by Peter Høeg
In the wardrobe a raincoat, rubber boots, clogs, sweaters, undershirts, socks, all stuffed in every which way. I run my fingers through the piles of clothes and over the top of the wardrobe. There is nothing but the dust that fell last year.
On the bed are his things from the hospital in a clear plastic bag. Rain pants, sneakers, sweatshirt, underwear, and socks. From his pocket a soft white stone that he used for chalk.
Juliane is standing in the doorway, crying. “The diapers were the only thing I threw out.”
Once a month, when his fear of heights grew worse, Isaiah would wear diapers for a couple of days. One time I bought them for him myself.
“Where’s his knife?”
She doesn’t know.
On the windowsill there is a model ship, like an expensive shout into the soft-spokenness of the room. On the pedestal it says: “S.S. Johannes Thomsen of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark.”
I have never before attempted to pry into how she keeps her head above water.
I put my arm around her shoulders.
“Juliane,” I say, “would you please show me your papers?”
The rest of us have a drawer, a notebook, a file folder. Juliane has seven greasy envelopes for the safekeeping of the printed testimony of her existence. For many Greenlanders, the most difficult thing about Denmark is the paperwork. The state bureaucracy’s front line of paper: application forms, documents, and official correspondence with the proper public authorities. There is a certain elegant and delicate irony in the fact that even a practically illiterate life like Juliane’s has sloughed off this mountain of paper.
The little appointment slips from the alcoholism clinic on Sundholm, her birth certificate, fifty coupons from the bakery on Christianshavns Square (when they add up to 500 kroner you get a free pastry). Old tax deduction cards, statements from Bikuben Savings & Loan, and a card from Rudolph Bergh, a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases. A photograph of Juliane in the King’s Garden in the sunshine. Public Health insurance certificates, a passport, receipts from the electric company. Letters from Riber Credit Bureau. A bundle of thin slips of paper, like check stubs, from which it’s apparent that Juliane receives a pension of 9,400 kroner a month. At the bottom of the stack there is a bunch of letters. I have never been able to read people’s letters, so I skip the private ones. The ones at the bottom are official, typewritten. I’m about to put them all away when I see it.
A peculiar letter. “We hereby wish to inform you that the directors of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark, at their most recent meeting, have decided to grant you a widow’s pension following the death of Norsaq Christiansen. The monthly pension awarded to you is in the amount of 9,000 kroner, to be adjusted according to the current cost-of-living index.” The letter is signed, on behalf of the board of directors, by “E. Lübing, Chief Accountant.”
There’s nothing very odd about that. But after the letter was typed up, someone turned it 90 degrees. And with a fountain pen that person wrote diagonally in the margin: “I am so sorry. Elsa Lübing.”
You can learn something about your fellow human beings from what they write in the margin. People have speculated a great deal about Fermat’s vanished proof. In a book concerning the never-proven postulate that whereas it is frequently possible to divide the square of a number into the sum of two other squares, this is not possible with powers higher than two, Fermat wrote in the margin: “I’ve discovered a truly wonderful proof for this argument. Unfortunately, this margin is too narrow to contain it.”
Two years ago some woman sat in the office of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark and dictated this utterly proper letter. It adheres to all formalities, it has no typing mistakes, it is as it should be. Then she received it for approval and read it over and signed it. She sat there for a moment. And then she turned the paper around and wrote, “I am so sorry.”
“What did he die of?”
“Norsaq? He was on an expedition to the west coast of Greenland. There was an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“He ate something that made him sick. I think.”
She gazes at me helplessly. People die. You won’t get anywhere by wondering how or why.
“We consider the case closed.”
I have the Toenail on the phone. I’ve left Juliane to her own thoughts, which are now moving like plankton in a sea of sweet wine. Maybe I should have stayed with her. But I’m no angel of mercy. I can hardly take care of my own soul. And besides, I have my own hangups. That’s what made me call police headquarters. They connect me with Division A, and they tell me that the detective is still in his office. Judging by his voice, he’s been there far too long.
“The death certificate was signed today at four o’clock.”
“What about the footprints?” I ask.
“If you’d seen what I’ve seen, or if you had children of your own, you’d know how completely irresponsible and unpredictable they are.”
His voice shifts into a growl at the thought of all the grief his own brats have caused him.
“Of course, it’s only a matter of a shitty Greenlander,” I say.
There’s silence in the receiver. He is a man who, even after a long workday, has reserves for adjusting his thermostat to quick frost.
“Now I’m damned well going to tell you one thing. We do not discriminate. Whether it’s a pygmy that fell, or a serial killer and sex offender, we go all the way. All the way. Do you understand? I picked up the forensics report myself. There is no indication that this was anything but an accident. It’s tragic, but we have 175 of them a year.”
“I’m thinking of filing a complaint.”
“By all means, file a complaint.”
Then we hang up. In reality, I hadn’t thought about complaining. But I’ve had a hard day, too.
I realize the police have a lot to do. I understand him quite well. I understood everything he said.
Except for one thing. When I gave my statement the day before yesterday, I answered a lot of questions. But some of them I didn’t answer. One of them had to do with “marital status.” “That’s none of your business,” I told the officer. “Unless you’re interested in a date.”
Why would the police know anything about my private life? I ask myself: How did the Toenail know that I don’t have any children? I can’t answer that question.
It’s just a little question. But the world is always so busy wondering why a single, defenseless woman, if she’s in my age group, doesn’t have a husband and a couple of charming little toddlers. Over time you develop an allergic reaction to the question.
I get out a few sheets of unlined paper and an envelope and sit down at the kitchen table. At the top I write: “Copenhagen, December 19, 1993. To the Attorney General. My name is Smilla Jaspersen, and with this letter I would like to file a complaint.”
6
He looks as if he’s in his late forties, but he’s twenty years older. He’s wearing a black thermal jogging suit, cleated shoes, an American baseball cap, and fingerless leather gloves. He takes a little brown medicine bottle out of his breast pocket and empties it into his mouth with a practiced, almost discreet movement. It’s propranolol, a beta blocker that slows his heartbeat. He opens one of his hands and looks at it. It’s big and white and manicured and quite steady. He selects a number-one club, a driver, Taylormade, with a polished bell-shaped head of Brazilian rosewood. He places it beside the ball, then takes his backswing. When he strikes, he has all of his strength, all of his 190 pounds, focused on a point as big as a postage stamp, and the little yellow ball seems to dissolve and vanish. It comes into view again only when it lands on the green, all the way at the edge of the yard, where it obediently drops close to the flag.
“Cayman balls,” he says. “From McGregor. I always had trouble with the neighbors before. These only go half as far.”
He is my father. This show has been for my benefit, and I see right through it to what it really is.
A little boy’s plea for love. Which I have absolutely no intention of giving him.
Seen from my perspective, Denmark’s entire population is middle-class. The truly poor and the truly rich are so few as to be almost exotic.
I have been fortunate enough to know quite a few of the poor, since many of them are Greenlanders.
My father belongs to the truly wealthy.
He has a 67-foot Swan at Rungsted Marina with a full-time three-man crew. He has his own little island at the mouth of Ise Fjord where he can retreat to his Norwegian log cabin, and he can tell any uninvited tourists to beat it, fuck off. He is one of the few people in Denmark to own a Bugatti and have a man employed to polish it and warm up the grease in the axle box with a Bunsen burner on the two occasions a year when he puts in an appearance at the Bugatti Club vintage-car race. The rest of the time he makes do with playing the phonograph record sent out by the club, on which you can hear someone cranking up one of these wonderful vehicles, fine-tuning the choke, and giving it the gas.
He owns this house, white as snow and decorated with whitewashed cement seashells, with a roof of natural shale and with a winding stairway up to the entrance. With rosebeds in a front yard that drops steeply down to Strand Drive, and a back yard that’s big enough for a nine-hole practice course, which is just right, now that he’s gotten the new balls.
He earned his money giving injections.
He has never been one to leak information about himself, but whoever is interested can look him up in Who’s Who and discover that he became a chief of staff when he was thirty, that he held Denmark’s first chair in anesthesiology when it was established, and that five years later he left the hospital system to devote himself—as it’s so nicely put—to private practice. Later his fame took him out traveling. Not as a vagabond, but in private jets. He has given injections to the famous. He was in charge of the anesthesia at the first pioneering heart transplants in South Africa. He was with the American delegation of doctors in the Soviet Union when Brezhnev died. I’ve heard it said that my father was the one who delayed death during the last weeks of Brezhnev’s life, wielding his long syringes.
He resembles a longshoreman and discreetly cultivates this look by letting his beard grow out now and then. A beard that is now gray but which was once blue-black and still requires two shaves a day with a straight razor for him to look presentable.
His hands are unfailingly steady. With those hands he can push a 150-mm syringe through the flank, retroperitoneally, through the deep back muscles, into the aorta. Then he taps the tip of the needle lightly against the large artery, to be sure that he has gone far enough, and then goes behind it to leave a deposit of lidocaine up at the large nerve plexus. The central nervous system controls the tone of the arteries. He has a theory that by using this blockade, he can help the poor circulation in the legs of overweight wealthy people.
While he’s giving an injection he is as focused as any human being could be. He thinks of nothing else, not even the bill for ten thousand kroner that his secretary is typing up, and which will fall due before the first of January. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year—next, please.
During the past twenty-five years he has been among the two hundred golf players fighting for the last fifty Eurocards. He lives with a ballet dancer who is thirteen years younger than me and who walks around looking at him as if the only thing she lives for is the hope that he will strip the tulle tutu and toe shoes off her.
So my father is a man who possesses everything he can get his hands on. And that’s what he thinks he’s showing me here on the golf course. That he has everything his heart could desire. Even the beta-blockers, which he’s been taking for the past ten years to steady his hands, are largely without side effects.
We walk around the house, along the raked gravel paths; in the summer Sørensen, the gardener, takes a pair of shears to the edges, so you could cut your feet on them if you don’t watch out. I’m wearing a sealskin coat over a jumpsuit of embroidered wool with a zipper. Seen from a distance, we are a father and daughter with a plethora of wealth and vitality. On closer examination, we are simply a banal tragedy spread over two generations.
The living room has a floor of bog oak and borders of stainless steel around a wall of glass facing the birdbath and rosebushes and the drop in social status toward Strand Drive. Benja is standing at the fireplace wearing a leotard and woolen socks, stretching the muscles in her feet and ignoring me. She looks pale and lovely and naughty, like an elf maiden turned stripper.
“Brentan,” I say.
“I beg your pardon?”
She enunciates every syllable, the way she learned at the Royal Theater school.
“For bad feet, dear. Brentan for fungus between your toes. You can get it without a prescription now.”
“It’s not fungus,” she says coldly. “I don’t think people get that until they reach your age.”
“Juveniles do too, dear. Especially people who work out a lot. And it spreads to the crotch quite easily.”
Snarling, Benja retreats backward into the adjoining chambers. She has an abundance of raw energy, but she had a protected childhood and a skyrocketing career. She hasn’t yet experienced the adversity necessary to develop a psyche that can keep fighting back.
Señora Gonzales arranges the tea things on the coffee table, which is a three-inch-thick glass plate on top of a polished marble block.
“It’s been a long time, Smilla.”
He talks about his new paintings for a while, about the memoirs he’s writing, and about what he’s practicing on the piano. He’s stalling. Preparing himself for the impact from the blow that will come when I state my business, which has nothing to do with him. He’s grateful that I let him talk. But in reality neither of us has any illusions.
“Tell me about Johannes Loyen,” I say.
My father was in his early thirties when he came to Greenland and met my mother.
The Inuit Aisivak told Knud Rasmussen that in the beginning the world was inhabited only by two men, who were both great sorcerers. Since they wanted to multiply, one of them transformed his body in such a way that he could give birth; and then the two of them created many children.
In the 1860s the Greenland catechist Hanseeraq recorded in the diary of the Brethren Congregation, Diarium Friedrichstal, many examples of women who hunted as men did. There are examples in Rink’s collection of legends, and in Reports from Greenland. It has certainly never been commonplace, but it has happened. Caused by the excessive number of women, by death and necessity, and by the natural acceptance in Greenland that each of the sexes contains the potential to become its opposite.
As a rule, however, women have then had to dress like men, and they have had to renounce any sort of family life. The collective could tolerate a change in sex, but not a fluid transition state.
It was different with my mother. She laughed and gave birth to her children and gossiped about her friends and cleaned skins like a woman. But she shot and paddled a kayak and dragged meat home like a man.
When she was about twelve years old, she went out on the ice with her father in April, and there he shot at an uuttoq, a seal sunning itself on the ice. He missed. For other men there might be various reasons why they would miss. For my grandfather there was only one. Something irreversible was about to happen. Calcification of the optic nerve. A year later he was totally blind.
On that day in April my mother stayed behind while her father walked on to check a long line. There she had time to ponder the various possibilities for her future. Such as the welfare assistance which even today is below subsistence level in Greenland and at that time was a kind of unintentional joke. Or death by starvation, which was not uncommon, or a life of depending on kinfolk who didn’t even have enough for themselves.
When the seal popped up again, she shot it.
Before, she had jigged for sea scorpions and Greenland halibut, and hunted for grouse. With this seal she became a hunter.
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I think it was rare for her to step outside herself and take an objective look at her role. But it happened once when we were living in tents at the summer encampment near Atikerluk, a mountain that is invaded by auks in the summertime, by so many black, white-breasted birds that only someone who has seen it can fully grasp the vast numbers. They defy measurement.
We had come from the north, where we were fishing for narwhals from small, diesel-powered cutters. One day we caught eight animals. Partly because the ice had trapped them in a restricted area, partly because the three boats lost contact with each other. Eight narwhals are far too much meat, even for dog food. Far too much meat.
One of them was a pregnant female. The nipple is located right above the genital opening. When my mother opened the abdominal cavity with a single cut to remove the intestines, an angel-white, perfectly formed pup two and a half feet long slid out onto the ice.
For close to four hours the hunters stood around in virtual silence, gazing out at the midnight sun, which at that time of year brings perpetual light, and ate mattak, narwhal skin. I couldn’t eat a single bite.
One week later we are camping out near the bird mountain, and we haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours. The technique is to melt into the landscape, waiting, and take the bird with a large net. On the second try I get three.
They were females, on their way to their young. They nest on ledges on the steep slopes, where the young make an infernal racket. The mothers hide the worms they find in a kind of pouch in their beaks. You kill them by pressing on their heart. I had three birds.
There had been so many before these. So many birds killed, cooked in clay, and eaten; so many that I couldn’t remember them all. And yet I suddenly see their eyes as tunnels, at the end of which their young are waiting, and the babies’ eyes are in turn tunnels, at the end of which is the narwhal pup, whose gaze in turn leads inward and away. Ever so slowly I turn over the net, and with a great explosion of sound, the birds rise into the air.