Smilla's Sense of Snow (23 page)

"There was a conference on the topic in Copenhagen, in March of '92," I say.

He stifles a groan as he tries to make his brain function. What finally gets it going is the fact that my question turns out to have something to do with him.

"I was invited," he says.

"Why didn't you go?"

"There was too much to read."

He has been saying for years that he has given up reading. First of all, it's a lie. Second, it's an insufferable way of intimating that he has grown so smart that the rest of the world has nothing more to teach him. "Neocatastrophism is a collective term. It was coined by Schindewolf sometime in the sixties. He was a paleontologist. But all kinds of scholars in the natural sciences have taken part in the debate. What they agree on is that the earth-and, in particular, its biology-has not evolved at an even pace but in leaps, which have been directed by great natural catastrophes that favor the survival of specific species. Meteor showers, comets, volcanic eruptions, spontaneous chemical disasters. The core of the debate has always been the question of whether these catastrophes occur at regular intervals. And if they do, what determines the frequency? An international association was established. Their first meeting was in Copenhagen. At the Falkoner Conference Center. Opened by the Queen. They spared no expense. They get money from left and right. The unions contribute because they think it's research about environmental disasters. Those in the industrial sector contribute because they think that at least it's not about environmental disasters. The research councils contribute because the association has some big names to flaunt."

"Does the name Hviid mean anything in that connection? Tørk Hviid?"

"There was a composer named Hviid."

"I don't think he's the one."

"You know I can't remember names, Smilla."

That's true. He can remember bodies. Titles. He can reconstruct every golf stroke in every sizable tournament he has played in. But he regularly forgets the name of his own secretary. It's symptomatic. For the truly self-centered person, the surrounding world pales and becomes nameless.

"Why didn't you go to that conference?"

"It was too much of a hodgepodge for my taste, Smilla. With all the opposing interests, all the politics. You know I avoid politics. They didn't even dare use the word 'catastrophe' when it came right down to it. They called it the `Center for Developmental Research.' "

"Can you find out who Hviid is?"

He takes a deep breath, full of his unexpected power. "Then I can count on you coming out here tomorrow," he says.

I'm about to tell him to send the information to me. But I'm feeling weak and rather soft. He can tell.

"You can meet me and Benja at the Savarin tomorrow."

It sounds like an order, but it's meant as a quick compromise.

One of the children opens the door.

I'm among the first to admit that a cold weather climate is unpredictable. But I'm still momentarily surprised. Outside, it's five o'clock in the evening. The first stars have appeared in the navy-blue, cloudless sky. But inside, around the child, it's snowing. A fine layer covers her red hair, her shoulders, her face, and her bare arms.

I follow her. In the living room there is flour everywhere. Three children are kneading dough right on the hardwood floor. In the kitchen their mother is greasing cookie sheets. On the kitchen table a little girl is kneading something that looks like pastry dough. Now she's trying to knead an egg yolk into it. With her hands and feet.

"The bottom fell out of the flour sack in the living room."

"I see. The floor will be wonderfully clean."

"He's out in the conservatory. I've forbidden him to smoke in here."

She has an authoritative strength, like my childhood image of God. And an unflappable gentleness like Santa Claus in a Disney film. If you want to know who the real heroes of world history are, just look at the mothers. In the kitchens, with the cookie sheets. While the men are sitting on the toilet. Out in the hammocks. Out in the conservatory.

He's brushing off the cactuses. The air is thick with cigar smoke. He has a little brush, as narrow as a toothbrush but with long bristles, curved, and maybe twelve inches long.

"It's so the pores won't clog up. That would prevent them from breathing."

"All things considered," I say, "that might be an advantage."

He gives me a guilty look. "My wife won't let me smoke around the children."

He shows me the stump of his cigar.

"Romeo and Giulietta. A classic Havana. And it tastes damn good. Especially the last inch. When you're just about to singe your lips. That's where it's saturated with nicotine."

I hang my yellow down jacket over the back of one of the white wrought-iron chairs. Then I take the scarf off my head. There's a piece of gauze underneath. I take that off, too. The mechanic cleaned the wound and rubbed chlorhexidine ointment on it. I bend my head down so he can see it.

When I lift my head up, his eyes are hard.

"A burn," he says thoughtfully. "You were in the vicinity, perhaps?"

"I was on board."

He washes his hands in a deep stainless-steel sink. "How did you manage to survive?"

"I swam."

He dries his hands and comes back. He touches the wound. It feels as if he's sticking his hands into my brain. "It's superficial," he says. "You're probably not going to be bald."

I called him at University Hospital earlier that day. I don't give my name, but it's not necessary, anyway. "The ship that burned in the harbor," I say. "There was a man on board."

It was the lead story on the radio. The newspapers had it on the front page. The photo was taken at night, in the light of the fire department's spotlights. In the middle of the harbor three charred masts loom out of the water. The rigging and yardarms are gone. But nothing was mentioned about any casualties.

He says very slowly, "Is that right?"

"I must have the results of the autopsy." He's silent for a long time.

"Hell and damnation," he says. "I have a family to feed."

I have nothing to say to that. "This afternoon. After four."

He sits down across from me, taking off the cellophane and paper ring of a cigar. He has a box of extra-long matches. He uses one to bore a hole in the conical, curved end of the rounded, rolled tobacco leaf. Then he lights it, carefully and meticulously. When it's burning evenly, he fixes his gaze on me.

"It wasn't you, by chance, who killed him, was it?" he says.

"No."

While he talks, he continues to stare at me, as if trying to examine my conscience.

"If a person drowns, the first thing to happen is that he tries to hold his breath. When he can't hold it any longer, he takes a couple of deep, desperate breaths. That pumps water into the lungs. This motion creates whitish protein material in the nose and throat, based on the same principle as when you beat egg whites. It's called froth. This person-whom I ought not, to discuss, and particularly with someone who might be involved in the crime-this person has no trace of it. So he didn't drown, at any rate."

He carefully taps the ash from his cigar.

"He was already dead when I went on board."

He hardly hears me. His thoughts are still on that morning and the autopsy.

"First they tied him up. With pieces of copper wire. He put up a hell of a fight, but they finally got him tied up. There must have been a couple of them. He was a strong man. An elderly gentleman, but strong. Then they bent his head to one side. You're familiar with sodium hydroxide-lye. An extremely caustic base. One person held him by his hair. Several clumps were torn out. And then they dripped lye into his right ear. Nice and easy, just like that, damn it all."

He regards his cigar thoughtfully. "You can't be in my business without running into torture now and then. It's a complicated subject. A hell of a subject. The legal definition, by the way, says that it has to be carried out by an organization. The important thing for the torturer is to find the victim's weak point. And this man was blind. That's not something I discovered. I didn't know that until we got his medical records. But they knew it. So they concentrated on his hearing. Damned inventive, you have to give them that. It's psychopathic. But it has a creative streak. What you can't help wondering is what they were after."

I think about the curator's voice on the telephone, about what I had thought was a muffled laugh. They had already broken him by then.

"He had cotton in his ears."

"Glad to hear it. It was gone when he was fished out. But I guessed about the cotton. When I found the little burns. At some point they reached the end of the line with him. Whenever that might have been. And so they did something quite clever. They moistened some cotton, maybe with lye, since it was handy. They then split an electrical cord and put one pole in each ear. And plugged it in. And then calmly turned on the switch. Dead on the spot. Quick, cheap, clean."

He shakes his head. He's a doctor, not a psychologist. He finds the world in which we live beyond comprehension.

"A couple of fucking professionals. But if I believed in New Year's resolutions, mine would be to make them pay."

I wake up around 1:00 a.m. One second I'm sleeping, the next I'm awake.

He's lying next to me. On his stomach with his hands down at his side. Asleep, one side of his face is pressed flat against the sheet. His mouth and nose vibrate gently, as if he were sniffing at a flower. Or were about to kiss a child.

I lie quietly and look at him in a way I haven't been able to before. His hair is brown, with a few gray streaks. It's thick, like the bristles of a broom. Burying your fingers in it is like grabbing a horse's mane.

There in bed, happiness comes over me. Not like something that belongs to me, but like a wheel of fire rolling through the room and the world.

For a moment I think I'll manage to let it pass and be able to lie there, aware of what I have, and not wish for anything more.

The next moment I want to hang on. I want it to continue. He has to lie beside me tomorrow, too. This is my chance. My only, my last chance.

I swing my legs onto the floor. Now I'm panic-stricken. This is what I've been working to avoid for thirty-seven years. I've systematically practiced the only thing in the world that is worth learning. How to renounce. I've stopped hoping for anything. When experienced humility becomes an Olympic discipline, I'll be on the national team.

I've never had any patience for other people's unhappy love affairs. I hate their weakness. I watch them find a man at the end of the rainbow. I watch them have children and buy a Silver Cross royal blue baby buggy and walk along the embankment in the spring sunshine and laugh condescendingly at me and think, Poor Smilla, she doesn't know what she's missing, she doesn't know what life is like for those of us who have babies and a marriage certificate.

Four months later there's a reunion for their old prenatal care group, and her dear Ferdinand has a little relapse and lines up a few hits on a mirror, and she finds him in the bathroom where he's rolling around with one of the other happy mothers, and in a nanosecond she's reduced from the great, proud, sovereign, invulnerable mama to a spiritual gnome. At one stroke she falls to my level and below, and becomes an insect, a worm, a centipede.

And then they take me out and dust me off. Then I'm supposed to listen to how hard it is to be a single mother after the divorce, how they had a fight over splitting up the stereo, how her youth is being sucked out by the child, who is now a machine that uses her and gives nothing in return.

I've never wanted to listen to that. "What the hell do you want?" I've said to them. "Do you think I edit some kind of lovelorn column? Do you think I'm your diary? An answering machine?"

There's one thing that is forbidden on journeys by sled, and that is whimpering. Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease. I refuse to listen to it. I refuse to be saddled with these orgies of emotional pettiness.

That's why I'm scared now. Standing there on his floor, next to his bed, I can hear something. It's coming from inside me, and it's a whimper. It's the fear that what has been given to me won't last. It's the sound of all the unhappy love stories I've never wanted to listen to. Now it sounds as if they're all contained within me.

But I can still be saved. I can gather up my clothes and put them under my arm. I don't even have to take time to get dressed. I can just walk out and run up the stairs. In my apartment I'll pack the essentials, or not even that much. I'll call a moving company and arrange to have my furnishings moved out and put in storage, and then I'll put my money box in one pocket and Isaiah's tape in the other, and I'll move into a hotel, so that I'm gone when he wakes up and I'll never have to look him in the eye again. He opens his eyes and looks at me. He lies there quite still, trying to figure out where he is. Then he smiles at me.

I remember that I'm naked. I turn my back to him and walk sideways over to my clothes. He folded them for me; they haven't been folded that way since I bought them. I put on my underwear. Modesty is part of the fundamental nature of human beings. It makes me sick to think of the European idea that they can solve all their own self-induced sexual neuroses by laying the meat on the table and putting it under a microscope.

I go into the living room. I have no idea what to do with myself.

He comes in a moment later. He's wearing boxer shorts. They're white and reach down to his knees and they're big enough to be made out of a comforter cover. He looks like a half-naked cricket player.

I notice them now, and remember that I saw them yesterday, too. He has narrow black lines around his wrists and ankles. They are scars. I don't want to ask him about it.

He comes over to me and kisses me. Even though we at no time have been drunk, you might say that this is our first sober embrace.

Not until now do I remember yesterday. So clearly it's as though the glow of the fire were on the walls of the apartment, right now.