Smilla's Sense of Snow (44 page)

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Authors: Peter Høeg

BOOK: Smilla's Sense of Snow
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Every once in a while it feels as if that moment has arrived. Just like now. As if this stack of papers in front of me has something vital to tell me about my future.
My mother's forefathers would have been astounded that the key to the universe for one of their descendants would turn out to be in written form.
On top there is a copy of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark's report on the 1991 expedition to Gela Alta. The last six pages are not copies. They are the original, slightly blurry, and technically flawed aerial photos of the Barren Glacier. It lives up to its reputation: arid, cold, white, worn, windblown, and abandoned even by the birds.
Then there are a couple of dozen handwritten pages with figures and small pencil sketches that are incomprehensible.
Twelve photographs are reprints of X-rays. They might be the same people I once looked at on the light box in Moritz's consultation room. They might be anything at all.
There are more photos. These might have been taken by X-ray, too. But the images are not of the human body. Straight black and gray lines have been drawn across the pictures, as if made with a ruler.
The last pages are numbered from 1 to 50 and are all part of a single report.
The text is sparse, the numerous pen-and-ink drawings are sketchy; calculations have been added by hand in several places when the typewriter couldn't supply the proper symbols.
It's a compilation of data pertaining to the transport of large objects across ice. With sketches of the procedures and brief, illustrative equations regarding the mechanical specifications.
There's a summary about the use of heavy sleds on expeditions to the North Pole. A series of drawings demonstrate the way ships were pulled across the ice to avoid being frozen solid in it.
Several sections of the report have short titles such as: “Ahnighito, Dog, Savik 1, Agpalilik.” They concern the transport of the largest-known fragments of meteorites from the Cape York site, Peary's difficult salvage operations and voyage on the schooner
Kite
, Knud Rasmussen's logbook, and Buchwald's legendary transport of the 30-ton
Ahnighito
in 1965.
This last section contains copies of Buchwald's own photographs. I've seen them many times before; they've been included in every article on the subject for the past twenty years. And yet it still seems as if I'm seeing them for the first time. The chutes made from railroad ties. The winches. The crudely welded sleds made of train tracks. The photocopies make the contrast too extreme and blur the details. And yet it's all so obvious. The
Kronos
is carrying a duplicate of Buchwald's equipment in the aft cargo hold. The meteorite that he transported to Denmark weighed 30.88 tons.
The last part of the report deals with the joint Danish, American,
and Soviet plan for a drilling platform on the ice. The Pylot Report on the bearing capacity of ice is mentioned in the list of references. My name is in the list of authors.
At the bottom of the stack of papers there are six color photos. They were taken with a flash in some kind of stalactite cave. Every student of geology has seen similar pictures. The salt mines in Austria, the blue grottoes on Sardinia, the lava caves on the Canary Islands.
But these are different. The light of the flash has been thrown back toward the lens in blinding reflections. As if it were a picture of a thousand small explosions. The photograph was taken in an ice cave.
The ice caves that I've seen have all had an extremely short lifetime, lasting only until the break in the glacier or the crevasse closed, or they were filled up by underground rivers of thawing ice. This one is not like anything I've ever seen before. Long, glittering stalactites hang from the ceiling everywhere, a colossal system of icicles that must have been formed over a long period of time.
In the middle of the cave is what looks like a lake. There's something in the lake. It could be anything. It's impossible to tell from the photo.
The only reason it's possible to imagine the scale of things is that a man is sitting in the foreground. He's sitting on one of the mounds that the dripping water and the cold have made rise up from the floor of the cave. He's laughing triumphantly at the camera. This time he's wearing down pants. But he still has
kamiks
on. It's Isaiah's father.
When I lift up the stack of paper, the last sheet stays on the table because it's thinner than the photographs. It's a sheet of writing paper with the rough draft of a letter. Only a few lines, written in pencil and crossed out in several places, then placed at the bottom of the stack. Like when you've written a diary, or a will, and you don't really want to acknowledge it. You don't feel that it should lie around, shouting your confessions to the wind. But you still want to have it close at hand. Maybe because it still needs some work.
I read it, then fold it up and put it in my pocket.
My throat is dry. My hands are shaking. What I need now is a smooth exit.
I've just put out my hand to open the door to Tørk's cabin when there's a click inside and a strip of light falls into the corridor. I step back. The door starts to open. It opens toward me, giving me time to choose a door to my right, open it, and step inside. I pull the door behind me but don't dare shut it all the way.
It's dark. The tiles under my feet tell me that I'm in the bathroom. The light is turned on from the outside. I retreat behind a curtain into the shower stall. The door opens. There's no sound, but a pair of hands float into view in the vertical slit where the curtain isn't quite closed. They are Tørk's hands.
His face appears in the mirror. He's so groggy with sleep that he doesn't even see himself. He bends down, turns on the faucet, lets it get cold, and drinks from it. Then he straightens up, turns around, and leaves. He moves mechanically, like a sleepwalker.
The instant the door to his cabin closes, I'm out in the corridor. In a second he'll notice that the papers are missing. I want to get out before the search starts.
The light goes out. His bunk creaks. He has gone back to sleep in the blue moonlight.
A chance like this, such magnificent luck, only occurs once in a lifetime. I could dance all the way to the exit.
A woman calls out in a low, commanding voice farther along the hallway in the dark up ahead. I turn around and head in the other direction. A man snickers in front of me. At the same moment he passes the patch of light from the open doorway to the salon. He's naked. He has an erection. They don't see me. I'm caught between them.
I step back into the bathroom again, back into the shower stall. The light goes on. They come inside. He goes over to the sink. He waits for his erection to subside. Then he stands on his toes and urinates into the sink. It's Seidenfaden. The author of the report about transporting massive weights across sea ice that I was just looking at. The report in which he refers to an article that I wrote. And now we're this close to each other. We live in a world of compressed juxtapositions.
The woman is standing behind him. She has an intent expression on her face. For a moment I think that she has seen me in the mirror. Then she lifts her hands above her head. She's holding a belt with the buckle down. When she strikes, she does it with such precision that only the buckle hits him, leaving a long white stripe across one buttock. The stripe changes from white to flaming red. He takes hold of the sink, bends over, and presses his backside toward her. She strikes again; the buckle hits his other buttock. Romeo and Juliet come to mind. Europe has a long tradition of elegant rendezvous. Then the light goes out. The door closes, and they're gone.
I step out into the corridor. My knees are shaking. I don't know what to do about the papers. I take two steps toward Tørk's cabin. Can't make up my mind. Take one step back. Decide to leave them in the salon. There's nothing else to do. I feel as if I'm imprisoned in a switching yard.
A door opens in the dark. This time there's no warning, the light isn't turned on, and it's only because I've become familiar with my surroundings that I manage to step into the bathroom and hide in the shower stall in time.
This time the light doesn't go on. But the door is opened and then closed and locked. I take out my screwdriver. They've come to get me. I'm holding the papers behind my back. I'm going to throw them as I jab with the screwdriver. Once from below, up toward the abdomen. And then I'll run.
The curtain is pushed aside. I get ready to push off from the wall.
The water is turned on. The cold water. Then the hot. The temperature is adjusted. The shower has been directed toward the wall. Within three seconds I'm soaking wet.
The spray is diverted away from the wall. He gets in under the water. I'm four inches away. Except for the splashing of the water, there's not a sound. And there's no light. But at this distance I don't need it to recognize the mechanic.
In the White Palace he never turned on the light on his way up the stairs. He always waited until the last minute to flip the switch in the basement. He likes peace and solitude in the dark.
His hand brushes mine when he fumbles for the soapdish. He
finds it, steps back a little from the water, and soaps up. Puts the soap back and massages his skin. Searches for the soap again. His fingers brush mine and move on. Then they slowly come back. Touch my hand.
He ought to gasp at least. A scream wouldn't be out of place. But he doesn't utter a sound. His fingers register the screwdriver, carefully take it out of my hand, and move up my arm to my elbow.
The water is turned off. The curtain is shoved aside; he steps out into the room. After a moment the light goes on.
He's put a big orange towel around his waist. His face is expressionless. All of his movements have been calm, deliberate, subdued.
He looks at me. And then he recognizes me.
His handle on the present dissolves. He doesn't move, his face hardly changes expression. But he's paralyzed.
I now know that he didn't realize I was on board.
He looks at my wet hair, the clinging dress, the soaked papers that I'm holding in front of me. My sloshing rubber boots and the screwdriver that he's holding. He doesn't understand a thing.
Then he hands me his towel, with an awkward and perplexed gesture. Without thinking that he is exposing himself. I take it and hand him the papers. He holds them in front of his genitals while I dry my hair. His eyes never leave my face.
We're sitting on the bunk in his cabin. Close together, with a chasm between us. We're whispering, even though it's not necessary.
“Do you know what's going on?” I ask.
“M-most of it.”
“Can you tell me?”
He shakes his head.
We've ended up just about where we started. In a morass of secrets. I feel a wild urge to throw myself at him and beg him to anesthetize me and wake me up only after it's all over.
I've never gotten to know him. Up until a few hours ago I thought that we had shared certain moments of silent solidarity. When I saw him walking across the landing platform of the
Greenland
Star
, I realized that we've always been strangers. When you're young, you think that sex is the culmination of intimacy. Later you discover that it's barely the beginning.
“I want to show you something.”
I put the papers in a pile on his desk. He hands me a T-shirt, underpants, thermal pants, wool socks, and a sweater. We get dressed with our backs turned, like two strangers. I have to roll his pants up above the knees and the sleeves of his sweater to the elbow. I ask him for a wool cap as well, and he gives it to me. From a drawer he takes out a flat, dark bottle and stuffs it into an inside pocket. I take the wool blanket off his bed and fold it up. Then we leave.
He opens the case. Jakkelsen stares at us disconsolately. His nose is blue-tinged and sharp, as if it were frozen.
“Who's this?”
“Bernard Jakkelsen. Lukas's little brother.”
I go over to him and unbutton his shirt and pull it away from the triangular steel. The mechanic doesn't move.
I turn off the light. We stand quietly in the darkness. Then we go upstairs. I lock the door behind us. When we reach the deck, the mechanic stops.
“Who did it?”
“Verlaine,” I say. “The bosun.”
There are steps welded onto the external bulkhead. I crawl up first. He follows me slowly. We reach a small half-deck clothed in darkness. A motorboat is perched on two wooden trestles, and behind it there's a large rubber raft. We sit down between the two. From here we have a view of the quarterdeck but we're shielded from the light.
“It happened on the
Greenland Star.
Just as you arrived.”
He doesn't believe me.
“Verlaine could have heaved him over the side. But he was afraid the body would float up near the platform the next day. Or be sucked up into a propeller.”

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