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

"With this place they've won out over the sea, man. Now it doesn't matter how far it is to the bottom or what the weather's like. They can put down a harbor anywhere. In the middle of the ocean."

I'm no teacher or Boy Scout leader. I'm not interested in setting him straight.

"Why do they need to be able to take it apart, Smilla?"

Maybe it's nervousness that makes me answer him, after all. "They built it when they started bringing oil up from the sea floor off North Greenland. It took ten years from the time they discovered oil until they could extract it. Their problem was the ice. First they built a prototype of what was supposed to be the world's largest and most solid drilling platform, the Joint Venture Warrior, a prodiirt of glasnost and Home Rule, a cooperative venture between the United States, the Soviet Union, and Denmark's largest shipping company A. P. Moller. You've sailed past drilling platforms. You know how big they are. You can see them fifty sea miles away, and they get bigger and bigger, like an entire universe floating on!xosts. They've got bars and restaurants and offices and workshops and movie theaters and fire stations, the whole thing mounted forty feet above the surface of the ocean so even the worst storm waves will pass underneath it. Just think about the way they look. The Joint Venture Warrior was supposed to be four times as big. The prototype was sixty feet above the water surface. It was supposed to provide jobs for 1,400 people. They constructed the prototype in Baffin Bay. After it was erected, an iceberg came along. They had expected that. But this iceberg was a little bigger than usual. It was calved somewhere on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. It was 325 feet tall and flat on top, the way icebergs are when they're that high. It had 1,300 feet of ice below the surface, and it weighed about 20 million tons. When they saw it coming, they did get a little nervous. But they had two big icebreakers on hand. They fastened them to the iceberg to pull it onto a different course. There was hardly any current and no wind. Still, nothing happened when they started up the engines. Except that the iceberg continued straight ahead, as if it didn't notice anything was tugging at it. And the iceberg rolled right over the prototype; there were no traces of the proud model for the Joint Venture Warrior left behind in the water except for some patches of oil and pieces of debris. Since then, they've made all Arctic Ocean equipment so that it can be dismantled in twelve hours. That's how much warning the Ice Center can give them. They drill from floating platforms that can be cut loose. This magnificent harbor is nothing more than a tin tray. When the ice came by, it would carry the platform off as though it had never been here. They only put it up during mild winters when the field ice doesn't reach this far north or the pack ice this far south. They haven't conquered the ice, Jakkelsen. The battle hasn't even begun yet."

He puts out his cigarette. He has his back to me. I can't tell whether he's disappointed or indifferent.

"How do you know all this, Smilla?"

When they were still deliberating whether to put the Joint Venture Warrior on the ice, I was working a sixmonth stint at the American cold-water laboratory on Pylot Island, conducting experiments to measure the elasticity of sea ice. I was part of an enthusiastic team of five. We knew each other from the first two ICC conferences. When we had parties and got drunk, we would give speeches about the fact that this was the first time five glaciologists of Inuit origin were gathered. We told each other that we represented the highest concentration of expertise anywhere in the world. We gleaned our most important data from plastic washbasins. We would pour salt water into the basins, put them in a laboratory freezer, and freeze the water to ice of a standard thickness. Then we took these sheets outdoors, placed them between two tabletops, loaded them down with weights, and measured how much they sagged before they broke. We made little electric motors vibrate the weights and proved that the vibrations from the drills wouldn't affect the structure or elasticity of the ice. We were full of the pride and enthusiasm of scientific pioneers. It wasn't until we were writing the final report, in which we recommended that A. P. Moller, Shell, and Gospetrol begin exploiting the Greenland oil reserves from platforms built on the ice, that we realized what we were doing. By then it was too late. A Soviet company had designed the Joint Venture Warrior and won the contract. All five of us were fired. Five months later the prototype was pulverized. Since then they haven't tried anything more permanent than floating platforms.

I could tell Jakkelsen all this, but I don't.

"Tonight I'm going to fix everything for us," he says.

"That will be wonderful."

"You don't believe me, man, but just wait and see. The whole thing is crystal-clear to me. They've never been able to fool me. I know this ship. I've got it all worked out."

When he steps into the light from the bridge, I see that he's not wearing any outdoor clothes. He's been standing here in 14°F weather, conversing with me as if we were indoors.

"Get your beauty sleep tonight, Smilla, and tomorrow everything will be different."

"The prison kitchen provided einzigartige opportunities for baking sourdough."

Urs is leaning over a rectangular shape wrapped in a white dish towel.

"Die vielen Faktoren, the many factors. The sour-dough starter, the yeast, and finally the bread dough. How long should it rise, and at what temperature? What types of flour? How hot an oven?"

He unwraps the bread. It has a dark brown, shiny, glazed crust broken in places by whole grains of wheat. An overwhelming aroma of grain, flour, and pungent freshness. Under different circumstances it might have made me happy. But something else interests me. A time factor. Every event on a ship has its first portent in the galley.

"Why are you baking now, Urs? It's ungewohnlich, unusual."

"The problem is the balance between the Säuerlichkeit and the rising power."

Ever since he discovered me in the dumbwaiter and we stopped talking to each other, I've thought there was something rather doughlike about him. Something elastic, unspoiled, simple, and yet sophisticated. And at the same time, much too soft.

"Are you serving an extra meal?" He tries to ignore me.

"You'll end up in the slammer," I say. "Right back in jail. Here in Greenland. And there won't be any kitchen work. No time off for good behavior. They don't make much of a fuss about meals here. When we meet up again, in three or four years, we'll see whether you've retained your good humor. Even if you've lost sixty-five pounds."

He slumps like a deflated souffle. He couldn't possibly know that there aren't any prisons in Greenland.

"At eleven o'clock. For one person."

"Urs, what were you sentenced for?" He gives me a stony look.

"It only takes one call. To Interpol." He doesn't reply.

"I called them before we sailed," I tell him. "When I saw the crew list. It was heroin."

Beads of sweat form on the narrow edge between his mustache and his upper lip.

"It wasn't from Morocco. Where was it from?"

"Why are you hounding me?"

"Where was it from?"

"The airport in Geneva. The lake is so close. I was in the military. We unloaded the crates along with the food supplies, via the river."

When he starts to talk, I understand a little about the art of interrogation for the first time in my life. Fear alone isn't what makes him talk. It's just as much a longing for contact, the burden of a guilty conscience, and the loneliness of the sea.

"Crates full of antiques?" He nods. "From the Far East. On the plane from Kyoto."

"Who brought them out? Who was the shipping agent?"