Peter (mechanic) - Isaiah

The relationship between the mechanic and Isaiah is a friendship built before Isaiah can speak Danish and sustained without requiring fluent speech. It is expressed in shared craft, private games, and concrete acts of care: the mechanic offers a space where Isaiah can work on his own terms, and when fear overwhelms the boy, he takes him in and stays beside him through the night. Their connection makes room for Isaiah’s independence while also giving the mechanic reason to suspect that the child is afraid of something more than a stranger at the door.

A friendship beyond language

The mechanic and Isaiah have been friends since before Isaiah learned Danish. Their understanding is described as a recognition between craftsmen, and as a meeting of two people who are each, in different ways, alone in the world. The friendship therefore precedes the Danish-language conversations through which the adults around Isaiah might otherwise measure familiarity. Words are not its foundation.

The mechanic’s basement workshop gives that connection a physical setting. Its double room is crowded with bicycle parts, electrical tools, plumbing supplies, paint, dismantled stereos, welding equipment, and a washing machine in pieces. Despite the apparent potential for disorder, everything is kept in place by the mechanic’s practical system. Beneath the full-sized bench is a miniature counterpart: a little table and stool, a workbench, a vise, a beer crate, and a cigar box holding Isaiah’s small paint cans. The arrangement is not merely a place for Isaiah to be present while the mechanic works; it gives him tools and a working world scaled to him.

Smilla remembers seeing them there together: the mechanic bent over a magnifying glass, Isaiah on the floor in his underpants, absorbed in his work. The soldering and epoxy smells belong to a scene of concentration so complete that neither looks up when she stands nearby for ten minutes. Their companionship does not need constant conversation or attention from an onlooker. They can work independently and still be together.

Work, play, and Isaiah’s own terms

The mechanic later describes the way their time together moves between making things and play. Isaiah makes faces, hiding his head and then raising it to resemble a sick old monkey, a rabbit, or Frankenstein’s monster. The mechanic pretends to tire of the performance and tells him to stop; then he gives Isaiah wood and a chisel, or a knife and soapstone. Isaiah works, sways, and rumbles like a little bear, sometimes speaking to himself in Greenlandic. The scene presents a companionable routine whose pleasures do not depend on Isaiah translating himself into Danish.

That independence also appears in the mechanic’s account of Isaiah’s clothing and nickname. Isaiah arrived in Denmark a month before Smilla moved in. Juliane had found him patent-leather shoes, considered stylish in Greenland, but his fan-shaped feet could not fit into pointed toes; she found a pair with rounded toes instead. The mechanic called him the Baron. For Smilla, the name captures Isaiah’s dignity and self-sufficiency: he needs little from the world to be happy. The affectionate nickname does not erase his difference; it registers the particular bearing the mechanic has come to recognize in him.

Hearing, care, and communication

Isaiah’s hearing loss changes how those around him communicate with him, but the friendship with the mechanic is already grounded in forms of understanding beyond language. After Isaiah’s fourth severe middle-ear infection in eight weeks, he emerges from the effects of penicillin hard of hearing. Smilla responds by sitting in front of him when she reads, so he can follow her lips. The mechanic, meanwhile, is someone with whom Isaiah can communicate in other ways.

The contrast matters: Smilla’s reading makes lip movement visible, while the mechanic’s shared work and play do not require speech to carry the relationship. The workshop, the tools Isaiah uses, and the familiar routines they repeat give their communication a material and practical form. Isaiah is not reduced to a condition to be corrected; the account shows how his daily life is shaped by hearing loss and how companionship can adapt to his ways of being present.

The night Isaiah is afraid

The friendship acquires a more protective dimension on the night the custodian, Petersen, unexpectedly enters the basement to fetch apricot wine from the carboys stored by the furnace. The mechanic looks down and sees Isaiah huddled like an animal, gripping the knife Smilla had given him, shaking and looking ferocious. Even after Isaiah recognizes Petersen, the shaking continues. The mechanic takes him onto his lap for the first time and speaks to him. Isaiah does not want to go home, so the mechanic brings him upstairs and lays him on the sofa.

The mechanic considers calling Smilla, but they do not yet know one another well. Instead, he stays beside Isaiah through the night. Every fifteen minutes, Isaiah bolts upright, shaking and crying; the mechanic remains there as the boy repeatedly wakes in terror. This is not a general declaration of affection but a specific act of care: he provides shelter when Isaiah cannot bear to go home, and gives up his own sleep to keep watch.

Afterward, the mechanic says he has felt that Isaiah is afraid of something. Smilla’s account of the footprints keeps returning to his mind, and he has therefore watched her and the Baron. The friendship links ordinary intimacy to the investigation: because the mechanic knows Isaiah’s habits and has witnessed his fear at close range, he recognizes a change that cannot be explained away as simple shyness.

What their bond reveals

The mechanic’s account revises the picture of Isaiah as a boy who is merely quiet or difficult to understand. In the workshop he is capable of sustained concentration, humor, and independent work; in the mechanic’s company, he can communicate without relying on Danish. Yet the episode with Petersen exposes a terror that breaks through that settled routine. The relationship holds both facts at once: Isaiah’s self-sufficiency and his need for refuge.

It also gives the mechanic a reason to participate in Smilla’s search for an explanation. His friendship with Isaiah is older and more intimate than his acquaintance with Smilla, and the remembered night makes him alert to the possibility that Isaiah’s fear was connected to the footprints she has described. The relationship thus functions not only as a source of companionship but as a form of knowledge: attention accumulated through shared work and a night of caretaking lets the mechanic recognize that something in Isaiah’s life remains unexplained.