Smilla's Sense of Snow (19 page)

Then the road opens onto a picture postcard: a large harbor basin surrounded by low yellow warehouses. The water is iced over, and while I'm still taking stock of the view, the sun appears, low, white-gold, surprising, and lights up the ice like an underground bulb behind frosted glass. There are small fishing boats at the wharf with blue hulls the color of the sea where it meets the horizon. On the outer edge of the basin, out in the harbor itself, there is a big three-masted sailing ship. That's Svajer Wharf.

Berth 126 is the sailing ship. I don't meet a soul on the way. All the machine sounds have disappeared behind me. Everything is quiet.

A post is sticking up from the wharf with a white, mailbox on it. Above is a large sign, still wrapped in white plastic.

On the stern it says in gilded letters that the ship's name is Northern Light. It has a figurehead carved like a rnan holding a torch; it has a shiny black hull at least a hundred feet long, masts that tower up to the sky and give the impression that you're standing in front of a church, and a smell of tar and sawdust. Someone has recently spent a fortune renovating it.

I go on board via a gangway with a thick coir mat and railings with polished bronze knobs. The entire deck is filled with big wooden crates marked FRAGILE and stacks of planks and paint cans. All the ropes are meticulously coiled up, all the wood has the deep, dark brown sheen of a dozen layers of expensive ship's lacquer. The white enamel shines like glass. The air shimmers with polish, two-component epoxy, and joint paste. Aside from this shimmering, the ship is apparently deserted.

A narrow ladder between the crates leads to a lacquered double door that isn't locked. Beyond the door a companionway descends into the darkness.

A man is standing at the bottom of the steps. He's leaning on a spear, and he doesn't move. Not even when I'm quite close to him.

The room must have several skylights that are still covered. But along the edges of the covers, thin stripes of white light filter in. Enough so that I can see it's a big hall. All the dividing walls have been torn out to create an area that is about eighty feet long and just as wide as the ship.

Now there is enough light for me to see that the man in front of me is an Inuit. What he's leaning on is a long harpoon. In his left hand he's holding a dart thrower. He is only partially dressed, in high kamiks and an inner coat of bird skin. He isn't much taller than me. I pat him on the cheek. He is cast from hollow fiberglass and then cleverly painted. His face is alert.

"Lifelike, isn't it?"

The voice comes from somewhere behind a screen. On my way over to it I have to go around a kayak that is still partially wrapped and a glass counter lying there like an empty 800-gallon aquarium. The screen is a hide stretched between two whalebones. Behind it is a desk. Behind the desk sits a man. He stands up and I shake his proffered hand. He looks exactly like the mannikin. But he's thirty years older. His hair is thick and cut pageboystyle, but gray. His background is like mine. Greenlandic a in some way.

"You're the curator?"

"Yes, I am."

His Danish is without accent. He gestures with his hand. "We're in the process of setting up the collection. It cost a fortune."

I place the tape in front of him. He touches it cautiously.

"I'm trying to identify the man speaking. I found my way over here by calling the Institute for Eskimology."

He smiles with satisfaction. "Word of mouth is the best advertisement. And by far the cheapest. Do you know what it costs to advertise?"

"Only personal ads."

"Is that expensive?" He is sincerely interested. Humor is wasted on him. "Very."

He nods. "It's terrible. They clean you out. The newspapers. The tax system, the customs office..."

It seems to me that I've seen him before. It's a feeling that I get from faces and places more and more often. I don't know whether it's because I've seen so much that the world is starting to repeat itself, or whether it's due to premature wear and tear on the mental apparatus.

He has a square, flat, matte-black cassette tape recorder on the table in front of him. He puts in the tape. The sound comes from distant speakers on the perimeter of the room. Now that my eyes are becoming adjusted to the darkness, I can sense the way the walls curve along with the sides of the ship.

He listens for half a minute with his head in his hands. Then he stops the tape.

"Mid-forties. Grew up near Angmagsalik. Very little formal education. On top of the East Greenlandic there are traces of more northern dialects. But up there they move around too much to say which exactly. He has probably never been away from Greenland for any appreciable length of time."

He looks at me with light-gray, almost milky eyes, with an expression as if he's waiting for something. Suddenly I know what it is. It's the applause after the first act. "Impressive," I say. "Can you tell me more?"

"He's describing a journey. Across ice. With sleds. He's probably a hunter, because he uses a series of technical terms, such as anut for the dog harnesses. He's probably talking to a European. He uses English names for locations. And he seems to think he has to repeat many things."

He listened to the tape for a very short time. I wonder whether he's pulling my leg.

"You don't believe me," he says coldly.

"I just wonder how you can conclude so much from so little."

"Language is a hologram." He says this slowly and firmly.

"In every human utterance lies the sum total of that person's linguistic past. Now, you yourself... You're in your mid-thirties. Grew up in Thule or north of there. One or both parents Inuit. You came to Denmark after assimilating the entire linguistic foundation of Greenlandic, but before you lost the child's instinctive talent for learning a foreign language perfectly. Let's say you were between seven and eleven years old. After that it gets harder. There are traces of several sociolects. Perhaps you lived or went to school in the northern suburbs, Gentofte or Charlottenlund. There is also a trace of a North Sealand accent. And strangely enough, even a later hint of West Greenlandic."

I make no attempt to hide my astonishment. "That's true," I say. "It's all basically true." He smacks his lips in satisfaction.

"Is there any possibility of determining where the conversation took place?"

"You really can't tell?"

I notice it again. His bold self-confidence and his sense of triumph at his knowledge.

He rewinds. He doesn't look at the tape recorder while he's handling it. He plays about ten seconds for me. "What do you hear?"

I hear only the incomprehensible voice. "Behind the voice. Another sound."

He plays it again. Then I hear it. The faint, escalating sound of a motor, like a generator starting up and then shut off.

"A prop plane," he says. "A big prop plane."

He fast-forwards. Turns it on again. A segment with the faint clatter of dishes.

"A large room. Low-ceilinged. Tables being set. Some kind of restaurant."

I can see that he knows the answer. But he's enjoying pulling it very slowly out of his top hat.

"A voice in the background."

He plays the same segment several times. Now I can just make it out.

"A woman," I say.

"A man talking like a woman. He's yelling. In Danish and American English. Danish is his mother tongue. Presumably he's yelling at the person setting the table. He's probably the restaurant manager."

One last time I wonder whether he's just guessing. But I know he's right. He must have an abnormally precise and skilled sense of hearing and a gift for languages.

The tape is playing again. "Another prop plane," I suggest.

He shakes his head. "A jet. A smaller jet. Quite soon after the previous plane. An airport with heavy traffic." He leans back.

"Where in the world can an East Greenlandic hunter sit and talk in a restaurant where the tables are being set, where a Dane is yelling in American English, and where you can hear an airport in the background?"

Now I know, too, but I let him tell me. Let little kids have their fun. Even grown-up kids.

"Only one place. At Thule Air Base."

On the base the club is called the Northern Star. A restaurant in two sections, with a dance hall.

He starts the tape again. "It's strange." I don't say a word.

"The music . . . behind the voice . . . remnants from the previous recording. It's pop, of course. 'There Must Be an Angel' by the Eurythmics. But the trumpet . . ."

He looks up.

"Of course you can hear that the piano is a Yamaha grand."

I can't hear any piano at all.

"A loud, heavy, flashy tone. A rather clumsy bass. Often a little off-key. Certainly no Bosendorfer . . . But it's the trumpet that surprises me."

"There's some of the music left at the end of the tape," I say.

He fast-forwards. When he presses the play button, we're at a spot right after the music starts.

"Mr. PC!" he says. Then his face goes blank, self-absorbed.

He lets it play to the end. When he stops the tape, he seems very far away. I give him time to come back. He wipes his eyes.

"Jazz," he says quietly. "My passion . . ."

It was a brief moment of letting down his guard. When he comes back, he's as cocky as ever. Three-quarters of the politicians and bureaucrats who are part of the Home Rule belong to his generation. They were the first Greenlanders to get a university education. Some of them have survived and held on to their identities. Others-like the curator-with their fragile but abnormally overblown self-confidence, have become genuine, intellectual Northern Danes.

"It's actually quite difficult to recognize a musician from the tone. Who can you identify this way? Stan Getz when he plays Latin-American style. Miles Davis from his naked, precise, vibrato-less sound. Armstrong by his meticulous crystallization of New Orleans jazz. And this musician."

He looks at me, full of anticipation and reproach. "Great jazz is synonymous with the John Coltrane quartet. McCoy Tyner on the piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums. And in the periods when Jones was in prison: Roy Hanes. Just those four. Except on four occasions. The four concerts at the New York Independent Club. That's when Roy Louber joined them on trumpet. He learned his sense for European harmonizing and his incantatory African nerve from Coltrane himself."

We sit there for a moment thinking about this. "Alcohol," he says suddenly, "has never been good for music. Cannabis is supposed to be great. But alcohol is a ticking bomb under jazz."

We sit there listening to the bomb ticking.

"Since that time in '64, Louber has been working on drinking himself to death. On his way down, in both human and musical terms, he happened to come through Scandinavia. And he stayed here."

Now I remember his name from concert posters. From certain scandalous newspaper headlines. One of them said: FAMOUS DRUNK JAZZ MUSICIAN TRIES TO TIP OVER CITY BUS. "He must have been playing in the restaurant. It's the same acoustics. The people eating in the background. Someone has seized the opportunity to make a pirate recording."

He smiles, full of sympathy for such a project. "They've managed to get themselves a free live recording. You can save a lot of money with a little Walkman. If you dare take the risk."

"Why would he go to Thule?"

"Money, of course. Jazz musicians live on so-called bare-ass jobs. Imagine what it costs . . ."

"What costs?"

"To drink yourself to death. Have you ever thought about how much money you save by not being an alcoholic?"

"No," I say.

"Five thousand kroner," he says.

"Excuse me?"

"That will be five thousand kroner for the session. Ten thousand if you want a notarized transcription of the contents."

There's not a trace of a smile on his face. He's dead serious.

"Can I get a receipt?"

"Then I'll have to add sales tax."

"Go ahead," I say. "Go right ahead."

I really can't use the receipt for anything. But I'm going to hang it up on the wall at home. As a reminder of what can happen to the famous Greenlandic generosity and indifference to money.

He types it up, on a sheet of typing paper.

"I'll need at least a week. Do you want to call me five or six days after New Year's?"

I take five crisp new 1,000-krone notes from the bundle. He closes his eyes and listens as I count them out. He has at least one passion more burning than modal jazz. It's the sensual crackle of money changing hands, with him on the receiving end.

After I stand up I think of one other thing I have to ask him.

"How did you learn to get so much from what you hear?"

He beams like a sun. "I was originally a theologian. An occupation that presents excellent opportunities for listening to people."

It's because the pastoral robes are such a total mask that it has taken me so long to recognize him. Even though it's less than ten days since I saw him bury Isaiah.

"Occasionally I still step into the role. Assist Pastor Chemnitz when he's busy. But in the last forty years it's been mostly languages. My teacher at the university was Louis Hjelmslev. He was a professor of comparative linguistics. He had a solid knowledge of forty or fifty languages. And he had learned and forgotten just as many. I was young then and as surprised as you are. When I asked him how he had learned so many languages, he replied"-and now he imitates a man with a severe overbite-" `The first thirteen or fourteen take a long time. After that, it goes a lot faster.' "

He roars with laughter. He's in a great mood. He has demonstrated his brilliance and earned money for it. It strikes me that he is the first Greenlander I've ever met who used the formal De with me and expected me to do the same.

"There's one more thing," he says. "Since I was twelve years old, I've been totally blind."'

He enjoys my sudden stiffness.

"I make my eyes follow your voice. But I can't see a thing. Under certain circumstances, blindness sharpens the sense of hearing."

I shake the hand he offers me. I ought to keep my mouth shut. There's really something perverse about harassing a blind man. And a fellow countryman at that. But for me there's always been something mysterious and provocative about genuine, sincere greed.