Authors: Peter Høeg

Smilla's Sense of Snow (15 page)

BOOK: Smilla's Sense of Snow

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She pauses, mastering her indignation.

“Later I received a letter which stated, briefly summarized, that I should not have gone over the heads of my immediate superiors with that type of request. But by then it was too late. Because on the telephone that day they had given me the answer. The 450,000 kroner had been used to charter a ship.”

She sees that I don't understand a thing.

“A ship,” she says, “a coaster, to transport eight men to the west coast of Greenland to pick up a few kilos of sample gemstones. It doesn't make sense. We often chartered the
Disko
from the Greenland Trading Company. To transport the cryolite. But a ship for a small expedition, that was unthinkable. Do you ever remember your dreams, Miss Smilla?”

“Sometimes.”

“Recently I've dreamed several times that you were sent by Providence.”

“You should hear what the police say about me.”

Like many elderly people, she has developed a selective sense of hearing. She ignores me and continues on her own track. “Perhaps you think I'm old. Perhaps you're wondering whether I'm senile. But remember, âYour old men shall dream dreams.'”

She looks straight through me, straight through the wall. Straight into the past.

“I think that the 115,000 kroner in 1966 must have been used to charter a ship. I think that someone, under the guise of the Cryolite Corporation, has sent two expeditions to the west coast.”

I hold my breath. With her honesty and her breach of a lifelong loyalty, this is a delicate moment.

“There can only be one explanation for this. At any rate, after forty-five years with the corporation, I cannot think of any other reason. They wanted to transport something back to Denmark, something so heavy that it required a ship.”

I put on my cape. The black one with the hood that makes me look like a nun and that I thought would be suitable for the occasion.

“The Carlsberg Foundation financed part of the expedition in '91. In their accounts there is a fee for a Benedicte Clahn,” I say.

She gazes, dreamy-eyed, straight ahead, as she pages through her complete, error-free internal account books.

“In 1966, too,” she says slowly. “A translator's fee of 267 kroner. That was also one of the entries I did not find an explanation for. But I remember her. She was one of the director's acquaintances. She had been living in Germany. I had the impression that they knew each other from Berlin in 1946. Immediately after the end of the war the Allies negotiated in Berlin regarding the division of aluminum supplies. A lot of people from the corporation were often down there during those years.”

“Such as?”

“Ottesen was there. The director of sales. And Councilor Ebel.”

“Any others?”

She's groggy from talking so much and from pouring out her heart into what might turn out to be the gutter. She wearily considers my question.

“I can't remember hearing about any others. Is it important?”

I shrug my shoulders. She takes hold of me. She can practically lift me off the floor. “The little boy's death. What are you planning to do?”

Denmark is a hierarchical society. She finds a mistake, and she complains to her boss. She is rejected. She complains to the board. She is rejected. But above the board sits Our Lord. She has turned to Him in prayer. Now she wants me to show that I am one of His assistants dispatched to help.

“That coaster. Did it sail off with what it went to get?”

She shakes her head. “That's hard to say. After the accident the survivors and their equipment were flown to GodthÃ¥b and then home. I am positive about that because the accounting department paid for the freight and their plane tickets.”

She follows me all the way out to the elevator. I feel a sudden tenderness for her. A motherly feeling, even though she is twice my age and three times as strong.

The elevator arrives.

“Now don't let your honesty give you bad dreams,” I say.

“I'm too old to regret anything.”

Then I ride down. On my way out the front door, I suddenly think of something. When I call her up on the silver-plated conch shell, she answers as if she had been standing there waiting for my call.

“Miss LÃ¼bing.”

I would never dream of using her first name.

“The director of finance. Who is he?”

“He's going to retire next year. He runs his own law office. His name is David Ving. The firm is Hammer & Ving. It's located somewhere on Ãster Street.”

I thank her.

“God be with you,” she says.

No one has ever said that to me before, outside of church. Maybe I've never had such a need for it before, either.

“I had a c-colleague who worked on the cleaning staff at the phone company's switching station on NÃ¸rre Street.”

We're sitting in the mechanic's living room.

“He told me that they just call in and say that now they have a court order. Then some clips are put on a relay and via the telephone network they can sit at police headquarters and tap all incoming and outgoing calls on a certain number.”

“I've never liked telephones.”

He has a big roll of wide red insulation tape and a little pair of scissors on the table. He cuts a long strip and attaches it to the telephone receiver.

“Do the same thing in your apartment. From now on, every time you make a call and every time someone calls you, you'll have to remove the t-tape first. That will make you remember that there might be an audience listening somewhere in the city. People always forget that telephones might not be private. The tape will remind you to be careful. If, for instance, you happen to make a declaration of love.”

If I were going to declare my love to someone, I certainly wouldn't do it over the phone. But I don't say anything.

I know nothing about him. Over the last ten days I've seen little drops of his past. They don't jibe. Like now, this knowledge of the procedure for tapping phones.

The tea he makes for us is another one of those little drops that surprise me but that I don't want to ask about.

He boils milk with fresh ginger, a quarter of a vanilla bean, and tea that is so dark and fine-leaved that it looks like black dust. He strains it and puts cane sugar in both our cups. There's something euphorically invigorating and yet filling about it. It tastes the way I imagine the Far East must taste.

I tell him about my visit to Elsa LÃ¼bing. He now knows everything that I know. Except for a few details, such as Isaiah's cigar box and its contents, including a tape on which a man is laughing.

“Who, other than the Carlsberg Foundation, financed the expedition in '91? Did she know? Who arranged for the ship?”

I kick myself for not asking that precise question. I reach for the telephone. The receiver is taped on.

“That's why the t-tape is there,” he says. “After five minutes you'd forget all about it otherwise.”

Together we walk over to the phone booth on the square. His stride is one and a half times as long as mine. And yet it still feels comfortable walking next to each other. He walks just as slowly as I do.

When my mother didn't come back I realized that any moment could be the last. Nothing in life should simply be a passage from one place to another. Each walk should be taken as if it is the only thing you have left.

You can demand something like this of yourself as an unattainable ideal. After that, you have to remind yourself about it every time you're sloppy about something. For me that means 250 times a day.

She picks up the phone at once. It strikes me how self-confident her voice is.

“Yes?”

I don't give my name. “The 450,000 kroner. Who paid it?”

She doesn't ask me about anything. Maybe it has also been revealed to her that someone might be on the line. She thinks for a moment in silence.

“Geoinform,” she says then. “That was the name of the company. They had two representatives on the Scientific Commission. They owned a block of shares. Five percent, as far as I can recall. Enough so that it had to be registered with the Trade Commission. The company is owned by a woman.”

The mechanic has stepped into the booth with me. It makes me think of three things. The first is that he fills it up. If he stood up straight he could push the bottom out of it, and walk away with me and the booth.

The second thing is that his hands against the glass in front of me are smooth and clean. Used to hard work but smooth and clean. Occasionally he gets a job at a garage on ToftegÃ¥rd Square. How, I ask myself, can he mess around all day long with grease and socket wrenches and keep his fingers so smooth?

The third thing is that I'm honest enough to admit that there's a certain pleasure in standing next to him this way. I have to stop myself from prolonging the conversation solely for that reason.

“I've been thinking about something you asked me. About Berlin after the war. There was one other colleague. At that time he was not employed by us. But he was later on. Not at the quarry, but here in Copenhagen. As a medical consultant. Dr. Loyen. Johannes Loyen. He did some work for the Americans. I think he was a forensics expert.”

“How does someone become a professor, Smilla?”

On a piece of paper we've made a list of names. There is attorney and CPA David Ving. Someone who knows something about ships. How to cover up the expenses of chartering one, for example, and send them as a Christmas present to little children in Greenland.

There is Benedicte Clahn. The mechanic found her in the phone book. If it's the same one, that is. It turns out that she lives two hundred yards from where we are now sitting. In one of the renovated warehouses on Strand Street. Which contain Denmark's most expensive condominiums. Three million kroner for nine hundred square feet. But then there's also a brick wall five feet thick to beat your head against when you figure out the price per square foot. And beams of Pomeranian pine to hang yourself from if the wall doesn't do the trick. He has written down her phone number next to her name.

And there are the two professors, Johannes Loyen and Andreas Fine Licht. Two men about whom we don't know an awful lot, except that their names are associated with both expeditions to Gela Alta. Two expeditions, about which we really don't know anything either.

“My father,” I say, “was once a professor. Now that he isn't one anymore, he says that in most cases the people who become professors are clever without being too clever.”

“So what happens to the ones who
are
too clever?”

I hate quoting Moritz. What can you do about people you don't
want to quote but who are still the ones who have said it most succinctly?

“He says that they either rise up to the stars or they go to the dogs.”

“Which of the two happened to your father?”

I have to think about that for a moment before I come up with an answer. “It's more like he's split in half,” I say.

Silently we listen to the sounds of the city. The cars on the bridge. The sound of pneumatic tools from the night shift at one of Holmen's dry docks. The chimes of Our Saviour's Church. They say that anyone can get permission to play the bells in the tower. That's also the impression you have from listening. Sometimes it sounds like Horowitz, sometimes as if they picked up some obscure drunk at CafÃ© HÃ¸vlen.

“The Trade Commission,” I say. “LÃ¼bing said that if you want to find out who controls a company or who sits on a board, you can look it up at the Trade Commission. Supposedly they have the balance sheets for all companies in Denmark listed on the stock exchange.”

“It's on K-Kampmanns Street.”

“How do you know that?” I ask.

He gazes out the window. “I paid attention in school.”

There are mornings when it feels as if you rise up to the surface through a mud bath. With your feet stuck in a block of cement. When you know that you've expired in the night and have nothing to be happy about except the fact that at least you've already died so they can't transplant your lifeless organs.

Six out of seven mornings are like that.

The seventh is like today. I wake up feeling crystal-clear. I climb out of bed as if I had some reason to get up.

I do the four yoga exercises I managed to learn before I received the eightieth reminder from the library, and they sent a messenger, and I had to pay such a big fine that I might just as well have bought the book.

I take a shower in ice-cold water. Put on leggings, a big sweater, gray boots, and a fur hat from Jane Eberlein. It's made in sort of a Greenland style.

I usually tell myself that I've lost my cultural identity for good. And after I've said this enough times, I wake up one morning, like today, with a solid sense of identity. Smilla Jaspersenâpampered Greenlander.

It's seven o'clock in the morning. I walk down to the harbor and out onto the ice.

The ice in Copenhagen Harbor is not a place where you'd recommend parents send their children out to play, even in a hard frost such as this one. Even I have to be careful when I go out there.

About forty yards out I stop. Here the surface is slightly darker. One more step and I would fall through. I stand there, bobbing up and down. Sea ice is porous and elastic, the water seeps up through it, forming around my boots two mirror surfaces that reflect the scattered lights in the darkness.

A man is standing on the dock. A black silhouette against the white walls of the buildings. Fear spreads out like a vibrating tone. The mortal danger of the seal when it's lying on the ice. So sensitive, so visible, so immobile. Then the tone dies out. It's the mechanic, stooped, rectangular, like a big rock. I haven't seen him for two days. Maybe I've been avoiding him.

You get so used to looking at the city from certain angles that from here it seems like some foreign capital never before seen. Like Venice. Or Atlantis. A city which, wrapped in snow and the night, could be made of marble. I walk back toward the dock.

He could have been someone else. I could have been someone else. We could have been young lovers. Instead of a dyslexic stutterer and a bitter shrew who tell each other half-truths and are walking together along some dubious path.

When I'm standing in front of him, he takes me by the shoulders. “That's dangerous!”

If I didn't know better, I could have sworn there was something almost pleading in his voice.

I shake off his hands.

“I have a good relationship with ice.”

When we disbanded the Young Greenlanders' Council to form IA, and had to position ourselves in relation to the social democrats in SIUMUT and the reactionary Greenlandic upper class in ATAS-SUT, we read Karl Marx's
Das Kapital.
It was a book I grew quite fond of. For its trembling, feminine empathy and its potent indignation. I know of no other book with such a strong belief in how much you can accomplish if you simply have the will to change.

Unfortunately, I'm not that confident myself. I've been given a great deal, and I've wanted a lot. And I've ended up not really having anything and not really knowing what I want. I've acquired the basics of an education. I've traveled. Occasionally I've felt that I've done what I wanted to do. And yet I've been directed. Some invisible hand has had me by the scruff of the neck, and every time I thought that now I was taking an important step up toward the light, it has pushed me farther into a network of sewer pipes running beneath a landscape I cannot see. As if it had been determined that I would have to swallow a specific amount of wastewater before I would be allowed a breathing hole.

As a rule I swim against the current. But on certain mornings, like today, I have enough surplus energy to surrender. Now, as I'm walking along beside the mechanic, I am strangely, inexplicably happy.

It dawns on me that we could eat breakfast together. I can't remember how long it's been since I ate breakfast with someone. It has been my own choice. I'm sensitive in the morning. I need time to throw cold water on my face and put on my eyeliner and drink a glass of juice before I'm feeling sociable. But this morning has taken care of itself. We met, and now we're walking along side by side. I'm just about to suggest it.

Suddenly I'm floating.

He has picked me up and carried me over to the scaffolding. I think it's a joke and am about to say something. Then I see what he sensed and keep quiet. The stairwell is dark on all floors. But a door is opening. It floods yellow light out into the darkness. And two figuresâJuliane and a man. He's talking to her. She staggers. Whatever he's saying falls like blows. She drops to her knees. Then the door shuts. The man takes the outdoor stairway.

Juliane's friends don't leave at seven in the morning. At that hour they haven't even come home yet. And if they do leave, they don't walk with the nimble ease of this man. They crawl.

We're standing in the shadow of the scaffolding. He can't see us. He's wearing a long Burberry raincoat and a hat.

At the end of the building facing Christianshavn the mechanic gives my arm a squeeze, and I continue on alone. The hat in front of me gets into a car. When he pulls away from the curb, the little
Morris stops right next to me. The seats are cold and so low that I have to stretch to see out the windshield. It's iced over, so we drive peeking through a strip, barely able to see from the hood ornament to the red taillights in front of us.

We drive across the bridge. Turn right before Holmens Church, past the National Bank, across the King's New Square. Maybe there's other traffic, maybe we're the only ones. It's impossible to tell through the windshield.

He parks the car at Krinsen Park. We drive past and stop across from the French Embassy. He doesn't look back.

He walks past the Hotel d'Angleterre and turns down StrÃ¸get, the walking street. We're twenty-five yards behind him. Now there are other people around us. He walks up to a doorway and lets himself in with a key.

If I had been alone, I would have stopped here. I don't need to go over to the door to know what it says on the nameplate. I know who the man is that we've been following, as surely as if he had shown me his credentials. If I had been alone, I would have strolled home and thought things over along the way.

But today there are two of us. For the first time in a long time we are two.

One moment he's standing at my side, and the next he's over by the door, sticking his hand in before it closes.

I follow him. When you're playing ball or some other game, sometimes there is a moment like this of spontaneous, wordless, mutual understanding.

We enter an archway with a vaulted ceiling of white and gold bronze, marble panels, soft yellow light, and a door with glass panes and a brass handle. The archway leads into a garden courtyard with evergreen shrubbery, little Japanese ginkgo trees, and a fountain. Everything is covered with the snow of the last two weeks, which once started to melt but now has a thin, frozen crust on the surface. From somewhere up above, the first light of day drifts downward, like dust.

An electric cord is lying inside the stairwell. It goes around a corner. From there comes the sound of a vacuum cleaner. In front of us is a janitor's cart, with two buckets, mops, scrub brushes,
and a couple of roller contraptions for wringing out wet rags. The mechanic grabs the cart.

There are footsteps above us. Light steps, muted by the blue runner held down by brass rods the width of the stairs. There's a pleasant scent surrounding us. A scent I recognize but can't identify.

We reach the third floor the moment the door shuts behind him. The mechanic carries the cart under his arm as if it were nothing.

The gilding and the cream-colored inlay from the doorway are repeated in the stairwell and on the doors. There are engraved brass nameplates. The plate in front of us is placed above an extra-wide mail slot. So that even the largest checks can get through. LAW OFFICE, it says. Of course. Law Office of Hammer & Ving. The door isn't locked, so we go in. The cart comes along.

We enter a large foyer. One door is open, leading to a series of offices that are extensions of one another, like the reception rooms in the photographs of Amalienborg Palace. And there are photographs of the Queen and the Prince, and shiny parquet floors, and paintings in gilt frames, and the most elegant office furniture I've ever seen. There is the same scent as in the stairwell, and now I recognize it. It's the scent of money.

Not a soul is around. I pick up a rag and wring it out, and the mechanic picks up a big mop.

At the end of the offices there is a closed double door. I knock on it. He must have a control panel near him, because when the door opens, he's sitting at the opposite end of the room, in an office with a window facing the courtyard.

He's sitting behind a black mahogany desk which stands on four lion's feet and is so big that you can't help wondering how they managed to get it up here. On the wall behind him hang three gloomy paintings of the Marble Bridge in heavy frames.

It's difficult to judge his age. From Elsa LÃ¼bing I know that he must be over seventy. But he looks healthy and athletic, as if every morning he walks barefoot across his beachfront and down to the sea, where he saws a hole in the ice and takes a refreshing dip, then runs back and eats a little bowl of gladiator muesli with skim milk.

It has kept his skin smooth and ruddy. But it hasn't been beneficial for hair growth. He's as bald as a peeled egg.

He's wearing glasses with gold frames that give off so many reflections that you never really get to see his eyes.

“Good morning,” I say. “Quality control. We're checking on the morning cleaning.”

He doesn't say anything, merely looks at us. As clearly as if he had spoken, I remember his voiceâdry and properâfrom a telephone conversation a long time ago.

The mechanic withdraws to a corner and starts mopping. I take the windowsill closest to the desk.

He looks down at his papers. I wipe the sill with the rag. It leaves striped traces of dirty water.

Soon he'll start to wonder.

“There's nothing like having a proper cleaning done,” I say.

He frowns, now mildly annoyed.

Next to the window hangs a picture of a sailing ship. I take it down and wipe the back of it with the rag.

“What a nice picture this is,” I say. “I'm rather interested in ships myself. When I get home after a long work day among rubber gloves and disinfectants, I put my feet up and leaf through a good book about ships.”

Now he's wondering whether I'm deranged.

“We all have our favorites, of course. Mine are the ships that sailed to Greenland. And, as chance will have it, when I saw your name on the fancy nameplate, I said to myself, My God, Smilla, I said. Ving! That nice man who once gave one of your friends a model ship for Christmas. The good ship
Johannes Thomsen
. To a little Greenlandic boy.”

I hang up the picture again. The water wasn't good for it. All cleaning has its price. I think about Juliane, on her knees before him, in the doorway.

“The other thing I never get tired of reading about is ships chartered for expeditions to Greenland.”

He's sitting perfectly still now. Only in the reflections of his glasses is there a faint movement.

“For example, the two ships that were chartered in '66 and '91. For the expeditions to Gela Alta.”

I go over to the cart and wring out the rag.

“I hope you'll be satisfied now,” I say. “We have to move on. Duty calls.”

On our way out we can look back through the long series of rooms all the way into his office. He's sitting behind the desk. He hasn't moved.

A middle-aged woman in a white smock is standing at the bottom of the stairs. She's standing there patting her vacuum cleaner, her expression sorrowful. As if she's been discussing how the two of them are going to manage in the big world without that janitor's cart.

The mechanic puts it down in front of her. He's not very happy about taking someone else's equipment. He wants to say a few words. From one working person to another. But he can't think of anything to say.

“We're from the firm,” I say. “We've been checking your work. We are very, very satisfied.”

I find one of Moritz's spanking new 100-krone bills in my pocket and balance it on the edge of the bucket.

“Please accept this bonus. On such a fine morning. To buy a piece of pastry for your coffee.”

She looks at me with melancholy eyes.

“I'm the proprietor,” she says. “There's only me and four employees.”

BOOK: Smilla's Sense of Snow

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