Smilla's Sense of Snow
Page 47
He’s holding the harpoon gun in front of him. He must have loaded it again. It seems as long as a lance; for a moment his wasted and much too rigid figure makes him look like some kind of cartoon character. His pants have frozen into an armor of ice. On his way ashore he must have fallen in.
“You must be held responsible,” he says.
Tørk’s umbrella shudders. A big invisible hand spins Lukas around on the spot. Then the dull blast follows, and Lukas has sketched a full pirouette. His face is once again turned toward us, but now his left arm is missing. He sits down on the ice and the bleeding starts.
Then the mechanic moves. Because he’s coming out of the water for a brief moment he resembles a big fish jumping onto land. The umbrella careens across the ice. Even without it, there is great confidence in Tørk’s upright form.
The mechanic reaches him. One of his yellow gloves clamps onto Tørk’s shoulder, the other locks around his jaw. Then he squeezes. When the face beneath the pale hair falls backward, the mechanic bends his helmet over it; they look each other in the eye. I wait for the sound of vertebrae being torn apart. The crack won’t be the sound of something breaking but of something slipping into place.
Tørk kicks, a practiced movement that goes outward and moves in a semicircle toward the mechanic’s face. It strikes the side of his helmet with the sound of an ax burying itself in a tree stump. Slowly the yellow form lists sideways and sinks to its knees.
The umbrella is lying in front of me on the ice. I’m so scared of the weapon that I can’t even kick it away.
The mechanic straightens up. He starts to take off his oxygen tanks. His movements are weightlessly slow, like an astronaut.
Then Tørk takes off. I run after him.
He could force the others to sail away. They wouldn’t like it. Especially Sonne. But Tørk could make them leave.
He runs down along the crevasse. His lamp flickers. It’s dark. At night in Qaanaaq I would go up on the ice to get blocks of meltwater. The ice has its own nocturnal hospitality. I have no flashlight now, but I’m running as if it were a level road. Without difficulty, with confidence. My kamiks grip the snow in a different way than his boots do.
It would take so little. One little mistake and he would fall the way Isaiah fell.
The white fields where the snow has settled form hexagons in the dark. We’re running through the universe.
I abandon the edge of the glacier before he does and head down. I want to cut him off from the motorboat. He hasn’t seen me yet or heard me. But he knows I’m here.
The ice is hikuliaq, new ice, that has formed where the old ice has drifted out. It’s too thick to force a motorboat through but too thin to walk on. A white fog of frost hovers overhead.
Then he sees me, or maybe he merely sees a figure, and he heads out onto the ice. I take a path parallel to his. He sees that it’s me. He realizes that he doesn’t have the strength to reach me.
The Kronos is hidden in the fog. He heads too far to the right. When he instinctively corrects his course, the ship is two hundred yards behind us. He’s lost his bearings. He’s being led out toward open water. Toward the spot where the current has hollowed out the ice so it’s as thin as a membrane, a fetal membrane. Underneath, the sea is dark and salty like blood, and a face is pressing up against the icy membrane from below; it’s Isaiah’s face, the as-yet-unborn Isaiah. He’s calling Tørk. Is it Isaiah who is pulling him along, or am I the one who is trying to head him off and to force him toward the thin ice?
His strength is about to give out. If you haven’t grown up in this landscape, it uses up your strength.
Maybe in a moment the ice will give way beneath him. Maybe it will seem a relief to have the cold water make him weightless and suck him downward. Even on a night like this the ice will look bluish white, like a neon light, from below.
Or maybe he will change direction and head to the right again, across the ice. Tonight the temperature will drop even more, and there will be a snowstorm. He’ll only survive a couple of hours. At some point he will stop, and the cold will transform him; like a stalactite, a frozen shell will close around a barely fluid life until even his pulse stops and he becomes one with the landscape. You can’t win against the ice.
Behind us the stone is still there, with its mystery and the questions it has raised. And the mechanic.
Somewhere ahead of me the running figure slowly grows darker.
Tell us, they’ll say to me. So we will understand and be able to resolve things. They’ll be mistaken. It’s only the things you don’t understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution.
Translation copyright © 1993 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
All rights reserved
Originally published in Danish under the title
Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne, copyright © 1992 by Peter Høeg and Rosinante/Munksgaard, Copenhagen
Designed by Debbie Glasserman
eISBN 9781429998536
First eBook Edition : March 2011
First edition, 1993
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Høeg, Peter.
[Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne. English] Smilla’s sense of snow / Peter Høeg ; translated by Tiina
Nunnally. p. cm.
I. Title.
PT8176.18.O335F7613 1993
839.8’1374—dc20
93-17742 CIP