Smilla Jaspersen—Isaiah (751d5865)

Smilla Jaspersen and Isaiah share a relationship of intimate, everyday care that endures in Smilla’s memories after his death. Music, the boy’s damaged hearing, and the small ritual of carrying him to bed make their bond concrete; later, Isaiah’s cigar box and tape connect that affection to Smilla’s investigation. His death is not merely a case she pursues: it is the loss of a child whose life she had helped hold, listen to, and protect.

A Bond Built Through Care

Smilla’s care for Isaiah takes the form of attention to what he can hear and how he responds. She moves speakers close to his damaged ears and turns up the volume so he can listen. Isaiah leans back against the sofa and closes his eyes; often, he falls asleep. The music is not presented as a cure for his hearing impairment. Instead, the scene records a shared practice shaped around his particular needs, with Smilla adjusting the room and the sound so that he can take part.

The ritual continues after the music has lulled him to sleep. Isaiah gradually slumps to one side without waking, and Smilla gathers him up and carries him downstairs. If the noise there is too much, she brings him back up and puts him to bed. Being set down wakes him every time. In the interval before full waking, he hoarsely hums bars of what he has heard, as if trying to sing them. The sequence gives their intimacy a physical rhythm: listening, sleep, carrying, waking, and the fragile return of music in his voice.

Memory After Isaiah’s Death

After Isaiah dies, Smilla keeps his cigar box in front of her. The object sits among other things she has weighed and examined, including an old harpoon tip, but its significance is personal as well as evidentiary. She takes a cassette from the box: a Maxell XLI-S, a higher-quality tape intended for recording music. The contrast between the tape’s capacity to preserve sound and the silence that follows its recording gives the object a double place in the relationship: it belongs to Smilla’s investigation, but it also recalls the music she used to play for Isaiah.

The tape’s sound comes in fragments. A voice finishes a sentence and stops; the pause button seems to have been pressed, leaving no crackle, only white noise and the remains of distant music. This broken recording sits beside Smilla’s remembered scenes of Isaiah listening. The narrative does not collapse the tape into a simple memento: the cigar box and recording also belong to the chain of evidence surrounding his death. Personal remembrance and inquiry occupy the same objects, so that returning to the case also means returning to the boy.

Grief and the Meaning of a Child’s Death

On Christmas morning, as Smilla reflects on music and her earlier life, she describes the child who is born as something to seek out: a star, a northern light, a column of energy in the universe. She says she can enjoy the sea and ice without feeling cheated of creation, even though she has never had a child of her own. Against that expansive image of birth, she calls the death of a child an abomination. In the context of Isaiah’s death, the statement makes clear why her concern cannot be contained by a detached forensic account.

Her grief is neither presented as a generalized sentiment nor separated from action. It is attached to Isaiah himself—to his damaged ears, his attempts to hum, the weight of his sleeping body in her arms, and the cigar box that remains after he is gone. The relationship turns the investigation into a response to a particular life and loss. Smilla’s refusal to treat the boy’s death as an ordinary misfortune gives her search its moral urgency.

From Intimate Loss to Action

Smilla’s account of Isaiah’s death reaches Peter as part of a larger explanation. When he asks for an explanation, she begins telling him in detail about Isaiah’s death, the police, the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark, the Arctic Museum, Andreas Licht, and the mechanic. The breadth of the account places the boy’s fate within a network of institutions and people, but its starting point remains the loss that binds Smilla to him. She speaks at length, taking two cigars to finish, while Peter listens and reaches for another cigar as she begins.

The relationship also informs Smilla’s decision to move forward while afraid. On Christmas morning she goes downstairs and rings Peter’s doorbell. When he appears in his pajamas, she tells him she is scared but will do it anyway; he answers that he knew it. The scene places her resolve after the remembrance of Isaiah and her insistence that a child’s death is an abomination. The evidence does not make Peter a substitute for Isaiah, or reduce Smilla’s choice to grief alone. Instead, it shows how the bond persists as a measure of what is at stake: memory leads back to the case, and the case demands action.