Isaiah's fear of heights

Isaiah’s fear of heights is presented as a daily, physical ordeal—and as the crucial contradiction in the circumstances surrounding his death. He could scarcely climb a stairway, yet he reached the scaffolding from which he fell; the distance between those facts is what Smilla cannot explain.

The Fear in Everyday Life

Smilla describes heights as Isaiah’s defining phobia. He would race up to the second floor, but then crawl onward with his eyes closed and both hands gripping the banister. Sweat gathered on his forehead, his knees buckled, and the journey from the second to the fourth floor took five minutes. The fear was not an abstract dislike of elevation: it governed his movement through the building, step by strained step.

His mother had tried to secure a ground-floor apartment before they moved in. Smilla points out that this practical response was constrained by their circumstances: as Greenlanders receiving welfare, finding suitable housing was not simply a matter of preference. The account thus connects Isaiah’s private fear to an environment that offered little accommodation for it.

The Climb and Its Contradiction

In a conversation with Loyen, Smilla uses Isaiah’s phobia to challenge the idea that his presence on the scaffolding could be taken as ordinary evidence that he was willing to climb. Loyen pauses before replying that, nevertheless, Isaiah had been up there. Smilla accepts the fact but rejects the implication: even a hydraulic lift or a Hercules crane, she argues, could not have forced Isaiah up the scaffolding against his will.

The contrast is stark. Isaiah struggled to ascend the familiar stairs inside the building, but somehow made it to the scaffolding above it. Smilla’s question is not merely how he got there; it is what made him go. His fear makes the climb harder to explain and turns it into a clue about the circumstances of his fatal fall.

What the Fear Leaves Unanswered

Smilla’s account does not resolve the mystery. She still sees Isaiah’s tiny figure lying in the basement morgue, and after asking Loyen what could have drawn him upward, she leaves without looking at him. The movement from the remembered stairway to the morgue and then out the door gives the conversation its force: the bodily reality of Isaiah’s fear is set against the unexplained fact of his final ascent.

The phobia therefore matters both as a specific part of Isaiah’s life and as evidence that complicates the apparent story of his death. It does not identify what happened on the scaffolding, but it makes a simple account of voluntary climbing difficult to accept—and keeps Smilla focused on the question of why he went up at all.