by Peter Høeg
He adds cream and several drops of orange juice to the soup.
“The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something. And human consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child discovers the in between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the stones, between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads to? It leads to fractions. Whole numbers plus fractions produce rational numbers. And human consciousness doesn’t stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers.”
He warms French bread in the oven and fills the pepper mill.
“It’s a form of madness. Because the irrational numbers are infinite. They can’t be written down. They force human consciousness out beyond the limits. And by adding irrational numbers to rational numbers, you get real numbers.”
I’ve stepped into the middle of the room to have more space. It’s rare that you have a chance to explain yourself to a fellow human being. Usually you have to fight for the floor. And this is important to me.
“It doesn’t stop. It never stops. Because now, on the spot, we expand the real numbers with imaginary square roots of negative numbers. These are numbers we can’t picture, numbers that normal human consciousness cannot comprehend. And when we add the imaginary numbers to the real numbers, we have the complex number system. The first number system in which it’s possible to explain satisfactorily the crystal formation of ice. It’s like a vast, open landscape. The horizons. You head toward them and they keep receding. That is Greenland, and that’s what I can’t be without ! That’s why I don’t want to be locked up.”
I wind up standing in front of him.
“Smilla,” he says, “can I kiss you?”
We probably all have an image of ourselves. I’ve always thought of myself as Ms. Fierce with the big mouth. Now I don’t know what to say. I feel as if he has betrayed me. Not listened the way he should have. That he has deceived me. On the other hand, he’s not doing anything. He’s not bothering me. He’s standing in front of the steaming pots and looking at me.
I can’t think of anything to say. I just stand there, not knowing what to do with myself, and then, fortunately, the moment has passed.
“M-merry Christmas.”
We have eaten without exchanging a word. Partly, of course, because what was not said before is still hovering in the room. But mostly because the soup demands it. You can’t talk over this soup. It’s shouting from the bowl, demanding your undivided attention.
Isaiah was the same way. Sometimes when I read aloud to him or when we listened to Peter and the Wolf, my attention would be distracted by something else and my thoughts would run away with me. After a while he would clear his throat. A friendly, remonstrating, telling sound. It meant something like: Smilla—you’re daydreaming.
It was the same with the soup. I’m eating it from a deep soup plate. The mechanic is drinking it from a big cup. It tastes of fish. Of the deep Atlantic Ocean, of icebergs, of seaweed. The rice has traces of the tropics, of the folded leaves of the banana palm. Of the floating spice markets in Burma. If you let your imagination run wild.
We’re drinking mineral water. He knows that I don’t touch alcohol. He hasn’t asked me why. In fact, he has never really asked me anything. Except for that request a few minutes ago.
He puts down his spoon.
“That ship,” he says. “The model ship in the Baron’s room. It looked so expensive.”
He places a printed brochure in front of me.
“That b-box he had in his room. The one he made into a cave. That was the box for the ship. That’s where I found this.”
Why hadn’t I seen it myself?
On the front it says: “Arctic Museum. The S. S. Johannes Thomsen of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark. Scale: 1:50.”
“What’s the Arctic Museum?” I ask.
He doesn’t know.
“But there’s an address on the box.”
He has something up his sleeve. He has cut the address out of the cardboard box with a knife. Probably to avoid spelling mistakes. Now he puts it down in front of me.
“The law office of Hammer & Ving.” And an address on ∅ster Street, near the King’s New Square.
“He was the one who picked up the Baron in his car.”
“What does Juliane say?”
“She’s so scared that she’s shaking.”
He makes coffee. With two kinds of beans, and the grinder and the funnel and the machine, and that same unhurried meticulousness. We drink it in silence. It’s Christmas Eve. For me, silence is usually an ally. Today it’s pressing lightly on my ears.
“Did you have a Christmas tree when you were a kid?” I ask.
A question of acceptable superficiality. But I ask it to find out who he is.
“Every year. Until I turned f-fifteen. Then the cat jumped up on it. And her fur caught on fire from the candles.”
“What did you do?”
Not until I ask the question do I realize that I took it for granted that he would have done something.
“Took off my shirt and wrapped it around the cat. That put out the fire.”
I imagine him without a shirt. In the glow of the lamps. In the glow of the Christmas candles. In the glow of the cat on fire. I push the thought aside. It comes back. Some thoughts have glue on them.
“Good night,” I say, getting up.
He goes with me to the door. “I’m p-positive that I’m going to dream tonight.”
There’s something sly about that remark. I scan his face, looking for a hint that he’s making fun of me, but his expression is serious.
“Thanks for the nice evening,” I say.
One of the signs that your life needs cleaning up is when your possessions gradually, overwhelmingly consist of things that you borrowed a long time ago but now it’s too late to give them back because you’d rather shave your head than confront the bogeyman who is the rightful owner.
My cassette player is stamped: “Geodetic Institute.” It has built-in speakers, built-in 70 percent distortion, built-in indestructibility, so I can’t even find an excuse to buy a new one.
In front of me on the table I have Isaiah’s cigar box. I’ve weighed the things in my hand, one at a time. I’ve looked up the harpoon tip in The Eskimos by Birket-Smith. It’s a tip from the Dorset culture, A.D. 700-900. The book says that at least five thousand of them have been found. Spread over two thousand miles of coastline.
I take the tape out of its box. It’s a Maxell XLI-S. A better-quality tape. A tape for people who want to record music.
There’s no music on the tape. It’s a man talking. A Greenlander.
On Disko Island in 1981 I helped test the corrosion effects of sea fog on the carabiners used for safety lines on glacier crossings. We simply hung them up on a cord and came back three months later. They still looked reliable. A little tarnished, but reliable. The manufacturer claimed the breaking strength would be 9,000 pounds. It turned out that we could pull them apart with a fingernail. Exposed to a hostile environment, they had disintegrated.
You lose your language through a similar process of deterioration.
When we moved from the village school to Qaanaaq, we had teachers who didn’t know one word of Greenlandic, nor did they have any plans to learn it. They told us that, for those who excelled, there would be an admission ticket to Denmark and a degree and a way out of the Arctic misery. This golden ascent would take place in Danish. This was when the foundation was being laid for the politics of the sixties. Which led to Greenland officially becoming “Denmark’s northernmost county,” and the Inuit were officially supposed to be called “Northern Danes” and “be educated to the same rights as all other Danes,” as the prime minister put it.
That’s how the foundation is laid. Then you arrive in Denmark and six months pass and it feels as if you will never forget your mother tongue. It’s the language
you think in, the way you remember your past. Then you meet a Greenlander on the street. You exchange a few words. And suddenly you have to search for a completely ordinary word. Another six months pass. A girl friend takes you along to the Greenlanders’ House on Løv Lane. That’s where you discover that your own Greenlandic can be picked apart with a fingernail.
Later, when I’ve gone back, I’ve tried to learn it again. As with so many other things, I haven’t exactly succeeded, or failed either. That’s about where I stand with my mother tongue—as if I were sixteen or seventeen years old.
And besides, there isn’t one language in Greenland. There are three. The man on Isaiah’s tape is speaking East Greenlandic. A southern dialect. It’s incomprehensible to me.
From his tone of voice, I imagine that he’s talking to someone else. But no one interrupts him. It sounds as if he’s talking in a kitchen or a dining room, because every once in a while there’s noise like silverware. Every once in a while there’s the sound of an engine. Maybe it’s a generator. Or electronic noise from the cassette recorder.
He’s explaining something that’s important to him. The explanation is lengthy, urgent, complicated, but there are also long pauses. In the pauses I can hear that behind his speech there is a hiss of something like music, maybe the sound of a wind instrument. The remnants of a previous recording that has not been adequately erased.
I give up trying to understand what he’s saying and let my thoughts wander. The speaker can’t be Isaiah’s father; the dialect isn’t right.
The voice finishes a sentence and stops. The pause button must have been pushed, because there’s no crackling. One minute the voice is there, the next it’s white noise. And far in the background, the remains of some distant music.
I let it hiss and put my feet up on the table.
Every so often I would play music for Isaiah. I would move the speakers over to the sofa, close to his damaged ears, and turn up the volume. He would lean back against the sofa and close his eyes. Often he would fall asleep. Very quietly he would slump over on one side without waking up. Then I would gather him up and carry him downstairs. If it was too noisy down there, I would carry him back up and put him to bed. The instant I put him down, he would always wake up. And in that half-asleep state, hoarsely humming, he seemed to be trying to sing some bars of what he had heard.
I’ve closed my eyes. It’s night. The last Christmas guests have taken their trailers full of presents home. Now they’re lying in bed looking forward to the day after tomorrow, when they can go out and exchange them or get cash instead.
It’s time for peppermint tea. Time to look out over the city. I turn toward the window. There’s always the hope that it may have started to snow while my back was turned.
At that moment someone laughs.
I’m on my feet with my hands out in front of me. It’s not a delicate, little-girl laugh. It’s the phantom of the opera. I’ll sell my life as dearly as possible.
There are four light taps and then the music starts. It’s jazz. In the foreground there’s the sound of a trumpet. It’s coming from Isaiah’s tape.
I push the stop button. It takes me a long time to come back down to earth. To build up a solid panic takes a fraction of a second. Getting rid of it can take half an evening.
I rewind and play the last part of the tape again. Again, the pause button is used. There’s no warning, suddenly the laughter is there. Deep, triumphant, sonorous. Then the taps. Then the music. It’s jazz and yet not jazz. There’s something euphoric, disconnected about it. Like four instruments that have run amok. But it fools you. Because there is also a strange precision to it. Like a clown act in a circus ring. What takes the greatest precision is that it’s supposed to sound like total chaos.
The tune plays for maybe seven minutes. Then the tape runs out, and the notes are abruptly cut off.
The music had a sense of energy. It gave me a strange lift, on top of the anxiety, at three o’clock on Christmas morning.
I sang in the church choir in Qaanaaq. I pictured the Three Wise Men wearing snowshoes, on dogsleds across the ice. With their gaze fixed on the star. I knew how they felt inside. They had gotten hold of Absolute Space. They knew they were on the right track. Moving toward an energy phenomenon. That’s what the Baby Jesus was for me, as I stood there pretending to read the notes, while in reality I had never understood them but always learned by ear.
It’s the same way now, with more than half my life behind me, in the White Palace. So what if I’ve never had a child of my own. I enjoy the sea and the ice without continually feeling cheated out of Creation. A child who is born is something to seek out, something to search for, a star, a northern light, a column of energy in the universe. And a child who dies—that’s an abomination.
I get up and go downstairs and ring the doorbell.
He comes out in his pajamas. Groggy with sleep.
“Peter,” I say, “I’m scared. But I’ll do it, anyway.”
He smiles, half awake, half asleep.
“I knew it,” he says. “I knew it.”
2
“Thirty is a biblical number,” says Elsa Lübing. “Judas received thirty silver coins. Jesus was thirty years old when he was baptized. With the new year it will be thirty years ago that the Cryolite Corporation switched over to automated bookkeeping.”
It’s December 27. We’re sitting in the same chairs. The same teapot is on the table, the same coasters under the teacups. The same dizzying view, the same white winter light. It might seem as if time had stood still. As if we’ve been sitting here for the past week without moving, and now a button is pushed and we take up where we left off. Except for one thing. She seems to have made a decision. There is something determined about her.
Her eyes are deep-set, and she’s paler than last time, as if it has cost her sleepless nights to get this far.
Or maybe it’s all in my imagination. Maybe she looks the way she does because she has celebrated Christmas by fasting and keeping vigil and saying her prayers seven hundred times twice a day.
“In some ways those thirty years changed everything. In other ways everything has stayed the same. The director at that time—in the fifties and early sixties—was Councilor Ebel. He and his wife both had their own custom-made Rolls-Royce. Every so often one of the cars would be parked outside, with the uniformed chauffeur waiting behind the wheel. Then we would know that he or his wife was visiting the factory. We never saw them in person. She had a private train car that was kept in Hamburg, and several times a year it was hooked up to the train and they traveled to the Riviera. The daily administration was handled by the finance director, the sales director, and chief engineer Ottesen. Ottesen was always in the laboratory or at the quarry in Saqqaq. We never saw him. The sales director was always traveling. Occasionally he came home, scattering smiles, gifts, and frivolous anecdotes to all sides. I remember that the first time he came back from Paris, after the war, he brought silk stockings.”
She laughs at the thought that silk stockings had once made her happy. “I’ve noticed that you’re interested in clothes, too. That disappears with age. For the last thirty years I’ve worn only white. If you limit earthly things, you set your thoughts free for the spiritual.”
I don’t say a word, but I make a mental note of the remark—for the next time I have pants made by tailor Tvilling on Heine Street. He collects sparkling gems like that.
“It was an apparatus 65 inches by 3 feet by 45 inches. It operated with two different levers. One for Continental types of decimal coinage and one for British pound sterling and pence. The relevant information was punched in a type of hole code on data entry cards that were put into the machine. This meant that the information was less accessible. When numbers are compressed onto punch cards and transformed into code, it’s more difficult to understand them. That’s centralization. That’s what the director said. Centralization always has certain associated costs.”
In some ways it h
as become easier to orient ourselves in the modern world. Every phenomenon has become international. The Greenland Trading Company—as part of centralization—closed its business on Maxwell Island in 1979. My brother had been a hunter there for ten years, the king of the island, as unchallengeable as a male baboon. The closing of the store drove him south to Upernavik. When I was posted at the meteorological station, he was sweeping the docks in the harbor. The following year he hanged himself. That was the year when the suicide rate in Greenland became the highest in the world. The Greenland Ministry wrote in Atuagagdliutit that it looked as if it was going to be difficult to combine the necessary centralization with the hunting trade. They didn’t write that there were bound to be quite a few more suicides along the way. But that was understood.
“Try the cookies,” she says. “Spekulaas. I baked them myself. It has taken me an entire lifetime to figure out how to take them out of the mold without ruining the pattern.”
The cookies are flat, dark brown, with slivers of burnt almonds pressed into the bottom. She looks at them intently. People who have lived alone all their lives can allow themselves to refine highly specialized interests. Such as how to take the cookies out of the mold.
“I cheat a little,” she says. “For example, this one here. The mold is a man and his wife. It’s quite difficult to get the eyes right. That’s the trouble with very dry pastry dough. So I use a knitting needle once they’re out of the mold and lying on the table. So it’s not the original design, but close to it. Something similar takes place in a company. Then it’s called ‘good accounting practice.’ It’s a flexible term that covers what the auditors will accept. Do you know how responsibility is shared in companies listed on the stock exchange?”
I shake my head. The cookies combine butter and spices in such a way that you could eat a hundred of them and only realize how sick you are after it’s too late.
