Isaiah's cigar box

Isaiah's cigar box is the concealed archive Isaiah leaves behind: a small container of personal objects and historical clues that redirects Smilla’s search from the circumstances of his death toward the secrets of the Cryolite Corporation and the meaning of a tape marked NIFLHEIM. Its significance lies not in any single item, but in the way the box holds together what institutional records conceal, what memory preserves, and what a Greenlander says in his own voice.

Concealment and Recovery

Smilla finds the box in the basement of Isaiah’s building, hidden inside a wall behind a brick that appears to be part of an unfinished repair. She remembers that six months earlier workers had opened the wall while investigating dry rot, then bricked it up without plastering the patch. One brick in the six-by-six-inch section yields when she presses it, though the gap is too narrow to admit a knife blade.

The hiding place is a device Isaiah has made and maintained with patience. Smilla imagines him returning to the basement every fifteen minutes while the mortar dried, nudging the brick inward and then easing it back into place. A suction cup allows her to draw the brick toward her; on its reverse she finds a small blue nail, nylon cord, and a hardened drop of epoxy. The cord runs into the cavity and suspends a flat cigar box held shut by two thick rubber bands. After retrieving it, she puts the brick back, restoring the concealment rather than leaving the opening exposed.

The discovery depends on a chain of ordinary circumstances: the unfinished repair, a nearly imperceptible shift in the brick, and the suction cup left among Isaiah’s things. The box makes the wall’s concealed space legible as an extension of Isaiah’s private life. What first appears to be a patch in a basement becomes a deliberately constructed hiding place, and the container turns a search grounded in absence into contact with objects Isaiah chose to preserve.

Contents and Personal Traces

When Smilla removes the rubber bands, the box holds four distinct objects. One is the Puma skinner she had bought for Isaiah: a short, broad-bladed knife with a carefully polished antler hilt. She remembers that he had shown no surprise or thanks when she gave it to him, then went down to the basement with it. She understood that he needed time to accept the knife as his own. Preserved in the box, it carries a history of intimacy that was quiet rather than openly expressed.

Another object is a harpoon point of the kind Greenlandic children find at abandoned encampments. They know such artifacts are supposed to be left for archaeologists, yet pick them up and carry them anyway. Looking it up in Birket-Smith’s The Eskimos, Smilla identifies it as Dorset-culture material, dating from A.D. 700–900; the book records at least five thousand finds across two thousand miles of coastline. The small object thus joins Isaiah’s personal cache to a much longer material history of life along Greenland’s coast.

The box also contains a bear claw, whose hardness, weight, and sharpness again astonish Smilla, and a cassette wrapped in faded green graph paper covered with figures. The remaining object, a plastic bus-pass holder with the pass removed, serves as a sleeve for a color photograph. The photograph shows a laughing, bare-chested man on a sunlit rock in North Greenland, his jeans tucked into kamiks and a large black diver’s watch on his wrist. Smilla recognizes him as Isaiah’s father. Where the concealed objects preserve traces of Isaiah’s choices, this image identifies a family connection through a candid moment of recognition.

The contents are not a uniform set of clues. A knife recalls a gift and the time Isaiah needed to claim it; the harpoon tip points to archaeological time; the claw registers the material presence of an animal; the photograph offers a face and a relationship. Together they make the box a personal archive whose contents are meaningful partly because they have been brought together and kept out of sight.

The Tape and the Meaning of NIFLHEIM

The cassette is a Maxell XLI-S, a higher-quality tape intended for recording music. It contains no music. Instead, a Greenlander speaks. Smilla initially withholds the box and the tape from a companion with whom she discusses what she has learned, an omission that keeps this piece of evidence private while the investigation continues.

The label on the graph paper connects the recording to Niflheim. In a remembered account of the postwar code-breaking work, Elsa Lübing explains that this was the word the group kept being asked about. She looked it up and found that it meant “world of mists,” the outermost part of Hell and the realm of the dead. The communication they were examining did not read like ordinary prose: it used agreed metaphors, ostensibly about transporting and selling goods. A German censor associated with the group had worked for von Gehlen, and Johannes Loyen later joined the effort while in Germany as a forensic-medicine expert helping close concentration camps.

The tape’s label therefore does more than provide an enigmatic name. It links an object secreted by Isaiah to a historical investigation into coded correspondence, without making the recording’s contents identical to the correspondence or resolving every question about it. Its voice is especially important beside Smilla’s reflections on linguistic attrition: she compares the loss of a language to corrosion, recalling how Greenlandic pupils were taught in Danish and how, after time away, an ordinary word in one’s mother tongue can become difficult to retrieve. The cassette preserves a Greenlander speaking, even as the historical and political context makes preservation itself precarious.

Private Evidence and Public Records

The box becomes consequential against the institutional barriers Smilla encounters. A director at the Cryolite Corporation tells her that the company’s papers are being transferred to the National Archives of Denmark, but that some records will remain confidential for fifty years and personal files for eighty. The papers are still physically held by the corporation even though they have formally been accepted by the archives, leaving access divided between custody and official classification. The box, by contrast, is physically present and can be opened by the person who finds it.

The corporation’s record-keeping is itself divided. Elsa Lübing describes a company partly supported by the state, with government representation on the board and ownership of 33.33 percent of its shares. Although accounts were copied and portions examined by the Audit Department, she explains that private-sector cooperation, complex employment arrangements, and corporate hierarchy restricted access to parts of the books. She kept bound account ledgers in the archives, but also acknowledges the existence of a smaller confidential ledger. This context makes Isaiah’s private cache more than a handy plot device: it belongs to an investigation in which what can be known depends on who kept a record, where it was stored, and who is allowed to see it.

The tension extends beyond the company. In Moritz’s clinic, where Lagermann has brought X-rays from the Institute of Forensic Medicine in defiance of legal restrictions, Smilla learns that the report from the 1966 expedition is missing. The absent report marks the limit of the official file, while the cigar box supplies evidence through another route: material kept by Isaiah, recovered from a wall, and read by Smilla. The contrast is not that private objects reveal everything while institutions reveal nothing, but that the two kinds of record have different vulnerabilities. The box can survive because it is hidden; official documents can exist and remain inaccessible, or disappear from the file altogether.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The box changes the form of Smilla’s investigation. Before she opens it, Isaiah is present chiefly as a memory and as the person whose death prompts her search. Once the hidden container is recovered, that absence becomes structured evidence: a knife recalls their connection, the photograph identifies his father, and the tape supplies a recorded Greenlandic voice attached to a word with a history of secrecy. The objects do not speak with one clear message, but they make it possible to move among personal memory, Greenlandic material history, and political records.

Its construction also gives concealment a physical form. The brick, the suction cup, the cord, and the cigar box are part of one carefully designed arrangement; retrieving the box requires Smilla to understand how the pieces work together. The evidence is not simply waiting in an archive for an authorized reader. It has been placed where an ordinary inspection nearly overlooked it, and discovery requires attention to a slight irregularity in a basement wall.

The book’s wider reflections on memory sharpen that significance. Smilla recalls childhood lessons about knowing oneself and the idea that a life might have a divine arithmetic, then considers that the written papers before her may reveal something about her future. The cigar box belongs to this world of material traces: evidence is preserved in different forms, and its meaning emerges through acts of looking, listening, remembering, and comparison. It does not offer a self-contained solution. Instead, it gives Smilla a concrete point from which to follow connections that official records, personal testimony, and the spoken language on a cassette cannot establish alone.