So I drink my tea while the traffic on Knippels Bridge thins out, becoming separate red stripes of light in the night. Gradually a kind of peace comes over me. Finally it's enough that I can fall asleep.

3

On an August day a year and a half earlier I met Isaiah for the first time. A humid, leaden heat had transformed Copenhagen into an incubator for imminent madness. I came home on a bus with that special pressure-cooker at mosphere, wearing a new dress of white linen, cut low in the back, trimmed with Valencia ruffles that took a long time to steam-press so they'd stand up properly, and they had already wilted in the general depression.

There are those who head south this time of year. South to the heat. Personally, I've never been farther than Køge, thirty miles south of Copenhagen. And don't plan to go either, until the nuclear winter has cooled down the continent.

It's the kind of day that might make you wonder about the meaning of life, and discover that there is none. And there's something rooting around on the stairway, on the landing below my apartment.

When the first large shipments of Greenlanders began arriving in Denmark in the 1930s, one of the first things they wrote home was that Danes are such pigs: they keep dogs in their houses. For a moment I think it's a dog lying on the stairs. Then I see that it's a child, and on this particular day that is not much better.

"Beat it, you little shit," I say.

Isaiah looks up.

"Peerit," he says. Beat it yourself.

There aren't many Danes who can tell by looking at me. They think there's a trace of something Asian, especially when I put a shadow under my cheekbones. But the boy on the stairs looks right at me with a gaze that cuts straight through to what he and I have in common. It's the kind of look you see in newborns. Later it vanishes, sometimes reappearing in extremely old people. This could be one reason I've never burdened my life with children-I've thought too much about why people lose the courage to look each other in the eye.

"Will you read me a story?"

I have a book in my hand. That's what prompted his question.

You might say that he looks like a forest elf. But since he is filthy, dressed only in underpants, and glistening with sweat, you might also say he looks like a seal pup. "Piss off," I say.

"Don't you like kids?"

"I eat kids."

He steps aside.

"Salluvutit, you're lying," he says as I go past.

At that moment I see two things in him that somehow link us together. I see that he is alone. The way someone in exile will always be. And I see that he is not afraid of solitude.

"What's the book?" he shouts after me. "Euclid's Elements," I say, slamming the door.

It turned out to be Euclid's Elements, after all.

That's the one I take out that very evening when the doorbell rings and he's standing outside, still in his underpants, staring straight at me; and I step aside and he walks into my apartment and into my life, never really to leave it again; then I take Euclid's Elements down from the bookshelf. As if to chase him away. As if to establish from the start that I have no books that would interest a child, that he and I cannot meet over a book, or in any other way. As if to avoid something.

We sit down on the sofa. He sits on the very edge, with both legs crossed, the way kids from Thule used to sit at Inglefield in the summertime, on the edge of the dogsled used as a bed inside the tent.

"A point is that which cannot be divided. A line is a length without breadth."

This book turns out to be the one he never comments on, and the one we keep returning to. Occasionally I try others. One time I borrow the children's book Rasmus Klump on the Ice Cap. In all serenity he listens to the description of the first pictures. Then he points a finger at the toylike bear Rasmus Klump.

"What does that one taste like?" he asks.

"A semicircle is a figure contained within a diameter… and the circumference intersected by the diameter." For me, the reading goes through three phases on that first evening in August.

First there is simply irritation at the whole impractical situation. Then there is the feeling that always comes over me at the mere thought of that book: veneration. The knowledge that it is the foundation, the boundary. That if you work your way backwards, past Lobachevsky and Newton and as far back as you can go, you end up at Euclid.

"On the greater of two given unequal straight lines…"

Then at some point I no longer see what I'm reading. At some point there is only my voice in the living room and the light of the sunset from the South Harbor. And then my voice isn't even there; it's just me and the boy. At some point I stop. And we simply sit there, gazing straight ahead, as if I were fifteen and he were sixteen, and we have reached "the point of no return." Some time later he gets up very quietly and leaves. I watch the sunset, which lasts three hours at this time of year. As if the sun, on the verge of leaving, had discovered qualities in the world that are now making its departure a reluctant one.

Of course Euclid didn't scare him off. Of course it made no difference what I read. For that matter, I could have read aloud from the telephone book. Or from Lewis and Carrisa's Detection and Classification of Ice. He would have come anyway, to sit with me on the sofa.

During some periods he would come every day. And then a couple of weeks might pass when I would see him only once, and from a distance. But when he did come, it was usually just starting to get dark, when the day was over and Juliane was out cold.

Once in a while I would give him a bath. He didn't like hot water, but it was impossible to get him clean in cold. I would put him in the bathtub and turn on the hand-held shower. He wouldn't complain. Long ago he had learned to put up with adversity. But not for one moment did he take his reproachful eyes off my face.

4

There have been quite a few boarding schools in my life. I regularly work at suppressing the memory of them, and for long periods of time I succeed. It's only in glimpses that a single memory sometimes manages to work its way into the light. The way the particular feeling of a dormitory does at this moment. At Stenhøj School, near Humlebæk, we slept in dorms. One for girls and one for boys. They opened all the windows at night. And our blankets were too thin.

In the Copenhagen county morgue in the basement of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University Hospital, the dead sleep their last, cold sleep in dormitories cooled to just above freezing. Everything is clean, modern, and final. Even in the examination room, which is painted like a living room; they've brought in a couple of floor lamps, and a green plant is trying to keep up its courage.

There's a white sheet over Isaiah. Someone has placed a little bunch of flowers on top of it, as if in an attempt to give the potted plant support. He is completely covered, but from the small body and large head, you can tell it's him. The French cranium measurers ran into serious problems in Greenland. They were working from the theory that there was a linear relation between a person's intelligence and the size of his skull. They discovered that the Greenlanders, whom they regarded as a transitional form of ape, had the largest skulls in the world.

A man in a white lab coat lifts the sheet away from Isaiah's face. He looks so intact, as if he had been carefully drained of all blood and color and then put to bed.

Juliane is standing next to me. She's dressed in black, and she is sober for the second day in a row.

As we walk down the hallway, the white coat goes with us.