‘Are you hungry?’ he asked into the air.
She looked up from her homework and nodded. He could feel her eyes on him. They were filled with something that simultaneously contained calm and scepticism. Distance and hope.
He couldn’t possibly imagine how her day would normally have unfolded. Nor did he want to. He wanted to protect his thoughts from the images that invariably followed. Then he reproached himself for being so sensitive. What right did he have to shield himself from what this little girl had to subject her body and her mind to so often? Her thoughts must be plagued by nightmares, day and night. Jakob felt powerless and guilty. His hatred for her father knew no bounds. No limitations. As she sat there in her dress, doing her homework, it was absolutely beyond him that an adult would ever want to hurt her.
‘I’ll put two sausages on your plate,’ he went on, giving his attention back to the frying pan. He turned off the stove, drained the potatoes and added some cream to the fat in the frying pan. ‘Do you fancy eating your dinner on the sofa?’
She shrugged, and he could tell from her eyes that she didn’t know what to say.
‘Yes, let’s eat there,’ he said, answering his own question. ‘Would you like me to cut up your food for you?’
She shrugged again.
‘Does your mum cut up your food?’
The girl looked at him quizzically. A small frown appeared on the fine skin on her forehead. ‘Not often,’ she said.
‘Do you like it when your mum cuts your food into bite-size pieces?’
Her frown grew deeper and her eyes widened.
‘I mean, in small bits?’ he explained.
The wrinkle disappeared as she nodded quickly.
‘Then I’ll cut it up for you,’ Jakob said with a smile, and plated the food.
He covered her dress with a clean tea towel, put the plate on top of it and handed her a fork. His mother would have turned in her grave, had she seen it, but he had been eating like this for a long time now. Besides, he thought the girl might feel safer if she was allowed to stay on the sofa, rather than having to sit at the dining table with him. On the sofa she had a small spot where she had sat for several hours with her homework and been left alone.
She ate slowly. Carefully and tentatively. As if each bite needed examining before it could be swallowed. He tried eating at her pace, so she wouldn’t feel out of place, but found it hard because his tongue couldn’t wait so long before swallowing once it had tasted the food.
Halfway through the meal she looked up. ‘Will I be sleeping here?’
He hesitated and tried to read the expression in her eyes. ‘Yes—if you’d like to?’
She looked down at her plate and skewered a piece of potato. ‘I would like to. You are nice and you help me.’
‘You can sleep in the bedroom,’ he said. ‘In the big bed. I’ll be sleeping here in the living room, so you’ll be all on your own in there, but if you want anything, just give me a shout. I can easily hear you.’
Jakob knew very well that the situation wasn’t sustainable. Paneeraq couldn’t continue to stay with him. It was Lisbeth who had suggested that he bring her home when he’d asked her advice, and she had pointed out how odd it was that Paneeraq wasn’t scared of him, given that he was a man. Many girls here have a tough father because we’ve pretty much always lived in a tough culture, surrounded by a tough environment. Perhaps she’s just glad to have met a nice man. It’s good for her to experience that. Why don’t you take her home so that she can calm down and have a nice evening where she’s treated well? But be careful—if she gets a taste for it, she won’t want to go home. I’ve seen that happen so many times. She had said the latter with a glint in her eye. I found it hard enough to go home myself.
He had asked Lisbeth if she would like to join them, but she was hosting a kaffemik party for her sister. It’ll probably do you good as well, she had said, and now Paneeraq was ensconced in the middle of his sofa.
37
Jakob flicked through his book on rocks and fossils. He had decided that Paneeraq might like a bedtime story, and now she was snuggled up under the big, airy quilt in his bed, while he perched on the edge with his book.
The idea of reading aloud to her was a good one, but he had forgotten that his library contained mostly non-fiction and police magazines—and while educating the young about the value of police work mattered greatly to him, it probably didn’t appeal to an eleven-year-old girl. He had finally settled on his geology book, but was only halfway through Igaliku sandstone in the sedimentary rock chapter when he was forced to concede that it might not be of interest to the little girl either.
He slammed shut the book. ‘This is really boring, ilaa?’
She nodded and smiled feebly.
‘I don’t mind you saying so,’ he said. ‘In this house you can say whatever you like, and even I have to admit that rocks can be a bit dull.’
Her smile widened. She had pulled up the big, white quilt so far that her face was only visible above her nose.
‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll just get something from the living room.’
He returned with a fossilised sea urchin and the shell of a more recent sea urchin. He placed them both on the mattress next to her pillow so she could see them.
‘These are both sea urchins,’ he said, giving each of them a little push. ‘One became fossilised, while the other is like a seashell. The sea urchin itself was probably eaten by a seagull or a raven in the summer.’
Paneeraq looked curiously at the two objects on the mattress. The shell was lying on its back, so it was easy to see that the two objects were very similar. The furrow on her brow reappeared, and she looked up at Jakob.
‘You’re allowed to touch them,’ he said, nodding towards the fossil and the shell.
Her small fingers closed around first the fossil, and then more delicately around the shell. She turned them over and studied their backs and their stomachs. The fossil was solid, the shell hollow and delicate. ‘How did it turn into a stone?’
‘It was probably buried in the mud of a big ocean more than three hundred million years ago, and it was slowly fossilised and turned into flint stone. Its shell has long since disappeared, so what you’re looking at is the soft animal inside the shell.’
She didn’t say anything, but clutched the fossilised sea urchin.
‘It’s incredible, don’t you think, that these little creatures crawled around in the sea all those millions of years ago? And that they look and function in exactly the same way today as they did thirty or a hundred million years ago. On the beaches back home in Denmark, where I come from, you can bend down and pick up a living sea urchin with one hand and a fossilised one with the other.’
Her hand enclosed the fossil. ‘Can I turn into a stone?’
He rubbed one eye. ‘Yes, you can, as a matter of fact, but it would take many more years than there have been people on this earth, so no one would ever know.’
She smiled contentedly and nodded softly, while she opened and closed her hand. ‘It feels warm.’
‘It’s your hand warming it up. Rocks love heat, and if they get plenty of it, they become liquid.’
She looked at him in disbelief.
‘It’s the truth. Once, all of Greenland was liquid. It’s called lava and comes from the core of the earth.’ He could see that she recognised the word lava.
He stopped speaking, and she let her head sink back on the pillow, but she continued to clench the fossilised sea urchin in her hand. ‘You can keep it, if you like,’ Jakob said.