Authors: Peter Høeg

Smilla's Sense of Snow (41 page)

BOOK: Smilla's Sense of Snow

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I kick his legs out from under him. He falls heavily to the floor. I try to pull him up, but my back hurts. I only manage to lift up his head.

“You overlooked KÃ¼tzow,” I say.

A sensuous little smile appears on his face. “Smilla. I knew you'd come back.”

I get him to his feet. Then I push his head into the sink and turn on the cold water. When he can stay on his feet, I pull him over toward the stairs.

We're five steps down when KÃ¼tzow comes out the door behind us.

There's no doubt that he thinks he's sneaking around on cat's paws. In reality he manages to stay upright only by hanging on to whatever is at hand. When he catches sight of us, he stops abruptly, puts his hand on the board with the barometer, and stares at me.

I have Jakkelsen's weak-kneed body pressed up against the railing. I'm having difficulty walking myself.

Shock slowly penetrates his drunkenness, which now must be further enhanced by one or two sparkling magnum bottles.

“Jaspersen,” he croaks. “Jaspersen â¦”

I'm so tired of men and their excesses. It's been this way ever since I came to Denmark. You always have to watch out not to trip over people who have poisoned themselves but think they're carrying it off with dignity.

“Piss off, Mr. Engineer,” I say.

He stares at me blankly.

We don't meet anyone else on our way down. I shove Jakkelsen into his cabin. He falls onto his bed like a rag doll. I turn him on his side. Infants, alcoholics, and drug addicts all risk suffocating on their own vomit. Then I lock his door from the outside with his own key.

I lock and barricade my door. It's 4:15 a.m. I'm going to sleep for three hours and then report sick and sleep twelve more. Everything else will have to wait.

I manage to sleep for forty-five minutes. First an electronic buzzer penetrates through the first nightmares, on the edge of sleep, followed by Lukas's commanding voice.

I'm working less than six feet away from Verlaine. He's using a hard rubber club as long as a lumberman's ax.

I can tell from my chapped lips that it's just under 14Â°F. He's working in his shirtsleeves. With one hand he hangs on to the sea rail or the fencing around the radar scanners. With the other he raises the club in a graceful, gentle arc behind his back and then brings it down on the deckhouse roof with an explosion like a car windshield being smashed. His face is covered with sweat, but his movements are easy and tireless. Each blow breaks off a plate of ice about three feet square.

There's no wind but a choppy sea in which the
Kronos
is pitching heavily. And there is fog, like big moist planes of whiteness in the dark.

Every time we emerge from one of the fog banks, which hang so low that they give the impression of floating on the water, the layer of ice visibly increases. I'm scraping the ice off the scanners with the handle of an ice pick. When I'm done with one of them I might as well go back to the one I just did. In less than two minutes a thin layer of hard gray ice has covered it again.

The deck and the superstructure are alive. Not with the small, dark figures hammering at the ice, but with the ice itself. All the deck lights are on. Together, the ice and the light have created a mythological landscape. The riggings and mast stays are coated with a foot of ice festoons drooping from the masts to the deck like watchful faces. An anchor lantern on its mount shines through its shroud of ice, like the glowing brain inside the head of some fantastical animal. The deck is a gray, solidified sea. Everything upright looms in the air with inquisitive faces and cold gray limbs.

Verlaine is on the starboard side. Behind me is the sea rail, and beyond that a free fall of almost sixty-five feet to the deck below. In front of me, behind the radar pedestals and the low mast with the antennas, siren, and a mobile spotlight for harbor maneuvers, Sonne is shoveling ice. The sheets of ice that Verlaine chops loose he tosses over the rail, where they fall onto the boatdeck next to
the lifeboat. From there Hansen, wearing a yellow hard hat, sends them on over the side of the ship.

On the port side Jakkelsen is chopping the ice free from the radar pedestals with a hammer. He's working his way toward me. At one point the scanners hide us from the rest of the roof.

He sticks the hammer in his jacket pocket. Then he leans back against the radar. He takes out a cigarette.

“As you predicted,” I say. “The bad ice.”

His face is white with exhaustion.

“No,” he says. “It doesn't start until 5â6 Beaufort, at just about the freezing point. He's called us out on deck too soon.”

He looks around. There's no one anywhere near.

“When I started sailing, you know, it was the captain who sailed the ship, and time was measured by the calendar. If you were on your way into an icy situation, you decreased your speed. Or you changed your route. Or turned and sailed with the wind. But in the last few years things have changed. Now it's the shipping companies that decide, now it's the offices in the big cities that are sailing the ships. And
this
is what you measure time by.”

He points at his wristwatch. “But we're obviously supposed to get somewhere by a certain time. So they've given him orders to keep going. And that's what he's doing. He's losing his touch. Since we had to go through this, anyway, there was no reason to call us on deck right now. A smaller ship can withstand ice up to 10 percent of its displacement. We could sail with five hundred tons of ice and it wouldn't make much difference. He could have sent a couple of the boys up to chop the antennas free.”

I scrape ice away from the directional antenna. When I'm working, I'm awake. As soon as I stop, I have brief lapses of sleep.

“He's afraid we won't be able to maintain cruising speed. Afraid we're going to blow something. Or that it'll suddenly get worse. It's his nerves. They're almost shot.”

He drops his cigarette, half smoked, onto the ice. A new fog bank envelops us. The moisture seems to stick to the ice that has already formed. For a moment Jakkelsen is almost hidden.

I work my way around the radar. I make sure that I stay in both Jakkelsen's and Sonne's fields of vision at all times.

Verlaine is right next to me. His blows fall so close to me that the pressure shoves frozen air toward my face. They land at the foot of the metal pedestal with the precision of a surgical incision, tearing away a transparent plate of ice. He kicks it over to Sonne.

His face is next to mine.

“Why?” he asks.

I hold the ice pick slightly behind me. A short distance away, out of earshot, Sonne clears off the base of the mast with the handle of his shovel.

“I know why,” he says. “Because Lukas wouldn't have believed it, anyway.”

“I could have pointed out Maurice's wound,” I say.

“A work accident. The angle grinder started going while he was changing the wheel. The chuck key struck him in the shoulder. It's been reported and explained.”

“An accident. Just like the boy on the roof,” I say.

His face is close to mine. Its only expression is one of incomprehension. He has no idea what I'm talking about.

“But with Andreas Licht,” I say, “the old man on the ship, that's where things got a little more clumsy.”

When his body locks up, it gives the illusion that he's frozen, like the ship around us.

“I saw you on the dock,” I lie. “When I swam in.”

While he ponders the consequences of what I've said, he gives himself away. For one second a sick animal stares at me from somewhere inside his body. Like his teeth, there is a thin veneer over the cruelty that turned him sadistic.

“There will be an investigation in Nuuk,” I say. “Police and naval authorities. Attempted murder alone could get you two years. Now they'll look into Licht's death, too.”

He grins at me, a big white-toothed smile.

“We're not putting in at GodthÃ¥b. We're going to the tankers' floating dock. It's twenty sea miles from land. You can't even see the coast.”

He gives me a quizzical look.

“You put up a good fight,” he says. “It's almost too bad that you're so alone.”

PART TWO

The Sea

“I'm thinking about the little captain on the bridge up there,” says Lukas. “He no longer sails a ship. He no longer exercises any authority. He's just a link in the coupling that transmits impulses to a complex mechanism.”

Lukas is leaning against the railing of the bridge wing. In front of the bow of the
Kronos
a skyscraper of red polyenamel grows out of the sea. It looms over the foredeck and well beyond the tops of the masts. If you tip your head way back you can see that somewhere high in the gray sky even this phenomenon comes to an end. It's not a building; it's the stern of a supertanker.

When I was a child in Qaanaaq in the late fifties and early sixties, even the European clock moved relatively slowly. Changes occurred at a rate that allowed people time to register a protest against them. This rebellion first took form in the concept of the “good old days.”

Nostalgia for the past was then a completely new feeling in Thule. Sentimentality will always be man's first revolt against development.

The times have made this reaction obsolete. Now a different kind of protest is needed than the lachrymose mourning for native soil. Things are happening so rapidly now that at any moment the present we're living in will be the “good old days.”

“For these ships,” says Lukas, “the rest of the world doesn't exist anymore. If you meet them on the open sea and try to raise them on the VHF to exchange weather reports and positions, or to ask about the ice conditions, they won't answer. They don't even have their radio on. When you displace 340,000 cubic yards of water and produce horsepower like a nuclear reactor and have a computer as big as an old-fashioned ship's chest to calculate your course and speed and maintain them or diverge from them slightly if necessary, then your surroundings cease to interest you. The only thing left in the world is your departure point and your destination and who's paying you when you reach it.”

Lukas has lost weight. He has started smoking.

He might be right. One of the syndromes of development in Greenland is that everything seems to have happened recently. The Danish Navy's new heavily armed, high-speed inspection ships were recently introduced. The vote to join the Common Market and the narrow majority to withdraw as of January 1, 1985. Not long ago the Defense Ministry restricted entry permits to Qaanaaq for military reasons. And at the spot where we're now standing, everything has been newly built. The large floating oil platform, the
Greenland Star
, outside of Nuuk, consists of 25,000 linked metal pontoons anchored to the sea floor 2,500 feet below us. A quarter of a mile of desolate, windblown, green-painted metal, ugly as sin, twenty sea miles from the coast. “Dynamic” is the word the politicians use.

It has all been created with the goal of coercion in mind.

Not the coercion of Greenlanders. The presence of the army and the direct violence of civilization are almost at an end in the Arctic. It's no longer necessary for development. The liberal appeal to greed in all its aspects is sufficient today.

Technological culture has not destroyed the peoples of the Arctic Ocean. Believing that would be to think too highly of culture. It has simply acted as a catalyst, a cosmic model for the potentialâwhich lies in every culture and every human beingâto center life around that particularly Western mixture of greed and naivete.

What they want to coerce is the Other, the vastness, that which
surrounds human beings. The sea, the earth, the ice. The complex stretched out in front of us is an attempt to do that.

Lukas's face is haggard with distaste.

“Previously, up until 1992, there was only Polar Oil at FÃ¦ringehavn. A little place. A communications station and a fish cannery on one side of the fjord. The plant on the other. Managed by the Greenland Trading Company. We could dock stern-fast, up to 50,000 tons. When we got the floating hoses out we would go ashore. There was only one building for living quarters, a galley, and a pumphouse. It smelled of diesel. Five men ran the whole place. We always had a gin-and-tonic with the manager in the galley.”

This sentimental side of Lukas is new to me.

“That must have been nice,” I say. “Did they have clogging and concertinas, too?”

His eyes grow narrow.

“You're wrong,” he says. “I'm talking about power. And about freedom. In those days the captain was the highest authority. We went ashore, and we took the crew along with us, except for the anchor watch. There was nothing at FÃ¦ringehavn. It was just a desolate, godforsaken place between GodthÃ¥b and FrederikshÃ¥b. But in the midst of that nothingness, you could take a walk if you wanted to.”

He gestures toward the complex of pontoons in front of us, and toward the distant aluminum barracks.

“Here they have three tax-free shops and regular helicopter service to the mainland. There's a hotel and a diving station. A post office. Administrative offices for Chevron, Gulf, Shell, and Exxon. In two hours they can put together a landing strip that can handle a small jet. The gross tonnage of that ship in front of us is 125,000 tons. There is development and progress here. But no one is allowed ashore, Jaspersen. They come on board if you want anything. They check off your requests on a list, and they bring a portable chute and load your order on board. If the captain insists on going ashore, a couple of security officers show up with a landing bridge and hold his hand until he's back on board. They say it's because of the danger of fire. Because of the risk of sabotage.
They say that when the piers are full, there are 250 million gallons of oil here.”

He searches for a new cigarette, but the pack is empty.

“That's the nature of centralization. Under these conditions the shipmasters have virtually disappeared. Seamen don't exist at all.”

I'm waiting. He wants something from me.

“Were you hoping to go ashore?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“Even if this was your only chance? If this was the end of the line? If we only had the return trip left?”

He wants to find out how much I know.

“We're not taking on any cargo,” I say. “We're not unloading anything. This is nothing but a rest stop. We're waiting for something or other.”

“You're guessing.”

“No,” I say, “I know where we're going.”

His body is still relaxed. But now he's on guard. “Tell me.”

“If I do, you have to tell me why we're docked here.”

His complexion doesn't look robust. It's quite pale and chapped in the relatively dry air. He licks his lips. He's been counting on me as a form of insurance. Now he's confronted with a new, risky contract. It demands a trust in me that he doesn't feel.

Without a word he walks past me. I follow him inside the bridge. I shut the door behind us. He goes over to the slightly raised navigational table.

“Show me,” he says.

It's a map of Davis Strait on a scale of 1:1,000,000. Toward the west it shows the outermost point of Cumberland Peninsula. To the northwest it includes the coast along Great Halibut Banks.

On the table, next to the sea chart, is the Ice Center's map of ice formations.

“Since November the field ice has stretched 100 sea miles out and no farther north than Nuuk,” I say. “The ice forced farther north by the West Greenland current has moved out to sea and melted because Davis Strait has had three mild winters and is relatively warmer than normal. The current, now free of ice, continues up along the coast. Disko Bay has the world's highest concentration of icebergs. During the last two winters the glacier at
Jakobshavn has moved 130 feet a day. That produces the largest icebergs outside of Antarctica.”

I point to the map of ice formations.

“This winter the icebergs were forced out of the bay as early as October and directed out along the coast with a ridge of turbulence between the West Greenland current and the Baffin current. Even in sheltered water there are icebergs. When we leave here, TÃ¸rk will set a northwesterly course until we're free of this belt.”

His face is expressionless. But there is the same air of concentration about him that I saw at the roulette table.

“Since December the Baffin current has carried western ice down to the 67th parallel. It has frozen together with the new ice somewhere between 200 and 400 sea miles out in Davis Strait. TÃ¸rk wants us somewhere in the vicinity of that edge. From there we'll be given a course due north.”

“You've sailed here before, Jaspersen?”

“I have hydrophobia. But I know something about ice.”

He bends over the map. “No one has ever sailed farther north than Holsteinsborg this time of year. Not even in sheltered waters. The current packs field ice and western ice into a floor of cement. We might be able to sail north for two days. What does he want us to do at the edge of the ice?”

I straighten up. “You can't play without chips, Captain.”

For a moment I think that I've lost him. Then he nods.

“It's like you said,” he replies slowly. “We're waiting here. That's what they've told me. We're waiting for a fourth passenger.”

Five hours earlier the
Kronos
shifted course. Outside the mess a dull sun hung low in the sky; by its position I could tell we had changed course, but I had already noticed.

In the dining hall of the boarding schools, students seemed to take root in their chairs. In any unstable situation, the few fixed points take on special meaning. In the mess of the
Kronos
, we sit glued to our chairs. At the other table Jakkelsen is eating, introspective and wan, his head bowed over his plate. Fernanda and Maria try to avoid looking at me.

Maurice is eating with his back to me. He's only using his right
hand. His left hand is in a sling around his neck that partially covers a thick bandage on his shoulder. He's wearing a work shirt with one sleeve cut off to make room for the bandage.

My mouth is dry with a fear that won't let up as long as I'm on board this ship.

On my way out the door, Jakkelsen comes up behind me. “We've changed course! We're on our way to GodthÃ¥b.”

I decide to clean the officers' mess. If Verlaine follows me, he'll have to pass the bridge. If we're on our way to Nuuk, he'll have to come. They can't permit me to go ashore in a large port.

I stay in the mess for four hours. I clean the windows and polish the brass trim and finally rub the wooden paneling with teak oil.

At one point KÃ¼tzow comes by. When he sees me, he hurries off.

Sonne appears. He stands there for a while, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. I'm wearing a short blue dress. Maybe he takes that as an invitation to stay. He has misread me. I've put on the dress so I'll be able to run as fast as possible. When he gets no encouragement, he leaves. He's too young to make a move, and not old enough to be pushy.

At four o'clock we drop anchor behind the red wall. Half an hour later I'm called to the bridge.

“At this time of year,” says Lukas, “there's only one way to get farther north. Unless you have an icebreaker along. And even then it might not be possible. What you have to do is go farther out to sea. Otherwise you'll get caught in a bay, and suddenly the ice will close around you, and there you'll sit.”

I could lie to him. But he's just about the only straw I have left to cling to. He's a man on his way down. Maybe sometime in the near future, he'll end up down there where our paths could cross.

“At 54 degrees west longitude,” I say, “the ocean floor drops off. That's where a branch of the western current turns away from the coast. There it meets the relatively colder northern current. West of the great fishing banks there is an area of unstable weather.”

“âThe Sea of Fog.' Never been there.”

“A place where the largest chunks of ice from the east coast are
carried and can't escape. Similar to the Iceberg Cemetery north of Upernavik.”

With the corner of the ruler I find a dark area on the ice map. “Too small to be clearly marked. It often takes the form of a long bay, like a fjord in the pack iceâmaybe it looks like that now. Risky but navigable. If the journey is important enough. Even the small Danish inspection cutters occasionally went in there, chasing British or Icelandic trawlers.”

“Why sail a 4,000-ton coaster with a couple of dozen men up toward Baffin Bay to enter a dangerous opening in the pack ice?”

I close my eyes and call up an image of a magnified plant embryo, a little shape curved around its own center. The same images that were superimposed on the sea chart on the boat deck.

“Because there's an island. The only island that far from the coast before you reach Ellesmere Island.”

Under my ruler it's a dot so small that it's almost invisible.

BOOK: Smilla's Sense of Snow

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