10

From the earth have you come.

Occasionally gyrfalcons would appear when we were hunting for auks. At first they would be nothing but two tiny dots on the horizon. Then the mountain seemed to dissolve and rise up into the sky. When a million auks take off, space turns black, for a moment, as if winter had returned in a flash.

My mother would shoot at the falcons. A gyrfalcon dives at a speed of 125 miles per hour. She usually hit them. She shot them with a nickel-plated, small-caliber bullet. We would pick them up for her. One time the bullet entered one eye and lodged in the other, as if the dead falcon were staring at us with a shiny, piercing gaze.

A taxidermist on the base stuffed them for her. Gyrfalcons are a protected species. On the black market in Germany or the United States you can sell a baby falcon for $50,000 to be bred for hunting. No one dared to believe that my mother had violated the ban on hunting them.

She didn't sell them. She gave them away. To my father, to one of the ethnographers who sought her out because she was a female hunter, to one of the officers from the base.

The stuffed falcons were both a gruesome and a dazzling gift. She would ceremoniously present them with an apparent display of absolute generosity. Then she would drop a remark about needing a pair of tailor's shears. She hinted that she was in need of eighty yards of nylon rope. Or she let it be known that we children could certainly use two pairs of thermal underwear.

She got whatever she asked for. By wrapping her guest in a web of fierce, mutually obligating courtesy.

This made me ashamed of her, and it made me love her. It was her response to European culture. She opened herself to it with a courtesy full of pallid premeditation. And she closed around it, encapsulating what she could use. A pair of scissors, a coil of rope, the spermatozoa that brought Moritz Jaspersen into her womb.

That's why Thule will never become a museum. The ethnographers have cast a dream of innocence over North Greenland. A dream that the Inuit will continue to be the bowlegged, drum-dancing, legend-telling, widely smiling exhibition images that the first explorers thought they were meeting south of Qaanaaq at the turn of the century. My mother gave them a dead bird. And made them buy half the store for her. She paddled a kayak that was made in the same way they were made in the seventeenth century, before the art of kayak building disappeared from North Greenland. But she used a sealed plastic container for her hunting float.

To the earth shall you return.

I can see how others are successful. But I can't find success myself.

Isaiah was on the verge of success. He could have gotten ahead. He would have been able to absorb Denmark and transform it and become both a Dane and a Greenlander.

I had an anorak made for him out of white silk. Even the pattern had been passed down by Europeans. The painter Gitz-Johansen once gave it to my father. He had gotten it in North Greenland when he was illustrating his great reference work on the birds of Greenland. I put the anorak on Isaiah, combed his hair, and then I lifted him up onto the toilet seat. When he saw himself in the mirror, that's when it happened. The tropical fabric, the Greenlandic respect for fine clothes, the Danish joy in luxury all merged together. Maybe it also meant something that I had given it to him.

A second later he had to sneeze. "Hold my nose!"

I held his nose. "Why?" I asked. He usually blew his nose into the sink.

As soon as I opened my mouth, his eyes found my lips in the mirror. I often realized that he understood things even before they were expressed.

"When I'm wearing annoraaq qaqortoq, this fine anorak, I don't want snot on my fingers."

And from the earth shall you rise again.

I try scanning the women standing around Juliane to see if any of them might be pregnant. With a boy who could be given Isaiah's name. The dead live on in their names. There were four girls who were named Ane after my mother. I've visited them many times and sat and talked with them, in order to find, through the woman before me, a glimpse of the one who left me.

They're pulling the ropes out of the eyelets on the side of the coffin. For a brief moment my yearning feels like madness. If only they would open the coffin for a moment and let me lie down beside his cold little body that someone has stuck a needle into, that they have opened up and photographed and cut slices out of and closed up again; if only I could just once feel his erection against my thigh, a gesture of intimated, boundless eroticism, the beating of a moth's wing against my skin, the dark insects of happiness.

It's so cold that they will have to wait to fill the grave, so when we leave, it lies open behind us. The mechanic and I walk side by side.

His name is Peter. It's less than thirteen hours since I said his name for the first time.

Sixteen hours ago it was midnight. On Kalkbrænderi Road. I've bought twelve big black plastic bags, four rolls of duct tape, four tubes of super glue, and a Maglite flashlight. I have slit open the bags, doubled them up, and glued them together. Then stuffed them into my Louis Vuitton handbag.

I'm wearing a pair of high boots, a red turtleneck sweater, a sealskin coat from Groenlandia, and a skirt from Scottish Corner. I've learned that it's always easier to explain things if you're nicely dressed.

What happens next lacks a certain degree of elegance. The entire factory area is surrounded by a fence twelve feet high, which has a single strand of barbed wire along the top. In my mind I imagine a door in the back, facing Kalkbrænderi Road and the train tracks. I've seen it before.

What I didn't see was the sign saying that Danish Watchdogs are on guard here. That might not mean anything. So many signs are put up for no other reason than to maintain the proper atmosphere. So I give a trial kick at the door. Within five seconds a dog is standing at the gate. He might be a German shepherd. He looks like something that was lying in front of the door for people to wipe their feet on. That might explain the foul mood that he's in.

There are people in Greenland who have a way with dogs. My mother did. Before nylon ropes became common in the seventies, we used harnesses made of sealskin as towlines. The other dog teams chewed through their harnesses. Our dogs didn't touch theirs. My mother had forbidden it.

Then there are those born with a fear of dogs who never overcome it. I'm one of those people. So I walk back along Strand Boulevard and take a cab home.

I don't go up to my apartment. I go to Juliane's. I take a pound of cod liver out of her refrigerator. Her friend at the fish market gives her free liver if it's split. In her bathroom I pour half a bottle of Halcion pills into my pocket. Her doctor prescribed them for her recently. She sells them. Halcion is marketable among junkies. She uses the money to buy her own medicine, the kind that customs officers charge duty on.

In Rink's collection there is a story from West Greenland about a bogeyman who can't fall asleep but must keep watch for all eternity. But that's because he hasn't tried Halcion. When you take it for the first time, half a tablet can put you into a deep coma.

Juliane lets me forage: She has given up on almost everything, including asking me questions.

"You've forgotten me!" she shouts after me.

I take a taxi back to Kalkbrænderi Road. The cab starts to smell like fish.

Standing beneath the streetlight under the viaduct facing the Free Harbor, I crush the pills into the liver. Now I smell like fish, too.

This time I don't have to call the dog. He's standing there waiting, hoping that I would come back. I toss the liver over the fence. You hear so much about dogs' keen sense of smell, I'm afraid he might smell the pills. My worries are for naught. The dog sucks up the liver like a vacuum cleaner.

Then we wait, the dog and I. The dog is waiting for more liver. I am waiting to see what the pharmaceutical industry can do for sleepless animals.

A car pulls up. A station wagon from Danish Watchdogs. There's no place to make yourself invisible or even discreet on Kalkbrænderi Road. So I just stand there. A man wearing a uniform gets out of the car. He looks me over but can't come up with a satisfactory explanation. Solitary woman wearing a fur coat at one in the morning on the outskirts of the Østerbro district? He unlocks the gate and puts the dog on a leash. He brings him out to the sidewalk. The dog growls nastily at me. Suddenly his legs turn to rubber and he's about to fall over. The man stares at the dog anxiously. The dog looks at him mournfully.

The man opens the back of the wagon. The dog manages to get his front paws in, but the man has to shove him the rest of the way. He's mystified. Then he drives off. Leaving me to my own thoughts about the way Danish Watchdogs works. I come to the conclusion that they put the dogs out as a kind of random sampling, every once in a while, and for only a short time at each place. Now the dog's on his way to the next place. I hope there's something soft for him to sleep on.

Then I stick the key in the lock. But it doesn't open the gate. I can just picture it. Elsa Lübing has always arrived at work at a time when a guard opened the gate. That's why she didn't know that the entrances on the outer periphery are on a different key system.

I'll have to go over the fence. It takes a long time. I end up throwing my boots over first. A piece of sealskin gets caught in the process.

I only have to look at a map once and the landscape rises up from the paper. It's not something that I learned. Although, of course, I had to acquire a nomenclature, a system of symbols. The ridged elevation peaks on the topographical maps of the Geodesic Institute. The red and green parabolas on the military maps of the ice pack. The discus-shaped, grayish-white photographs of X-band radar. The multi-spectrum scans of LANDSAT 3. The candy-colored sediment maps of the geologists. The red-and-blue thermal photographs. But in the truest sense it has been like learning a new alphabet. Which you then forget about as soon as you start reading. The text about ice.

There was a map of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark in the book at the Geological Institute. A cadastral map, an aerial photograph, and a floor plan. Now, standing on the grounds, I know how it all once looked.

It's a demolition site now. Dark as a cave, with white spots where the snow has been blown into drifts.

I've entered the grounds where the rear of the raw cryolite building once stood. The foundation is still there.

An abandoned soccer field of frozen concrete. I look for the railroad tracks, and at that very moment stumble over the ties. The tracks of the train that brought the ore in from the company's dock. Silhouetted in the darkness is the workers' shed where the smithy, the machine shop, and the carpentry shop once were housed. A cellar full of bricks was once the basement under the cafeteria. The factory grounds are bisected by Svaneke Street. On the other side of the road is the residential district with lots of electric Christmas stars, lots of candles, and all those nuclear families. And outside their windows: the two rectangular laboratory buildings which haven't been torn down yet. Is this a portrait of Denmark's relationship to its former colony? Disillusionment, resignation, and retreat? While retaining the last administrative grip: control of foreign policy, mineral rights, and military interests?

In front of me, against the light from Strand Boulevard, the building looks like a small castle.

It's an L-shaped building. The entrance is at the top of a fan-shaped, granite staircase, in the wing facing Strand Boulevard. This time the key works.

The door opens onto a small square foyer with black and white marble tiles and acoustics that reverberate, no matter how quietly you move. From here one stairway leads down to the darkness and the archives below, and another goes five steps up to the floor where Elsa Lübing, for forty-five years, has exerted her influence.

The stairs lead up to some French doors. Beyond them is one large room, which must run the full length of the wing. There are eight desks, six bay windows facing the street, file cabinets, telephones, word processors, two copy machines, metal shelves with red and blue plastic file folders. On one wall a map of Greenland. On a long table a coffee machine and several mugs. In the corner a big electronic safe with a little window glowing with the word CLOSED.

One desk is set apart from the others and slightly larger. It has plate glass on top. On the glass stands a little crucifix. No private office for the Chief Accountant. Merely a desk in the regular pool. Just like in the first Christian congregation.

I sit down in her high-backed chair. In order to understand what it was like sitting here for forty-five years among the erasers and bank stationery, with part of her consciousness elevated to a spiritual dimension, where a light burns with a strength that makes her shrug cheerfully at earthly love-which for the rest of us is a mixture of the cathedral in Nuuk and the potential for a third world war.

After a moment I get up, none the wiser.

There are venetian blinds on the windows. The yellow light of Strand Boulevard is zebra-striped in the room. I punch in the date when she became Chief Accountant: QS-17-57.

The safe hums, and the door opens outward. There is no handle, only a wide ridge to take hold of and lean your weight against.

On the narrow metal shelves are the account books of the Cryolite Corporation since 1885, when it was separated from the Øresund Corporation by government charter. About six ledgers for each year. Hundreds of volumes in gray moleskin with red stamping. A piece of history. About the politically and economically most profitable and most important investments in Greenland.

I take out a book marked 1991 and page through it at random. It says: salary, pension, harbor fees, labor costs, room and board, tonnage charges, laundry and dry cleaning, travel expenses, shareholders' dividends, paid to Struer Chemical Laboratory.

Rows of keys are hanging to the right, on the wall of the safe. I find the one marked ARCHIVES.

When I push the door of the safe closed, the numbers disappear one by one, and when I leave the room and go downstairs in the dark, it once again says CLOSED.

The first room in the archives is the entire basement under one wing of the building. A low-ceilinged room with countless wooden shelves, countless quantities of ledger paper wrapped in brown paper, and filled with the air that always hovers over vast paper deserts, enervating and drained of all moisture.

The second room is perpendicular to the first. It has the same kind of shelving. But it also contains archive cabinets with flat drawers for topographical maps. A hanging file with hundreds of maps, some of them clamped onto brass rods. A locked wooden cabinet, like a coffin ten yards long. That must be where the drilling cores sleep.

The room has two windows high on the wall facing Strand Boulevard, and four toward the factory grounds. This is where my preparations with the plastic bags come in. I thought I would cover the windows so I can turn on a light.

There are women who paint their own attractive attic apartments themselves. Reupholster the furniture. Sandblast the façade. I have always called on a professional. Or let it wait until next year.

These windows are large, with iron bars on the inside. It takes me forty-five minutes to drape all six.

When I'm finished I don't dare turn on the overhead lights, after all, but make do with my flashlight. Merciless order ought to prevail in archives. They are quite simply the crystallization of a wish to put the past in order. So that busy, energetic young people can come waltzing in, select a specific case, a specific core sample, and waltz out again with precisely that segment of the past.

These archives, on the other hand, leave something to be desired. There are no signs on the shelves. There are no numbers, dates, or letters on the spines of the filed material. And when I select a couple at random, I get: Coal petrographic analyses on seams from Atd (low group profiles), Nicgssuaq, West Greenland, and On the use of processed raw cryolite in the production of electric light bulbs, and Demarcation of borders at the land parceling of 1862.

I go upstairs and make a phone call. It always feels wrong to call someone on the phone. It feels especially wrong to call from the scene of the crime. As if I had gotten a direct line to police headquarters to turn myself in.

"This is Elsa Lübing."

"I'm standing here amid mountains of papers trying to remember where it says something about the fact that even the chosen ones risk being led astray."

First she hesitates, then she laughs.

"In Matthew. But perhaps more appropriate on this occasion would be Mark, where Jesus says: `Are you not therefore mistaken, because you do not know the Scriptures nor the power of God?' "

We giggle together on the phone.

"I disavow any responsibility," she says. "I've asked for a cleanup and cataloging for forty-five years."

"I'm so glad there's something you didn't manage to get done."

She's silent on the phone.

"Where?" I ask.

"There are two shelves above the bench-the long wooden case. That's where the expedition reports are. Arranged alphabetically according to the minerals they were looking for. The volumes closest to the window are the trips that had both a geological and a historical purpose. The one you're looking for should be one of the last ones."

She's about to hang up. "Miss Lübing," I say.

"Yes?"

"Did you ever take a sick day?"

"The Lord has watched over me."

"I thought so," I say. "I could sort of tell." Then we hang up.

It takes me less than two minutes to find the report. It's in a black ring binder. There are forty pages, numbered in the lower-right-hand corner: It's just the right size to stuff into my handbag. Afterward I have to remove the plastic blackout curtains, and I'll disappear down Kalkbrænderi Road without a trace, just the way I arrived.

I can't restrain my curiosity. I take the report over to the far corner of the room and sit down on the floor, leaning against a bookcase. It gives under my weight. It's a flimsy, wooden bookcase. They never thought that the archives would get so big. That Greenland would be so surprisingly inexhaustible. They've simply filled up the shelves. The traces of time on a flimsy wooden skeleton.

"The geologic expedition of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark to Gela Alta, July through August 1991," it says on the title page. Then follow twenty closely typed pages of expedition report. I skim the first pages, which start off by describing the objective of the expedition: "To investigate the deposits of granular ruby crystals on the Barren Glacier on Gela Alta." The text also lists the five European members of the expedition. Among others, a professor of Arctic ethnology, Dr. Andreas Fine Licht, Ph.D. The name rings a bell somewhere deep inside me. But when I try to listen, it stops. I assume that his presence explains why it says at the bottom that the expedition is supported by the Institute for Arctic Ethnology.

Next comes a report with both an English and a Danish section. I page through this part, too. It concerns a rescue operation from Holsteinsborg to Barren Glacier by helicopter. The helicopter wasn't able to land very close because of the risk of avalanche from the engine noise. That's why it turned around and they sent a Cherokee 6-3000 instead, whatever that is, but it says that it landed on the water, with a pilot, navigator, doctor, and nurse on board. There's a brief report from the rescue team and a doctor's certificate from the hospital. There were five fatalities. One Finn and four Inuits. One of the Inuits was named Norsaq Christiansen.

There is a twenty-page appendix. A summary of the mineralogical samples brought back. The logs. A series of black-and-white aerial photos of a glacier, splitting and floating around a bright, fractured conical cliff.

A plastic folder contains copies of about twenty letters, all concerning transport of the bodies.

The whole thing looks clean and aboveboard. It's tragic, and yet something that might happen. Nothing that could explain why a little boy, two years later, falls off a rooftop in Copenhagen. It occurs to me that I've been seeing ghosts. That I've gone astray. That it's all a figment of my imagination.

For the first time I notice how burdened the room is with the past. With hundreds of days, hundreds of numbers, hundreds of people, who every day, year in and year out, have eaten their two sandwiches in the cafeteria and shared a beer with Amanda, but never more than one except at Christmas, when the laboratory spikes a 6oz gallon carboy of 96-proof disinfecting alcohol with cumin for the Christmas party. The archives are shouting at me that they have been content. And that's also what it said in the book at the library, and what Elsa Lübing said: "We were content. It was a good place to work."

As so often before, I feel a yearning to participate, to take part. In Thule and Siorapaluk no one ever asked people what they did, because everybody was a hunter, everybody had work to do. In Denmark, if you are a wage earner, it lends meaning and fulfillment to your life to know that now you're rolling up your sleeves and putting a pen behind your ear and pulling up your bootstraps and going to work. And when you're off, you watch TV or visit friends or play badminton or take a night course in Basic. You don't live life in a cellar beneath Strand Boulevard in the middle of the night at Christmastime.

This is not the first or the last time that I have had these thoughts. What is it that makes us seek out the plunge into depression?

As I close the report, I have an idea. I open it again and page through to the medical report. There I see something. And then I know that it's been worth all the trouble.

I've seen girlfriends in Greenland who, discovering that they're pregnant, suddenly take better care of themselves than ever before. That's the feeling that passes over me now. From now on I have to watch out for myself.

The traffic has stopped. I don't wear a watch, but it must be about 3:00 a.m. I switch off my flashlight.

The building is quiet. In the silence there is suddenly a sound that is wrong. It's too close to be coming from the street. But faint, like a whisper. From where I'm sitting, the doorway into the first small room is a faintly lit gray rectangle. One moment it's visible, the next it's not. Someone has stepped into the room, someone who is blocking the light with his body.

By moving my head slightly I can follow his movement along the shelves. I take off my boots. They're no good for running. I stand up. By moving my head slightly I can place the figure inside the faintly lit frame of the doorway.

We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror.

I take hold of one of the bookcases and topple it toward him. Just as it picks up speed, the first volumes fall out. That warns him, and he puts up his hands and tries to stop the bookcase. First it sounds like the bones of his forearms are snapping. Then what sounds like fifteen tons of books fall onto the floor. He can't let go of the bookcase. But it's resting very heavily on him. And slowly his legs begin to buckle.

The misconception that violence always favors the physically strong has spread to a large segment of the population. It's not correct. The results of a fight are a matter of speed in the first few yards. When I moved out to Skovgards School after six months at Rugmarkens School, I encountered for the first time the classic Danish persecution of those who are different. In the school we came from, we were all foreigners and in the same boat. In my new class I was the only one with black hair and broken Danish. There was one boy in particular, from one of the older classes, who was really quite brutal. I found out where he lived. Then I got up early and waited for him where he crossed Skovshoved Road. He was thirty pounds heavier than I was. He didn't have a chance. He never got the couple of minutes that he needed to work himself into a trance. I hit him right in the face and broke his nose. I kicked him on one kneecap and then on the other, to bring him down to a more acceptable height. It took twelve stitches to put his nasal septum back in place. No one ever really believed that it could have been me:

This time I don't stand there picking my nose either, waiting for Christmas to arrive. From the wall I grab one of the brass rods with fifty topographical maps attached and hit him as hard as I can on the back of the neck.

He drops at once. The bookcase comes down on top of him. I wait for a moment. To see whether he has any friends with him. Or a little dog. But there is no sound except his breathing from under thirty yards of bookcase.

I shine my flashlight on his face. A great deal of dust has settled on him. The blow has split the edge of one ear. He's wearing black sweatpants, a dark blue sweater, a black wool cap, dark blue deck shoes, and a guilty conscience. It's the mechanic.

"Clumsy Peter," I say. "What's the matter, did you trip?"

He can't answer because of the bookcase. I try to push it aside, but it won't budge.

I have to give up on professional precautions and turn on the light. I start in shoveling papers, books, folders, reports, and bookends made of solid steel away from the bookcase. I have to clear away nine feet. It takes fifteen minutes. Then I can lift it an inch, and he crawls out on his own. Over to the wall, where he sits down, feeling his skull.

Not until then do my legs start to shake.

"My vision is blurry," he says. "I think I have a c-concussion."

"We can always hope so," I say.

It takes fifteen minutes before he can stand up. And even then he's like Bambi on the ice. It takes another half hour to get the bookcase upright. We have to take off all the papers first before we can lift it and then put them all back. It gets so hot that I have to take off my skirt and work in my tights. He walks around barefoot and barechested and gets frequent hot flashes and dizzy spells and has to rest. Shock and unanswered questions hang in the air along with enough dust to fill a sandbox.

"It smells like fish in here, Smilla."

"Cod liver," I say. "It's supposed to be so healthy." He watches in silence as I open the electronic safe and hang the key in its place. Then we lock up after us. He leads me over to a gate in the fence facing Svaneke Street. It's open. After we go through, he bends over the lock and it clicks shut.

His car is parked on the next street. I have to support him with one hand. In the other I'm carrying a garbage bag full of other garbage bags. A patrol car passes us slowly, but without stopping. They see so much going on in the streets at this time of year. People should be allowed to amuse themselves in whatever manner they choose.

He tells me that he's trying to get his car accepted by a classic car museum. It's a '61 Morris 1000, he tells me. With red leather seats and wooden top and instrument panel.

"I can't drive," he says.

"I don't have a license."

"Have you ever driven before?"

"Snow-cats on the ice cap."

But he wasn't going to subject his Morris to that. So he drives. There's barely room for his large body behind the wheel. The top is full of holes and we're freezing. I wish that he had succeeded in getting it into a museum a long time ago.

The temperature has fallen from just below freezing to hard frost, and on our way home it starts to snow. With qanik, fine-grained powder snow.

The most dangerous kind of avalanches are powder snow avalanches. They're set off by extremely small energy disturbances, such as a loud noise. They have a very small mass, but they move at 125 miles per hour, and they leave behind them a deadly vacuum. There are people who have had their lungs sucked out of their bodies by powder snow avalanches.

In miniature form, these are the kind of avalanche that started on the steep, slippery roof that Isaiah fell from and which I now force myself to look up at. One of the things you can learn from snow is the way great forces and catastrophes can always be found in miniature form in daily life. Not one day of my adult life has passed that I haven't been amazed at how poorly Danes and Greenlanders understand each other. It's worse for Greenlanders, of course. It's not healthy for the tightrope walker to be misunderstood by the person who's holding the rope. And in this century the Inuit's life has been a tightrope dance on a cord fastened on one end to the world's least hospitable land with the world's most severe and fluctuating climate, and fastened on the other end to the Danish colonial administration.

That's the big picture. The little everyday picture is that t have lived on the floor above the mechanic for a year and a half, have spoken to him countless times, and he has fixed my doorbell and repaired my bicycle, and I have helped him check a letter to the housing authorities for spelling mistakes. There were about twenty misspelled words out of a total of twenty-eight. He's dyslexic.

We ought to take a shower and rinse off the dust and the blood and the cod liver. But we are bound together by what has happened. So we both go up to his apartment. Where I've never been before.

Order reigns in the living room. The furniture is made of sanded, lye-treated blond wood, with cushions and upholstery of woolen horse blankets. There are candlesticks with candles, a bookcase with books, a bulletin board with photographs and kids' drawings by the children of friends. "To Big Peter from Mara, five years old." There are rosebushes in large porcelain pots, and they have red blossoms, and it looks as if someone waters them and talks to them and promises them that they will never be sent on vacation to my place, where, for some strange reason, the climate is bad for green plants.

"C-coffee?"

Coffee is poison. And yet I suddenly have the urge to roll in the mud and I say, "Yes, please."

I stand in the doorway and watch while he makes it. The kitchen is completely white. He takes up his position in the middle, the way a badminton player does on the court, so he has to move as little as possible. He has a little electric grinder. First he grinds a lot of light-colored beans and then some that are tiny, almost black, and shiny as glass. He mixes them in a little metal funnel that he attaches to an espresso machine, which he places on a gas burner.

People acquire bad coffee habits in Greenland. I pour hot milk right onto the Nescafe. I'm not above dissolving the powder in water straight from the hot-water tap.

He pours one part whipping cream and two parts whole milk into two tall glasses with handles.

When he draws out the coffee from the machine, it's thick and black like crude oil. Then he froths the milk with the steam nozzle and divides the coffee between the two glasses.

We take it out to the sofa. I do appreciate it when someone serves me something good. In the tall glasses the drink is dark as an old oak tree and has an overwhelming, almost perfumed tropical scent:

"I was following you," he says.

The glass is scorching hot. The coffee is scalding. Normally hot drinks lose heat when they're poured. But in this case the steam nozzle has heated up the glass to 200°F along with the milk.

"The door's open. So I go in. I had no idea that you'd be s-sitting in the d-dark waiting."

I cautiously sip at the rim. The drink is so strong that it makes my eyes water and I can suddenly feel my heart.

"I'd been thinking about what you said on the roof. About the footprints."

His stammer is barely noticeable now. Sometimes it vanishes entirely.

"We were friends, you know. He was so young. But we were still friends… We don't talk much. But we have fun. Damn, we sure have fun. He m-makes faces. He puts his head in his hands. And he raises it, and he looks like a sick old monkey. He hides it again. He raises it. He looks like a rabbit. Again and he looks like Frankenstein's monster. I'm on the floor and finally I have to tell him to stop it. I give him a block of wood and a chisel. A knife and a piece of soapstone. He sits there swaying and rumbling like a little bear. Every so often he says something. But it's in Greenlandic. Talking to himself. So we sit and work. Independently but together. I'm surprised he can be such a good person, with a mother like that."

He pauses for a long time, hoping I'll take over. But I don't come to his rescue. We both know that I'm the one who deserves an explanation.

"So one night we're sitting there as usual. Then Petersen the custodian comes in. He keeps his wine carboys under the stairs next to the furnace. Comes in to get his apricot wine. He's not usually there that time of day. So there he is with his deep voice and his wooden clogs. And then I happen to look down at the boy. And he's sitting all huddled up. Like an animal. With the knife you gave him in his hand. Shaking all over. Looking ferocious. Even after he realized it was only Petersen, he still kept shaking. I take him on my lap. For the first time. I talk to him. He doesn't want to go home. I b-bring him up here. Put him on the sofa. I think about calling you up, but what would I say? We don't know each other very well. He sleeps here. I stay up, sitting next to the sofa. Every fifteen minutes he bolts up like a spring, shaking and crying."

He's not a talker. In the last five minutes he has said more to me than in the past year and a half. He's left himself so vulnerable that I can't look him in the eye; I stare down at my coffee. A film of tiny, clear bubbles has formed on it, catching the light and breaking it up into red and purple.

"From that day on, I have the feeling that he's afraid of something. What you said about the footprints keeps on going through my mind. So I sort of keep my eye on you. You and the Baron understand… understood each other."

Isaiah arrived in Denmark a month before I moved in. Juliane had given him a pair of patent-leather shoes. Patent-leather shoes are considered stylish in Greenland. They couldn't get his fan-shaped feet into a pair with pointed toes. But Juliane managed to find a pair with rounded toes. After that, the mechanic called Isaiah "the Baron." When a nickname sticks, it's because it captures some deeper truth. In this case, it was Isaiah's dignity. Which had something to do with the fact that he was so self-sufficient. That there was so little he needed from the world to be happy.

"By accident I see you go up to Juliane's apartment and leave again. I sneak after you in the Morris. Watch you feed the dog. See you climb over. I open the other gate."

That's how it all fits together. He hears something, he sees something, he follows somebody, he opens a gate, gets bashed in the head, and we sit here. No mysteries, nothing new or disturbing under the sun.

He gives me a crooked smile. I smile back. We sit there drinking coffee and smiling at each other. We know that I know he's lying.

I tell him about Elsa Lübing. About the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark. About the report lying in front of us on the table in a plastic bag.

I tell him about Ravn. Who doesn't exactly work where he works, but somewhere else instead.

He sits there looking down as I talk. His head bent, motionless.

It's hidden, lying out there on the edge of consciousness. But we both sense that we are participating in a barter. That, with profound, mutual suspicion, we are trading information that we have to reveal in order to get some in return.

"Then there's the l-lawyer."

Outside, above the harbor, a light appears, as if it had been sleeping in the canals, under the bridges, and is now hesitantly rising up onto the ice, which grows brighter. In 'i'hule the light returned in February. For weeks ahead of time we could see the sun while it was still far beneath the mountains and we were living in darkness; its rays fell on I'earl Island, hundreds of miles out to sea, making it glow like a shard of rose mother-of-pearl. I was positive, no rnatter what the adults said, that the sun had been hibernating in the sea and was now waking up.

"It all started when I noticed the car, a red BMW, on Strand Street," he says.

"Yes?" It seems to me that the cars on Strand Street change every day.

"Once a month. He picks up the Baron. When he got home, the Baron was impossible to talk to."

"I see." You have to give slow people all the time in the world.

"Then one day I open the car-I have a tool with me-and look in the glove compartment. Belongs to a lawyer. Name of Ving."

"You might have been looking in the wrong car."

"Flowers. It's like flowers. When you're a g-gardener. I see a car once or twice and I remember it. The way you are with snow. The way you were up on the roof."

"Maybe I was mistaken."

He shakes his head. "I watched you and the Baron play that jumping game."

A large part of my childhood was spent playing that game. I often still play it in my sleep. You jump across an untouched expanse of snow. The others wait with their backs turned. Afterward-on the basis of the footprints -you have to reconstruct the way the first person jumped. Isaiah and I played that game. I often took him to kindergarten. Sometimes we arrived an hour and a half late. I got in trouble. They warned me that a kindergarten couldn't function if the children came drifting in late in the day. But we were happy.

"He could leap like a flea," says the mechanic, daydreaming. "He was sly. He'd turn halfway around in the air and land on one foot. He'd walk back in his own footprints."

He looks at me, shaking his head. "But you guessed right every time."

"How long were they gone?"

The jackhammers on Knippels Bridge. The traffic starting up. The seagulls. The distant bass sound, actually more like a deep vibration, of the first hydrofoil to Sweden. The short toots on the horn of the Bornholm ferry as it turns in front of Amalienborg Palace. It's almost morning.

"Maybe several hours. But a different car brought him home. A cab. He always came back alone in a cab."

He makes us an omelet while I stand in the doorway telling him about the Institute of Forensic Medicine. About Professor Loyen. About Lagermann. About the trace of something that might be a muscle biopsy, taken from a child. After he fell.

He slices onions and tomatoes, sautes them in butter, whips the egg whites until they're stiff, blends in the egg yolks, and cooks the whole thing on both sides. He takes the pan over to the table. We drink milk and eat slices of a moist black rye bread that smells of tar.

We eat in silence. Whenever I eat with strangers-like now-or if I'm very hungry-like now-I am reminded of the ritual significance of meals. In my childhood I remember associating the solemnity of companionship with great gustatory experiences. The pink, slightly frothy whale blubber eaten from a communal platter. The feeling that practically everything in life is meant to be shared.

I get up.

He's standing in the door as if to block my way.

I think about the inadequacy of what he has told me today.

He steps aside. I walk past. With my boots and my fur coat in my hand.

"I'll leave part of the report. It'll be good practice for your dyslexia."

There's a look of mischief in his eyes. "Smilla. Why is it that such an elegant and petite girl like you has such a rough voice?"

"I'm sorry," I say, "if I give you the impression that it's only my mouth that's rough. I do my best to be rough all over."

Then I close the door.

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