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

"There was a composer named Hviid."

"I don't think he's the one."

"You know I can't remember names, Smilla."

That's true. He can remember bodies. Titles. He can reconstruct every golf stroke in every sizable tournament he has played in. But he regularly forgets the name of his own secretary. It's symptomatic. For the truly self-centered person, the surrounding world pales and becomes nameless.

"Why didn't you go to that conference?"

"It was too much of a hodgepodge for my taste, Smilla. With all the opposing interests, all the politics. You know I avoid politics. They didn't even dare use the word 'catastrophe' when it came right down to it. They called it the `Center for Developmental Research.' "

"Can you find out who Hviid is?"

He takes a deep breath, full of his unexpected power. "Then I can count on you coming out here tomorrow," he says.

I'm about to tell him to send the information to me. But I'm feeling weak and rather soft. He can tell.

"You can meet me and Benja at the Savarin tomorrow."

It sounds like an order, but it's meant as a quick compromise.

One of the children opens the door.

I'm among the first to admit that a cold weather climate is unpredictable. But I'm still momentarily surprised. Outside, it's five o'clock in the evening. The first stars have appeared in the navy-blue, cloudless sky. But inside, around the child, it's snowing. A fine layer covers her red hair, her shoulders, her face, and her bare arms.

I follow her. In the living room there is flour everywhere. Three children are kneading dough right on the hardwood floor. In the kitchen their mother is greasing cookie sheets. On the kitchen table a little girl is kneading something that looks like pastry dough. Now she's trying to knead an egg yolk into it. With her hands and feet.

"The bottom fell out of the flour sack in the living room."

"I see. The floor will be wonderfully clean."

"He's out in the conservatory. I've forbidden him to smoke in here."

She has an authoritative strength, like my childhood image of God. And an unflappable gentleness like Santa Claus in a Disney film. If you want to know who the real heroes of world history are, just look at the mothers. In the kitchens, with the cookie sheets. While the men are sitting on the toilet. Out in the hammocks. Out in the conservatory.

He's brushing off the cactuses. The air is thick with cigar smoke. He has a little brush, as narrow as a toothbrush but with long bristles, curved, and maybe twelve inches long.

"It's so the pores won't clog up. That would prevent them from breathing."

"All things considered," I say, "that might be an advantage."

He gives me a guilty look. "My wife won't let me smoke around the children."

He shows me the stump of his cigar.

"Romeo and Giulietta. A classic Havana. And it tastes damn good. Especially the last inch. When you're just about to singe your lips. That's where it's saturated with nicotine."

I hang my yellow down jacket over the back of one of the white wrought-iron chairs. Then I take the scarf off my head. There's a piece of gauze underneath. I take that off, too. The mechanic cleaned the wound and rubbed chlorhexidine ointment on it. I bend my head down so he can see it.

When I lift my head up, his eyes are hard.

"A burn," he says thoughtfully. "You were in the vicinity, perhaps?"

"I was on board."

He washes his hands in a deep stainless-steel sink. "How did you manage to survive?"

"I swam."

He dries his hands and comes back. He touches the wound. It feels as if he's sticking his hands into my brain. "It's superficial," he says. "You're probably not going to be bald."

I called him at University Hospital earlier that day. I don't give my name, but it's not necessary, anyway. "The ship that burned in the harbor," I say. "There was a man on board."

It was the lead story on the radio. The newspapers had it on the front page. The photo was taken at night, in the light of the fire department's spotlights. In the middle of the harbor three charred masts loom out of the water. The rigging and yardarms are gone. But nothing was mentioned about any casualties.

He says very slowly, "Is that right?"

"I must have the results of the autopsy." He's silent for a long time.

"Hell and damnation," he says. "I have a family to feed."

I have nothing to say to that. "This afternoon. After four."

He sits down across from me, taking off the cellophane and paper ring of a cigar. He has a box of extra-long matches. He uses one to bore a hole in the conical, curved end of the rounded, rolled tobacco leaf. Then he lights it, carefully and meticulously. When it's burning evenly, he fixes his gaze on me.

"It wasn't you, by chance, who killed him, was it?" he says.

"No."

While he talks, he continues to stare at me, as if trying to examine my conscience.

"If a person drowns, the first thing to happen is that he tries to hold his breath. When he can't hold it any longer, he takes a couple of deep, desperate breaths. That pumps water into the lungs. This motion creates whitish protein material in the nose and throat, based on the same principle as when you beat egg whites. It's called froth. This person-whom I ought not, to discuss, and particularly with someone who might be involved in the crime-this person has no trace of it. So he didn't drown, at any rate."

He carefully taps the ash from his cigar.

"He was already dead when I went on board."

He hardly hears me. His thoughts are still on that morning and the autopsy.

"First they tied him up. With pieces of copper wire. He put up a hell of a fight, but they finally got him tied up. There must have been a couple of them. He was a strong man. An elderly gentleman, but strong. Then they bent his head to one side. You're familiar with sodium hydroxide-lye. An extremely caustic base. One person held him by his hair. Several clumps were torn out. And then they dripped lye into his right ear. Nice and easy, just like that, damn it all."

He regards his cigar thoughtfully. "You can't be in my business without running into torture now and then. It's a complicated subject. A hell of a subject. The legal definition, by the way, says that it has to be carried out by an organization. The important thing for the torturer is to find the victim's weak point. And this man was blind. That's not something I discovered. I didn't know that until we got his medical records. But they knew it. So they concentrated on his hearing. Damned inventive, you have to give them that. It's psychopathic. But it has a creative streak. What you can't help wondering is what they were after."

I think about the curator's voice on the telephone, about what I had thought was a muffled laugh. They had already broken him by then.

"He had cotton in his ears."

"Glad to hear it. It was gone when he was fished out. But I guessed about the cotton. When I found the little burns. At some point they reached the end of the line with him. Whenever that might have been. And so they did something quite clever. They moistened some cotton, maybe with lye, since it was handy. They then split an electrical cord and put one pole in each ear. And plugged it in. And then calmly turned on the switch. Dead on the spot. Quick, cheap, clean."

He shakes his head. He's a doctor, not a psychologist. He finds the world in which we live beyond comprehension.

"A couple of fucking professionals. But if I believed in New Year's resolutions, mine would be to make them pay."

I wake up around 1:00 a.m. One second I'm sleeping, the next I'm awake.

He's lying next to me. On his stomach with his hands down at his side. Asleep, one side of his face is pressed flat against the sheet. His mouth and nose vibrate gently, as if he were sniffing at a flower. Or were about to kiss a child.