Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  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.

  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 Godthåbs 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 Allerød. 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.

  “The morning after the boy was brought in, we were busy. Drunk drivers and Christmas parties. Every afternoon at four o‘clock the fucking police are standing there waiting for a report. So at eight o’clock I start on the boy. You’re not squeamish, are you? We have a certain routine. First an external examination. We look for cell tissue under the fingernails, for sperm in the rectum, and then we open them up and look at the internal organs.”

  “Are the police present?”

  “Only under unusual circumstances, for instance if there is strong suspicion of murder. Not on this occasion. This was routine. He was wearing rain pants. I hold them up, thinking to myself that they’re not what you would wear for doing the long jump. I have a little trick. The kind of thing you invent in any profession. I hold a light bulb inside the pant legs. Helly Hansen. Sturdy stuff. I wear them myself when I work in the garden. But near the thigh there’s a perforation. I examine the boy. Purely routine. There I find a hole. I should have noticed it when I was doing the surface examination, I tell you that quite frankly, but what the hell, we’re all human. Then I start to frown. Because there wasn’t any bleeding, and the tissue hasn’t contracted. Do you know what that means?”

  “No,” I say.

  “It means that whatever happened at that spot occurred after his heart stopped beating. Now I take a closer look at his rain gear. There’s a little indentation around the hole, and the whole thing rings a bell. So I get out a biopsy needle. A kind of syringe, quite big, attached to a handle. You plunge it into the tissue to get a sample. The way geologists take core samples. Used a lot by sports physiologists over at the August Krogh Institute. And damn if it doesn’t fit! The circle on the rain gear could have been caused by someone who was in a hurry, who shoved it in with a good whack.”

  He leans toward me. “I’ll eat my old hat if someone hasn’t taken a muscle biopsy from him.”

  “The ambulance medic?”

  “I thought of that, too. It doesn’t make any sense, but who the hell else could it be? So I call them up and ask them. I talk to the driver. And the medic. And to our orderlies who received the body. They all swear on a stack of Bibles that they did nothing of the kind.”

  “Why didn’t Loyen tell me this?”

  For an instant he seems about to explain. Then the intimacy between us is broken.

  “Must be a fucking coincidence,” he mutters to himself.

  He turns off the grow lights. We have been sitting surrounded by night on all sides. Now it’s becoming noticeable that, in spite of everything, there will be some sort of daylight, after all. The house is quiet. It’s sitting there gasping soundlessly, trying to catch its breath before the next Armageddon.

  I take a short walk along the narrow pathways. There’s something obstinate about cactuses. The sun tries to hold them down, the desert wind wants to hold them down, and the drought, and the night frost. Yet they thrive. They bristle, they retreat behind a thick shell. And they don’t budge an inch. I regard them with sympathy.

  Lagermann reminds me of his plants. Maybe that’s why he collects cactus. Without knowing his background, I can tell that he must have had several cubic yards of concrete to break through to reach the light.

  We are standing next to a bed with green sea urchins that look as if they’ve been out in a storm of cotton.

  “Pilocereus senilis,” he says.

  Nearby there is a row of pots with smaller green and violet plants.

  “Mescaline. Even the big places—the Botanical Gardens in Mexico City, say, or Cesar Mandriques’s cactus museum on Lanzarote—have no more than I do. One little sliver and you’re way out there. Or so I’ve heard. I’m a sensible man. A rationalist. We examine the brain. Slice off a piece. Afterward the assistant puts the skull back in place and pulls up the scalp. Can’t tell the difference. I’ve seen thousands of brains. There’s nothing mysterious about it. It’s chemistry—the whole works. As long as you have enough information. Why do you think he ran up onto that roof?”

  For the first time I feel like giving an honest answer. “I think someone was after him.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s not like kids to run that far. Mine sit down and start howling. Or freeze.”

  The mechanic once rebuilt a bicycle for Isaiah. He hadn’t learned to ride a bike in Greenland. When it was ready he took off. The mechanic found him six miles away on the Old Køge Highway, with training wheels and a lunchbox on the baggage rack. On his way to Greenland. He was headed in that direction because Juliane had been in Hvidovre Hospital once for the DTs.

  From the age of seven, when I came to Denmark for the first time, until I was thirteen and gave up, I ran away more times than I can remember. Twice I made it to Greenland, and one of those times as far as Thule. It’s just a matter of attaching yourself to a family and pretending your mother is sitting five seats ahead in the plane or standing a little farther back in the line. The world is full of adventure stories about lost parrots and Persian cats and French bulldogs that miraculously find their way home to Mother and Father on Frydenholms Avenue. That’s nothing compared to the countless miles children have put behind them in search of a decent life.

  This is all something I might try to explain to Lagermann. But I don’t.

  We’re standing in the front hallway, among the boots, the skateblade protectors, remains of provisions, and miscellaneous items left behind by the troops.

  “What now?”

&nb
sp; “I’m looking for the logical explanation,” I say, “that you were talking about before. Until I find it, I’m not going to feel much in the Christmas spirit.”

  “Don’t you have a job you have to go to?”

  I don’t answer. Suddenly he lays down all his thorns. When he speaks, he has stopped swearing.

  “I’ve seen hundreds of relatives who have been overwhelmed by grief. Hundreds of talented private citizens who thought they could do it better than we and the police could. I’ve looked at their ideas and their tenacity, and I said to myself, I give them five minutes. But with you I’m not so sure …”

  I attempt a smile that’s supposed to reciprocate his optimism. But it’s too early in the morning even for me.

  Instead, I suddenly discover that I’ve turned toward him and blown him a kiss. From one desert plant to another.

  I’m no expert on types of cars. As far as I’m concerned, you could send all the cars in the world through a compacter and shoot them out through the stratosphere and put them in orbit around Mars. Except, of course, the taxis that have to be at my disposal when I need them.

  But I do have some idea what a Volvo 840 looks like. For the past few years Volvo has sponsored the Europe Tour golf tournament, and they used my father in a series of ads about men and women who had made it on the international scene. In one photo he was in the midst of teeing off in front of the terrace at Søllerrød Golf Club, and in another he was wearing a white lab coat, sitting in front of a tray of instruments with an expression in his eyes as if to say, If you need a block inserted, bam, into the pituitary, I’m the one to do it. In both ads he had persuaded them to take the photo from the angle that makes him look like Picasso with a toupee, and the caption was something about “those who never miss.” For three months, in buses and subway stations, that ad made me think of what I might have added to the caption. And it stamped in my mind forever the angular, somewhat shrunken shape of a Volvo 840.