She has earned it. It arrives, looking like summer. With whipped cream so fresh and soft and yellowish white, as if they had a cow standing in back of the bakery.

I wait for her to taste it. It's difficult for people to be on their guard at the same time as their senses are being caressed.

"Have you talked about this to anyone else?"

She's about to deny it indignantly. Then her reawakened memories and her trust in us and maybe even the taste of the raspberries do something to her.

"I was brought up taking discretion for granted," she says.

We nod reassuringly.

"Perhaps Johannes Loyen and I have discussed these things one or two times. But that was over twenty years ago."

"Was it possibly in 1966?"

She looks at me with surprise. For a moment I'm in the clanger zone. Then she tells herself that, of course, we knew this from Loyen.

"Johannes worked for a company that was organizing a trip to Greenland. He wanted us to sit down together and try to reconstruct some of the information from the Ietters of '46. It was mainly route descriptions. A lot about anchoring conditions. We were not successful. Even though we spent a lot of time on it. I even think I received a fee for it."

"And again in '90 and '91?"

She bites her lip. "Helen, his wife, is very jealous."

"What was he interested in?"

She shakes her head. "He has never told me anything. Have you tried to ask him yourself?"

"We haven't had the opportunity," I say. "But we will."

Something about my reply distracts her. I search for something reassuring to divert her attention. She thinks of something herself. She looks from me to the mechanic and back again.

"Are you married?"

Surprisingly enough, he blushes. It starts at his throat and creeps upward, like an allergic reaction to shellfish. A flaming, helpless blush.

I notice a brief wave of heat along my inner thighs. For a moment I think someone has put something warm in my lap. But there's nothing there.

"No," I say. "It's difficult to devote yourself to the army's archives and have a family at the same time." She nods sympathetically. She knows everything about t he dichotomy between war and love.

"Two men meet," I say, "maybe in Berlin. Loyen and Ving. Loyen knows something, knows about something in Greenland worth finding. Ving has an organization that they can use as a cover for getting it, because he's the director of the Cryolite Corporation and its real leader. Then there's Andreas Licht. About him we know only that he is familiar with conditions in Greenland."

I have no intention of telling him about Berth 126. "They organize an expedition, under the guise of the corporation, in 1966. Something goes wrong. Maybe there was an accident involving explosives. At any rate, the expedition fails. So they wait twenty-five years. And then try again. But this time something is different. Outside money pays for the transportation. It seems as if they've gotten help and allied themselves with someone. But something goes wrong again. Four men die. One of them is Isaiah's father."

I'm sitting on the mechanic's sofa. Under a woolen blanket. He's standing in the middle of the room, about to open a bottle of champagne. There's something distracting to me about the expensive wine here in this room. He puts it down unopened.

"I talked to Juliane this afternoon," he says.

I noticed at the pastry shop, and afterward on the way home, that something was wrong.

"The Baron was examined every month at the hospital. She got f-fifteen hundred kroner every time. Always the f-first Tuesday of the month. They picked him up. She never went along. The Baron never said anything."

He sits down and stares at the cold bottle. I know what he's thinking. He's considering putting it away again. He has put tall, fragile glasses in front of us. First he washed them in hot water without soap, and then dried them with a clean dishcloth until they were totally transparent. In his big hands they seem as fragile as cellophane.

In Nuuk the waiting list for housing is eleven years. Then you get a closet, a shed, a shack. All money in Greenland is attached to the Danish language and culture. Those who master Danish get the lucrative positions. The others can languish in the filet factories or in unemployment lines. In a culture that has a murder rate comparable to a war zone.

Growing up in Greenland has ruined my relationship to wealth for good. I see that it exists. But I could never strive for it. Or seriously respect it. Or regard it as a goal.

I often feel like a garbage pail. Circumstances have clumped into my life the excesses of a technological culture: differential equations, a fur hat. And now: a bottle of wine cooled to 32°F. Over the years it has gotten harder for me to enjoy it wholeheartedly. If it were all taken away in a flash, I wouldn't mind.

I no longer make an effort to keep Europe or Denmark at a distance. Neither do I plead with them to stay. In some way they are part of my destiny. They come and go in my life. I have given up doing anything about it.

It's night. The last few days have been so long that I've been looking forward to my bed, and to a sleep as all-consuming as in my childhood. In a moment, after merely moistening my lips with the wine, I will get up and leave.

He opens the bottle almost soundlessly. He pours, slowly and carefully, until the glasses are a little more than half full. They are instantly frosted with a matte mist. From invisible irregularities on the inner, curved sides, small beaded rows of bubbles rise to the surface.

He puts his elbows on his knees and gazes into the bubbles. His face is remote, absorbed by the sight and, at that moment, as innocent as a child's. The same way I so often saw Isaiah view the world.

I leave my glass untouched and sit down in front of him on the low table. Our faces are now at the same level. "Peter," I say, "you know the old excuse that she was drunk so she didn't know what she was doing."

He nods.

"That's why I'm doing this before I drink anything." Then I kiss him. I don't know how much time passes. But while it lasts, my whole body is in my mouth.

Then I leave. I could stay, but I don't. It's not because of him or me. It's out of respect for what has taken hold of me, for what hasn't been there for years, for what I don't think I recognize anymore, for what is foreign to me.

It takes me a long time to fall asleep. But that's mostly because I don't have the heart to abandon the night and the silence, and the alert, hypersensitive consciousness that he is lying downstairs, somewhere below me.

When sleep finally comes, I dream that I'm in Siorapaluk. There are several of us children lying on the bed. We've been telling stories, and now the others have fallen asleep. Only my voice is left. I hear it from outside myself, it's trying to keep on going. But at last it staggers, wobbles, falls to its knees, spreads out its arms, and allows itself to be gathered up in a net of dreams.