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

3

I hit the alarm clock with the side of my hand. It shoots through the cabin like a projectile, slams against the hooks on the door, and drops to the floor.

I don't do well with phenomena that are supposed to last for life. Prison sentences, marriage contracts, lifetime appointments. They're attempts to pin down segments of life and exempt them from the passage of time. It's even worse with things that are supposed to last forever. Like my alarm clock. My "eternity clock." That's what they called it. I pried it out of the smashed instrument panel of the second NASA moon vehicle after it was totaled on the ice cap. The vehicle was as incapable as the Americans of withstanding minus 67°F and winds that went off the Beaufort scale.

They didn't notice that I took the clock. I took it as a souvenir, to prove that no everlasting flowers can survive in my company, that even the American space program couldn't survive three weeks with me.

The clock has lasted for ten years. Ten years in which it has received nothing but brutality and harsh words. But they expected great things from it back then. They said you could stick it in the flame of a blowtorch and boil it in sulfuric acid and sink it to the bottom of the Philippine Trench and it would keep time as if nothing had happened. This claim was a flagrant provocation for me. In Qaanaaq we thought that wristwatches were cute. Some of the hunters wore them for decoration. But we would never dream of being regulated by them.

That's what I told Gil, who was driving. (My job was to sit in the observation cockpit and report when the color of the firn got too dark or too white, which means that it won't hold but will open up, allowing the earth to swallow a 15-ton, idiotic American dream of reaching the moon, letting it fall into a 100-foot-deep, brilliantly blue-and-green crevasse, which narrows at the bottom and wedges everything that falls in into a tight embrace at minus 22°F.) In Qaanaaq we are guided by the weather, I told him. We are guided by the animals. By love. And death. Not by a piece of mechanized tin.

I was only in my early twenties. At that age you can lie -you can even lie to yourself-with greater self-confidence. In reality, European time had come to Greenland a long time ago, long before my birth. It came with the Greenland Trading Company's opening and closing times, payment schedules, church hours, and hourly wages.

I've tried pounding on the clock with a sheet-metal hammer. It made dents in the hammer. By now I've given up. Now I make do with knocking it onto the floor, where it lies, electronically beeping, unperturbed, saving me from showing up on the bridge without having splashed cold water on my face and put on eyeliner.

It's 2:30 a.m. It's the middle of the night in the Northern Atlantic Ocean. At 10:00 p.m., with no prior warning except a green wink of light, Lukas's voice had issued from the loudspeaker over my bed. Like an invasion of my little room.

"Jaspersen. At 3:00 a.m. we need coffee served on the bridge."

Not until the clock hits the floor does it emit any sound. I woke up on my own, awakened by a feeling of abnormal activity. Twenty-four hours is enough to make the ship's rhythm my own. A ship at sea is quiet at night. the engine thuds, of course, the long, high swells slosh against the side, and now and then the stern crushes a fifty-ton block of water into a fine powder of fluid. But those are normal sounds, and when sounds are repeated often enough, they become part of the silence. The watch is changed on the bridge, somewhere a ship's clock strikes. But the people are asleep.

Now there is commotion against this familiar backdrop. Boots in the corridor, doors slamming, voices, sounds on the loudspeaker, and a distant rumbling from hydraulic winches.

On my way up the stairs to the bridge, I stick my head out on deck. It's dark. I can hear footsteps and voices, but no light is on. I step out into the darkness.

I'm not wearing any outdoor clothes. The temperature is about freezing, the wind is blowing astern, the cloud cover is low and dense. The waves are visible only right next to the ship, but the troughs of the waves seem as long as a soccer field. The deck is slippery and slick with salt water. I duck under the sea rail to seek shelter and make myself as unobtrusive as possible. Near the tarp I pass a figure in the dark. Up ahead there is a faint light. It's coming from the cargo hold farthest forward. The hatches have been slid aside and a railing put up around the opening. Two wires extend through the opening from the two backward-facing cranes on the forward mast. Over the railing, both in front and in back, lies a heavy blue nylon hawser. There's no one in sight.

The cargo hold is surprisingly deep and illuminated by four fluorescent lights, one on each bulkhead. Thirty feet down, on the lid of a huge metal container, sits Verlaine. At each corner of the container is a white fiberglass holder, like the ones for inflatable life rafts.

That's all I manage to see. Someone grabs my clothes from behind.

I yield, not out of resignation, but to retaliate with even greater force. At that moment the ship rolls on an oblique swell, and we lose our balance and fall backward against the control panel for the winches, and I catch a scent of aftershave that I recognize.

"Idiot! You idiot!" Jakkelsen fights to catch his breath after his exertion. There's something in his face and voice that wasn't there before. The beginnings of fear.

"This ship is run like in the old days-you keep to your own area." He gives me an almost pleading look. "Beat it. Get lost."

I walk back. He half whispers, half shouts after me into the wind. "Do you want to end up in the big wet closet?"

The tray rams into one side of the door frame and then the other before I manage to get my bearings and stand there clattering in the dark room.

No one speaks to me. After a moment I push my way backward and find room for the cups and the pastry on the table among rulers and calipers.

"Two minutes, eight hundred yards."

He's merely an outline in the dark, but it's an outline that I haven't seen before. He's bending over the green digits of the electronic log.

The pastry dough smells of butter. Urs is a meticulous cook. The aroma is whisked away because the door is standing open. On the bridge wing, I can make out Sonne's back.

Above a sea chart, a faint red bulb is turned on, and Sigmund Lukas's face appears out of the darkness. "Five hundred yards."

The other man is wearing a coverall with the collar turned up. Next to him, on the navigation table, there is a flat box the size of a stereo amplifier. Two slender telescope antennas stick up out of the sides of the box. Nearby stands a woman, wearing the same kind of coverall as the man. Her long dark hair flowing loosely over her turned-up collar and curling down her back seems oddly out of place with her work clothes and air of concentration. It's Katja Claussen. Instinctively I know that the man is Seidenfaden.

"One minute, two hundred yards."

"Hoist it up."

The voice comes from the intercom on the wall. I release my grip on the tabletop behind me. My palms are sweaty. I've heard that voice before. On the phone in my apartment. The last time I was there.

The red light goes off. Out of the night a gray shape rises up, emerging from the forward cargo hold, and swings, swaying slowly, over the side of the ship.

"Ten seconds."

"Lower it, Verlaine."

He must be sitting in the enclosed crow's nest at the top of the forward mast. We're listening to his orders to the crew.

"Pull it tight. Slack off now."

"Five seconds. Four, three, two, one, zero."

A ray of light behind us bores a tunnel through the night. The container is lying in the water, fifteen feet from the stern. It's apparently riding a bow wave. From one of its corners, a blue hawser runs forward along the side of the ship. Maria and Fernanda, Hansen, and the deckhands are standing at the railing. They're keeping it away from the hull with what looks like a very long boathook. In the light I can see that there are two narrow, inflatable white rubber strips along its sides.

"Release it, Verlaine."

I move over to the bridge wing. The light is coming from one of the spotlights mounted on the sea rail. Sonne is manning it. He searches with the spotlight across the water. The container is free of the hawser now, already forty yards astern, and is starting to sink.

There's a muted bang. The five fiberglass shells on the surface of the water are cast off, and like five enormous lily pads, five self-inflating gray flotation balloons spread out above the big metal container. Then the spotlight goes out.

"One yard, five hundred gallons." It's the woman's voice.

"Three thousand, four thousand. Two yards, thirteen hundred gallons. Two yards. Two and a half. Two point three. Thirteen hundred gallons, and two point three."

I stand next to the serving tray. In my place. On the instrument in front of her, several displays are now lit up red.

"I'm letting it out. Twelve hundred and two and a half. Three, three-twenty, four, four and a half, five. Fifteen hundred gallons and five yards. The list is zero. Temperature 31°F."

She turns a dial and a sound fills the room, as if they had brought in my alarm clock.

"Directional signal, ten-four."

She switches off the intercom. The man in front straightens up from the log. The tension has been released. Sonne enters the room and shuts the door. Lukas is standing right next to me.

"You can go back to bed."

I gesture toward the coffee. He shakes his head. They don't even want me to pour it. I've been summoned up here to carry a tray twenty feet from the kitchen dumbwaiter to the bridge. It doesn't make sense. Unless he wanted me to see what I've just witnessed.

I gather up the tray. The woman in front of me puts out her hand to caress the man. She doesn't look at him. Her hand rests for a moment on the back of his neck. Then she twists a little strand of his hair around her fingers and pulls it out. They haven't noticed me at all. I wait for him to react to the pain. But he stands there, motionless, his back erect.

Urs's face is shiny with sweat. He tries to gesture with his hand and balance the big three-gallon pot at the same time.

"Feodora, the only one mit 60 prozent cacao. Und the whipped cream must be ein bisschen frozen. Ten minutes in icebox," he says to me.

All eleven of them are here. There are no questions hovering in the air. As if I'm the only one who doesn't understand what's been going on. Or as if they have no need to understand.

I slurp up the scalding chocolate through the lightly frozen whipped cream. The effect is instant intoxication, starting in my stomach and rising up, hot and pulsating, to the top of my skull. I wonder what a wizard like Urs is doing on board the Kronos.

Verlaine stares at me thoughtfully. But I avoid his eyes. I'm the next to the last to leave. In a corner Jakkelsen is brooding over a cup of black coffee.

Maria is in the bathroom, standing in front of the mirror. At first I think they're some kind of prosthesis, then I see that they're little hollow aluminum cones. She has one on each fingertip, and now she cautiously removes them. Underneath her nails are red, an inch and a half long, and perfect.

"I support my family," she says. "In Phuket. On my salary. I came to Denmark as a whore. In Thailand you're either a virgin or a whore."

Her Danish is darker than Verlaine's, less distinct. "Sometimes I had thirty customers a day. I've worked my way out of that."

She stretches out her forefinger, puts her nail on my cheek, and rests it against my skin.

"I once scratched out the eyes of a policeman."

I stand there, leaning against her fingernail. She gives me a searching look. Then she lowers her hand.

I'm waiting inside my cabin with the door slightly ajar. Jakkelsen shows up a moment later. His cabin is a little farther down the corridor. He locks his door behind him. I walk over to his door barefoot. He's working on something. There's a faint scraping noise, the door handle is pulled upward. He's wedging his desk chair under the door handle.

He's barricading himself inside. Maybe he's scared of the door being forced open by some of the women who are chasing him.

I tiptoe back to my cabin. I get undressed, take my pink terrycloth bathrobe and my hemp mitt out of my box, and noisily walk to the bathroom, whistling. I scrub myself with the mitt, dry myself off, rub my skin with lotion, and go back down the corridor, my bath slippers slapping. Then I creep back to Jakkelsen's door.

It's quiet inside. Maybe he's manicuring his nails or tending to his delicate hands in some other manner. But I doubt it.

I knock on the door. There's no reply. I knock harder. Total silence. I have my own key in my bathrobe pocket. I unlock his door. But I still can't open it. I start wiggling the door handle up and down. After a minute the chair falls to the floor. I wait for the panic to subside. Then I push open the door, after glancing down the hall in both directions. The situation might be misunderstood.

I stand there in the dark. Not a sound. I decide that the cabin must be empty. Then I turn on the light. Jakkelsen is sleeping in Thai silk pajamas in delicate pastel colors. His skin looks waxen. There are bubbles of saliva at the corners of his mouth that move with every faint, labored breath. One arm protrudes over the edge of the bed. His wrist sticking out of the pajama sleeve is frighteningly skinny. He looks like a sick child-and in a way, that's what he is.

I give him a shake. His eyelids open slightly. His eyeballs roll upward so the whites of his eyes give me a blind, dead look. He doesn't utter a sound.

The ashtray next to his bunk is empty. There's nothing on the table. Everything is neat and tidy.

I roll up his pajama sleeve. Along the inside of his arm there are between forty and sixty little yellowish-blue pricks with a black center, a fine pattern along his swollen veins. I pull out the drawer for the bed linen. He had dropped everything in there. Foil, matches, an old-fashioned glass hypodermic, fast-drying glue, a syringe, an open pocketknife, a plastic container for sewing machine needles, and a piece of black rubber packing cord.

He's not planning to wake up for a while. He's sleeping a powder sleep, completely relaxed, worry-free.

Before Home Rule, there were no customs officers in Greenland. The police and the harbor authorities were in charge of customs matters. I met Jorgensen the year I was posted at the meteorological station in Upernavik.

He was the harbormaster. But he was rarely at work. He was constantly being taken to Thule by the Americans or he was on board one of the navy's inspection ships. He held the Greenland record for helicopter rides.

They would come to get Jorgensen whenever they were on to something but couldn't quite locate it. When they had a suspicion but couldn't find the hiding place. The narcotics patrol at Thule Air Base had dogs and metal detectors and a team of lab assistants and technicians. In Holsteinsborg the navy had several tracking experts, and in Nuuk they had a mobile X-ray apparatus from the Welding Center.

And yet they would all send for Jorgensen. He'd been a licensed welder at Burmeister and Wain, and since then he had studied to be an officer in the merchant marine, and had now ended up as a harbormaster who never showed his face in the harbor.

He was a little man, gray, bent, his hair bristly like a badger's. He spoke the same nasal, one-syllable Danish to Greenlanders and Russians and all the military people, regardless of rank.

They would bring him on board the seized ship or plane, and he would mumble a little at the crew and captain, and gaze around with his nearsighted eyes, and rather absentmindedly knock with a knuckle on the iron plates here and there, and then they'd call over one of the navy's locksmiths, who would bring an angle grinder and remove the plate. Behind it they would find five thousand bottles or 400,000 cigarettes, and as the years passed, more and more often, blocks of paraffin-coated white powder stacked up.

Jorgensen told us that when you're tracking something, a systematic approach will take you only so far. "Whenever I lose my glasses," he said, "first I search for them systematically. I look in the john and next to the coffee machine and under the newspaper. But if they're not there, I stop thinking and sit down on a chair and survey the scene to see whether an idea will come to me, and it always does; an idea always comes to me. We can't just go around breaking everything into pieces whether we're looking for a pair of glasses or for bottles; we have to think things through and take note, we have to discover the crook inside ourselves and figure out where we might have stashed them."

In February 1981 he was shot on one of the outposts in Disko Bay by four young Greenlanders who, on his recommendation, had been given unreasonably harsh sentences for smuggling alcohol: For some reason he was fond of me. Greenlanders in general he never tried to understand.

Now I'm reminded of Jorgensen, and I try to find the unkie in myself.

I would take my time hiding the stuff. I wouldn't be sloppy. I would be tempted to hide it outside my cabin. But I wouldn't be able to stand having it physically very far away. The way mothers are said to feel about their infants.

There's the air conditioner. The Kronos has a highpressure ventilation system that even now is humming softly. The intake vent is behind the perforated panels on the ceiling. There are at least forty screws in each panel. Forty screws would seem insurmountable every time I wanted to get to my baby.

For the second time today I go through his drawers.

With still no results. They hold writing paper, blue putty of the sort you use to hang up postcards, a few thick glitzy issues of Playboy, an electric razor, several decks of cards, a box of chess pieces, four clear plastic boxes each containing a flashy silk bow tie, quite a lot of foreign currency, a clothes brush, and a few extra gold chains like the one he wears around his neck.

On the shelf there is a Spanish-Danish dictionary, a Berlitz Turkish phrasebook, a handbook on contract bridge published by British Petroleum, a couple of books on chess. A dog-eared paperback with an illustration of a naked corn-fed blonde on the cover, entitled Flossy-Sweet Sixteen.

I've never been seriously interested in books that aren't reference books. I've never claimed to be particularly cultured. On the other hand, I've always thought that it's never too late to start a new life of learning. Maybe I should start with Flossy-Sweet Sixteen.

I take the pocketknife out of the drawer. On the edge of the blade are a few bottle-green specks. I open his closet and go through his clothes one more time. There's nothing in that color. In his bed, Jakkelsen gurgles softly.

I take the box of chess pieces out of the drawer. I pick up a white king and a black queen and put them on the desk. They are meticulously carved out of some kind of heavy wood. The chessboard is on the desk, covered with a thin metallic plate. On board a ship it's practical having a chessboard that's magnetic. There are magnets on the bottom of the chess pieces, a lead-colored disk at the base with a piece of green felt attached. I stick the knife blade in between the metal disk and the base of the king. It resists, but it comes off. A little dab of glue has been applied on each side. I put the disk on the desk. A little speck of felt remains on the knife, a few minuscule green fibers that you wouldn't notice unless you were looking for them.

The chess piece is hollow. It's about three inches tall and filled with a cylinder a half inch in diameter. It's probably not something Jakkelsen did; they were originally produced this way. But he has taken advantage of it. On top is a lump of putty. Underneath are three clear plastic tubes. I shake them out. There are four more under them.

I put them back in place, seal them up with the putty, and glue the magnet onto the chess piece. I could have searched the rest of the pieces. To see whether you could fit two or three vials in each of the pawns. To figure out whether he had enough for four or six months use. But I feel like getting out of there. A single woman shouldn't stay too long in a strange gentleman's cabin.