With someone else this ritual might have seemed like one of the little functional tics that Europeans get when they're alone too much. But not with her. She is never alone. She is married to Jesus.

"Just now, when you closed the door, I opened the Bible. It was the first page of Revelation. Which you mentioned. `I have the keys of Hades and of Death.' "

We stand there looking at each other.

"The keys of hell," she says. "How far will you go?"

"Try me."

For a moment something still struggles inside her. "There's a double archive, in the basement, in the building on Strand Boulevard. In the first one are the accounts and correspondence. The supervisors, the bookkeepers, I myself, and sometimes the department heads all have access. The other archive is behind the first one. That's where the expedition reports are kept. Certain mineral samples. There is a whole wall full of topographical maps. A case of drilling cores, geological core samples about the size of a narwhal tusk. Technically, access is granted only with the permission of the board or the director."

She turns her back to me.

I sense the appropriate solemnity. She is about to commit one of her life's (without doubt very few) breaches of the regulations.

"Naturally I cannot mention that there is a passkey system. Or that the Abloy key over there on the board is for the main entrance."

I slowly turn my head. Behind me there are three brass hooks, three keys. One of them is an Abloy.

"The building itself does not have a security system. The key to the archives in the basement is hanging in the safe in the office. An electronic safe with a six-digit code, the date on which I became the Chief Accountant: OS-1757. The key fits both the first and second basement rooms."

She turns around and comes over to me. It's my guess that this proximity is the closest she ever comes to touching another human being.

"Do you believe?" she asks.

"I don't know whether I believe in your God."

"That doesn't matter. You believe in a Supreme Being?"

"There are mornings when I don't even believe in myself."

She laughs for the second time that day. Then she turns around and walks over toward her panoramic view. When she's halfway across the room, I put the key in my pocket. With the tips of my fingers I make sure that Rohrmann's silk lining hasn't shredded, at least in that pocket.

Then I leave. I take the stairs. If there is divine providence, one of the great questions is how directly it intervenes. Whether it is the Lord Himself who saw me at 6 Hejre Road and said, "Let there be a break," and there was a break. In one of his own angels.

When I turn the corner onto Due Road I have a ballpoint pen in my hand. There is a license plate I feel like jotting down on my hand. Nothing comes of it. When I reach the corner, there is no car in sight.

10

From the earth have you come.

Occasionally gyrfalcons would appear when we were hunting for auks. At first they would be nothing but two tiny dots on the horizon. Then the mountain seemed to dissolve and rise up into the sky. When a million auks take off, space turns black, for a moment, as if winter had returned in a flash.

My mother would shoot at the falcons. A gyrfalcon dives at a speed of 125 miles per hour. She usually hit them. She shot them with a nickel-plated, small-caliber bullet. We would pick them up for her. One time the bullet entered one eye and lodged in the other, as if the dead falcon were staring at us with a shiny, piercing gaze.

A taxidermist on the base stuffed them for her. Gyrfalcons are a protected species. On the black market in Germany or the United States you can sell a baby falcon for $50,000 to be bred for hunting. No one dared to believe that my mother had violated the ban on hunting them.

She didn't sell them. She gave them away. To my father, to one of the ethnographers who sought her out because she was a female hunter, to one of the officers from the base.

The stuffed falcons were both a gruesome and a dazzling gift. She would ceremoniously present them with an apparent display of absolute generosity. Then she would drop a remark about needing a pair of tailor's shears. She hinted that she was in need of eighty yards of nylon rope. Or she let it be known that we children could certainly use two pairs of thermal underwear.

She got whatever she asked for. By wrapping her guest in a web of fierce, mutually obligating courtesy.

This made me ashamed of her, and it made me love her. It was her response to European culture. She opened herself to it with a courtesy full of pallid premeditation. And she closed around it, encapsulating what she could use. A pair of scissors, a coil of rope, the spermatozoa that brought Moritz Jaspersen into her womb.

That's why Thule will never become a museum. The ethnographers have cast a dream of innocence over North Greenland. A dream that the Inuit will continue to be the bowlegged, drum-dancing, legend-telling, widely smiling exhibition images that the first explorers thought they were meeting south of Qaanaaq at the turn of the century. My mother gave them a dead bird. And made them buy half the store for her. She paddled a kayak that was made in the same way they were made in the seventeenth century, before the art of kayak building disappeared from North Greenland. But she used a sealed plastic container for her hunting float.

To the earth shall you return.

I can see how others are successful. But I can't find success myself.

Isaiah was on the verge of success. He could have gotten ahead. He would have been able to absorb Denmark and transform it and become both a Dane and a Greenlander.

I had an anorak made for him out of white silk. Even the pattern had been passed down by Europeans. The painter Gitz-Johansen once gave it to my father. He had gotten it in North Greenland when he was illustrating his great reference work on the birds of Greenland. I put the anorak on Isaiah, combed his hair, and then I lifted him up onto the toilet seat. When he saw himself in the mirror, that's when it happened. The tropical fabric, the Greenlandic respect for fine clothes, the Danish joy in luxury all merged together. Maybe it also meant something that I had given it to him.

A second later he had to sneeze. "Hold my nose!"

I held his nose. "Why?" I asked. He usually blew his nose into the sink.

As soon as I opened my mouth, his eyes found my lips in the mirror. I often realized that he understood things even before they were expressed.

"When I'm wearing annoraaq qaqortoq, this fine anorak, I don't want snot on my fingers."

And from the earth shall you rise again.

I try scanning the women standing around Juliane to see if any of them might be pregnant. With a boy who could be given Isaiah's name. The dead live on in their names. There were four girls who were named Ane after my mother. I've visited them many times and sat and talked with them, in order to find, through the woman before me, a glimpse of the one who left me.

They're pulling the ropes out of the eyelets on the side of the coffin. For a brief moment my yearning feels like madness. If only they would open the coffin for a moment and let me lie down beside his cold little body that someone has stuck a needle into, that they have opened up and photographed and cut slices out of and closed up again; if only I could just once feel his erection against my thigh, a gesture of intimated, boundless eroticism, the beating of a moth's wing against my skin, the dark insects of happiness.

It's so cold that they will have to wait to fill the grave, so when we leave, it lies open behind us. The mechanic and I walk side by side.

His name is Peter. It's less than thirteen hours since I said his name for the first time.