Peter Høeg - Smilla's Sense of Snow aka Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

"He's disappeared," I say. "I tried to call him. Some stranger answered the phone. Maybe he's in jail."

One minute before the ship appears, I can sense its presence. The pull of the hull against the anchor chains, the slow shifting of the entire vast, floating hulk.

"Forget about him, honey. That's what the rest of us have had to do."

On the port side there is a short floating platform at the bottom of a steep ladder beneath a single yellow light. He doesn't turn off the motor but steadies the boat by holding on to an iron girder.

"You can go back with me, Smilla."

There's something touching about him, as if he hadn't realized until now that we stopped playing games a long time ago.

"The thing is," I say, "that I don't have anything in particular to go back to."

I sling the box onto the platform myself. When I step up onto it and turn around, he stands there for a moment, gazing at me, a small figure, rising and sinking, the big rubber boat lending him a dancing movement. Then he turns away and pushes off.

My cabin is 8 by 10 feet. But they've still found space for a sink and mirror, a closet, a bunk with a reading light, a shelf for books, a chair, and under the porthole a little desk with the big dog on top.

He stretches from one bulkhead all the way across to the bed and is about six feet long. His eyes are sad, his paws dark, and with every list of the ship, he tries to touch me. If he succeeds, I will instantly disintegrate. My flesh will fall off my bones, my eyes will run out of their sockets and evaporate, my intestines will force their way out through my skin and explode in clouds of methane.

He doesn't belong here. He doesn't belong in my world at all. His name is Aajumaaq and he's from East Greenland, and my mother brought him home from a visit to Ammassalik. After seeing him once down there, she realized that he must have always been present in Qaanaaq, too, and after that she saw him regularly. He never touches the ground, and here, too, he floats a little above the desk. He's here because I'm on a ship.

I've always been afraid of the sea. They never got me into a kayak, even though it was my mother's greatest wish. I have never set foot on the deck of Moritz's Swan. One of the reasons I'm fond of ice is that it covers the water and makes it solid, safe, negotiable, manageable. I know that, outside, the waves and the wind have picked up, and far forward the bow of the Kronos is pitching through the waves, splintering them, and sending loud cascades of water along the gunwale until, outside my porthole, they disperse into a whistling mist shining white in the night. On the open sea there are no landmarks, there is only an amorphous, chaotic shifting of directionless masses of water that loom up and break and roll, and their surface is, in turn; broken by subsystems that interfere and form whirlpools and appear and disappear and finally vanish without a trace. Slowly this confusion will work its way into the chambers of my inner ear and destroy my sense of orientation; it will fight its way into my cells and displace their salt concentrations and the conductivity of my nervous system as well, leaving me deaf, blind, and helpless. I'm not afraid of the sea simply because it wants to strangle me. I'm afraid of it because it will rob me of my orientation, the inner gyroscope of my life, my awareness of what is up and down, my connection to Absolute Space.

No one can grow, up in Qaanaaq without going to sea. No one can live as I have, as a professional student and expedition outfitter and guide in North Greenland, without being forced to go to sea. I've been on more ships and for much longer periods of time than I care to remember. If I'm not actually standing on a deck, I've usually managed to repress it.

The process of disintegration started the moment I came on board several hours ago. There's a boiling in my ears, a strange, internal displacement of fluids. I can no longer discern the points of the compass with certainty. Aajumaaq sits on my desk waiting to catch me off guard.

He waits right inside the doorway leading to sleep, and every time I hear my own breath grow deeper and know that now I'm asleep, I don't slip into that peaceful obliteration of reality that I need. Instead, I fall into a dangerous new clarity beside that guiding spirit, the floating dog with three claws on each paw, amplified by my mother's imagination; ever since I was a child, he has been grafted into my nightmares.

It's been about an hour since the engines started up, and from a great distance I sensed rather than heard the play of the anchor and the clattering of the chain, and I'm too tired to stay awake and too tense to sleep, and in the end I just wish for some kind of diversion.

It comes with the opening of my door. There's no knock, no warning footsteps. He tiptoes up to the door, jerks it open, and sticks his head inside.

"The captain wants to see you on the bridge."

He stands in the doorway, trying to make it difficult for me to get out of bed and put on my clothes, trying to make me expose myself. With the quilt around my shoulders I slide down to the foot of the bunk and give the door a kick so that he just manages to pull back his head in time.

Jakkelsen. His name is Jakkelsen. He might have a first name, too, but on the Kronos only surnames are used.

I stand there in the rain until the rubber boat with Lander's silhouette disappears. Since there's no one in sight, I try to lift my box by myself, but have to forget about getting it up the ladder. I leave it behind and climb into the darkness beyond the single light.

The steps end at an open cargo door. Inside, a dim bulb illuminates a green corridor on a level with the second deck. Sheltered from the rain, with his feet up on a cable end box, a boy sits smoking a cigarette.

He's wearing black steel-toed shoes, blue work pants, and a blue wool sweater, and he's too young and much too gaunt to be a sailor.

"I've been waiting for you. Jakkelsen. We use last names here. Captain's orders."

He scrutinizes me. "Stick with me, because I can do things for you, know what I mean?"

He has a dusting of freckles across his nose, his hair is red and curly. Above the cigarette his eyes are half-closed, lazy, inquisitive, insolent. He could be seventeen.

"You can start by getting my baggage."

He gets up reluctantly, letting his cigarette fall to the deck, where it continues to glow.

He barely manages to get up the ladder with the box. He puts it down on the deck. "I have a bad back, know what I mean?"

He walks on ahead, sauntering, with his hands behind his back. I follow with the box. A deep, continuous vibration of giant engines passes through the hull, like a reminder that departure is imminent.

A stairway brings us to the level of the upper decks. Here the smell of diesel fuel dissipates, the air tastes of rain and cold. One corridor has a white wall on the right, a long row of doors on the left. One of them is mine.

Jakkelsen opens it, steps aside so I can enter, follows me in, closes the door, and stands in front of it.

I shove the box aside and sit down on the bed. "Jaspersen. According to the crew list, your name is Jaspersen."

I open the closet.

"How about a quick fuck?"

I wonder whether I've heard right. "Women are crazy about me."

A certain eagerness and excitement has come over him. I stand up. It's important to avoid being caught by surprise.

"That's a good idea," I say. "But let's wait until your birthday. Your fiftieth birthday."

He looks disappointed. "By then you'll be ninety. So I won't be interested."

He gives me a wink and goes out the door. "I know the sea, remember. Stick with me, Jaspersen."

Then he shuts the door.