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

This experience of the mortality and continuity of all things always made me happy.

I feel somewhat the same way now. I've taken off my clothes and am standing in front of the mirror.

Anyone interested in death would benefit from looking at me. I've taken off my bandages. There's no skin on my kneecaps. Between my hips there is a wide yellowish-blue patch of blood that has coagulated under the skin where Jakkelsen's marline spike struck me. The palms of both hands have suppurating lesions that refuse to close. At the base of my skull I have a bruise like a gull's egg, and a spot where the skin is broken and contracted. I've been modest enough to keep on my white socks so you can't see my swollen ankle; and I won't even mention all the black-and-blue marks, or my scalp, which still throbs now and then from the burn.

I've lost weight, going from gaunt to emaciated. Lack of sleep has made my eyes sink into their sockets. And yet I smile at the stranger in the mirror. There's no simple arithmetic for life's distribution of happiness and sorrow, no such thing as a standard share. One of the few people who make life worth living is on board the Kronos.

He calls me at exactly five o'clock. This is the first time I feel affection for the intercom system.

"S-Smilla, meet you in the sick bay in fifteen minutes."

He feels the same way about telephones as I do. He barely manages to state his message before he's gone. "Føjl," I say. His name tastes sweet in my mouth. "Thanks for yesterday."

The system clicks off, the light goes out.

I put on blue work clothes. It's not a haphazard decision. T'here's nothing haphazard about the clothes I choose to wear. I could dress up, of course. Even here I could dress tip. But the blue clothes are the uniform of the Kronos, symbolizing the fact that we are now meeting under different circumstances, that the world is against us more than ever before.

I listen at the door for a long time before I venture out into the, corridor.

I can't imagine that anything like the Christian image of hell actually exists. But lately I've been wondering about the ancient Greenlandic realm of the dead. If you consider all the unpleasantness you encounter while you're alive, it seems improbable that it would all come to an end simply because you're dead.

If there are clandestine meetings between lovers in the realm of the dead, the prelude would be something like this. I move from doorway to doorway. I no longer see the Kronos as merely a ship, but rather as a field of dangers. I try to figure out in advance whether a specific danger might solidify into something life-threatening.

When someone comes out of the exercise room, I dash into the bathroom before the door has closed behind them. From the crack in the doorway I watch Maria go past. Swift and stony-faced. I'm not the only one who knows that the Kronos is the underworld.

I meet no one on my way up the stairs. The door to the bridge is shut, the chart room empty.

In front of the sick bay I stop. I straighten my clothes. My face feels naked without makeup.

The room is dark, the curtains drawn. I close the door behind me and lean against it. I feel my lips. I want him to come out of the dark and kiss me.

A cool, delicate floral fragrance reaches me. I wait. It's not the ceiling light that someone turns on but the lamp above the examination table, a kind of operating light. It makes yellow patches of light on the black leather, leaving the rest of the room in shadow.

Tørk is sitting on a chair, with his feet propped up on the bunk. Near the wall, in semi-darkness, stands Verlaine. Katja Claussen is sitting on the end of the table with her feet dangling. There's no one else in the room.

I watch myself from a distance. Maybe because it's too painful to be inside my own body. I don't care about the three in front of me; I don't care about myself. It was the mechanic that I talked to a moment ago. He was the one who summoned me here.

We all have our limits. A certain limit to our perseverance, to how many overtures we can make in our lives. And to how many rejections we can stand.

"Empty your pockets."

Verlaine does the talking. This is my first opportunity to observe the division of labor between the two men. I can guess that Verlaine takes care of the rough stuff.

I step toward the light and put my flashlight and keys down on the bunk. I wonder what the woman is doing in the room. In the next moment I have my answer. Verlaine nods to her, and she comes over to me. The men look away as she searches me. She's much taller than I am, but still agile. She starts below my knees, feeling my ankles and then working her way up. She finds the screwdriver and Jakkelsen's hypodermic case. Then she takes my belt away from me.

Tørk does not look at what she's found. But Verlaine weighs the objects in his hand.

How will it come? Will I see it coming?

Tørk stands up. "Formally, you are under arrest." He doesn't look at me. We both know that any reference to formalities is part of the same illusion as our mutual courtesy. They are the only pretexts left.

He looks down. Then he slowly shakes his head, and something like amazement passes over his face.

"You're a spectacular bluffer," he says. "I'd much rather sit up in the crow's nest listening to your lies than walk around among all these mediocre truths."

All three of them stand there for a moment. Then they leave.

Verlaine is the one who locks the door. He stops in the doorway. He looks tired. There's something honest about his silence. It tells me that this isn't a cell and I haven't been arrested. This is the beginning of the conclusion, which will happen sometime soon.

In Sunday school they taught us that the sun was Our Lord Jesus; at boarding school we learned for the first time that the sun was supposed to be a continuously exploding hydrogen A-bomb.

For me the sun has always been the Heavenly Clown. In my first conscious memory of the sun, I have my eyes scrunched up and I'm looking right at it, fully aware that this is forbidden. I'm thinking that the sun is both menacing and full of laughter, like a clown's face when he paints himself with blood and ashes, bites down on a stick, and-alien, gruesome, and joyous-approaches us children.

Now, just before the orb of the sun reaches the horizon, where it momentarily evades the black cloud cover, casting fiery light across the ice and the ship, the clown's strategy becomes manifest-to evade the darkness by clucking as low as possible. The lethal striking force of humiliation.

The Kronos is on its way into the ice. I can see it in the distance, veiled by half-inch-thick safety glass fogged up by the salt crystallized on the outside. That doesn't make any difference. I can feel the ice as if I were standing on it.

It's dense field ice, and at first everything is gray. The narrow channel broken by the Kronos is like a gutter of ashes. The ice floes-most of them as long as the shipare like huge pieces of rock, slightly swollen and cracked by the cold. It's a world of absolute lifelessness.

Then the sun drops beneath the cloud cover, like ignited gasoline.

The ice cover was formed last year in the Arctic Ocean. From there it was forced out between Svalbard and the east coast of Greenland, carried down around Cape Farewell, and pushed up along the west coast.

It was created in beauty. One October day the temperature drops 50 degrees in four hours, and the sea is as motionless as a mirror. It's waiting to reflect a wonder of creation. The clouds and the sea glide together in a curtain of heavy gray silk. The water grows viscous and tinged with pink, like a liqueur of wild berries. A blue fog of frost smoke detaches itself from the surface of the water and drifts across the mirror. Then the water solidifies. Up out of the dark sea the cold now pulls a rose garden, a white blanket of ice blossoms formed from salt and frozen drops of water. They may last for four hours or two days.