Smilla's Sense of Snow (42 page)

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.