3

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.