Smilla Jaspersen—Isaiah

Smilla Jaspersen—Isaiah is a relationship of chosen care that becomes central to Smilla’s life and, after Isaiah’s death, to her investigation. Its defining tension is between her attempts to keep distance and the lasting commitment she discovers she has made: she understands that she cannot leave him in the lurch, while his presence gives her a sense of meaning that survives his death.

First Encounters and Chosen Closeness

When Isaiah first comes to Smilla’s apartment, she reaches for Euclid’s Elements, as if a book meant to interest no child could establish that the two of them have nothing in common. She reads aloud, but the text does not drive him away. Smilla later recognizes that he would have come regardless of what she read, simply to sit beside her on the sofa. The scene makes her resistance legible without making it decisive: the relationship begins not with an announced invitation, but with Isaiah’s repeated return and Smilla’s eventual recognition of what his visits mean.

His visits settle into a pattern rather than a fixed schedule. For a time he may come every day; then weeks may pass in which Smilla sees him only once, and from a distance. Often he appears as evening approaches, when the day is over and Juliane is incapacitated. At times Smilla bathes him, accommodating his dislike of hot water while trying to get him clean. Isaiah does not complain, but keeps his reproachful gaze on her. The care is practical, and the look that accompanies it makes clear that their closeness is not simply a matter of Smilla acting upon a passive child: Isaiah watches and judges her in return.

Shared History and Everyday Care

Smilla’s attachment is grounded in shared play as well as shelter. She and Isaiah play the Greenlandic jumping game: one person crosses untouched snow while the others turn away, then they reconstruct the route from the footprints. Smilla often takes him to kindergarten, sometimes arriving an hour and a half late, and remembers those delayed mornings as happy. The mechanic recalls Isaiah’s skill at the game: he could leap, turn in midair, land on one foot, and walk back along his own tracks. Smilla, he says, guessed the jumps correctly every time. Their play joins physical trust to attentive knowledge: Smilla reads Isaiah’s traces, and Isaiah learns the distinctive ways she sees.

The relationship also meets needs that are not always voiced. Sometimes Isaiah comes home to no food while Juliane sits with friends amid alcohol, laughter, and tears. He does not complain or announce that he is hungry. Instead, he patiently seeks another solution, sometimes sitting in Smilla’s living room for an hour without asking for anything. Smilla cooks for him, including a whole mackerel weighing three pounds, which she places on newspaper on the floor because that is where he prefers to eat. She watches him eat the fish methodically, and tries to understand the difference between growing up in Greenland and growing up in Denmark. These episodes show care as a response to circumstance, but also mark the limits of explanation: Smilla knows the impulse to understand can itself become an act of erasure.

As Juliane’s self-destruction worsens, Isaiah sometimes does not want to go home at night. He asks Smilla formally, in Danish, whether he can sleep at her place. His use of the polite form of address follows his understanding of the respect embedded in it; Smilla describes his courtesy as something he adopts with deliberate sensitivity. The request confirms that her apartment has become a refuge, while the formality with which he asks preserves a measure of dignity and choice within that dependence.

Trust, Fear, and Conflict

Their intimacy does not make Smilla consistently gentle. Once, after Isaiah moves onto dangerously thin new ice near a bridge, she calls to him quietly rather than shouting. When he reaches the cobblestones, she hits him. Smilla understands the blow as a distillation of her feelings for him, but the episode remains a rupture: Isaiah tells her plainly that she hit him and looks around for a weapon. His response does not erase the hurt. Yet he then recovers his characteristic composure, saying in Greenlandic that he will get used to it. The exchange reveals both the force and the asymmetry of their attachment: Smilla’s fear can turn into violence, while Isaiah, still a child, finds a way to absorb the breach and continue.

The novel sets this capacity alongside the game that the two of them played. In that game, Smilla can infer Isaiah’s movements from footprints; in the episode on the ice, she must act before she can be certain what will happen. The shared skill of reading traces cannot protect him from danger, nor does her knowledge of him grant control over his choices. Their closeness is therefore neither idealized nor presented as perfect understanding. It includes protection, dependence, anger, and repair, but its durable feature is Smilla’s continued responsibility toward him.

Death and the Continuing Bond

At Isaiah’s funeral, Smilla’s grief turns on the physical finality of the coffin and the knowledge that his body has been examined after death. She imagines lying beside him and longs for the intimacy of their former closeness. The passage is not a resolution of grief: the open grave remains unfilled because of the cold, and Smilla leaves with the mechanic, Peter, after saying his name for the first time less than thirteen hours earlier. Isaiah’s absence is placed against the ordinary movement of those still living, without being made ordinary itself.

In Copenhagen Harbor, after his death, Smilla thinks of the change that has come over her. She understands Isaiah’s death as a fissure in the fixed order that had held her in place, and describes herself as set in motion, a foreign body skating over the ice. The relationship thus continues through consequence: Isaiah is no longer beside her, but his death has altered how she experiences both herself and Denmark. Her movement is not simply freedom from the past; it begins in the loss of someone to whom she had been bound.

That bond also explains why Smilla returns to Juliane. She tells Juliane that she will come back because Juliane is the only thing left of Isaiah, just as Smilla is Moritz’s sole connection to her own mother. The relationship extends beyond private memory into a fragile obligation to those who remain. Smilla’s commitment to Isaiah is therefore not exhausted by mourning him; it shapes her choices about his mother and her own family.

Meaning, Memory, and Purpose

Smilla later connects Isaiah to the Arctic creation story of the raven, who begins without knowing his identity or purpose and finds both through revelation. She wonders whether Isaiah gave her what every child can give: a sense of meaning, a necessary movement passing through one generation and into the next. His body in the snow is, to her, a violation of that meaning. She consequently makes understanding his death her purpose, determined to investigate the small, encompassing fact of why he died. The investigation is not separate from their relationship: it is the form her obligation takes after care can no longer protect him.

The novel also places their closeness within a longer temporal frame. Smilla remembers summer nights when Isaiah falls asleep on her sofa. Watching his breathing brings her, in memory, to Iita and the summer tent of her childhood. The scene makes their relationship feel almost parental to her, though she does not claim that Isaiah is her child. Looking at her own body, she recognizes that she will die and that even her feelings for him will one day die with her. Isaiah, however, will have been here; after him may come his children or other children, a continuing chain. The thought gives her happiness not by denying mortality, but by holding personal attachment together with the life that continues beyond any one person.

Smilla’s bond with Isaiah therefore moves from an unplanned welcome to repeated acts of care, from shared play to the painful limits of protection, and from bereavement to a renewed sense of purpose. She cannot preserve him, and she does not pretend that grief can be solved by explanation. Yet her effort to discover why he died, her continuing connection to Juliane, and her meditation on the generations after Isaiah all show how the relationship persists: as a promise not to abandon him, and as a way of carrying his significance forward.