Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg Read Free Book Online

him back again. He was stuck to my mother with a rubber band that was invisible to the rest of the world but which had the effect and physical reality of a drive belt.
    He didn’t have much to do with us children when he was there. From my first six years I remember only traces of him. The smell of the Latakia tobacco he smoked. The autoclave in which he sterilized his instruments. The interest he aroused whenever he would occasionally put on his cleats, take up a stance, and shoot a bucket of balls across the new ice. And the mood he brought with him, which was the sum of the feelings he had for my mother. The same kind of soothing warmth that you might expect to find in a nuclear reactor.
    What was my mother’s role in this? I don’t know, and I will never find out. Those who understand such things say that the two spouses must always assist each other if a relationship is truly to founder and turn to flotsam. That’s possible. Like everybody else, from the age of seven I have painted my childhood with lots of
false colors, and some of this may have rubbed off on my mother as well. But in any case, she was the one who stayed where she was, and set out her nets and braided my hair. She was there, a huge presence, while Moritz with his golf clubs and beard stubble and syringes oscillated between the two extremes of his love: either a total merging or putting the entire North Atlantic between him and his beloved.
    No one who falls into the water in Greenland comes up again. The sea is less than 39° F, and at that temperature all the processes of decomposition stop. That’s why fermentation of the stomach contents does not occur here; in Denmark, however, it gives suicides renewed buoyancy and brings them to the surface, to wash up on shore.
    But they found the remains of her kayak, which led them to conclude that it must have been a walrus. Walruses are unpredictable. They can be hypersensitive and shy. But if they come a little farther south, and if it’s autumn, when there are few fish, they can be transformed into some of the swiftest and most meticulous killers in the great ocean. With their two tusks they can stave in the side of a ship made of ferrocement. I once saw hunters holding a cod up to a walrus that they had captured alive. The walrus puckered up his lips as for a kiss and then sucked the meat right off the bones of the fish.
    â€œIt would be nice if you came out here for Christmas, Smilla.”
    â€œChristmas doesn’t mean anything to me.”
    â€œAre you planning to let your father sit here all alone?”
    This is one of the annoying tendencies that Moritz has developed with age—this mixture of perfidy and sentimentality.
    â€œCouldn’t you try the Old Men’s Home?”
    I have stood up, and now he comes over to me. “You’re damned heartless, Smilla. And that’s why you’ve never been able to hold on to a man.”
    He’s as close to tears as he can get.
    â€œFather,” I say, “write me a prescription.”
    He switches immediately, fast as lightning, from complaint to concern, just as he did with my mother.

    â€œAre you ill, Smilla?”
    â€œVery. But with this piece of paper you can save my life and keep your Hippocratic oath. It has to be five figures.”
    He winces; it’s a matter of his life’s blood. We’re talking about his vital organs: his wallet and his checkbook.
    I put on my fur. Benja does not come out to say goodbye. At the door he hands me the check. He knows that this pipeline is his only connection to my life. Even this he is afraid of losing.
    â€œDon’t you want Fernando to drive you home?”
    Then something dawns on him. “Smilla,” he shouts, “you’re not going away, are you?”
    There is a snow-covered lawn between us. It might just as well have been the ice cap.
    â€œThere’s something weighing on my conscience,” I say. “It’ll