be falling but rather growing up from the sea, rising to the sky to settle on the top of the rock tower above me. At first the snow is six-sided, newly formed flakes. After forty-eight hours the flakes break down, their outlines blur. By the tenth day, the snow is a grainy crystal that becomes compacted after two months. After two years it enters the transitional stage between snow and firn. After three years it becomes névé. After four years, it’s transformed into a large, blocky glacial crystal.

  It wouldn’t survive more than three years here on Gela Alta. By that time the glacier would push it out to sea. There it would break up and float outward to melt, disperse, and be absorbed by the sea. And then someday it would rise up as newly formed snow.

  The ice is grayish now. I step down onto it. It’s not good. Nothing is much good anymore.

  I stay in the shelter of the ship for as long as possible. At one point the ice is so thin that I have to make a detour. They probably wouldn’t see me, anyway. It has started to grow dark. The light is drifting away; it was never very bright in the first place. I have to crawl the last ten yards on my stomach. I put the blanket on the ice and squirm my way forward.

  The motorboat is tied up at the edge of the ice. It’s empty. The shore is still three hundred yards away. A kind of stairway has formed here where the submerged part of the glacier has thawed several times and then frozen up again.

  What’s overpowering me at the moment is the smell of earth. After so long at sea, the island smells like a garden. I scrape away the layer of snow that’s about fifteen inches thick. Underneath are remnants of moss and withered Arctic willow.

  There was a thin layer of snow when they arrived; their footprints are quite clear. They have two sleds with them. The mechanic is pulling one of them, Tørk and Verlaine the other.

  They’ve headed up the slope to avoid the steep portals where the ice runs out to sea. The loose snow is a foot and a half deep. They’ve been taking turns stamping down a trail.

  I put on my kamiks. I keep my eyes on the snow and simply concentrate on walking. I feel like a child again. We’re going somewhere, I don’t remember where, it’s been a long journey, maybe many sinik; I start to stumble, I’m no longer one with my feet, they’re walking by themselves, plodding, as if each step were a task to complete. Somewhere inside me I feel an urge to give up, to sit down and sleep.

  Then my mother is behind me. She knows what’s happening, she has known it for some time. She talks to me—she who is usually so taciturn. She gives me a box on the ear, part violence, part caress.

  “What kind of wind is it, Smilla?”

  “It’s kanangnaq.”

  “That’s wrong, Smilla, you’re asleep.”

  “No, I’m not. The wind is faint and damp, the ice must have just started breaking up.”

  “Speak politely to your mother, Smilla. You’ve learned rudeness from qallunaaq.”

  We keep on going this way, and I wake up again. I know that we have to get there; long ago I grew too heavy for her to carry me.

  I’m thirty-seven years old. Fifty years ago, that was a full lifetime in Thule. But I’ve never grown up. I’ve never gotten used to walking alone. Somewhere deep inside I’m still hoping that someone will come up behind me and box my ear. My mother. Moritz. Some outside force.

  I’m starting to stumble. I’m standing near the glacier. They paused here. They put crampons on their boots.

  Close up, I understand how the glacier got its name. The wind has worn down its surface to a compact, slippery covering with no irregularities, like a white, fired ceramic glaze. Right in front of me it slides over a drop of about 160 feet. Here the surface of the ice is broken up into an ice fall. A network of gray, white, and grayish-blue steps. From a distance they seem quite regular; on closer inspection they form a labyrinth.

  I can’t tell which way they’ve headed. I can’t see them, either. So I start walking. Their tracks are harder to follow. But not impossible. The snow has settled on the horizontal steps; there they’ve left their mark. At one point, when I lose my bearings and begin searching in semicircles, I spot a yellow trace of urine from far away.

  I start hallucinating and fragments of conversations come back to me. I say something to Isaiah. He answers. The mechanic is there, too.

  “Smilla.”

  I walked three feet past him without seeing him. It’s Tørk. He has been waiting for me. He has spoken my name so gently. Like the time he called me up, on the last night in my apartment.

  He’s alone. He has no sled and no baggage. Sitting there, he looks so colorful. Yellow boots. His red jacket casting a rosy glow across the snow around him. The turquoise band against his pale hair.

  “I knew you would come. But I didn’t know how. I saw you walking across the water.”

  As if we’ve been friends all along but had to hide it from the rest of the world.

  “There was a layer of ice.”

  “Before that you walked through locked doors.”

  “I had a key.”

  He shakes his head. “For people with resources, the right events happen. They may look like coincidences, but they arise out of necessity. Katja and Ralf wanted to put the brakes on you in Copenhagen. But I saw possibilities. You would point out things that we’d overlooked. That Ving and Loyen had overlooked. That people always overlook.”

  He hands me a climbing harness. I step into it and fasten it in front.

  “But what about the Northern Light?” I ask. “And the fire?”

  “Licht called Katja when he got the cassette. He tried to blackmail her. We had to do something. It was my fault that you got involved in that. I turned things over to Maurice and Verlaine. Verlaine has this primitive hatred of women.”

  He gives me the end of the rope. I make a figure-eight hitch. He hands me a short ice ax.

  He goes first. He has a long, thin stick. He uses it to test the ground for crevasses. When he’s fifty feet away, he speaks. The shiny walls around us create acoustics like those in a bathroom. Harsh and yet intimate, as if we were sitting in the bathtub together.

  “Of course, I’ve read the things you’ve written. Your passion for ice is certainly thought provoking.”

  He jabs his ice ax into the snow, wraps the rope around it, and carefully pulls in the rope as I follow him. When I reach him, he speaks again. />
  “What would your experts say about this glacier?”

  We gaze around us in the growing darkness. The question is difficult to answer.

  “I don’t know what to say. If it were ten times bigger, they might classify it as a very small ice calotte. If it were lower they would say it was a botu glacier. If the current and wind conditions had been slightly different, the drifting and deflation would have reduced it so severely within a month that they would say there wasn’t any glacier here at all, just an island with a little snow on it. It’s impossible to classify it.”

  I come up to him again, and he hands me the rope. I choose a belay stance, and he continues on. His natural movements are agile and methodical, but the ice makes them slightly fumbling, too, as with all Europeans. He resembles a blind man, practiced in his blindness, perfectly adapted to his stick, but still blind.

  “The limited ability of science to explain things has always interested me. My own field of biology is based on zoological and botanical systems of classification that have all collapsed. As a science, biology no longer has any foundation. What do you think about change?”

  His question comes as a non sequitur. I follow him, and he winds up the woven double rope. We’re connected by an umbilical cord, like mother and child.

  “It’s supposed to be the spice of life,” I say.

  He hands me his thermos. I take a sip. Hot tea with lemon. He bends down. On the snow there are some dark grains, crushed stone.