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

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.

Alvarez theorizes that the impact occurred 65 million years ago, that the meteor was between four and nine miles in diameter, and that it exploded on impact, releasing energy comparable to 100 million megatons of TNT. The resultant ash cloud totally blocked out the sun for a period of at least several days. During this period several food chains collapsed. The result was that a large portion of the marine and submarine microorganisms were annihilated, which in turn prompted further consequences for the large carnivores and herbivores. On the basis of discoveries made by the author in the Barents Sea and Davis Strait, the article discusses the possibility that the radiation resulting from the explosion on impact might explain a series of mutations among marine-based parasites in the early Paleocene periods. The article also discusses whether such mutations might be the reason for massive extinctions of the larger sea animals.

I scroll through it again. The language is clear, the style clean, almost transparent. But 65 million years still seems like a very long time ago.

It's dark by the time I take the train back. The wind carries a light snow with it, pirhuk. My mind registers it as if through an anesthetic.

In a big city you adopt a particular way of regarding the world. A focused, sporadically selective view. When you scan a desert or an ice floe, you see with different eyes. You let the details slip out of focus in favor of the whole. This way of seeing reveals a different reality. If you look at someone's face in this manner, it starts to dissolve into a shifting series of masks.

With this way of seeing, a person's breath in the coldthat veil of cooled drops that forms in the air in temperatures under 46°F-is not merely a phenomenon twenty inches from his mouth. It's something all-encompassing, a structural transformation of the space surrounding a warm-blooded creature, an aura of minimal but definite thermal displacement. I've seen hunters shoot snow hares in a starless winter night at a distance of 270 yards by aiming at the fog around them.

I am not a hunter. And I'm asleep inside. Maybe I'm close to giving up. But I sense him when I'm fifty yards away, before he hears me. He's standing between the two marble pillars which flank the gate leading from Strand Drive to the stairs.

In the city, in the Norrebro district, people stand on streetcorners and in doorways; it doesn't mean anything. But on Strand Drive it is significant. And besides, I've grown hypersensitive. So I shake off my resignation, take several steps backward, and go into the neighboring yard.

I find the hole in the hedge that I used so often as a child, squeeze my way through it, and wait. After several minutes I see the other one. He's positioned himself at the corner of the porter's lodge, where the driveway curves up toward the house.

I walk back to the. place where I can approach the kitchen door from an angle so I'm not visible to either of them. The visibility has started to deteriorate. The black soil beneath the roses is hard as a rock. The birdbath is swathed in a big snowdrift.

I walk along the wall of the house, and it occurs to me that although I have so often felt persecuted, I actually might not have had anything to complain about until now.

Moritz is alone in the living room; I can see him through the window. He's sitting in the low oak chair, his hands gripping the armrests. I continue around the house, past the main entrance, along the back to where the bay window juts out. There's a light on in the pantry. That's where I see Benja. She's pouring a glass of cold milk. Refreshing on a night like this, when you have to stand guard and wait. I take the fire escape. It leads up to the balcony outside what was once my room. I go inside and feel my way forward. They've delivered the box; it's on the floor.

The door to the hallway is open. Downstairs in the foyer Benja is seeing the Toenail out.

I can see him walking across the gravel, like a dark shadow. Over to the garage and in through the little door.

They're parked in the garage, of course. Moritz moved his car a little so there was room for them. Citizens must assist the police in every way possible.

I tiptoe down the stairway. I know it well, so I don't make any noise. I reach the foyer, go past the coat closet and into the small parlor. There is Benja. She doesn't see me. She's standing there looking out across Øresund. Toward the lights at Tuborg Harbor, toward Sweden and Flakfort. She's humming. Not particularly cheerful or relaxed. But intent. Tonight, she's thinking, tonight they'll nab Smilla. The fake Greenlander.

"Benja," I say.

She twirls around in a flash, like when she's dancing. But then she freezes.

I don't say a word, just motion with my hand, and with bowed head she precedes me into the living room.

I remain standing in the doorway, where the long drapes prevent me from being seen from the road. Moritz raises his head and sees me. His expression doesn't change. But his face becomes flatter, more careworn.

"It was me." Benja has gone over to stand next to him. He is hers.

"I was the one who called," she says.

He rubs his hand across the stubble on his chin. He hasn't shaved tonight. The stubble is black with flecks of gray. His voice is low and resigned.

"I never said I was perfect, Smilla."

He's said that thousands of times, but I don't have the heart to remind him. For the first time ever, I see that he is old. That someday, maybe not so far in the future, he's going to die. For a moment I fight it, then I give up and am filled with sympathy. At this pathetic moment.

"They're waiting for you outside," says Benja. "They're going to take you away. You don't belong here."

I can't help admiring her. You find some of this same madness in female polar bears defending their cubs. Moritz doesn't seem to hear her. His voice is still low, introspective. As if he's talking mainly to himself. "I wanted peace and quiet so badly. I wanted to have my family around me. But I never achieved that. It never worked out. Things got out of control for me. When I saw that box they delivered this afternoon, I realized that you were leaving again. Like all the times you ran away. I'm too old to bring you back home again. Maybe it was wrong to do it in the past."

His eyes are bloodshot when he looks at me. "I don't want to let you go, Smilla."

Every life contains within it a potential for clarification. He has lost that chance. The conflicts that are now pressing him down in his chair are the same ones he had in his thirties, when I got to know him, when he became my father. The only thing age has done is to whittle away his ability to confront them.

Benja licks her lips.

"Will you go out to them yourself," she says, "or should I go get them?"

For as long as I can remember, I have been trying to escape this house, this country. Each time, life has used him as its unresisting instrument to call me back. At this moment it becomes more obvious than it has been since I was a child that freedom of choice is an illusion, that life leads us through a series of bitter, involuntarily comical, and repetitive confrontations with the problems that we haven't resolved. At some other time I might have smiled at this. Right now I'm too tired. So I bow my head and prepare to give up.