Juliane Christiansen—Isaiah

Juliane Christiansen’s relationship with her son Isaiah is reconstructed through what remains after his death: clothes, a small stone, a model ship, and the diapers she could not bring herself to discard. Her love is real but difficult to voice amid alcoholism, poverty, and the numbing assumption that death is simply a closed case. The relationship comes into view less through a sustained account of their shared life than through the objects and silences that make his absence tangible.

A Bond Shaped by Vulnerability

Juliane is described as Isaiah’s mother and as a woman whose bearing changes strikingly with alcohol. Sober, she is stiff, silent, and inhibited; drunk, she becomes lively and cheerful. After returning from the hospital, she has taken disulfiram and continued drinking, so her renewed animation exists alongside the physical poisoning caused by combining the two. In that altered state, she tells Smilla that she loves her. The declaration is addressed to Smilla, not Isaiah, but it establishes that affection can break through Juliane’s usual reserve even as her drinking compromises her health.

The account of Juliane’s drinking is set against the narrator’s memory of the enormous consumption of alcohol in Greenland and of the voluntary liquor rationing once imposed in Thule. That background helps explain why alcohol is not treated as a private quirk or an isolated failing: it is part of the social world that has shaped the narrator’s own attitude to drinking. Juliane’s dependence nevertheless remains personal and consequential, making it harder for her to speak or act clearly while she is grieving her son.

Isaiah’s Things and the Shape of His Absence

When Smilla visits Juliane’s apartment, the two have previously kept to the kitchen and coffee, respecting the privacy of a life already exposed to scrutiny. This time Smilla feels responsible for looking for something others may have overlooked. Juliane lets her search, partly because she has bought apple wine and partly because prolonged welfare scrutiny has worn down her sense that anything can remain private.

The apartment’s worn domestic details—polished floors crossed in wooden-soled boots, cigarettes left burning on the tabletop, and a sofa used to sleep off hangovers—make the home feel lived in and depleted. Against that background, the objects associated with Isaiah carry particular weight. His hospital belongings are in a clear plastic bag on the bed: rain pants, sneakers, a sweatshirt, underwear, and socks. A soft white stone from his pocket, which he used as chalk, is among them. In the wardrobe, Smilla searches through rainwear and other clothes but finds only dust. The search is not just for evidence; it brings the ordinary remnants of a child’s life into contact with the fact that he is gone.

The most revealing absence is a deliberate one. Juliane stands in the doorway crying and says that the diapers were the only thing she threw out. Isaiah would wear diapers for a couple of days about once a month, when his fear of heights grew worse; once, Smilla herself had bought them for him. Juliane has kept the other belongings, but this detail shows that she could not preserve everything, and that even the discarded item was associated with a recurring vulnerability she and Smilla had recognized. Asked where his knife is, Juliane does not know. The missing knife remains an unanswered question amid a room full of things that have been saved.

A model ship stands on the windowsill, bearing the name of the S.S. Johannes Thomsen of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark. Its formal inscription and conspicuous presence contrast with the room’s softness and neglect. The ship does not explain the mother-son bond, but it belongs to the same material field through which Smilla tries to understand what has happened: objects speak where Juliane cannot supply a coherent account.

Grief, Paperwork, and What Can Be Said

Smilla asks Juliane to show her papers, and the request shifts their interaction from sympathy to investigation. Juliane’s records are not organized in a drawer or notebook but kept in seven greasy envelopes: appointment slips from an alcoholism clinic, a birth certificate, bakery coupons, tax documents, bank statements, medical records, insurance papers, a passport, utility receipts, and official letters. A stack of slips indicates that she receives a monthly pension of 9,400 kroner. The paperwork gives her life an official legibility, but it also represents the state’s persistent presence in the life of someone who has had to live under welfare supervision.

Within the official correspondence, Smilla finds a letter Juliane dictated at the Cryolite Corporation’s office two years earlier. It follows formal conventions, contains no typing errors, and has been approved and signed. After signing, Juliane turned the paper over and wrote an apology in the margin. The contrast between the proper letter and the handwritten words suggests an emotion that the official form could not accommodate. In a relationship story otherwise conveyed through what is kept or discarded, this small addition to a document shows feeling surfacing at the edge of an authorized account.

The search leads Smilla to ask what Isaiah died of. Juliane says that he had been on an expedition on Greenland’s west coast and that there was an accident; she thinks he ate something that made him ill. She looks helpless and offers no firm explanation. Her response is not a detailed memory of the event but an account already reduced to uncertainty. When she says that people die and there is no point in wondering how or why, the statement makes her grief sound like resignation—and helps explain why Smilla believes someone may have overlooked something. Juliane’s acceptance does not settle the circumstances of Isaiah’s death; it marks the limit of what she can or will make of them.

Care Without a Clear Resolution

Juliane’s dependence and vulnerability shape what she can offer her son’s memory. She permits Smilla to rummage through her belongings and later lets her take what she needs without asking questions. At another point, Smilla takes cod-liver liver from Juliane’s refrigerator and half a bottle of her Halcion pills. Juliane has recently received the prescription, sells the pills among drug users, and uses the money to buy her own medicine, which is subject to customs duty. These details expose the precarious economy around her treatment and addiction; they also show that her home has become a place where Smilla can act without being challenged.

Juliane’s passivity is not presented as uncomplicated consent or as proof that she has stopped loving Isaiah. Smilla understands that Juliane has given up asking questions, while Juliane’s retained belongings and tears at the mention of the diapers point to a grief still present beneath her withdrawal. As Smilla leaves with the pills, Juliane shouts after her that she has forgotten her. The accusation turns the relationship outward: the scene concerns not only the dead child, but also Juliane’s continuing need to be remembered by the person who has entered her home and taken something from it.

The relationship remains unresolved. Juliane cannot give Smilla a reliable explanation of Isaiah’s death, and Smilla leaves her alone with thoughts she imagines drifting like plankton in sweet wine. She admits that she might have stayed, but cannot cast herself as a merciful rescuer. That limit matters: Smilla’s care takes the form of attention, searching, and occasional practical aid, not a promise to repair Juliane’s life. Through the mother’s grief, the novel makes Isaiah’s absence at once intimate and investigable: the saved clothes testify to attachment, while the uncertain story of his death drives Smilla beyond the family’s private sorrow.