by Peter Høeg
"So there is nothing externally visible?" I ask.
He shakes his head. "Nothing. Botulism is determined by a process of elimination. Something you come to suspect because you can't find any other cause of death. Then you take a blood sample. And samples of the food under suspicion. You send them to the Serum Institute. Queen Ingrid's Hospital in Godthab has a medical laboratory, of course. But no facilities to trace the less common toxins. So blood samples were sent to Copenhagen. In the samples they found the toxin from botulinum."
He takes out one of his big cigar matches. Moritz's eyebrows shoot up on his brow. It's forbidden, under penalty of death, to smoke in the clinic. Smokers are shown to the smoking salon, which means a walk in the garden. Even there he doesn't like it much. He thinks that the sight of someone smoking, even from a distance, might affect his golf swing. It was one of his few, great, miraculous triumphs over my mother that he got her to go outside to smoke in Qaanaaq. It was one of his many defeats that she smoked indoors in the summer tent at Siorapaluk.
With the unsulfured end of the match Lagermann points at a row of tiny numbers on the bottom edge of the X-ray. "X-rays cost a damn fortune. We only use them to search for hardware that has been stuck into people. No pictures were taken in '91. It wasn't thought necessary."
He takes out a cellophane-wrapped cigar from his breast pocket.
"You're not allowed to smoke in here," says Benja. He gives her a preoccupied look. Then he gently taps the photo with the cigar.
"But in '66 they had to take pictures. There was some doubt about identification. They were severely maimed by the explosion. There was nothing to do but take X-rays. To look for old bone fractures and the like. The negatives were supposedly sent around to all the doctors in Greenland. Along with a full dental shot of what was left of their teeth."
It's not until now that I realize there are no thighbones beneath the pelvis in the X-ray.
Lagermann carefully places two more negatives next to the first one. In one of them almost the entire spine is intact. The other is a chaos of bone fragments and dark shadows, a pulverized universe.
"These prompt various professional questions. Such as the location of the bodies in relation to the detonation. It looks as if they were sitting right on top of the charge. That it was not-as is normal when you use plastic explosives on rock or ice-placed in a bored-out channel, or kneaded to an upside-down can, which concentrates the explosion in one particular spot. It practically blew up right under their ass, so to speak. Which rarely happens when professionals are involved."
"I'm leaving," says Benja. But she stays in her chair. "All of this is speculation based on very little evidence, of course. But this isn't."
He hangs up two larger X-rays under the first ones. "Enlargements from the negative of these areas."
He points with the cigar. "You can see the remains of the liver, the lower esophagus, and the stomach. The bottom rib has gotten stuck here, right above the vertebra lumbalis, which is here. This is the heart. Here it's damaged, there it's intact. Do you notice anything?"
To me it seems a chaos of black and gray nuances. Moritz leans forward. Curiosity wins out over vanity. From his inside pocket he takes out the glasses which only we, the women in his life, have ever seen him wear. Then he puts a fingernail on each picture.
"There."
Lagermann straightens up.
"Yes," he says, "that's the spot. But what the hell is it?"
Moritz picks up a magnifying glass from an aluminum tray. Even when he points it out, I don't understand. Only when he shows it to me on the second negative can I make it out. Just like in glaciology. One occurrence is an accident. It's the repeat occurrence that creates a structure.
It's a needle-thin, whitish line, uneven, crooked. It wanders up along the smashed vertebrae, disappears at the ribs, reappears at the tip of one lung, vanishes, and shows up again near the heart, outside and partly inside of it, in the large ventricle, like a white thread of light.
Lagermann points at the second X-ray. Through the liver, into the left kidney.
They stare through the magnifying glass.
Then Moritz turns around. He picks up a shiny, thick journal from his desk.
"Nature," he says. "A special issue from 1979. Which you, Smilla, directed my attention to."
There's a photograph on the right-hand side. An X-ray photo, but using a technique that makes the soft organs visible, too, so that the body almost imperceptibly merges into the skeleton.
"This," says Moritz, "is a man from Ghana."
He points with his fountain pen along the left side of the photograph. There is a light winding line moving from one hip up through the abdominal cavity.
"Dracunculus," he says. "Guinea worm. Transmitted via Cyclops water fleas, in the drinking water. Can also bore its way through the skin. A truly nasty parasite. Up to three feet long. Works its way through the body with a speed of up to half an inch a day. Finally sticks its head out through the thigh. That's where the Africans catch it and roll it up around a stick. Every day they wind up a few more inches. It takes a month to get it out. That month and the months before are one continuous period of suffering."
"That's gross," says Benja.
We put our heads up close to the X-rays.
"I thought so," says Lagermann. "I thought it must be some kind of worm."
"The article in Nature," says Moritz, "is about diagnosing this sort of parasite by X-ray. It's quite complicated if it's not calcified in the tissue. Because the heart is no longer beating, it's very difficult to make the contrast fluids disseminate through the body."
"But this is about Greenland," I say. "Not the tropics." Moritz nods.
"But you had underlined the article in your letter. Loyen wrote it. It's one of his main specialties." Lagermann taps on the negative. "I don't know anything about tropical diseases. I'm a forensics specialist. But something has bored its way into these two people. Something that might be a worm or might be something else. Something that has left a channel sixteen inches long and at least two millimeters in diameter. Straight through the diaphragm and the soft organs. Something that stops in areas exploded by infection. For these two gentlemen the TNT didn't make any difference. They were already dead. They died because something-whatever the hell it was-had stuck its head into the heart of one man and the liver of the other."
We stare at the X-rays in bewilderment.
"The right man to solve this problem," says Moritz, "might be Loyen."
Lagermann regards him with his eyes narrowed. "Yes," he says, "it would be interesting to hear what he has to say. But if we wanted to be sure of an honest answer, it looks as if we'd have to tie him to a chair, give him sodium pentothal, and hook him up to a lie detector."
6
I would like to understand Benja. At this moment more than ever.
It wasn't always this way. I didn't always have to understand things. At least I tell myself that it wasn't always this way. When I came to Denmark for the first time, I experienced phenomena. In all their gruesomeness, or beauty, or gray drabness. But without feeling any great need to explain them.
Often there was no food when Isaiah came home. Juliane would be sitting at the table with her friends, and there were cigarettes and laughter and tears and an enormous abuse of alcohol, but there wasn't as much as five kroner to go out and buy some French fries. He never complained. He never yelled at his mother. He never sulked. Patient, silent, and watchful he would wrench himself away from the outstretched hands and go on his way. In order to find, if possible, some other solution. Sometimes the mechanic was home, sometimes I was. He could sit in my living room for an hour or more without telling me he was hungry. Persisting in an extreme, almost stupid, Greenlandic politeness.
Occasionally I would feel the urge to explain things after I had cooked for him, after I had boiled a mackerel and put the whole fish, weighing three pounds, on the floor on a newspaper because that's where he preferred to eat. Without
uttering a word, using both hands, he would devour the entire fish with methodical thoroughness and eat the eyes and suck out the brain and lick the backbone and crunch on the fins. I would try to understand the difference between growing up in Denmark and growing up in Greenland. To comprehend the humiliating, exhausting, monotonous emotional dramas with which European children and parents are bound together in mutuaI hatred and dependence. And to understand Isaiah.
Deep inside I know that trying to figure things out leads to blindness, that the desire to understand has a buiIt-in brutality that erases what you seek to comprehend. Only experience is sensitive. But maybe I'm both weak and brutal. I've never been able to resist trying.
Benja seems to have been given everything. I've met her parents. They're trim and subdued and play the piano and speak foreign languages, and every year, when the Royal Theater's school closed for the summer and they went south to their house on the Costa Smeralda, they aways took the best French ballet tutor along to badger Benja on the terrace between the palm trees every morning, because that's what she herself wanted.
You might think that someone who has never suffered or lacked anything worth mentioning would be at peace with herself. For a long time I misjudged her. I thought she and Moritz were playing a game when she walked through the room in front of us, dressed only in her little panties, and placed red silk scarves over the lamps because the light hurt her eyes, and made an endless series of appointments with Moritz and then canceled them because, she said, today she needed to see someone her own age. I thought that on some mysterious wave of self-confidence she was testing her youth and beauty and attractiveness on Moritz, who was almost fifty years older than her.
One day I witnessed her ordering him to move the furniture so that she would have room to dance, and he refused.
At first she didn't believe him. Her pretty face and slanted, almond-shaped eyes and smooth brow beneath corkscrew curls glowed with the awareness of a victory already won. Then she realized that he was not going to yield. Maybe it was the first time in their relationship. First she turned pale with rage, and then her face cracked. Her eyes became despairing, empty, abandoned; her mouth closed on smothered, infantile, despairing tears which refused to flow.
Then I realized that she loved him. That under that appealing coquettishness was a love like a military operation that would tolerate anything and fight any necessary tank battles and demand the world in return. Then I realized, too, that she might always hate me. And that she had lost in advance. Somewhere inside Moritz there is a landscape she will never reach. The home of his feelings for my mother.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Right now, at this very moment, it occurs to me that she might have won, after all. If that's the case, then I'll grant her that she put her nose to the grindstone. She didn't just leave it at wiggling her little fanny around. She didn't settle for sending lovesick glances from the stage to Moritz in the first row, hoping that it would all work out in the long run. She didn't put her trust in her influence at home in the bosom of her family. If I didn't realize it before, I know it now. That there is a raw energy in Benja.
I'm standing in the snow, pressed up against the wall of the house, peering down into the pantry. There Benja is pouring a glass of milk. Enchanting, lithe Benja. And she's handing it to a man who now steps into view. It's the Toenail.
I'm walking along Strand Drive from Klampenborg Station, and it's a wonder that I notice it at all, because I've had a hard day.
That morning I couldn't stand it any longer; I got up, tucked my hair and bandage-which is now only a Bandaid over the wound-under a ski hat, put on sunglasses and a Loden coat, and took the train to the main station, and there I called the mechanic's number, but no one answered.
Then I stroll along the docks, from the Customs Wharf to Langelinie, trying to gather my thoughts. At the North Harbor I make several purchases and pack up a box that they will deliver to Moritz's villa, and from a phone booth I make a call that I know is one of the crucial actions in my life.
And yet it's strange that it means so little. Under certain circumstances the fateful decisions in life, sometimes even in matters of life and death, are made with an almost indifferent ease. While the little things-for instance, the way people hang on to what is over-seem so important. What's important today is to see Knippels Bridge once again, where I rode with him, and the White Palace, where I slept with him, and the Cryolite Corporation, and Skudehavns Road, where we walked together, arm in arm. I call him again from the phone booth at North Harbor Station. A man answers. But it's not him. It's a controlled, anonymous voice.
"Yes?"
I hold the receiver to my ear. Then I hang up.
I page through the phone book. I can't find his car repair shop. I take a taxi out to Toftegards Square and walk along Vigerslev Avenue. There is no garage. From a phone booth I call the mechanics' association. The man I talk to is friendly and patient. But there has never been a car repair shop registered on Vigerslev Avenue.
I've never noticed until now how exposed phone booths are. Making a call is like putting yourself on display for instant recognition.
The phone book lists two addresses for the Center for Developmental Research, one at the August Krogh Institute and one at Denmark's Technical High School on Lundtofte Slope. At the latter address there's apparently a library and office.
I take a cab to Kampmanns Street, to the office of the Trade Commission. The boy's smile and tie and naivete are unchanged.
"I'm glad you came back," he says.
I show him the newspaper clipping. "You read foreign papers. Do you remember this one?"
"The suicide," he says. "Everybody remembers that. The consular secretary jumped off a roof. The man they arrested had tried to talk her out of it. The case raised a fundamental question about the legal rights of Danes abroad."
"You don't happen to remember the secretary's name, do you?"
He has tears in his eyes. "We studied international law at the university together. A wonderful girl. Ravn was her name. Nathalie Ravn. She applied for a job with the Ministry of Justice. They said-in local circles-that she might become the first female police commissioner."
"There's nothing 'local' left anymore," I say. "If something happens in Greenland, it's connected to something else in Singapore."
He gazes at me, uncomprehending and mournful. "You didn't come here to see me," he says. "You came about this."
"I'm not worth getting to know," I say, meaning it.
"You remind me of her. Secretive. And not someone you would picture behind a desk. I couldn't understand why she suddenly became a secretary in Singapore. That's a different Ministry."
I take the train to Lyngby Station and then catch a bus. In a way, it feels like when I was seventeen. You think that the despair will stop you cold, but it doesn't; it wraps itself up in a dark corner somewhere inside and forces the rest of your system to function, to take care of practical matters, which may not be important but which keep you going, which guarantee that you are still, somehow, alive.
Between the buildings the snow is three feet high; only narrow corridors have been cleared.
They haven't finished remodeling the Center for Developmental Research yet. In the lobby they've put in a counter, but it's covered up because they're in the process of painting the ceiling. I tell them what I'm looking for. A woman asks me whether I have computer time reserved. I say no. She shakes her head, the library isn't open yet, the center's archives are kept on LTNIC at Denmark's Data Processing Center for Research and Training, the computer system for institutes of higher learning, which is not accessible to the general public.
I walk around among the buildings for a while. I was here many times in my student days. Our classes on surveying were held here. Time has changed the area, made it harsher and more alien than I remember it. Or maybe it's the cold. Or just me.
I walk past the computer building. It's locked, but when a group of students comes out, I go in. In the cen
tral room there are maybe fifty terminals. I wait for a while. When an elderly man comes in, I follow him. When he sits down, I stand behind him and pay attention. He doesn't notice me. He sits there for an hour. Then he leaves. I sit down at a free terminal and press a key. The machine writes: Log on user ID? I type LTH3-just as the elderly gentleman did. The machine replies: Welcome to the Laboratory for Technical Hygiene. Your password? I type JPB. The way the elderly gentleman did. The machine replies: Welcome Mr. Jens Peter Bramslev.
When I type Center for Developmental Research the machine replies with a menu. One of the topics is Library. I type in Tørk Hviid. There is only one title. "A Hypothesis on the Eradication of Submarine Life in the Arctic Sea in Conjunction with the Alvarez Incident."
It's a hundred pages long. I scroll through them. There are timelines. Pictures of fossils. Neither the pictures nor the captions are legible in the poor resolution of the screen. There are various charts. Some diagrammatic, geological maps of the present-day Davis Strait in various stages of its creation. The whole thing seems consistently incomprehensible. I press on to the end.
After a long list of references there is a brief abstract of the article.
This article is based on the theory of physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Luis Alvarez from the 1970s. He proposed that the iridium content in a layer of clay between the chalk and tertiary sediments at Gubbio in the northern Apennines and at Stevn's Klint in Denmark is too big to be anything but the result of an extremely large meteor impact.