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

I try to make some connection between what he's telling me and what I've seen.

He stubs out his cigarette. "But there's still something that doesn't fit. The ship came from a shipyard in Hamburg. She's been in Danish waters for two weeks. Docked in Copenhagen. It's a little too late to drop off the goods five hundred sea miles out in the Atlantic, isn't it?"

I agree. It seems incomprehensible.

"I don't think what happened yesterday had to do with smuggled goods. I know this business, I'm positive it had nothing to do with goods. You know why? Because I looked inside the container. You know what was in the container? Cement. Hundreds of 100-pound sacks of Portland cement. I took a look inside one night. There was a padlock on it. But the keys to the cargo area are always kept on the bridge. In case the tonnage should shift. So when I was on watch, I borrowed them. I was psyched, man. I opened the top. Nothing but cement. I tell myself it must be a joke. There must be something underneath. So I go all the way back to the galley and get a barbecue skewer. I'm about to shit in my pants at the thought of Verlaine catching me. I spend two hours in that container. Moving the sacks around and sticking the skewer into them, trying to find something. My back's killing me. My hands are all scraped up. Cement dust is the worst. But I don't find a thing. I tell myself it's impossible, this whole trip. Everything is secret. Extra pay because we don't know where we're going, don't know what we're carrying. And then the only thing they take on board is a garbage container full of cement. It's too much. I can't sleep at night. I tell myself that it has to be dope."

"So you've given up."

"I think," he says slowly, "that yesterday was a test. The thing is, it's not that easy to drop a heavy cargo over the side. You want to hit the precise coordinates so you can find the goods later. You want to avoid getting it caught in the propeller. You don't want it to sway too much if there's a wind and a high sea, or you'll risk smashing it up. And you know that even small movements will change your relative speed on the coast guard's radar. It would be, preferable to stop and carefully ease the container into the water. But that won't work. They make a note of all changes in speed. You'd have the customs people on the VHF immediately. So if you really want to put something big and heavy into the water and do it discreetly and without drawing attention, you'd need to do a dry run. To test your flotation balloons and your transmitting equipment, and to give the sailors a chance to rehearse their maneuvers on deck. To set up the boom and the winch and the forward guy wire properly. That container yesterday was a test, a dummy. It was dropped at that point to see whether we were out of radar range. It was really just a preview."

"For what?"

"For the real goods, man. What we're on our way to get. Take my word for it. I know everything about the sea. This is costing them a fortune. The only thing that would pay off would be dope."

At the end of the tunnel a narrow spiral stairway winds around a steel girder no thicker than the base of a flagpole. Jakkelsen places his hand on the white enamel. "This supports the forward mast."

I think about the loading boom and winch. They're both marked for a maximum weight of forty-five tons. "It's so skinny."

"Vertical pressure. The weight on the mast produces a pressure downward. There's no lateral pressure of any significance."

I count fifty-six steps, and estimate that we've ascended to a height comparable to a three-story house. My injured foot just manages to make it.

We come to a landing on the stairs against a bulkhead. There's a circular hatch on the bulkhead, five feet across. There are two compression wheels on it, making it look like the entrance to a bank vault in a cartoon. The hatch doesn't fit in with its surroundings. The Kronos looks as if it was built about the same time as the Lauritzen Shipping Company's Kista Dan, which was my first encounter with a big diesel ship as a child-an overwhelming experience. That was in the early sixties. This hatch looks as if it was made the day before yesterday.

It's loosely closed. Jakkelsen turns both wheels a half revolution and pulls. It must be heavy, but it moves outward without resistance. Inside a heavy, three-ply, black rubber flange acts as a seal.

Behind the door is a platform jutting out over dark nothingness. Somewhere next to the door Jakkelsen finds a big battery lantern. I take it from him and turn it on.

From the sound-the distant echo from the walls far away-I already had a sense of the room's size. Now the beam of light strikes the bottom, which seems dizzyingly far below us. In reality it's about thirty or forty feet down. The hatchway is about fifteen feet above us. I move the light all the way around its perimeter. It has the same kind of rubber flange. I shine the light on the bottom. It's a stainless-steel grating.

"It's lower now," he says. "When the container was in here, it was higher up."

Under the grating the. floor slopes down toward a drainage outlet.

I find a corner and move the light all the way up the wall.

The walls are of polished steel. Partway up, light falls on something jutting out. It looks like a shower head. But it's pointed straight down. A little higher up there's another one. And then another. The same on the opposite wall. A total of eighteen in the room.

I examine the wall. In the middle, at the top, and at the bottom of each wall there's a built-in grating 20 by 20 inches square.

The platform we're standing on sticks out a foot and a half into the room. On the left there's some sort of instrument panel. It has four lights, a power switch, a meter labeled OXYGEN, another labeled nix PRESSURE, a thermostat with a scale from +68°F to -76°F, and a hygrometer.

I hang the lantern back in its place. We go out, and I close the hatch. There's a white door in the wall to the left. I try Jakkelsen's key, but it won't open. That doesn't matter so much. I can guess what's behind it. A panel identical to the one inside the tank. Plus some control buttons.

We walk back, Jakkelsen in front. His energy is dissipating. He's almost burned out.

I make him wait in his cabin while I get his chess pieces for him. There's no one around. My alarm clock says it's 3:30 a.m. I feel as if I've aged.

I take a shower. When I come out of the bathroom, he's standing in the doorway. Full of energy. With a transfigured look on his thin young face.

"Smilla," he whispers, "how about a quick fuck?"

"Jakkelsen," I say, "tell me something. Was that Peder Most a junkie, too?"

I stick my head inside the dryer and bury my hands in the dish towels, still burning hot. I can feel the skin on my face and hands start to dry out at once.

If you're homeless, you're always looking for connections, similarities, little smells and colors and sensations that remind you of a place where you felt at home, where you once felt settled. The air inside a clothes dryer is desert air. I once felt at home in a desert.

We were walking across a plain at the bottom of a valley; around us stretched flat, lifeless steppes; overhead was the hot sun. As if a mercilessly curious god had pointed his microscope and laboratory light at us because we were the only living creatures in an otherwise dead world. We walked through sand dunes and across salt pans, through a yellowish-brown and ashen-gray and yet incredibly beautiful hell of heat. At the end of the day a sandstorm came up and we had to lie flat on the ground with scarves over our faces. We didn't have any water left, and one of the participants, a young man, became delirious and screamed that he was going to die of thirst. When the storm let up, a curtain of blowing sand hung between us and the sun for a moment. It shone from inside, as if it had encircled the sun, as if a great, glowing swarm of bees were about to rise up into the sky with it. I felt clear-headed and happy, for no explicable reason. The time was 11:30 at night, the burning light was the midnight sun, and the place was Schuckerdt Valley in Northeast Greenland, an Arctic desert where, during a very brief summer, the polar sun heats up the cliffs to 95°F, creating a mosquito-plagued landscape of dried-out riverbeds and a rocky surface shimmering with heat. It took two days to cross it, and ever since I've often wished I could go back. My brother was on the expedition as a hunter. That was the last time he and I took a long journey together. We felt like children, as if the time when Moritz forced me to go to Denmark had never existed, as if we had never experienced twelve years of separation. At this moment, in front of the clothes dryer, I hang on to that inexplicable memory of my youth, whose sweetness I will never again share with anyone. The bad thing about death is not that it changes the future. It's that it leaves us alone with our memories.