Smilla's Sense of Snow (40 page)

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Authors: Peter Høeg

BOOK: Smilla's Sense of Snow
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I stick the screwdriver in between the two sliding doors and force them apart. Then I slip out feet first onto a countertop.
There's a faint light coming into the room. It's from the stern running lights shining into this level from a skylight overhead. The room is a kitchenette with a refrigerator, a sideboard, and a couple of hot plates.
The door leads to a narrow corridor. I crouch down in the corridor and wait.
People perish during transitional phases. In Scoresbysund they would shoot each other in the head with shotguns when the winter started to kill off summer. It's not difficult to coast along when things are going well, when a balance has been established. What's difficult is the new. The new ice. The new light. The new feelings.
I sit down. It's my only chance. It's everybody's only chance. To give yourself the necessary time to get acclimated.
The bulkhead in front of me is quivering from the distant engine beneath us. The smokestack must be just on the other side. This level of the ship has been built around the big, rectangular shape of the funnel.
To my left I can see a faint light at floor level. It's the night-light on the stairs. That door is my escape route.
To my right there is silence at first. Then, in the stillness, I can hear someone breathing. It's much softer than the other sounds of the ship. But after six days on board, the daily noises have become a discreet background against which all deviations are evident. Even the light snoring of a sleeping woman.
This means that there is one cabin, or possibly two, here on the port side, and there will be one or two opposite. So the salon and mess face the foredeck.
I stay seated. After a while a pipe gurgles distantly. The
Kronos
has high-pressure flushable toilets. Somewhere either above or below us, a toilet was flushed. The movement in the pipes reveals that the bath and toilets on this deck are in front of the smokestack, and built adjacent to it.
I've taken along my alarm clock in my apron pocket. What else could I do? I look at it, and then I make my move.
The lock on the exit is a latch. I unhook it. So that I'll be able to get out fast. But mainly so that someone else will be able to get in.
I feel my way to a door between the short corridor to the exit and what must be the salon. I put my ear against it and wait. The only thing I hear is the distant ship's clock that sounds the bells.
The door opens into darkness more intense than the dimness behind me. Here, too, I wait. Then I turn on the light switch. It doesn't produce an ordinary light. It illuminates hundreds of aquarium lamps over hundreds of very small, sealed aquariums, set in rubber frames and attached to stands that cover all three walls. There are fish in the aquariums. More different kinds and greater numbers than in any tropical fish shop.
Along one wall is a black-stained table with two large, flat porcelain sinks with an elbow-operated mixing apparatus. On the table there are two gas jets and two Bunsen burners, all with permanent copper pipe connections to a gas cock. An autoclave is mounted on a side table. A Mettler scale. A pH meter. A large bellows camera mounted on a tripod. A bifocal microscope.
Under the table there is a metal rack with small, deep drawers. I open a few of them. In cardboard boxes from Struer's Chemical Laboratory there are pipettes, rubber hoses, plugs, glass slides, and litmus paper. Chemicals in little glass flasks. Powdered magnesium, potassium permanganate, iron filings, powdered sulfur, copper sulfate crystals. Against the wall, in wooden crates lined with straw and corrugated cardboard, are little carboys of acid. Hydrofluoric acid, hydrochloric acid, and acetic acid in various concentrations.
On the opposite table there are permanently attached plastic trays, developing baths, and an enlarging apparatus. I don't understand a thing. The room is furnished like a mixture of Denmark's National Aquarium and a chemical laboratory.
The salon has double doors with paneling. A reminder that the
Kronos
was built for the long-vanished elegance of the fifties, old-fashioned even then. The room lies right below the navigation bridge and is exactly the same size—like a low-ceilinged Danish living room. There are six large windows facing the foredeck. All of them are iced over, and a faint bluish-gray light seeps through the ice.
On the port side unmarked wooden and cardboard boxes are stacked up, held in place by a flag rope stretched between two heaters.
A table is bolted down in the middle of the room, and several
thermoses are standing in the indentations of the tabletop. Long worktables with Luxo lamps have been put up along two of the walls. A small copy machine has been screwed onto the bulkhead. Next to it is a fax machine. A cupboard overhead is filled with books.
On my way over to the bookshelf I notice the sea chart. It has been placed beneath a sheet of non-reflecting Plexiglas; that's why I didn't notice it before. I turn on the lamp.
The text in the margin has been cut off, so it takes a few minutes for me to identify it. On sea charts, land is a detail, a mere line, a contour drowning in a swarm of numbers indicating depths. Then I recognize the promontory across from Sisimiut. Under the glass plate, at the edge of the map, there are several smaller photocopies of specialized maps: “Mean time lag from moon's transit (upper or lower) at Greenwich until onset of high tide in West Greenland”; “Overview of surface currents west of Greenland”; “Index map of sector divisions in Holsteinsborg region.”
At the top, up against the bulkhead, lie three photographs. Two of them are black-and-white aerial shots. The third looks like a fractal detail of the Mandelbrot set, produced by a color printer. All three photos have the same shape in the center. A shape approximating a circle, curving around an opening. Like a five-week-old fetus which, fishlike, curls around the gills.
I try the file cabinets, but they're locked. I'm about to look at the books when a door opens somewhere on the deck. I turn off the light and stand perfectly still. A second door is opened and shut, and then there is silence. But the deck doesn't seem asleep anymore. Somewhere someone is awake. I don't need to look at my clock. There's still time, but my nerves can't take it.
I have my hand on the exit door when someone comes up the stairs. I retreat backward into the corridor. A key is put in the lock. There is a pause of surprise that the door isn't locked. I push open the door to the galley, step in, and close it behind me. Footsteps approach down the corridor. Maybe there's something cautious, hesitant about them, maybe someone is wondering why the door wasn't locked, maybe they're going to search the deck. Maybe I'm hearing things. I shove myself up onto the counter and into
the dumbwaiter. I pull the doors shut, but they don't close properly from the inside.
The door to the hallway opens and a light is turned on. In the middle of the room, right in front of the slit I haven't been able to close, stands Seidenfaden, wearing his outdoor clothes, still windblown from his walk on deck. He goes over to the refrigerator and disappears out of my field of vision. There's a hiss of carbon dioxide, and he comes back into view. He's standing there drinking beer out of a can.
At that moment, while his face has an expression of introspective pleasure and he seems about to cough, he's looking straight at me, but he doesn't see me. Suddenly the dumbwaiter starts to rumble with a loud clatter.
There's no room for me to react. All I can do is pull the cork off the screwdriver and get ready to be discovered in about two seconds.
Then the dumbwaiter descends.
Above me in the dark the doors are shoved aside. But I'm already gone; I'm on my way down.
I pray that it's Jakkelsen who has disobeyed my orders; maybe he noticed some movement in the shaft and pushed the button to bring me down. I hope that it'll be dark when the doors open. And that Jakkelsen's trembling hands will be there to help me when I crawl out.
I stop, the door is cautiously pulled open. Outside, it's dark.
Something cold and wet is pressed against my thigh. Something is put in my lap. Something is shoved under my knees. Then the door is closed, the dumbwaiter hums, a motor starts up, and I ascend once more.
I shift the screwdriver into my left hand and find the flashlight with my right. For a moment I'm blinded, then I can see.
Leaning against me, two inches from my eyes, looms an upright, cold magnum bottle beaded with moisture: Moët & Chandon 1986 Brut Imperial Rose. Pink champagne. In my lap there's a champagne glass. Under my knees I can feel the concave bottom of another bottle.
I take it for granted that when the doors open I will find myself bathed in light, face to face with Seidenfaden.
It doesn't turn out that way. I count two bumps and know that I've passed the boat deck. I'm on my way up to the bridge, to the officers' mess.
The dumbwaiter comes to a halt, and then there is silence; nothing happens. I try to open the doors. It's almost impossible because of the bottles.
Somewhere a door is opened and shut. Then a match is struck. I wriggle the doors open a crack. There's a candle in a candlestick on the big dining-room table where I served dinner a few days ago. Now someone picks up the candle and moves toward me.
The doors slide back. I have a hand against the wall behind me in order to put as much force as I can into the blow. I'm expecting Tørk or Verlaine. I'm thinking of aiming for their eyes.
The light blinds me because it's so close. I can't make out anything except a dark outline, which removes one bottle and then the other. When the glass is removed, a hand fumbles over my hip for a moment.
There is a muffled sound of surprise.
Kützow's face is lowered toward me. We gaze into each other's eyes. Tonight his are bulging, as if he had been afflicted with acute Basedow's disease. But he isn't sick in the ordinary sense. He is enormously drunk.
“Jaspersen!” he says.
Then we both catch sight of the screwdriver. It's pointed at a spot between his eyes.
“Jaspersen,” he repeats.
“A minor repair,” I say.
It's difficult to talk because my scrunched-up position makes it hard to breathe.
“
I'm
the one in charge of repairs on board.”
His voice is authoritative but slurred. I poke my head out the door. “I see you're also in charge of the wine cellar. Urs and the captain will be interested to hear that.”
He blushes, a slow but pervasive change to a color bordering on purple. “I can explain.”
In ten seconds he'll start wondering. I get an arm out.
“I don't have time,” I say. “I have to get on with my work.”
At that instant the dumbwaiter starts down. At the last second I pull my upper body inside. I manage to feel a burst of fury that there isn't some kind of safety device preventing it from operating when the doors are open.
In my mind I go through the entire discovery, confrontation, and catastrophic ending. By the time I reach the galley, my imagination has been used up.
The dumbwaiter doesn't stop there. It continues its descent.
Then it stops. Those final seconds have drained my last reserves. Now I have only the element of surprise on my side. I wrench open the doors and push them back. They slam into place with a bang. A sack marked
Vildmose Potatoes.
DANISH SHIPPING PROVISIONS sways toward me. I swing both legs out, put them against it, and push. The sack stops swaying, pitches backward, and flies toward the farthest corner. It lands among the boxes labeled WIUFF'S LAMMEFJORD CARROTS.
I regain my balance on the floor. My legs feel like rubber. But I have the screwdriver out in front of me.
Urs comes out from behind the sack.
I can't think of anything to say. When I stagger out the door, he's still on his knees.
“
Bitte, Fräulein Smilla, bitte
…”
Subconsciously I must have been expecting some kind of alarm. Armed men in wait for me. But the
Kronos
is wrapped in darkness. I walk up through three decks without meeting anyone.
The stairway from the bridge is empty. Jakkelsen is nowhere to be seen. I brazenly enter the bridge deck, go through the door marked OFFICERS' ACCOMMODATIONS, and open the door to the men's bathroom.
He's standing at the sink. He had been combing his hair. His forehead is pressed against the mirror, as if he wanted to make sure that the result would be especially nice. He was in the process of combing back the hair over his ears. But he's asleep. Unconsciously and pliantly his body follows the rolling of the ship, holding itself upright. But he's snoring. His mouth is open and his tongue is hanging out slightly.
I stick my hand into the breast pocket of his work shirt. I take
out a rubber tube. He slipped into the bathroom and had a little fix to keep up his courage. Then he tried to spruce himself up. But he got tired.

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