I make no comment. But I file it in the black book under his name.
“Each time on these expeditions you have served as navigator. Each time they have made use of confidential map material, satellite and radar photos, and meteorological observations supplied by the military. Nine times in the course of the last twelve years you have signed a declaration of secrecy and confidentiality. All of which we have copies of.”
I’m beginning to have an idea where he’s heading, what the main point is.
“In a little country like ours, you are a sensitive issue, Miss Jaspersen. You have seen and heard a lot. Which automatically happens when you’re allowed into North Greenland. But you have a past and a character which would have ensured that you would not have been permitted to see or hear anything if you had found yourself in any other place inside Danish territory.”
The circulation is starting to return to my feet.
“Anyone with even a smidgen of common sense would keep a very low profile in your position.”
“Is it my clothes you don’t like?”
“What we don’t like is your fruitless or outright damaging attempts to meddle in the investigation of the case, which I already promised you I would look into.”
Of course this is the direction we’ve been heading all along.
“Yes,” I say, “I remember what you promised me. Back when you were still working for the district attorney of Copenhagen.”
“Miss Smilla,” he says quite gently, “we can throw you in the slammer at any time. Do you understand me? We can give you solitary confinement, an isolation tank whenever we feel like it. No judge would hesitate, after he saw your dossier.”
From the start, this meeting has been about authenticity. He wanted to show me what he’s capable of. That he can obtain information that I sent to Greenland’s government and to the military. That he can follow my movements. That he has access to any archives. And that at any time he can summon an intelligence officer at six o’clock in the evening at Christmastime. And he has done all this so I won’t have a shadow of a doubt that he can lock me up at any moment.
He has succeeded. Now I know what he can do. That he will have his way. Because underneath his threat lies a deeper layer of knowledge. Which he now drags into the light.
“Imprisonment,” he says slowly, “in a little soundproof room with no windows is, I’ve been told, particularly uncomfortable when you’ve grown up in Greenland.”
There is no sadism in him. Merely a precise and perhaps faintly melancholy understanding of the instruments at his disposal.
There are no prisons in Greenland. The greatest difference in the administration of the law in Copenhagen and in Nuuk is that in Greenland the punishment is more often a fine for offenses which in Denmark would have resulted in imprisonment. The Greenlandic hell is not the European rocky landscape with pools of sulfur. The Greenlandic hell is the locked room. In my memories of my childhood it seemed as though we were never indoors. Living in the same place for a long time was unthinkable for my mother. I feel the same way about my spatial freedom as I’ve noticed men feel about their testicles. I cradle it like a baby, and worship it like a goddess.
I’ve reached the end of the road in my investigation of Isaiah’s death.
We stand up. We haven’t touched our cups. The tea has grown cold.
PART TWO
The City
1
You can try to cover up depression in various ways. You can listen to Bach’s compositions for the organ in Our Saviour’s Church. You can arrange a line of good cheer in powder form on a pocket mirror with a razor blade and ingest it with a straw. You can call for help. For instance, by telephone, so that you know who’s listening.
That’s the European method. Hoping to work your way out of problems through action.
I take the Greenlandic way. It consists of submerging yourself in the dark mood. Putting your defeat under a microscope and dwelling on the sight.
When things are really bad—like now—I picture a black tunnel in front of me. I go up to it. I strip off my nice clothes, my underwear, my hard hat, my Danish passport, and then I walk into the dark.
I know that a train is coming. A lead-lined steam locomotive transporting strontium 90. I go to meet it.
It’s possible for me to do this because I’m thirty-seven years old. I know that inside the tunnel, underneath the wheels, down between the ties, there is a little spot of light.
It’s the morning of Christmas Eve. For several days I’ve been gradually withdrawing from the world. Now I’m preparing for the final descent. Which has to come. Because I have allowed myself to be cowed by Ravn. Because I am failing Isaiah. Because I can’t get my father out of my thoughts. Because I don’t know what I’m going to say to the mechanic. Because it feels as if I’m never going to get any smarter.
I’ve prepared myself by not eating breakfast. That expedites the confrontation. I’ve locked the door. I sit down in the big chair. And invoke the bad mood: Here sits Smilla. Starving. In debt. The morning of Christmas Eve. While other people have their families, their sweethearts, their canaries. While other people have each other.
It proves effective. I’m already standing in front of the tunnel. Aging. A failure. Abandoned.
The doorbell rings. It’s the mechanic. I can tell by the way he rings the bell. Cautiously, tentatively, as if the bell were screwed right into the skull of an old woman that he doesn’t want to disturb. I haven’t seen him since the funeral. Haven’t wanted to think about him.
I go out and disconnect the bell. I sit down again.
Internally I begin to evoke the images from the second time I ran away and Moritz came to get me in Thule. We were standing on the uncovered cement platform that you walk on for the last twenty yards out to the plane. My aunt was whimpering. I took as many deep breaths as I could. I thought this might be a way to take the clear, dry, somehow sweet air back to Denmark with me.
Someone is knocking on my back door. It’s Juliane. She gets down on her knees and calls through the mail slot. “Smilla, I’m making fish balls!”
“Leave me alone.”
She’s offended. “I’ll pour the batter through your mail slot.”
Right before we climbed the stairs into the plane, my aunt gave me a pair of kamiks to wear indoors. The beadwork alone had taken her a month.
The phone rings.
“There’s something I would like to talk to you about.” It’s Elsa Lübing’s voice.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Tell it to somebody else. Cast not thy pearls before swine.”
I pull out the phone jack. I’m starting to feel rather attracted to the thought of Ravn’s isolation cell. This is the kind of day when you wouldn’t be surprised if someone started knocking on your windows. On the fifth floor.
Someone knocks on my window. Outside stands a green man. I open the window.
“I’m the window washer. I just wanted to warn you, so you don’t go and take off your clothes.”
He gives me a big smile. As if he were washing the windows by putting one pane at a time into his mouth.
“What the hell do you mean? Are you implying that you don’t want to see me nude?”
His smile fades. He pushes a button, and the platform he’s standing on takes him out of reach.
“I don’t want my windows washed,” I shout after him. “At my age I can barely see out of them, anyway.”
During my first years in Denmark I didn’t speak to Moritz. We ate dinner together. He had demanded that. Without uttering a word we would sit there rigidly, while successive housekeepers served successive dishes. Mrs. Mikkelsen, Dagny, Miss Holm, Boline Hsu. Rissole, hare in cream sauce, Japanese vegetables, Hungarian spaghetti. Without exchanging a single word.
When people talk about how fast children forget, how fast they forgive, how sensitive they are, I let it go in one ear and out the other. Children can remember and forget and totally freeze out the people they don’t like.
I must have been about twelve before I understood even part of the reason why he had brought me to Denmark.
I had run away from the school in Charlottenlund. I was hitchhiking west. I had heard that if you headed west you would come to Jutland. Frederikshavn was in Jutland. From there you could go to Oslo. From Oslo freighters regularly departed for Nuuk.
Near Sorø, late in the afternoon, I got a lift from a forest ranger. He drove me to his home, gave me milk and sandwiches, and told me to wait a minute. While he was calling the police, I stood with my ear to the door.
Outside the garage I found his son’s motorbike. I set out across the fields. The ranger chased after me, but his slippers got stuck in the mud.
It was wintertime. On a curve near a lake, I skidded and crashed and tore my jacket and scraped my hand. From there I walked for a large part of the night. I sat down to sleep in a shelter near a bus stop. When I woke up, I was sitting on a kitchen table, and a woman was disinfecting the scrapes on my ribs with rubbing alcohol. It felt as if I’d been knocked down by a pile driver.
At the hospital they picked the asphalt out of the wound and put a cast on my broken wrist bones. Then Moritz arrived to pick me up.
He was very angry. He was shaking as we walked side by side down the hospital corridor.
He was holding on to my arm. When he let go to take out his car keys, I took off. I was on my way to Oslo. But I wasn’t in the best shape, and he has always been quick. Golf players jog in order to last the course, which is often two times sixteen miles if they play seventy-two holes in two days. He caught up with me in a flash.
I had a surprise for him. A surgical scalpel from the emergency room that I had hidden in my hood. They slice through flesh like butter that’s been sitting in the sun. But because my right hand was in a cast, I only managed to give him a gash across the palm of one hand.
He looked at his hand, and then he raised it to hit me. But I had slipped back a bit, so we circled around each other there in the parking lot. If physical violence has haunted a human relationship for a long time, it’s sometimes a relief to get it out in the open.
Suddenly he straightened up.
“You’re just like your mother,” he said. And then he started to cry.
In that moment I caught a glimpse of his soul. When my mother disappeared, she must have taken part of Moritz with her. Or even worse: part of his physical world must have drowned along with her. There in the parking lot, early on that winter morning, as we stood and stared at each other, while his blood dripped and burned a little red tunnel through the snow, I remembered something about him. I remembered him in Greenland before my mother’s death. I remembered that in the midst of his lurking, unpredictable mood swings there had been a gaiety expressing a joy in life, maybe even a kind of warmth. My mother had taken that part of his world with her. She had vanished with all the colors. Since then he had been imprisoned in a world that was only black and white.
He had brought me to Denmark because I was the only thing that could remind him of what he had lost. People in love worship a photograph. They fall on their knees before a scarf. They make a journey to look at the wall of a building. Whatever can ignite the coals that both warm and sear them.
With Moritz it was much worse. He was hopelessly in love with someone whose molecules had been sucked out into the vast emptiness. His love had given up hope. But it had latched on to memory. I was that memory. With great difficulty he had brought me here, and over the years he had withstood an endless number of rejections in a desert of hostility so that he could look at me and find some momentary respite observing the traits I had in common with the woman who was my mother.
We both straightened up. I threw the scalpel into the bushes. We walked back to the emergency room and got his wound bandaged.
That was the last time I tried to run away. I won’t say that I forgave him. I always disapprove of adults who are unable to deal with the pressure of love and take it out on little children. But I will say that, in some sense, I understood him.
From the chair where I’m sitting I can see the mail slot. It’s the last entrance that the world hasn’t tried to force its way through. Now a long strip of gray cardboard is pushed through it. There’s writing on it. I let it lie there for a while. But it’s hard to ignore a message that’s almost a yard long.
“Anything is better than suicide,” it says. That’s what it’s supposed to say, anyway. He has managed to include two or three spelling mistakes in the brief text.
His door is open. I know that he never locks it. I knock and go in.
I’ve thrown a little cold water on my face. I may have even brushed my hair.
He’s sitting in the living room reading. It’s the first time I’ve seen him wearing glasses.
The window washer is busy outside. When he catches sight of me, he decides to move on to the floor below.
The mechanic still has a bandage on his ear. But it looks as if it’s healing. He has dark circles under his eyes, but he is freshly shaven.
“There was another expedition.” He taps the papers in front of him. “Here’s the map.”
I sit down next to him. He smells of shampoo and garlic. “Somebody wrote on the map.”
For the first time I take a closer look at the detail map of the glacier. It’s a photocopy. Someone has written in the margin with pencil. The copying has made the note clearer. It’s a mixture of English and Danish. “Revised according to the Carlsberg Foundation expedition, 1966.”
He looks at me expectantly. “So I think to m–myself that there must have been a second expedition. And for a moment I consider going back to the archives.”
“Without a key?”
“I’ve got some tools.”
No reason to doubt that. He has tools that could open the basement of the National Bank.
“Then I get the idea of calling Carlsberg. It turns out to be d-difficult. They transfer me. I end up having to talk to the Carlsberg Foundation. They inform me that they funded an expedition in 1966. But nobody from those days is still there. And they didn’t have the report. But they did have something else.”
It’s his trump card.
“They had the account books and the list of expedition participants and colleagues to whom they paid a salary. Do you know where I said I was c-calling from? The tax authorities. They gave me the names at once. And you know what? There was an old friend.”
He puts a piece of paper in front of me. There is a list of printed names, two of which I recognize. He points at one of them.
“Odd name, isn’t it? After you’ve heard it once, you remember it. He was on both expeditions.”
“Andreas Fine Licht,” it says. “600 CYD 9/12.”
“What’s CYD?”
“Cape York dollars. The Cryolite Corporation’s own currency in Greenland.”
“I called the office of the National Registry. They needed to get the names and social security numbers and the last known address of everybody. I had to call the foundation back. But then I found them. There are ten names, right? Three of them were Greenlanders. Of the seven others, only two are still alive. N-nineteen sixty-six is starting to seem like a long time ago. One of them is Licht. The other one is a woman. Carlsberg said they had paid her for translating something. They didn’t know what. Her name is Benedicte Clahn.”
“There’s one more,” I say.
He looks at me, puzzled.
I put the medical report in front of him and point to the signature. He slowly spells it out. “Loyen.” Then he nods. “He was there in ’66, too.”
He makes us dinner.
On principle, when people feel comfortable in a home, they end up in the kitchen. In Qaanaaq we lived in the kitchen. Here I settle for standing in the doorway. The kitchen is spacious enough, but he fills it up all by himself.
There are some women who can make soufflés. Who just happen to have a recipe for mocha parfait stuffed into their sports bra. Who can stack up
their own wedding cakes with one hand and produce pepper steak Nossi Bé with the other.
That ought to make all of us happy. As long as it doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to have a guilty conscience because we’re still not on a first-name basis with our toasters.
He has a mountain of fish and a mountain of vegetables. Salmon, mackerel, cod, various types of flounder. Tails, heads, fins. Two big crabs. And carrots, onions, leeks, parsnips, fennel, and Jerusalem artichokes.
He cleans and boils the vegetables.
I tell him about Ravn and Captain Telling.
He puts on some rice. With cardamom and star aniseed.
I tell him about the confidentiality clauses I’ve signed. About the reports Ravn had.
He strains off the vegetable water and gets ready to cook the fish.
I tell him about the threats. That they can arrest me whenever they like.
He puts in the pieces of fish gradually. I remember this from Greenland. From the days when we took time to cook our food. Different kinds of fish have different cooking times. Cod is done right away. Mackerel a little later, and salmon even later.
“I’m afraid of being locked up,” I say.
He puts the crabs in last. He lets them boil for no more than five minutes.
In a way, I’m relieved that he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t yell at me. He’s the only other person who knows how much we know. How much we will now have to forget.
It seems necessary to explain my claustrophobia to him.
“Do you know what the foundation of mathematics is?” I ask. “The foundation of mathematics is numbers. If anyone asked me what makes me truly happy, I would say: numbers. Snow and ice and numbers. And do you know why?”
He splits the claws with a nutcracker and pulls out the meat with curved tweezers.
“Because the number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers a sense of longing, and do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing?”