Smilla's Sense of Snow Read Free Page A

feeling that always comes over me at the mere thought of that book: veneration. The knowledge that it is the foundation, the boundary. That if you work your way backwards, past Lobachevsky and Newton and as far back as you can go, you end up at Euclid.
    â€œOn the greater of two given unequal straight lines …”
    Then at some point I no longer see what I’m reading. At some point there is only my voice in the living room and the light of the sunset from the South Harbor. And then my voice isn’t even there; it’s just me and the boy. At some point I stop. And we simply sit there, gazing straight ahead, as if I were fifteen and he were sixteen, and we have reached “the point of no return.” Some time later he gets up very quietly and leaves. I watch the sunset, which lasts three hours at this time of year. As if the sun, on the verge of leaving, had discovered qualities in the world that are now making its departure a reluctant one.
    Of course Euclid didn’t scare him off. Of course it made no difference what I read. For that matter, I could have read aloud from the telephone book. Or from Lewis and Carrisa’s Detection and Classification of Ice . He would have come anyway, to sit with me on the sofa.
    During some periods he would come every day. And then a
couple of weeks might pass when I would see him only once, and from a distance. But when he did come, it was usually just starting to get dark, when the day was over and Juliane was out cold.
    Once in a while I would give him a bath. He didn’t like hot water, but it was impossible to get him clean in cold. I would put him in the bathtub and turn on the hand-held shower. He wouldn’t complain. Long ago he had learned to put up with adversity. But not for one moment did he take his reproachful eyes off my face.

    4
    There have been quite a few boarding schools in my life. I regularly work at suppressing the memory of them, and for long periods of time I succeed. It’s only in glimpses that a single memory sometimes manages to work its way into the light. The way the particular feeling of a dormitory does at this moment. At Stenhøj School, near Humlebæk, we slept in dorms. One for girls and one for boys. They opened all the windows at night. And our blankets were too thin.
    In the Copenhagen county morgue in the basement of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University Hospital, the dead sleep their last, cold sleep in dormitories cooled to just above freezing. Everything is clean, modern, and final. Even in the examination room, which is painted like a living room; they’ve brought in a couple of floor lamps, and a green plant is trying to keep up its courage.
    There’s a white sheet over Isaiah. Someone has placed a little bunch of flowers on top of it, as if in an attempt to give the potted plant support. He is completely covered, but from the small body and large head, you can tell it’s him. The French cranium measurers ran into serious problems in Greenland. They were working from the theory that there was a linear relation between a person’s intelligence
and the size of his skull. They discovered that the Green-landers, whom they regarded as a transitional form of ape, had the largest skulls in the world.
    A man in a white lab coat lifts the sheet away from Isaiah’s face. He looks so intact, as if he had been carefully drained of all blood and color and then put to bed.
    Juliane is standing next to me. She’s dressed in black, and she is sober for the second day in a row.
    As we walk down the hallway, the white coat goes with us.
    â€œYou’re a relative?” he suggests. “A sister?”
    He’s no taller than me, but broad and with a stance like a ram about to butt someone.
    â€œDoctor,” he says. He points to the breast pocket of his lab coat and discovers that there is no name tag to identify him. “Damn it to hell.”
    I continue down the hallway.