Smilla's Sense of Snow (7 page)

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.

8

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, widebladed 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.

9

According to a certain scientific theory you can only be sure of the existence of what you yourself have experienced. So there must be very few people who are completely convinced that Godthabs Road exists at five o'clock in the morning. At any rate, the windows are dark and empty, the streets are bare, and bus number 2 is empty except for the driver and me.

There's something special about five o'clock in the morning. It's as if sleep touches bottom. The curve of the REM cycle shifts direction and begins to lift the sleeper up toward the recognition that it cannot go on like this much longer. People are as vulnerable as newborn infants at that hour. That's when the big wild animals hunt, and when the police show up to demand payment of delinquent parking fines.

And that's when I take bus number 2 out to Brønshøj, to Kabbeleje Road at the edge of Utterslev Marsh, to pay a visit to forensic medicine expert Lagermann.

He recognized my voice on the phone before I had time to say my name and rattled off a time. "Six-thirty," he said. "Can you make it?"

So I arrive a little before six. People hold their lives together by means of the clock. If you make a slight change, something interesting nearly always happens.

Kabbeleje Road is dark. The houses are dark. The marsh at the end of the street is dark. It's freezing cold, the sidewalk is light gray with frost, the parked cars are covered with a glittering white fur coat. I'll be curious to see the sleepy face of the forensic medicine expert.

There is one house with lights on. Not merely with lights on but illuminated, and with figures moving behind the windows, as if a gala ball has been going on since last night and it's not over yet. I ring the bell. Smilla, the good fairy, the last guest before dawn.

Five people open the door, all at once, and then wedge themselves tightly into the doorway. Five children, from very small to medium-sized. And inside there are more. They're dressed for a raid, with ski boots and backpacks, leaving their hands free to punch somebody. They have milky-white skin, freckles, and copper-red hair under hats with earflaps, and they exude an air of hyperactive vandalism.

Right in the middle stands a woman who has the children's skin and hair color, with the height, shoulders, and back of an American football player. Behind her the forensic medicine expert comes into view.

He's a foot and a half shorter than his wife. He is fully dressed and inveterately red-eyed and chipper.

He doesn't raise an eyebrow at the sight of me. He lowers his head, and we plow our way through the shouts and through some rooms that show signs of barbarian migration, as if the wild hordes had passed this way and back again on their way home; then through a kitchen where sandwiches have been prepared for an entire battalion, and out through a door. He closes the door; it's suddenly quiet, dry, very hot, and there's a purple glow.

We're standing in a greenhouse built onto the house as a kind of winter garden. Except for a couple of narrow pathways, a little terrace with white wrought-iron furniture, and a table, the floor is covered with cactuses in beds and pots. Cactuses of all sizes, from a fraction of an

inch up to six feet high. In all stages of prickliness. Lit by ultraviolet grow lights.

"Dallas," he says. "Great place for putting together a collection. Otherwise I don't know whether I'd recommend it; hell if I know. On a Saturday night we could have up to fifty murders. We often had to work downstairs next to the emergency room. It was set up so we could do the autopsies there. It was practical. I learned a lot about gunshot wounds and stab wounds. My wife said I never saw the children. Hell, she was right, too." As he talks, he stares steadily at me.

"You're early, all right. Not that it matters to us; we're up, anyway. My wife got the kids into the nursery school in Allerod. So they could get out in the woods a little. Did you know the little boy?"

"I was a friend of the family. Especially him." We sit down across from each other.

"What do you want?"

"You gave me your card."

He ignores my remark. I sense that he's a man who has seen too much to waste time on pretenses. If he's going to reveal anything, he expects honesty.

So I tell him about Isaiah's fear of heights. About the tracks on the roof. About my visit with Professor Loyen. About Investigator Ravn.

He lights a cigar and looks at his cactuses. Maybe he hasn't understood what I've been telling him. I'm not sure I understand it myself.

"We have the only real institute," he says. "The others have four people fumbling around and they can't even get money for pipettes or for the white mice they need to graft their cell tests on. We have an entire building. We have pathologists and chemists and forensic geneticists. And the whole warehouse in the basement. Teach students, too. And we've got two hundred fucking employees. We get three thousand cases a year. If you're sitting in Odense you might see forty murders. I've had fifteen hundred here in Copenhagen. And just as many in Germany and the United States. There are only maybe three people, tops, in Denmark who can call themselves experts in forensic medicine. Loyen and I are two of them."

Next to his chair there is a cactus that looks like a tree stump in bloom: An explosion of purple and orange has risen out of the languid green, thorny, tree-like growth.