Page 117 - The Midnight Library

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‘Bit early in the morning, isn’t it, for philosophy?’ Nora laughed,

ner vously.
She saw a wall of ice outside the porthole, rising out of the sea. She was
either ver y far north or ver y far south. She was ver y far somewhere.
e woman was still staring at her. Nora had no idea if they were friends

or not. e woman seemed tough, direct, earthy, but probably an interesting
form of company.
‘I don’t mean philosophy. I don’t even mean what got you into
glaciological research. Although, it might be the same thing. I mean, why

did you choose to go as far away from civilisation as possible? You’ve never
told me.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I like the cold.’
‘No one likes this cold. Unless they are a sado-masochist.’

She had a point. Nora reached for the sweater at the end of her bed and
put it on, over the sweater she was already wearing. As she did she saw,
beside the vodka bottle, a laminated lanyard lying on the floor.

Ingrid Skirbekk
Professor of Geoscience
International Polar Research Institute

‘I don’t know, Ingrid. I just like glaciers, I suppose. I want to understand

them. Why they are . . . melting.’
She wasn’t sounding like a glacier expert, judging from Ingrid’s raised
eyebrows.
‘What about you?’ she asked, hopefully.

Ingrid sighed. Rubbed her palm with a thumb. ‘Aer Per died, I couldn’t
stand to be in Oslo any more. All those people that weren’t him, you know?
ere was this coffee shop we used to go to, at the university. We’d just sit
together, together but silent. Happy silent. Reading newspapers, drinking

coffee. It was hard to avoid places like that. We used to walk around
ever ywhere. His troublesome soul lingered on ever y street . . . I kept telling
his memor y to piss the fuck off but it wouldn’t. Grief is a bastard. If I’d have
stayed any longer, I’d have hated humanity. So, when a research position

came up in Svalbard I was like, yes, this has come to save me . . . I wanted to
be somewhere he had never been. I wanted somewhere where I didn’t have