Smilla's Sense of Snow Read Online Free PDF Page A

matter of a shitty Greenlander," I say.
    There's silence in the receiver. He is a man who, even after a long workday, has reserves for adjusting his thermostat to quick frost.
    "Now I'm damned well going to tell you one thing. We do not discriminate. Whether it's a pygmy that fell, or a serial killer and sex offender, we go all the way. All the way. Do you understand? I picked up the forensics report myself. There is no indication that this was anything but an accident. It's tragic, but we have 175 of them a year."
    "I'm thinking of filing a complaint."
    "By all means, file a complaint."
    Then we hang up. In reality, I hadn't thought about complaining. But I've had a hard day, too.
    I realize the police have a lot to do. I understand him quite well. I understood everything he said.
    Except for one thing. When I gave my statement the day before yesterday, I answered a lot of questions. But some of them I didn't answer. One of them had to do with "marital status."
    "That's none of your business," I told the officer. "Unless you're interested in a date."
    Why would the police know anything about my private life? I ask myself: How did the Toenail know that I don't have any children? I can't answer that question.
    It's just a little question. But the world is always so busy wondering why a single, defenseless woman, if she's in my age group, doesn't have a husband and a couple of charming little toddlers. Over time you develop an allergic reaction to the question.
    I get out a few sheets of unlined paper and an envelope and sit down at the kitchen table. At the top I write: "Copenhagen, December 19, 1993. To the Attorney General. My name is Smilla Jaspersen, and with this letter I would like to file a complaint."
     
     

6
     
    He looks as if he's in his late forties, but he's twenty years older. He's wearing a black thermal jogging suit, cleated shoes, an American baseball cap, and fingerless leather gloves. He takes a little brown medicine bottle out of his breast pocket and empties it into his mouth with a practiced, almost discreet movement. It's propranolol, a beta blocker that slows his heartbeat. He opens one of his hands and looks at it. It's big and white and manicured and quite steady. He selects a number-one club, a driver, Taylormade, with a polished bell-shaped head of Brazilian rosewood. He places it beside the ball, then takes his backswing. When he strikes, he has all of his strength, all of his 190 pounds, focused on a point as big as a postage stamp, and the little yellow ball seems to dissolve and vanish. It comes into view again only when it lands on the green, all the way at the edge of the yard, where it obediently drops close to the flag.
    "Cayman balls," he says. "From McGregor. I always had trouble with the neighbors before. These only go half as far."
    He is my father. This show has been for my benefit, and I see right through it to what it really is. A little boy's plea for love. Which I have absolutely no intention of giving him.
    Seen from my perspective, Denmark's entire population is middle-class. The truly poor and the truly rich are so few as to be almost exotic.
    I have been fortunate enough to know quite a few of the poor, since many of them are Greenlanders.
    My father belongs to the truly wealthy.
    He has a 67-foot Swan at Rungsted Marina with a fulltime three-man crew. He has his own little island at the mouth of Ise Fjord where he can retreat to his Norwegian log cabin, and he can tell any uninvited tourists to beat it, fuck off. He is one of the few people in Denmark to own a Bugatti and have a man employed to polish it and warm up the grease in the axle box with a Bunsen burner on the two occasions a year when he puts in an appearance at the Bugatti Club vintage-car race. The rest of the time he makes do with playing the phonograph record sent out by the club, on which you can hear someone cranking up one of these wonderful vehicles, fine-tuning the choke, and giving it the gas.
    He owns