Read Smilla's Sense of Snow Online
Authors: Peter Høeg
Smilla's Sense of Snow (27 page)
“They're dead, darling.” His Danish is so thick that it's almost American English. “A long time ago. Dead and gone. Mr. P.C. âPaul Chambers.”
“What year? What year was it?”
His gaze filters through glassy eyes, drunken and uncommunicative.
“Dead and gone. Me too, darling. Any time. Any time now.”
He smiles. I let him go. He straightens up and pours spit out of the trumpet. Then I feel myself gently lifted down to the floor. The mechanic is standing behind me.
“Start walking, Smilla.”
I start walking. He vanishes again. I keep going straight ahead. In front of me is the door to the foyer.
“Smilla Jaspersen!”
We remember people by their clothes and by the places where we've seen them, so at first I don't recognize him. The dark blue suit and the silk tie don't go with his face. Then I realize that it's the Toenail. There's nothing shrill about him; his voice is low and commanding. Equally discreet and inescapable, they will follow me out to the car in a few minutes. I start walking faster. I've turned off my brain. On either side a man like him is now approaching, a self-confident and insistent figure.
I reach the foyer. Behind me the door slams shut. It's a large door, also made to resemble a bank vault door, so tall and heavy that it looks as if it serves merely a decorative purpose. Now it slams like the lid of a cigar box. The mechanic leans casually against it. It shuts out all noise. There is only a faint thud when someone sets his shoulder against it.
“Run, Smilla,” he says. “Run. Lander's waiting out on the road.”
I take a look around. There are no guests in the foyer. Behind the kiosk's magazine and cigarette displays a clerk yawns widely. Behind the information counter a girl is about to fall asleep over her PC. In back of me a man is nonchalantly leaning his six foot six frame against a steel door being jolted by small thuds. Everything is calm and quiet at Casino Ãresund. A place with class. With style and cultured excitement and diversion at the green felt
tables. The place where you make new friends and meet old ones.
tables. The place where you make new friends and meet old ones.
Then I take off. I'm out of breath by the time I get to the parking lot.
“Your car, madam.”
It's the same attendant as when we arrived.
“I've decided to have it scrapped. After the look you gave it.”
There is no path for pedestrians. They hadn't planned on the eventuality that the casino might have guests who arrived on foot. So I run along the roadway, duck under the two white crossing gates, and come out on Sund Lane. A hundred yards ahead waits a red Jaguar with its taillights on.
Lander doesn't look at me as I get in. His face is tense and pale.
It's night and freezing cold. I don't remember ever seeing a big city gripped by frost like this. There is something defenseless and powerless about Copenhagen, as if a new ice age were on its way.
“What's an LMC?”
He drives stiffly and slowly, unused to the white, crystalline membrane that the cold has spread on the asphalt.
“Landing Mobile Craft. A flat-bottomed landing vessel. The kind used during the invasion of Normandy.”
I make him drive me to Harbor Street. He parks between the hydrofoil jetty and the old dock for the Bornholm boat. I ask him for his shoes and his cap. He gives them to me with no questions asked.
“Wait an hour,” I say. “But no longer.”
The ice is dark bottle-green in the night, with a thin membrane of snow that must have just fallen. I make my way down a vertical wooden ladder built into the wharf. It's very cold on the mirror of ice. My Burberry seems oddly stiff, Lander's shoes feel as thin as eggshells. But they're white. Along with my coat and the cap, they make me one with the ice. Just in case someone might be posted at the White Palace.
Along the bulwark small packs of ice have formed. I estimate the thickness to be over four inches. Thick enough for the harbor authorities to open an ice rink. The problem is the dark, coagulated slush in the channel itself.
People live so close together in Northern Greenland. Sleeping many to a room. Hearing and seeing everyone else at all times.
The community is so small. There were 600 people spread among twelve settlements the last time I was home.
The community is so small. There were 600 people spread among twelve settlements the last time I was home.
In contrast to this is nature. Every hunter, every child is gripped by a wild delirium whenever he walks or rides away from the settlement. First there's the feeling of a rising energy bordering on madness. Then comes a peculiar sense of clarity.
I know it's funny. But here in Copenhagen Harbor, at two in the morning, this feeling of clarity comes over me. As if it somehow came from the ice and the night sky and the relatively open space.
I think about what has happened to me since Isaiah's death.
I see Denmark before me like a spit of ice. It's drifting, but it holds us frozen solid in the ice floes, in a fixed position in relation to everyone else.
Isaiah's death is an irregularity, an eruption that produced a fissure. That fissure has set me free. For a brief time, and I can't explain how, I have been set in motion, I have become a foreign body skating on top of the ice.
The way I am now skating across Copenhagen Harbor, dressed in a clown hat and borrowed shoes.
From this angle a new Denmark comes into view. A Denmark that consists of those who have partially wrested themselves free of the ice.
Loyen and Andreas Licht, driven by different forms of greed.
Elsa Lübing, Lagermann, Ravn, bureaucrats whose strength and dilemma is their faith in a corporation, in the medical profession, in a government apparatus. But who, out of sympathy, eccentricity, or for some incomprehensible reason, have circumvented their loyalty to help me.
Lander, the rich businessman, driven by a desire for excitement and a mysterious sense of gratitude.
That is the beginning of a social cross section of Denmark. The mechanic is the skilled worker, the laborer. Juliane is the dregs. And Iâwho am I? Am I the scientist, the observer? Am I the one who has been given the chance to get a glimpse of life from the outside? From a point of view made up of equal parts of loneliness and objectivity?
Or am I only pathetic?
In the channel the grease ice is held together with a thin, dark, disintegrating crust of ice, what's called “rotten ice,” dissolving and crumbling from below. I walk along the dark edge, down toward the White Palace, until I find a floe that's big enough. I step onto it and then onto the next. There's a slight movement with the current, down through the harbor, of maybe half a knot, rocking, lethal. I leap the last part of the way from floe to floe. I don't even get my feet wet.
The windows of the White Palace are dark. The entire complex seems to be in a sleep that also encompasses the walls, the playground, the stairways, the naked trunks of the trees. From the canal I come up behind the bicycle sheds, slowly and cautiously. I stop there.
I look at the parked cars. At the dark entryways. There is no movement. Then I look at the snow. The thin, fine layer of newly fallen snow.
There is no moon, so it takes time before I notice them. A single row of footprints. He came across the bridge and went behind the building. On this side of the playground the footprints are visible. A Vibram sole under a large person. They lead in under the shed roof in front of me, and they don't come back out.
Then I can feel him. There's no sound, no smell, nothing to see. But the tracks have made me resonant to his presence, to the certainty of a looming threat.
We wait for twenty minutes. When the cold makes me start shaking I pull away from the wall so I won't make any noise. Maybe I should give up and go back the way I came. But I stay. I detest fear. I hate being scared. There is only one path to fearlessness. It's the one that leads into the mysterious center of the terror.
For twenty minutes there is only soundless waiting. At 9° Fahrenheit. My mother could handle that. Most Greenlandic hunters can manage it any time. I can pull it off on rare occasions. For most Europeans it would be unthinkable. They would shift their weight, clear their throat, cough, rustle their overcoat.
The man whose presence I sense less than a yard away must be
convinced that he's alone, that no one can hear or see him. And yet he is as soundless as if he never existed.
convinced that he's alone, that no one can hear or see him. And yet he is as soundless as if he never existed.
But not for one second am I tempted to move, to give in to the cold. Like one long, internal shriek my senses tell me that someone is waiting there. That he's waiting for me.
I don't even hear him leave. I close my eyes for a moment because the cold has made them run. When I open them, a shadow has torn away from the shed roof and is moving off. A tall figure with a quick, fluid gait. And above his head, like a halo or a crown, something white, maybe a hat.
There are two ways to tag polar bears. The usual way is to stun them from a helicopter. The machine drops down directly over the bear, you lean out of the cockpit, and the instant that the air pressure from the rotor strikes the animal, it falls to the ground and you shoot.
Then there's the other method that we used on Svalbard. From a snowmobileâ“the Viking way.” You shoot with a custom air rifle made by Neiendamm in southern Jutland. This method requires you to get close, less than fifty yards away. Less than twenty-five is better. The moment the bear stops and turns around, you get a good look at it. Not one of those living carcasses that amuse you at the zoo, but a
polar bear
, the one from the Greenlandic coat of arms, colossal, three-quarters of a ton of muscle, bone, and teeth. With an extreme, lethal ability to explode. A wild animal that has existed for only 20,000 years, and in that time has known only two types of mammals: its own species and its prey.
polar bear
, the one from the Greenlandic coat of arms, colossal, three-quarters of a ton of muscle, bone, and teeth. With an extreme, lethal ability to explode. A wild animal that has existed for only 20,000 years, and in that time has known only two types of mammals: its own species and its prey.
I have never missed. We used bullets in which a gas device injected a large dose of Zolatil. The bear fell almost instantaneously. But not for a moment was I free of the panicky, hair-raising fear.
It's the same feeling now. What is moving away from me is only a shadow, a stranger, a person who is not aware of my presence. But the hair on my skin, which is numb from the cold, is standing on end like spines on a porcupine.
I reach the stairway through the basement rooms. The mechanic's door is locked, and the tape is in place.
The door of Juliane's apartment is standing open. As I pass, she comes out onto the stairs.
“You're going away, Smilla.”
She looks weak and helpless. But I hate her, anyway.
“Why didn't you tell me about Ving?” I say. “That he came and picked up Isaiah?”
She starts to cry. “The apartment. He gave us the apartment. He's a big shot with the housing authority. He could take it away again. He said that himself. Aren't you coming back?”
“Of course I am,” I say.
It's true. I'll have to come back. She's the only thing left of Isaiah. Just as, for Moritz, I'm his only connection with my mother.
I walk up to my own floor. The tape hasn't been touched. I let myself in. Everything is the way I left it. I gather up only the most essential clothes. They fill two suitcases, which weigh so much that I would have to call a moving van. I try to repack them. It's difficult, because I don't dare turn on a light but work by the reflection from the city's lights on the snow outside. Finally I limit myself to one large duffel bag. But not without heart-rending sacrifices.
Standing in the middle of the room, I take one last look around. I pick up Isaiah's cigar box and put it in the bag. I say a brief mental farewell to my home.
Then the phone rings.
Of course I should just let it ring. I promised the mechanic not to come up here. And I wouldn't want to talk to the police. Everything else can wait. I should just let it ring. I have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
I loosen the tape and pick up the receiver.
“Smilla ⦔
The voice is languid, almost distracted. But at the same time golden and resonant, like in a TV commercial. I have never heard it before. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I know that it belongs to the person who was standing less than a yard away from me only moments ago. I'm absolutely sure of it.
“Smilla ⦠I know you're there.”
I hear his breathing. Deep, calm. “Smilla ⦔
I put down the receiver, not on the phone, but on the table. I have to use both hands so I won't drop it. I sling my bag over my
shoulder. No time to change shoes. I race out the door and down the dark stairway, out the front door and along Strand Street, across the bridge, and up Havne Street. We can't control ourselves every second of our lives. There comes a time, for each of us, when panic takes the upper hand.
shoulder. No time to change shoes. I race out the door and down the dark stairway, out the front door and along Strand Street, across the bridge, and up Havne Street. We can't control ourselves every second of our lives. There comes a time, for each of us, when panic takes the upper hand.
Lander is waiting with the engine running. I throw myself into the passenger seat and cling to him.
“This is a good start,” he says.
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