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

"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."

He looks as if he's in his late forties, but he's twenty years older. He's wearing a black thermal jogging suit, cleated shoes, an American baseball cap, and fingerless leather gloves. He takes a little brown medicine bottle out of his breast pocket and empties it into his mouth with a practiced, almost discreet movement. It's propranolol, a beta blocker that slows his heartbeat. He opens one of his hands and looks at it. It's big and white and manicured and quite steady. He selects a number-one club, a driver, Taylormade, with a polished bell-shaped head of Brazilian rosewood. He places it beside the ball, then takes his backswing. When he strikes, he has all of his strength, all of his 190 pounds, focused on a point as big as a postage stamp, and the little yellow ball seems to dissolve and vanish. It comes into view again only when it lands on the green, all the way at the edge of the yard, where it obediently drops close to the flag.

"Cayman balls," he says. "From McGregor. I always had trouble with the neighbors before. These only go half as far."

He is my father. This show has been for my benefit, and I see right through it to what it really is. A little boy's plea for love. Which I have absolutely no intention of giving him.

Seen from my perspective, Denmark's entire population is middle-class. The truly poor and the truly rich are so few as to be almost exotic.

I have been fortunate enough to know quite a few of the poor, since many of them are Greenlanders.

My father belongs to the truly wealthy.

He has a 67-foot Swan at Rungsted Marina with a fulltime three-man crew. He has his own little island at the mouth of Ise Fjord where he can retreat to his Norwegian log cabin, and he can tell any uninvited tourists to beat it, fuck off. He is one of the few people in Denmark to own a Bugatti and have a man employed to polish it and warm up the grease in the axle box with a Bunsen burner on the two occasions a year when he puts in an appearance at the Bugatti Club vintage-car race. The rest of the time he makes do with playing the phonograph record sent out by the club, on which you can hear someone cranking up one of these wonderful vehicles, fine-tuning the choke, and giving it the gas.

He owns this house, white as snow and decorated with white-washed cement seashells, with a roof of natural shale and with a winding stairway up to the entrance. With rosebeds in a front yard that drops steeply down to Strand Drive, and a back yard that's big enough for a nine-hole practice course, which is just right, now that he's gotten the new balls.

He earned his money giving injections.

He has never been one to leak information about himself, but whoever is interested can look him up in Who's Who and discover that he became a chief of staff when he was thirty, that he held Denmark's first chair in anesthesiology when it was established, and that five years later he left the hospital system to devote himself-as it's so nicely put-to private practice. Later his fame took him out traveling. Not as a vagabond, but in private jets. He has given injections to the famous. He was in charge of the anesthesia at the first pioneering heart transplants in South Africa. He was with the American delegation of doctors in the Soviet Union when Brezhnev died. I've heard it said that my father was the one who delayed death during the last weeks of Brezhnev's life, wielding his long syringes.

He resembles a longshoreman and discreetly cultivates this look by letting his beard grow out now and then. A beard that is now gray but which was once blue-black and still requires two shaves a day with a straight razor for him to look presentable.

His hands are unfailingly steady. With those hands he can push a 150-mm syringe through the flank, retroperitoneally, through the deep back muscles, into the aorta. Then he taps the tip of the needle lightly against the large artery, to be sure that he has gone far enough, and then goes behind it to leave a deposit of lidocaine up at the large nerve plexus. The central nervous system controls the tone of the arteries. He has a theory that by using this blockade, he can help the poor circulation in the legs of overweight wealthy people.

While he's giving an injection he is as focused as any human being could be. He thinks of nothing else, not even the bill for ten thousand kroner that his secretary is typing up, and which will fall due before the first of January. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year-next, please.

During the past twenty-five years he has been among the two hundred golf players fighting for the last fifty Eurocards. He lives with a ballet dancer who is thirteen years younger than me and who walks around looking at him as if the only thing she lives for is the hope that he will strip the tulle tutu and toe shoes off her.

So my father is a man who possesses everything he can get his hands on. And that's what he thinks he's showing me here on the golf course. That he has everything his heart could desire. Even the beta-blockers, which he's been taking for the past ten years to steady his hands, are largely without side effects.

We walk around the house, along the raked gravel paths; in the summer Sorensen, the gardener, takes a pair of shears to the edges, so you could cut your feet on them if you don't watch out. I'm wearing a sealskin coat over a jumpsuit of embroidered wool with a zipper. Seen from a distance, we are a father and daughter with a plethora of wealth and vitality. On closer examination, we are simply a banal tragedy spread over two generations.

The living room has a floor of bog oak and borders of stainless steel around a wall of glass facing the birdbath and rosebushes and the drop in social status toward Strand Drive. Benja is standing at the fireplace wearing a leotard and woolen socks, stretching the muscles in her feet and ignoring me. She looks pale and lovely and naughty, like an elf maiden turned stripper.