Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg Page B

room. Very carefully. Without finding anything. Other than the memory of Isaiah. Then I call up the image of the way it looked the two times I was here before, a long time ago.
    I must have been sitting there half an hour when it came to me. Six months ago the building was inspected for dry rot. The insurance company brought over a dog that was trained to sniff it out. It found two smaller patches. They knocked them down and then swabbed the area. One of the places, where they worked was in this room. They opened the wall three feet off the floor. They bricked it up again, but it still hasn't been covered with plaster like the rest of the wall. Underneath the workbench, in the shadows, there is still a rectangle of 6 by 6-inch bricks.
    And yet I almost didn't find it. He must have waited while the workers were finishing up. Then he went in while the mortar was still damp and pushed one brick slightly inward. He waited for a moment and then pulled it back into place. He kept at it until the mortar was dry. Quietly and calmly, the whole evening, at fifteen-minute intervals, he drifted down to the basement to move the brick an inch. That's what I imagine. You couldn't fit the blade of a knife in between the brick and the mortar. But when I press on it, it slides right in. At first I can't understand how he got it out, because there's nothing to grab hold of. Then I pick up the suction cup and stare at it. I can't shove the brick inward because it would simply fall into the wall cavity. But when I put the black rubber disk against the brick and use the little handle to create suction, the brick comes out toward me with a great deal of resistance. When I have it out, I understand why. A little blue nail has been pounded into the back. Twisted around it is a thin nylon cord. A big drop of epoxy, now hard as stone, had been applied to the nail and cord. The cord runs down into the wall cavity. On the end hangs a flat cigar box with two thick rubber bands around it. The whole thing is a dream of technical ingenuity.
    I put the box in my coat pocket. Then I tuck the brick back in place.
     
    Chivalry is an archetype. When I came to Denmark, Copenhagen County gathered a class of children at Rugmarken's School to learn Danish, near the welfare barracks for emigrants in Sundby on Amager. I sat next to a boy named Baral. I was seven and had short hair. During recess I played ball with the boys. After about three months there was a lesson in which we were supposed to say each other's names.
    "And next to you, Baral, what is her name?"
    "His name is Smilla."
    "Her name is Smilla. Smilla is a girl."
    He looked at me in mute astonishment. After the first shock had receded, and for the rest of the school year, there was only one real difference in his behavior toward me. It was now augmented by a pleasant, courteous helpfulness.
    I found the same thing in Isaiah. He might suddenly switch over to Danish in order to use De, the polite form of address, with me after he came to understand the inherent respect contained in that expression. Over the last three months, when Juliane's self-destruction was greater and more directed than ever, he sometimes didn't want to go home at night.
    "Do you think," he said, addressing me formally in Danish, "that I could sleep here?"
    After I had given him a bath I would put him up on the toilet seat while I rubbed him with lotion. From there he could see his own face in the mirror, sniffing suspiciously at the rose scent of Elizabeth Arden's night cream.
    He has never, while awake, touched me. He never took my hand, he never gave any caresses, and he never asked for any. But during the night, he would sometimes roll over toward me, sound asleep, and lie there for several minutes. Against my skin he would get a diminutive erection that came and went, came and went; like Punch in a puppet show.
    On those nights I wouldn't sleep much. At the slightest change in his rapid breathing, I woke up. Often I would simply