Smilla's Sense of Snow aka Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

by Peter Høeg

  She's in her mid-sixties, with long reddish-brown hair partially pinned up under her hat. She is straight-backed, pale, with an aggressive chin and flaring nostrils. She's a complex person if I've ever seen one.

  I have only the time it takes to cross the floor to make a few crucial decisions.

  Several hours earlier I called her from a phone booth at Enghave Station. Her voice is deep, hoarse, almost lazy. But underneath the calm I think I can sense a volcano. Or maybe I'm hearing a mirage. After spending an hour at Berth 126, I don't trust my ears anymore.

  When I tell her that I'm interested in her work in Berlin in 1946, she refuses to discuss it.

  "It's absolutely out of the question. Completely impossible. It's a matter of military secrets, you know. And, by the way, it was Hamburg."

  She is quite determined. But at the same time there is a glimmer of curiosity strictly reined in.

  "I'm calling from Svanemolle Army Base," I say. "We're putting together a publication commemorating Danish participation in the Second World War."

  She does an about-face.

  "Are you really? So you're calling from the base. Are you from the Women's Corps, perhaps?"

  "I have a master's in history. I'm editing this commemorative publication for the army's historical archives."

  "Are you really? A woman! I'm pleased to hear that. I think I'd better speak to my father first. Do you know my father?"

  I haven't had the pleasure. And if I'm going to meet him, I'd better hurry. According to my calculations, he must be about ninety. But I don't say this out loud. "General August Clahn," she says.

  "We would like the publication to be a surprise." She understands perfectly.

  "When would you be free to talk to me?"

  "That will be difficult," she says. "I'll have to look at my calendar."

  I wait. I can see my reflection in the steel wall of the phone booth. It shows a big fur hat. Dark hair underneath. Beneath the hair a smirking smile.

  "I might just be able to find time this afternoon."

  That's what I remember on my way through the cafe. As I look at her. A general's daughter. A friend of the military. But also a hoarse voice. The way she looks at the mechanic. An explosive person. I reach a decision.

  "Smilla Jaspersen," I say. "And this is Captain Peter Fojl, Ph.D."

  The mechanic freezes.

  Benedicte Clahn laughs radiantly at him. "How exciting. Are you a historian, too?"

  "One of the best military historians in Northern Europe," I say.

  His right eye starts to twitch. I order coffee and raspberry tarts for him and myself. Benedicte Clahn orders another mineral water. She doesn't want any cake. She wants Dr. Peter Fojl's undivided attention.

  "There's so much. I don't know what you're interested in."

  I take the plunge. "Your collaboration with Johannes Loyen."

  She nods. "You've spoken to him?"

  "He and Captain Foil are close friends." She nods archly. That's natural. That one sheik would know the other.

  "It's so long ago, you know."

  The coffee arrives in a bistro coffeepot. It's hot and aromatic. Meeting the mechanic is what has lured me into the dangerous practice of drinking this damaging intoxicant.

  He leaves his cup untouched. He hasn't yet grown accustomed to his academic distinction. He's sitting there looking down at his hands.

  "It was in March of 1946. The Royal Air Force had taken over Dagmar House on Town Hall Square from the Germans in Copenhagen. I found out that they were looking for young Danish men and women who could speak German and English. My mother was Swiss. I had gone to school in Grindelwald. I'm bilingual. I was too young to join the Resistance. But I saw this as an opportunity to do something for Denmark."

  She's talking to me. But everything is directed at the mechanic. A large part of her life has probably been directed toward men.

  She laughs hoarsely. "To be quite honest, I had a boyfriend, a second lieutenant who had gone down there six months earlier. I wanted to be wherever he was. Women had to turn twenty-one within the first three months they were there. I was eighteen. And I wanted to leave at once. So I lied that I was three years older."

  Maybe, I think to myself, this was also your chance to escape from Daddy General in a legal way.

  "I was interviewed by a colonel in the blue-gray uniform of the RAF. There was also a test in English and German. And in reading Gothic German handwriting. They said they wanted to check my conduct during the war. They must not have done that, or they would have found out about my age."

  The raspberry tart has a bottom layer of almond custard. It tastes of fruit, burnt almonds, and heavy cream. Combined with the surroundings, it is for me the quintessence of the middle and upper classes in Western civilization. The union of exquisitely sophisticated crowning achievements and a nervous, senselessly extravagant consumption.

  "We took a special train to Hamburg. Of course, Germany was divided among the Allied powers. Hamburg was British. We worked and were housed in a large Hitler Jugend barracks. Count Goltz Barracks in Rahlstedt."

  Being the untalented listeners that they are, most Danes cheat themselves out of experiencing a fascinating law of nature. The one now taking effect in Benedicte Claim, the transformation of the speaker the minute she becomes absorbed in her story.

  "We were housed in double rooms with two beds across from the buildings where we worked. It was a large hall. We sat twelve at each table. We wore uniforms, khaki-colored battle dress with skirts, shoes, stockings, and a cape. We had the rank of sergeant in the British Army. At every table there was a Tischsortierer, a table monitor. At our table this was a female British captain."

  She pauses for a moment. The pianist is working his way into Frank Sinatra. She isn't listening.

  "Purple Bols," she says. "I got drunk for the first time in my life. We could buy things at the PX on the base. For a carton of Capstan cigarettes we could get as much on the black market as a German family lived on for a month. The man in charge was Colonel Ottini. An Englishman in spite of his name. About thirty-five. Charming, with a face like a good-natured bulldog. We read all mail going out and coming into the country. Letters and envelopes looked the way they do today. But the paper was worse. We would cut open the envelope, read the letter, stamp it CENSORED, and then tape it closed. All photographs and drawings were to be removed and destroyed. All letters with gossip about Nazis who had positions in the reconstruction of Germany were to be reported. If, for example, it said, `Just imagine, once he was a Sturmbannfuhrer in the SS and now he's a manager.' It was quite common. But mostly they were looking for the Nazi underground organization called Edelweiss. You see, the Germans had burned a large part of their own archives during the retreat. The Allies were in desperate need of information. That must be why they hired us. There were six hundred of us Danes. And that was just in Hamburg. If a letter mentioned the word `Edelweiss,' if it contained a pressed flower, if letters were underlined that might form the word `Edelweiss,' then we were supposed to stamp it-we each had our own rubber stamp-and send it on to der Tischsortierer."

  As if by telepathy the pianist is now playing "Lili MarIene." With a march tempo, the way Marlene Dietrich sang one of the verses. Benedicte Claim closes her eyes. Her voice has changed.

  "That song," she says.

  We wait until it comes to the end. It slips over into "Ich hab noch einen Koffer in Berlin."

  "The worst thing was the hunger," she says. "The hunger and the destruction. It was twenty minutes by a kind of subway from Rahlstedt to the center of Hamburg. We were off every Saturday afternoon and Sunday. And with our sergeants' uniforms, we had access to the officers' mess halls. Could get champagne, caviar, Chateaubriand, ice cream. Fifteen minutes from the center of town, near Wandsbek, the piles of rubble started. You can't possibly imagine it. Rubble as far as the eye could see. All the way to the horizon. A plain of ruins. And the Germans. They were starving. They walked past on the street, pa
le, hollow-cheeked, famished. I was there for six months. Never, not once, did I ever see a German hurry."

  She has tears in her voice. She has forgotten where she is. She grips my arm hard.

  "War is horrible!"

  She looks at us, realizes that we are representatives of the armed forces,. and for a brief moment a number of planes of consciousness collide for her. Then she returns to the present, cheerful and sensual. She smiles at the mechanic.

  "My second lieutenant went home. I was ready to follow him. But one day I'm called into Ottini's office. He makes me an offer. The next day I'm transferred to Blankenese. On the Elbe River. There the British had taken over all the big mansions. We worked in one of ' them. There were forty of us in the house. Mostly British and Americans. The twenty who worked on the top floor i listened in on the telephone network. Downstairs there;j were several different groups. Of course we were never told what the others were doing. In Rahlstedt we had also been sworn to secrecy. But there we talked to each other all the same. We showed each other funny letters. In Blankenese it was completely different. That's where I met Johannes Loyen. At first it was just myself and two others. An English mathematician and a Belgian teacher of choreographic notation systems. We worked with j coded letters and telephone conversations. Mostly letters." She laughs.

  "I think they were testing us in the beginning. Gave us things that weren't important. We often cracked two letters a day. They were usually love letters. I arrived in July. In August something happened. The letters changed character. Many of them were written by the same people. A new censor was also attached to our group, a German who had worked for von Gehlen. I never understood it. That the Americans and the British took over parts of the German intelligence apparatus. But he was a kind and gentle man. You can never really tell about people, can you?-they say that Himmler played the violin. His name was Holtzer. He somehow had a special knowledge of the case we were working on. That's what I gradually came to understand. That it was a case. The other three knew about it. They never said anything. But they kept on asking me about specific phrases. Gradually a picture began to emerge."

  We've vanished for her again. She is in Hamburg, on the Elbe, in August 1946.

  "There was one word they kept asking about. It was `Niflheim.' One day I looked it up. It means `world of mists.' It's the outermost part of Hell, the realm of the dead. By the end of August they must have narrowed down what they were looking for, because from then on we only received letters exchanged by the same four people. We never saw the envelopes. We only knew their names, never their addresses. At first we had eight letters. About two new ones arrived each week. The code was rather sloppy, like something learned in a hurry. But still complicated to break, because it didn't build on normal language but on a series of agreed-upon metaphors. It ostensibly dealt with the transport and sale of goods. It was at this time that Johannes-Dr. Loyen-joined the group. He was in Germany as a forensic medicine expert, to participate in the closure of concentration camps."

  She squints her eyes, which makes her look like a schoolgirl.

  "A very handsome man. And quite vain. Give him my greetings and tell him I said that, Captain."

  The mechanic nods and crushes his napkin in his hands.

  "He was bitter that it was the forensic odontologists and not him who were the big stars in the identification process, also in connection with the Nuremberg trials. With our group he was supposed to serve as a consultant on medical matters. There was no need for that. At that time I discovered that Niflheim had to be an expedition to Greenland. Loyen knew something about Greenland. Perhaps he had been there. He never told us. But he was good at German. He ended up working on an equal footing with the rest of us. At the end of September we had a breakthrough. I was the one who broke the code: A letter mentioned, as a prognosis, the price of beans during the current week. Figures that rose slightly each day, culminating on Friday. I looked up the week in the Almanac that my mother had sent me. There was a full moon on Friday. I had sailed the English Channel in the Admiral's Cup on Father's big Colin Archer several times. It seemed to me that the numbers resembled tide tables. We looked them up in the big almanacs of the British fleet. It was the ebb and flow of the Elbe. After that it was easy. It took us three weeks to decipher our way backward through the letters. They were about finding a ship, and sailing it to Greenland. Operation Niflheim."

  "For what?" I ask. She shakes her head.

  "I never found out. I don't think the others knew, either. The letters were about negotiating for a shipwhich was quite complicated because of the state of emergency. And about the possibility of sailing to Kiel and north through Danish waters. About which passages had been mineswept. About the British blockade of the Elbe and the Kiel Canal. But all the people who wrote them knew what it was about. That's why they never mentioned it."

  All three of us lean back at the same moment. Back to the pastry shop, The Golden Brioche, back to the smell of coffee, back to the present, to "Satin Doll."

  "I would like a small tart," says Benedicte Clahn.

  She has earned it. It arrives, looking like summer. With whipped cream so fresh and soft and yellowish white, as if they had a cow standing in back of the bakery.

  I wait for her to taste it. It's difficult for people to be on their guard at the same time as their senses are being caressed.

  "Have you talked about this to anyone else?"

  She's about to deny it indignantly. Then her reawakened memories and her trust in us and maybe even the taste of the raspberries do something to her.

  "I was brought up taking discretion for granted," she says.

  We nod reassuringly.

  "Perhaps Johannes Loyen and I have discussed these things one or two times. But that was over twenty years ago."

  "Was it possibly in 1966?"

  She looks at me with surprise. For a moment I'm in the clanger zone. Then she tells herself that, of course, we knew this from Loyen.

  "Johannes worked for a company that was organizing a trip to Greenland. He wanted us to sit down together and try to reconstruct some of the information from the Ietters of '46. It was mainly route descriptions. A lot about anchoring conditions. We were not successful. Even though we spent a lot of time on it. I even think I received a fee for it."

  "And again in '90 and '91?"

  She bites her lip. "Helen, his wife, is very jealous."

  "What was he interested in?"

  She shakes her head. "He has never told me anything. Have you tried to ask him yourself?"

  "We haven't had the opportunity," I say. "But we will."

  Something about my reply distracts her. I search for something reassuring to divert her attention. She thinks of something herself. She looks from me to the mechanic and back again.

  "Are you married?"

  Surprisingly enough, he blushes. It starts at his throat and creeps upward, like an allergic reaction to shellfish. A flaming, helpless blush.

  I notice a brief wave of heat along my inner thighs. For a moment I think someone has put something warm in my lap. But there's nothing there.

  "No," I say. "It's difficult to devote yourself to the army's archives and have a family at the same time." She nods sympathetically. She knows everything about t he dichotomy between war and love.

  "Two men meet," I say, "maybe in Berlin. Loyen and Ving. Loyen knows something, knows about something in Greenland worth finding. Ving has an organization that they can use as a cover for getting it, because he's the director of the Cryolite Corporation and its real leader. Then there's Andreas Licht. About him we know only that he is familiar with conditions in Greenland."

  I have no intention of telling him about Berth 126. "They organize an expedition, under the guise of the corporation, in 1966. Something goes wrong. Maybe there was an accident involving explosives. At any rate, the expedition fails. So they wait twenty-five years. And then try again. But this time something is different. Outside money pays for the transportati
on. It seems as if they've gotten help and allied themselves with someone. But something goes wrong again. Four men die. One of them is Isaiah's father."

  I'm sitting on the mechanic's sofa. Under a woolen blanket. He's standing in the middle of the room, about to open a bottle of champagne. There's something distracting to me about the expensive wine here in this room. He puts it down unopened.

  "I talked to Juliane this afternoon," he says.

  I noticed at the pastry shop, and afterward on the way home, that something was wrong.

  "The Baron was examined every month at the hospital. She got f-fifteen hundred kroner every time. Always the f-first Tuesday of the month. They picked him up. She never went along. The Baron never said anything."

  He sits down and stares at the cold bottle. I know what he's thinking. He's considering putting it away again. He has put tall, fragile glasses in front of us. First he washed them in hot water without soap, and then dried them with a clean dishcloth until they were totally transparent. In his big hands they seem as fragile as cellophane.

  In Nuuk the waiting list for housing is eleven years. Then you get a closet, a shed, a shack. All money in Greenland is attached to the Danish language and culture. Those who master Danish get the lucrative positions. The others can languish in the filet factories or in unemployment lines. In a culture that has a murder rate comparable to a war zone.

  Growing up in Greenland has ruined my relationship to wealth for good. I see that it exists. But I could never strive for it. Or seriously respect it. Or regard it as a goal.

  I often feel like a garbage pail. Circumstances have clumped into my life the excesses of a technological culture: differential equations, a fur hat. And now: a bottle of wine cooled to 32°F. Over the years it has gotten harder for me to enjoy it wholeheartedly. If it were all taken away in a flash, I wouldn't mind.