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

4

"That was my first trip. So I went to see a colleague. `How do I navigate to Greenland?' I asked him. He said, `You sail to Skagen and turn left. When you get to Cape Farewell, turn right."'

I twist the corkscrew into the cork. It's a bottle of white wine, its color yellowish-green, and Urs has let it travel alone in the dumbwaiter at the last minute, as if it were a temperature-sensitive icon. When I pull up the corkscrew, half the cork stays in the bottle. I'll have to screw it in again. Then the cork disintegrates and falls into the liquid. Urs said that Montrachet is a great wine. So a little cork shouldn't hurt.

"Then he took out a sea chart, placed one end of a ruler at Skagen, arched it up to Cape Farewell, and drew a line along the curve. `Follow this,' he said, `and you'll be sailing the great circle, And don't sleep the last fortyeight hours before you reach the cape. Drink black coffee and keep a look out for icebergs'."

Lukas is doing the talking. Turned away from his audience. But his air of authority holds their attention. There are three people besides him in the officers' mess: Katja Claussen, Seidenfaden, and engineer Kutzow. This is the first time in my life that I've waited on a table.

"In those days we sailed in April. We tried to hit the socalled Easter easterly. If you did, you'd have a tailwind the whole way. It was unheard of for anyone to choose the period between November and the end of March voluntarily."

There are rules about the order in which you're supposed to serve wine. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with them. So I take a chance and serve the woman. She swirls the inch of liquid around in her glass, but her eyes are fixed on Lukas and she doesn't taste what she's sipping.

I try alternating from the right side to the left as I serve. To make sure everybody's happy.

They've dressed for dinner. The men have white shirts on, the woman is wearing a red dress.

"We can expect the first ice twenty-four hours out of Cape Farewell. That's where the Greenland Trading Company's Hans Hedtoft went down in 1959, and ninety-five passengers and crew perished. Have you ever seen an iceberg, Miss Claussen?"

I serve the cauliflower and Urs's sourdough bread. Everything goes tolerably well at the table. But out by the dumbwaiter I drop the rest of the cauliflower all over the poached salmon. It's lying there whole, its skin still on, staring at me expectantly. Urs explained that a Japanese chef taught him not to poach the eyes but to set them aside and then put them back in after the flesh is tender. And lightly brush the whole fish with egg whites so that it has a slimy sheen, as if it has come straight from the net to the table. I don't think much of this technique. I think the fish looks as though it died from natural causes.

I scrape off the cauliflower and carry in the fish. They're not looking at what they eat, anyway. They're looking at Lukas.

"Icebergs are pieces of glaciers that float down from the ice cap to the open sea and break off. If they're solid, the relationship between the part above water and the part below is one to five. If they're hollow, it's one to two. The latter are the most dangerous kind, of course. I've seen icebergs 130 feet tall, weighing 50,000 tons, that could be capsized by the vibrations from a ship's propelIer."

I burn my fingers on the potatoes au gratin. Lukas hasn't seen anything yet. In a rubber raft near the Antarctic, I've slipped past partially melted table icebergs that were 300 feet tall, weighed a million tons, and might explode if you whistled the first few bars of "In the Lovely, Joyful Summertime."

"The Titanic struck an iceberg in 1912, southeast of Newfoundland, and sank three hours later. Fifteen hundred people died."

In my cabin I placed a piece of newspaper in the sink, leaned over it, and cut eight inches off my hair so that it was all the same length as the part that grew out after the fire. For the first time since I came on board, I can take off my scarf. That's all I can do to prevent the woman from recognizing me.

I could have spared myself the trouble. I'm a fly on the wall; she doesn't see me. The man is looking at Lukas, the engineer is looking at his glass, and Lukas isn't looking at anyone or anything. For a moment the woman's eyes fall on me, giving me an appraising look. She's at least eight inches taller and five years younger than me. She's brooding and wary, and there's a slight tension around her mouth that tells a story-maybe the story of what it costs (contrary to popular opinion) for a woman to look good.

I hold my breath. It was dark at Isaiah's funeral. There were twenty other women there. And she was there for a different reason. She was there to warn Andreas Licht. He should have listened to her warning.

It takes her a fraction of a second to categorize me. Internally, she opens the drawer labeled "servant" and "five foot two" and drops me inside and forgets about me. She has other things to think about. Under the table she has put her hand on the man's thigh.

He hasn't touched the fish.

"But we have radar on board," he says.

"The Hans Hedtoft had radar on board, too."

No experienced captain or expedition leader would consciously frighten his fellow travelers. If you're familiar with the risks of sailing through ice, you know that once a trip has started, you can't afford to increase the external risk with inner fear. I don't understand Lukas.

"But the icebergs are the least of our problems. They're the layman's image of the Arctic seas. Much worse is the field ice, a belt of pack ice that floats along the east coast, rounds Cape Farewell in November, and stretches all the way up past Godthåb."

I've managed to get the cork out whole from the second bottle. I fill Kutzow's glass. He drinks as he absentmindedly regards the label on the bottle. It's the percentage of alcohol that interests him.

"Where the pack ice stops, the western ice begins. It's formed in Baffin Bay and forced down into Davis Strait, where it freezes together with the winter ice. It forms an ice field that we'll run into near the fishing grounds north of Holsteinsborg."

Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions. Whenever we left Qaanaaq to set out hunting, to go visiting, or to go to Qeqertat, the latent feelings of love, friendship, and animosity would all explode. Between Lukas and his two passengers and employers, a mutual, solid feeling of antagonism is in the air.

I look at Lukas. He hasn't said or done anything. And yet without a word he demands that they look at him. Once again I have that vague, uneasy feeling of having witnessed a performance that has been staged partially for my benefit, but which I don't understand.

"Where's Tørk?" the captain asks. "He's working," replies the woman.

If you fly from Europe to Thule, you'll step out of the plane and think that you've entered a freezer that's under several atmospheres of pressure, as an invisible icy cold forces its way into your lungs. If you fly in the opposite direction, you'll think you've landed in a Finnish sauna when you arrive in Europe. But a ship sailing for Greenland does not sail north; it sails west. Cape Farewell lies on the same latitude as Oslo. The cold doesn't come until you round the cape and sail due north. The wind that kicks up during the day is raw and damp, but no colder than a storm in the Kattegat. The waves, on the other hand, are the long, deep swells of the North Atlantic.

The deck is swimming in water. The hatch to the forward cargo hold is now closed. I pace it off. It's 18 by 20 feet. It wasn't originally that size. At both ends there's a white, newly painted border two and a half feet wide. And there's a welding seam on the deck. The opening has recently been enlarged by almost three feet in both directions.

For Europeans the sea symbolizes the unknown, and sailing is both a journey and an adventure. This image has no relation to reality. Sailing is the movement that comes closest to standing still. To feel that you are actually moving requires landmarks, it requires fixed points on the horizon and ice heaves that disappear beneath your sled runners, and the sight of mountains seen across the napariaq, the upright at the back of the sled, ice formations that loom up and pass by and vanish on the horizon.

All this is missing at sea. A ship seems to stand still, to be a fixed platform of steel, framed by a permanent circular horizon with a cold gray winter wind blowing across it, placed on top of a moving yet always uniform abyss of water. Convulsed by the monotonous exertion of its engines, the ship pounds in vain on one spot.

Or else it's just me who's gotten too old to travel. With the fog from outside, depression drifts in over me. To travel you have to have a home to leave and come back to. Otherwise you're a refugee, an exile, a qivittoq. At this very moment in North Greenland they're all huddling in the huts in Qaanaaq.

I ask, as I have so many times before, why I have ended up here. I can't bear the entire blame alone, it's too heavy a burden. I must have had bad luck as well. The universe must have somehow pulled away from me. When my surroundings give way, I retreat into myself like a live mussel sprinkled with lemon juice. I can't turn the other cheek, I can't face hostility with even greater faith.

One time I hit Isaiah. I had told him that when we were children and the ice broke up near Siorapaluk, far inside the bay, we would leap from one ice floe to another, knowing full well that if we slipped we would slide under the ice and the current would carry us to Nerrivik, the mother of the sea, never to return. The next day he wanted to wait outside the grocery store, near the Greenlander statue on the square, but when I came out, he was gone. And when I went over to the bridge, I saw him down on the-ice-thin, new ice, disintegrating from below because of the current. I didn't shout, I, couldn't shout. I walked over to the urinal by the bulwark and called gently to him, and he came, hesitantly, skipping over the ice, and when he was standing on the cobblestones, I hit him. The blow was probably a distillation of my feelings for him, the way violence sometimes is. He barely managed to stay on his feet.

"You hit me," he said, looking around through his tears for a weapon to slit me open with.

Then, in one simple but enormous leap, he found his way back to the unlimited reserves of his character. "Naammassereerpoq, I guess I'll get used to that," he said.

I don't possess such depths. Maybe that's one of the reasons why things have gone the way they have. There's no sound, but I know that someone is standing behind me. Then Verlaine leans against the sea rail, following my gaze out across the sea. He takes off his work glove and pulls a handful of rice out of his breast pocket. "I thought Greenlanders had short legs and fucked like pigs and only worked when they were hungry. Once when I was on a ship up there we were taking kerosene to a town somewhere in the north. We pumped it straight into the tanks standing on shore. At one point a little man in a boat came over and fired a rifle and shouted something at us. Then they all ran to their huts and came back with rifles and set off in their dinghies or fired their guns from shore. If I hadn't been watching, the pressure would have blown the hoses off the tanks. It turned out to be because of a school of some kind of fish."

"What time of year was this?"

"Maybe July or the beginning of August."

"Beluga," I say. "A small whale. It must have been near the trading stations south of Upernavik."

"We telegraphed the trading company that they had stopped work and had gone fishing. We received the reply that this happened several times a year. That's the way it is with primitive people. When their stomachs are full, they don't see any reason to work."

I nod in agreement.

"In Greenland they say that Filipinos are a nation of lazy little pimps, who are only allowed on ships because they don't ask for more than a dollar an hour, but you have to keep on feeding them vast amounts of steamed rice if you don't want a knife in your back."

"That's true," he says.

He leans toward me so he won't have to yell. I look up toward the bridge. We're in full view where we're standing.

"This is a ship with rules. Some are the captain's. Some are Tørk's. But not all of them. They're dependent on us; we're just the rats."

He smiles at me. His teeth are glazed pieces of chalk against his dark skin. He notices what I'm looking at. "Porcelain crowns. I was in prison in Singapore. After a year and a half I didn't have a tooth left in my mouth. My jaw was held together with galvanized steel wire. Then we organized an escape."

He leans even closer to me. "That's where I found out how much I hate the police."

When he straightens up and leaves, I keep standing there, staring out at the sea. It starts to snow. But it's not snow. It's coming from the deck. I look down at myself. All the way from my collar down to the elastic at my waist, my down jacket has been cut open with a single slit. Without anything touching the lining, the padding was cut wide open so the down is tearing loose and swirling around me like snowflakes. I take off the jacket and fold it up. On my way back across the deck it occurs to me that it must be cold. But I don't feel cold.