Peter Høeg - Smilla's Sense of Snow aka Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

In that moment I caught a glimpse of his soul. When my mother disappeared, she must have taken part of Moritz with her. Or even worse: part of his physical world must have drowned along with her. There in the parking lot, early on that winter morning, as we stood and stared at each other, while his blood dripped and burned a little red tunnel through the snow, I remembered something about him. I remembered him in Greenland before my mother's death. I remembered that in the midst of his lurking, unpredictable mood swings there had been a gaiety expressing a joy in life, maybe even a kind of warmth. My mother had taken that part of his world with her. She had vanished with all the colors. Since then he had been imprisoned in a world that was only black and white.

He had brought me to Denmark because I was the only thing that could remind him of what he had lost. People in love worship a photograph. They fall on their knees before a scarf. They make a journey to look at the wall of a building. Whatever can ignite the coals that both warm and sear them.

With Moritz it was much worse. He was hopelessly in love with someone whose molecules had been sucked out into the vast emptiness. His love had given up hope. But it had latched on to memory. I was that memory. With great difficulty he had brought me here, and over the years he had withstood an endless number of rejections in a desert of hostility so that he could look at me and find some momentary respite observing the traits I had in common with the woman who was my mother.

We both straightened up. I threw the scalpel into the bushes. We walked back to the emergency room and got his wound bandaged.

That was the last time I tried to run away. I won't say that I forgave him. I always disapprove of adults who are unable to deal with the pressure of love and take it out on little children. But I will say that, in some sense, I understood him.

From the chair where I'm sitting I can see the mail slot.

It's the last entrance that the world hasn't tried to force its way through. Now a long strip of gray cardboard is pushed through it. There's writing on it. I let it lie there for a while. But it's hard to ignore a message that's almost a yard long.

"Anything is better than suicide," it says. That's what it's supposed to say, anyway. He has managed to include two or three spelling mistakes in the brief text.

His door is open. I know that he never locks it. I knock and go in.

I've thrown a little cold water on my face. I may have even brushed my hair.

He's sitting in the living room reading. It's the first time I've seen him wearing glasses.

The window washer is busy outside. When he catches sight of me, he decides to move on to the floor below. The mechanic still has a bandage on his ear. But it looks as if it's healing. He has dark circles under his eyes, but he is freshly shaven.

"There was another expedition." He taps the papers in front of him. "Here's the map."

I sit down next to him. He smells of shampoo and garlic. "Somebody wrote on the map."

For the first time I take a closer look at the detail map of the glacier. It's a photocopy. Someone has written in the margin with pencil. The copying has made the note clearer. It's a mixture of English and Danish. "Revised according to the Carlsberg Foundation expedition, 1966."

He looks at me expectantly. "So I think to m-myself that there must have been a second expedition. And for a moment I consider going back to the archives."

"Without a key?"

"I've got some tools."

No reason to doubt that. He has tools that could open the basement of the National Bank.

"Then I get the idea of calling Carlsberg. It turns out to be d-difficult. They transfer me. I end up having to talk to the Carlsberg Foundation. They inform me that they funded an expedition in 1966. But nobody from those days is still there. And they didn't have the report. But they did have something else."

It's his trump card.

"They had the account books and the list of expedition participants and colleagues to whom they paid a salary. Do you know where I said I was c-calling from? The tax authorities. They gave me the names at once. And you know what? There was an old friend."

He puts a piece of paper in front of me. There is a list of printed names, two of which I recognize. He points at one of them.

"Odd name, isn't it? After you've heard it once, you remember it. He was on both expeditions."

"Andreas Fine Licht," it says. "600 CYD 9/12."

"What's CYD?"

"Cape York dollars. The Cryolite Corporation's own currency in Greenland."

"I called the office of the National Registry. They needed to get the names and social security numbers and the last known address of everybody. I had to call the foundation back. But then I found them. There are ten names, right? Three of them were Greenlanders. Of the seven others, only two are still alive. N-nineteen sixty-six is starting to seem like a long time ago. One of them is Licht. The other one is a woman. Carlsberg said they had paid her for translating something. They didn't know what. Her name is Benedicte Clahn."

"There's one more," I say. He looks at me, puzzled.

I put the medical report in front of him and point to the signature. He slowly spells it out. "Loyen." Then he nods. "He was there in '66, too."

He makes us dinner.

On principle, when people feel comfortable in a home they end up in the kitchen. In Qaanaaq we lived in the kitchen. Here I settle for standing in the doorway. The kitchen is spacious enough, but he fills it up all by himself.

There are some women who can make souffles. Who just happen to have a recipe for mocha parfait stuffed into their sports bra. Who can stack up their own wedding cakes with one hand and produce pepper steak Nossi Be with the other.

That ought to make all of us happy. As long as it doesn't mean that the rest of us have to have a guilty conscience because we're still not on a first-name basis with our toasters.

He has a mountain of fish and a mountain of vegetables. Salmon, mackerel, cod, various types of flounder. Tails, heads, fins. Two big crabs. And carrots, onions, leeks, parsnips, fennel, and Jerusalem artichokes.

He cleans and boils the vegetables.

I tell him about Ravn and Captain Telling.

He puts on some rice. With cardamom and star aniseed.

I tell him about the confidentiality clauses I've signed. About the reports Ravn had.

He strains off the vegetable water and gets ready to cook the fish.

I tell him about the threats. That they can arrest me whenever they like.

He puts in the pieces of fish gradually. I remember this from Greenland. From the days when we took time to cook our food. Different kinds of fish have different cooking times. Cod is done right away. Mackerel a little later, and salmon even later.

"I'm afraid of being locked up," I say.

He puts the crabs in last. He lets them boil for no more than five minutes.

In a way, I'm relieved that he doesn't say anything, doesn't yell at me. He's the only other person who knows how much we know. How much we will now have to forget.

It seems necessary to explain my claustrophobia to him.

"Do you know what the foundation of mathematics is?" I ask. "The foundation of mathematics is numbers. If anyone asked me what makes me truly happy, I would say: numbers. Snow and ice and numbers. And do you know why?"

He splits the claws with a nutcracker and pulls out the meat with curved tweezers.

"Because the number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers a sense of longing, and do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing?"

He adds cream and several drops of orange juice to the soup.