There are mornings when it feels as if you rise up to the surface through a mud bath. With your feet stuck in a block of cement. When you know that you've expired in the night and have nothing to be happy about except the fact that at least you've already died so they can't transplant your lifeless organs.
Six out of seven mornings are like that.
The seventh is like today. I wake up feeling crystalclear. I climb out of bed as if I had some reason to get up. I do the four yoga exercises I managed to learn before I received the eightieth reminder from the library, and they sent a messenger, and I had to pay such a big fine that I might just as well have bought the book.
I take a shower in ice-cold water. Put on leggings, a big sweater, gray boots, and a fur hat from Jane Eberlein. It's made in sort of a Greenland style.
I usually tell myself that I've lost my cultural identity for good. And after I've said this enough times, I wake up one morning, like today, with a solid sense of identity. Smilla Jaspersen-pampered Greenlander.
It's seven o'clock in the morning. I walk down to the harbor and out onto the ice.
The ice in Copenhagen Harbor is not a place where you'd recommend parents send their children out to play, even in a hard frost such as this one. Even I have to be careful when I go out there.
About forty yards out I stop. Here the surface is slightly darker. One more step and I would fall through. I stand there, bobbing up and down. Sea ice is porous and elastic, the water seeps up through it, forming around my boots two mirror surfaces that reflect the scattered lights in the darkness.
A man is standing on the dock. A black silhouette against the white walls of the buildings. Fear spreads out like a vibrating tone. The mortal danger of the seal when it's lying on the ice. So sensitive, so visible, so immobile. Then the tone dies out. It's the mechanic, stooped, rectangular, like a big rock. I haven't seen him for two days. Maybe I've been avoiding him.
You get so used to looking at the city from certain angles that from here it seems like some foreign capital never before seen. Like Venice. Or Atlantis. A city which, wrapped in snow and the night, could be made of marble. I walk back toward the dock.
He could have been someone else. I could have been someone else. We could have been young lovers. Instead of a dyslexic stutterer and a bitter shrew who tell each other half-truths and are walking together along some dubious path.
When I'm standing in front of him, he takes me by the shoulders. "That's dangerous!"
If I didn't know better, I could have sworn there was something almost pleading in his voice.
I shake off his hands.
"I have a good relationship with ice."
When we disbanded the Young Greenlanders' Council to form IA, and had to position ourselves in relation to the social democrats in SIUMUT and the reactionary Greenlandic upper class in ATASSUT, we read Karl Marx's Das Kapital. It was a book I grew quite fond of. For its trembling, feminine empathy and its potent indignation. I know of no other book with such a strong belief in how much you can accomplish if you simply have the will to change.
Unfortunately, I'm not that confident myself. I've been given a great deal, and I've wanted a lot. And I've ended up not really having anything and not really knowing what I want. I've acquiied the basics of an education. I've traveled. Occasionally I've felt that I've done what I wated to do. And yet I've been directed. Some invisible hand has had me by the scruff of the neck, and every time I thought that now I was taking an important step up toward the light, it has pushed me farther into a network of sewer pipes running beneath a landscape I cannot see. As if it had been determined that I would have to swallow a specific amount of wastewater before I would be allowed a breathing hole.
As a rule I swim against the current. But on certain mornings, like today, I have enough surplus energy to surrender. Now, as I'm walking along beside the mechanic, I am strangely, inexplicably happy.
It dawns on me that we could eat breakfast together. I can't remember how long it's been since I ate breakfast with someone. It has been my own choice. I'm sensitive in the morning. I need time to throw cold water on my face and put on my eyeliner and drink a glass of juice before I'm feeling sociable. But this morning has taken care of itself. We met, and now we're walking along side by side. I'm just about to suggest it.
Suddenly I'm floating.
He has picked me up and carried me over to the scafIoIding. I think it's a joke and am about to say something. Then I see what he sensed and keep quiet. The stairwell is dark on all floors. But a door is opening. It floods yellow light out into the darkness. And two figures Juliane and a man. He's talking to her. She staggers. Whatever he's saying falls like blows. She drops to her knees. Then the door shuts. The man takes the outdoor stairway.
Juliane's friends don't leave at seven in the morning. At that hour they haven't even come home yet. And if they do leave, they don't walk with the nimble ease of this man. They crawl.
We're standing in the shadow of the scaffolding. He can't see us. He's wearing a long Burberry raincoat and a hat.
At the end of the building facing Christianshavn the mechanic gives my arm a squeeze, and I continue on alone. The hat in front of me gets into a car. When he pulls away from the curb, the little Morris stops right next to me. The seats are cold and so low that I have to stretch to see out the windshield. It's iced over, so we drive peeking through a strip, barely able to see from the hood ornament to the red taillights in front of us.
We drive across the bridge. Turn right before Holmens Church, past the National Bank, across the King's New Square. Maybe there's other traffic, maybe we're the only ones. It's impossible to tell through the windshield.
He parks the car at Krinsen Park. We drive past and stop across from the French Embassy. He doesn't look back.
He walks past the Hotel d'Angleterre and turns down Stroget, the walking street. We're twenty-five yards behind him. Now there are other people around us. He walks up to a doorway and lets himself in with a key.
If I had been alone, I would have stopped here. I don't need to go over to the door to know what it says on the nameplate. I know who the man is that we've been following, as surely as if he had shown me his credentials. If I had been alone, I would have strolled home and thought things over along the way.
But today there are two of us. For the first time in a long time we are two.
One moment he's standing at my side, and the next he's over by the door, sticking his hand in before it closes. I follow him. When you're playing ball or some other game, sometimes there is a moment like this of spontaneous, wordless, mutual understanding.
We enter an archway with a vaulted ceiling of white and gold bronze, marble panels, soft yellow light, and a door with glass panes and a brass handle. The archway leads into a garden courtyard with evergreen shrubbery, little Japanese ginkgo trees, and a fountain. Everything is covered with the snow of the last two weeks, which once started to melt but now has a thin, frozen crust on the surface. From somewhere up above, the first light of day drifts downward, like dust.
An electric cord is lying inside the stairwell. It goes around a corner. From there comes the sound of a vacuum cleaner. In front of us is a janitor's cart, with two buckets, mops, scrub brushes, and a couple of roller contraptions for wringing out wet rags. The mechanic grabs the cart.
There are footsteps above us. Light steps, muted by the blue runner held down by brass rods the width of the stairs. There's a pleasant scent surrounding us. A scent I recognize but can't identify.
We reach the third floor the moment the door shuts behind him. The mechanic carries the cart under his arm as if it were nothing.
The gilding and the cream-colored inlay from the doorway are repeated in the stairwell and on the doors. There are engraved brass nameplates. The plate in front of us is placed above an extra-wide mail slot. So that even the largest checks can get through. LAW OFFICE, it says. Of course. Law Office of Hammer & Ving. The door isn't locked, so we go in. The cart comes along.
We enter a large foyer. One door is open, leading to a series of offices that are extensions of one another, like the reception rooms in the photographs of Amalienborg Palace. And there are photographs of the Queen and the Prince, and shiny parquet floors, and paintings in gilt frames, and the most elegant office furniture I've ever seen. There is the same scent as in the stairwell, and now I recognize it. It's the scent of money.
Not a soul is around. I pick up a rag and wring it out, and the mechanic picks up a big mop.
At the end of the offices there is a closed double door. I knock on it. He must have a control panel near him, because when the door opens, he's sitting at the opposite end of the room, in an office with a window facing the courtyard.
He's sitting behind a black mahogany desk which stands on four lion's feet and is so big that you can't help wondering how they managed to get it up here. On the wall behind him hang three gloomy paintings of the Marble Bridge in heavy frames.
It's difficult to judge his age. From Elsa Lübing I know that he must be over seventy. But he looks healthy and athletic, as if every morning he walks barefoot across his beachfront and down to the sea, where he saws a hole in the ice and takes a refreshing dip, then runs back and eats a little bowl of gladiator muesli with skim milk.
It has kept his skin smooth and ruddy. But it hasn't been beneficial for hair growth. He's as bald as a peeled egg.
He's wearing glasses with gold frames that give off so many reflections that you never really get to see his eyes. "Good morning," I say. "Quality control. We're checking on the morning cleaning."
He doesn't say anything, merely looks at us. As clearly as if he had spoken, I remember his voice-dry and proper-from a telephone conversation a long time ago.
The mechanic withdraws to a corner and starts mopping. I take the windowsill closest to the desk.
He looks down at his papers. I wipe the sill with the rag. It leaves striped traces of dirty water.
Soon he'll start to wonder.
"There's nothing like having a proper cleaning done," I say.
He frowns, now mildly annoyed.
Next to the window hangs a picture of a sailing ship. I take it down and wipe the back of it with the rag.
"What a nice picture this is," I say. "I'm rather interrested in ships myself. When I get home after a long work day among rubber gloves and disinfectants, I put my feet up and leaf through a good book about ships."
Now he's wondering whether I'm deranged.
"We all have our favorites, of course. Mine are the ships that sailed to Greenland. And, as chance will have it, when I saw your name on the fancy nameplate, I said to myself, My God, Smilla, I said. Ving! That nice man who once gave one of your friends a model ship for Christmas. The good ship Johannes Thomsen. To a little Greenlandic boy."
I hang up the picture again. The water wasn't good for it. All cleaning has its price. I think about Juliane, on her knees before him, in the doorway.
"The other thing I never get tired of reading about is ships chartered for expeditions to Greenland."
He's sitting perfectly still now. Only in the reflections of his glasses is there a faint movement.
"For example, the two ships that were chartered in '66 and '91. For the expeditions to Gela Alta."
I go over to the cart and wring out the rag.
"I hope you'll be satisfied now," I say. "We have to move on. Duty calls."
On our way out we can look back through the long series of rooms all the way into his office. He's sitting behind the desk. He hasn't moved.
A middle-aged woman in a white smock is standing at the bottom of the stairs. She's standing there patting her vacuum cleaner, her expression sorrowful. As if she's been discussing how the two of them are going to manage in the big world without that janitor's cart.
The mechanic puts it down in front of her. He's not very happy about taking someone else's equipment. He wants to say a few words. From one working person to another. But he can't think of anything to say.
"We're from the firm," I say. "We've been checking your work. We are very, very satisfied."
I find one of Moritz's spanking new 100-krone bills in my pocket and balance it on the edge of the bucket. "Please accept this bonus. On such a fine morning. To buy a piece of pastry for your coffee."
She looks at me with melancholy eyes.
"I'm the proprietor," she says. "There's only me and four employees."
We stand there a moment, staring at each other, all three of us.
"So what?" I say. "Even proprietors eat pastry with their coffee."
We get into the car and sit there for a while, gazing out across the King's New Square. It's too late for us to eat breakfast together. We agree to meet later. Now that the tension is past, we talk to each other like strangers. After I get out, he rolls down the window.
"Smilla, was that wise?"
"It was an impulse," I say. "And besides, have you ever done any hunting?"
"A little."
"If you're hunting shy animals, like reindeer, you let them catch sight of you a few times on purpose. You stand up and wave the butt of your rifle. In all living creatures, fear and curiosity are closely related in the brain. The deer comes closer. It knows that it's dangerous. But it has to come and see what's moving like that."
"What did you do when it came close?"
"Nothing," I said. "I've never been able to make myself shoot. But maybe you're lucky enough to have someone nearby who knows what has to be done."
I walk home across Knippels Bridge. It's eight o'clock, the day has hardly begun. I feel as if I've accomplished just as much as if I had a paper route.
A letter is waiting for me, a rectangular envelope of heavy stationery. It's from my father. It's a lined envelope from the United Paper Companies with his initials embossed on it. His handwriting looks as if he has taken a course in bragging about himself calligraphically. Which he. has. That was while I was living with him. After two evening classes he had forgotten his old handwriting. And still hadn't learned a new one. After three months he wrote like a child. I had to forge his signature on the bills he sent out. He was afraid his patients would have a relapse when they saw the great medicine man's wobbly signature.
Later it became more controlled. The world admires it. To me it simply seems snobbish.
But the letter is friendly enough. It consists of one line on a piece of paper with a watermark, which I know costs five kroner per sheet. And a bunch of photocopies of newspaper clippings, held together with a paper clip.
"Dear Smilla," it says. "Here's what Berlingske Tidende's archives had on Loyen and Greenland." There is one more sheet.
"A complete list of his scientific publications," it says in Moritz's handwriting. The list is typed.
Underneath it says that the information is from something called Index Medicus, acquired from a database in Stockholm. There are articles in four languages, including Russian. Most of them are in English. I can't even understand the titles of half of them. But Moritz has added a brief explanation in the margin. There are articles on crash injuries. On toxicology. A co-authored article on the difficulties in assimilation of vitamin B12 by the stomach as a complication of gunshot wounds. They're from the forties and fifties. In the sixties the articles start dealirig with Arctic medicine. Trichinosis, frostbite. A book about influenza epidemics around the Barents Sea. There is a long list of shorter articles on parasites. Many on the use of X-rays. His work has been multifaceted.
It looks as if he has done historical research on several occasions. There's an article on the examination of the Iron Age bog people. And there are three articles I put a check mark next to. They deal with the examination of mummies by X-ray. One of them was carried out in Berlin in the seventies, at the Pergamon Museum, on mummies from Tutankhamen's tomb. The second one deals with pre-Buddhist embalming methods in Malaysia and Thailand, published by a museum in Singapore. The third is a treatise on the Greenlandic Qilakitsoq mummies.
At the bottom of the list I write: "With thanks, Smilla," put it in an envelope, and address it to my father. Then I go through the clippings.
There are eighteen of them, and they're in chronological order. I start with the most recent. There's an article from October, announcing that preparations are now nearly complete for the establishment of a forensic medical office for Greenland under the leadership of Professor Johannes Loyen, M.D. The next one is from a year earlier. There's a photo with a brief caption: "The ethics council at the conference in Godthåb." Wearing kamiks and fur hats. Loyen is second from the left. He towers as high as those standing behind him a couple of steps up. The next one is from his seventieth birthday the year before. The text says that due to his work with an autopsy center for Greenland, they have made an exception and extended his tenure. The articles continue this way, backward in time.
"Congratulations on your sixtieth, Professor Loyen."
"Professor Loyen lectures at Greenland's newly opened university."
"Representatives from the board of health in Greenland, Copenhagen's chief medical officer to the left, and chief of staff J. Loyen, head of the newly established Institute for Arctic Medicine."
And so on, backward through the seventies and sixties. The expeditions of '91 and '66 are not mentioned.
The next-to-last clipping is from 1949. It's a little piece of verbal prostitution. An enthusiastic description of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark's new dumpsters, which have eased the transport of ore from the deeper sections of the quarry up to the earth's surface: A heartfelt tribute to Councilor Ebel and his wife, who are pictured in front. Behind stand chief engineer Dr. Wilhelm Ottesen and the corporation's medical consultant, Dr. Johannes Loyen. The photo was taken at the quarry in Saqqaq, at the moment when the new machines brought the first load to the surface.
After this picture there's a gap of ten years. The last clipping is from May 1939.
It's a photo with a caption. The picture was taken in a harbor. A dark ship is in the background. About a dozen pwople are standing in the foreground. Gentlemen in lightweight suits, women in long skirts and thin wraps. The setting makes it seem staged. The caption is quite brief: "The courageous and enthusiastic company from Freia Film upon departure for Greenland." Then follows a list of the courageous and enthusiastic company. It consists of actors and a director, the film company's doctor and his assistant. The doctor's name is Rovsing. The assistant is unnamed. Assistants didn't have names in the conservative press in the thirties. But his later career has preserved this photo as well in an archive, and prompted someone to add his name with a ballpoint pen. He's visible in the photograph. Taller than everyone else. And in spite of his youth, his subordinate position, and his spot behind eccentrics pandering to the camera, his arrogance slaines through even then. It's Loyen. I fold up the clipping.
After breakfast I put on a long suede coat and the Jane Eberlein fur hat. The coat has deep inside pockets. Into them I put the last, folded clipping, a bundle of krone notes, Isaiah's tape, and the letter to my father. Then I leave. The day has begun.
At Pronto Print on Torve Street I have a copy of the tape made. I also borrow their phone book. The Institute for Eskimology is located on Fiol Lane. I call them from the phone booth on the square. I'm transferred to an instructor who sounds as if he is of Greenlandic extraction. I explain that I have a tape in East Greenlandic that I can't understand. He asks me why I don't go over to the Greenlanders' House.
"I want an expert. It's not just a matter of understanding what is said. I want to try to identify who is speaking. I'm looking for someone who can listen to the voice and tell me that the speaker has henna-dyed hair and was spanked as a five-year-old when he was sitting on the potty, and from his vowels it sounds as if this happened in Akunnaaq in 1947."
He starts chuckling to himself. "Do you have money, madam?"
"Do you? And it's not madam. It's miss."
"Svajer Wharf. It's on the South Harbor. Berth number 126. Ask for the curator."
He's still chuckling as he hangs up.
I take the train to Enghave Station. From there I walk. I've had a look at Krak's Map of Copenhagen at the library on Torve Street. In my mind I have an image of a labyrinth of winding streets.
The station is cold. A man is standing on the opposite platform. He's staring longingly toward the train that will take him away, into the city, into the crowds. He's the last person I see.
Right now the inner city is like an anthill. Now people are crowding into the department stores. They're getting ready for theater premieres. They're standing in line in front of Hviid's Wine Cellar.
The South Harbor is a ghost town. The sky is low and gray. The inhaled air tastes of coal smoke and chemicals. Anyone who is afraid that machines will soon take over should not take a stroll in the South Harbor. The snow hasn't been cleared away. The sidewalks are impassable. Now and then enormous double semis with dark windows devoid of any humans move along the narrow, plowed roads. A blanket of green smoke hovers over a soap factory. A cafeteria advertises hash browns and sausages. Behind the windows red and yellow lights shine on lonely deep-fat fryers in an empty kitchen. A above a snowy pile of coal a crane moves aimlessly and restlessly back and forth on its rails. There are bluish glimmers through the cracks in closed garage doors, and the crackling of arc welders, and the jingling of the illegal money being earned, but no human voices.
Then the road opens onto a picture postcard: a large harbor basin surrounded by low yellow warehouses. The water is iced over, and while I'm still taking stock of the view, the sun appears, low, white-gold, surprising, and lights up the ice like an underground bulb behind frosted glass. There are small fishing boats at the wharf with blue hulls the color of the sea where it meets the horizon. On the outer edge of the basin, out in the harbor itself, there is a big three-masted sailing ship. That's Svajer Wharf.
Berth 126 is the sailing ship. I don't meet a soul on the way. All the machine sounds have disappeared behind me. Everything is quiet.
A post is sticking up from the wharf with a white, mailbox on it. Above is a large sign, still wrapped in white plastic.
On the stern it says in gilded letters that the ship's name is Northern Light. It has a figurehead carved like a rnan holding a torch; it has a shiny black hull at least a hundred feet long, masts that tower up to the sky and give the impression that you're standing in front of a church, and a smell of tar and sawdust. Someone has recently spent a fortune renovating it.
I go on board via a gangway with a thick coir mat and railings with polished bronze knobs. The entire deck is filled with big wooden crates marked FRAGILE and stacks of planks and paint cans. All the ropes are meticulously coiled up, all the wood has the deep, dark brown sheen of a dozen layers of expensive ship's lacquer. The white enamel shines like glass. The air shimmers with polish, two-component epoxy, and joint paste. Aside from this shimmering, the ship is apparently deserted.
A narrow ladder between the crates leads to a lacquered double door that isn't locked. Beyond the door a companionway descends into the darkness.
A man is standing at the bottom of the steps. He's leaning on a spear, and he doesn't move. Not even when I'm quite close to him.
The room must have several skylights that are still covered. But along the edges of the covers, thin stripes of white light filter in. Enough so that I can see it's a big hall. All the dividing walls have been torn out to create an area that is about eighty feet long and just as wide as the ship.
Now there is enough light for me to see that the man in front of me is an Inuit. What he's leaning on is a long harpoon. In his left hand he's holding a dart thrower. He is only partially dressed, in high kamiks and an inner coat of bird skin. He isn't much taller than me. I pat him on the cheek. He is cast from hollow fiberglass and then cleverly painted. His face is alert.
"Lifelike, isn't it?"
The voice comes from somewhere behind a screen. On my way over to it I have to go around a kayak that is still partially wrapped and a glass counter lying there like an empty 800-gallon aquarium. The screen is a hide stretched between two whalebones. Behind it is a desk. Behind the desk sits a man. He stands up and I shake his proffered hand. He looks exactly like the mannikin. But he's thirty years older. His hair is thick and cut pageboystyle, but gray. His background is like mine. Greenlandic a in some way.
"You're the curator?"
"Yes, I am."
His Danish is without accent. He gestures with his hand. "We're in the process of setting up the collection. It cost a fortune."
I place the tape in front of him. He touches it cautiously.
"I'm trying to identify the man speaking. I found my way over here by calling the Institute for Eskimology."
He smiles with satisfaction. "Word of mouth is the best advertisement. And by far the cheapest. Do you know what it costs to advertise?"
"Only personal ads."
"Is that expensive?" He is sincerely interested. Humor is wasted on him. "Very."
He nods. "It's terrible. They clean you out. The newspapers. The tax system, the customs office…"
It seems to me that I've seen him before. It's a feeling that I get from faces and places more and more often. I don't know whether it's because I've seen so much that the world is starting to repeat itself, or whether it's due to premature wear and tear on the mental apparatus.
He has a square, flat, matte-black cassette tape recorder on the table in front of him. He puts in the tape. The sound comes from distant speakers on the perimeter of the room. Now that my eyes are becoming adjusted to the darkness, I can sense the way the walls curve along with the sides of the ship.
He listens for half a minute with his head in his hands. Then he stops the tape.
"Mid-forties. Grew up near Angmagsalik. Very little formal education. On top of the East Greenlandic there are traces of more northern dialects. But up there they move around too much to say which exactly. He has probably never been away from Greenland for any appreciable length of time."
He looks at me with light-gray, almost milky eyes, with an expression as if he's waiting for something. Suddenly I know what it is. It's the applause after the first act. "Impressive," I say. "Can you tell me more?"
"He's describing a journey. Across ice. With sleds. He's probably a hunter, because he uses a series of technical terms, such as anut for the dog harnesses. He's probably talking to a European. He uses English names for locations. And he seems to think he has to repeat many things."
He listened to the tape for a very short time. I wonder whether he's pulling my leg.
"You don't believe me," he says coldly.
"I just wonder how you can conclude so much from so little."
"Language is a hologram." He says this slowly and firmly.
"In every human utterance lies the sum total of that person's linguistic past. Now, you yourself… You're in your mid-thirties. Grew up in Thule or north of there. One or both parents Inuit. You came to Denmark after assimilating the entire linguistic foundation of Greenlandic, but before you lost the child's instinctive talent for learning a foreign language perfectly. Let's say you were between seven and eleven years old. After that it gets harder. There are traces of several sociolects. Perhaps you lived or went to school in the northern suburbs, Gentofte or Charlottenlund. There is also a trace of a North Sealand accent. And strangely enough, even a later hint of West Greenlandic."
I make no attempt to hide my astonishment. "That's true," I say. "It's all basically true." He smacks his lips in satisfaction.
"Is there any possibility of determining where the conversation took place?"
"You really can't tell?"
I notice it again. His bold self-confidence and his sense of triumph at his knowledge.
He rewinds. He doesn't look at the tape recorder while he's handling it. He plays about ten seconds for me. "What do you hear?"
I hear only the incomprehensible voice. "Behind the voice. Another sound."
He plays it again. Then I hear it. The faint, escalating sound of a motor, like a generator starting up and then shut off.
"A prop plane," he says. "A big prop plane."
He fast-forwards. Turns it on again. A segment with the faint clatter of dishes.
"A large room. Low-ceilinged. Tables being set. Some kind of restaurant."
I can see that he knows the answer. But he's enjoying pulling it very slowly out of his top hat.
"A voice in the background."
He plays the same segment several times. Now I can just make it out.
"A woman," I say.
"A man talking like a woman. He's yelling. In Danish and American English. Danish is his mother tongue. Presumably he's yelling at the person setting the table. He's probably the restaurant manager."
One last time I wonder whether he's just guessing. But I know he's right. He must have an abnormally precise and skilled sense of hearing and a gift for languages.
The tape is playing again. "Another prop plane," I suggest.
He shakes his head. "A jet. A smaller jet. Quite soon after the previous plane. An airport with heavy traffic." He leans back.
"Where in the world can an East Greenlandic hunter sit and talk in a restaurant where the tables are being set, where a Dane is yelling in American English, and where you can hear an airport in the background?"
Now I know, too, but I let him tell me. Let little kids have their fun. Even grown-up kids.
"Only one place. At Thule Air Base."
On the base the club is called the Northern Star. A restaurant in two sections, with a dance hall.
He starts the tape again. "It's strange." I don't say a word.
"The music… behind the voice… remnants from the previous recording. It's pop, of course. 'There Must Be an Angel' by the Eurythmics. But the trumpet…"
He looks up.
"Of course you can hear that the piano is a Yamaha grand."
I can't hear any piano at all.
"A loud, heavy, flashy tone. A rather clumsy bass. Often a little off-key. Certainly no Bosendorfer… But it's the trumpet that surprises me."
"There's some of the music left at the end of the tape," I say.
He fast-forwards. When he presses the play button, we're at a spot right after the music starts.
"Mr. PC!" he says. Then his face goes blank, self-absorbed.
He lets it play to the end. When he stops the tape, he seems very far away. I give him time to come back. He wipes his eyes.
"Jazz," he says quietly. "My passion…"
It was a brief moment of letting down his guard. When he comes back, he's as cocky as ever. Three-quarters of the politicians and bureaucrats who are part of the Home Rule belong to his generation. They were the first Greenlanders to get a university education. Some of them have survived and held on to their identities. Others-like the curator-with their fragile but abnormally overblown self-confidence, have become genuine, intellectual Northern Danes.
"It's actually quite difficult to recognize a musician from the tone. Who can you identify this way? Stan Getz when he plays Latin-American style. Miles Davis from his naked, precise, vibrato-less sound. Armstrong by his meticulous crystallization of New Orleans jazz. And this musician."
He looks at me, full of anticipation and reproach. "Great jazz is synonymous with the John Coltrane quartet. McCoy Tyner on the piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums. And in the periods when Jones was in prison: Roy Hanes. Just those four. Except on four occasions. The four concerts at the New York Independent Club. That's when Roy Louber joined them on trumpet. He learned his sense for European harmonizing and his incantatory African nerve from Coltrane himself."
We sit there for a moment thinking about this. "Alcohol," he says suddenly, "has never been good for music. Cannabis is supposed to be great. But alcohol is a ticking bomb under jazz."
We sit there listening to the bomb ticking.
"Since that time in '64, Louber has been working on drinking himself to death. On his way down, in both human and musical terms, he happened to come through Scandinavia. And he stayed here."
Now I remember his name from concert posters. From certain scandalous newspaper headlines. One of them said: FAMOUS DRUNK JAZZ MUSICIAN TRIES TO TIP OVER CITY BUS. "He must have been playing in the restaurant. It's the same acoustics. The people eating in the background. Someone has seized the opportunity to make a pirate recording."
He smiles, full of sympathy for such a project. "They've managed to get themselves a free live recording. You can save a lot of money with a little Walkman. If you dare take the risk."
"Why would he go to Thule?"
"Money, of course. Jazz musicians live on so-called bare-ass jobs. Imagine what it costs…"
"What costs?"
"To drink yourself to death. Have you ever thought about how much money you save by not being an alcoholic?"
"No," I say.
"Five thousand kroner," he says.
"Excuse me?"
"That will be five thousand kroner for the session. Ten thousand if you want a notarized transcription of the contents."
There's not a trace of a smile on his face. He's dead serious.
"Can I get a receipt?"
"Then I'll have to add sales tax."
"Go ahead," I say. "Go right ahead."
I really can't use the receipt for anything. But I'm going to hang it up on the wall at home. As a reminder of what can happen to the famous Greenlandic generosity and indifference to money.
He types it up, on a sheet of typing paper.
"I'll need at least a week. Do you want to call me five or six days after New Year's?"
I take five crisp new 1,000-krone notes from the bundle. He closes his eyes and listens as I count them out. He has at least one passion more burning than modal jazz. It's the sensual crackle of money changing hands, with him on the receiving end.
After I stand up I think of one other thing I have to ask him.
"How did you learn to get so much from what you hear?"
He beams like a sun. "I was originally a theologian. An occupation that presents excellent opportunities for listening to people."
It's because the pastoral robes are such a total mask that it has taken me so long to recognize him. Even though it's less than ten days since I saw him bury Isaiah.
"Occasionally I still step into the role. Assist Pastor Chemnitz when he's busy. But in the last forty years it's been mostly languages. My teacher at the university was Louis Hjelmslev. He was a professor of comparative linguistics. He had a solid knowledge of forty or fifty languages. And he had learned and forgotten just as many. I was young then and as surprised as you are. When I asked him how he had learned so many languages, he replied"-and now he imitates a man with a severe overbite-" `The first thirteen or fourteen take a long time. After that, it goes a lot faster.' "
He roars with laughter. He's in a great mood. He has demonstrated his brilliance and earned money for it. It strikes me that he is the first Greenlander I've ever met who used the formal De with me and expected me to do the same.
"There's one more thing," he says. "Since I was twelve years old, I've been totally blind."'
He enjoys my sudden stiffness.
"I make my eyes follow your voice. But I can't see a thing. Under certain circumstances, blindness sharpens the sense of hearing."
I shake the hand he offers me. I ought to keep my mouth shut. There's really something perverse about harassing a blind man. And a fellow countryman at that. But for me there's always been something mysterious and provocative about genuine, sincere greed.
"Mr. Curator," I whisper, "you should be careful. At your age. With all the money you have on you. Surrounded by these treasures. On a ship that's screaming like an open bank vault. South Harbor is crawling with crooks. You know the world is full of people unscrupulously striving to obtain the possessions of their fellow human beings."
He swallows hard.
"Goodbye," I say. "If I were you, I would barricade the door after I leave."
The last golden rays of sunshine have settled on the flat stone of the dock. In a few minutes they'll be gone, leaving behind a raw, damp cold.
There's not a soul in sight. I use a key to slit the white plastic on the sign. Just a rip, just enough to see inside. It was painted by a sign painter. Black letters on a white background. "Copenhagen University, the Polar Center, and the Cultural Ministry hereby establish the ARCTIC MUSEUM." Then a list of the foundations paying for the fun. I don't bother to read it. I start walking along the dock.
The Arctic Museum. That's where Isaiah's ship was bought. I pull the curator's receipt out of a deep pocket.
It's impeccably composed, and yet another miracle, considering that he's blind. He signed it. His signature is illegible. But he has also stamped it. I can read the stamp.
It says "Andreas Fine Licht, Ph.D. Professor of Eskimo Languages and Cultures."
I stand still until the shock subsides. Then I consider going back.
I decide to keep going. The tape is a copy. And when you're hunting, it's sometimes beneficial to make yourself visible, to stop and wave the butt of your rifle.