2

It's six-thirty in the morning, but they've already eaten and the mess is empty except for Verlaine. I drink a glass of juice and follow him to the storage room for work clothes. He looks me over and then hands me a pile of clothes.

Maybe it's the work clothes, maybe it's the surroundings, maybe it's the color of his skin. But for a moment I feel the urge for some contact.

"What's your native language?"

"You mean, what's your native language, sir?" he corrects me gently, using the formal form of address.

His Danish has a faint lilt to each word, the way it's spoken on the island of Fyn.

We look each other in the eyes. He has a plastic bag in his breast pocket. He takes a clump of rice out of it. He stuffs it in his mouth, chews it slowly and thoroughly, swallows, and rubs his palms together.

"Bosun," he adds. Then he turns around and leaves. There's nothing under the sun as grotesque as cold European courtesy manifested in the third and fourth worlds.

I change into work clothes in my cabin. He has given me the correct size. As much as work clothes can ever be the right size. I try putting a belt around the smock. Now I no longer look like a mailbag. Now I look like an hourglass five feet two inches tall. I put a silk scarf over my hair. I have to clean, and I don't want to get dust in the fine down that is starting to cover my bald spot. I take out a vacuum cleaner. I put it down in the corridor, and then I quietly drift into the mess. Not to resume my breakfast -I couldn't get a bite down. During the night the sea outside my porthole seeped down into my stomach and joined forces with the smell of diesel fuel and with the awareness of being on the open sea, and coated my insides with tepid nausea. There are those who claim that you can fight seasickness by standing on deck in the fresh air. That may work if the boat is docked or on its way through the Falsterbo Canal, where you can go up and look at the solid land that you will soon have under your feet. When Sonne wakes me up this morning by knocking on my door to give me a key, and I get dressed and stand on deck wearing a down jacket and ski cap, and gaze out into the pitch dark of winter, and realize that now I will have to continue because I'm on the open sea and there's no way back, that's when I first feel truly sick.

In the mess the two tables have been cleared and wiped off. I stand in the doorway to the galley.

Urs is stirring a pot of boiling milk. I estimate him to be about 250 pounds. But solidly built. All Danes are pale in the winter, but his face borders on green-tinged. Covered with a light mask of sweat in the heat of the galley.

His movements are forceful and impatient. But he possesses a warmth and charisma in his role as keeper of the larder. They don't call him by his last name either.

"A superb breakfast."

I didn't touch it. But you have to start a conversation somewhere.

He gives me a smile and turns back to the milk as he shrugs his shoulders. "I am a Schweizer."

I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.

"Fruhstuck," I say in German. "Impressive. Like a first-class restaurant."

"I had such a restaurant. In Geneva. On the lake," he continues in German.

He has prepared a tray with coffee, steamed milk, juice, butter, and croissants.

"Can I take it to the bridge?"

"Nein. Breakfast isn't served. It's sent up in the dumbwaiter. But if you come back at 11:15, Fraulein, there's the officers' lunch."

"How do you like cooking on a ship?"

The question is an excuse to stay there. He has put a tray into the dumbwaiter and pushed a button labeled NAVIGATING BRIDGE. Now he's preparing the next one. This is the one that interests me. It consists of tea, toast, cheese, honey, jam, juice, and soft-boiled eggs. Three cups and three plates. On the boat deck, to which the stewardess is forbidden access, the Kronos has three passengers. He puts the tray in the dumbwaiter and presses BOAT DECK.

"Not bad. Besides, I had no choice. Eleven-fifteen, then," he says in German.

The scenario for the end of the world is firmly established. It will begin with three extremely cold winters and then the lakes, the rivers, and the seas will freeze over. The sun will cool down so it can no longer create summer, the snow will keep falling for a merciless white eternity. Then one long endless winter will arrive and, finally, the wolf Sköll will devour the sun. The moon and stars will be extinguished, and a fathomless darkness will reign. The Fimbul winter.

In school they taught us that this was the way northerners imagined the end of the world before Christianity taught them that the universe would perish in fire. I've always remembered this, not because it was any more personally relevant than so much else I learned, but because it dealt with snow. When I heard it for the first time, I thought that it was a distorted picture created by people who had no understanding of the nature of winter.

Opinion was divided in North Greenland. My mother, along with many others, preferred winter. Because of the hunting on new ice, because of the deep sleep, because of the handicrafts, but most of all because of the visiting. Winter was a time for community, not for the end of the world.

In school they also told us that Danish culture had made great progress since ancient times and the theory of a Fimbul winter. There are moments when it's difficult for me to believe this is true. Like now, when I'm wiping down the tanning bed in the ship's weight room with alcohol.

The ultraviolet lights from a tanning bed split small amounts of the oxygen in the air, creating the unstable gas ozone. Its sharp smell of pine needles is found in the summer in Qaanaaq, too, with its almost painfully bright sunshine in the glare off the snow and sea.

One of my duties is to wipe off this thought-provoking apparatus with alcohol.

I've always enjoyed cleaning. Even though they tried to teach us laziness in school.

For the first six months we were taught in the village by the wife of one of the hunters. One summer day they came from the boarding school and wanted to take me to town. A Danish pastor and a West Greenlandic catechist. They issued orders without looking at our faces. They called us avanersuarmiut, people from the north.

Moritz forced me to go. My brother had grown too big and too obstinate for him. The boarding school was in Qaanaaq, in the town itself. I stayed for five months, until my fighting spirit had matured sufficiently that I could refuse.

In school we had all our meals served to us. We had a hot bath every day and clean clothes every other. In the village we had bathed once a week, much less often when hunting or traveling. Every day, from the glacier above ahe cliffs, I had collected kangirluayhuq, big blocks of freshwater ice, and carried them home in sacks and heated them over the stove. At the boarding school you turned on a faucet. When summer vacation arrived, all the students and teachers went out to Herbert Island and visited the hunters, and for the first time in a long while we had boiled seal meat and tea. That's when I noticed the paralysis. Not just in me but in everybody. We could not pull ourselves together anymore; it was no longer a natural thing to reach out for some water and brown soap and the package of Neogene and start rinsing the skins. We weren't used to washing clothes, we couldn't pull ourselves together to cook. At every break we would slip into a daydreaming state of waiting. Hoping that someone would take over, would relieve us, free us from our duties, and do what we ourselves ought to have done.