Smilla's Sense of Snow Read Free

that special pressure-cooker atmosphere, wearing a new dress of white linen, cut low in the back, trimmed with Valencia ruffles that took a long time to steam-press so they’d stand up properly, and they had already wilted in the general depression.
    There are those who head south this time of year. South to the heat. Personally, I’ve never been farther than Køge, thirty miles south of Copenhagen. And don’t plan to go either, until the nuclear winter has cooled down the continent.
    It’s the kind of day that might make you wonder about the meaning of life, and discover that there is none. And there’s something rooting around on the stairway, on the landing below my apartment.
    When the first large shipments of Greenlanders began arriving in Denmark in the 1930s, one of the first things they wrote home was that Danes are such pigs: they keep dogs in their houses. For a moment I think it’s a dog lying on the stairs. Then I see that it’s a child, and on this particular day that is not much better.
    â€œBeat it, you little shit,” I say.

    Isaiah looks up.
    â€œPeerit,” he says. Beat it yourself.
    There aren’t many Danes who can tell by looking at me. They think there’s a trace of something Asian, especially when I put a shadow under my cheekbones. But the boy on the stairs looks right at me with a gaze that cuts straight through to what he and I have in common. It’s the kind of look you see in newborns. Later it vanishes, sometimes reappearing in extremely old people. This could be one reason I’ve never burdened my life with children—I’ve thought too much about why people lose the courage to look each other in the eye.
    â€œWill you read me a story?”
    I have a book in my hand. That’s what prompted his question.
    You might say that he looks like a forest elf. But since he is filthy, dressed only in underpants, and glistening with sweat, you might also say he looks like a seal pup.
    â€œPiss off,” I say.
    â€œDon’t you like kids?”
    â€œI eat kids.”
    He steps aside.
    â€œ Salluvutit, you’re lying,” he says as I go past.
    At that moment I see two things in him that somehow link us together. I see that he is alone. The way someone in exile will always be. And I see that he is not afraid of solitude.
    â€œWhat’s the book?” he shouts after me.
    â€œEuclid’s Elements ,” I say, slamming the door.
    It turned out to be Euclid’s Elements , after all.
    That’s the one I take out that very evening when the doorbell rings and he’s standing outside, still in his underpants, staring straight at me; and I step aside and he walks into my apartment and into my life, never really to leave it again; then I take Euclid’s Elements down from the bookshelf. As if to chase him away. As if to establish from the start that I have no books that would interest a child, that he and I cannot meet over a book, or in any other way. As if to avoid something.
    We sit down on the sofa. He sits on the very edge, with both legs crossed, the way kids from Thule used to sit at Inglefield in
the summertime, on the edge of the dogsled used as a bed inside the tent.
    â€œA point is that which cannot be divided. A line is a length without breadth.”
    This book turns out to be the one he never comments on, and the one we keep returning to. Occasionally I try others. One time I borrow the children’s book Rasmus Klump on the Ice Cap . In all serenity he listens to the description of the first pictures. Then he points a finger at the toylike bear Rasmus Klump.
    â€œWhat does that one taste like?” he asks.
    â€œA semicircle is a figure contained within a diameter … and the circumference intersected by the diameter.”
    For me, the reading goes through three phases on that first evening in August.
    First there is simply irritation at the whole impractical situation. Then there is the