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

by Peter Høeg

  "And the cactuses need watering," I say.

  "But what pride would children have in a father who lets his ass get kicked the first time his job is threatened?" I say nothing.

  "Assistant chief pathologist can't be the only decent way to make a living. My grandmother was Jewish. Maybe I can take care of the toilets at the Mosaic Cemetery."

  He's thinking out loud. But he has already made up his mind.

  In the kitchen he stops short.

  "Year and date of the two expeditions?" I give them to him.

  "It might be informative to look at the forensic medical reports," he says.

  The first pastries have come out of the oven. One is shaped like a naked woman. They used raisins for the nipples and pubic hair.

  "Look," a little boy says to me, "it's supposed to be you."

  "Yes," says another one. "Take off your clothes so we can see if it looks like you."

  "Shut up," says Lagermann.

  He helps me with my coat. "My wife thinks that no circumstances warrant giving your kids a couple of swats."

  "In Greenland," I say, "they don't hit children, either." He looks disappointed. "But it must be damned human to feel tempted."

  The mechanic is waiting on the sidewalk. The two men shake hands. In an attempt to reach each other, the forensics expert stretches up in the air while the mechanic hunches down toward the ground. They meet in the middle, with the awkwardness of a silent movie. As so often before, the question blows in the wind about why men are so rarely cohesive. Why is it that they can be virtual equilibrists at an autopsy table, in a kitchen, behind a dogsled, but as soon as they have to shake hands with a stranger, they sink into infantile helplessness?

  "Loyen," says Lagermann.

  He turns away from the mechanic, as if to keep him out of the conversation. A last, failed attempt to preserve his professional discretion and protect a colleague.

  "He went in early that morning. He comes and goes as he pleases. But the security guard saw him. I looked it up in the work schedule. He had no other reason to be there. He took that biopsy. He just couldn't fucking resist. The guard says that the cleaning staff was there at the same time. Maybe that's why he was so sloppy."

  "How did he know the boy was dead?" He shrugs his shoulders.

  "Ving," says the mechanic. Lagermann gives him a hostile look.

  "V-ving. Juliane called him. And he must have called Loyen."

  He has the little Morris parked outside. We sit next to each other without saying a word. When he speaks, he stutters badly.

  "I f-followed you out here. Stopped near T-tuborg Road and saw you go through the m-marsh."

  I don't have to ask why. In some ways we are equally frightened.

  I open our clothes, straddle him, and put him inside me. We sit like that for a long time.

  He puts tape on my front door. He has that kind of opaque white tape that graphic artists use. With scissors he cuts two thin strips and places them over the upper and lower hinges. They're invisible. If you know where they are, you can just make them out.

  "Just for now. Every time you go inside, make sure they're there. If they've come unstuck, you wait for me to arrive. But it's best to spend as little time here as possible."

  He avoids looking at me.

  "If you want to, you c-could stay with me for the time being."

  It's never clear what that "for the time being" means.

  At the university they had a lot of funny ethnological cliches. One of them was about how much European mathematics was indebted to ancient folk culture; just look at the pyramids, whose geometry commands respect and admiration.

  This, of course, is idiocy disguised as a pat on the back. Technological culture is superior in the very reality it defines. The seven to eight rules of thumb of the Egyptian surveyors is abacus mathematics compared to integral calculus.

  In The Last Kings of Thule, Jean Malauri writes that a significant argument for studying the interesting Polar Eskimos is that you can thus learn something about human progression from the Neanderthal stage to the people of the Stone Age.

  It's written with a certain amount of affection. But it's a study in unconscious prejudices.

  Any race of people that allows itself to be graded on a scale designed by European science will appear to be a culture of higher primates.

  Any grading system is meaningless. Every attempt to compare cultures with the intention of determining which is the most developed will never be anything other than one more bullshit projection of Western culture's hatred of its own shadows.

  There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it. When I start talking about Qaanaaq, to myself or to others, I again start to lose what has never been truly mine.

  Like now, on his sofa, when I feel like telling him why I feel a connection to the Inuits. That it's because of their ability to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that life is meaningful. Because of the way, in their consciousness, they can live with the tension between irreconcilable contradictions, without sinking into despair and without looking for a simplified solution. Because of their short, short path to ecstasy. Because they can meet a fellow human being and see him for what he is, without judging, their clarity not weakened by prejudice.

  I feel the need to tell him all this. Now I let this need grow. I feel it pressing on my heart, my throat, behind my forehead. I know it's because at this moment I am happy. Nothing corrupts like happiness. It makes us think that since we share this moment, we can also share the past. Since he's strong enough to meet me in the present, he must be able to contain my childhood as well.

  Then I release the impulse. It's a feeling of tension. Now it rises up and disappears through the ceiling, and he will never have any idea that it existed.

  He's cooking bananas. He leaves them in the oven until the peel is black. In the meantime, he roasts hazelnuts. In the toaster oven. He assures me that it produces a more even roasting.

  I feel no urge whatsoever to laugh. He's as solemn as a priest. He makes a single cut in the bananas. They are yellow and viscous. He puts heather honey and a few drops of liqueur into the cut.

  As far as I'm concerned, the world could stop right now. No one needs to say anything more.

  He dabs his lips with the napkin. Sensual lips and a wide mouth. A rather thick upper lip.

  "They go up there in 1966. And then they're quiet for twenty-five years. They go up there again. Then they're quiet for two and a half years. Then the Baron dies. The police are very interested. The museum burns."

  We each want the other person to say it. "Seems like something's up, Smilla."

  "You're right."

  "They're getting ready to go back up there. Winter would be the right time to make preparations. So they c-could sail in early spring."

  That's what I've been thinking, too.

  "But how are they d-doing it? They can't organize the trip and the ship and the equipment through the Cryolite Corporation. Because it's practically shut down."

  I feel like looking at the stars, so I turn off the light. The glow from outside is slightly different here than in my apartment.

  "Loyen, Licht, Ving," I say. "They discovered it. Whatever it is. They found out it was there. Maybe in Hamburg. They were in charge of the first expeditions. But they're old now. They couldn't do it again. And someone has killed Licht. Behind the three of them is something else, something bigger, something more ruthless."

  He comes over and puts his arm around me. I can lean my head against his armpit.

  "They need a ship," he says thoughtfully. "I have a friend who knows something about ships."

  I feel like asking him questions, to find out a small part of all that I don't know about him. But I stop myself. "I was at
the Trade Commission. Geoinform has three people on its board."

  I mention the three names. He shakes his head. Outside the window the Pleiades are barely visible. I point to them.

  "The Pleiades. In my language, they're called qilut-tuusat."

  He pronounces it slowly and carefully. The way he cooks. His breath is aromatic and tangy. From nuts roasted in a toaster oven.

  Standing in the middle of the bedroom, we take off each other's clothes.

  He has a light, fumbling brutality, which several times makes me think that this time it'll cost me my sanity. In our dawning, mutual intimacy, I induce him to open the little slit in the head of his penis so I can put my clitoris inside and fuck him.

  2

  First we enter the salon. The portholes are brass, the walls and ceiling mahogany. The chairs have light-colored leather cushions and are bolted to the floor with brass rivets and furnished with bronze holders mounted on gimbals for whiskey glasses, and they are so deep that even during an Arctic typhoon you could sit and enjoy the clinking of the ice cubes in your triple Laphroig.

  The next room is a promenade of eighty feet along the keel through more mahogany and past more polished portholes, and past ship's clocks and opulent desks bolted to the floor where a dozen people are working as if everything has to be finished in the next thirty seconds. The women are typing on word processing keyboards, the men are talking on three telephones at once, and the ceiling has disappeared in a cloud of cigarette smoke and frenzy.

  Then comes a reception area. A middle-aged woman is sitting there, wearing makeup and a lace blouse and tailored jacket. She has the forearms of someone who had signed on as a blacksmith. She would have scared me if I hadn't had the mechanic along.

  He knows her. They shake hands and it looks as if they're going to arm wrestle, and we continue on into the captain's cabin. Along the way we pass glass cabinets with models of the kind of tanker so long that the crew has to set up camp three times on a trip from one end to the other.

  Inside, the portholes are as large as well covers, placed lower down on the wall so you can see the shrubs of the little park in the middle of Sankt Anna Square. You are reminded that this entire maritime mirage is located on the third floor of a mansion with its back to Amalienborg Palace. It is the worst interior architectonic extravaganza I have ever seen.

  Behind the desk, which has a rim around the edge so the gold ballpoint pens won't roll onto the floor during an imaginary sea voyage, sits a boy who looks fourteen at most, newly confirmed, his sandy-colored hair plastered down, and freckles on his nose.

  When he speaks, it's in a thin, light alto, full of dignity. "I know what you want to say, honey. You want to say: 'Where's your father, little boy, because he's the one we've come to talk to.' But you're mistaken. I'll be thirty-three next month. If a child molester accidentally happened to kill me, there would be 25 million kroner for my wife and my three kids after the business was sold."

  Then he gives me a wink.

  His name is Birgo Lander. He's the mechanic's friend. He is the owner and director of this shipping firm. He spent his youth in practically all the Danish reform schools; he's an orphan, rich, totally without scruples, even more dyslexic than the mechanic, addicted to gambling, and a drunkard; with his face he could ride the bus on a child's ticket, but that's not necessary since he owns a custom-made Jaguar.

  Part of this I know, along with everyone in Denmark, from newspapers and magazines. The mechanic told me the rest on the way over here.

  He takes the mechanic's hand in both of his. He doesn't say anything, but he looks at him as if he has been reunited with a long-absent big brother. Then we sit down. The mechanic pushes his chair back a little and withdraws from the conversation. I'm the one who's going to explain.

  "If I wish to rent a ship of about 4,000 tons to transport a cargo that I have no intention of discussing, to a place that I am not going to reveal either, how would I go about it? And if I were already in the process of looking for the right ship, could anyone trace my efforts?"

  He stands up. He's wearing high-heeled cowboy boots. They don't really do much for his height. From a cupboard on the wall he takes out a double bottle of clear fruit brandy. The mechanic and I decline. He pours himself one in a tall, cylindrical tumbler.

  The whole room smells of fresh pears. Lander sips at his drink. Seven times in a row. Then he looks at me to see whether I'm shocked.

  "I'm drunk from ten in the morning on," he says. "And I can afford it."

  His eyes are swimming, but his voice is clear. "If you tried to find a ship, you could be traced. But only by someone who was friends with a ship broker. And you're friends with one now, honey."

  Somehow I already like him. A throwaway child, someone who has always had a hard time dealing with the world and hasn't actually wanted to learn how.

  He takes a 1,000-krone bill out of a drawer and puts it on the desk.

  "Everything has a front and a back. Normally, they are of equal size."

  He tenderly turns over the bill. "But in the shipping industry, things are arranged so cunningly that the back is much bigger than the front."

  He throws out his hand. "The front is this location on this expensive square. It's all the cigar-box wood and the suites you walked through to reach this office."

  He taps his thin hair. "The back is inside here. But you don't 'rent' a ship, honey. You 'charter' it. From a shipowner. It's handled by, contract. A contract has a front side which-if worst comes to worst-can be presented in maritime court. On the front it says where the ship is sailing and what it's sailing with."

  He takes a sip of the brandy. "But you are reticent with information about the destination and cargo. So you request a contract in which the destination is listed as `the entire world,' and the freight as `unspecified.' That would make any shipowner unhappy. His ships are his children. He wants to know where they're going to be playing. Preferably avoid bad company. But no trouble is so great that you can't buy your way out of it. So you suggest that a so-called side letter, or side contract, be prepared. The Danish shipping business is full of side contracts. During the past fifteen years practically every Danish shipping company has transported coal from South Africa and ammunition to the Middle East, even though this is against the law. It takes side contracts many yards long. And they're not for the maritime court. They're just as sensitive to light as undeveloped film. That's what you would ask for. It says that you will pay the shipping company a kind of bonus in order to continue to be a discreet and secretive young lady. Let's play a game. Let's say that I'm the shipowner that you want to charter a ship from. Ninety-eight percent of all deals in this business are made in private. So you confide to Uncle Birgo, in confidence, where your little boat is really going."

  "To the west coast of Greenland."

  "That will make it more difficult for the person who wants to do the chartering, and easier for the one who wants to trace the transaction. A ship has to be classified `ice class' to sail to Greenland. The Maritime Inspection Board of Denmark requires all ships to be classified every fourth year in terms of the hull, once a year for safety equipment and engines. If a ship is not approved, it cannot put to sea at all. Since last year, ships sailing to Greenland must have a double hull."

  "The crew?"

  "Normally a ship is chartered with crew. Or you go to one of the international companies that deal exclusively with supplying full crews. But in this particular situation, you would probably prefer a `bare boat charter.' Which means that you hire a ship and nothing else. Then you find a captain. He has to be a special kind of person, the kind you can take aside and, over a full glass, tell him that in this case his wages will be a little out of the ordinary. ()n the other hand, you need all his tact and sensitivity. Along with him, you find the rest of the crew. For a ship of 4,000 tons, you need eleven to twelve men."

  Now I have to ask him something. Requests are always difficult.

  "If a customer had put out
a feeler for that sort of ship and that sort of captain, would you be able to find out about it, Uncle Lander?"

  He looks at me sadly. "The headline at the top of the page for everything in this business says: `Any negotiations whatsoever to be kept strictly private and confidential.' The shipping industry is one of the most discreet in the world."

  He solemnly wraps his hands around his glass. Then he gives me a wink. "But for you, my little sweetie pie, I would go to great lengths."

  He looks at the mechanic and then back at me. "If I may call you that?"

  "You may call me whatever comes into your little shrunken head," I say.

  He blinks once. He's so unused to opposition that he has forgotten what it feels like.

  He hides his face in his hands for a moment to collect his thoughts. "This business may not look very good on the front side. But on the back it is full of what they call ethics. And the two most important rules are: You don't cheat a customer. And you never cheat a fellow shipowner."

  He takes a drink. We are face to face with his philosophy of life.

  "You screw the state and the authorities if an opportunity presents itself. With a big smile you break Minister Espersen's currency legislation, and travel to Capetown with a briefcase with a million in cash to bribe a Bushman who's the harbor master, who's holding a 500,000-ton tanker at the shipyard under the pretense of a quarantine. You buy five companies a year in Panama for $1,000 apiece to avoid sailing under a Danish flag and regulations. You reroute a cargo that's allergic to customs officials to a Spanish port where you've paid the local customs officers to reinvoice your crates. But you don't cheat a customer. Because you need customers to come back. And above all, you never cheat a broker. We shipping folks stick together. The way it works is, I have a customer who has a ship and you have a customer who has a cargo, and we bring them together. Next time it's the other way around. A ship broker lives off other ship brokers, who live off other ship brokers…"