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

8

Hot water is soothing. I, who grew up with milky-white baths in glacial meltwater, have grown addicted to hot water. One of the few dependencies I acknowledge. Like my occasional need to drink coffee, or to see the sun shining on the ice.

The water in the faucets on board the Kronos is boiling hot. I mix it with cold to just about scalding, and then I let the shower wash over me. It makes the flames burst out from my back, at the base of my skull, the bruises on my pelvis, and especially my foot, which is still swollen and sprained. The fever and shaking grow worse; I stand there until it all goes away, leaving me listless.

I get a thermos of tea from the galley and take it back to my cabin. In the dark, I put it down, lock the door, take a deep breath, and then turn on the light.

Jakkelsen is sitting on my bunk, wearing a white jogging suit. His pupils seem to have receded into his brain, giving him a quartz-like gaze of artificial self-confidence.

"You realize that I saved your life, don't you?" he says. I wait for the terror to let go of my limbs so that I can sit down.

"Life at sea is too brutal for Smilla, I tell myself. So I go down to the engine room and wait. If somebody wants to find you, he just has to go below. Sooner or later you'll come past on your way to the bottom. And right behind you come Verlaine and Hansen and Maurice. But I stay where I am. I'd locked the doors up to the deck, you know. You would all have to come back the same way." I stir my tea. The spoon clatters against the cup.

"When they come back with you in the bag, I'm still sitting there. I'm familiar with their problem. Dumping garbage from the mess and tossing people you don't like overboard is a thing of the past. There are always two on watch on the bridge, and the deck is lit up. Anyone who drops something bigger than a toothpick over the railing will face trouble and a marine inquiry. We'd have to put in at Godthåb and have little bowlegged Greenlanders in police uniforms running around like ants."

It occurs to him that I'm one of those little bowlegged ants he's talking about.

"Sorry," he says.

Somewhere a clock strikes four bells, the measure of time at sea, a time that doesn't distinguish between night and day but only the monotone changeover of four-hour watches. These bells reinforce the feeling that we're at a standstill, that we've never left port but have remained stationary in time and space, merely twisting ourselves farther down into meaninglessness.

"Hansen stays next to the hatch in the engine room. So I saunter up on deck and over to the port stairway. When Verlaine comes up, I see what's going on. Verlaine keeping watch on deck. Hansen at the hatchway. And Maurice alone with you down below. What does that mean?"

"Maybe Maurice wants a quick fuck," I say.

He nods thoughtfully. "That's possible. But he prefers young girls. An interest in mature women comes later, with experience. I'm positive that they're going to drop you into the cargo hold. What a great plan, man! It's forty feet down. It'll look like you fell. All they have to do is take off the sack afterward. That's why they were carrying you so carefully. So there wouldn't be any marks." He beams at me. Pleased that he figured out their plan.

"I go down to the between decks and over to the stairs. Through the steps I can see Maurice lugging you through the door. He's not even breathing hard. But he goes to the weight room every day. Four hundred pounds on the bench press and fifteen miles on the exercycle. I have to make a decision. You've never done anything for me, have you? In fact, you've given me trouble. And besides, there's something about you that's so…so damned…"

"Old-maidish?"

"Exactly. On the other hand, I never could stand Maurice."

He pauses dramatically.

"I'm a fan of the ladies. So I light the cigar. I can't see you anymore. You're out on the platform. But I put my mouth on the smoke detector and blow, and it goes off." He gives me a searching look.

"Maurice comes toward the stairs, covered with blood. The sprinklers wash it down the steps. A small flood. It makes me want to throw up. Why are they going to so much trouble? What have you done to them, Smilla?"

I need his help. "They've put up with me until now. Things started going wrong as soon as I got too close to the stern."

He nods. "That's always been Verlaine's territory."

"Now we're going to go up to the bridge and tell Lukas all about this," I say.

"No can do, man."

There are red patches on his face. I wait. But he can hardly speak.

"Does Verlaine know that you're a little needle freak?" He reacts with that baroque cockiness you sometimes encounter in people who have almost hit bottom.

"I'm the one controlling the drug; the drug doesn't control me!"

"But Verlaine has seen through you. He's going to put the finger on you. Why would that be so bad?"

He meticulously studies his tennis shoes.

"Why do you have a pass key, Jakkelsen?" He shakes his head.

"I've already been up on the bridge," I say. "With Verlaine. We agreed that the alarm went off by itself. That I fell down the stairs out of sheer astonishment."

"Lukas won't buy that."

"He doesn't believe us. But there's nothing he can do. You weren't mentioned at all."

He's relieved. Then a thought occurs to him. "Why didn't you tell him what happened?"

I have to win his help. It's like trying to build something on sand. "I'm not interested in Verlaine. I'm interested in Tørk."

The panic is back in his eyes. "That's much worse, man. I know a creep when I see one, and he's bad news."

"I want to know what we're on our way to get."

"I've told you, man. We're on our way to get some dope."

"No," I say. "It's not dope. Narcotics come from the tropics. From Colombia. From Burma. From Pakistan. And it goes to Europe. Or the U.S.A. It doesn't come to Greenland. Not in quantities that require a 4,000-ton ship. That forward cargo hold is specially built. I've never seen anything like it. It can be sterilized with steam. The air composition, temperature, and humidity can be regulated. You've seen all of this and thought about it. What did you come up with?"

His hands take on their own helplessly fluttering life on top of my pillows, like baby birds that have fallen out of the nest. His mouth opens and shuts.

"Something alive, man. Otherwise it wouldn't make any sense. They're going to transport something that's alive."

Sonne unlocks the sick bay for me. It's nine o'clock at night. I find a gauze bandage. He bolsters his uncertainty by standing at attention. Because I'm a woman. Because he doesn't understand me. Because there's something he wants to say.

"On the between decks, when we showed up with the fire-extinguishing equipment, you were sitting there with a couple of fire blankets."

At the spot where the skin is broken I dab on a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide. No Mercurochrome for me. I have to feel it sting before I believe it's going to do any good.

"I went back, but they were gone," he says. "Someone must have taken them away,"

I say. "It's good to keep things tidy."

"But they forgot to take this away."

Behind his back he's been holding a wet, folded gunny sack. Maurice's blood has left big purplish patches on it. I put the bandage on the wound. The gauze has some kind of adhesive on it that makes it stay on by itself.

I take along a big elastic bandage. He follows me out the door. He's a nice young Dane. He ought to be on board an East Asiatic Company tanker right now. He could have been on the bridge of one of the Lauritzen ships. He could have been sitting at home under the cuckoo clock with his mother and father in Ærøskøbing, eating meatballs and gravy, praising Mama's cooking, and basking in Papa's humble pride. Instead, he wound up here. In worse company than he could ever imagine. I feel sorry for him. He's a little piece of what's good about Denmark. Honesty, integrity, enterprise, obedience, crew cuts, and financial order.

"Sonne," I say, "are you from Ærøskøbing?"

"No, Svaneke." He looks disconcerted.

"Does your mother make meatballs?"

He nods.

"Good meatballs? Crusty on the outside?"

He blushes. He wants to protest. Wants to be taken seriously. Wants to exert his authority. The way Denmark does. With blue eyes, pink cheeks, and honorable intentions. But all around him are powerful forces: money, development, abuse, the collision of the new world with the old. And he doesn't understand what's going on. That he will only be tolerated as long as he cooperates. And that's all the imagination he has, anyway. Only enough to cooperate.

To say stop requires quite different talents. Something much more vulgar, much more clear-sighted. Much more embittered.

I reach up and pat his cheek. I can't resist. The blush rises up from his throat, like a rose beneath his skin. "Sonne," I say, "I don't know what you're up to, but just keep on doing it."

I lock my door, place the chair under the door handle, and sit down on my bed.

Those who have traveled enough in places where it's very cold will sooner or later find themselves in a situation where survival means staying awake. Death is built into sleep. The person who freezes to death passes through a brief state of sleep. The person who bleeds to death goes to sleep, and the one who is buried under an avalanche of compact, wet snow falls asleep before suffocating to death.

I need to sleep. But I can't, not yet. In this situation there's a certain respite in the hazy region between sleep and full consciousness.

During the first Inuit Circumpolar Conference we discovered that all peoples around the Arctic Sea shared the story of the raven, the Arctic creation myth.

Even the raven started out in human form, and he fumbled blindly, and his actions were haphazard until it was revealed to him who he was and what his purpose was.

To find out what your purpose is. Maybe that's what lsaiah has given me. The way every child can. A sense of meaning. Of a wheel turning through me, and through him, too-a vast and frail and yet necessary movement.

That is what has been violated. Isaiah's body in the snow is a violation. While he was alive, he brought purpose and meaning. And, as always, I didn't appreciate how important he was until he was gone.

Now my purpose is to understand why he died. To penetrate and illuminate the infinitesimal yet all-encompassing fact of his death.

I wrap the elastic bandage around my foot and try to get my blood circulation going. Then I let myself out and quietly knock on Jakkelsen's door.

He's still full of chemical energy. But the effects are beginning to wear off.

"I want to go up on the boat deck," I say. "Tonight. You're going to help me."

He's on his feet and on his way out the door. I don't try to stop him. Someone like that doesn't have any real freedom of choice.

"You must be crazy, man. That's a restricted area. Jump overboard, man. Why don't you jump overboard instead."

"You have to help me," I say. "Or I'll be forced to go up on the bridge and tell them to come and get you. And in the presence of witnesses you'll have to roll up your sleeves so they can admit you to the sick bay, strap you to the bunk; and lock the door with a guard outside."

"You'd never do that, man."

"My heart would bleed at having to report a hero of the high seas. But I'd be forced to do it."

He struggles with his suspicions.

"I'd also let drop a few words to Verlaine about what you've seen."

That pushes him over the edge. He's shaking uncontrollably.

"He'd cut me up in little pieces," he says. "How could you do that, after I rescued you?"

Maybe I could make him understand. But it would require an explanation that I can't give him.

"I want to know," I say, "I have to know what we're going to pick up. What that tank is designed to hold."

"Why, Smilla?"

It all began with a person falling off a roof. But before that's resolved, there is a series of connections that may never be untangled. And what Jakkelsen needs is to be reassured. Europeans need easy explanations; they will always choose a simple lie over a contradictory truth.

"Because I owe it to somebody," I say. "I owe it to someone I love."

It's not a mistake to use the present tense. It's only in a narrow, physical sense that Isaiah has ceased to exist. Jakkelsen stares at me, disillusioned and gloomy. "You don't love anyone. You don't even like yourself. You're not a real woman. When I dragged you up the stairs, I saw that little point sticking out of the bag. A screwdriver. Like a little dick. You stabbed him, man."

His face is full of amazement. "I can't figure you out, man. You're the good fairy in the monkey cage. But you're cold, too, man. You're like a fucking banshee."

As we reach the covered area on the upper deck, the clock on the bridge strikes four bells; it's two in the morning, halfway through the middle watch.

The wind has died down, the temperature has dropped, and pujuq, the fog, has raised its four white walls around the Kronos.

Next to me, Jakkelsen has already started shivering. He has no resistance to the cold.

Something has happened to the contours of the ship, to the sea rail, the masts, the spotlights, and the radio antenna, which at a height of a hundred feet stretches from the mast farthest forward to the one in the stern. I rub my eyes. But it's not my eyesight.

Jakkelsen puts his finger on the railing and lifts it again. It leaves behind a black spot where it has melted through the fine, milky layer of ice.

"There are two kinds of ice on a ship, you know. The ugly kind, that comes from the waves slamming over the side and freezing solid. More and more, faster and faster, after the rigging and everything else upright starts to get thick with it. And then the truly bad kind of ice. The type that comes from the sea fog. It doesn't need any waves, it simply covers everything. It's just something that's there."

He gestures out toward the whiteness. "This is the start of the truly bad kind. Four more hours and we'll have to get out the ice axes."

His movements seem feeble but his eyes are shining. He would hate having to hammer off ice. But somewhere inside him even this aspect of the sea ignites a wild joy in him.

I walk thirty feet forward, to a spot where I won't be visible from the bridge, but where I can survey several of the windows on the boat deck. They're all dark. All the windows in the superstructure are dark, except for a faint light from the officers' mess. The Kronos is asleep. "They're sleeping," I say.

He's been over to the quarterdeck to look at the windows facing astern. "We should fucking well all be asleep."

We go up the three levels to the boat deck. He continues on to the next landing. From there he'll be able to see whether anyone leaves the bridge. And whether anyone happens to leave the boat deck. Inside a sack, for instance.

I'm wearing my black serving uniform. It's almost worthless as an excuse for anything at two o'clock in the morning, but I couldn't come up with anything else. I'm taking actions without stopping to think about them. Because forward is the only way to go, and it's impossible to stop. I put Jakkelsen's key in the lock. It slides in effortlessly. But it won't turn. The combination has been changed.

"It's a sign, man. We should drop this idea."

He comes back down and stands right behind me. I take hold of his lower lip. The blood blister hasn't gone down yet. He would have protested if I hadn't put my hand over his mouth.

"If it's a sign, then it means that behind that door there's something they've gone to a lot of trouble to keep us from seeing."

I whisper this in his ear. Then I let him go. He can think of a lot of things to say, but he restrains himself. He follows me with his head bowed. When the opportunity arises, he'll take his revenge and stomp on me, or sell me to whoever comes along, or give me the final kick from behind. But right now he feels cowed.

Rooms designed for some form of socializing always seem unreal when they're empty. Theater stages, churches, dining rooms. The mess is dark and lifeless, but still populated with the memory of life and mealtimes.

In the galley there's a strong odor of sourdough, yeast, and alcohol. Urs told me that his bread rises for six hours, from ten o'clock at night until four in the morning. We have an hour and a half, two at the most.

When I open the two sliding doors, Jakkelsen realizes what I'm up to.

"I knew you were crazy, man. But I didn't know you were that far gone…"

The dumbwaiter has been cleaned, and inside there is a tray laden with cups and saucers, breakfast plates, silverware, and napkins. Urs's token preparations for the next day.

I remove the tray and the china.

"I get claustrophobic," says Jakkelsen.

"You're not the one who's going up in it."

"I get claustrophobic for other people, too."

The box is rectangular. I get up on the counter and crawl in sideways. First I test whether it's even possible to put my head down far enough between my knees. Then I shove my upper body partway inside.

"You press the button for the boat deck. When I get out, leave the dumbwaiter there. So it doesn't make any unnecessary noise. Then go up to the stairs and wait. If anyone tries to send you away, refuse to leave. If they insist, go back to your cabin. Give me an hour. If I'm not back by then, wake up Lukas."

He wrings his hands. "I can't, man. I can't."

I have to stretch my legs, but I also have to watch that I don't put my hands down on the sourdough rising on the counter.

"Why not?"

"He's my brother, man. That's why I'm on board. That's why I have a key. He thinks I'm clean."

I take one last lungfuI of air, exhale, and squeeze myself into the little box.

"If I'm not back in an hour, wake up Lukas. It's your only chance. If you don't come to get me, I'll tell Tørk everything. He'll get Verlaine to take care of you. Verlaine is his man."

We haven't turned on the light. The galley is dark except for the faint glow from the sea and the reflection of the fog. But I can still tell that I've hit home. I'm glad I can't see his face.

I put my head between my knees. He pushes the doors closed. There's the soft hum of an electric motor beneath me in the dark as I move upward.

The movement lasts for about fifteen seconds. My only thought is one of helplessness. The fear that'someone will be waiting for me up there.

I get out my screwdriver. So I'll have something to offer when they slam open the doors and pull me out.

But nothing happens. The dumbwaiter stops abruptly in its shaft of darkness, and I sit there with nothing but the pain in the back of my thighs, the movement of the ship on the sea, and the distant sound of the engine, which is now barely audible.

I stick the screwdriver in between the two sliding doors and force them apart. Then I slip out feet first onto a countertop.

There's a faint light coming into the room. It's from the stern running lights shining into this level from a skylight overhead. The room is a kitchenette with a refrigerator, a sideboard, and a couple of hot plates.

The door leads to a narrow corridor. I crouch down in the corridor and wait.

People perish during transitional phases. In Scoresbysund they would shoot each other in the head with shotguns when the winter started to kill off summer. It's not difficult to coast along when things are going well, when a balance has been established. What's difficult is the new. The new ice. The new light. The new feelings.

I sit down. It's my only chance. It's everybody's only chance. To give yourself the necessary time to get acclimated.

The bulkhead in front of me is quivering from the distant engine beneath us. The smokestack must be just on the other side. This level of the ship has been built around the big, rectangular shape of the funnel.

To my left I can see a faint light at floor level. It's the night-light on the stairs. That door is my escape route. To my right there is silence at first. Then, in the stillness, I can hear someone breathing. It's much softer than the other sounds of the ship. But after six days on board, the daily noises have become a discreet background against which all deviations are evident. Even the light snoring of a sleeping woman.

This means that there is one cabin, or possibly two, here on the port side, and there will be one or two opposite. So the salon and mess face the foredeck.

I stay seated. After a while a pipe gurgles distantly. The Kronos has high-pressure flushable toilets. Somewhere either above or below us, a toilet was flushed. The movement in the pipes reveals that the bath and toilets on this deck are in front of the smokestack, and built adjacent to it.

I've taken along my alarm clock in my apron pocket. What else could I do? I look at it, and then I make my move.

The lock on the exit is a latch. I unhook it. So that I'll he able to get out fast. But mainly so that someone else will be able to get in.

I feel my way to a door between the short corridor to the exit and what must be the salon. I put my ear against it and wait. The only thing I hear is the distant ship's clock that sounds the bells. The door opens into darkness more intense than the dimness behind me. Here, too, I wait. Then I turn on the light switch. It doesn't produce an ordinary light. It illuminates hundreds of aquarium lamps over hundreds of very small, sealed aquariums, set in rubber frames and attached to stands that cover all three walls. There are fish in the aquariums. More different kinds and greater numbers than in any tropical fish shop.

Along one wall is a black-stained table with two large, flat porcelain sinks with an elbow-operated mixing apparatus. On the table there are two gas jets and two Bunsen burners, all with permanent copper pipe connections to a gas cock. An autoclave is mounted on a side table. A Mettler scale. A PH meter. A large bellows camera mounted on a tripod. A bifocal microscope.

Under the table there is a metal rack with small, deep drawers. I open a few of them. In cardboard boxes from Struer's Chemical Laboratory there are pipettes, rubber hoses, plugs, glass slides, and litmus paper. Chemicals in little glass flasks. Powdered magnesium, potassium permanganate, iron filings, powdered sulfur, copper sulfate crystals. Against the wall, in wooden crates lined with straw and corrugated cardboard, are little carboys of acid. Hydrofluoric acid, hydrochloric acid, and acetic acid in various concentrations.

On the opposite table there are permanently attached plastic trays, developing baths, and an enlarging apparatus. I don't understand a thing. The room is furnished like a mixture of Denmark's National Aquarium and a chemical laboratory.

The salon has double doors with paneling. A reminder that the Kronos was built for the long-vanished elegance of the fifties, old-fashioned even then. The room lies right below the navigation bridge and is exactly the same size-like a low-ceilinged Danish living room. There are six large windows facing the foredeck. All of them are iced over, and a faint bluish-gray light seeps through the ice.

On the port side unmarked wooden and cardboard boxes are stacked up, held in place by a flag rope stretched between two heaters.

A table is bolted down in the middle of the room, and several thermoses are standing in the indentations of the tabletop. Long worktables with Luxo lamps have been put up along two of the walls. A small copy machine has been screwed onto the bulkhead. Next to it is a fax machine. A cupboard overhead is filled with books.

On my way over to the bookshelf I notice the sea chart.

It has been placed beneath a sheet of non-reflecting Plexiglas; that's why I didn't notice it before. I turn on the lamp.

The text in the margin has been cut off, so it takes a few minutes for me to identify it. On sea charts, land is a detail, a mere line, a contour drowning in a swarm of numbers indicating depths. Then I recognize the promontory across from Sisimiut. Under the glass plate, at the edge of the map, there are several smaller photocopies of specialized maps: "Mean time lag from moon's transit (upper or lower) at Greenwich until onset of high tide in West Greenland"; "Overview of surface currents west of Greenland"; "Index map of sector divisions in Holsteinsborg region."

At the top, up against the bulkhead, lie three photographs. Two of them are black-and-white aerial shots. The third looks like a fractal detail of the Mandelbrot set, produced by a color printer. All three photos have the same shape in the center. A shape approximating a circle, curving around an opening. Like a five-week-old fetus which, fishlike, curls around the gills.

I try the file cabinets, but they're locked. I'm about to look at the books when a door opens somewhere on the deck. I turn off the light and stand perfectly still. A second door is opened and shut, and then there is silence. But the deck doesn't seem asleep anymore. Somewhere someone is awake. I don't need to look at my clock. There's still time, but my nerves can't take it.

I have my hand on the exit. door when someone comes up the stairs. I retreat backward into the corridor. A key is put in the lock. There is a pause of surprise that the door isn't locked. I push open the door to the galley, step in, and close it behind me. Footsteps approach down the corridor. Maybe there's something cautious, hesitant about them, maybe someone is wondering why the door wasn't locked, maybe they're going to search the deck. Maybe I'm hearing things. I shove myself up onto the counter and into the dumbwaiter. I pull the doors shut, but they don't close properly from the inside.

The door to the hallway opens and a light is turned on. In the middle of the room, right in front of the slit I haven't been able to close, stands Seidenfaden, wearing his outdoor clothes, still windblown from his walk on deck. He goes over to the refrigerator and disappears out of my field of vision. There's a hiss of carbon dioxide, and he comes back into view. He's standing there drinking beer out of a can.

At that moment, while his face has an expression of introspective pleasure and he seems about to cough, he's looking straight at me, but he doesn't see me. Suddenly the dumbwaiter starts to rumble with a loud clatter.

There's no room for me to react. All I can do is pull the cork off the screwdriver and get ready to be discovered in about two seconds.

Then the dumbwaiter descends.

Above me in the dark the doors are shoved aside. But I'm already gone; I'm on my way down.

I pray that it's Jakkelsen who has disobeyed my orders; maybe he noticed some movement in the shaft and pushed the button to bring me down. I hope that it'll be dark when the doors open. And that Jakkelsen's trembling hands will be there to help me when I crawl out.

I stop, the door is cautiously pulled open. Outside, it's dark.

Something cold and wet is pressed against my thigh. Something is put in my lap. Something is shoved under my knees. Then the door is closed, the dumbwaiter hums, a motor starts up, and I ascend once more.

I shift the screwdriver into my left hand and find the flashlight with my right. For a moment I'm blinded, then I can see.

Leaning against me, two inches from my eyes, looms an upright, cold magnum bottle beaded with moisture: Moet & Chandon 1986 Brut Imperial Rose. Pink champagne. In my lap there's a champagne glass. Under my knees I can feel the concave bottom of another bottle.

I take it for granted that when the doors open I will find myself bathed in light, face to face with Seidenfaden. It doesn't turn out that way. I count two bumps and know that I've passed the boat deck. I'm on my way up to the bridge, to the officers' mess.

The dumbwaiter comes to a halt, and then there is silence; nothing happens. I try to open the doors. It's almost impossible because of the bottles.

Somewhere a door is opened and shut. Then a match is struck. I wriggle the doors open a crack. There's a candle in a candlestick on the big dining-room table where I served dinner a few days ago. Now someone picks up the candle and moves toward me.

The doors slide back. I have a hand against the wall behind me in order to put as much force as I can into the blow. I'm expecting Tørk or Verlaine. I'm thinking of aiming for their eyes.

The light blinds me because it's so close. I can't make out anything except a dark outline, which removes one bottle and then the other. When the glass is removed, a hand fumbles over my hip for a moment.

There is a muffled sound of surprise.

Kützow's face is lowered toward me. We gaze into each other's eyes. Tonight his are bulging, as if he had been afflicted with acute Basedow's disease. But he isn't sick in the ordinary sense. He is enormously drunk.

"Jaspersen!" he says.

Then we both catch sight of the screwdriver. It's pointed at a spot between his eyes.

"Jaspersen," he repeats.

"A minor repair," I say.

It's difficult to talk because my scrunched-up position makes it hard to breathe.

"I'm the one in charge of repairs on board."

His voice is authoritative but slurred. I poke my head out the door. "I see you're also in charge of the winecellar. Urs and the captain will be interested to hear that."

He blushes, a slow but pervasive change to a color bordering on purple. "I can explain."

In ten seconds he'll start wondering. I get an arm out. "I don't have time," I say. "I have to get on with my work."

At that instant the dumbwaiter starts down. At the last second I pull my upper body inside. I manage to feel a burst of fury that there isn't some kind of safety device preventing it from operating when the doors are open.

In my mind I go through the entire discovery, confrontation, and catastrophic ending. By the time I reach the galley, my imagination has been used up.

The dumbwaiter doesn't stop there. It continues its descent.

Then it stops. Those final seconds have drained my last reserves. Now I have only the element of surprise on my side. I wrench open the doors and push them back. They slam into place with a bang. A sack marked Vildmose Potatoes. DANISH SHIPPING PROVISIONS sways toward me. I swing both legs out, put them against it, and push. The sack stops swaying, pitches backward, and flies toward the farthest corner. It lands among the boxes labeled WIUFF'S LAMMEFJORD CARROTS.

I regain my balance on the floor. My legs feel like rubber. But I have the screwdriver out in front of me.

Urs comes out from behind the sack.

I can't think of anything to say. When I stagger out the door, he's still on his knees.

"Bitte, Fraulein Smilla, bitte…"

Subconsciously I must have been expecting some kind of alarm. Armed men in wait for me. But the Kronos is wrapped in darkness. I walk up through three decks without meeting anyone.

The stairway from the bridge is empty. Jakkelsen is nowhere to be seen. I brazenly enter the bridge deck, go through the door marked OFFICERS' ACCOMMODATIONS, arid open the door to the men's bathroom.

He's standing at the sink. He had been combing his hair. His forehead is pressed against the mirror, as if he wanted to make sure that the result would be especially nice. He was in the process of combing back the hair over his ears. But he's asleep. Unconsciously and pliantly his body follows the rolling of the ship, holding itself upright. But he's snoring. His mouth is open and his tongue is hanging out slightly.

I stick my hand into the breast pocket of his work shirt. I take out a rubber tube. He slipped into the bathroom and had a little fix to keep up his courage. Then he tried to spruce himself up. But he got tired.

I kick his legs out from under him. He falls heavily to the floor. I try to pull him up, but my back hurts. I only manage to lift up his head.

"You overlooked Kützow," I say.

A sensuous little smile appears on his face. "Smilla. I knew you'd come back."

I get him to his feet. Then I push his head into the sink and turn on the cold water. When he can stay on his feet, I pull him over toward the stairs.

We're five steps down when Kützow comes out the door behind us.

There's no doubt that he thinks he's sneaking around on cat's paws. In reality he manages to stay upright only by hanging on to whatever is at hand. When he catches sight of us, he stops abruptly, puts his hand on the board with the barometer, and stares at me.

I have Jakkelsen's weak-kneed body pressed up against the railing. I'm having difficulty walking myself.

Shock slowly penetrates his drunkenness, which now must be further enhanced by one or two sparkling magnum bottles.

"Jaspersen," he croaks. "Jaspersen…"

I'm so tired of men and their excesses. It's been this way ever since I came to Denmark. You always have to watch out not to trip over people who have poisoned themselves but think they're carrying it off with dignity. "Piss off, Mr. Engineer," I say.

He stares at me blankly.

We don't meet anyone else on our way down. I shove Jakkelsen into his cabin. He falls onto his bed like a rag doll. I turn him on his side. Infants, alcoholics, and drug addicts all risk suffocating on their own vomit. Then I lock his door from the outside with his own key.

I lock and barricade my door. It's 4:15 a.m. I'm going to sleep for three hours and then report sick and sleep twelve more. Everything else will have to wait.

I manage to sleep for forty-five minutes. First an electronic buzzer penetrates through the first nightmares, on the edge of sleep, followed by Lukas's commanding voice.

I'm working less than six feet away from Verlaine. He's using a hard rubber club as long as a lumberman's ax.

I can tell from my chapped lips that it's just under 14°F. He's working in his shirtsleeves. With one hand he hangs on to the sea rail or the fencing around the radar scanners. With the other he raises the club in a graceful, gentle arc behind his back and then brings it down on the deckhouse roof with an explosion like a car windshield being smashed. His face is covered with sweat, but his movements are easy and tireless. Each blow breaks off a plate of ice about three feet square.

There's no wind but a choppy sea in which the Kronos is pitching heavily. And there is fog, like big moist planes of whiteness in the dark.

Every time we emerge from one of the fog banks, which hang so low that they give the impression of floating on the water, the layer of ice visibly increases. I'm scraping the ice off the scanners with the handle of an ice pick. When I'm done with one of them I might as well go back to the one I just did. In less than two minutes a thin layer of hard gray ice has covered it again.

The deck and the superstructure are alive. Not with the small, dark figures hammering at the ice, but with the ice itself. All the deck lights are on. Together, the ice and the light have created a mythological landscape. The riggings and mast stays are coated with a foot of ice festoons drooping from the masts to the deck like watchful faces. An anchor lantern on its mount shines through its shroud of ice, like the glowing brain inside the head of some fantastical animal. The deck is a gray, solidified sea. Everything upright looms in the air with inquisitive faces and cold gray limbs.

Verlaine is on the starboard side. Behind me is the sea rail, and beyond that a free fall of almost sixty-five feet to the deck below. In front of me, behind the radar pedestals and the low mast with the antennas, siren, and a mobile spotlight for harbor maneuvers, Sonne is shoveling ice. The sheets of ice that Verlaine chops loose he tosses over the rail, where they fall onto the boatdeck next to the lifeboat. From there Hansen, wearing a yellow hard hat, sends them on over the side of the ship.

On the port side Jakkelsen is chopping the ice free from the radar pedestals with a hammer. He's working his way toward me. At one point the scanners hide us from the rest of the roof.

He sticks the hammer in his jacket pocket. Then he leans back against the radar. He takes out a cigarette. "As you predicted," I say. "The bad ice."

His face is white with exhaustion.

"No," he says. "It doesn't start until 5-6 Beaufort, at just about the freezing point. He's called us out on deck too soon."

He looks around. There's no one anywhere near. "When I started sailing, you know, it was the captain who sailed the ship, and time was measured by the calendar. If you were on your way into an icy situation, you decreased your speed. Or you changed your route. Or turned and sailed with the wind. But in the last few years things have changed: Now it's the shipping companies that decide, now it's the offices in the big cities that are sailing the ships. And this is what you measure time by." He points at his wristwatch. "But we're obviously supposed to get somewhere by a certain time. So they've given him orders to keep going. And that's what he's doing. He's losing his touch. Since we had to go through this, anyway, there was no reason to call us on deck right now. A smaller ship can withstand ice up to 10 percent of its displacement. We could sail with five hundred tons of ice and it wouldn't make much difference. He could have sent a couple of the boys up to chop the antennas free."

I scrape ice away from the directional antenna. When I'm working, I'm awake. As soon as I stop, I have brief lapses of sleep.

"He's afraid we won't be able to maintain cruising speed. Afraid we're going to blow something. Or that it'll suddenly get worse. It's his nerves. They're almost shot."

He drops his cigarette, half smoked, onto the ice. A new fog bank envelops us. The moisture seems to stick to the ice that has already formed. For a moment Jakkelsen is almost hidden.

I work my way around the radar. I make sure that I stay in both Jakkelsen's and Sonne's fields of vision at all times.

Verlaine is right next to me. His blows fall so close to me that the pressure shoves frozen air toward my face. They land at the foot of the metal pedestal with the precision of a surgical incision, tearing away a transparent plate of ice. He kicks it over to Sonne.

His face is next to mine. "Why?" he asks.

I hold the ice pick slightly behind me. A short distance away, out of earshot, Sonne clears off the base of the mast with the handle of his shovel.

"I know why," he says. "Because Lukas wouldn't have believed it, anyway."

"I could have pointed out Maurice's wound," I say. "A work accident. The angle grinder started going while he was changing the wheel. The chuck key struck him in the shoulder. It's been reported and explained."

"An accident. Just like the boy on the roof," I say. His face is close to mine. Its only expression is one of incomprehension. He has no idea what I'm talking about. "But with Andreas Licht," I say, "the old man on the ship, that's where things got a little more clumsy." When his body locks up, it gives the illusion that he's frozen, like the ship around us.

"I saw you on the dock," I lie. "When I swam in." While he ponders the consequences of what I've said, he gives himself away. For one second a sick animal scares at me from somewhere inside his body: Like his teeth, there is a thin veneer over the cruelty that turned him sadistic.

"There will be an investigation in Nuuk," I say. "Police and naval authorities. Attempted murder alone could get you two years. Now they'll look into Licht's death, too." He grins at me, a big white-toothed smile.

"We're not putting in at Godthåb. We're going to the tankers' floating dock. It's twenty sea miles from land. You can't even see the coast."

He gives me a quizzical look.

"You put up a good fight," he says. "It's almost too bad that you're so alone."