Smilla's Sense of Snow (34 page)

I follow him up to the upper deck. Along the corridor past my own cabin. Farthest back on the port side is the mess. He pushes open the door and we step inside.

I take my time and count eleven people in that little room. Five Danes, six Asians. Two of the latter are women. Three of the men look like little boys.

"Smilla Jaspersen, the new stewardess."

It's always been this way. I stand alone in the doorway, the others in front of me. Sometimes it's a school, sometimes a university, sometimes it's some other kind of gathering. They may not have anything in particular against me, they might be more or less indifferent, but aImost every time they look as if they'd rather not be bothered.

"Verlaine, our bosun. Hansen and Maurice. The three of them are in charge of the deck. Maria and Fernanda, ship's assistants."

In the doorway to the galley stands a tall, heavyset man with a full reddish-brown beard, wearing a white cook's outfit.

"Urs. Our cook."

The hostility is stronger in the eyes of the women than of the men. But there is also a raw directness which has managed to thwart the rule dictating the use of surnames.

There's something subdued and disciplined about all of them. With the exception of Jakkelsen. He's leaning against the wall, under the NO SMOKING sign, with a cigarette in his mouth. He has one eye closed against the smoke while the other regards me quizzically.

"That's Bernard Jakkelsen," says the first mate. He hesitates for a moment. "He also works on deck." Jakkelsen ignores him.

"Jaspersen is supposed to keep our cabins clean," he says. "There'll be plenty of work mucking out for eleven men and four officers. I seem to have a tendency to just drop things all over the floor, if you know what I mean."

My socks have slipped down around my heels because my rubber boots are too big. You can't live like a human being when your socks are drooping. Not when you're tired and scared besides. And now they're laughing, not a hearty laughter. But a feeling of dominance emanates from the gaunt figure of Jakkelsen, affecting everyone in the room.

I lose my temper. I grab hold of Jakkelsen's lower lip and pinch it hard. I pull it away from his teeth. When he takes hold of my wrist, I grab his little finger with my left hand and bend back the top joint. He drops to his knees with a whimper like a woman. I increase the pressure.

"Do you know how I'm going to clean your cabin?" I say. "I'll open the porthole. And then I'll pretend that I've opened a big closet. And then I'll put all your things inside. And then I'll wash it down with salt water."

I let him go and step aside. But he doesn't try to grab me. He stands up slowly and goes over to a framed photograph of the Kyonos in front of a flat-topped iceberg in the Antarctic. He mournfully examines his face in the glass.

"I'll get a blood blister, damn it, a blood blister." No one in the room has moved.

I straighten up and look around at them. People don't like saying "I'm sorry" in Greenlandic. I've never bothered to learn the phrase in Danish.

In my cabin I pull the desk over to the door and wedge Bugge's Greenlandic dictionary under the door handle. Then I go to bed. I have every reason to believe that tonight the dog will leave me in peace.

2

It's six-thirty in the morning, but they've already eaten and the mess is empty except for Verlaine. I drink a glass of juice and follow him to the storage room for work clothes. He looks me over and then hands me a pile of clothes.

Maybe it's the work clothes, maybe it's the surroundings, maybe it's the color of his skin. But for a moment I feel the urge for some contact.

"What's your native language?"

"You mean, what's your native language, sir?" he corrects me gently, using the formal form of address.

His Danish has a faint lilt to each word, the way it's spoken on the island of Fyn.

We look each other in the eyes. He has a plastic bag in his breast pocket. He takes a clump of rice out of it. He stuffs it in his mouth, chews it slowly and thoroughly, swallows, and rubs his palms together.

"Bosun," he adds. Then he turns around and leaves. There's nothing under the sun as grotesque as cold European courtesy manifested in the third and fourth worlds.

I change into work clothes in my cabin. He has given me the correct size. As much as work clothes can ever be the right size. I try putting a belt around the smock. Now I no longer look like a mailbag. Now I look like an hourglass five feet two inches tall. I put a silk scarf over my hair. I have to clean, and I don't want to get dust in the fine down that is starting to cover my bald spot. I take out a vacuum cleaner. I put it down in the corridor, and then I quietly drift into the mess. Not to resume my breakfast -I couldn't get a bite down. During the night the sea outside my porthole seeped down into my stomach and joined forces with the smell of diesel fuel and with the awareness of being on the open sea, and coated my insides with tepid nausea. There are those who claim that you can fight seasickness by standing on deck in the fresh air. That may work if the boat is docked or on its way through the Falsterbo Canal, where you can go up and look at the solid land that you will soon have under your feet. When Sonne wakes me up this morning by knocking on my door to give me a key, and I get dressed and stand on deck wearing a down jacket and ski cap, and gaze out into the pitch dark of winter, and realize that now I will have to continue because I'm on the open sea and there's no way back, that's when I first feel truly sick.

In the mess the two tables have been cleared and wiped off. I stand in the doorway to the galley.

Urs is stirring a pot of boiling milk. I estimate him to be about 250 pounds. But solidly built. All Danes are pale in the winter, but his face borders on green-tinged. Covered with a light mask of sweat in the heat of the galley.

His movements are forceful and impatient. But he possesses a warmth and charisma in his role as keeper of the larder. They don't call him by his last name either.

"A superb breakfast."

I didn't touch it. But you have to start a conversation somewhere.

He gives me a smile and turns back to the milk as he shrugs his shoulders. "I am a Schweizer."

I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.

"Fruhstuck," I say in German. "Impressive. Like a first-class restaurant."

"I had such a restaurant. In Geneva. On the lake," he continues in German.

He has prepared a tray with coffee, steamed milk, juice, butter, and croissants.

"Can I take it to the bridge?"

"Nein. Breakfast isn't served. It's sent up in the dumbwaiter. But if you come back at 11:15, Fraulein, there's the officers' lunch."

"How do you like cooking on a ship?"

The question is an excuse to stay there. He has put a tray into the dumbwaiter and pushed a button labeled NAVIGATING BRIDGE. Now he's preparing the next one. This is the one that interests me. It consists of tea, toast, cheese, honey, jam, juice, and soft-boiled eggs. Three cups and three plates. On the boat deck, to which the stewardess is forbidden access, the Kronos has three passengers. He puts the tray in the dumbwaiter and presses BOAT DECK.

"Not bad. Besides, I had no choice. Eleven-fifteen, then," he says in German.

The scenario for the end of the world is firmly established. It will begin with three extremely cold winters and then the lakes, the rivers, and the seas will freeze over. The sun will cool down so it can no longer create summer, the snow will keep falling for a merciless white eternity. Then one long endless winter will arrive and, finally, the wolf Sköll will devour the sun. The moon and stars will be extinguished, and a fathomless darkness will reign. The Fimbul winter.

In school they taught us that this was the way northerners imagined the end of the world before Christianity taught them that the universe would perish in fire. I've always remembered this, not because it was any more personally relevant than so much else I learned, but because it dealt with snow. When I heard it for the first time, I thought that it was a distorted picture created by people who had no understanding of the nature of winter.

Opinion was divided in North Greenland. My mother, along with many others, preferred winter. Because of the hunting on new ice, because of the deep sleep, because of the handicrafts, but most of all because of the visiting. Winter was a time for community, not for the end of the world.

In school they also told us that Danish culture had made great progress since ancient times and the theory of a Fimbul winter. There are moments when it's difficult for me to believe this is true. Like now, when I'm wiping down the tanning bed in the ship's weight room with alcohol.

The ultraviolet lights from a tanning bed split small amounts of the oxygen in the air, creating the unstable gas ozone. Its sharp smell of pine needles is found in the summer in Qaanaaq, too, with its almost painfully bright sunshine in the glare off the snow and sea.

One of my duties is to wipe off this thought-provoking apparatus with alcohol.

I've always enjoyed cleaning. Even though they tried to teach us laziness in school.

For the first six months we were taught in the village by the wife of one of the hunters. One summer day they came from the boarding school and wanted to take me to town. A Danish pastor and a West Greenlandic catechist. They issued orders without looking at our faces. They called us avanersuarmiut, people from the north.

Moritz forced me to go. My brother had grown too big and too obstinate for him. The boarding school was in Qaanaaq, in the town itself. I stayed for five months, until my fighting spirit had matured sufficiently that I could refuse.

In school we had all our meals served to us. We had a hot bath every day and clean clothes every other. In the village we had bathed once a week, much less often when hunting or traveling. Every day, from the glacier above ahe cliffs, I had collected kangirluayhuq, big blocks of freshwater ice, and carried them home in sacks and heated them over the stove. At the boarding school you turned on a faucet. When summer vacation arrived, all the students and teachers went out to Herbert Island and visited the hunters, and for the first time in a long while we had boiled seal meat and tea. That's when I noticed the paralysis. Not just in me but in everybody. We could not pull ourselves together anymore; it was no longer a natural thing to reach out for some water and brown soap and the package of Neogene and start rinsing the skins. We weren't used to washing clothes, we couldn't pull ourselves together to cook. At every break we would slip into a daydreaming state of waiting. Hoping that someone would take over, would relieve us, free us from our duties, and do what we ourselves ought to have done.

When I understood where things were heading, I rebelled against Moritz for the first time and went home. It was also a return to relative contentedness with my work.

This same contentedness comes over me now as I'm vacuuming the cabins in the crew's quarters on the upper deck of the Kronos. The same sense of calm as when I repaired nets in my childhood.

Strict order reigns in every one of the cabins. The crew understands-as I did to survive the boarding schools in my life-that when you have only a few cubic yards to yourself and your innermost feelings, that private space must be subjected to the severest discipline if it is to withstand the dissolution, destruction, and pressure to yield coming from all sides.

In his own way Isaiah had this fastidiousness, too. The mechanic had it. The crew of the Kronos has it. Surprisingly enough, Jakkelsen has it, too.

On his walls Jakkelsen has banners, postcards, and little souvenirs from South America, the Far East, Canada, and Indonesia. All the clothes in the closet are meticulously folded and stacked up.

I feel around among the stacks. I take off the mattress and vacuum out the cubbyhole for the bed linen. I pull out the desk drawers, I get down on my knees and look under the desk, I carefully examine the mattress. His closet is full of shirts. I touch every one of them. Some of them are raw silk. He has a collection of aftershave lotions and eau de toilette that smell expensive and sweetly alcoholic; I open them and put a dab of the fragrance on a paper napkin, which I then roll into a ball and put in the pocket of my smock, to flush down the toilet later on. I'm looking for something specific, but I don't find it. Or anything else of interest, either.

I put the vacuum cleaner back and go downstairs, past the second deck, past the cold storage and the supply rooms, and on down the stairs,, bordered on one side by the smokestack housing and on the other by a wall labeled DEEP TANK. At the bottom of the stairs is the door to the engine room. I'm carrying in my hand a bucket and scrub brush as a ready excuse, and if that's not enough, I can always fall back on the tried-and-true story that I'm a stranger who's gotten lost.

The door is heavy and insulated, and when I open it the noise is deafening at first. I'm out on a steel platform from which a gallery extends, running around the entire perimeter of the room.

On the deck thirty feet below me on a slightly raised platform in the middle of the room, the engine looms up. It's in two sections: the main engine with nine exposed cylinder heads and a six-cylinder auxiliary engine. The shiny valves move rhythmically like parts of a beating heart. The entire engine block is about sixteen feet high and forty feet long, and the whole thing gives the impression of an overwhelming, tamed savagery. There's not a soul in sight.

The steel of the walkway is perforated, my canvas shoes are walking right over the drop beneath me. Everywhere signs prohibit smoking in five languages. Several yards up ahead there's an alcove. A blue veil of tobacco smoke is seeping out. Jakkelsen is sitting on a folding chair with his feet up on the worktable smoking a cigar. Half an inch under his lower lip there's a blood blister running the whole width of his mouth. I lean against the table, in order to discreetly put my hand on the 13-inch monkey wrench lying there.