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It's freezing—an extraordinary 0° Fahrenheit—and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik—big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost.

December darkness rises up from the grave, seeming as limitless as the sky above us. In this darkness our faces are merely pale, shining orbs, but even so I can sense the disapproval of the pastor and the verger directed at my black net stockings and at Juliane's whimpering, made worse by the fact that she took disulfiram this morning and is now confronting her grief almost sober. They think that she and I have no respect for either the weather or the tragic circumstances. But the truth is that both the stockings and the pills are each in their own way a tribute to the cold and to Isaiah.

The pastor and the verger and the women surrounding Juliane are all Greenlanders, and when we sing "Guutiga, illimi," "Thou, My Lord," and when Juliane's legs buckle under her and she starts to sob, the volume slowly increasing, and when the pastor speaks in West Greenlandic, taking his point of departure in the Moravians' favorite passage from Ephesians about redemption through His blood, then with only a tiny lapse of concentration you might feel yourself transported to Upernavik or Holsteinsborg or Qaanaaq in Greenland.

But out in the darkness, like the bow of a ship, the walls of Vestre Prison loom; we are in Copenhagen.

The Greenlanders' cemetery is part of Vestre Cemetery. A procession follows Isaiah in his coffin—Juliane's friends, who are now holding her upright, the pastor and the verger, the mechanic, and a small group of Danes, among whom I recognize only the social worker and the investigator.

The pastor is now saying something that makes me think he must have actually met Isaiah, even though, as far as I know, Juliane has never gone to church.

Then his voice disappears, because now the other women are weeping along with Juliane.

Many have come, perhaps twenty, and now they let their sorrow wash over them like a black flood, into which they dive and let themselves be carried along in a way that no outsider could understand, no one who has not grown up in Greenland. And even that might not be enough. Because I can't follow them, either.

For the first time I look closely at the coffin. It's hexagonal. At a certain point ice crystals take the same form.

Now they are lowering him into the ground. The coffin is made of dark wood, it looks so small, and there is already a layer of snow on it. The flakes are the size of tiny feathers, and that's the way snow is, it's not necessarily cold. What is happening at this moment is that the heavens are weeping for Isaiah, and the tears are turning into frosty down that is covering him up. In this way the universe is pulling a comforter over him, so that he will never be cold again.

The moment the pastor throws earth on the coffin and we are supposed to turn around and leave, a silence falls that seems to last for a long time. The women are quiet, no one moves, it's the sort of silence that is waiting for something to burst. From where I'm standing, two things happen.

First, Juliane falls to her knees and puts her face to the ground, and the other women leave her alone.

The second event is internal, inside of me, and what bursts through is an insight.

All along I must have had a comprehensive pact with Isaiah not to leave him in the lurch, never, not even now.

Copyright © 1992 by Peter Høeg and Munksgaard/Rosinante, Copenhagen