They have their own table next to the window and their own waiter and they always eat the same thing. Moritz has lamb kidneys and Benja a bowl of the kind of fodder you give rabbits. Today there's a family sitting near them that has sneaked a little child into this otherwise child-free area. Moritz looks at the child.

"You've never given me any grandchildren," he tells me.

"Little children smell of pee," says Benja.

Moritz looks at her with astonishment. "Lamb kidneys do, too," he says.

I think about the mechanic waiting outside in the car. "Won't you sit down, Smilla?"

"Someone is waiting for me."

Through the windows Benja can see the Morris, but not who's sitting inside.

"It looks like someone your own age," she says. "Somewhere in his forties. Judging from his fancy car."

If I reply, I'll end up hurting Moritz. So I let it pass uncontested.

I lean over the edge of the table. It has always been like this. Benja and Moritz sit comfortably, leaning back. They belong here. I stand with my overcoat on, feeling as if I've come in from the street to peddle something.

Moritz is holding two envelopes in his hands. One is gray and spotted with what looks like red wine. In the silence between us he tries to use them to force me into a chair. He doesn't succeed.

"This makes me uncomfortable," he says. I don't know what he means.

"Hviid is not an ordinary name. There was a composer, Jonathan Hviid. I called Victor Halkenhvad." Benja lifts her head. Even she has heard of that name. "I didn't know he was still alive."

"I'm not sure he is, either."

He hands me the envelope. I hold it up to my nose. The spots are red wine. Moritz sticks a finger inside his turtleneck collar and moves it around.

"It wasn't pleasant. He's not the man he used to be. At one point he slammed down the receiver. While I was in the middle of a sentence. But he did write, after all."

It's a rare experience to see Moritz uncomfortable. Not until I'm out in the car do I understand why.

He catches up with me at the door. "You forgot this." It's the second envelope.

"A single clipping about Tork Hviid. From the Danish Press Service."

A clipping service he subscribes to. They collect any mention in the press about him.

He wants to touch me. He doesn't dare. He wants to say something. He doesn't manage it.

In the car I read the letter out loud. The handwriting is almost illegible.

Dear Jørgen, you cheap little barber's assistant.

The mechanic looks disoriented.

"My father's first name is Jørgen," I say. "And Victor has always been temperamental."

It must be fifteen years since I saw him last. The opera had given him an honorary residence on Store Kannike Lane. He was sitting in an armchair positioned next to the piano. He was wearing a dressing gown; I had never seen him in anything else. His legs were naked and swollen. I don't know whether he could stand up anymore. He must have weighed over 300 pounds. Everything sagged on him. He was looking at me, not Moritz. Those weren't bags under his eyes, they were hammocks.

"I don't like women," he said. "Move farther away." I moved away.

"You were cute when you were little," he said. "That time is past."

He signed an album cover and handed it to Moritz. "I know what you're thinking," he said. "You're thinking now that old idiot has recorded another album."

It was Gurrelieder. I still have the record. It's still an unforgettable recording. I've sometimes thought that the body, our very physical existence, puts a limit on how much pain a mind can bear. And that Victor Halkenhvad, on that record, reaches that limit. So that afterward the rest of us can listen and make that journey without going there ourselves.

Even if, like me, you know nothing about European cultural history, you can still hear a world collapsing in that music, on that record. The question is whether anything has taken its place. Victor didn't think so.

I've looked it up in my journal. That's all I have left my memory. It's ten years ago that you last visited me. Let me tell you that I have Alzheimer's. Even a money doctor like you must know what that means. Every new day a piece of my brain peels away. Soon, thank God, I won't even be able to remember all of you who betrayed me and yourselves.

It was his indifference that did it. At the same time as he sang, trembling, ready to burst, unbearably full of romanticism and its feelings, there was a sense of distance, a place inside him that didn't give a damn.

Jonathan Hviid and I went to the Conservatory together. We started in 1933. The year that Schonberg converted to Judaism. The same year as the Reichstag fire. Jonathan was just like that. The most awful timing. He composed a piece for eight flutes and called it "Silver Polyps." In the midst of the flatulent postwar Danish narrow-mindedness which even regarded Carl Nielsen as too controversial. He wrote a brilliant concerto for piano and orchestra. The piano was supposed to have old-fashioned iron hot plates placed on top of the strings because they produced a very special sound. He never got it performed. Never, not once. He married a woman about whom even I have a difficult time finding anything negative to say. She was in her early twenties when they had the boy. They lived in Bronshøj, in a neighborhood that doesn't exist anymore. Garden sheds with tin roofs. I visited them there. Jonathan wasn't making a dime. The boy was totally neglected. Holes in his clothes, red-eyed, never had a bicycle, was beaten at the local proletarian school because he was too weak from hunger to defend himself. Because Jonathan was supposed to be a great artist. You've all betrayed your children. And it takes an old queen like me to tell you.

The mechanic has pulled over in order to listen.

"The sheds in Bronshøj," he says. "I remember them. They were behind the movie theater."

He broke off ties with me. At some point I heard that they had gone to Greenland. She had taken a job as a teacher. Provided for the family while Jonathan composed for the polar bears. After they came back I visited them only once. The son was there, too. Handsome as a god. Some sort of scientist. Cold. We talked about music. He asked about money the whole time. Permanently scarred. Like you are, Moritz. You haven't visited me for ten years. I hope your fortune suffocates you. There was a certain stubbornness about the boy, too. Like Schonberg. Twelve-tone music. Pure stubbornness. But Schonberg wasn't cold. The boy was ice. I'm tired. I've started peeing in my bed. Can you stand to hear that, Moritz? It'll happen to you someday, too.

He hadn't signed it.

The clipping in the other envelope is a single paragraph:

"On October 7, 1991, the police in Singapore arrested Tørk Hviid, a Danish citizen. The Consulate, on behalf of the Foreign Ministry, has lodged a protest."

It doesn't mean anything to me. But it reminds me that Loyen was once in Singapore, too. To photograph mummies.

We drive out to the North Harbor. Outside the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark he slows down, and we look at each other.

We leave the car near the Svanemolle power plant and stroll toward the harbor, along Sundkrogs Street.

There is a dry wind with barely visible, blowing ice crystals that sting your face.

Now and then we hold hands. Now and then we stop to kiss with cold lips and warm mouths, now and then we walk on separately. We're wearing boots. Snowdrifts have piled up on the sidewalk. And yet we feel like two dancers, gliding in and out of an embrace, a swoop into a lift. He doesn't hold me back. He doesn't weigh me down to the ground, he doesn't urge me forward. One moment he's at my side, the next he's a little behind me.