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

don't think people get that until they reach your age."
    "Juveniles do too, dear. Especially people who work out a lot. And it spreads to the crotch quite easily."
    Snarling, Benja retreats backward into the adjoining chambers. She has an abundance of raw energy, but she had a protected childhood and a skyrocketing career. She hasn't yet experienced the adversity necessary to develop a psyche that can keep fighting back.
    Senora Gonzales arranges the tea things on the coffee table, which is a three-inch-thick glass plate on top of a polished marble block.
    "It's been a long time, Smilla."
    He talks about his new paintings for a while, about the memoirs he's writing, and about what he's practicing on the piano. He's stalling. Preparing himself for the impact from the blow that will come when I state my business, which has nothing to do with him. He's grateful that I let him talk. But in reality neither of us has any illusions. "Tell me about Johannes Loyen," I say.
    My father was in his early thirties when he came to Greenland and met my mother.
    The Inuit Aisivak told Knud Rasmussen that in the beginning the world was inhabited only by two men, who were both great sorcerers. Since they wanted to multiply, one of them transformed his body in such a way that he could give birth; and then the two of them created many children.
    In the 1860s the Greenland catechist Hanseeraq recorded in the diary of the Brethren Congregation, Diarium Friedrichstal, many examples of women who hunted as men did. There are examples in Rink's collection of legends, and in Reports from Greenland. It has certainly never been commonplace, but it has happened. Caused by the excessive number of women, by death and necessity, and by the natural acceptance in Greenland that each of the sexes contains the potential to become its opposite.
    As a rule, however, women have then had to dress like men, and they have had to renounce any sort of family life. The collective could tolerate a change in sex, but not a fluid transition state.
    It was different with my mother. She laughed and gave birth to her children and gossiped about her friends and cleaned skins like a woman. But she shot and paddled a kayak and dragged meat home like a man.
    When she was about twelve years old, she went out on the ice with her father in April, and there he shot at an uuttoq, a seal sunning itself on the ice. He missed. For other men there might be various reasons why they would miss. For my grandfather there was only one. Something irreversible was about to happen. Calcification of the optic nerve. A year later he was totally blind. On that day in April my mother stayed behind while her father walked on to check a long line. There she had time to ponder the various possibilities for her future. Such as the welfare assistance which even today is below subsistence level in Greenland and at that time was a kind of unintentional joke. Or death by starvation, which was not uncommon, or a life of depending on kinfolk who didn't even have enough for themselves.
    When the seal popped up again, she shot it.
    Before, she had jigged for sea scorpions and Greenland halibut, and hunted for grouse. With this seal she became a hunter.
    I think it was rare for her to step outside herself and take an objective look at her role. But it happened once when we were living in tents at the summer encampment near Atikerluk, a mountain that is invaded by auks in the summertime, by so many black, white-breasted birds that only someone who has seen it can fully grasp the vast numbers. They defy measurement.
    We had come from the north, where we were fishing for narwhals from small, diesel-powered cutters. One day we caught eight animals. Partly because the ice had trapped them in a restricted area, partly because the three boats lost contact with each other. Eight narwhals are far too much meat, even for dog food. Far too much meat.
    One of them was a pregnant female. The nipple is located right above the