Hibernation by Sarah Schillaci

It is no more complicated to hold your meeting 250 km north of the Arctic Circle than to hold it at any other of the world’s most exiting places. It’s just different! – From the brochure of the Hotel Arctic

Gjerta, I have discovered, has gotten into the habit of pretending she is readjusting her nose ring while actually just picking her nose. I was never fooled, not even the first time, but I’ve tried myself to pass off my digging around in my nostril as “rubbing that bit of dirt off” or “allergies,” so when I caught her lightly investigating the crevasses of her nose with her pinkie, I was willing to turn a blind eye.

“I think it is slightly infected,” she said when she saw me looking.

“Hydrogen peroxide,” I replied.

The behavior has continued, though, and since I must sit next to Gjerta for seven hours every day in the cramped cockpit of the catamaran, I am nearing in on calling her out on it. I watch her do it now, rotating the stud in her nose with her ring finger in the efforts of camouflaging the dirty work. Apparently satisfied with the results, she retracts her hand and fluffs her hair.

“You must really love your husband,” she says. “I would stab my brother in the heart if it meant I could get out of Nuuk.” Her hand makes a threatening rise towards her nose again, but stops and picks up the microphone. After making her announcement in Danish, she shoves the microphone in my direction. I clear my throat and reach for the English version of the script (Gjerta already has hers memorized). “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Susan again! On our right we can see the Uummannaq Fjord and, right in it, the Great Qarajaq glacier—the fastest moving in the world! We will be pausing here if you care to take photographs.”

I think Randy saw my tits before he saw my face. I was driving home from my last year at Scripps in a Subaru wagon that I had purchased ill-advisedly from my roommate’s boyfriend. He said it was fine except in extreme heat; I pretended that the route home didn’t include Arizona and New Mexico. Somewhere past the junction of highways 80 and 162 the thing overheated for the twentieth time, and—lacking income as I was—I decided to pitch camp near the shore of the Rio Grande. By 4 p.m. it was closing in on 90 degrees, which was about 20 degrees cooler than the inside of the car. Feeling very post-collegiate and liberal, I shucked my tank top and threw it over my face to block the sun (it was the late 90s, braless was still in). I reclined in the shadow of the Outback for over an hour until a voice informed me that I was parked over his sample site, and would I move my car?

Male/25/beard/dog owner/doctoral candidate/registered Green/pitiable auto mechanic with a yet-to-be-discovered passion for glaciology (“I was always interested in it, Susie!” he shouted when I later accused him of lying about his focus for the sake of MIT’s grant money). Beshirted once again, I watched Randy’s back as he tried to fix the car. He said he knew more about the geological controversies of the Permian reef complex in the canyon than Japanese cars. I said I never bought American. That night—post-tow truck fiasco, post-proffering of futon, post-truncated dinner at Applebee’s—he drew a finger behind my shoulder blade and told me the mineral content of the sand on my back and the geological history of the canyon.

“You can tell it’s limestone by licking it. It’s salty, see.” I couldn’t see, it was my back, but I trusted him. “You know, you put me at least a week behind by driving that piece of shit over my dig site.”

I told him I would make it up to him.

If I am counting correctly, it has been two weeks and three days since Randy last saw my breasts. The last time we had sex was two weeks and one day ago, the morning that he left for the last major expedition of the fall at an ice outcropping near Upernavik. There is no sun in central Greenland from the beginning of November to February, and it is dangerous to study glaciers in the dark. Gjerta tells me that our autumn has been mild, and that the blast of 15°F temperatures we were graced with in the past few weeks is far more normal for this time of year. On the first day of the freeze when I showed up in a snowsuit Gjerta smiled for the longest time on record and told me if I didn’t want to be miserable for the next nine months I ought to harden up. It looks like you’ve been miserable for the last nine years, I wanted to say, but only laughed a little and stuffed my head more completely into the hood.

That morning two weeks ago, in any case, I refused to take off my sweater, not even for my husband who was going on a month-long foray into polar bear country. I watched him pack his duffel bag from underneath my Patriots throw blanket, seeing him put in gloves and glove lines, boots and socks and sock liners and heating packets and a copy of The Hot Zone, which a friend with a sick sense of humor had sent to us.

“Say hi to Santa for me,” I said from under the minuteman’s head.

Randy put down the snowsuit he was packing and slipped his hands under the sweater, his rough hands moving softly, discriminately over my perpetually goose-bumped skin. “I’ll bring you back a reindeer.”

There is no need for Randy to haul a reindeer back from Upernavik because they graze peacefully in thriving herds right here outside of Nuuk.

“To the north you will be able to see the grazing grounds of one of the many thriving herds of reindeer that peacefully live outside of Nuuk.”

Gjerta looks like she wants a cigarette. When I first met her she was chain smoking outside of Harald’s Tourist Boat Rides (or, for the locals, Harald’s Turist Båd Køre), and a single glance from her overly lined eyes indicated that I—female/29/nonpracticing public defender from Connecticut—was not the tanned surfer boy demigod she had envisioned when Harald Andersen told her that her new coworker was an American who would be living in Nuuk for a year. That day I was intimidated by what I assumed was immediate repugnance for me; I placed her at a surly 21. Today in the cockpit I am confident that she cannot be more than 17.

“Harald is a moron,” she says, jabbing at my English libretto. “Have you ever heard such a stupid script? It is like Good Burger, only with no black people.” Gjerta also has a seemingly bottomless library of references to American pop culture. I suspect that it is because many movie theaters in Nuuk cannot afford the major features. “I said to him once, ‘Harald, you’re such a fool, no one gives a shit about reindeer unless they are on a plate.’ That’s why most people come to Greenland, to kill a reindeer.”

“Did you actually say that to him?” I ask.

Gjerta glares at me and blows her bangs out of her face. This, I have learned, is the face she considers an adequate reply to questions she doesn’t feel like answering. I have seen this face in response to “Are you planning on going to college?”, “What do your parents do for a living?”, “Where did you learn to speak English so well?” and “What’s your brother’s name?” The one time the face came with an answer was when I asked her if she was used to the weather, or if she still got cold in the winter.

“No” (glare, blow) “I just pretend I am in hell and then I feel toasty until April.”

A few weeks after I started working with her, I invited Gjerta over to have dinner with me and Randy and Torben, one of Randy’s graduate assistants, hoping that a potential romance might lighten her perpetual funk. I gave her directions to our house and she said she would be there, but I was not shocked when we were clearing the table and she had still not arrived.

“She’s a brat,” I told Randy and Torben. “I have never been around a person who has less of a reason to turn down an invitation than this kid. It is like sitting next to the embodiment of gloom all day, like she’s holding the scepter of bitch in her grubby little fingers. She colors in her fingernails with the same ballpoint pen, every day. It makes little squeaking noises.”

Torben, an intelligent young geologist who—if he takes after his professor—will probably take his future Greenlandish wife to Mexico City to do research, stacked the plates thoughtfully. “A lot of the young people in Nuuk, they want to get out but there is nowhere to go; they already live in the biggest city in their country. Kids who don’t want to be tour directors or fishermen or hydrologists have no great opportunities in here. That’s why they all start smoking, I think. There is nothing else to do.”

“Also it’s nighttime for half of the goddamn year,” I pointed out.

“This from the woman who left her office in New Haven after nine for two straight years,” Randy laughed and pushed me away from the sink as Torben commenced to do the dishes. “Besides, Susie,” he said into my hair, pulling me to him and smelling of stone, “you’re just not thinking of all the things that can get done in the dark.”

When we get back from the tour, the last of the day, the rotund Harald tells Gjerta to bring the catamaran to the end of the dock and close it up for the night. Only two months into the job, I still haven’t learned how to sail the thing. Harald watches her clomp back into the boat in her heavy leather boots, and then turns to me.

“Susan,” he says very seriously. “The tourist season is coming to an end.”

“I can sort of see that,” I say, watching the passengers trying to rub the frostbite out of their extremities in the office.

“I think this will be our last day of touring the fjords with the Helsinki Maria. I am so sorry.”

Being laid off has never been sweeter. “That’s fine, Harald, really. You know I was just looking for something to pass the time while my husband does his research. I wanted to thank you for letting me lead the tours, I’ve learned so much.”

Harald’s frown deepens, accentuated by his brilliant gray handlebar moustache. “I hope that it will be okay then for Gjerta. It is too late in the fall for her to get a winter job. Usually she quits in late August but this year she has stayed around so late. I wonder what she will do.”

From the end of the dock I see Gjerta jump from the catamaran, her hand brushing her hair back. She has never (and does not now) worn gloves or a hat to work. It allows her to re-tousle her hair at will, though to the detriment of her hands which are almost as calloused as Randy’s. I turn to Harald.

“I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

I’ve taken to watching a lot of German MTV while Randy is gone, as it is often the only thing I can find in English. I am working on my third round each of “Taildaters” and Miller Lite—a commodity bizarrely available in our neighborhood grocery store, along with Mallomars and several old Danielle Steele novels—when the doorbell rings. Maybe it’s Santa Claus, I think, and open the door.

Of course it is Gjerta, but for a wild moment I think it is a panda bear. The eyeliner that had so markedly encompassed Gjerta’s eyes earlier in the day has made a bleary trip southward, giving her two enormous upside down crescents.

“I did it,” she says, and for the first time I have heard her speak her accent is very noticeable, and voice unstable. “I stabbed my brother in the heart.”

His name is Martin and he is her twin, her mother is a hairdresser and her father is dead, when her father was alive he was a businessman and they all lived in Scotland for five years, and she does not want to go to college because all they teach you in college is how to mess with people’s minds and she knows how to do that already, thanks to Harald’s stupid scripts. I learn all of this as I sit in the kitchen, feeding kettle corn to a girl who could likely be a teenage convict.

“But, Gjerta,” I begin, not exactly wanting to get an answer, “why did you stab Martin in the heart? Did you really think that would get you out of Nuuk? To where, a prison? There are jails in Nuuk, you know.”

Gjerta swallows a handful of popcorn. “He said that if I couldn’t get a job for the winter that I would have to work in the salon with Mama. I told him that I was leaving Nuuk, and he said that no one ever left Nuuk and I would be a hairdresser and I told him he was full of shit and he said that it’s true because no one would let me cut their hair because it looks like something died on my head. So I told him he would never have sex because his pimples would drip on the girl and he said my nose piercing looked ugly and I stabbed him in the heart.”

Gjerta picks up a lone piece of popcorn and examines it, creasing it with her pen-decorated fingernails before putting it in her mouth. “With a fork.”

Nuuk is not very big, and even though it takes some time to get the car started we are at Gjerta’s house ten minutes later. Even from the driveway I can hear the Smashing Pumpkins blasting from the interior. Gjerta opens the door, and slumped on the couch is a lanky boy with hair that falls in his eyes, a smattering of acne on his forehead, and a dishtowel clamped to his bare chest. He jumps up when we walk in and begins shrieking at Gjerta in Danish before seeing me. He drops the dishtowel (I see three pencil-tip sized holes on his left pectoral) and reaches for his slightly bloodstained shirt on the ground.

“Hi Martin,” I say. “I’m Susan. I work with Gjerta.”

“Worked you mean,” says Martin. “She lost her job.”

“The season ended, Martin, don’t be a dumbshit.”

The altercation becomes Danish again, and I interrupt. “I just gave Gjerta a ride home and wanted to make sure that your…wound was okay. Not infected.”

Martin tugs on his ear, which I see is thrice pierced. “It is fine. I put some snow on it.”

Gjerta leans forward, appraising her handiwork. “Perhaps you should try hydrogen peroxide.”

Gjerta goes to get the bottle from the bathroom cupboard, and Martin tells me about his day: he went to work at the fish market, learned that they still weren’t hiring at the music store, got a new stud for his new piercing at HASH (the only store that he and Gjerta have bought their clothes at since they turned 13), and got home and learned his sister had gotten fired and then she stabbed him in the chest.

“Really you are to blame, I think,” he says. “She can do the job alone, you know, she speaks English and Danish and German, too, and Harald’s never hired someone else. She said it was better with you there, the time went by faster, but, you know, you get used to being alone. But now it’s too late and she’ll just be sitting around the house all day this winter. The winter is not so bad if you have work, but there is nothing worse than being broke in the dark. We were going to save enough to see Prodigy in Oslo but now we won’t be able to, probably.”

I don’t know what to say. “I’m sorry.”

Martin shrugs. “Whatever, you know, usually a Viking slasher group from Sweden comes through at winter solstice to do a midnight show. They do it outside and almost always everyone gets at least a little bit of frostbite, but never Gjerta and never me. Always the tourists.”

“How do you stay warm?”

Like Gjerta, I notice, Martin is stingy with his smiles. He almost gives me one now. “Before we were born, Gjerta and I learned how to keep our blood moving faster in our veins. So we can sit still but it keeps us warm until winter is over.” He touches my wrist, and although his hand is bony and thin it is alarmingly hot. “Sometimes it helps,” he says, “to be a little less real in the cold.”

Gjerta returns from the bathroom with the peroxide and a band aid. Martin self-consciously lifts up his shirt and Gjerta pats at the stab wounds. She is about to cover it up when she pauses and says, almost to herself, “I bet you could find a ring to go in one of these.”

I leave Gjerta and Martin in what I can only hope for them is a state of peace, a serious conversation in Danish punctuated by the words “smack my bitch up,” “Kevin Costner,” and “radical.” They are eating Mallomars and their heads are almost touching, two oft-hole punched domes of obsidian. As I exit their house I realize that, in my rush to rescue Martin from his utensil wound, I forgot to put on gloves. The cold of the steering wheel is searing, but I grip it, albeit daintily, and make my way back to my side of Nuuk. I have just turned down my street when the Volvo, which has been valiantly sputtering against the inevitable since Gjerta first got in the car, stalls and dies. I am still not a wizard at stick shift. Broke in the dark indeed. I jam my hands into my pockets and trudge down to the house that Randy picked out over a webcam tour, a tour that failed to show the bay that lies one hundred meters to the east, the fishing boats, the ice, the horizon that will fail to provide a sunrise for months.

Sometimes in the mornings I wake up to Randy’s hands, running over the crevasses and divides and faults of the body lying next to him. Cleavage, he tells me, refers to the tendency of minerals to break along weak planes. “I wish I could break them off,” he says, demarcating the hemispheres of my breasts. “Take a sample of you with me while I’m away.” A year was too long to go breastless, we figured back in March. Just watch “Celebrity Smack” on MTV Deutschland; cleavage can be dangerous.

I walk into the house to the phone ringing. It is Randy, calling from the camp outside Upernavik. The recent cold snap has made going outside almost impossible, but the ice samples have been excellent and their research, for once, is on schedule.

“It was amazing, Susie,” he says, voice crackling over hundreds of miles of frost. “We were getting some last-minute specimens and then, right above us, the Aurora Borealis.”

“Was it as amazing as you thought it would be?”

“Yes, but, I swear to God, not as amazing as these samples.”

Randy goes on, telling me about the orthogneisses and paragneisses of the Thule mixed-gneiss complex. I listen to him talk and I begin to understand something about the lives of the rocks stuck in the ice in the Arctic.