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

by Peter Høeg

  He's filled with emotion. "It's one big brotherhood, honey."

  He takes a drink and waits until he has regained control of his voice.

  "That means that we have a network. We know other brokers from Guadeloupe to Tierra del Fuego, from Rangoon to the Outer Hebrides. And we talk to each other. Little conversations, and when you've been talking for several years, and if you have a flair for it, you end up making 100,000 kroner every time you pick up the phone and open your mouth. In every large port Lloyd's and the other big companies have an observer on staff who reports all arrivals and departures. And after a while you get to know the observers. If anyone has tried to hire a 4,000-ton ice class to carry a secret cargo to a secret destination, and if you're interested in who and how, then.you've come to the right man, honey. Because Uncle Birgo is going to find out for you."

  We stand up. He shakes hands across the desk. "It was nice to meet you, honey."

  He really means it.

  We go out past the lace blouse. In the next office I turn around.

  "I forgot something."

  He's sitting at his desk. He's still laughing. I go up to him and give him a kiss on the cheek.

  "What would Føjl say?" he asks.

  I give him a wink. "Any negotiations whatsoever are to be kept strictly private and confidential."

  Every other day Moritz picks up Benja after her afternoon rehearsals and they eat together at Savarin in Nyhavn.

  Moritz goes there because of the food, and because the prices stimulate his ego, and because he likes having a good view of people on the street through the plate-glass windows that stretch the entire height of the building Façade. Benja goes because she knows that through those same windows people on the street have a good view of her.

  They have their own table next to the window and their own waiter and they always eat the same thing. Moritz has lamb kidneys and Benja a bowl of the kind of fodder you give rabbits. Today there's a family sitting near them that has sneaked a little child into this otherwise child-free area. Moritz looks at the child.

  "You've never given me any grandchildren," he tells me.

  "Little children smell of pee," says Benja.

  Moritz looks at her with astonishment. "Lamb kidneys do, too," he says.

  I think about the mechanic waiting outside in the car. "Won't you sit down, Smilla?"

  "Someone is waiting for me."

  Through the windows Benja can see the Morris, but not who's sitting inside.

  "It looks like someone your own age," she says. "Somewhere in his forties. Judging from his fancy car."

  If I reply, I'll end up hurting Moritz. So I let it pass uncontested.

  I lean over the edge of the table. It has always been like this. Benja and Moritz sit comfortably, leaning back. They belong here. I stand with my overcoat on, feeling as if I've come in from the street to peddle something.

  Moritz is holding two envelopes in his hands. One is gray and spotted with what looks like red wine. In the silence between us he tries to use them to force me into a chair. He doesn't succeed.

  "This makes me uncomfortable," he says. I don't know what he means.

  "Hviid is not an ordinary name. There was a composer, Jonathan Hviid. I called Victor Halkenhvad." Benja lifts her head. Even she has heard of that name. "I didn't know he was still alive."

  "I'm not sure he is, either."

  He hands me the envelope. I hold it up to my nose. The spots are red wine. Moritz sticks a finger inside his turtleneck collar and moves it around.

  "It wasn't pleasant. He's not the man he used to be. At one point he slammed down the receiver. While I was in the middle of a sentence. But he did write, after all."

  It's a rare experience to see Moritz uncomfortable. Not until I'm out in the car do I understand why.

  He catches up with me at the door. "You forgot this." It's the second envelope.

  "A single clipping about Tork Hviid. From the Danish Press Service."

  A clipping service he subscribes to. They collect any mention in the press about him.

  He wants to touch me. He doesn't dare. He wants to say something. He doesn't manage it.

  In the car I read the letter out loud. The handwriting is almost illegible.

  Dear Jørgen, you cheap little barber's assistant.

  The mechanic looks disoriented.

  "My father's first name is Jørgen," I say. "And Victor has always been temperamental."

  It must be fifteen years since I saw him last. The opera had given him an honorary residence on Store Kannike Lane. He was sitting in an armchair positioned next to the piano. He was wearing a dressing gown; I had never seen him in anything else. His legs were naked and swollen. I don't know whether he could stand up anymore. He must have weighed over 300 pounds. Everything sagged on him. He was looking at me, not Moritz. Those weren't bags under his eyes, they were hammocks.

  "I don't like women," he said. "Move farther away." I moved away.

  "You were cute when you were little," he said. "That time is past."

  He signed an album cover and handed it to Moritz. "I know what you're thinking," he said. "You're thinking now that old idiot has recorded another album."

  It was Gurrelieder. I still have the record. It's still an unforgettable recording. I've sometimes thought that the body, our very physical existence, puts a limit on how much pain a mind can bear. And that Victor Halkenhvad, on that record, reaches that limit. So that afterward the rest of us can listen and make that journey without going there ourselves.

  Even if, like me, you know nothing about European cultural history, you can still hear a world collapsing in that music, on that record. The question is whether anything has taken its place. Victor didn't think so.

  I've looked it up in my journal. That's all I have left my memory. It's ten years ago that you last visited me. Let me tell you that I have Alzheimer's. Even a money doctor like you must know what that means. Every new day a piece of my brain peels away. Soon, thank God, I won't even be able to remember all of you who betrayed me and yourselves.

  It was his indifference that did it. At the same time as he sang, trembling, ready to burst, unbearably full of romanticism and its feelings, there was a sense of distance, a place inside him that didn't give a damn.

  Jonathan Hviid and I went to the Conservatory together. We started in 1933. The year that Schonberg converted to Judaism. The same year as the Reichstag fire. Jonathan was just like that. The most awful timing. He composed a piece for eight flutes and called it "Silver Polyps." In the midst of the flatulent postwar Danish narrow-mindedness which even regarded Carl Nielsen as too controversial. He wrote a brilliant concerto for piano and orchestra. The piano was supposed to have old-fashioned iron hot plates placed on top of the strings because they produced a very special sound. He never got it performed. Never, not once. He married a woman about whom even I have a difficult time finding anything negative to say. She was in her early twenties when they had the boy. They lived in Bronshøj, in a neighborhood that doesn't exist anymore. Garden sheds with tin roofs. I visited them there. Jonathan wasn't making a dime. The boy was totally neglected. Holes in his clothes, red-eyed, never had a bicycle, was beaten at the local proletarian school because he was too weak from hunger to defend himself. Because Jonathan was supposed to be a great artist. You've all betrayed your children. And it takes an old queen like me to tell you.

  The mechanic has pulled over in order to listen.

  "The sheds in Bronshøj," he says. "I remember them. They were behind the movie theater."

  He broke off ties with me. At some point I heard that they had gone to Greenland. She had taken a job as a teacher. Provided for the family while Jonathan composed for the polar bears. After they came back I visited them only once. The son was there, too. Handsome as a god. Some sort of scientist. Cold. We talked about music. He asked about money the whole time. Permanently scarred. Like you are, Moritz. You haven't visited me for ten years. I hope your fortune suffoca
tes you. There was a certain stubbornness about the boy, too. Like Schonberg. Twelve-tone music. Pure stubbornness. But Schonberg wasn't cold. The boy was ice. I'm tired. I've started peeing in my bed. Can you stand to hear that, Moritz? It'll happen to you someday, too.

  He hadn't signed it.

  The clipping in the other envelope is a single paragraph:

  "On October 7, 1991, the police in Singapore arrested Tørk Hviid, a Danish citizen. The Consulate, on behalf of the Foreign Ministry, has lodged a protest."

  It doesn't mean anything to me. But it reminds me that Loyen was once in Singapore, too. To photograph mummies.

  We drive out to the North Harbor. Outside the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark he slows down, and we look at each other.

  We leave the car near the Svanemolle power plant and stroll toward the harbor, along Sundkrogs Street.

  There is a dry wind with barely visible, blowing ice crystals that sting your face.

  Now and then we hold hands. Now and then we stop to kiss with cold lips and warm mouths, now and then we walk on separately. We're wearing boots. Snowdrifts have piled up on the sidewalk. And yet we feel like two dancers, gliding in and out of an embrace, a swoop into a lift. He doesn't hold me back. He doesn't weigh me down to the ground, he doesn't urge me forward. One moment he's at my side, the next he's a little behind me.

  There's something honest about an industrial harbor. There are no royal yacht clubs here, no promenades, no energy wasted on façades. There are silos for raw materials, warehouses, container cranes.

  Inside an open doorway there is a steel hull. We go up a wooden ladder and reach the deck. We sit on the bridge and look out across the white deck. I lay my head on his shoulder. We're sailing. It's summer. We're sailing north. Maybe north along the coast of Norway. Not very far from shore, because I'm afraid of the open sea. Past the mouths of the great fjords. The sun is shining. The sea is blue and clear and deep; as if we had a huge mass of fluid crystal beneath the keel. There's a midnight sun, a reddish, almost leaping disk of light. A faint song of the wind in the guy wires.

  We walk out to the marina. Men in smocks ride past on bicycles, turning around to stare at us, and we laugh at them, knowing that we are radiant.

  We wander along the quiet docks until we're frozen stiff. We eat in a little cafe that's built onto a smokehouse. Outside, the clouds bow for a brief moment to an extraordinary red sunset that makes the colors on the hulls of the fishing vessels shift from blue-white to rose to purple.

  He tells me about his parents. About his father, who never says anything, who is a carpenter and one of the last people in Denmark who knows how to make a winding staircase that twists up toward the sky in a perfect wooden spiral. About his mother, who test bakes cakes for the food pages of women's magazines, cakes that she can't even taste because she's diabetic.

  When I ask him how he came to know Birgo Lander, he shakes his head and falls silent. Across the table I caress the side of his jaw, marveling at the way life can suddenly allow us to experience happiness and ecstasy with someone who is a complete stranger.

  Outside, night has fallen.

  Even in the dark, even in the winter, the wealthy suburb of Hellerup belongs to another dimension than Copenhagen. We've parked the car on a quiet, hushed road. The snow gleams white along the curb and along the high walls surrounding the villas. In the gardens evergreen trees and shrubs form dense black surfaces, like the edge of a forest or the side of a mountain, above a white carpet of snow.

  There are no streetlights. And yet we can see the house. A tall white villa standing where the road on which we've parked dwindles down to a lane.

  There is no hedge or fence around the house. From the sidewalk you can step directly onto the lawn. Upstairs, on the third floor, there's a light in a window. Everything seems well kept, newly painted, expensive, and discreet.

  A few steps from the sidewalk there's a sign on the lawn lit by a lamp. The sign says GEOINFORM.

  We were just going to drive by to look at the building. We've been here for an hour now.

  It has nothing to do with the house. We could have parked anywhere. And for any length of time.

  A police car stops alongside us. It has passed us twice before. Now they've gotten curious.

  The officer addresses the mechanic across me. "What's going on here, buddy?"

  I stick my head out the window toward the patrol car. "We live in a one-room apartment, Mr. Commissioner. A basement apartment on Jøgersborg Street. We have three children and a dog. Sometimes we just need a little private life. And it can't cost anything. So we drive out here."

  "All right, ma'am," he says. "But drive somewhere else for your private life. This is the embassy district." They're gone. The mechanic starts the car and puts it into gear.

  Then the light goes out in the house in front of us. He slows down. We creep down toward the lane with our headlights off. Three figures come out onto the stairway. Two of them are merely dark spots in the night. But the third instinctively seeks out the light. A fur coat and a white face catch the light. It's the woman I saw talking to Andreas Licht at Isaiah's funeral. She tosses her head, and the dark hair flows into the night. Now that I see this gesture repeated, I realize that it's an expression not of vanity but of self-confidence. A garage door goes up. The car comes out in a flood of light. Its headlights sweep over us and then it's gone. Behind it the door slowly closes.

  We're following the car. Not close, because the lane is deserted, but not far behind either.

  If you drive through Copenhagen in the dark and allow the surroundings to slip out of focus and blur, a new pattern appears that is not visible to the focused eye. The city as a moving field of light, as a spiderweb of red and white pulled over your retina.

  The mechanic is relaxed when he drives, almost introspective, as if he were about to fall asleep. He makes no sudden movements, and there is no sudden braking, no real acceleration; we simply float through the streets and the traffic. And the whole time, somewhere ahead, like a wide, low silhouette, is the car that is leading us.

  The traffic grows more sporadic and finally vanishes altogether. We're on our way out toward Kalvebod Wharf.

  We drive out to the wharf very slowly, our headlights off. Several hundred yards ahead, on the dock itself, a pair of red taillights wink off. The mechanic parks along a dark wooden fence.

  The relative warmth of the sea has created a mist that swallows up the light. Visibility is about a hundred yards. The opposite side of the harbor has vanished in the darkness. The waves are languidly slapping against the wharf.

  And something is moving. No sound, but a black crystallization of a point in the night. A field of blackness systematically moving between the parked cars. Twenty-five yards away from us the movement stops. A person is standing next to a light-colored refrigerated trailer. Above the figure there is a lighter spot, as if from a white hat or a halo. He doesn't move for a long time. The mist grows a little thicker. When it disperses, the figure is gone.

  "He was feeling the c-car hoods. To see if they were warm."

  He's whispering, as if his voice could be heard in the night.

  "A c-cautious man."

  We sit quietly, letting time pass through us. In spite of this place, in spite of the unknown we're waiting for, it feels like a flood of happiness to me.

  By his watch about half an hour passes.

  We don't hear the car. It appears out of the fog, its headlights turned off, and passes us with an engine sound that is merely a whistle. Its windows are dark.

  We get out of the car and walk along the dock. The two dark contours that we could barely make out are ships. The closest one is a sailing ship. The gangway has been removed, and the ship is dark. A white plaque on the superstructure says; in German, that it's a Polish training ship.

  The next one is a tall black hull. An aluminum stairway leads upward amidships, but it all seems empty and deserted. The ship's name is Kronos. It's about four hundred fee
t long.

  We walk back to the car.

  "Maybe we should go on board," he says.

  I'm the one who has to make the decision. For a moment I'm tempted. Then comes the fear and the memory of the burning profile of the Northern Light against Iceland Wharf. I shake my head. Right now, at this moment, life seems too precious to me.

  We call Lander from a phone booth. He's still at work. "What if the name of the ship was Kronos?" I say. He goes away and then returns. A few minutes pass as he turns the pages.

  "Lloyd's Register of Ships lists five: a chemical tanker based in Frederiksstad, a sand dredger in Odense, a tugboat in Gdansk, and two `general cargo' ships, one in Piraeus and one in Panama."

  "The last two."

  "The Greek one is a 1,200-ton ship, the other 4,000 tons." I hand the ballpoint pen to the mechanic. He shakes his head.

  "I'm no good at numbers, either."

  "Any picture?"

  "Not in Lloyd's. But quite a few statistics. Four hundred and fifteen feet long, built in Hamburg in '57. Reinforced for ice."

  "The owners?"

  He goes away from the telephone again. I look at the mechanic. His face is in darkness; now and then car headlights make it appear, white, anxious, sensual. And under the sensuality, something intractable.

  "Lloyd's Maritime Directory lists the shipowner as Plejada, registered in Panama. But the name looks Danish. A Katja Claussen. Never heard of her."

  "I have," I say. "Kronos is our ship, Lander."

  3

  We're sitting on his bed with our backs against the wall. In this light, against his naked whiteness, the scars around his wrists and ankles are as black as iron bands.

  "Do you think that people determine their own lives, Smilla?"

  "The details," I say, "but the big things happen on their own."

  The telephone rings.

  He removes the tape and listens to a brief message. Then he hangs up.