Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg Page A

to create chaos. On a purely personal level, I think all you'd have to do is send me in here alone to turn on the light, and that would trigger such a state of confusion that you wouldn't even be able to find the light switch afterward. But as it is now, everything is kept in its place by the thoroughly pragmatic sense of order of a person who wants to make sure he can always find whatever he needs.
    The place is a double world. Above is the workbench, the tools, the tall office chair. Below, under the table, the universe is duplicated half-size. A little masonite table with a coping saw, screwdriver, chisel. A little stool. A workbench. A little vise. A beer crate. A cigar box with maybe thirty cans of Humbrol. Isaiah's things. I've been in here once before when they were sitting and working. The mechanic on the chair, bent over a magnifying glass on a stand; Isaiah on the floor, in his underpants, lost to the world. There was the smell of burning solder and epoxy hardener in the air. And something else, something stronger: total, all-consuming concentration. I stood there for maybe ten minutes. They didn't look up once. Isaiah wasn't equipped for the Danish winter. Only occasionally would Juliane manage to dress him adequately. After I had known him for six months, he contracted his fourth severe middle ear infection in eight weeks. When he came out of the penicillin daze, he was hard-of-hearing. After that I would sit in front of him when I read so that he could follow the movement of my lips. In the mechanic he found someone with whom he could communicate in other ways than through language.
    For several days I've been walking around with something in my pocket because I've been expecting this meeting. I show it to him now.
    "What's this?"
    It's the suction cup that I took from Isaiah's room. "A `cup.' Glaziers use them to carry large pieces of glass."
    I take the things out of the beer crate. There are several pieces of carved wood. A harpoon, an ax. A boat carved from a dense, rather speckled kind of wood, maybe pear. An umiaq. It's rubbed smooth on the outside and hollowed out with a gouge. A slow, meticulous, carefully executed job. There is also a car made of bent and glued aluminum strips cut from an almost paper-thin sheet. Pieces of rough colored glass that have been melted and stretched over a Bunsen burner. Several pairs of glasses. A Walkman. The cover is gone but it has been ingeniously repaired with a Plexiglas plate and tiny hinges screwed on. It's lying in a hand-sewn vinyl case. The whole thing bears the mark of a joint project for a child and an adult. There is also a stack of cassette tapes.
    "Where's his knife?"
    The mechanic shrugs. After a moment he plods off. He's the whole world's 200-pound friend, and buddy-buddy with the custodian, too. He has keys to all the basement rooms and can come and go as he pleases.
    I pick up the little stool and sit down on it by the door, so I can see the whole room.
    At boarding school we each had a cupboard 12 by 20 inches. It had a lock. The owner had a key for it. Everyone else could open it with a steel comb.
    There's a widespread notion that children are open, that the truth about their inner selves just seeps out of them. That's all wrong. No one is more covert than a child, and no one has a greater need to be that way. It's a response to a world that's always using a can opener to open them up to see what's inside, wondering whether it ought to be replaced with a more useful sort of preserves.
    The first need that developed at boarding schoolaside from the perpetual, never truly satisfied hungerwas the need for peace. There is no peace in a dormitory. So the need is suppressed. It turns into a need for a hiding place, for a secret room.
    I try to imagine Isaiah's situation, the places he went. The apartment, the housing block, the kindergarten, the embankment. Places that could never be thoroughly searched. So I stick to the place at hand.
    I look around the