The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

Katrine Bratt held his gaze. ‘No idea. Does it matter?’
A pling told Harry that the lift had reached their floor.
Jonas was drawing a snowman. The idea was to make it smile and sing, to make it a happy
snowman. But he couldn’t get it right; it just stared back at him blankly from the enormous white
sheet. Around him, in the large auditorium, there was hardly a sound, just the scratch of his father’s
chalk, now and then a bang on the board in front of him, and the whisper of students’ ballpoint pens
on paper. He didn’t like pens. If you used a pen you couldn’t rub it out, you couldn’t change
anything, what you drew was there for ever. He had woken up today thinking that his mother was
back, that everything was fine again, and he’d run into her bedroom. But his father had been in
there getting dressed and he told Jonas to get dressed as well because he was going to the university
today. Pens.
The room sloped down to where his father stood and was like a theatre auditorium. His father had
not said a word to the students, not even when he and Jonas entered. Just nodded to them, pointed to
the seat where Jonas was to sit and then went straight to the board and began to write. And the
students were clearly used to that, for they had been sitting ready and started taking notes at once.
The boards were covered with numbers and small letters and a few strange doodles that Jonas did
not recognise. His father had once explained to him that physics had its own language, one which
he used to tell stories. When Jonas asked if they were adventure stories, his father had laughed and
said that physics could only be used to explain things that were true, that it was a language that
couldn’t lie if it tried.
Some of the doodles were funny. And very elegant.
Chalk dust floated down onto his father’s shoulders. A fine white layer settled like snow on his
jacket. Jonas looked at his father’s back and tried to draw him. But this didn’t turn out to be a happy
snowman, either. And suddenly the lecture room went absolutely still. All the pens stopped writing.
Because the piece of chalk had stopped. It stood motionless at the top of the board, so high up that
his father had to stretch his arm over his head to reach. And now it looked as if the chalk was stuck
and that his father was hanging from the board, like when Wile E. Coyote was hanging from a tiny
branch on a cliff face and it was a very, very long way down. Then his father’s shoulders began to
shake, and Jonas thought he was trying to free the chalk, get it to move again, but it wouldn’t. A
ripple ran through the auditorium as if everyone was opening their mouths and sucking in breath at
the same moment. Then his father freed the chalk at last, walked to the exit without turning and was
gone. He’s going to get some more chalk, Jonas thought. The buzz of students’ voices around him
grew gradually louder. He caught two words: ‘wife’ and ‘missing’. He looked at the board, which
was almost completely covered. His father had been trying to write that she was dead, but the chalk
could only say what was true, so it had got stuck. Jonas tried to rub out his snowman. Around him
people were packing up their things, and the seats banged as they got up and left.
A shadow fell over the failed snowman on the paper, and Jonas looked up.
It was the policeman, the tall one with the ugly face and the kind eyes.
‘Would you like to come with me, and we’ll see if we can find your father?’ he asked.
Harry knocked gently on the office door with the sign saying Prof. Filip Becker.
As there was no answer, he opened it.