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

by Peter Høeg

  "How do you like cooking on a ship?"

  The question is an excuse to stay there. He has put a tray into the dumbwaiter and pushed a button labeled NAVIGATING BRIDGE. Now he's preparing the next one. This is the one that interests me. It consists of tea, toast, cheese, honey, jam, juice, and soft-boiled eggs. Three cups and three plates. On the boat deck, to which the stewardess is forbidden access, the Kronos has three passengers. He puts the tray in the dumbwaiter and presses BOAT DECK.

  "Not bad. Besides, I had no choice. Eleven-fifteen, then," he says in German.

  The scenario for the end of the world is firmly established. It will begin with three extremely cold winters and then the lakes, the rivers, and the seas will freeze over. The sun will cool down so it can no longer create summer, the snow will keep falling for a merciless white eternity. Then one long endless winter will arrive and, finally, the wolf Sköll will devour the sun. The moon and stars will be extinguished, and a fathomless darkness will reign. The Fimbul winter.

  In school they taught us that this was the way northerners imagined the end of the world before Christianity taught them that the universe would perish in fire. I've always remembered this, not because it was any more personally relevant than so much else I learned, but because it dealt with snow. When I heard it for the first time, I thought that it was a distorted picture created by people who had no understanding of the nature of winter.

  Opinion was divided in North Greenland. My mother, along with many others, preferred winter. Because of the hunting on new ice, because of the deep sleep, because of the handicrafts, but most of all because of the visiting. Winter was a time for community, not for the end of the world.

  In school they also told us that Danish culture had made great progress since ancient times and the theory of a Fimbul winter. There are moments when it's difficult for me to believe this is true. Like now, when I'm wiping down the tanning bed in the ship's weight room with alcohol.

  The ultraviolet lights from a tanning bed split small amounts of the oxygen in the air, creating the unstable gas ozone. Its sharp smell of pine needles is found in the summer in Qaanaaq, too, with its almost painfully bright sunshine in the glare off the snow and sea.

  One of my duties is to wipe off this thought-provoking apparatus with alcohol.

  I've always enjoyed cleaning. Even though they tried to teach us laziness in school.

  For the first six months we were taught in the village by the wife of one of the hunters. One summer day they came from the boarding school and wanted to take me to town. A Danish pastor and a West Greenlandic catechist. They issued orders without looking at our faces. They called us avanersuarmiut, people from the north.

  Moritz forced me to go. My brother had grown too big and too obstinate for him. The boarding school was in Qaanaaq, in the town itself. I stayed for five months, until my fighting spirit had matured sufficiently that I could refuse.

  In school we had all our meals served to us. We had a hot bath every day and clean clothes every other. In the village we had bathed once a week, much less often when hunting or traveling. Every day, from the glacier above ahe cliffs, I had collected kangirluayhuq, big blocks of freshwater ice, and carried them home in sacks and heated them over the stove. At the boarding school you turned on a faucet. When summer vacation arrived, all the students and teachers went out to Herbert Island and visited the hunters, and for the first time in a long while we had boiled seal meat and tea. That's when I noticed the paralysis. Not just in me but in everybody. We could not pull ourselves together anymore; it was no longer a natural thing to reach out for some water and brown soap and the package of Neogene and start rinsing the skins. We weren't used to washing clothes, we couldn't pull ourselves together to cook. At every break we would slip into a daydreaming state of waiting. Hoping that someone would take over, would relieve us, free us from our duties, and do what we ourselves ought to have done.

  When I understood where things were heading, I rebelled against Moritz for the first time and went home. It was also a return to relative contentedness with my work.

  This same contentedness comes over me now as I'm vacuuming the cabins in the crew's quarters on the upper deck of the Kronos. The same sense of calm as when I repaired nets in my childhood.

  Strict order reigns in every one of the cabins. The crew understands-as I did to survive the boarding schools in my life-that when you have only a few cubic yards to yourself and your innermost feelings, that private space must be subjected to the severest discipline if it is to withstand the dissolution, destruction, and pressure to yield coming from all sides.

  In his own way Isaiah had this fastidiousness, too. The mechanic had it. The crew of the Kronos has it. Surprisingly enough, Jakkelsen has it, too.

  On his walls Jakkelsen has banners, postcards, and little souvenirs from South America, the Far East, Canada, and Indonesia. All the clothes in the closet are meticulously folded and stacked up.

  I feel around among the stacks. I take off the mattress and vacuum out the cubbyhole for the bed linen. I pull out the desk drawers, I get down on my knees and look under the desk, I carefully examine the mattress. His closet is full of shirts. I touch every one of them. Some of them are raw silk. He has a collection of aftershave lotions and eau de toilette that smell expensive and sweetly alcoholic; I open them and put a dab of the fragrance on a paper napkin, which I then roll into a ball and put in the pocket of my smock, to flush down the toilet later on. I'm looking for something specific, but I don't find it. Or anything else of interest, either.

  I put the vacuum cleaner back and go downstairs, past the second deck, past the cold storage and the supply rooms, and on down the stairs,, bordered on one side by the smokestack housing and on the other by a wall labeled DEEP TANK. At the bottom of the stairs is the door to the engine room. I'm carrying in my hand a bucket and scrub brush as a ready excuse, and if that's not enough, I can always fall back on the tried-and-true story that I'm a stranger who's gotten lost.

  The door is heavy and insulated, and when I open it the noise is deafening at first. I'm out on a steel platform from which a gallery extends, running around the entire perimeter of the room.

  On the deck thirty feet below me on a slightly raised platform in the middle of the room, the engine looms up. It's in two sections: the main engine with nine exposed cylinder heads and a six-cylinder auxiliary engine. The shiny valves move rhythmically like parts of a beating heart. The entire engine block is about sixteen feet high and forty feet long, and the whole thing gives the impression of an overwhelming, tamed savagery. There's not a soul in sight.

  The steel of the walkway is perforated, my canvas shoes are walking right over the drop beneath me. Everywhere signs prohibit smoking in five languages. Several yards up ahead there's an alcove. A blue veil of tobacco smoke is seeping out. Jakkelsen is sitting on a folding chair with his feet up on the worktable smoking a cigar. Half an inch under his lower lip there's a blood blister running the whole width of his mouth. I lean against the table, in order to discreetly put my hand on the 13-inch monkey wrench lying there.

  He takes his feet off the table, puts down the cigar, and gives me a big smile. "Smilla. I was just sitting here thinking about you."

  I let go of the wrench. His restlessness has been temporarily stowed away.

  "I've got a bad back, you know. On other ships they take it easy while they're at sea. Here we start at 7:00 A.M. Chipping off rust and splicing mooring cables and painting and scraping off oxide scale and polishing brass. How am I supposed to keep my hands looking presentable if I have to splice cable every single day?"

  I don't reply. I try silence on Bernard Jakkelsen. He has very little tolerance for it. Even now when he's in good spirits, you can sense his underlying nervousness.

  "Where are we off to, Smilla?" I simply wait.

  "I've been sailing for five years, and I've never seen anything like this before. Alcohol prohibited. Uniforms. No one allowed on the boat deck. And even
Lukas says that he doesn't know where we're going."

  He puffs on his cigar again. "Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen. That must be a Greenlandic middle name…" He must have looked at my passport. Which is in the ship's safe. That's something worth thinking about. "I've had a good look at this ship. I know everything about ships. This one here, she's got a double hull and icebreaker cables running the whole length of the ship. Up front the plates are thick enough to withstand an antitank grenade."

  He gives me a sly look. "In the stern, over the propeller, there's an ice cutter. That engine produces at least 6,000 ihp, enough to sail at 16 to 18 knots. We're on our way up to the ice. I'm sure about that. You don't think we're heading for Greenland, do you?"

  I don't have to reply to keep him talking.

  "Then there's the crew. They're a pile of shit. And they stick together. They all know each other. And they're scared; can't get them to talk about why. And there are the passengers that we never see. Why are they coming along?"

  He puts down his cigar. He hasn't really been enjoying it. "Then there's you, Smilla. I've sailed on lots of 4,000 ton ships. None of them ever had a cabin attendant. Certainly not one who acts like she's the Queen of Sheba."

  I pick up his cigar and drop it in my bucket. It goes out with a little hiss.

  "I'm cleaning up," I say.

  "Why did he let you on board, Smilla?"

  I don't give him an answer. I don't know what to say.

  It's not until the door to the engine room shuts behind me that I realize how enervating the noise was. The silence is refreshing.

  Verlaine, the bosun, is standing on the lowest platform, leaning against the wall. I involuntarily turn sideways as I go past him.

  "Get lost?"

  He pulls out a clump of rice from his breast pocket and puts it in his mouth. He doesn't drop a single grain, and nothing sticks to his hands; it's a purely automatic movement.

  Maybe I should make up an excuse, but I hate being interrogated. "Just took a wrong turn."

  Several steps up, I happen to remember something. "Mr. Bosun," I add. "Just took a wrong turn, Mr. Bosun."

  3

  I hit the alarm clock with the side of my hand. It shoots through the cabin like a projectile, slams against the hooks on the door, and drops to the floor.

  I don't do well with phenomena that are supposed to last for life. Prison sentences, marriage contracts, lifetime appointments. They're attempts to pin down segments of life and exempt them from the passage of time. It's even worse with things that are supposed to last forever. Like my alarm clock. My "eternity clock." That's what they called it. I pried it out of the smashed instrument panel of the second NASA moon vehicle after it was totaled on the ice cap. The vehicle was as incapable as the Americans of withstanding minus 67°F and winds that went off the Beaufort scale.

  They didn't notice that I took the clock. I took it as a souvenir, to prove that no everlasting flowers can survive in my company, that even the American space program couldn't survive three weeks with me.

  The clock has lasted for ten years. Ten years in which it has received nothing but brutality and harsh words. But they expected great things from it back then. They said you could stick it in the flame of a blowtorch and boil it in sulfuric acid and sink it to the bottom of the Philippine Trench and it would keep time as if nothing had happened. This claim was a flagrant provocation for me. In Qaanaaq we thought that wristwatches were cute. Some of the hunters wore them for decoration. But we would never dream of being regulated by them.

  That's what I told Gil, who was driving. (My job was to sit in the observation cockpit and report when the color of the firn got too dark or too white, which means that it won't hold but will open up, allowing the earth to swallow a 15-ton, idiotic American dream of reaching the moon, letting it fall into a 100-foot-deep, brilliantly blue-and-green crevasse, which narrows at the bottom and wedges everything that falls in into a tight embrace at minus 22°F.) In Qaanaaq we are guided by the weather, I told him. We are guided by the animals. By love. And death. Not by a piece of mechanized tin.

  I was only in my early twenties. At that age you can lie -you can even lie to yourself-with greater self-confidence. In reality, European time had come to Greenland a long time ago, long before my birth. It came with the Greenland Trading Company's opening and closing times, payment schedules, church hours, and hourly wages.

  I've tried pounding on the clock with a sheet-metal hammer. It made dents in the hammer. By now I've given up. Now I make do with knocking it onto the floor, where it lies, electronically beeping, unperturbed, saving me from showing up on the bridge without having splashed cold water on my face and put on eyeliner.

  It's 2:30 a.m. It's the middle of the night in the Northern Atlantic Ocean. At 10:00 p.m., with no prior warning except a green wink of light, Lukas's voice had issued from the loudspeaker over my bed. Like an invasion of my little room.

  "Jaspersen. At 3:00 a.m. we need coffee served on the bridge."

  Not until the clock hits the floor does it emit any sound. I woke up on my own, awakened by a feeling of abnormal activity. Twenty-four hours is enough to make the ship's rhythm my own. A ship at sea is quiet at night. the engine thuds, of course, the long, high swells slosh against the side, and now and then the stern crushes a fifty-ton block of water into a fine powder of fluid. But those are normal sounds, and when sounds are repeated often enough, they become part of the silence. The watch is changed on the bridge, somewhere a ship's clock strikes. But the people are asleep.

  Now there is commotion against this familiar backdrop. Boots in the corridor, doors slamming, voices, sounds on the loudspeaker, and a distant rumbling from hydraulic winches.

  On my way up the stairs to the bridge, I stick my head out on deck. It's dark. I can hear footsteps and voices, but no light is on. I step out into the darkness.

  I'm not wearing any outdoor clothes. The temperature is about freezing, the wind is blowing astern, the cloud cover is low and dense. The waves are visible only right next to the ship, but the troughs of the waves seem as long as a soccer field. The deck is slippery and slick with salt water. I duck under the sea rail to seek shelter and make myself as unobtrusive as possible. Near the tarp I pass a figure in the dark. Up ahead there is a faint light. It's coming from the cargo hold farthest forward. The hatches have been slid aside and a railing put up around the opening. Two wires extend through the opening from the two backward-facing cranes on the forward mast. Over the railing, both in front and in back, lies a heavy blue nylon hawser. There's no one in sight.

  The cargo hold is surprisingly deep and illuminated by four fluorescent lights, one on each bulkhead. Thirty feet down, on the lid of a huge metal container, sits Verlaine. At each corner of the container is a white fiberglass holder, like the ones for inflatable life rafts.

  That's all I manage to see. Someone grabs my clothes from behind.

  I yield, not out of resignation, but to retaliate with even greater force. At that moment the ship rolls on an oblique swell, and we lose our balance and fall backward against the control panel for the winches, and I catch a scent of aftershave that I recognize.

  "Idiot! You idiot!" Jakkelsen fights to catch his breath after his exertion. There's something in his face and voice that wasn't there before. The beginnings of fear.

  "This ship is run like in the old days-you keep to your own area." He gives me an almost pleading look. "Beat it. Get lost."

  I walk back. He half whispers, half shouts after me into the wind. "Do you want to end up in the big wet closet?"

  The tray rams into one side of the door frame and then the other before I manage to get my bearings and stand there clattering in the dark room.

  No one speaks to me. After a moment I push my way backward and find room for the cups and the pastry on the table among rulers and calipers.

  "Two minutes, eight hundred yards."

  He's merely an outline in the dark, but it's an outline that I haven't seen before. H
e's bending over the green digits of the electronic log.

  The pastry dough smells of butter. Urs is a meticulous cook. The aroma is whisked away because the door is standing open. On the bridge wing, I can make out Sonne's back.

  Above a sea chart, a faint red bulb is turned on, and Sigmund Lukas's face appears out of the darkness. "Five hundred yards."

  The other man is wearing a coverall with the collar turned up. Next to him, on the navigation table, there is a flat box the size of a stereo amplifier. Two slender telescope antennas stick up out of the sides of the box. Nearby stands a woman, wearing the same kind of coverall as the man. Her long dark hair flowing loosely over her turned-up collar and curling down her back seems oddly out of place with her work clothes and air of concentration. It's Katja Claussen. Instinctively I know that the man is Seidenfaden.

  "One minute, two hundred yards."

  "Hoist it up."

  The voice comes from the intercom on the wall. I release my grip on the tabletop behind me. My palms are sweaty. I've heard that voice before. On the phone in my apartment. The last time I was there.

  The red light goes off. Out of the night a gray shape rises up, emerging from the forward cargo hold, and swings, swaying slowly, over the side of the ship.

  "Ten seconds."

  "Lower it, Verlaine."

  He must be sitting in the enclosed crow's nest at the top of the forward mast. We're listening to his orders to the crew.

  "Pull it tight. Slack off now."

  "Five seconds. Four, three, two, one, zero."

  A ray of light behind us bores a tunnel through the night. The container is lying in the water, fifteen feet from the stern. It's apparently riding a bow wave. From one of its corners, a blue hawser runs forward along the side of the ship. Maria and Fernanda, Hansen, and the deckhands are standing at the railing. They're keeping it away from the hull with what looks like a very long boathook. In the light I can see that there are two narrow, inflatable white rubber strips along its sides.