Smilla's Sense of Snow aka Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

6

I would like to understand Benja. At this moment more than ever.

It wasn't always this way. I didn't always have to understand things. At least I tell myself that it wasn't always this way. When I came to Denmark for the first time, I experienced phenomena. In all their gruesomeness, or beauty, or gray drabness. But without feeling any great need to explain them.

Often there was no food when Isaiah came home. Juliane would be sitting at the table with her friends, and there were cigarettes and laughter and tears and an enormous abuse of alcohol, but there wasn't as much as five kroner to go out and buy some French fries. He never complained. He never yelled at his mother. He never sulked. Patient, silent, and watchful he would wrench himself away from the outstretched hands and go on his way. In order to find, if possible, some other solution. Sometimes the mechanic was home, sometimes I was. He could sit in my living room for an hour or more without telling me he was hungry. Persisting in an extreme, almost stupid, Greenlandic politeness.

Occasionally I would feel the urge to explain things after I had cooked for him, after I had boiled a mackerel and put the whole fish, weighing three pounds, on the floor on a newspaper because that's where he preferred to eat. Without uttering a word, using both hands, he would devour the entire fish with methodical thoroughness and eat the eyes and suck out the brain and lick the backbone and crunch on the fins. I would try to understand the difference between growing up in Denmark and growing up in Greenland. To comprehend the humiliating, exhausting, monotonous emotional dramas with which European children and parents are bound together in mutuaI hatred and dependence. And to understand Isaiah.

Deep inside I know that trying to figure things out leads to blindness, that the desire to understand has a buiIt-in brutality that erases what you seek to comprehend. Only experience is sensitive. But maybe I'm both weak and brutal. I've never been able to resist trying.

Benja seems to have been given everything. I've met her parents. They're trim and subdued and play the piano and speak foreign languages, and every year, when the Royal Theater's school closed for the summer and they went south to their house on the Costa Smeralda, they aways took the best French ballet tutor along to badger Benja on the terrace between the palm trees every morning, because that's what she herself wanted.

You might think that someone who has never suffered or lacked anything worth mentioning would be at peace with herself. For a long time I misjudged her. I thought she and Moritz were playing a game when she walked through the room in front of us, dressed only in her little panties, and placed red silk scarves over the lamps because the light hurt her eyes, and made an endless series of appointments with Moritz and then canceled them because, she said, today she needed to see someone her own age. I thought that on some mysterious wave of self-confidence she was testing her youth and beauty and attractiveness on Moritz, who was almost fifty years older than her.

One day I witnessed her ordering him to move the furniture so that she would have room to dance, and he refused.

At first she didn't believe him. Her pretty face and slanted, almond-shaped eyes and smooth brow beneath corkscrew curls glowed with the awareness of a victory already won. Then she realized that he was not going to yield. Maybe it was the first time in their relationship. First she turned pale with rage, and then her face cracked. Her eyes became despairing, empty, abandoned; her mouth closed on smothered, infantile, despairing tears which refused to flow.

Then I realized that she loved him. That under that appealing coquettishness was a love like a military operation that would tolerate anything and fight any necessary tank battles and demand the world in return. Then I realized, too, that she might always hate me. And that she had lost in advance. Somewhere inside Moritz there is a landscape she will never reach. The home of his feelings for my mother.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Right now, at this very moment, it occurs to me that she might have won, after all. If that's the case, then I'll grant her that she put her nose to the grindstone. She didn't just leave it at wiggling her little fanny around. She didn't settle for sending lovesick glances from the stage to Moritz in the first row, hoping that it would all work out in the long run. She didn't put her trust in her influence at home in the bosom of her family. If I didn't realize it before, I know it now. That there is a raw energy in Benja.

I'm standing in the snow, pressed up against the wall of the house, peering down into the pantry. There Benja is pouring a glass of milk. Enchanting, lithe Benja. And she's handing it to a man who now steps into view. It's the Toenail.

I'm walking along Strand Drive from Klampenborg Station, and it's a wonder that I notice it at all, because I've had a hard day.

That morning I couldn't stand it any longer; I got up, tucked my hair and bandage-which is now only a Bandaid over the wound-under a ski hat, put on sunglasses and a Loden coat, and took the train to the main station, and there I called the mechanic's number, but no one answered.

Then I stroll along the docks, from the Customs Wharf to Langelinie, trying to gather my thoughts. At the North Harbor I make several purchases and pack up a box that they will deliver to Moritz's villa, and from a phone booth I make a call that I know is one of the crucial actions in my life.

And yet it's strange that it means so little. Under certain circumstances the fateful decisions in life, sometimes even in matters of life and death, are made with an almost indifferent ease. While the little things-for instance, the way people hang on to what is over-seem so important. What's important today is to see Knippels Bridge once again, where I rode with him, and the White Palace, where I slept with him, and the Cryolite Corporation, and Skudehavns Road, where we walked together, arm in arm. I call him again from the phone booth at North Harbor Station. A man answers. But it's not him. It's a controlled, anonymous voice.

"Yes?"

I hold the receiver to my ear. Then I hang up.

I page through the phone book. I can't find his car repair shop. I take a taxi out to Toftegards Square and walk along Vigerslev Avenue. There is no garage. From a phone booth I call the mechanics' association. The man I talk to is friendly and patient. But there has never been a car repair shop registered on Vigerslev Avenue.

I've never noticed until now how exposed phone booths are. Making a call is like putting yourself on display for instant recognition.

The phone book lists two addresses for the Center for Developmental Research, one at the August Krogh Institute and one at Denmark's Technical High School on Lundtofte Slope. At the latter address there's apparently a library and office.

I take a cab to Kampmanns Street, to the office of the Trade Commission. The boy's smile and tie and naivete are unchanged.

"I'm glad you came back," he says.

I show him the newspaper clipping. "You read foreign papers. Do you remember this one?"

"The suicide," he says. "Everybody remembers that. The consular secretary jumped off a roof. The man they arrested had tried to talk her out of it. The case raised a fundamental question about the legal rights of Danes abroad."

"You don't happen to remember the secretary's name, do you?"

He has tears in his eyes. "We studied international law at the university together. A wonderful girl. Ravn was her name. Nathalie Ravn. She applied for a job with the Ministry of Justice. They said-in local circles-that she might become the first female police commissioner."

"There's nothing 'local' left anymore," I say. "If something happens in Greenland, it's connected to something else in Singapore."

He gazes at me, uncomprehending and mournful. "You didn't come here to see me," he says. "You came about this."

"I'm not worth getting to know," I say, meaning it.

"You remind me of her. Secretive. And not someone you would picture behind a desk. I couldn't understand why she suddenly became a secretary in Singapore. That's a different Ministry."

I take the train to Lyngby Station and then catch a bus. In a way, it feels like when I was seventeen. You think that the despair will stop you cold, but it doesn't; it wraps itself up in a dark corner somewhere inside and forces the rest of your system to function, to take care of practical matters, which may not be important but which keep you going, which guarantee that you are still, somehow, alive.

Between the buildings the snow is three feet high; only narrow corridors have been cleared.

They haven't finished remodeling the Center for Developmental Research yet. In the lobby they've put in a counter, but it's covered up because they're in the process of painting the ceiling. I tell them what I'm looking for. A woman asks me whether I have computer time reserved. I say no. She shakes her head, the library isn't open yet, the center's archives are kept on LTNIC at Denmark's Data Processing Center for Research and Training, the computer system for institutes of higher learning, which is not accessible to the general public.

I walk around among the buildings for a while. I was here many times in my student days. Our classes on surveying were held here. Time has changed the area, made it harsher and more alien than I remember it. Or maybe it's the cold. Or just me.

I walk past the computer building. It's locked, but when a group of students comes out, I go in. In the central room there are maybe fifty terminals. I wait for a while. When an elderly man comes in, I follow him. When he sits down, I stand behind him and pay attention. He doesn't notice me. He sits there for an hour. Then he leaves. I sit down at a free terminal and press a key. The machine writes: Log on user ID? I type LTH3-just as the elderly gentleman did. The machine replies: Welcome to the Laboratory for Technical Hygiene. Your password? I type JPB. The way the elderly gentleman did. The machine replies: Welcome Mr. Jens Peter Bramslev.

When I type Center for Developmental Research the machine replies with a menu. One of the topics is Library. I type in Tørk Hviid. There is only one title. "A Hypothesis on the Eradication of Submarine Life in the Arctic Sea in Conjunction with the Alvarez Incident."

It's a hundred pages long. I scroll through them. There are timelines. Pictures of fossils. Neither the pictures nor the captions are legible in the poor resolution of the screen. There are various charts. Some diagrammatic, geological maps of the present-day Davis Strait in various stages of its creation. The whole thing seems consistently incomprehensible. I press on to the end.

After a long list of references there is a brief abstract of the article.

This article is based on the theory of physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Luis Alvarez from the 1970s. He proposed that the iridium content in a layer of clay between the chalk and tertiary sediments at Gubbio in the northern Apennines and at Stevn's Klint in Denmark is too big to be anything but the result of an extremely large meteor impact.

Alvarez theorizes that the impact occurred 65 million years ago, that the meteor was between four and nine miles in diameter, and that it exploded on impact, releasing energy comparable to 100 million megatons of TNT. The resultant ash cloud totally blocked out the sun for a period of at least several days. During this period several food chains collapsed. The result was that a large portion of the marine and submarine microorganisms were annihilated, which in turn prompted further consequences for the large carnivores and herbivores. On the basis of discoveries made by the author in the Barents Sea and Davis Strait, the article discusses the possibility that the radiation resulting from the explosion on impact might explain a series of mutations among marine-based parasites in the early Paleocene periods. The article also discusses whether such mutations might be the reason for massive extinctions of the larger sea animals.

I scroll through it again. The language is clear, the style clean, almost transparent. But 65 million years still seems like a very long time ago.

It's dark by the time I take the train back. The wind carries a light snow with it, pirhuk. My mind registers it as if through an anesthetic.

In a big city you adopt a particular way of regarding the world. A focused, sporadically selective view. When you scan a desert or an ice floe, you see with different eyes. You let the details slip out of focus in favor of the whole. This way of seeing reveals a different reality. If you look at someone's face in this manner, it starts to dissolve into a shifting series of masks.

With this way of seeing, a person's breath in the coldthat veil of cooled drops that forms in the air in temperatures under 46°F-is not merely a phenomenon twenty inches from his mouth. It's something all-encompassing, a structural transformation of the space surrounding a warm-blooded creature, an aura of minimal but definite thermal displacement. I've seen hunters shoot snow hares in a starless winter night at a distance of 270 yards by aiming at the fog around them.

I am not a hunter. And I'm asleep inside. Maybe I'm close to giving up. But I sense him when I'm fifty yards away, before he hears me. He's standing between the two marble pillars which flank the gate leading from Strand Drive to the stairs.

In the city, in the Norrebro district, people stand on streetcorners and in doorways; it doesn't mean anything. But on Strand Drive it is significant. And besides, I've grown hypersensitive. So I shake off my resignation, take several steps backward, and go into the neighboring yard.

I find the hole in the hedge that I used so often as a child, squeeze my way through it, and wait. After several minutes I see the other one. He's positioned himself at the corner of the porter's lodge, where the driveway curves up toward the house.

I walk back to the. place where I can approach the kitchen door from an angle so I'm not visible to either of them. The visibility has started to deteriorate. The black soil beneath the roses is hard as a rock. The birdbath is swathed in a big snowdrift.

I walk along the wall of the house, and it occurs to me that although I have so often felt persecuted, I actually might not have had anything to complain about until now.

Moritz is alone in the living room; I can see him through the window. He's sitting in the low oak chair, his hands gripping the armrests. I continue around the house, past the main entrance, along the back to where the bay window juts out. There's a light on in the pantry. That's where I see Benja. She's pouring a glass of cold milk. Refreshing on a night like this, when you have to stand guard and wait. I take the fire escape. It leads up to the balcony outside what was once my room. I go inside and feel my way forward. They've delivered the box; it's on the floor.

The door to the hallway is open. Downstairs in the foyer Benja is seeing the Toenail out.

I can see him walking across the gravel, like a dark shadow. Over to the garage and in through the little door.

They're parked in the garage, of course. Moritz moved his car a little so there was room for them. Citizens must assist the police in every way possible.

I tiptoe down the stairway. I know it well, so I don't make any noise. I reach the foyer, go past the coat closet and into the small parlor. There is Benja. She doesn't see me. She's standing there looking out across Øresund. Toward the lights at Tuborg Harbor, toward Sweden and Flakfort. She's humming. Not particularly cheerful or relaxed. But intent. Tonight, she's thinking, tonight they'll nab Smilla. The fake Greenlander.

"Benja," I say.

She twirls around in a flash, like when she's dancing. But then she freezes.

I don't say a word, just motion with my hand, and with bowed head she precedes me into the living room.

I remain standing in the doorway, where the long drapes prevent me from being seen from the road. Moritz raises his head and sees me. His expression doesn't change. But his face becomes flatter, more careworn.

"It was me." Benja has gone over to stand next to him. He is hers.

"I was the one who called," she says.

He rubs his hand across the stubble on his chin. He hasn't shaved tonight. The stubble is black with flecks of gray. His voice is low and resigned.

"I never said I was perfect, Smilla."

He's said that thousands of times, but I don't have the heart to remind him. For the first time ever, I see that he is old. That someday, maybe not so far in the future, he's going to die. For a moment I fight it, then I give up and am filled with sympathy. At this pathetic moment.

"They're waiting for you outside," says Benja. "They're going to take you away. You don't belong here."

I can't help admiring her. You find some of this same madness in female polar bears defending their cubs. Moritz doesn't seem to hear her. His voice is still low, introspective. As if he's talking mainly to himself. "I wanted peace and quiet so badly. I wanted to have my family around me. But I never achieved that. It never worked out. Things got out of control for me. When I saw that box they delivered this afternoon, I realized that you were leaving again. Like all the times you ran away. I'm too old to bring you back home again. Maybe it was wrong to do it in the past."

His eyes are bloodshot when he looks at me. "I don't want to let you go, Smilla."

Every life contains within it a potential for clarification. He has lost that chance. The conflicts that are now pressing him down in his chair are the same ones he had in his thirties, when I got to know him, when he became my father. The only thing age has done is to whittle away his ability to confront them.

Benja licks her lips.

"Will you go out to them yourself," she says, "or should I go get them?"

For as long as I can remember, I have been trying to escape this house, this country. Each time, life has used him as its unresisting instrument to call me back. At this moment it becomes more obvious than it has been since I was a child that freedom of choice is an illusion, that life leads us through a series of bitter, involuntarily comical, and repetitive confrontations with the problems that we haven't resolved. At some other time I might have smiled at this. Right now I'm too tired. So I bow my head and prepare to give up.

Then Moritz stands up. "Benja," he says. "Stay here." She gives him a startled look. "Smilla," he says, "what can I do?"

We measure each other with narrowed eyes. Something has slipped inside him.

"Your car," I say. "Drive your car up to the back door. As close as possible, so you can put the box in it without them seeing you. And so I can get in and lie on the floor in back."

When he leaves the room, Benja sits down in his chair. Her face is expressionless and remote. We hear him start up the car and drive it out; we hear the crunching of the tires in the gravel in front of the door. The sound of the door. Moritz's cautious, burdened steps as he carries the box out.

When he returns, he's wearing rubber boots, an oilskin coat and cap. He simply stands in the doorway for a moment. Then he turns around and leaves.

When I get up, Benja slowly follows me. I go into the little parlor where the telephone is and dial a number. It's instantly answered.

"I'm coming," I say. Then I hang up.

When I turn around, Benja is standing behind me. "After you drive off, I'll go out and send them after you." I step closer to her. With my thumb and forefinger, through her leotard, I grab her crotch and squeeze. When she opens her mouth, I put my other hand around her throat and cut off her windpipe. Her eyes grow big and terrified. She falls to her knees and I go with her, so we are both kneeling across from each other on the floor. She is taller and heavier than I am, but her level of energy and treachery are of a different kind. At the Royal Theater they don't learn to express their anger physically.

"Benja," I whisper. "Leave me alone."

I pinch harder. There are drops of sweat on her upper lip.

Then I let her go. She doesn't utter a sound. Her face is empty with fear.

The door to the foyer is open. The car is waiting right outside. I crawl in the back on the floor. My box is on the back seat. A blanket is pulled over me. Moritz gets into the front seat.

Outside the garage the car stops. The window is rolled down.

"Thank you so much for your help," says the Toenail. Then we drive off.

Skovshoved Water Ski Club has a wide wooden ramp that slopes down into the water from a high dock. That's where Lander is waiting. He's wearing a one-piece, waterproof sailing outfit tucked into his boots. It's black.

The tarpaulin on the roof of his car is black, too. It's not the Jaguar but a Land Rover with the body high off the ground.

The rubber boat tied on under the tarp is black, too. A Zodiac made of heavy rubberized canvas with a wooden bottom. Moritz wants to help but doesn't move fast enough. With a swift jerk the small man tips the boat off the car, catches it on his head, and shoves it down the ramp with one fluid movement.

He takes an outboard motor out of the back of the car, lands it in the boat, and fastens it to the stern.

All three of us lift the boat to get it into the water. In my box I find rubber boots, a balaclava hood, thermal gloves, and a sou'wester that I pull on over my sweater.

Moritz does not go out on the ramp with us but stays at the railing. "Can I do anything for you, Smilla?"

It's Lander who answers. "You can get out of here fast."

Then he pushes off and starts up the motor. An invisible hand takes hold of the boat from below and pulls us away from land. The snow is falling heavily. After a few seconds Moritz's figure disappears. Just as he turns around and goes back to the car.

Lander has a compass strapped to his left wrist. In a corridor of visibility momentarily appearing in the snowfall, we can see Sweden. The lights of Tarba;k. And, as lighter, floating spots in the dark, two ships at anchor between the shore and the central navigation channel. Northwest of Flakfort.

"The starboard one is Kronos."

I'm having a hard time separating Lander from his office, his liquor, his high heels, his elegant clothes. The authority with which he maneuvers the boat between the swells, which get bigger the farther we are from shore, is unexpected and foreign.

I try to orient myself. It's one sea mile out to the channel. Two shoal markers along the way. The channel lights to Tuborg Harbor. To Skovshoved Harbor. The masthead lights on the hills above Strand Drive. A container ship on its way south.

When the snowfall blocks out the view, I correct his course twice. He gives me a searching glance, but he obeys. I don't try to explain anything to him. What would I say?

A slight wind comes up. It blows cold, hard drops of salt water into our faces. We huddle in the bottom, leaning against each other. The heavy Zodiac dances on the choppy waves. He puts his mouth to my balaclava hood, which I've pulled up.

"Føjl and I were in the navy together. In the Seals. We were in our early twenties. If you're a thinking person, then you have to be that age to put up with that kind of shit. For six months we would get up at 5:00 a.m. and swim half a mile in ice-cold water and run for an hour and a half. We had parachute jumping at night over the sea, three miles off the coast of Scotland, and I'm practically nightblind. We dragged that crappy rubber boat around on our heads through the Danish woods while the officers pissed on us and tried to rearrange our psyches to make fighting men out of us."

I put my hand on his arm holding the throttle and correct the course. Five hundred yards ahead the container ship cuts across our course in the form of a green starboard light and three running lanterns up high.

"It's usually the small ones who do best. Guys my size. We were the ones who could keep it up. The bigger guys could manage one lift and then they were finished. We had to put them in the rubber boat and carry them along. But Føjl was different. Føjl was big. But as fast as if he were small. They couldn't wear him out. They never cracked him in the interrogation courses. He would just give them that friendly stare; you know how he is. And then he wouldn't budge an inch. One day we were diving under ice. It was winter. The sea was frozen solid. We had to dynamite a hole in it. There was a strong current that day. On my way down I passed through a cold belt. That happens sometimes. The condensed water from the exhaled air freezes to ice and blocks the small valves in the air tank. I hadn't attached the safety line yet. That's how you can find your way back to the hole in the ice. That's what diving under ice is like. From six feet away the hole is a dark edge. From fifteen feet away you can't see it any longer. So I'm seized with panic. I lose the line. I don't think I can see the hole anymore. Everything is green and brilliant and neon-colored under the ice. I feel as if I'm being sucked into the realm of the dead. I can feel the current grabbing me and carrying me down and away. They tell me that Føjl was watching. So he picks up a lead belt in one hand and jumps into the water without any oxygen tank. With only a line in his hand. Because there wasn't time. And he dives down to me. He catches me forty feet down. But he's diving in a dry suit. This means that the water pressure presses the rubber against his skin. With an additional one atmosphere of pressure for every thirty feet. About thirty feet down the rubber edge cut through the skin of his wrists and ankles. What I remember about our passage up to the surface was clouds of blood."

I think about the scars around his wrists and ankles. "He was also the one who forced the water out of my lungs. And gave me artificial respiration. We had to wait a long time. They only had a little gas turbine helicopter, and the weather was bad. He gave me heart massage and artificial respiration all the way back."

"Back to where?"

"To Scoresbysund. We were on exercises in Greenland. It was cold. But that suited him fine."

The snow closes around us in a chaotic gridwork, a wild confusion of slanted stripes.

"He's disappeared," I say. "I tried to call him. Some stranger answered the phone. Maybe he's in jail."

One minute before the ship appears, I can sense its presence. The pull of the hull against the anchor chains, the slow shifting of the entire vast, floating hulk.

"Forget about him, honey. That's what the rest of us have had to do."

On the port side there is a short floating platform at the bottom of a steep ladder beneath a single yellow light. He doesn't turn off the motor but steadies the boat by holding on to an iron girder.

"You can go back with me, Smilla."

There's something touching about him, as if he hadn't realized until now that we stopped playing games a long time ago.

"The thing is," I say, "that I don't have anything in particular to go back to."

I sling the box onto the platform myself. When I step up onto it and turn around, he stands there for a moment, gazing at me, a small figure, rising and sinking, the big rubber boat lending him a dancing movement. Then he turns away and pushes off.