Smilla's Sense of Snow (3 page)

"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.Godthab 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 Godthab 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.

5

Juliane Christiansen, Isaiah's mother, is a strong endorsement for the curative powers of alcohol. When she's sober, she is stiff, silent, and inhibited. When she's drunk, she is lively and happy as a clam.

Because she took the disulfiram this morning and has been drinking on top of the pills, so to speak, since she returned from the hospital this beautiful transformation naturally appears through a veil of the overall poisoning of the organism. And yet she is feeling markedly better. "Smilla," she says, "I love you."

They say that people drink a lot in Greenland. That is a totally absurd understatement. People drink a colossal amount. That's why my relationship to alcohol is the way it is. Whenever I feel the urge for something stronger than herbal tea, I always remember what went on before the voluntary liquor rationing in Thule.

I've been in Juliane's apartment before, but we always sat in the kitchen and drank coffee. You have to respect people's privacy. Especially when their lives are otherwise exposed like an open wound. But now I feel driven by an urgent sense of responsibility; someone has overlooked something.

So I rummage around, and Juliane lets me do as I please. Partly because she bought some apple wine at the supermarket, partly because she's been on welfare and under the electron microscope of the authorities for so long that she has stopped imagining that anything could be kept private.

The apartment is full of that domestic coziness that comes from walking too often across polished hardwood floors with wooden-soled boots, and from forgetting burning cigarettes on the tabletop, and from sleeping off plenty of hangovers on the sofa; the only thing that's new and works properly is the TV, which is big and black, like a grand piano.

There is one more room than in my apartment: Isaiah's room. A bed, a low table, and a wardrobe. On the floor a cardboard box. On the table two sticks, a hopscotch marker, a kind of suction cup, a model car. Colorless as beach pebbles in a drawer.

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."