"The article in Nature," says Moritz, "is about diagnosing this sort of parasite by X-ray. It's quite complicated if it's not calcified in the tissue. Because the heart is no longer beating, it's very difficult to make the contrast fluids disseminate through the body."

"But this is about Greenland," I say. "Not the tropics." Moritz nods.

"But you had underlined the article in your letter. Loyen wrote it. It's one of his main specialties." Lagermann taps on the negative. "I don't know anything about tropical diseases. I'm a forensics specialist. But something has bored its way into these two people. Something that might be a worm or might be something else. Something that has left a channel sixteen inches long and at least two millimeters in diameter. Straight through the diaphragm and the soft organs. Something that stops in areas exploded by infection. For these two gentlemen the TNT didn't make any difference. They were already dead. They died because something-whatever the hell it was-had stuck its head into the heart of one man and the liver of the other."

We stare at the X-rays in bewilderment.

"The right man to solve this problem," says Moritz, "might be Loyen."

Lagermann regards him with his eyes narrowed. "Yes," he says, "it would be interesting to hear what he has to say. But if we wanted to be sure of an honest answer, it looks as if we'd have to tie him to a chair, give him sodium pentothal, and hook him up to a lie detector."

6

I would like to understand Benja. At this moment more than ever.

It wasn't always this way. I didn't always have to understand things. At least I tell myself that it wasn't always this way. When I came to Denmark for the first time, I experienced phenomena. In all their gruesomeness, or beauty, or gray drabness. But without feeling any great need to explain them.

Often there was no food when Isaiah came home. Juliane would be sitting at the table with her friends, and there were cigarettes and laughter and tears and an enormous abuse of alcohol, but there wasn't as much as five kroner to go out and buy some French fries. He never complained. He never yelled at his mother. He never sulked. Patient, silent, and watchful he would wrench himself away from the outstretched hands and go on his way. In order to find, if possible, some other solution. Sometimes the mechanic was home, sometimes I was. He could sit in my living room for an hour or more without telling me he was hungry. Persisting in an extreme, almost stupid, Greenlandic politeness.

Occasionally I would feel the urge to explain things after I had cooked for him, after I had boiled a mackerel and put the whole fish, weighing three pounds, on the floor on a newspaper because that's where he preferred to eat. Without uttering a word, using both hands, he would devour the entire fish with methodical thoroughness and eat the eyes and suck out the brain and lick the backbone and crunch on the fins. I would try to understand the difference between growing up in Denmark and growing up in Greenland. To comprehend the humiliating, exhausting, monotonous emotional dramas with which European children and parents are bound together in mutuaI hatred and dependence. And to understand Isaiah.

Deep inside I know that trying to figure things out leads to blindness, that the desire to understand has a buiIt-in brutality that erases what you seek to comprehend. Only experience is sensitive. But maybe I'm both weak and brutal. I've never been able to resist trying.

Benja seems to have been given everything. I've met her parents. They're trim and subdued and play the piano and speak foreign languages, and every year, when the Royal Theater's school closed for the summer and they went south to their house on the Costa Smeralda, they aways took the best French ballet tutor along to badger Benja on the terrace between the palm trees every morning, because that's what she herself wanted.

You might think that someone who has never suffered or lacked anything worth mentioning would be at peace with herself. For a long time I misjudged her. I thought she and Moritz were playing a game when she walked through the room in front of us, dressed only in her little panties, and placed red silk scarves over the lamps because the light hurt her eyes, and made an endless series of appointments with Moritz and then canceled them because, she said, today she needed to see someone her own age. I thought that on some mysterious wave of self-confidence she was testing her youth and beauty and attractiveness on Moritz, who was almost fifty years older than her.

One day I witnessed her ordering him to move the furniture so that she would have room to dance, and he refused.

At first she didn't believe him. Her pretty face and slanted, almond-shaped eyes and smooth brow beneath corkscrew curls glowed with the awareness of a victory already won. Then she realized that he was not going to yield. Maybe it was the first time in their relationship. First she turned pale with rage, and then her face cracked. Her eyes became despairing, empty, abandoned; her mouth closed on smothered, infantile, despairing tears which refused to flow.

Then I realized that she loved him. That under that appealing coquettishness was a love like a military operation that would tolerate anything and fight any necessary tank battles and demand the world in return. Then I realized, too, that she might always hate me. And that she had lost in advance. Somewhere inside Moritz there is a landscape she will never reach. The home of his feelings for my mother.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Right now, at this very moment, it occurs to me that she might have won, after all. If that's the case, then I'll grant her that she put her nose to the grindstone. She didn't just leave it at wiggling her little fanny around. She didn't settle for sending lovesick glances from the stage to Moritz in the first row, hoping that it would all work out in the long run. She didn't put her trust in her influence at home in the bosom of her family. If I didn't realize it before, I know it now. That there is a raw energy in Benja.

I'm standing in the snow, pressed up against the wall of the house, peering down into the pantry. There Benja is pouring a glass of milk. Enchanting, lithe Benja. And she's handing it to a man who now steps into view. It's the Toenail.

I'm walking along Strand Drive from Klampenborg Station, and it's a wonder that I notice it at all, because I've had a hard day.

That morning I couldn't stand it any longer; I got up, tucked my hair and bandage-which is now only a Bandaid over the wound-under a ski hat, put on sunglasses and a Loden coat, and took the train to the main station, and there I called the mechanic's number, but no one answered.

Then I stroll along the docks, from the Customs Wharf to Langelinie, trying to gather my thoughts. At the North Harbor I make several purchases and pack up a box that they will deliver to Moritz's villa, and from a phone booth I make a call that I know is one of the crucial actions in my life.

And yet it's strange that it means so little. Under certain circumstances the fateful decisions in life, sometimes even in matters of life and death, are made with an almost indifferent ease. While the little things-for instance, the way people hang on to what is over-seem so important. What's important today is to see Knippels Bridge once again, where I rode with him, and the White Palace, where I slept with him, and the Cryolite Corporation, and Skudehavns Road, where we walked together, arm in arm. I call him again from the phone booth at North Harbor Station. A man answers. But it's not him. It's a controlled, anonymous voice.

"Yes?"

I hold the receiver to my ear. Then I hang up.