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Authors: Peter Høeg

BOOK: Smilla's Sense of Snow
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“But we can read about Greenland.”
He says “we” about our reading aloud, aware that he contributes just as much by his presence as I do.
“In what book?”
“In Euclid's
Elements
.”
It's dark by the time I get home. The mechanic is pushing his bicycle down into the basement.
He is very wide, like a bear, and if he straightened up his head
he would be quite imposing. But he keeps his head down, maybe to apologize for his height, maybe to avoid the doorframes of this world.
I like him. I have a weakness for losers. Invalids, foreigners, the fat boy of the class, the ones nobody ever wants to dance with. My heart beats for them. Maybe because I've always known that in some way I will forever be one of them.
Isaiah and the mechanic had been friends from the time before Isaiah learned to speak Danish. They probably didn't need many words. One craftsman recognizing another. Two males who were alone in the world, each in his own way.
I follow along as he pushes the bike downstairs. I have an idea about the basement.
He has gotten a double room for a workshop. It has a cement floor, warm, dry air, and a bright yellow electric light. The limited space is packed full. There's a workbench running along two walls. Bicycle wheels and inner tubes on hooks. A milk crate full of defective potentiometers. A plastic panel with nails and screws on it. A board with small insulated pliers for working with electronics. A board full of hooks. Ten square yards of plywood with what looks like all the tools in the world. A row of soldering irons. Four shelves of plumbing supplies, paint cans, dismantled stereos, sets of socket wrenches, welding electrodes, and an entire set of Metabo electrical tools. Against the wall two large canisters for a CO
2
welder, and two small ones for a blowtorch. There is also a washing machine in pieces. Buckets full of a solution to fight dry rot. A bicycle stand. A foot pump.
There are so many things gathered here that they seem to be waiting for the slightest excuse to create chaos. On a purely personal level, I think all you'd have to do is send me in here alone to turn on the light, and that would trigger such a state of confusion that you wouldn't even be able to find the light switch afterward. But as it is now, everything is kept in its place by the thoroughly pragmatic sense of order of a person who wants to make sure he can always find whatever he needs.
The place is a double world. Above is the workbench, the tools, the tall office chair. Below, under the table, the universe is duplicated
half-size. A little masonite table with a coping saw, screwdriver, chisel. A little stool. A workbench. A little vise. A beer crate. A cigar box with maybe thirty cans of Humbrol. Isaiah's things. I've been in here once before when they were sitting and working. The mechanic on the chair, bent over a magnifying glass on a stand; Isaiah on the floor, in his underpants, lost to the world. There was the smell of burning solder and epoxy hardener in the air. And something else, something stronger: total, all-consuming concentration. I stood there for maybe ten minutes. They didn't look up once.
Isaiah wasn't equipped for the Danish winter. Only occasionally would Juliane manage to dress him adequately. After I had known him for six months, he contracted his fourth severe middle ear infection in eight weeks. When he came out of the penicillin daze, he was hard-of-hearing. After that I would sit in front of him when I read so that he could follow the movement of my lips. In the mechanic he found someone with whom he could communicate in other ways than through language.
For several days I've been walking around with something in my pocket because I've been expecting this meeting. I show it to him now.
“What's this?”
It's the suction cup that I took from Isaiah's room.
“A ‘cup.' Glaziers use them to carry large pieces of glass.”
I take the things out of the beer crate. There are several pieces of carved wood. A harpoon, an ax. A boat carved from a dense, rather speckled kind of wood, maybe pear. An
umiaq.
It's rubbed smooth on the outside and hollowed out with a gouge. A slow, meticulous, carefully executed job. There is also a car made of bent and glued aluminum strips cut from an almost paper-thin sheet. Pieces of rough colored glass that have been melted and stretched over a Bunsen burner. Several pairs of glasses. A Walkman. The cover is gone but it has been ingeniously repaired with a Plexiglas plate and tiny hinges screwed on. It's lying in a hand-sewn vinyl case. The whole thing bears the mark of a joint project for a child and an adult. There is also a stack of cassette tapes.
“Where's his knife?”
The mechanic shrugs. After a moment he plods off. He's the whole world's 200-pound friend, and buddy-buddy with the custodian, too. He has keys to all the basement rooms and can come and go as he pleases.
I pick up the little stool and sit down on it by the door, so I can see the whole room.
At boarding school we each had a cupboard 12 by 20 inches. It had a lock. The owner had a key for it. Everyone else could open it with a steel comb.
There's a widespread notion that children are open, that the truth about their inner selves just seeps out of them. That's all wrong. No one is more covert than a child, and no one has a greater need to be that way. It's a response to a world that's always using a can opener to open them up to see what's inside, wondering whether it ought to be replaced with a more useful sort of preserves.
The first need that developed at boarding school—aside from the perpetual, never truly satisfied hunger—was the need for peace. There is no peace in a dormitory. So the need is suppressed. It turns into a need for a hiding place, for a secret room.
I try to imagine Isaiah's situation, the places he went. The apartment, the housing block, the kindergarten, the embankment. Places that could never be thoroughly searched. So I stick to the place at hand.
I look around the room. Very carefully. Without finding anything. Other than the memory of Isaiah. Then I call up the image of the way it looked the two times I was here before, a long time ago.
I must have been sitting there half an hour when it came to me. Six months ago the building was inspected for dry rot. The insurance company brought over a dog that was trained to sniff it out. It found two smaller patches. They knocked them down and then swabbed the area. One of the places where they worked was in this room. They opened the wall three feet off the floor. They bricked it up again, but it still hasn't been covered with plaster like the rest of the wall. Underneath the workbench, in the shadows, there is still a rectangle of 6 by 6-inch bricks.
And yet I almost didn't find it. He must have waited while the
workers were finishing up. Then he went in while the mortar was still damp and pushed one brick slightly inward. He waited for a moment and then pulled it back into place. He kept at it until the mortar was dry. Quietly and calmly, the whole evening, at fifteen-minute intervals, he drifted down to the basement to move the brick an inch. That's what I imagine. You couldn't fit the blade of a knife in between the brick and the mortar. But when I press on it, it slides right in. At first I can't understand how he got it out, because there's nothing to grab hold of. Then I pick up the suction cup and stare at it. I can't shove the brick inward because it would simply fall into the wall cavity. But when I put the black rubber disk against the brick and use the little handle to create suction, the brick comes out toward me with a great deal of resistance. When I have it out, I understand why. A little blue nail has been pounded into the back. Twisted around it is a thin nylon cord. A big drop of epoxy, now hard as stone, had been applied to the nail and cord. The cord runs down into the wall cavity. On the end hangs a flat cigar box with two thick rubber bands around it. The whole thing is a dream of technical ingenuity.
I put the box in my coat pocket. Then I tuck the brick back in place.
Chivalry is an archetype. When I came to Denmark, Copenhagen County gathered a class of children at Rugmarken's School to learn Danish, near the welfare barracks for emigrants in Sundby on Amager. I sat next to a boy named Baral. I was seven and had short hair. During recess I played ball with the boys. After about three months there was a lesson in which we were supposed to say each other's names.
“And next to you, Baral, what is her name?”
“His name is Smilla.”
“
Her
name is Smilla. Smilla is a girl.”
He looked at me in mute astonishment. After the first shock had receded, and for the rest of the school year, there was only one real difference in his behavior toward me. It was now augmented by a pleasant, courteous helpfulness.
I found the same thing in Isaiah. He might suddenly switch over
to Danish in order to use
De
, the polite form of address, with me after he came to understand the inherent respect contained in that expression. Over the last three months, when Juliane's self destruction was greater and more directed than ever, he sometimes didn't want to go home at night.
“Do you think,” he said, addressing me formally in Danish, “that I could sleep here?”
After I had given him a bath I would put him up on the toilet seat while I rubbed him with lotion. From there he could see his own face in the mirror, sniffing suspiciously at the rose scent of Elizabeth Arden's night cream.
He has never, while awake, touched me. He never took my hand, he never gave any caresses, and he never asked for any. But during the night, he would sometimes roll over toward me, sound asleep, and lie there for several minutes. Against my skin he would get a diminutive erection that came and went, came and went, like Punch in a puppet show.
On those nights I wouldn't sleep much. At the slightest change in his rapid breathing, I woke up. Often I would simply lie awake, thinking that the air I was breathing was the air he had just exhaled.
Bertrand Russell wrote that pure mathematics is the field in which we don't know what we're talking about or to what extent what we say is true or false.
That's the way I feel about cooking.
I eat mostly meat. Fatty meat. I can't keep warm on vegetables and bread. I've never managed to acquire an understanding of my kitchen, of raw ingredients, or of the basic chemistry of cooking. I have only one simple work principle: I always make hot food. That's important when you live alone. It serves a mental hygienic purpose. It keeps you going.
Today it serves another purpose as well. It puts off two telephone calls. I don't like talking on the phone. I want to see whom I'm talking to.
I put Isaiah's cigar box on the table. Then I make the first call.
I'm actually hoping that it's too late; it'll be Christmas soon, and people should be leaving work early.
I call the Cryolite Corporation. The director is still in his office. He doesn't introduce himself; he is merely a voice, dry, implacable, and unsympathetic, like sand running through an hourglass. He informs me that the government was represented on the board, and since the company was now in the process of closing down, and the foundation was being reorganized, it had been decided to
transfer all papers to the national archives, which houses documents dealing with decisions made by public authorities. Some of the papers—he was not able to tell me which ones—would fall into the category of “general resolutions,” which remain confidential for fifty years, while others—again he could not, as I must understand, tell me which ones—would be regarded as personal files, which enjoy eighty years of protection.
I try asking him where the papers are, the papers in general.
All information is still physically under the safekeeping of the corporation, but formally the documents have already been accepted into the national archives, which is where I would have to inquire, and is there anything else he could do for me?
“Yes,” I say, “drop dead.”
I take the rubber bands off Isaiah's box.
The knives in my apartment are only sharp enough to open envelopes with. Cutting a slice of coarse bread is on the borderline of their ability. I don't need anything sharper. Otherwise, on bad days, it might easily occur to me that I could always go stand in the bathroom in front of the mirror and slit my throat. On such occasions it's nice to have the added security of needing to go downstairs and borrow a decent knife from a neighbor.
But I understand the love for a shiny blade. One day I bought a Puma skinner for Isaiah. He didn't thank me. His face showed no surprise. He lifted the short, wide-bladed knife out of the green felt box, carefully, and five minutes later he left. He knew, and I knew, and he knew that I knew, that he left to go down to the basement under the mechanic's workbench to curl up with his new possession, and that it would take months for him to comprehend that it was actually his.
Now it's lying in front of me, in its sheath, in his cigar box. With a wide, meticulously polished hilt of antler. There are four other things in the box. A harpoon point of the type children in Greenland find at abandoned encampments and which they know they're supposed to leave for the archaeologists but which they pick up and lug around anyway. A bear claw, and as usual I'm amazed at the hardness, weight, and sharpness of this one nail. A cassette tape, without a box but wrapped in a sheet of faded green
graph paper covered with figures. At the top it says in capital letters: NIFLHEIM.
And there is a plastic bus pass holder. The pass itself has been removed, so the holder now serves as a sleeve for a photograph. A color photo, probably taken with an Instamatic. In the summer, and it must be in North Greenland, because the man has his jeans stuffed into a pair of
kamiks.
He's sitting on a rock in the sunshine. He's bare-chested and has a big black diver's watch on his left wrist. He's laughing at the photographer, and at that moment, with every tooth and every wrinkle enhanced by his laughter, he is Isaiah's father.
It's late. But it seems to be a time when those of us who keep the machinery of society going give it one last kick before Christmas in order to earn our bonuses—this year it's a frozen duck and a little kiss behind the ear from the director.
So I open the phone book. The Copenhagen district attorney has offices on Jens Kofods Street.
I don't know exactly what I'm going to say to Ravn. Maybe I just need to tell him that I haven't been duped, that I haven't given up. I need to tell him, “You know what, you little fart? I just want you to know I'm keeping an eye on you.”
I'm prepared for any sort of reply.
Except for the one I get.
“There is no one by that name working here,” says a cold woman's voice.
I sit down. There's nothing to do but breathe gently into the receiver to stall for time.
“To whom am I speaking?” she asks.
I almost hang up the phone. But there's something in her voice that makes me stay on the line. There's something parochial about her. Narrow-minded and nosy. I'm suddenly inspired by that nosiness.
“This is Smilla,” I whisper, trying to put cotton candy between me and the mouthpiece. “From Smilla's Sauna Parlor. Mr. Ravn had an appointment for a massage that he wanted to change …”
“This Ravn, is he short and thin?”
“Like a toothpick, honey.”
“Wears big coats?”
“Like huge tents.”
I can hear her breathing harder. I'm positive her eyes are shining.
“It's the guy in the fraud division.”
Now she's happy. In her own way. I've given her this year's Christmas story to tell her bosom buddies over coffee and pastry the next morning.
“You have simply saved my day,” I say. “If you ever need a massage …”
She hangs up.
I take my tea over to the window. Denmark is a lovely country. And the police are particularly lovely. And surprising. They accompany the Royal Guard to Amalienborg Palace. They help lost ducklings cross the street. And when a little boy falls off a rooftop, first the uniformed police show up. And then the detectives. And finally the assistant district attorney for special economic crimes sends his representatives. How reassuring:
I pull out the jack. I've talked enough on the phone today. I've had the mechanic rig up something so I can turn off the doorbell, too.
I sit down on the sofa. First come the images from the day. I let them pass. Then come memories from when I was a child, vacillating between slight depression and mild elation; I let them go, too. Then comes peace. That's when I put on a record. Then I sit down and cry. I'm not crying about anything or anyone specific. The life I live I created for myself, and I wouldn't want it any different. I cry because in the universe there is something as beautiful as Kremer playing the Brahms violin concerto.

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