Kerrigan in Copenhagen Read online

  For Copenhagen,

  city of the ever-changing light,

  with love

  With deep and sincere thanks to

  Anton Mueller & Helen Garnons-Williams &

  all their associates at Bloomsbury

  Nat Sobel & Judith Weber & all their associates at Sobel Weber

  Roger & Brenda Derham & Valerie Shortland

  Duff Brenna, Walter Cummins, Greg Herriges, Mike Lee,

  Robert Stewart & Gladys Swan

  With special thanks to

  Junot Díaz, Alain de Botton & Andre Dubus III for their invaluable encouragement

  Always for Daniel, Isabel, Søren & Leo

  Contents

  Zero: A Love Affair

  One: Kerrigan’s Associate

  Two: The Seducer

  Three: Jax!

  Four: The Green Peril

  Five: As Sane As I Am

  Six: A Foray into the Black Pool

  Seven: Pint of View

  Eight: The Smoke Eaters

  Nine: Land of Dreams

  Bibliography

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Zero: A Love Affair

  Kerrigan, Kerrigan,

  Whither rovest thou?

  —GILGAMESH

  Terrence Einhorn Kerrigan is in love.

  When his wife and child were taken from him, he told himself he would never love a woman again, and he never has, not in the way that requires a surrender of the sovereign spirit. But a man must love nonetheless, and thus a love affair begins this story—a love affair with a city.

  Here he has made his home, returning after the death of his parents to the city of his mother, a city whose moods are unpredictable, unfathomable, unimpeachable as a woman’s, often still and dark, perfidious as its April weather—now light and sweet as the touch of a summer girl who fancies you, now cold as snow, false as ice, merciless as the howling beating wind that swoops around his building, now quietly enigmatic as the stirring of the great chestnut trees that line the banks of the lake beneath his windows.

  The city is Copenhagen, the city of the Danish smile and blue eye, the Danish national character that one of its great unknown sons, Tom Kristensen, described in his great unknown 1930 novel Hærværk, made into the great unknown 1977 film Havoc, as “false blue eyes and blond treachery.”

  Here he will clothe himself in its thousand years of history, let its wounds be his wounds, let its poets’ songs fill his soul, let its food fill his belly, its drink temper his reason, its jazz sing in the ears of his mind, its light and art and nature and seasons wrap themselves about him and keep him safe from chaos.

  It is the city of a hundred vices and fifteen hundred serving houses, bars, cafés—more of them than one will ever come to know in a lifetime without a very major effort. Kerrigan has decided to make that effort. He came to Copenhagen to find serenity, to find a life, and was surprised to find love, and then astonished to lose it, and he searched for it, searched his heart for it, but like Gilgamesh he kept finding instead a Divine Alewife who filled his glass and chanted:

  Kerrigan Kerrigan

  Whither rovest thou?

  What you seek, you shall not find.

  Rather, let full be your belly.

  Make merry day and night

  And forget the darkness.

  Of each day make you a feast of light.

  Let your raiment be sparkling and fresh.

  Wash your head and bathe in water.

  Scrape smooth the stubble from your jowls.

  And reach for the hand of the little one

  Who reaches for yours.

  Lay with the woman who delights in you,

  For this is the greatest a man can achieve.

  Kerrigan agrees, even if there is no little one anymore. Gone the woman who delights in him. Gone the child. And that is how all stories end. With the naked, withered Christmas tree tilted against the trash barrel.

  Yet he knows no better city in which to follow the Alewife’s bidding, as far as he is able.

  He does not know precisely how many serving houses there are in Copenhagen. He has not yet decided how many of them he will visit over what time scale or how many of them he will include in his book. He has no idea what might happen in each of the places he visits, what adventures he might encounter, what dark nights of the soul he might descend to, what radiant bodies he might win with a flattering tongue.

  And not to know, he decides, is good.

  One: Kerrigan’s Associate

  Whiskey, it keepeth the reason from stifling.

  —RAPHAEL HOLINSHED, 1577

  Kerrigan’s path to meet his Research Associate and her jade-green eyes leads him diagonally across the Botanical Gardens to Nørreport. He hoofs over to Fiolstræde; then, at the intersection of Skindergade, it occurs to him that he still has some time and that there are three choices open to him. There are always three choices.

  He has a good hour before he will meet his Associate and considers whether to turn left to the Booktrader, right to Charlie Scott’s Pub, or continue directly forward through Jorck’s Passage to Farrelly’s Irish Rover.

  If he goes left to the Booktrader, at Skindergade 23, he will enjoy the company of his good friend, the antiquarian bookseller Lars Rasmussen, in addition to the possible company of an artist and a bookbinder, Natacha and Iben, two lovely young women who are often there, and diverse others: artists, singers, musicians, poets, professors, writers, a criminologist friend named Dave from New York who includes Kerrigan on his field trips to Danish prisons, an ornithologist in the employ of Kastrup airport to discourage the birds from being sucked into jet motors, and a found-art practitioner who collects what she calls kussesten—stones found along the beach and in the forest that resemble kusse, Danish for cunt—thus, cunt-stones. (Danes rarely call a spade a shovel.) At the Booktrader, Kerrigan would stand leaning on the remainder table of books for a buck and a half (ten crowns) beneath the elaborate plaster sculpture on the ceiling titled The Book Lovers by Kasper Holten—a wreath of nine naked figures coiling out of a book, each performing some variety of erotic act on the next and the whole wreath of them spiraling toward a distant heart. But he will also be tempted to drink the wine poured liberally by Lars into glasses that hold more than they would appear to, and on top of what he has had already he will get drunk and show up late and sloppy to meet his Associate, and he does not wish to see his bad behavior reflected in her jade-green eyes.

  If he goes right, to Charlie Scott’s at Skindergade 53, he will have the opportunity to enjoy Jazz Under the Stairs, featuring the astonishingly energetic Australian clarinetist and singer Chris Tanner, and possibly bump into guitarist and composer Billy Cross, who is the nephew of Lionel Trilling and does the best arrangement of “Blue Suede Shoes” that Kerrigan has ever heard and who inter alia has been lead guitar for Bob Dylan and occasionally comes into Charlie Scott’s, although there, Kerrigan no doubt will drink many pints of inexpensive pilsner and will also be drunk and late for his Associate.

  On the third hand, he is more hungry than he is thirsty. He has been roaming this midmorning and early afternoon around the north side, sampling pints here and there, and wandered past the building at Skt. Hans Gade 18 where Knut Hamsun in 1890 wrote the novel Hunger about a consciousness starving to express itself. Kerrigan is literally feeling peckish, and he knows that if he walks straight ahead through Jorck’s Passage, a half turn to the right will put him at Vimmelskaftet 46, on the Walking Street, outside Farrelly’s Irish Rover, where at all hours he can get a full or, alternatively, diminutive Irish breakfast served by his favorite Irish-American waitress, Cathy.

  His choice has been chosen.


  It’s a bit nippy for the outdoor tables so he steps inside the great dark cave of the bar, and Cathy greets him instantly with her Chicago accent, “Gad, Kerrigan, where you been hidin’? Want Irish breakfast? Big or little?”

  “Little, please.”

  “You always let me down!”

  Round and blue-eyed with some manner of sweet street-smart curl to her lips, she approaches his table with cutlery wrapped in a skimpy green paper napkin and a tumbler of ice and amber fluid.

  “What’s this?” Kerrigan asks with alarm, and sips.

  “It’s Paddy’s,” she whispers, “and keep your voice down, cancha? You wanna get me in trouble?”

  “A goddamn full glass of Irish whiskey? I can’t drink all this on top of what I already had!”

  “Aw, you fuckin’ drama queen!”

  “I have a meeting with my research associate!”

  “And you don’t wanna fuck that up!”

  “I can’t drink this.”

  “You always disappoint me, Kerrigan! Get it down your neck now. It’s good for you.”

  Despite himself he sips the Paddy’s, knowing he must come up for a spell of air soon, and suddenly knows that that air must be the air of Dubh Lin—fort of the Dane, Garrison of the Saxons—on the banks of the River Liffy. Why, he wonders, does he feel he must go to Dublin? The compulsion seems to take force from a constellation of coincidences: the fact that the lake outside the window of his east side apartment here is called Sortedams Sø, which means Black Dam Lake, and Dubh Lin means Dark Pool, and his own name, Kerrigan, is originally Ciarogan, a double diminutive of ciar—dark, black—and incredibly his mother’s maiden name was Mørk, Danish for dark. He discovered these facts one by one with an increasing sense of amazement. Moreover, Dublin was also founded by the Danes twelve hundred years ago, and his branch of the Kerrigans originated, according to his father, on the curving street that is said to be the bank of the Dark Pool into which the Vikings sailed.

  He intuits a connection between the Dark Pool and the Black Lake, between the Vikings there and the Irish here, between his Irish father and his Danish mother and the origin of his name, that he might find a life in wrapping the cloak of these international, cross-cultural, historical facts around him, the life and love that had been stolen from him by Licia.

  This is at least part of it. This is definitely part of it, part of what he must fill his mind with. Sometimes, lying in his solitary bed some nights, some mornings, he feels disconnected from all of time, existing purely in the present, as though he has had no past, as though he only just arrives each moment in the present and all of the past is mere illusion, the future melting back into the present, the present disappearing in the unfathomable bottomless past …

  Maybe, he thinks, I have been drinking too much.

  The time is not right, he knows, to go to Dublin. First he must meet his newly employed Associate and must begin his project with her.

  He manages to get out of the Irish Rover after only one whiskey by leaving money on the table, ducking out while Cathy’s in the back. He leaves a generous tip to discourage her from future compulsions to serve him gratis whiskey. He dodges around to Skindergade again, heading for Frederiksberg, where he is to meet his Associate, at Wine Room 90.

  And now it is there again—the illusion. Suddenly the day is gone, and he and his Associate sit close in the little taxi, knees touching occasionally—by accident? Kerrigan wonders. Late-afternoon pastel facades of west Copenhagen reel past the window on either side. Secretly he hopes their project will never conclude.

  Quite another matter is his Associate herself, a handsome woman of seven and fifty years who in her youth was a beauty. Why is a young girl so pretty and why does it last so short a time? Søren Kierkegaard asked in Either/Or. Or was it in Seducer’s Diary? Same thing. On the other hand, his Associate is not bad at all. Not bad at all, Kerrigan speculates. Anyway he himself is only a year younger.

  His project, what he has contracted for, what he is being paid to do, is to select a sampling of one hundred of the best, the most historic, the most congenial of Copenhagen’s 1,525 serving houses and write them up for one of a one-hundred-volume travel guide: The Great Bars of the Western World. Kerrigan thinks of himself as a failed poet, which is a less complicated concept than a failed human being, and he has accepted this commission under false pretenses. He does not wish the book to be written. He wants only to research it. Forever. For whatever of forever remains him.

  They have just come from Wine Room 90 in the Frederiksberg section, an elegant old establishment that, however, drove him to distraction because of management’s insistence that beer be tapped in accordance with some scientific principles that involve frequent work with a spatula in foam and require twenty minutes to draw a single pint. Which meant for him more thirst than the quaffing of it. If it takes twenty minutes to tap a pint and ten minutes to drink it, a serious time deficit is involved. The minutes haunt him with their mocking brevity. All glasses are essentially empty, defining an empty space. Every clock wears the face of a pompously indifferent sadist, measuring life’s depletion with a series of equally measured hand strokes.

  Kerrigan is the writer, his Associate the researcher; he the form, she the content—or, in another more hopeful context, she will be the form and he the content. As a body fills a grave, he thinks, remembering a line from Malamud’s Fidelman. Kerrigan is a man of quotes. They substitute nicely for thought. And he is well versed in dates, which seem to place him in history, in relation to persons and events. It is nice to be placed and to have a substitute for thought. He is aware of this as well as of the double bind of his ironic nature. No matter. Enivrez-vous. Could man be drunk forever, on liquor, love or fights, / Lief would I rise of morning, and lief lie down of night / But men at times are sober, they think by fits and starts, / and if they think they fasten their hands upon their hearts.

  He feels himself perched on the edge of the turning millennium, knows what this past millennium contained, or at least to some personal extent the last fifty-six years of it, yet speculating on the contents of the next seems to him like practicing science fiction.

  “Why must it take so long to fill my glass?” he demanded of her, nursing the little bit of beer remaining of his first pint.

  “You have an interesting accent,” she said. “Where did you learn your Danish?”

  “In bed,” snapped Kerrigan.

  “Did you have many instructors?” she asked with a teasing curl to her lip.

  He chuckled, sipped a drop of the remaining beer. “You didn’t answer my question,” he said. “Why does it take so long?”

  On the table before her was a slender Moleskine notebook filled with the minute spidery scrawl of her penmanship, a seemingly endless cornucopia of facts. She ran her slender, chiseled finger down the handwritten contents page, thumped with a red pointed fingernail the line she was seeking, and flipped halfway through the book. “I have that right here,” she said with a smile. “They tap it very slowly so the acid foams off, giving it a soft and stomach-friendly taste …”

  “Stomach friendly?” he said with a smirk. Her smile was both warm and sphinxlike, slightly naughty, for she could see, he saw, that when he looked into her luminous, in this light, forest-green eyes, the pupils ringed with a thin circle of distinct yellow, he was harboring naughty thoughts about her. This was not the first time she had assisted him with research. Last time they worked together they were close to getting involved and almost did, but not quite. He was about to be a husband then, soon to be a father. Free now, he would not mind taking up where they left off then, though he deeply and sincerely does not want to get involved.

  But at the rate the silver-bearded, white-aproned bartender tapped beer, Kerrigan could not get out of Wine Room 90 on Old King’s Road fast enough.

  Now, in the taxicab, she leans toward him, unbuttoned forest-green woolen coat hanging open, leaving him to wonder if it is her wish for him to see there what he
sees in her décolletage—what the Danes call “the cavalier passage” and in English has the harsh and uncharming title of “cleavage.” Always a mystery. Devilish strategy. How lovely, he thinks, is the process of the grain in the blood, and says, “I see a sweet country. I could rest my weapon there. That’s a quote from The Tain.”

  “The Tain,” she says, and shifts to English. “Is that not Irish high poetry? Let me respond from Odin’s Sayings of the High One: “Remember always to praise the voman’s radiant body, for he who flatters, gets.” The undertone is ironic, though irony in Danish, Kerrigan knows, is often a mask of affection.

  Now, however, she asks the taxi to stop outside the Railway Café on Reventlow’s Street. The sign outside the bar says Øl in red neon and Bier in flat blue. A sidewalk placard gives the English translation, BEER. A life-size cardboard cutout of a golden Tuborg girl in an aquamarine frame stands alongside the door, holding a tray with a bottle of gold Tuborg.

  “This von is a must,” his Associate says.

  He loves the way she says “one.” “Why?”

  “Because I haf to pee.”

  Kerrigan pays the driver, gets a receipt, and follows her, his leather satchel crooked beneath his arm. In the satchel he carries his fat, oversize, annotated, dog-eared paperback copy of Finnegans Wake around with him. Not that he expects ever to finish reading it, but its presence alleviates any danger of his having to worry about being alone with his mind.

  Inside the bar there is no tap, so he orders two bottles of green Tuborg while his Associate finds the loo. He sits at the bar and surveys the art on the walls: paintings of locomotives, street scenes of old Copenhagen, a faithful dog, a plashy seascape, photos of steam engines, and a long glass case of HO gauge model trains. This is, after all, across the street from the central station.

  “Nice-looking pictures,” he says to the nice-looking, plump, blonde, fortyish barmaid. A man can never know too many barmaids, he thinks.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Some of them.”