I follow along as he pushes the bike downstairs. I have an idea about the basement.

He has gotten a double room for a workshop. It has a cement floor, warm, dry air, and a bright yellow electric light. The limited space is packed full. There's a workbench running along two walls. Bicycle wheels and inner tubes on hooks. A milk crate full of defective potentiometers. A plastic panel with nails and screws on it. A board with small insulated pliers for working with electronics. A board full of hooks. Ten square yards of plywood with what looks like all the tools in the world. A row of soldering irons. Four shelves of plumbing supplies, paint cans, dismantled stereos, sets of socket wrenches, welding electrodes, and an entire set of Metabo electrical tools. Against the. wall two large canisters for a CO2 welder, and two small ones for a blowtorch. There is also a washing machine in pieces. Buckets full of a solution to fight dry rot. A bicycle stand. A foot pump.

There are so many things gathered here that they seem to be waiting for the slightest excuse to create chaos. On a purely personal level, I think all you'd have to do is send me in here alone to turn on the light, and that would trigger such a state of confusion that you wouldn't even be able to find the light switch afterward. But as it is now, everything is kept in its place by the thoroughly pragmatic sense of order of a person who wants to make sure he can always find whatever he needs.

The place is a double world. Above is the workbench, the tools, the tall office chair. Below, under the table, the universe is duplicated half-size. A little masonite table with a coping saw, screwdriver, chisel. A little stool. A workbench. A little vise. A beer crate. A cigar box with maybe thirty cans of Humbrol. Isaiah's things. I've been in here once before when they were sitting and working. The mechanic on the chair, bent over a magnifying glass on a stand; Isaiah on the floor, in his underpants, lost to the world. There was the smell of burning solder and epoxy hardener in the air. And something else, something stronger: total, all-consuming concentration. I stood there for maybe ten minutes. They didn't look up once. Isaiah wasn't equipped for the Danish winter. Only occasionally would Juliane manage to dress him adequately. After I had known him for six months, he contracted his fourth severe middle ear infection in eight weeks. When he came out of the penicillin daze, he was hard-of-hearing. After that I would sit in front of him when I read so that he could follow the movement of my lips. In the mechanic he found someone with whom he could communicate in other ways than through language.

For several days I've been walking around with something in my pocket because I've been expecting this meeting. I show it to him now.

"What's this?"

It's the suction cup that I took from Isaiah's room. "A `cup.' Glaziers use them to carry large pieces of glass."

I take the things out of the beer crate. There are several pieces of carved wood. A harpoon, an ax. A boat carved from a dense, rather speckled kind of wood, maybe pear. An umiaq. It's rubbed smooth on the outside and hollowed out with a gouge. A slow, meticulous, carefully executed job. There is also a car made of bent and glued aluminum strips cut from an almost paper-thin sheet. Pieces of rough colored glass that have been melted and stretched over a Bunsen burner. Several pairs of glasses. A Walkman. The cover is gone but it has been ingeniously repaired with a Plexiglas plate and tiny hinges screwed on. It's lying in a hand-sewn vinyl case. The whole thing bears the mark of a joint project for a child and an adult. There is also a stack of cassette tapes.

"Where's his knife?"

The mechanic shrugs. After a moment he plods off. He's the whole world's 200-pound friend, and buddy-buddy with the custodian, too. He has keys to all the basement rooms and can come and go as he pleases.

I pick up the little stool and sit down on it by the door, so I can see the whole room.

At boarding school we each had a cupboard 12 by 20 inches. It had a lock. The owner had a key for it. Everyone else could open it with a steel comb.

There's a widespread notion that children are open, that the truth about their inner selves just seeps out of them. That's all wrong. No one is more covert than a child, and no one has a greater need to be that way. It's a response to a world that's always using a can opener to open them up to see what's inside, wondering whether it ought to be replaced with a more useful sort of preserves.

The first need that developed at boarding schoolaside from the perpetual, never truly satisfied hungerwas the need for peace. There is no peace in a dormitory. So the need is suppressed. It turns into a need for a hiding place, for a secret room.

I try to imagine Isaiah's situation, the places he went. The apartment, the housing block, the kindergarten, the embankment. Places that could never be thoroughly searched. So I stick to the place at hand.

I look around the room. Very carefully. Without finding anything. Other than the memory of Isaiah. Then I call up the image of the way it looked the two times I was here before, a long time ago.

I must have been sitting there half an hour when it came to me. Six months ago the building was inspected for dry rot. The insurance company brought over a dog that was trained to sniff it out. It found two smaller patches. They knocked them down and then swabbed the area. One of the places, where they worked was in this room. They opened the wall three feet off the floor. They bricked it up again, but it still hasn't been covered with plaster like the rest of the wall. Underneath the workbench, in the shadows, there is still a rectangle of 6 by 6-inch bricks.

And yet I almost didn't find it. He must have waited while the workers were finishing up. Then he went in while the mortar was still damp and pushed one brick slightly inward. He waited for a moment and then pulled it back into place. He kept at it until the mortar was dry. Quietly and calmly, the whole evening, at fifteen-minute intervals, he drifted down to the basement to move the brick an inch. That's what I imagine. You couldn't fit the blade of a knife in between the brick and the mortar. But when I press on it, it slides right in. At first I can't understand how he got it out, because there's nothing to grab hold of. Then I pick up the suction cup and stare at it. I can't shove the brick inward because it would simply fall into the wall cavity. But when I put the black rubber disk against the brick and use the little handle to create suction, the brick comes out toward me with a great deal of resistance. When I have it out, I understand why. A little blue nail has been pounded into the back. Twisted around it is a thin nylon cord. A big drop of epoxy, now hard as stone, had been applied to the nail and cord. The cord runs down into the wall cavity. On the end hangs a flat cigar box with two thick rubber bands around it. The whole thing is a dream of technical ingenuity.

I put the box in my coat pocket. Then I tuck the brick back in place.

Chivalry is an archetype. When I came to Denmark, Copenhagen County gathered a class of children at Rugmarken's School to learn Danish, near the welfare barracks for emigrants in Sundby on Amager. I sat next to a boy named Baral. I was seven and had short hair. During recess I played ball with the boys. After about three months there was a lesson in which we were supposed to say each other's names.

"And next to you, Baral, what is her name?"

"His name is Smilla."

"Her name is Smilla. Smilla is a girl."

He looked at me in mute astonishment. After the first shock had receded, and for the rest of the school year, there was only one real difference in his behavior toward me. It was now augmented by a pleasant, courteous helpfulness.