That ought to make all of us happy. As long as it doesn't mean that the rest of us have to have a guilty conscience because we're still not on a first-name basis with our toasters.
He has a mountain of fish and a mountain of vegetables. Salmon, mackerel, cod, various types of flounder. Tails, heads, fins. Two big crabs. And carrots, onions, leeks, parsnips, fennel, and Jerusalem artichokes.
He cleans and boils the vegetables.
I tell him about Ravn and Captain Telling.
He puts on some rice. With cardamom and star aniseed.
I tell him about the confidentiality clauses I've signed. About the reports Ravn had.
He strains off the vegetable water and gets ready to cook the fish.
I tell him about the threats. That they can arrest me whenever they like.
He puts in the pieces of fish gradually. I remember this from Greenland. From the days when we took time to cook our food. Different kinds of fish have different cooking times. Cod is done right away. Mackerel a little later, and salmon even later.
“I'm afraid of being locked up,” I say.
He puts the crabs in last. He lets them boil for no more than five minutes.
In a way, I'm relieved that he doesn't say anything, doesn't yell at me. He's the only other person who knows how much we know. How much we will now have to forget.
It seems necessary to explain my claustrophobia to him.
“Do you know what the foundation of mathematics is?” I ask. “The foundation of mathematics is numbers. If anyone asked me what makes me truly happy, I would say: numbers. Snow and ice and numbers. And do you know why?”
He splits the claws with a nutcracker and pulls out the meat with curved tweezers.
“Because the number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers a sense of longing, and do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing?”
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: Smillaâyou'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 â
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 tongueâas 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.