Now that Lagermann has arrived and unpacked and hung up the pictures with little clips, the door opens, and Moritz slouches in.

Standing there in front of us he is three people in one. He is my father, who still loves my mother and maybe me as well, and is now sick with anxiety that he can't control.

He is the great doctor, M.D., and international injection star who has never been excluded, always the one who knew things before anyone else did.

And he is the little boy who has been shut out of the room in which something is happening that he's dying to take part in.

It's the latter person that I, on sudden impulse, allow into the room and whom I introduce to Lagermann. Of course he knows my father; he shakes his hand and smiles broadly at him; he has met him two or three times before. I should have realized what would happen now: that Lagermann would pull him over to the light box.

"Just have a look at this," he says. "Because there's something here that'll surprise the hell out of you." The door opens and Benja pads in. With her woolen socks and her turned-out prima-donna feet and her demand for undivided attention.

The two men are glued to the transparent star chart on the box. They are explaining it to me. But their words are directed at each other.

"There are few dangerous bacteria in Greenland." Lagermann doesn't know that Moritz and I have forgotten more about Greenland than he will ever learn. But we don't interrupt him.

"It's too cold. And too dry. That's why poisoning from spoiled food is extremely rare. With the exception of one kind: botulism, anaerobic bacteria that produce a very dangerous form of meat poisoning."

"I'm a lactovegetarian," says Benja.

"The report is in Godthab, with a copy in Copenhagen. It says that they found five people on the same day, August 7, 1991. Healthy young people. Botulism, Clostridium botulinum, is anaerobic, just like the tetanus bacteria. And not dangerous in and of itself. But its waste products are exceedingly toxic. They attack the peripheril nervous system where the nerves innervate the muscle fibers. Paralyze the lungs. Just before death, it's spectucular, of course. Hypoventilation, acidosis like crazy. The person turns blue in the face. But when it's over, there's not a trace. Naturally the livores are slightly darker, but hell, they are with a heart attack, too."

"So there is nothing externally visible?" I ask.

He shakes his head. "Nothing. Botulism is determined by a process of elimination. Something you come to suspect because you can't find any other cause of death. Then you take a blood sample. And samples of the food under suspicion. You send them to the Serum Institute. Queen Ingrid's Hospital in Godthab has a medical laboratory, of course. But no facilities to trace the less common toxins. So blood samples were sent to Copenhagen. In the samples they found the toxin from botulinum."

He takes out one of his big cigar matches. Moritz's eyebrows shoot up on his brow. It's forbidden, under penalty of death, to smoke in the clinic. Smokers are shown to the smoking salon, which means a walk in the garden. Even there he doesn't like it much. He thinks that the sight of someone smoking, even from a distance, might affect his golf swing. It was one of his few, great, miraculous triumphs over my mother that he got her to go outside to smoke in Qaanaaq. It was one of his many defeats that she smoked indoors in the summer tent at Siorapaluk.

With the unsulfured end of the match Lagermann points at a row of tiny numbers on the bottom edge of the X-ray. "X-rays cost a damn fortune. We only use them to search for hardware that has been stuck into people. No pictures were taken in '91. It wasn't thought necessary."

He takes out a cellophane-wrapped cigar from his breast pocket.

"You're not allowed to smoke in here," says Benja. He gives her a preoccupied look. Then he gently taps the photo with the cigar.

"But in '66 they had to take pictures. There was some doubt about identification. They were severely maimed by the explosion. There was nothing to do but take X-rays. To look for old bone fractures and the like. The negatives were supposedly sent around to all the doctors in Greenland. Along with a full dental shot of what was left of their teeth."

It's not until now that I realize there are no thighbones beneath the pelvis in the X-ray.

Lagermann carefully places two more negatives next to the first one. In one of them almost the entire spine is intact. The other is a chaos of bone fragments and dark shadows, a pulverized universe.

"These prompt various professional questions. Such as the location of the bodies in relation to the detonation. It looks as if they were sitting right on top of the charge. That it was not-as is normal when you use plastic explosives on rock or ice-placed in a bored-out channel, or kneaded to an upside-down can, which concentrates the explosion in one particular spot. It practically blew up right under their ass, so to speak. Which rarely happens when professionals are involved."

"I'm leaving," says Benja. But she stays in her chair. "All of this is speculation based on very little evidence, of course. But this isn't."

He hangs up two larger X-rays under the first ones. "Enlargements from the negative of these areas."

He points with the cigar. "You can see the remains of the liver, the lower esophagus, and the stomach. The bottom rib has gotten stuck here, right above the vertebra lumbalis, which is here. This is the heart. Here it's damaged, there it's intact. Do you notice anything?"

To me it seems a chaos of black and gray nuances. Moritz leans forward. Curiosity wins out over vanity. From his inside pocket he takes out the glasses which only we, the women in his life, have ever seen him wear. Then he puts a fingernail on each picture.

"There."

Lagermann straightens up.

"Yes," he says, "that's the spot. But what the hell is it?"

Moritz picks up a magnifying glass from an aluminum tray. Even when he points it out, I don't understand. Only when he shows it to me on the second negative can I make it out. Just like in glaciology. One occurrence is an accident. It's the repeat occurrence that creates a structure.

It's a needle-thin, whitish line, uneven, crooked. It wanders up along the smashed vertebrae, disappears at the ribs, reappears at the tip of one lung, vanishes, and shows up again near the heart, outside and partly inside of it, in the large ventricle, like a white thread of light.

Lagermann points at the second X-ray. Through the liver, into the left kidney.

They stare through the magnifying glass.

Then Moritz turns around. He picks up a shiny, thick journal from his desk.

"Nature," he says. "A special issue from 1979. Which you, Smilla, directed my attention to."

There's a photograph on the right-hand side. An X-ray photo, but using a technique that makes the soft organs visible, too, so that the body almost imperceptibly merges into the skeleton.

"This," says Moritz, "is a man from Ghana."

He points with his fountain pen along the left side of the photograph. There is a light winding line moving from one hip up through the abdominal cavity.

"Dracunculus," he says. "Guinea worm. Transmitted via Cyclops water fleas, in the drinking water. Can also bore its way through the skin. A truly nasty parasite. Up to three feet long. Works its way through the body with a speed of up to half an inch a day. Finally sticks its head out through the thigh. That's where the Africans catch it and roll it up around a stick. Every day they wind up a few more inches. It takes a month to get it out. That month and the months before are one continuous period of suffering."

"That's gross," says Benja.

We put our heads up close to the X-rays.

"I thought so," says Lagermann. "I thought it must be some kind of worm."