by Peter Høeg
If the temperature goes up right before sunrise, the way it did today, the frost will retreat last from a car’s roof and above the windshield wipers. A banal fact that only the fewest people are aware of. The car on Kabbeleje Road that has no frost on it, either because it was wiped off or because it has been recently driven, is a blue Volvo 840.
There are probably plenty of reasons why someone might have parked here at twenty after six in the morning. But just at the moment I can’t think of any. So I walk to the car, bend over the hood, and peer in through the tinted front window. In the driver’s seat sits a man, sleeping. I stand there for a few moments, but he doesn’t move. Finally I saunter off toward Brønshøj Square.
It’s important to sleep. I would have liked a couple of more hours myself that morning. But I wouldn’t have chosen to sit in a Volvo on Kabbeleje Road.
“My name is Smilla Jaspersen.”
“Groceries from the store?”
“No, Smilla Jaspersen.”
It’s not entirely true that phone conversations are the worst communication imaginable. Security intercoms, after all, are much worse. To fit in with the rest of the building, which is tall, silvery gray, and imposing, the intercom is made of anodized aluminum and shaped like a conch shell. Unfortunately, it has also absorbed the roar of the great oceans, which now drown out the conversation.
“The cleaning lady?”
“No,” I say, “and not the pedicurist, either. I have some questions about the Cryolite Corporation.”
Elsa Lubing takes a break. You have that prerogative when you’re standing at the proper end of the intercom. Where it’s warm, and where the buzzer to open the door is.
“This is really most inconvenient. You will have to write or come back some other time.”
She hangs up.
I take a step back and look up. The building stands alone, in the Fugle section of Frederiksberg, at the end of Hejre Road. It’s unusually tall for Copenhagen. Elsa Lübing lives on the seventh floor. On the balcony beneath hers the ornate wrought iron is covered with planters. From the directory it’s apparent that these flower lovers are Mr. and Mrs. Schou. I give the doorbell a short and authoritative ring.
“Yes?” The voice is at least eighty years old.
“Delivery from the florist shop. I have a bouquet for Elsa Lübing upstairs, but she’s not home. Would you please let me in?”
“I’m sorry, we have strict instructions not to open the door for the other apartments.”
I am enchanted by people in their eighties who still obey strict instructions.
“Mrs. Schou,” I say, “they are orchids. Straight off the plane from Madeira. They’re languishing down here in the cold.”
“That’s terrible!”
“Awful,” I say. “But a tiny little push on that little buzzer will bring them into the warmth where they belong.”
She buzzes me in.
The elevator is the kind that makes you want to ride up and down seven or eight times just to enjoy the little built-in plush sofa, the polished Brazilian rosewood, the gold grating, and the sandblasted cupids on the panes of glass, through which you can see the cable and the counterbalance sink into the depths you’ve left behind.
Lubing’s door is shut. Downstairs Mrs. Schou has opened hers to hear whether the orchid story is a cover for a quick Christmas rape.
I have a piece of paper in my pocket, among the loose money and reminders from the science department of the university library. I drop the paper through the mail slot. Then Mrs. Schou and I wait.
The door has a brass mail slot, hand-painted nameplate, and panels of gray and white.
It swings inward. In the doorway stands Elsa Lübing.
She takes her time looking me over.
“Well,” she says finally, “you are certainly persistent.”
She steps aside. I walk past her into the apartment.
She and the building share the same coloring, polished silver and fresh cream. She is quite tall, almost six feet, and she is wearing a long, simple, off-white dress. She has put up her hair, but several loose locks fall like a cascade of shiny metal over her cheeks. No makeup, no perfume, and no jewelry other than a silver cross at her throat. An angel. The kind you can trust to guard something with a flaming sword.
She looks at the letter I stuck through the door. It’s Juliane’s pension award.
“I remember this letter quite well,” she says.
There’s a painting on the wall. From the heavens, down toward the earth, flows a stream of long-bearded patriarchs, fat little children, fruit, cornucopias, hearts, anchors, royal crowns, cannons, and a text you can read if you know Latin. This picture is the only sign of luxury. Other than that, the room has bare white walls, a parquet floor with wool carpets, an oak desk, a low, round table, a pair of high-backed chairs, a sofa, a tall bookcase, and a crucifix.
Nothing else is needed. Because there is something else here. A view that only a pilot would normally see, tolerable only if you don’t suffer from vertigo. The apartment seems to consist mainly of one very large, bright room. Over by the balcony, along the entire width of the room, there is a wall of glass. From there you can see all of Frederiksberg, Bellahøj, and, in the distance, Høje Gladsaxe. The light of the winter morning comes in through the window, as white as if we were outside. On the other side there is another large window. From there you can see the spires of Copenhagen, across an endless expanse of rooftops. High above the city, Elsa Lübing and I stand as if in a bell jar, trying to size each other up.
She offers me a hanger for my coat. Spontaneously I slip off my shoes. Something about the room demands it. We sit down in two high-backed chairs.
“This time of day,” she says, “I am normally in prayer.”
She says this as naturally as if she were usually in the middle of the heart association’s exercise program at this time of day.
“So—unbeknownst to you—you have chosen an inconvenient time,” she says.
“I saw your name on the letter and looked you up in the phone book.”
She looks at the paper again. Then she takes off her thick-lensed reading glasses.
“A tragic accident. Especially for the child. A child needs both parents. That is one of the practical reasons why marriage is sacred.”
“Mr. Lübing would be pleased to hear that.”
If her husband is dead, I’m not insulting anyone. If he’s alive, it’s a tasteful compliment.
“There is no Mr. Lübing,” she says. “I am the bride of Jesus.”
She says this in a manner both serious and coquettish, as if they had been married a few years ago and the relationship is still happy and looks as if it will last.
“But that does not mean that I do not regard love between men and women as holy. It is, however, only a stage along the way. A stage that I have permitted myself to skip, so to speak.”
She gazes at me with something that looks like sly humor. “Like skipping a grade in school.”
“Or,” I say, “like going directly from bookkeeper to chief accountant at the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark.”
When she laughs, her laughter is as resonant as a man’s.
“My dear,” she says, “are you married?”
“No. Never have been.”
We move our chairs closer together. Two mature women who both know what it’s like to live without men. She seems to be managing better than I am.
“The boy is dead,” I say. “Four days ago he fell off a roof”
She gets up and goes over to the glass wall. If you could look that dignified and that good it would be a pleasure getting old. I drop the idea at the mere thought of having to grow another foot.
“I met him once,” she says. “When you met him you understood why it is written that unless you become as children, you will not enter Paradise. I hope his poor mother will find her way to Jesus.”
“Only if you can find Him at the bottom of a bottle.”
She l
ooks at me without smiling. “He is everywhere. Even there.”
In the early sixties the Christian mission in Greenland still had some of the quivering vigor of imperialism. More recent times—especially at Thule Air Base—with their containers full of porno magazines and whiskey and the demand for semi-prostitution, have left us on the outskirts of religion in a vacuum of wonder. I have lost the sense of how to tackle a believing European.
“How did you meet Isaiah?”
“I used my modest influence within the corporation to increase the contact with Greenlanders. Our quarry in Saqqaq was a restricted area, just like the ∅resund Cryolite Corporation’s quarry in Ivittuut was. The workers were Danish. The only Greenlanders we hired were on the cleaning staff, the kivfaks. From the day the mine opened, a strict separation had been maintained between Danes and Inuits. In this situation I tried to draw their attention to the commandment ‘Love thy neighbor.’ Every few years we would hire Inuits in connection with geological expeditions. It was on one of these that Isaiah’s father died. Even though his wife had left him and their child, he had continued to contribute to her support. When the board of directors awarded the pension, I invited her and the child to my office. That’s where I saw him.”
Something about the word “award” gives me an idea.
“Why was the pension granted? Was there a legal obligation?”
She hesitates for a moment. “There was probably no obligation. I cannot rule out that they were influenced by my advice.”
I see yet another side of Miss Lübing. Power. Maybe that’s the way it is with angels. Maybe a certain pressure was put on Our Lord in Paradise, too.
I go over to join her at the window. Frederiksberg, the neighborhood around Genforenings Square, Brønshøj—the snow makes everything look like a village. Hejre Road is short and narrow. It runs into Due Road. On Due Road there are many parked cars. One of them is a blue Volvo 840. The products of the Volvo factories do get around. They would have to, in order for the company to afford sponsoring the Europe Tour. And to pay the fee my father boasts that he demanded for his photograph.
“What did Isaiah’s father die of?”
“Food poisoning. You are interested in the past, Miss Jaspersen?”
At this point I have to decide whether I’m going to feed her some phony story or take the more difficult route with the truth. On the low table is the Bible. One of the Greenlandic catechists at the Moravian mission’s Sunday school was obsessed with the Dead Sea Scrolls. I remember his voice as he said, “And Jesus said: ‘Thou shalt not lie.’” I let that thought be a warning.
“I think something scared him, that someone was chasing him up on that roof he fell from.”
Her equanimity does not waver even for a second. The last few days I’ve been meeting people who view with the greatest calm the things that surprise me the most.
“The Devil assumes many forms.”
“It’s one of those forms that I’m searching for.”
“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”
“That kind of justice is too long-term for me.”
“It was my understanding that for the short term we have the police.”
“They’ve closed the case.”
She stares at me.
“Tea,” she says. “I haven’t even offered you anything to drink.”
On her way out to the kitchen she turns around in the doorway.
“Do you know the parable of the talents? It’s about loyalty. There is a loyalty toward the worldly as well as the heavenly. I was an official of the Cryolite Corporation for forty-five years. Do you understand?”
“Every second or third year the corporation outfitted a geological expedition to Greenland.”
We’re drinking tea. Out of Trankebar royal porcelain, from a Georg Jensen silver teapot. Elsa Lübing’s taste is, upon closer observation, more elegant than it is modest.
“The expedition in the summer of ’91 to Gela Alta on the west coast cost 1,870,747 kroner and 50 øre, half of which was paid in Danish kroner, half in ‘Cape York dollars,’ the corporation’s own monetary unit, named after Knud Rasmussen’s trading post in Thule in 1910. That’s all I can tell you.”
I am sitting there rather gingerly. I had Rohrmann on Ordrup Road sew a silk lining into my kidskin pants. She didn’t want to do it. She says that it makes the seams shred. But I insisted. My life depends on small pleasures. I wanted the combination of coolness and warmth from the silk against my thighs. But the price I pay is having to sit down cautiously. It’s the back-and-forth movement against the chair that strains the seams. That’s my minor problem during this conversation. Miss Lübing has a bigger problem. It is written, I think, that you should not make your heart a den of thieves, and she knows that there is some pressure on her right now.
“I joined the Cryolite Corporation in ’47. When manufacturer Virl said to me on August 17, ‘You will receive 240 kroner per month, free lunch, and three weeks’ vacation,’ I didn’t say a word. But inside I was thinking that it’s true, after all. Look at the birds of the air—they neither sow nor reap. So will He not look out for you? At Grøn & Witzke on the King’s New Square, where I came from, I had been getting 187 kroner a month.”
The telephone is next to the front door. There are two things worth noting about it. The jack is pulled out, and there is no notepad, address book, or pencil. I noticed that when I came in. Now I begin to understand what she does with the stray telephone numbers that the rest of us write on the wall, on the back of our hands, or drop into oblivion. She deposits them in her tremendous memory for numbers.
“Since then, as far as I know, no one has ever had reason to complain about the corporation’s generosity or openness. And whatever complaints there were have been rectified. When I started, there were six cafeterias. A cafeteria for the workers, a lunchroom for office personnel, one for the skilled technicians, one for office supervisors and the chief accountant and the bookkeepers, one for the scientific staff over in the laboratory buildings, and one for the director and the board. But that was changed.”
“Perhaps you made your influence felt?” I suggest.
“We had several politicians on the board. At that time Steincke, the minister of social welfare, was one of them. Since what I saw went against my conscience, I went to see him—on May 17, 1957, at four o‘clock in the afternoon, on the very day I was named Chief Accountant. I said, ‘I don’t know anything about socialism, Mr. Steincke, but I do know that it has certain things in common with the conduct of the first Christian congregation. They gave what they had to the poor and lived together as brothers and sisters. How can these ideas be reconciled with six cafeterias, Mr. Steincke?’ He answered with a quote from the Bible. He said that you should render unto God what is God’s, but also render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. But after a few years, there was only one cafeteria left.”
When she pours the tea, she uses a sieve to prevent any leaves from getting into the cup. There is a piece of cotton under the teapot spout so it won’t drip on the table. Something similar is taking place inside her. What’s bothering her is the unaccustomed effort of filtering out what must not reach me.
“We are—were—partially state-supported. Not 50 percent like ∅resund Cryolite Corporation. But the government was represented on the board and owned 33.33 percent of the shares. There was also a great openness about the accounts. Copies were made of everything on old-fashioned photostats. Portions of the accounts were examined by the Audit Department, the institution which, as of January 1, 1976, became the National Bureau of Auditing. The problem was cooperation with the private sector. With the Swedish Diamond Drilling Corporation, Greenex, and, later, with Greenland’s Geological Survey. The half-time and quarter-time employees. This created complex situations. There was also the hierarchy. Every company has one. There were sections of the account books that even I didn’t have access to. I had my account ledgers bound in gray moleskin stamped in red. We keep them in a safe in
the archives. But there was also a smaller, confidential ledger. There must have been. It had to be that way in a large corporation.”
“‘Keep them in the archives.’ That’s present tense.”
“I retired last year. Since then I’ve been associated with the corporation as an accounting consultant.”
I try one last time. “The accounts for the expedition in the summer of ’91—was there anything special about them?”
For a moment I imagine that I’m on the verge of getting through to her. Then the filter slides back into place.
“I’m not certain I remember.”
I try one last time. Which is tactless and doomed in advance. “Could I see the archive?”
She merely shakes her head.
My mother smoked a pipe made of an old shell casing. She never told a lie. But if there was some truth she wanted to conceal, she would scrape out the pipe, put the scrapings in her mouth, say Mamartoq, “Lovely,” and then pretend to be unable to speak. Keeping silent is also an art.
“Wasn’t it difficult,” I say as I put on my shoes, “for a woman to be financially responsible for a large corporation in the fifties?”
“The Lord has been merciful.”
I think to myself that in Elsa Lübing the Lord has had an effective instrument for manifesting His mercy.
“What makes you think the boy was being chased?”
“There was snow on the roof that he fell from. I saw his footprints. I have a sense of snow.”
She gazes wearily straight ahead. Suddenly her frailty is apparent.
“Snow is the symbol of inconstancy,” she says. “As in the book of Job.”
I have put on my cape. I’m not very familiar with the Bible. But odd fragments from my childhood lessons occasionally get stuck on the flypaper of my brain.
“Yes,” I say. “And a symbol of the light of truth. As in Revelation. ‘His head and his hair were white as snow.’”
She looks at me anxiously as she closes the door behind me. Smilla Jaspersen. The dear guest. Spreader of light. When she leaves there is a blue sky and good spirits.
