Authors: Peter Høeg

Smilla's Sense of Snow (54 page)

BOOK: Smilla's Sense of Snow

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The mechanic won't be going back either. He would figure things out, he would link me to TÃ¸rk as surely as if he had seen us together. TÃ¸rk will let him dive; they obviously have a need for him, at least in placing the first fuse. They'll let him dive, and then he will cease to exist. TÃ¸rk will return, and there will have been an accident. Maybe something went wrong with the oxygen gauge. TÃ¸rk will have planned it all out.

Now I understand the equipment near the lake. The mechanic
was unpacking it while TÃ¸rk was talking to me. That's why he took me into the laboratory.

The light from his lamp catches the stone, casting shadows onto the wall in front of me. When I enter the tunnel the light dims.

It's a rectangular horizontal shaft, five feet square. Several yards inside the entrance it gets wider and there's a table. On top of the table there are measuring devices, milk bottles, dried meat, oatmealâeverything is twenty-eight years old and covered with ice.

I let my eyes grow accustomed to the faint light from the ice and then continue on until everything is pitch dark, but I keep going, following the wall with my outstretched hand. The floor has a slight incline, but there's no draft that might indicate an exit up ahead; it's a dead end.

I come to a wall in front me, a wall of ice. This is where I wait.

There's no sound of footsteps, but there's a light in the distance, coming closer. He has fastened the lamp to his forehead. It locates me next to the wall, and the light stands still. Then he takes it off. It's Verlaine.

“I showed Lukas the refrigerator,” I tell him. “When that's added on top of what you did to Jakkelsen, you'll get a life sentence without parole.”

He stops halfway between me and the light.

“Even if they ripped off your arms and legs, you'd find some way to kick back,” he says.

He bows his head and mutters to himself. It sounds like some kind of prayer. Then he steps toward me.

At first I think it's his shadow on the wall, but then I look back, anyway. A rose is growing on the ice, about ten feet across, composed of little red dots spattered up on the wall. Then he lifts his feet off the ground, spreads his arms, rises a foot and a half in the air, and throws himself against the wall. He hangs there, impaled like a big insect, in the center of the rose. That's when the sound comes. A brief whistle. A gray cloud drifts into the light from the lamp on the ground. Out of the cloud steps Lukas. He doesn't look at me. He looks at Verlaine. In his hand he's holding a compressed-air harpoon gun.

Verlaine moves. With one hand he fumbles at his back. Somewhere
below his shoulder blade a thin black line sticks out. The metal must be a special alloy to have the strength to hold him off the ground. The point was no more than four feet away when Lukas shot it at him. It entered his body in about the same place where Jakkelsen was stabbed.

I step out of the light and walk past Lukas.

I walk toward a rising white sun of light. When I emerge from the tunnel walls I see that a lamp is now burning, mounted high on a stanchion. They must have started the generator. TÃ¸rk is standing next to the lamp. The mechanic is standing in the water up to his knees. It takes a moment for me to recognize him. He's wearing a big yellow suit with boots and a helmet attached. I make it halfway over to them before Terk catches sight of me. He bends down. From the gear he takes out a pipe about the size of a furled umbrella. The mechanic is looking down at the water. His helmet would prevent him from hearing me. I take off my compass and toss it in the water. He raises his head and sees me. Then he starts to slide back the glass on the front of his helmet. TÃ¸rk is struggling with the umbrella. Unfolds the stock of a weapon.

“S-Smilla,” says the mechanic.

I keep walking forward. Behind me, in the resonating shaft of the tunnel, there are footsteps.

“I'm only going to m-make one d-dive. It's necessary for our work tomorrow.”

“There won't be any tomorrow for you or me,” I say. “Ask him where Verlaine is.”

The mechanic turns toward TÃ¸rk. He looks at him and understands.

“Why the boy?” I ask.

I ask the question for the mechanic's benefit and to stop time, not because I need any answer myself. I know what happened, as surely as if I had been on the roof myself.

I can feel TÃ¸rk as if he were a part of me. Through him I can feel the disastrous nature of the situation. All the balls he has in the air. The question of how well he can manage without the mechanic. His need to make a decision. And yet his voice is calm, almost sorrowful.

“He jumped.”

I keep on walking as I talk. He snaps on a long magazine perpendicular to the weapon.

“He panicked,” TÃ¸rk says.

“Why?” I ask.

“I wanted to ask him to give me the cassette tape back. But he ran away; he didn't recognize me. He thought I was a stranger. It was dark.”

He releases the safety. The mechanic doesn't notice the weapon, he's looking at TÃ¸rk's face.

“We get up onto the roof. He doesn't see me.”

“There were tracks,” I lie. “I saw the tracks; he turned around.”

“I shouted to him; he turned around, but he didn't see me.”

He looks me in the eye.

“He was hard of hearing,” I say. “He didn't turn around. He couldn't hear a thing.”

There is ice under my feet. I'm on my way across the ice toward him, just as Isaiah was heading away from him. It's as if I am Isaiah. But on his way back now. To do something differently. To see whether there might be an alternative.

Lukas is fifteen feet away when TÃ¸rk sees him. He has gone the other way around the stone. TÃ¸rk has been dividing his attention between me and the mechanic. You can't do everything. Even he can't do everything.

“Bernard is dead,” says Lukas.

He's holding the harpoon gun in front of him. He must have loaded it again. It seems as long as a lance; for a moment his wasted and much too rigid figure makes him look like some kind of cartoon character. His pants have frozen into an armor of ice. On his way ashore he must have fallen in.

“You must be held responsible,” he says.

TÃ¸rk's umbrella shudders. A big invisible hand spins Lukas around on the spot. Then the dull blast follows, and Lukas has sketched a full pirouette. His face is once again turned toward us, but now his left arm is missing. He sits down on the ice and the bleeding starts.

Then the mechanic moves. Because he's coming out of the water
for a brief moment he resembles a big fish jumping onto land. The umbrella careens across the ice. Even without it, there is great confidence in TÃ¸rk's upright form.

The mechanic reaches him. One of his yellow gloves clamps onto TÃ¸rk's shoulder, the other locks around his jaw. Then he squeezes. When the face beneath the pale hair falls backward, the mechanic bends his helmet over it; they look each other in the eye. I wait for the sound of vertebrae being torn apart. The crack won't be the sound of something breaking but of something slipping into place.

TÃ¸rk kicks, a practiced movement that goes outward and moves in a semicircle toward the mechanic's face. It strikes the side of his helmet with the sound of an ax burying itself in a tree stump. Slowly the yellow form lists sideways and sinks to its knees.

The umbrella is lying in front of me on the ice. I'm so scared of the weapon that I can't even kick it away.

The mechanic straightens up. He starts to take off his oxygen tanks. His movements are weightlessly slow, like an astronaut.

Then TÃ¸rk takes off. I run after him.

He could force the others to sail away. They wouldn't like it. Especially Sonne. But TÃ¸rk could make them leave.

He runs down along the crevasse. His lamp flickers. It's dark. At night in Qaanaaq I would go up on the ice to get blocks of meltwater. The ice has its own nocturnal hospitality. I have no flashlight now, but I'm running as if it were a level road. Without difficulty, with confidence. My
kamiks
grip the snow in a different way than his boots do.

It would take so little. One little mistake and he would fall the way Isaiah fell.

The white fields where the snow has settled form hexagons in the dark. We're running through the universe.

I abandon the edge of the glacier before he does and head down. I want to cut him off from the motorboat. He hasn't seen me yet or heard me. But he knows I'm here.

The ice is
hikuliaq,
new ice, that has formed where the old ice has drifted out. It's too thick to force a motorboat through but too thin to walk on. A white fog of frost hovers overhead.

Then he sees me, or maybe he merely sees a figure, and he heads out onto the ice. I take a path parallel to his. He sees that it's me. He realizes that he doesn't have the strength to reach me.

The
Kronos
is hidden in the fog. He heads too far to the right. When he instinctively corrects his course, the ship is two hundred yards behind us. He's lost his bearings. He's being led out toward open water. Toward the spot where the current has hollowed out the ice so it's as thin as a membrane, a fetal membrane. Underneath, the sea is dark and salty like blood, and a face is pressing up against the icy membrane from below; it's Isaiah's face, the as-yet-unborn Isaiah. He's calling TÃ¸rk. Is it Isaiah who is pulling him along, or am I the one who is trying to head him off and to force him toward the thin ice?

His strength is about to give out. If you haven't grown up in this landscape, it uses up your strength.

Maybe in a moment the ice will give way beneath him. Maybe it will seem a relief to have the cold water make him weightless and suck him downward. Even on a night like this the ice will look bluish white, like a neon light, from below.

Or maybe he will change direction and head to the right again, across the ice. Tonight the temperature will drop even more, and there will be a snowstorm. He'll only survive a couple of hours. At some point he will stop, and the cold will transform him; like a stalactite, a frozen shell will close around a barely fluid life until even his pulse stops and he becomes one with the landscape. You can't win against the ice.

Behind us the stone is still there, with its mystery and the questions it has raised. And the mechanic.

Somewhere ahead of me the running figure slowly grows darker.

Tell us, they'll say to me. So we will understand and be able to resolve things. They'll be mistaken. It's only the things you don't understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution.