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

"What time of year was this?"

"Maybe July or the beginning of August."

"Beluga," I say. "A small whale. It must have been near the trading stations south of Upernavik."

"We telegraphed the trading company that they had stopped work and had gone fishing. We received the reply that this happened several times a year. That's the way it is with primitive people. When their stomachs are full, they don't see any reason to work."

I nod in agreement.

"In Greenland they say that Filipinos are a nation of lazy little pimps, who are only allowed on ships because they don't ask for more than a dollar an hour, but you have to keep on feeding them vast amounts of steamed rice if you don't want a knife in your back."

"That's true," he says.

He leans toward me so he won't have to yell. I look up toward the bridge. We're in full view where we're standing.

"This is a ship with rules. Some are the captain's. Some are Tørk's. But not all of them. They're dependent on us; we're just the rats."

He smiles at me. His teeth are glazed pieces of chalk against his dark skin. He notices what I'm looking at. "Porcelain crowns. I was in prison in Singapore. After a year and a half I didn't have a tooth left in my mouth. My jaw was held together with galvanized steel wire. Then we organized an escape."

He leans even closer to me. "That's where I found out how much I hate the police."

When he straightens up and leaves, I keep standing there, staring out at the sea. It starts to snow. But it's not snow. It's coming from the deck. I look down at myself. All the way from my collar down to the elastic at my waist, my down jacket has been cut open with a single slit. Without anything touching the lining, the padding was cut wide open so the down is tearing loose and swirling around me like snowflakes. I take off the jacket and fold it up. On my way back across the deck it occurs to me that it must be cold. But I don't feel cold.

The Welfare Council of the merchant marine sends out packages of nine videos at a time to subscribers. Sonne has arranged to show the first one on the enlarged screen in the exercise room. I sit in back. When it fades in on a sunset over a desert landscape, I slip out.

On the second deck, arranged in two rows of cupboards facing each other, tools and spare parts are stored. I take out a Phillips screwdriver. I rummage aimlessly. In a wooden crate I find several gray, lightly greased ball hearings made of solid steel, each a little bigger than a golf ball, wrapped in oily paper. I take one of them.

I walk up the stairs and onto the quarterdeck. The light from the movie shines out of the two long windows up there. I crawl on my knees over to the bulkhead underueath the window and peer inside. Only after I've located both Verlaine's shiny black hair and the outline of Jakkelsen's curls do I return to the corridor. I let myself into Jakkelsen's cabin.

Now there is only bed linen in the drawer under the bunk. But the chess game is still in its place. I put the box under my sweater. I listen at the door for a while and then go back to my own cabin. Far away, from some indeterminate direction, I can sense the sound track of the film through the metal hull.

I put the box in a drawer. It's a strange feeling to be in possession of something that would probably bring its owner anywhere from three years without parole to a death sentence, depending on the port where it was discovered.

I put on my jogging suit. I knot the steel ball into a long white bath towel that I've folded double. Then I hang it back on its hook. And I sit down to wait.

If you have to wait for a long time, you have to seize hold of the waiting or it will become destructive. If you let things slide, your consciousness will waver, awakening fear and restlessness; depression strikes, and you're pulled down.

To keep up my spirits I ask myself: What is a human being? Who am I?

Am I my name?

The year I was born my mother traveled to West Greenland and brought home the girl's name Millaaraq. Because it reminded Moritz of the Danish word mild, which didn't exist in the vocabulary of his love relationship with my mother, because he wanted to transform everything Greenlandic into something that would make it European and familiar, and because I apparently had smiled at him-the boundless trust of an infant, which comes from the fact that she still doesn't know what's in store for her-my parents agreed on Smillaaraq. With the wear and tear that time subjects all of us to, it was shortened to Smilla.

Which is merely a sound. If you look beyond the sound, you will find the body with its circulation, its movement of fluids. Its love of ice, its anger, its longing, its knowledge about space, its weakness, faithlessness and loyalty. Behind these emotions the unnamed forces rise and fade away, parceled-out and disconnected images of memory, nameless sounds. And geometry. Deep inside us is geometry. My teachers at the university asked us over and over what the reality of geometric concepts was. They asked: Where can you find a perfect circle, true symmetry, an absolute parallel when they can't be constructed in this imperfect, external world?

I never answered them, because they wouldn't have understood how self-evident my reply was, or the enormity of its consequences. Geometry exists as an innate phenomenon in our consciousness. In the external world a perfectly formed snow crystal would never exist. But in our consciousness lies the glittering and flawless knowledge of perfect ice.

If you have strength left, you can look further, beyond geometry, deep into the tunnels of light and darkness that exist within each of us, stretching back toward infinity.

There's so much you could do if you had the strength. It's two hours since the movie ended. Two hours since Jakkelsen locked his door. But there's no reason to be impatient. You can't grow up in Greenland without being familiar with abuse. It's an erroneous cliche that narcotics make people unpredictable. On the contrary, drugs make them very, very predictable. I know that Jakkelsen will come. I have the patience to wait as long as it takes. I lean forward to turn off the light so I can sit in the dark. The light switch is between the sink and the closet, so I have to lean forward.

That's the moment he chooses. He must have been standing with his ear to the door. I've underestimated Jakkelsen. He has sneaked up to my door and unlocked it, waiting for some audible movement inside-without my hearing him, even though I'm sitting right behind the door. Now he opens it so that it strikes me on the temple and knocks me to the floor between the bed and the closet. Then he's inside and has shut the door behind him. He's not going to rely on his own physical strength. He has brought along a big marline spike with a wooden handle and a hollow tip of polished steel.

"Give it here," he says. I try to sit up.

"Stay down!"

I sit up.

He shifts the marline spike in his hand so the heavy end is pointing down, and with the same motion he strikes my foot. He hits the bone of my right ankle. For a moment my body refuses to believe the extent of the pain, then a white tongue of fire shoots through my skeleton to the top of my skull, and my upper body drops back to the floor of its own accord.

"Give it here."

I can't say a word. But I put my hand in my pocket, pull out the little plastic container, and hand it to him. "All of it."

"In the drawer."

He pauses for a moment. To reach the desk he'll have to step over me.

His nervousness is more pronounced than ever, but there's something determined about him. I once heard Moritz say that you could live a long healthy life on heroin. If you could afford it. The stuff itself has an almost preservative effect. What puts junkies in their graves are the cold stairways and liver infections and the contaminated additives and AIDS and the exhausting business of getting money. But if you can afford it, you can live with your dependency. That's what Moritz said.