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

As he gets his shoulder underneath me, I shift the screwdriver into my right hand. As he slowly stands up, I put it to my mouth, bite down on the cork, and pull it off. He rolls me around 90 degrees to get me free of the edge. With the fingers of my left hand I find his shoulder. I can't reach his throat, but I can feel the soft, triangular hollow between his collarbone and trapezius muscle, where the nerves lie exposed beneath a thin layer of skin and tissue. That's where I jab the screwdriver. It goes through the blanket. Then it stops. The surprisingly elastic resistance and solidity of living cells. I put the palms of my hands together, and with a jerk I lift my body free so that all my weight rests on the handle of the screwdriver. It slides into place.

He doesn't utter a sound. But all movement ceases, and for a moment we stand there swaying together. I wait for him to release me; I'm already anticipating the impact with the grating in the darkness beneath me. Then he drops me onto the platform.

I hit my head on the railing. Dizziness spreads over me, increases, and then disappears. The sack and the woolen blankets protected my head enough for me to remain conscious.

Then a ram batters me in the stomach. He's kicking me.

My first impulse is to vomit. But since the pain keeps coming, I can't manage to catch my breath between each kick. I'm about to suffocate. I think that it's too bad I couldn't get any closer to his throat.

The next thing I notice is the screaming. I think it's him screaming. Someone takes me by the shoulders and I think that now I've used up all my own resources and my luck, and I just want to die in peace.

But he's not the one who's screaming. It's an electronic screech, the sine wave of an oscillator. I'm being dragged up the stairs. The small of my back thuds against every single step.

A feeling of coldness reaches me, along with the sound of rain falling. Then a hatch is opened and I'm released. Next to me an animal is coughing up its lungs.

I work the sack up over my head. I have to roll back and forth to get free of the blankets.

I emerge into a cold, pouring rain, to the electronic screech, a blinding electric light, and to the retching breathing of the creature beside me.

It's not an animal. It's Jakkelsen. Soaking wet and white as chalk. We're inside a room that I can't immediately identify. Above our heads the sprinkler system is sending wildly rotating cascades of water over us. The sound of the smoke alarm is rising and falling, monotonous and nerve-racking.

"What else could I do? I lit a cigar and put my mouth up to the sensor. Then the shit hit the fan."

I try to ask a question but can't manage a sound. He guesses what I want to ask.

"Maurice," he says. "His days as a heartthrob are over. He didn't even notice me."

Somewhere overhead there's the sound of running footsteps. They're coming down the stairs.

I'm incapable of moving. Jakkelsen gets to his feet. He has dragged me up the stairs to the next level. We must be on the between decks, under the foredeck. The exertion had made him collapse.

"I'm not in very good shape," he says. Then he runs unsteadily into the darkness.

The door flies open. Sonne steps in. It takes me a moment to identify him. He's carrying a big foam extinguisher, and he's dressed in full firefighting gear with an oxygen tank on his back. Behind him stand Maria and Fernanda.

As we gaze at each other, the alarm stops and the water pressure tapers off in the sprinkler system and finally halts altogether. Amid the trickling of drops along the walls and the murmuring of streams on the ceiling and floor, the distant sound of waves breaking against the bow of the Kronos seeps into the room.

Falling in love has been greatly overrated. Falling in love consists of 45 percent fear of not being accepted and 45 percent manic hope that this time the fear will be put to shame, and a modest 10 percent frail awareness of the possibility of love.

I don't fall in love anymore. Just like I don't get the mumps.

But of course anyone can be overpowered by love. The last few weeks I've allowed myself to think about him for a few minutes each night. I give my mind permission and then watch how my body yearns and how I still remember him from the time before I really noticed him. I see his solicitude, remember his stutter, his embraces, and the awareness of the enormous core of his personality. When these images start to radiate too much longing, I cut them off. At least I try to.

I haven't fallen in love. I see things too clearly for that. Falling in love is a form of madness. Closely related to hatred, coldness, resentment, intoxication, and suicide.

Occasionally-not often, but occasionally-I'm reminded of the times in my life when I've fallen in love. That's what's happening now.

The man they call Tørk is sitting across from me at the table in the officers' mess. If this encounter had taken place ten years ago, I might have fallen in love with him. Sometimes a person's charisma is such that it slips right through our façades, our essential prejudices and inhibitions, and goes straight to our guts. Five minutes ago a clamp locked around my heart, and now it's getting tighter. This sensation is linked to a rising fever which is my body's response to the stress it's been under, and it brings on a piercing headache.

Ten years ago this headache might have led to a strong desire to press my mouth on his and watch him lose his self-control.

Today I can observe what is happening to me, full of respect for the phenomenon, but completely aware that it's nothing more than a short-lived, lethal illusion.

The photographs had captured his charm but made it lifeless, like a statue. They couldn't reproduce his personal presence, which has two sides to it. Both an emanation out into the room and an attraction toward him.

Even when he's seated, he's quite tall. His hair is almost metallic white, pulled back into a ponytail.

He looks at me, and the heavy pounding in my foot and my back and the base of my skull grows louder. A number of the boys and men in my life who have affected me in this way pass hazily through my mind like the patches of ice formations we were expected to recognize during exams at the university.

Then I take hold of reality and pull myself back on shore. The hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end, telling me that, no matter who else he might be, he's the one who stood three feet away from me in the cold night while we both waited in front of the White Palace. The halo around his head was his extraordinary white hair.

He gazes at me attentively.

"Why on the foredeck?" says Lukas, who is sitting at the head of the table. He's talking to Verlaine, sitting diagonally across from me, slouching and amenable.

"To get warm. Before I had to go back to working on the runners."

Now I remember. Kista Dan and Maggi Dan, the Lauritzen Line ships used for trips to the Arctic-the ships of my childhood. Before the American base, before the flights from South Greenland. For extreme conditions, such as a hard freeze, they were equipped with special aluminum lifeboats that had runners screwed on underneath so they could be pulled across the ice like sleds. That's the kind of runners Verlaine had been attaching. "Jaspersen."

Lukas glances down at the paper in front of him. "You left the laundry room half an hour before your shift was over, at 1530 hours, to take a walk. You went down to the engine room, saw a door, opened it, and followed the runnel to the stairway. What in hell were you doing there?"

"Wanted to find out what was down below."

"And?"

"There was a door. With two handles. I touched one of them, and the alarm went off. I thought at first that I was the one who did it."