Authors: Peter Høeg

Smilla's Sense of Snow (10 page)

BOOK: Smilla's Sense of Snow

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“It smells like fish in here, Smilla.”

“Cod liver,” I say. “It's supposed to be so healthy.”

He watches in silence as I open the electronic safe and hang the key in its place. Then we lock up after us. He leads me over to a gate in the fence facing Svaneke Street. It's open. After we go through, he bends over the lock and it clicks shut.

His car is parked on the next street. I have to support him with one hand. In the other I'm carrying a garbage bag full of other garbage bags. A patrol car passes us slowly, but without stopping. They see so much going on in the streets at this time of year. People should be allowed to amuse themselves in whatever manner they choose.

He tells me that he's trying to get his car accepted by a classic car museum. It's a '61 Morris 1000, he tells me. With red leather seats and wooden top and instrument panel.

“I can't drive,” he says.

“I don't have a license.”

“Have you ever driven before?”

“Snow-cats on the ice cap.”

But he wasn't going to subject his Morris to that. So he drives. There's barely room for his large body behind the wheel. The top is full of holes and we're freezing. I wish that he had succeeded in getting it into a museum a long time ago.

The temperature has fallen from just below freezing to hard frost, and on our way home it starts to snow. With
qanik,
fine-grained powder snow.

The most dangerous kind of avalanches are powder snow avalanches. They're set off by extremely small energy disturbances, such as a loud noise. They have a very small mass, but they move at 125 miles per hour, and they leave behind them a deadly vacuum. There are people who have had their lungs sucked out of their bodies by powder snow avalanches.

In miniature form, these are the kind of avalanche that started on the steep, slippery roof that Isaiah fell from and which I now
force myself to look up at. One of the things you can learn from snow is the way great forces and catastrophes can always be found in miniature form in daily life. Not one day of my adult life has passed that I haven't been amazed at how poorly Danes and Greenlanders understand each other. It's worse for Greenlanders, of course. It's not healthy for the tightrope walker to be misunderstood by the person who's holding the rope. And in this century the Inuit's life has been a tightrope dance on a cord fastened on one end to the world's least hospitable land with the world's most severe and fluctuating climate, and fastened on the other end to the Danish colonial administration.

That's the big picture. The little everyday picture is that I have lived on the floor above the mechanic for a year and a half, have spoken to him countless times, and he has fixed my doorbell and repaired my bicycle, and I have helped him check a letter to the housing authorities for spelling mistakes. There were about twenty misspelled words out of a total of twenty-eight. He's dyslexic.

We ought to take a shower and rinse off the dust and the blood and the cod liver. But we are bound together by what has happened. So we both go up to his apartment. Where I've never been before.

Order reigns in the living room. The furniture is made of sanded, lye-treated blond wood, with cushions and upholstery of woolen horse blankets. There are candlesticks with candles, a bookcase with books, a bulletin board with photographs and kids' drawings by the children of friends. “To Big Peter from Mara, five years old.” There are rosebushes in large porcelain pots, and they have red blossoms, and it looks as if someone waters them and talks to them and promises them that they will never be sent on vacation to my place, where, for some strange reason, the climate is bad for green plants.

“Câcoffee?”

Coffee is poison. And yet I suddenly have the urge to roll in the mud and I say, “Yes, please.”

I stand in the doorway and watch while he makes it. The kitchen is completely white. He takes up his position in the middle, the way a badminton player does on the court, so he has to move as
little as possible. He has a little electric grinder. First he grinds a lot of light-colored beans and then some that are tiny, almost black, and shiny as glass. He mixes them in a little metal funnel that he attaches to an espresso machine, which he places on a gas burner.

People acquire bad coffee habits in Greenland. I pour hot milk right onto the NescafÃ©. I'm not above dissolving the powder in water straight from the hot-water tap.

He pours one part whipping cream and two parts whole milk into two tall glasses with handles.

When he draws out the coffee from the machine, it's thick and black like crude oil. Then he froths the milk with the steam nozzle and divides the coffee between the two glasses.

We take it out to the sofa. I do appreciate it when someone serves me something good. In the tall glasses the drink is dark as an old oak tree and has an overwhelming, almost perfumed tropical scent.

“I was following you,” he says.

The glass is scorching hot. The coffee is scalding. Normally hot drinks lose heat when they're poured. But in this case the steam nozzle has heated up the glass to 200Â°F along with the milk.

“The door's open. So I go in. I had no idea that you'd be s-sitting in the d-dark waiting.”

I cautiously sip at the rim. The drink is so strong that it makes my eyes water and I can suddenly feel my heart.

“I'd been thinking about what you said on the roof. About the footprints.”

His stammer is barely noticeable now. Sometimes it vanishes entirely.

“We were friends, you know. He was so young. But we were still friends â¦ We don't talk much. But we have fun. Damn, we sure have fun. He m-makes faces. He puts his head in his hands. And he raises it, and he looks like a sick old monkey. He hides it again. He raises it. He looks like a rabbit. Again and he looks like Frankenstein's monster. I'm on the floor and finally I have to tell him to stop it. I give him a block of wood and a chisel. A knife and a piece of soapstone. He sits there swaying and rumbling like a little bear. Every so often he says something. But it's in Greenlandic. Talking to himself. So we sit and work. Independently but
together. I'm surprised he can be such a good person, with a mother like that.”

He pauses for a long time, hoping I'll take over. But I don't come to his rescue. We both know that I'm the one who deserves an explanation.

“So one night we're sitting there as usual. Then Petersen the custodian comes in. He keeps his wine carboys under the stairs next to the furnace. Comes in to get his apricot wine. He's not usually there that time of day. So there he is with his deep voice and his wooden clogs. And then I happen to look down at the boy. And he's sitting all huddled up. Like an animal. With the knife you gave him in his hand. Shaking all over. Looking ferocious. Even after he realized it was only Petersen, he still kept shaking. I take him on my lap. For the first time. I talk to him. He doesn't want to go home. I b-bring him up here. Put him on the sofa. I think about calling you up, but what would I say? We don't know each other very well. He sleeps here. I stay up, sitting next to the sofa. Every fifteen minutes he bolts up like a spring, shaking and crying.”

He's not a talker. In the last five minutes he has said more to me than in the past year and a half. He's left himself so vulnerable that I can't look him in the eye; I stare down at my coffee. A film of tiny, clear bubbles has formed on it, catching the light and breaking it up into red and purple.

“From that day on, I have the feeling that he's afraid of something. What you said about the footprints keeps on going through my mind. So I sort of keep my eye on you. You and the Baron understand â¦ understood each other.”

Isaiah arrived in Denmark a month before I moved in. Juliane had given him a pair of patent-leather shoes. Patent-leather shoes are considered stylish in Greenland. They couldn't get his fanshaped feet into a pair with pointed toes. But Juliane managed to find a pair with rounded toes. After that, the mechanic called Isaiah “the Baron.” When a nickname sticks, it's because it captures some deeper truth. In this case, it was Isaiah's dignity. Which had something to do with the fact that he was so selfâsufficient. That there was so little he needed from the world to be happy.

“By accident I see you go up to Juliane's apartment and leave again. I sneak after you in the Morris. Watch you feed the dog. See you climb over. I open the other gate.”

That's how it all fits together. He hears something, he sees something, he follows somebody, he opens a gate, gets bashed in the head, and we sit here. No mysteries, nothing new or disturbing under the sun.

He gives me a crooked smile. I smile back. We sit there drinking coffee and smiling at each other. We know that I know he's lying.

I tell him about Elsa LÃ¼bing. About the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark. About the report lying in front of us on the table in a plastic bag.

I tell him about Ravn. Who doesn't exactly work where he works, but somewhere else instead.

He sits there looking down as I talk. His head bent, motionless.

It's hidden, lying out there on the edge of consciousness. But we both sense that we are participating in a barter. That, with profound, mutual suspicion, we are trading information that we have to reveal in order to get some in return.

“Then there's the l-lawyer.”

Outside, above the harbor, a light appears, as if it had been sleeping in the canals, under the bridges, and is now hesitantly rising up onto the ice, which grows brighter. In Thule the light returned in February. For weeks ahead of time we could see the sun while it was still far beneath the mountains and we were living in darkness; its rays fell on Pearl Island, hundreds of miles out to sea, making it glow like a shard of rose mother-of-pearl. I was positive, no matter what the adults said, that the sun had been hibernating in the sea and was now waking up.

“It all started when I noticed the car, a red BMW, on Strand Street,” he says.

“Yes?” It seems to me that the cars on Strand Street change every day.

“Once a month. He picks up the Baron. When he got home, the Baron was impossible to talk to.”

“I see.” You have to give slow people all the time in the world.

“Then one day I open the carâI have a tool with meâand look
in the glove compartment. Belongs to a lawyer. Name of Ving.”

“You might have been looking in the wrong car.”

“Flowers. It's like flowers. When you're a g-gardener. I see a car once or twice and I remember it. The way you are with snow. The way you were up on the roof.”

“Maybe I was mistaken.”

He shakes his head. “I watched you and the Baron play that jumping game.”

A large part of my childhood was spent playing that game. I often still play it in my sleep. You jump across an untouched expanse of snow. The others wait with their backs turned. Afterwardâon the basis of the footprintsâyou have to reconstruct the way the first person jumped. Isaiah and I played that game. I often took him to kindergarten. Sometimes we arrived an hour and a half late. I got in trouble. They warned me that a kindergarten couldn't function if the children came drifting in late in the day. But we were happy.

“He could leap like a flea,” says the mechanic, daydreaming. “He was sly. He'd turn halfway around in the air and land on one foot. He'd walk back in his own footprints.”

He looks at me, shaking his head. “But you guessed right every time.”

“How long were they gone?”

The jackhammers on Knippels Bridge. The traffic starting up. The seagulls. The distant bass sound, actually more like a deep vibration, of the first hydrofoil to Sweden. The short toots on the horn of the Bornholm ferry as it turns in front of Amalienborg Palace. It's almost morning.

“Maybe several hours. But a different car brought him home. A cab. He always came back alone in a cab.”

He makes us an omelet while I stand in the doorway telling him about the Institute of Forensic Medicine. About Professor Loyen. About Lagermann. About the trace of something that might be a muscle biopsy, taken from a child. After he fell.

He slices onions and tomatoes, sautÃ©s them in butter, whips the egg whites until they're stiff, blends in the egg yolks, and cooks
the whole thing on both sides. He takes the pan over to the table. We drink milk and eat slices of a moist black rye bread that smells of tar.

We eat in silence. Whenever I eat with strangersâlike nowâor if I'm very hungryâlike nowâI am reminded of the ritual significance of meals. In my childhood I remember associating the solemnity of companionship with great gustatory experiences. The pink, slightly frothy whale blubber eaten from a communal platter. The feeling that practically everything in life is meant to be shared.

I get up.

He's standing in the door as if to block my way.

I think about the inadequacy of what he has told me today.

BOOK: Smilla's Sense of Snow

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