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

I lie quietly and look at him in a way I haven't been able to before. His hair is brown, with a few gray streaks. It's thick, like the bristles of a broom. Burying your fingers in it is like grabbing a horse's mane.

There in bed, happiness comes over me. Not like something that belongs to me, but like a wheel of fire rolling through the room and the world.

For a moment I think I'll manage to let it pass and be able to lie there, aware of what I have, and not wish for anything more.

The next moment I want to hang on. I want it to continue. He has to lie beside me tomorrow, too. This is my chance. My only, my last chance.

I swing my legs onto the floor. Now I'm panic-stricken. This is what I've been working to avoid for thirty-seven years. I've systematically practiced the only thing in the world that is worth learning. How to renounce. I've stopped hoping for anything. When experienced humility becomes an Olympic discipline, I'll be on the national team.

I've never had any patience for other people's unhappy love affairs. I hate their weakness. I watch them find a man at the end of the rainbow. I watch them have children and buy a Silver Cross royal blue baby buggy and walk along the embankment in the spring sunshine and laugh condescendingly at me and think, Poor Smilla, she doesn't know what she's missing, she doesn't know what life is like for those of us who have babies and a marriage certificate.

Four months later there's a reunion for their old prenatal care group, and her dear Ferdinand has a little relapse and lines up a few hits on a mirror, and she finds him in the bathroom where he's rolling around with one of the other happy mothers, and in a nanosecond she's reduced from the great, proud, sovereign, invulnerable mama to a spiritual gnome. At one stroke she falls to my level and below, and becomes an insect, a worm, a centipede.

And then they take me out and dust me off. Then I'm supposed to listen to how hard it is to be a single mother after the divorce, how they had a fight over splitting up the stereo, how her youth is being sucked out by the child, who is now a machine that uses her and gives nothing in return.

I've never wanted to listen to that. "What the hell do you want?" I've said to them. "Do you think I edit some kind of lovelorn column? Do you think I'm your diary? An answering machine?"

There's one thing that is forbidden on journeys by sled, and that is whimpering. Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease. I refuse to listen to it. I refuse to be saddled with these orgies of emotional pettiness.

That's why I'm scared now. Standing there on his floor, next to his bed, I can hear something. It's coming from inside me, and it's a whimper. It's the fear that what has been given to me won't last. It's the sound of all the unhappy love stories I've never wanted to listen to. Now it sounds as if they're all contained within me.

But I can still be saved. I can gather up my clothes and put them under my arm. I don't even have to take time to get dressed. I can just walk out and run up the stairs. In my apartment I'll pack the essentials, or not even that much. I'll call a moving company and arrange to have my furnishings moved out and put in storage, and then I'll put my money box in one pocket and Isaiah's tape in the other, and I'll move into a hotel, so that I'm gone when he wakes up and I'll never have to look him in the eye again. He opens his eyes and looks at me. He lies there quite still, trying to figure out where he is. Then he smiles at me.

I remember that I'm naked. I turn my back to him and walk sideways over to my clothes. He folded them for me; they haven't been folded that way since I bought them. I put on my underwear. Modesty is part of the fundamental nature of human beings. It makes me sick to think of the European idea that they can solve all their own self-induced sexual neuroses by laying the meat on the table and putting it under a microscope.

I go into the living room. I have no idea what to do with myself.

He comes in a moment later. He's wearing boxer shorts. They're white and reach down to his knees and they're big enough to be made out of a comforter cover. He looks like a half-naked cricket player.

I notice them now, and remember that I saw them yesterday, too. He has narrow black lines around his wrists and ankles. They are scars. I don't want to ask him about it.

He comes over to me and kisses me. Even though we at no time have been drunk, you might say that this is our first sober embrace.

Not until now do I remember yesterday. So clearly it's as though the glow of the fire were on the walls of the apartment, right now.

We set the table together. He has a juicer. He squeezes apple and pear juice into tall glasses. The apple juice is green with a reddish sheen, the pear juice is yellowish. For the first few minutes. Then they start changing taste and color.

We eat virtually nothing. We drink a little juice and stare at the china and the butter and cheese and the toast and the marmalade and raisins and sugar.

There's no traffic in the harbor, and very little on the bridge. It's a holiday.

He's several yards away, but he feels as close as if our bodies were still wrapped around each other.

By the time I kiss him goodbye and go up to my apartment, still in my underwear with my clothes under my arm, we haven't exchanged a single word that morning.

Back at my place, I decide not to shower. There are so many reasons for not washing. In Qaanaaq, one mother didn't wash her child's left cheek for three years because Queen Ingrid had kissed it.

I get dressed and go down to the phone booth on the square. I call University Hospital, Institute of Forensic Medicine, Autopsy Center of Copenhagen, and ask to speak with Dr. Lagermann.

He has aired out the room. In order to get enough oxygen so his next cigar will burn. But for a brief moment there is fresh, cool air.

"Can they stand all this fresh air-the cactuses?" With Lagermann, irony won't really get you any return on your investments.

"In the Sahara, in the hollows of Niger, it gets down to 20°F at night. In the daytime it's 122°F in the sun. That's the biggest temperature difference within a twenty-four-hour period on the earth's surface. Sometimes it doesn't rain for five years in a row."

"But does anyone breathe at them through a cigar?"

He sighs. "In there I can't smoke because of my family. Out here I'm harassed by my guests."

He puts the cigar back in the box. A flat wooden box with a picture of Romeo kissing Giulietta on the balcony. "Now," he says, "I want an explanation, damn it." I have to collect my thoughts. But they're stuck on the kiss on the cigar box.

"Do you know Euclid's Elements?" I ask.

Then I tell him everything in detail. About Isaiah's death. About the police. About the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark. About the Arctic Museum. About Andreas Licht. A little about the mechanic.

As soon as I start, he forgets and fishes a cigar out of the box.

It takes two cigars for me to finish.

When I stop talking he moves away, as if to put some distance between us. Slowly he strolls along the short narrow paths among the plants. He has a habit of smoking the cigar down to the last fraction of an inch, until he's standing there with a glowing ember between his fingers. Then he drops the last flecks of tobacco into the plant beds.

He comes toward me.

"I've broken my vow of confidentiality. I'm committing a criminal offense if I don't tell the police what you've told me. I'm up against one of Denmark's most influential scientists, the district attorney, the police commissioner. People have been fired for even thinking half of what I've actually done. And I have a family to feed."

"And the cactuses need watering," I say.