Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg

their lingo and pump them for information about who Mrs. Lübing was and what happened to her.
    I don't have that kind of directness. I don't like talking to strangers. I don't like Danish workmen in groups. Actually, I don't like any men at all in groups.
    While I've been thinking, I've walked all the way around the block, and the workmen have caught sight of me and wave me closer, and they turn out to be courteous gentlemen who have been employed there for thirty years, and who have the melancholy task of closing down the place, and who know that Mrs. Lübing is still alive and that she lives in the Frederiksberg district and is listed in the phone book, and why do I want to know?
    "She did me a favor once," I tell them. "Now I want to ask her about something."
    They nod and say that Mrs. Lübing did a lot of favors for people, and they have daughters of their own my age, and they tell me to stop by again.
    On my way back toward the city along Strand Boulevard I think that inside even the most paranoid suspicion there is a sense of humanity and the desire for contact waiting to emerge.
    No one who has lived side by side with animals that have plenty of room can ever visit the zoo. But one time I take Isaiah along to the Natural History Museum to show him the room with the seals.
    He thinks they look sickly. But he's fascinated with the model of the aurochs. On the way home we walk through Fælled Park.
    "How old did it say it was?" he asks.
    "Forty thousand years old."
    "Then it's going to die soon."
    "You're probably right."
    "When you die, Smilla, can I have your hide?"
    "All right," I say.
    We walk across the Triangle. It's a warm autumn day, the air is misty.
    "Smilla, can we go to Greenland?"
    I see no reason to spare children from unavoidable truths. They have to grow up to bear the same burdens as the rest of us.
    "No," I say.
    "All right."
    I've never promised him anything. I can't promise him anything. Nobody can promise anyone anything.
    "But we can read about Greenland."
    He says "we" about our reading aloud, aware that he contributes just as much by his presence as I do.
    "In what book?"
    "In Euclid's Elements."
     
    It's dark by the time I get home. The mechanic is pushing his bicycle down into the basement.
    He is very wide, like a bear, and if he straightened up his head he would be quite imposing. But he keeps his head down, maybe to apologize for his height, maybe to avoid the doorframes of this world.
    I like him. I have a weakness for losers. Invalids, foreigners, the fat boy of the class, the ones nobody ever wants to dance with. My heart beats for them. Maybe because I've always known that in some way I will forever be one of them.
    Isaiah and the mechanic had been friends from the time before Isaiah learned to speak Danish. They probably didn't need many words. One craftsman recognizing another. Two males who were alone in the world, each in his own way.
    I follow along as he pushes the bike downstairs. I have an idea about the basement.
    He has gotten a double room for a workshop. It has a cement floor, warm, dry air, and a bright yellow electric light. The limited space is packed full. There's a workbench running along two walls. Bicycle wheels and inner tubes on hooks. A milk crate full of defective potentiometers. A plastic panel with nails and screws on it. A board with small insulated pliers for working with electronics. A board full of hooks. Ten square yards of plywood with what looks like all the tools in the world. A row of soldering irons. Four shelves of plumbing supplies, paint cans, dismantled stereos, sets of socket wrenches, welding electrodes, and an entire set of Metabo electrical tools. Against the. wall two large canisters for a CO2 welder, and two small ones for a blowtorch. There is also a washing machine in pieces. Buckets full of a solution to fight dry rot. A bicycle stand. A foot pump.
    There are so many things gathered here that they seem to be waiting for the slightest excuse