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

It's always been this way. I stand alone in the doorway, the others in front of me. Sometimes it's a school, sometimes a university, sometimes it's some other kind of gathering. They may not have anything in particular against me, they might be more or less indifferent, but aImost every time they look as if they'd rather not be bothered.

"Verlaine, our bosun. Hansen and Maurice. The three of them are in charge of the deck. Maria and Fernanda, ship's assistants."

In the doorway to the galley stands a tall, heavyset man with a full reddish-brown beard, wearing a white cook's outfit.

"Urs. Our cook."

The hostility is stronger in the eyes of the women than of the men. But there is also a raw directness which has managed to thwart the rule dictating the use of surnames.

There's something subdued and disciplined about all of them. With the exception of Jakkelsen. He's leaning against the wall, under the NO SMOKING sign, with a cigarette in his mouth. He has one eye closed against the smoke while the other regards me quizzically.

"That's Bernard Jakkelsen," says the first mate. He hesitates for a moment. "He also works on deck." Jakkelsen ignores him.

"Jaspersen is supposed to keep our cabins clean," he says. "There'll be plenty of work mucking out for eleven men and four officers. I seem to have a tendency to just drop things all over the floor, if you know what I mean."

My socks have slipped down around my heels because my rubber boots are too big. You can't live like a human being when your socks are drooping. Not when you're tired and scared besides. And now they're laughing, not a hearty laughter. But a feeling of dominance emanates from the gaunt figure of Jakkelsen, affecting everyone in the room.

I lose my temper. I grab hold of Jakkelsen's lower lip and pinch it hard. I pull it away from his teeth. When he takes hold of my wrist, I grab his little finger with my left hand and bend back the top joint. He drops to his knees with a whimper like a woman. I increase the pressure.

"Do you know how I'm going to clean your cabin?" I say. "I'll open the porthole. And then I'll pretend that I've opened a big closet. And then I'll put all your things inside. And then I'll wash it down with salt water."

I let him go and step aside. But he doesn't try to grab me. He stands up slowly and goes over to a framed photograph of the Kyonos in front of a flat-topped iceberg in the Antarctic. He mournfully examines his face in the glass.

"I'll get a blood blister, damn it, a blood blister." No one in the room has moved.

I straighten up and look around at them. People don't like saying "I'm sorry" in Greenlandic. I've never bothered to learn the phrase in Danish.

In my cabin I pull the desk over to the door and wedge Bugge's Greenlandic dictionary under the door handle. Then I go to bed. I have every reason to believe that tonight the dog will leave me in peace.

It's six-thirty in the morning, but they've already eaten and the mess is empty except for Verlaine. I drink a glass of juice and follow him to the storage room for work clothes. He looks me over and then hands me a pile of clothes.

Maybe it's the work clothes, maybe it's the surroundings, maybe it's the color of his skin. But for a moment I feel the urge for some contact.

"What's your native language?"

"You mean, what's your native language, sir?" he corrects me gently, using the formal form of address.

His Danish has a faint lilt to each word, the way it's spoken on the island of Fyn.

We look each other in the eyes. He has a plastic bag in his breast pocket. He takes a clump of rice out of it. He stuffs it in his mouth, chews it slowly and thoroughly, swallows, and rubs his palms together.

"Bosun," he adds. Then he turns around and leaves. There's nothing under the sun as grotesque as cold European courtesy manifested in the third and fourth worlds.

I change into work clothes in my cabin. He has given me the correct size. As much as work clothes can ever be the right size. I try putting a belt around the smock. Now I no longer look like a mailbag. Now I look like an hourglass five feet two inches tall. I put a silk scarf over my hair. I have to clean, and I don't want to get dust in the fine down that is starting to cover my bald spot. I take out a vacuum cleaner. I put it down in the corridor, and then I quietly drift into the mess. Not to resume my breakfast -I couldn't get a bite down. During the night the sea outside my porthole seeped down into my stomach and joined forces with the smell of diesel fuel and with the awareness of being on the open sea, and coated my insides with tepid nausea. There are those who claim that you can fight seasickness by standing on deck in the fresh air. That may work if the boat is docked or on its way through the Falsterbo Canal, where you can go up and look at the solid land that you will soon have under your feet. When Sonne wakes me up this morning by knocking on my door to give me a key, and I get dressed and stand on deck wearing a down jacket and ski cap, and gaze out into the pitch dark of winter, and realize that now I will have to continue because I'm on the open sea and there's no way back, that's when I first feel truly sick.

In the mess the two tables have been cleared and wiped off. I stand in the doorway to the galley.

Urs is stirring a pot of boiling milk. I estimate him to be about 250 pounds. But solidly built. All Danes are pale in the winter, but his face borders on green-tinged. Covered with a light mask of sweat in the heat of the galley.

His movements are forceful and impatient. But he possesses a warmth and charisma in his role as keeper of the larder. They don't call him by his last name either.

"A superb breakfast."

I didn't touch it. But you have to start a conversation somewhere.

He gives me a smile and turns back to the milk as he shrugs his shoulders. "I am a Schweizer."

I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.

"Fruhstuck," I say in German. "Impressive. Like a first-class restaurant."

"I had such a restaurant. In Geneva. On the lake," he continues in German.

He has prepared a tray with coffee, steamed milk, juice, butter, and croissants.

"Can I take it to the bridge?"

"Nein. Breakfast isn't served. It's sent up in the dumbwaiter. But if you come back at 11:15, Fraulein, there's the officers' lunch."

"How do you like cooking on a ship?"

The question is an excuse to stay there. He has put a tray into the dumbwaiter and pushed a button labeled NAVIGATING BRIDGE. Now he's preparing the next one. This is the one that interests me. It consists of tea, toast, cheese, honey, jam, juice, and soft-boiled eggs. Three cups and three plates. On the boat deck, to which the stewardess is forbidden access, the Kronos has three passengers. He puts the tray in the dumbwaiter and presses BOAT DECK.

"Not bad. Besides, I had no choice. Eleven-fifteen, then," he says in German.

The scenario for the end of the world is firmly established. It will begin with three extremely cold winters and then the lakes, the rivers, and the seas will freeze over. The sun will cool down so it can no longer create summer, the snow will keep falling for a merciless white eternity. Then one long endless winter will arrive and, finally, the wolf Sköll will devour the sun. The moon and stars will be extinguished, and a fathomless darkness will reign. The Fimbul winter.

In school they taught us that this was the way northerners imagined the end of the world before Christianity taught them that the universe would perish in fire. I've always remembered this, not because it was any more personally relevant than so much else I learned, but because it dealt with snow. When I heard it for the first time, I thought that it was a distorted picture created by people who had no understanding of the nature of winter.