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Authors: Peter Høeg

BOOK: Smilla's Sense of Snow
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On an August day a year and a half earlier I met Isaiah for the first time. A humid, leaden heat had transformed Copenhagen into an incubator for imminent madness. I came home on a bus with that special pressure-cooker atmosphere, wearing a new dress of white linen, cut low in the back, trimmed with Valencia ruffles that took a long time to steam-press so they'd stand up properly, and they had already wilted in the general depression.
There are those who head south this time of year. South to the heat. Personally, I've never been farther than Køge, thirty miles south of Copenhagen. And don't plan to go either, until the nuclear winter has cooled down the continent.
It's the kind of day that might make you wonder about the meaning of life, and discover that there is none. And there's something rooting around on the stairway, on the landing below my apartment.
When the first large shipments of Greenlanders began arriving in Denmark in the 1930s, one of the first things they wrote home was that Danes are such pigs: they keep dogs in their houses. For a moment I think it's a dog lying on the stairs. Then I see that it's a child, and on this particular day that is not much better.
“Beat it, you little shit,” I say.
Isaiah looks up.
“Peerit,”
he says. Beat it yourself.
There aren't many Danes who can tell by looking at me. They think there's a trace of something Asian, especially when I put a shadow under my cheekbones. But the boy on the stairs looks right at me with a gaze that cuts straight through to what he and I have in common. It's the kind of look you see in newborns. Later it vanishes, sometimes reappearing in extremely old people. This could be one reason I've never burdened my life with children—I've thought too much about why people lose the courage to look each other in the eye.
“Will you read me a story?”
I have a book in my hand. That's what prompted his question.
You might say that he looks like a forest elf. But since he is filthy, dressed only in underpants, and glistening with sweat, you might also say he looks like a seal pup.
“Piss off,” I say.
“Don't you like kids?”
“I eat kids.”
He steps aside.
“
Salluvutit,
you're lying,” he says as I go past.
At that moment I see two things in him that somehow link us together. I see that he is alone. The way someone in exile will always be. And I see that he is not afraid of solitude.
“What's the book?” he shouts after me.
“Euclid's
Elements
,” I say, slamming the door.
It turned out to be Euclid's
Elements
, after all.
That's the one I take out that very evening when the doorbell rings and he's standing outside, still in his underpants, staring straight at me; and I step aside and he walks into my apartment and into my life, never really to leave it again; then I take Euclid's
Elements
down from the bookshelf. As if to chase him away. As if to establish from the start that I have no books that would interest a child, that he and I cannot meet over a book, or in any other way. As if to avoid something.
We sit down on the sofa. He sits on the very edge, with both legs crossed, the way kids from Thule used to sit at Inglefield in
the summertime, on the edge of the dogsled used as a bed inside the tent.
“A point is that which cannot be divided. A line is a length without breadth.”
This book turns out to be the one he never comments on, and the one we keep returning to. Occasionally I try others. One time I borrow the children's book
Rasmus Klump on the Ice Cap
. In all serenity he listens to the description of the first pictures. Then he points a finger at the toylike bear Rasmus Klump.
“What does that one taste like?” he asks.
“A semicircle is a figure contained within a diameter … and the circumference intersected by the diameter.”
For me, the reading goes through three phases on that first evening in August.
First there is simply irritation at the whole impractical situation. Then there is the feeling that always comes over me at the mere thought of that book: veneration. The knowledge that it is the foundation, the boundary. That if you work your way backwards, past Lobachevsky and Newton and as far back as you can go, you end up at Euclid.
“On the greater of two given unequal straight lines …”
Then at some point I no longer see what I'm reading. At some point there is only my voice in the living room and the light of the sunset from the South Harbor. And then my voice isn't even there; it's just me and the boy. At some point I stop. And we simply sit there, gazing straight ahead, as if I were fifteen and he were sixteen, and we have reached “the point of no return.” Some time later he gets up very quietly and leaves. I watch the sunset, which lasts three hours at this time of year. As if the sun, on the verge of leaving, had discovered qualities in the world that are now making its departure a reluctant one.
Of course Euclid didn't scare him off. Of course it made no difference what I read. For that matter, I could have read aloud from the telephone book. Or from Lewis and Carrisa's
Detection and Classification of Ice
. He would have come anyway, to sit with me on the sofa.
During some periods he would come every day. And then a
couple of weeks might pass when I would see him only once, and from a distance. But when he did come, it was usually just starting to get dark, when the day was over and Juliane was out cold.
Once in a while I would give him a bath. He didn't like hot water, but it was impossible to get him clean in cold. I would put him in the bathtub and turn on the hand-held shower. He wouldn't complain. Long ago he had learned to put up with adversity. But not for one moment did he take his reproachful eyes off my face.
There have been quite a few boarding schools in my life. I regularly work at suppressing the memory of them, and for long periods of time I succeed. It's only in glimpses that a single memory sometimes manages to work its way into the light. The way the particular feeling of a dormitory does at this moment. At Stenhøj School, near Humlebæk, we slept in dorms. One for girls and one for boys. They opened all the windows at night. And our blankets were too thin.
In the Copenhagen county morgue in the basement of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University Hospital, the dead sleep their last, cold sleep in dormitories cooled to just above freezing. Everything is clean, modern, and final. Even in the examination room, which is painted like a living room; they've brought in a couple of floor lamps, and a green plant is trying to keep up its courage.
There's a white sheet over Isaiah. Someone has placed a little bunch of flowers on top of it, as if in an attempt to give the potted plant support. He is completely covered, but from the small body and large head, you can tell it's him. The French cranium measurers ran into serious problems in Greenland. They were working from the theory that there was a linear relation between a person's intelligence
and the size of his skull. They discovered that the Green-landers, whom they regarded as a transitional form of ape, had the largest skulls in the world.
A man in a white lab coat lifts the sheet away from Isaiah's face. He looks so intact, as if he had been carefully drained of all blood and color and then put to bed.
Juliane is standing next to me. She's dressed in black, and she is sober for the second day in a row.
As we walk down the hallway, the white coat goes with us.
“You're a relative?” he suggests. “A sister?”
He's no taller than me, but broad and with a stance like a ram about to butt someone.
“Doctor,” he says. He points to the breast pocket of his lab coat and discovers that there is no name tag to identify him. “Damn it to hell.”
I continue down the hallway. He's right behind me.
“I have children myself,” he says. “Do you know whether it was a doctor who found him?”
“A mechanic,” I say.
He takes the elevator up with us. I suddenly feel a need to know who has touched Isaiah.
“Did you examine him?”
He doesn't answer. Maybe he didn't hear me. He strides on ahead of us. At the glass door he suddenly whips out a card, the way a flasher tears aside his coat.
“My card. Jean Pierre, like the flute player. Lagermann, like the licorice.”
Juliane and I haven't said a word to each other. But as she gets into the taxi and I'm just about to close the door, she grabs hold of my hand.
“That Smilla is a damn great lady,” she says, as if she were talking about someone who's not there. “One hundred percent.”
The cab drives off, and I straighten up. It's almost noon. I have an appointment.
It says “State Autopsy Center for Greenland” on the glass door I come to after I walk back along Frederik V's Street, past the Teilum
building and the Institute of Forensic Medicine over to the new annex of the University Hospital; I take the elevator up past floors marked on the button panel as the Greenland Medical Association, the Arctic Center, and the Institute for Arctic Medicine, on up to the sixth floor, which is a penthouse suite.
That morning I had called police headquarters and they transferred me to Division A, who put the Toenail on the line.
“You can see him in the morgue,” he says.
“I also want to talk to the doctor.”
“Loyen,” he says. “You can talk to Loyen.”
Beyond the glass door there is a short passageway leading to a sign on which it says PROFESSOR and, in smaller letters, J. LOYEN. Below the sign there is a doorway, and beyond the door a cloakroom, and beyond that a chilly office with two secretaries sitting under photostats of icebergs on blue water in brilliant sunlight, and beyond that the real office begins.
They haven't put in a tennis court here. But not for lack of space. It's probably because Loyen has a couple of them in his back yard in Hellerup, and two more at his summer home on Dune Road in Skagen. And because tennis courts would have ruined the weighty solemnity of the room.
There's a thick carpet on the floor, two walls covered with books, picture windows looking out over the city and Fælled Park, a safe built into the wall, paintings in gold frames, a microscope on a light table, a glass case with a gilded mask that appears to be from an Egyptian sarcophagus, two sofa groups, two monitors on pedestals that have been turned off, and there's still enough floor space to go for a jog should you get tired of sitting behind a desk.
The desk is a vast mahogany ellipse from which he rises and comes forward to greet me. He is six foot seven and about seventy years old, straight-backed, and tan as a desert sheik in his white lab coat. He has a kind expression on his face, like someone who sits up on a camel benevolently gazing down on the rest of the world crawling past in the sand.
“Loyen.”
Even though he omits his title, it's still understood. Along with the fact that we must not forget that the rest of the world's population is at least a head shorter than him, and here, under his feet,
he has legions of other doctors who have not succeeded in becoming professors, and above him is only the white ceiling, the blue sky, and Our Lord—and maybe not even that.
“Please sit down, my dear.”
He radiates courtesy and dominance, and I ought to be happy. Other women before me have been happy, and there will be many more. What could be better at life's difficult moments than having six feet seven inches of polished medical self-confidence to lean on? And in such reassuring surroundings as these?
On his desk are framed photographs of the doctor's wife and the Airedale and Daddy's three big boys, who are bound to study medicine and get top grades in all their exams, including clinical sexology.
I've never claimed that I was perfect. Confronted with people who have power, and who enjoy using it, I turn into a different person, a baser and meaner one.
But I don't show it. I sit down on the very edge of the chair, and I place my dark gloves and the hat with the dark veil on the very edge of the mahogany surface. Facing Professor Loyen, like so many times before, there is a black-clad, grieving, inquiring, uncertain woman.
“You're a Greenlander?”
It's because of his professional experience that he can see it.
“My mother was from Thule. You were the one who … examined Isaiah?”
He gestures affirmatively.
“What I'd like to know is: what did he die of?”
The question catches him a little off guard.
“From the fall.”
“But what does that mean, physiologically?”
He thinks it over for a moment, not used to having to explain the obvious.
“He fell from a height of seven stories. The organism as a whole quite simply collapses.”
“But somehow he looked so unscathed.”
“That's normal with accidental falls, my dear. But …”
I know what he's going to say: Until we open them up, that is. Then it's nothing but splinters of bone and internal bleeding.
“But he wasn't,” he finishes his sentence.
He straightens up. He has other things to do. The conversation is drawing to a close without ever getting started. Like so many conversations before and after this one.
“Was there any trace of violence?”
This doesn't surprise him. At his age and in his business he is not easily surprised.
“None at all,” he says.
I sit there in total silence. It's always interesting to leave Europeans in silence. For them it's a vacuum in which the tension grows and converges toward the intolerable.
“What gave you that idea?”
He has now dropped the “my dear.” I ignore his question.
“Why is it that this office and this department are not located in Greenland?” I ask.
“The institute is only three years old. Previously there was no autopsy center for Greenland. The district attorney in GodthÃ¥b would send word to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Copenhagen whenever it was necessary. This department is new and temporary. The whole thing is going to be moved to GodthÃ¥b sometime next year.”
“And you?” I ask.
He's not used to being interrogated, and any moment now he's going to stop answering. “I'm head of the Institute for Arctic Medicine. But originally I was a forensic pathologist. During this initial phase I am the acting director of the autopsy center.”
“Do you perform all of the forensic autopsies on Greenlanders?”
It's a shot in the dark. But it must have been a hard, flat shot all the same, because it makes him blink.
“No,” he says, speaking slowly now, “but I sometimes assist the Danish autopsy center. They have thousands of cases every year, from all over the country.”
I think about Jean Pierre Lagermann.
“Did you perform the autopsy alone?”
“We have a set routine that is followed except in extraordinary cases. There is one doctor, with a lab technician or sometimes a nurse to assist him.”
“Is it possible to see the autopsy report?”
“You wouldn't be able to understand it, anyway. And you wouldn't like what you did understand!”
For a brief moment he has lost his self-control. But it's instantly restored. “These reports are the property of the police, who formally request the autopsies. And who decide, by the way, when the burial can take place after they sign the death certificate. Public access to administrative details applies to civil matters, not criminal ones.”
He's into the game and approaching the net. His voice takes on a soothing tone. “You must understand, in a case like this, if there is even the slightest doubt about the circumstances of the accident, both we and the police are interested in the most thorough investigation possible. We look for everything. And we find everything. In a case of molestation it's virtually impossible to avoid leaving marks. There are fingerprints, torn clothing; the child defends himself and gets skin cells under his fingernails. There was nothing like that. Nothing.”
So that was the set and match. I get up and put on my gloves. He leans back.
“We looked at the police report, of course,” he says. “It was quite clear from the footprints that he was alone on the roof when it happened.”
I start the long walk to the middle of the room, and from there I look back at him. I'm on to something but I don't know what it is. But now he's back up on his camel.
“You're welcome to phone again, my dear.”
It takes a moment before the dizziness subsides.
“We all have our phobias,” I say. “Something that we're truly terrified of. I have mine. You probably have yours, when you take off that bulletproof white coat. Do you know what Isaiah's was? It was heights. He would race up to the second floor. But from there he crawled, with his eyes closed and both hands on the banister. Picture that—every day, on the stairway, inside the building, with sweat on his forehead and his knees buckling, five minutes to get from the second to the fourth floor. His mother had tried to get a ground-floor apartment before they moved in. But you know how it is—when you're a Greenlander and on welfare …”
There's a good long pause before he replies. “Nevertheless, he
was
up there.”
“Yes,” I say, “he was. But you could have tried a hydraulic lift. You could have tried a Hercules crane and you still wouldn't have budged him even a foot up that scaffolding. What puzzles me, what keeps me awake at night, is wondering what made him go up there at all.”
I can still see Isaiah's tiny figure before me, lying down there in the basement morgue. I don't even look at Loyen. I simply walk out the door.

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