Smilla's Sense of Snow Read Online Free PDF

this house, white as snow and decorated with white-washed cement seashells, with a roof of natural shale and with a winding stairway up to the entrance. With rosebeds in a front yard that drops steeply down to Strand Drive, and a back yard that's big enough for a nine-hole practice course, which is just right, now that he's gotten the new balls.
    He earned his money giving injections.
    He has never been one to leak information about himself, but whoever is interested can look him up in Who's Who and discover that he became a chief of staff when he was thirty, that he held Denmark's first chair in anesthesiology when it was established, and that five years later he left the hospital system to devote himself-as it's so nicely put-to private practice. Later his fame took him out traveling. Not as a vagabond, but in private jets. He has given injections to the famous. He was in charge of the anesthesia at the first pioneering heart transplants in South Africa. He was with the American delegation of doctors in the Soviet Union when Brezhnev died. I've heard it said that my father was the one who delayed death during the last weeks of Brezhnev's life, wielding his long syringes.
    He resembles a longshoreman and discreetly cultivates this look by letting his beard grow out now and then. A beard that is now gray but which was once blue-black and still requires two shaves a day with a straight razor for him to look presentable.
    His hands are unfailingly steady. With those hands he can push a 150-mm syringe through the flank, retroperitoneally, through the deep back muscles, into the aorta. Then he taps the tip of the needle lightly against the large artery, to be sure that he has gone far enough, and then goes behind it to leave a deposit of lidocaine up at the large nerve plexus. The central nervous system controls the tone of the arteries. He has a theory that by using this blockade, he can help the poor circulation in the legs of overweight wealthy people.
    While he's giving an injection he is as focused as any human being could be. He thinks of nothing else, not even the bill for ten thousand kroner that his secretary is typing up, and which will fall due before the first of January. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year-next, please.
    During the past twenty-five years he has been among the two hundred golf players fighting for the last fifty Eurocards. He lives with a ballet dancer who is thirteen years younger than me and who walks around looking at him as if the only thing she lives for is the hope that he will strip the tulle tutu and toe shoes off her.
    So my father is a man who possesses everything he can get his hands on. And that's what he thinks he's showing me here on the golf course. That he has everything his heart could desire. Even the beta-blockers, which he's been taking for the past ten years to steady his hands, are largely without side effects.
    We walk around the house, along the raked gravel paths; in the summer Sorensen, the gardener, takes a pair of shears to the edges, so you could cut your feet on them if you don't watch out. I'm wearing a sealskin coat over a jumpsuit of embroidered wool with a zipper. Seen from a distance, we are a father and daughter with a plethora of wealth and vitality. On closer examination, we are simply a banal tragedy spread over two generations.
    The living room has a floor of bog oak and borders of stainless steel around a wall of glass facing the birdbath and rosebushes and the drop in social status toward Strand Drive. Benja is standing at the fireplace wearing a leotard and woolen socks, stretching the muscles in her feet and ignoring me. She looks pale and lovely and naughty, like an elf maiden turned stripper.
    "Brentan," I say.
    "I beg your pardon?"
    She enunciates every syllable, the way she learned at the Royal Theater school.
    "For bad feet, dear. Brentan for fungus between your toes. You can get it without a prescription now."
    "It's not fungus," she says coldly. "I