Isaiah

Isaiah’s death breaks open the settled surface of Smilla’s life: she describes it as a fissure that briefly sets her in motion. Yet the memories that give him weight are not limited to the circumstances of his death. He is a child with damaged hearing, a careful formal politeness, and an ability to endure neglect without announcing his need. Through their everyday encounters, the novel presents him as a person in his own right, while showing how easily his experience might be reduced to a case, a clue, or an explanation.

Identity and Circumstances

Isaiah is Juliane’s son and Smilla’s young neighbor. His Greenlandic background and his life in Denmark place him across a cultural and linguistic divide that the adults around him do not necessarily know how to cross. The recollections of him are filtered through Smilla, who is at once attentive to his habits and conscious of the limits of interpreting another person’s experience.

His damaged ears shape one of their quiet routines. Smilla moves speakers beside the sofa and turns up the music; Isaiah leans back, closes his eyes, and often falls asleep. When he slumps to one side, she carries him downstairs, or back to bed if the noise there is too much. He wakes as soon as she puts him down, then, half asleep, tries to hum a few bars of what he has heard. The scene makes his hearing impairment part of a particular shared experience—not merely a label, and not something the narrative presents as solved or overcome.

Isaiah’s presence also survives in material traces. Smilla has his cigar box before her on the table when she examines what it contains, including a recording on a music-quality Maxell tape. Later, she recognizes his footprints in a photograph from the snow. The box and the tracks connect the living boy she remembers to the investigation of his death, but they do not exhaust who he was.

Daily Life and Acts of Care

Isaiah sometimes arrives home to find no food. Juliane may be at the table with friends, amid cigarettes, laughter, tears, and heavy drinking, without even five kroner available for French fries. He does not complain or yell at his mother. Instead, quiet and watchful, he leaves to seek another solution. Sometimes he goes to the mechanic’s home; sometimes he comes to Smilla’s. He can sit in her living room for an hour without saying that he is hungry, persisting in what Smilla understands as an extreme Greenlandic politeness.

When she cooks for him, he may eat a whole three-pound mackerel placed on newspaper on the floor because that is where he prefers to eat. He eats it methodically, including the eyes and brain, and works along the backbone and fins. Smilla tries to understand what the contrast between growing up in Greenland and Denmark means, but recognizes that the act of trying to explain can itself become a way of imposing distance. The scene offers concrete care—food set out in the place he chooses—without turning Isaiah’s appetite or manners into a general account of Greenlandic life.

His politeness is not simply silence. After he understands the respect conveyed by the formal Danish address, he sometimes switches into Danish and uses its deferential form with Smilla. During a period when Juliane’s self-destruction has intensified, he asks, formally, whether he could sleep at Smilla’s home. She bathes him, settles him on the toilet seat while applying lotion, and lets him look at himself in the mirror. The small domestic details make their bond legible as care that is both practical and affectionate.

Language, Memory, and Recognition

The novel places Isaiah’s use of language within a larger history of Greenlandic language attrition. Smilla remembers teachers in Qaanaaq who did not speak Greenlandic and did not plan to learn it, while presenting Danish education as the route to advancement and a way out of Arctic hardship. She describes how a language can seem secure and then gradually become harder to call upon, like metal weakened by exposure to a hostile environment. Her account frames language loss as more than an individual failure of memory: it takes place within institutions that assign value to Danish and devalue Greenlandic.

Isaiah’s respectful switch into Danish is a personal instance of that linguistic world, not a simple sign of assimilation. He adopts the formal address because he has grasped the respect it expresses. Smilla is struck by the recognition in this gesture: like a boy she remembers from school, Isaiah can make courtesy a way of acknowledging another person. The same attention to recognition appears in his account of the Baron, who remembers him. The Baron may go weeks without visiting the basement, but when he sees Isaiah at the playground he stops, comes over, and walks with him as far as the door. Isaiah values the gesture because it shows that the Baron has not forgotten him; other children, he says, forget.

These memories resist turning Isaiah into a symbol of either cultural difference or childhood vulnerability. Smilla’s reflections on understanding another culture insist that knowledge comes through living alongside people, learning language, and accepting that understanding may remain wordless. Her effort to comprehend Isaiah is thus accompanied by doubt about the very impulse to explain him. The story preserves his observable choices and words while acknowledging the limits of what Smilla can know.

The Ice and Smilla’s Remorse

One memory makes the danger between them immediate. Smilla has told Isaiah how children in her Greenlandic childhood leapt from one floe to another when the ice broke up near Siorapaluk, knowing that a slip could carry them beneath the ice and away with the current. The following day, Isaiah waits near the grocery store and the Greenlander statue, but disappears before she comes out. At the bridge, she sees him on new ice so thin that it is coming apart from below.

Smilla cannot shout. She walks to a nearby urinal by the bulwark and calls to him gently; he comes back hesitantly across the ice. When he reaches the cobblestones, she hits him. Smilla later regards the blow as a distillation of her feelings for him, while the episode remains a record of her failure to turn fear into a safe response. Isaiah looks for a weapon and tells her that she hit him. Then, rather than remaining fixed in that accusation, he says, “Naammassereerpoq, I guess I'll get used to that,” a return, in Smilla’s telling, to the reserves of character she feels she does not possess herself. The moment holds affection and harm together instead of converting the relationship into an uncomplicated portrait of protection.

Death and Narrative Significance

After Isaiah’s death, the footprints in the snow become evidence that must be read correctly. Smilla explains that the police photograph has lost their detail because a flash or lighting placed at too steep an angle produces glare; the snow needs Polaroid filters and lights held down at its level. Her knowledge of how snow records movement is not incidental to the investigation: it allows her to recognize what the photograph fails to preserve.

In Copenhagen Harbor, after his death, Smilla understands the change in her life through the image of an irregularity in ice. Isaiah’s death has made a fissure; for a brief time, she is no longer held in a fixed position, but moves like a foreign body across the frozen surface. The investigation is therefore also an aftermath of attachment. Isaiah is the person whose absence propels Smilla forward, but his remembered life exceeds that narrative function: it includes the mackerel on the newspaper, music beside his damaged ears, the formal request for a place to sleep, and the hurt that remains between them after she strikes him. In naming a child’s death an abomination, Smilla gives voice to the moral force of that loss without treating it as a puzzle whose solution can restore him.