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

by Peter Høeg

  I ponder what it must have been like to be her, with her inordinate sense for numbers and her belief in honesty, having to work on a daily basis with someone she suspected of covering up an irregularity.

  She gives me her own answer. " 'For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad.' Mark 4:22." Faith in divine justice has given her patience.

  "In 1977 we were computerized. I never managed to understand it. At my request we continued to keep manual accounts. In 1992 I retired. Three weeks before my last workday we balanced the books. The finance director suggested that I leave this balance sheet to the office manager. I insisted on doing it myself. On January 7-exactly twenty-five years after the event I mentioned-I sat there with the books for the expedition to Gela Alta from the previous summer. It was like an omen. I took out the old accounts. I compared the two, item by item. This was difficult, of course. The expedition of '91 was financed through the Scientific Commission, which had become common practice. And yet it was possible to compare them. The biggest entry in '91 was for 450,000 kroner. I called the commission and requested an itemization."

  She pauses, mastering her indignation.

  "Later I received a letter which stated, briefly summarized, that I should not have gone over the heads of my immediate superiors with that type of request. But by then it was too late. Because on the telephone that day they had given me the answer. The 450,000 kroner had been used to charter a ship."

  She sees that I don't understand a thing.

  "A ship," she says, "a coaster, to transport eight men to the west coast of Greenland to pick up a few kilos of sample gemstones. It doesn't make sense. We often chartered the Disko from the Greenland Trading Company. To transport the cryolite. But a ship for a small expedition, that was unthinkable. Do you ever remember your dreams, Miss Smilla?"

  "Sometimes."

  "Recently I've dreamed several times that you were sent by Providence."

  "You should hear what the police say about me." Like many elderly people, she has developed a selective sense of hearing. She ignores me and continues on her own track. "Perhaps you think I'm old. Perhaps you're wondering whether I'm senile. But remember, `Your old men shall dream dreams.'" She looks straight through me, straight through the wall. Straight into the past.

  "I think that the 115,000 kroner in 1966 must have been used to charter a ship. I think that someone, under the guise of the Cryolite Corporation, has sent two expeditions to the west coast."

  I hold my breath. With her honesty and her breach of a lifelong loyalty, this is a delicate moment.

  "There can only be one explanation for this. At any rate, after forty-five years with the corporation, I cannot think of any other reason. They wanted to transport something back to Denmark, something so heavy that it required a ship."

  I put on my cape. The black one with the hood that makes me look like a nun and that I thought would be suitable for the occasion.

  "The Carlsberg Foundation financed part of the expedition in '91. In their accounts there is a fee for a Benedicte Clahn," I say.

  She gazes, dreamy-eyed, straight ahead, as she pages through her complete, error-free internal account books. "In 1966, too," she says slowly. "A translator's fee of 267 kroner. That was also one of the entries I did not find an explanation for. But I remember her. She was one of the director's acquaintances. She had been living in Germany. I had the impression that they knew each other from Berlin in 1946. Immediately after the end of the war the Allies negotiated in Berlin regarding the division of aluminum supplies. A lot of people from the corporation were often down there during those years."

  "Such as?"

  "Ottesen was there. The director of sales. And Councilor Ebel."

  "Any others?"

  She's groggy from talking so much and from pouring out her heart into what might turn out to be the gutter. She wearily considers my question.

  "I can't remember hearing about any others. Is it important?"

  I shrug my shoulders. She takes hold of me. She can practically lift me off the floor. "The little boy's death. What are you planning to do?"

  Denmark is a hierarchical society. She finds a mistake, and she complains to her boss. She is rejected. She complains to the board. She is rejected. But above the board sits Our Lord. She has turned to Him in prayer. Now she wants me to show that I am one of His assistants dispatched to help.

  "That coaster. Did it sail off with what it went to get?"

  She shakes her head. "That's hard to say. After the accident the survivors and their equipment were flown to Godthab and then home. I am positive about that because the accounting department paid for the freight and their plane tickets."

  She follows me all the way out to the elevator. I feel a sudden tenderness for her. A motherly feeling, even though she is twice my age and three times as strong. The elevator arrives.

  "Now don't let your honesty give you bad dreams," I say.

  "I'm too old to regret anything."

  Then I ride down. On my way out the front door, I suddenly think of something. When I call her up on the silver-plated conch shell, she answers as if she had been standing there waiting for my call.

  "Miss Lübing."

  I would never dream of using her first name. "The director of finance. Who is he?"

  "He's going to retire next year. He runs his own law office. His name is David Ving. The firm is Hammer & Ving. It's located somewhere on Qester Street."

  I thank her.

  "God be with you," she says.

  No one has ever said that to me before, outside of church. Maybe I've never had such a need for it before, either.

  "I had a c-colleague who worked on the cleaning staff at the phone company's switching station on N¢rre Street." We're sitting in the mechanic's living room.

  "He told me that they just call in and say that now they liave a court order. Then some clips are put on a relay and via the telephone network they can sit at police headcparters and tap all incoming and outgoing calls on a certain number."

  "I've never liked telephones."

  He has a big roll of wide red insulation tape and a little pair of scissors on the table. He cuts a long strip and attaches it to the telephone receiver.

  "Do the same thing in your apartment. From now on, every time you make a call and every time someone calls you, you'll have to remove the t-tape first. That will make you remember that there might be an audience listening somewhere in the city. People always forget that telephones might not be private. The tape will remind you to he careful. If, for instance, you happen to make a declaration of love."

  If I were going to declare my love to someone, I cerminly wouldn't do it over the phone. But I don't say anything.

  I know nothing about him. Over the last ten days I've seen little drops of his past. They don't jibe. Like now, this knowledge of the procedure for tapping phones.

  The tea he makes for us is another one of those little c1 rops that surprise me but that I don't want to ask about. He boils milk with fresh ginger, a quarter of a vanilla bean, and tea that is so dark and fine-leaved that it looks like black dust. He strains it and puts cane sugar in both our cups. There's something euphorically invigorating and yet filling about it. It tastes the way I imagine the Far East must taste.

  I tell him about my visit to Elsa Lübing. He now knows everything that I know. Except for a few details, such as Isaiah's cigar box and its contents, including a tape on which a man is laughing.

  "Who, other than the Carlsberg Foundation, financed the expedition in '91? Did she know? Who arranged for the ship?"

  I kick myself for not asking that precise question. I reach for the telephone. The receiver is taped on. "That's why the t-tape is there," he says. "After five minutes you'd forget all about it otherwise."

  Together we walk over to the phone booth on the square. His stride is one and a half times as long as mine. And yet it still feels comfortable walki
ng next to each other. He walks just as slowly as I do.

  When my mother didn't come back I realized that any moment could be the last. Nothing in life should simply be a passage from one place to another. Each walk should be taken as if it is the only thing you have left.

  You can demand something like this of yourself as an unattainable ideal. After that, you have to remind yourself about it every time you're sloppy about something. For me that means 250 times a day.

  She picks up the phone at once. It strikes me how self confident her voice is.

  "Yes?"

  I don't give my name. "The 450,000 kroner. Who paid it?"

  She doesn't ask me about anything. Maybe it has also been revealed to her that someone might be on the line. She thinks for a moment in silence.

  "Geoinfarm," she says then. "That was the name of the company. They had two representatives on the Scientific Commission. They owned a block of shares. Five percent, as far as I can recall. Enough so that it had to be registered with the Trade Commission. The company is owned by a woman."

  The mechanic has stepped into the booth with me. It makes me think of three things. The first is that he fills it up. If he stood up straight he could push the bottom out of it, and walk away with me and the booth.

  The second thing is that his hands against the glass in front of me are smooth and clean. Used to hard work but smooth and clean. Occasionally he gets a job at a garage on Toftegard Square. How, I ask myself, can he mess around all day long with grease and socket wrenches and keep his fingers so smooth?

  The third thing is that I'm honest enough to admit that there's a certain pleasure in standing next to him this way. I have to stop myself from prolonging the conversation solely for that reason.

  "I've been thinking about something you asked me. About Berlin after the war. There was one other colleague. At that time he was not employed by us. But he was later on. Not at the quarry, but here in Copenhagen. As a medical consultant. Dr. Loyen. Johannes Loyen. He did some work for the Americans. I think he was a forensics expert."

  "How does someone become a professor, Smilla?"

  On a piece of paper we've made a list of names. There is attorney and CPA David Ving. Someone who knows something about ships. How to cover up the expenses of chartering one, for example, and send them as a Christnras present to little children in Greenland.

  There is Benedicte Clahn. The mechanic found her in the phone book. If it's the same one, that is. It turns out that she lives two hundred yards from where we are now sitting. In one of the renovated warehouses on Strand Street. Which contain Denmark's most expensive condominiums. Three million kroner for nine hundred square feet. But then there's also a brick wall five feet thick to beat your head against when you figure out the price per square foot. And beams of Pomeranian pine to hang yourself from if the wall doesn't do the trick. He has written down her phone number next to her name.

  And there are the two professors, Johannes Loyen and Andreas Fine Licht. Two men about whom we don't know an awful lot, except that their names are associated with both expeditions to Gela Alta. Two expeditions, about which we really don't know anything either.

  "My father," I say, "was once a professor. Now that he isn't one anymore, he says that in most cases the people who become professors are clever without being too clever."

  "So what happens to the ones who are too clever?"

  I hate quoting Moritz. What can you do about people you don't want to quote but who are still the ones who have said it most succinctly?

  "He says that they either rise up to the stars or they go to the dogs."

  "Which of the two happened to your father?"

  I have to think about that for a moment before I come up with an answer. "It's more like he's split in half," I say.

  Silently we listen to the sounds of the city. The cars on the bridge. The sound of pneumatic tools from the night shift at one of Holmen's dry docks. The chimes of Our Saviour's Church. They say that anyone can get permission to play the bells in the tower: That's also the impression you have from listening. Sometimes it sounds like Horowitz, sometimes as if they picked up some obscure drunk at Cafe Hovlen.

  "The Trade Commission," I say. "Lübing said that if you want to find out who controls a company or who sits on a board, you can look it up at the Trade Commission. Supposedly they have the balance sheets for all companies in Denmark listed on the stock exchange."

  "It's on K-Kampmanns Street."

  "How do you know that?" I ask.

  He gazes out the window. "I paid attention in school."

  3

  There are mornings when it feels as if you rise up to the surface through a mud bath. With your feet stuck in a block of cement. When you know that you've expired in the night and have nothing to be happy about except the fact that at least you've already died so they can't transplant your lifeless organs.

  Six out of seven mornings are like that.

  The seventh is like today. I wake up feeling crystalclear. I climb out of bed as if I had some reason to get up. I do the four yoga exercises I managed to learn before I received the eightieth reminder from the library, and they sent a messenger, and I had to pay such a big fine that I might just as well have bought the book.

  I take a shower in ice-cold water. Put on leggings, a big sweater, gray boots, and a fur hat from Jane Eberlein. It's made in sort of a Greenland style.

  I usually tell myself that I've lost my cultural identity for good. And after I've said this enough times, I wake up one morning, like today, with a solid sense of identity. Smilla Jaspersen-pampered Greenlander.

  It's seven o'clock in the morning. I walk down to the harbor and out onto the ice.

  The ice in Copenhagen Harbor is not a place where you'd recommend parents send their children out to play, even in a hard frost such as this one. Even I have to be careful when I go out there.

  About forty yards out I stop. Here the surface is slightly darker. One more step and I would fall through. I stand there, bobbing up and down. Sea ice is porous and elastic, the water seeps up through it, forming around my boots two mirror surfaces that reflect the scattered lights in the darkness.

  A man is standing on the dock. A black silhouette against the white walls of the buildings. Fear spreads out like a vibrating tone. The mortal danger of the seal when it's lying on the ice. So sensitive, so visible, so immobile. Then the tone dies out. It's the mechanic, stooped, rectangular, like a big rock. I haven't seen him for two days. Maybe I've been avoiding him.

  You get so used to looking at the city from certain angles that from here it seems like some foreign capital never before seen. Like Venice. Or Atlantis. A city which, wrapped in snow and the night, could be made of marble. I walk back toward the dock.

  He could have been someone else. I could have been someone else. We could have been young lovers. Instead of a dyslexic stutterer and a bitter shrew who tell each other half-truths and are walking together along some dubious path.

  When I'm standing in front of him, he takes me by the shoulders. "That's dangerous!"

  If I didn't know better, I could have sworn there was something almost pleading in his voice.

  I shake off his hands.

  "I have a good relationship with ice."

  When we disbanded the Young Greenlanders' Council to form IA, and had to position ourselves in relation to the social democrats in SIUMUT and the reactionary Greenlandic upper class in ATASSUT, we read Karl Marx's Das Kapital. It was a book I grew quite fond of. For its trembling, feminine empathy and its potent indignation. I know of no other book with such a strong belief in how much you can accomplish if you simply have the will to change.

  Unfortunately, I'm not that confident myself. I've been given a great deal, and I've wanted a lot. And I've ended up not really having anything and not really knowing what I want. I've acquiied the basics of an education. I've traveled. Occasionally I've felt that I've done what I wated to do. And yet I've been directed. Some invisible hand has
had me by the scruff of the neck, and every time I thought that now I was taking an important step up toward the light, it has pushed me farther into a network of sewer pipes running beneath a landscape I cannot see. As if it had been determined that I would have to swallow a specific amount of wastewater before I would be allowed a breathing hole.

  As a rule I swim against the current. But on certain mornings, like today, I have enough surplus energy to surrender. Now, as I'm walking along beside the mechanic, I am strangely, inexplicably happy.

  It dawns on me that we could eat breakfast together. I can't remember how long it's been since I ate breakfast with someone. It has been my own choice. I'm sensitive in the morning. I need time to throw cold water on my face and put on my eyeliner and drink a glass of juice before I'm feeling sociable. But this morning has taken care of itself. We met, and now we're walking along side by side. I'm just about to suggest it.