Kerrigan in Copenhagen Page 11

  “I’m hungry,” says Kerrigan.

  “You must have some constitution, Mr. Kerrigan. I know a good place for lunch.” She gives him a look. “You will keep your powder dry, though, won’t you?”

  “You,” he says, blushing, “are not a gentleman.”

  She blinks. “My ambitions have never been that low.” And, “How sweetly you blush. You know the old Danish proverb, ‘A blush is the color of virtue.’ ”

  Because she wants to show him another place for lunch, they sit in the sun over a very light brunch of morning bread and cheese, coffee and gammel dansk, bitter snaps, while a man and woman in dark clothes dance a tango on the concrete square outside the Bopa Café.

  With her left hand, his Associate holds the Moleskine open on the table while eating a buttered rundstykke roll—a “round piece”—with her right. He notices she occasionally chews with her mouth open so he can see the bread and butter tumbling round on her pink tongue.

  He says, “Don’t chew with your mouth open, honey,” and she pats her mouth with a paper napkin. “Tak for sidst, ey?” she says. Danish for “Thanks for the last time we met,” but also a euphemism for revenge.

  “Right. You can have it from the same dresser drawer,” he says, another Danish euphemism for tit-for-tat evening up.

  “This was the headquarters of one of the main resistance parties during the Second World War,” she tells him. “BOPA is an acronym for the Danish Borgenes Parti, the Citizens’ Party.” She daubs again at her pretty lips with the napkin, chews, swallows, sips coffee, sips bitter snaps, says, “Ummm,” and continues. “Leo Mathisen, in fact, played various places during the war. He was Danish but he wrote and sang in English. English was forbidden by the German occupation forces, so he just sang gibberish versions of the words. Dr. Werner Best was the German commandant under the occupation,” she continues. “He picked the best house in Copenhagen, a mansion just up the coast, actually right outside the city. Your ambassador has it as his residence now.”

  “Do you remember the war?” he asks.

  As she butters a slice of Graham’s bread, she is silent. Then she looks up at his face, as though about to speak, but seems to think better of it and reaches for her Moleskine. She gives him a rundown on the occupation of Denmark, and he watches with infatuation her lips, which he longs unbearably to kiss.

  On April 9, 1940, the Germans marched in over the southern border of Jutland. There was a little bit of fighting and an air assault as well, but the Danes decided not to commit heroic suicide. Unlike Norway, where the resistance had the mountains to hide in and fight from, Denmark is completely flat. There were no natural barriers. Also, unlike the Norwegian king, the Danish king, Christian X, stayed in his capital and rode on horseback through Copenhagen every day, as was his custom, all by himself, no guards, no escort.

  The Danish ambassador in Washington, D.C., was astute enough to place Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands under the protection of the allied forces, so the Germans were unable to make strategic use of them, which could have been a catastrophe.

  Germany plundered the Danish agriculture to feed its troops under the pretense that they would pay back. Some Danes, of course, did make money. There was also clandestine ferrying of Jews and communists across the sound most nights to Malmö, to the safety of Swedish neutrality, particularly during October 1943 when the gestapo attempted to round up the Jews in Denmark. The Swedes were very helpful. They also made a lot of money. Being neutral, they could help everyone. And the boatmen made money, too. But they took chances for it as well.

  She lays a slice of medium-old cheese on her buttered sour bread, bites, chews with closed lips, sips coffee, and he imagines how interesting her kiss would be, tasting of old cheese and the nice bittersweet aroma of coffee with cream and the harsh taste of bitter snaps.

  Yet he cannot forget that expression on her face earlier, as she looked at him and seemed to be about to tell something.

  She continues: In 1943, things started getting hotter. By August, there was a general strike, shooting in the streets. Hostages were taken. The Danes scuttled their own navy in the harbor, and in September, the Freedom Council was set up. In January 1944, the gestapo, accompanied by Danish police, liquidated the outspoken poet-priest Kaj Munk (1898–1944), dragged him from his home and put a bullet in the back of his neck and left him in a ditch.

  Throughout that year, there was sabotage and countersabotage. It was nowhere near what happened elsewhere in Europe, but it was bad enough. Nocturnal arrests, liquidations, random terror by the occupying forces and liquidations by the underground, too—perhaps not all of them justified. The lawful police were replaced by a makeshift police department set up by the Germans—the hilfspolizei—called Hipo for short or, more often, Hipo svin, Hipo swine, made up mainly of ex-convicts and criminals.

  Meanwhile, in Denmark, hundreds of thousands of German refugees were streaming north from Germany, two hundred thousand in all, starved, filthy, lice-infested. It was clear Germany was losing the war; the question for the Danes was whether Denmark would be the last battlefield. But on May 4, 1945, the Germans capitulated, and Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway were liberated the next day.

  Copenhagen was filled with fleeing German officers and Nazis speeding for the border in their jeeps. There was shooting in the streets, and candles burned in all the windows of the towns and cities—all the candles that Danes always kept in ready because the Germans frequently would cut off the power supply. It was a spontaneous display. The streets of Copenhagen glowed with thousands of candles in the windows. To this day, more than half a century later, there are still people who put lighted candles in the window on May 4 in remembrance of the end of the five-year occupation by the German “cousins.”

  “You know,” Kerrigan says, “people say a lot about the European Union. But at least it stopped most of the fighting that’s torn Europe apart over the years. Germany against France. France against England. France against the rest of Europe. Germany and Italy against Europe. England occupying Ireland for centuries. All now finally annulled by a treaty tying their fates all together. The United States of Europe.”

  Her green eyes sparkle, and instead of singing her praises, he sings the praise of her land.

  “Shakespeare picked the right country, the right climate, the right amount of darkness for his melancholy Dane, although I admit I’ve grown to love the extremes of Danish seasons and light—the dark winters suit me. And the white nights of summer suit me even better. There is nothing like those white nights. The long late sunsets, the yellow skies—hell, every color! And the birds singing at three in the morning. You know the Belgian painter Magritte? His painting Empire of Light? It purports to show a paradox, as many of Magritte’s paintings do—a dark city street beneath a bright sky. But to me that is a realistic portrait of a Danish summer night. You know, you’re at a party that runs to half past two and step out in the garden for air and the sky is growing light, the birds are singing—even if the world around you is still dark, it’s sunrise. Deep winter, too. In some ways, deep winter is even better. I remember standing on Langebro once—Long Bridge—you know, the one that connects Copenhagen with the island of Amager, in midwinter, and there was snow on the ground, and the sky was white as the snow, and everything else, the water, the bridge, the ships in the water, the smoke rising from their stacks, was shades of white and gray and black. It was a pure black-and-white world. But as I stood there watching, suddenly my eye began to pick out little blots of color—the red of a bird’s plumage, a woman’s long wool coat, the green of your eyes …”

  “You should have been a painter.”

  “If I was, I would like to paint you.” In red panties, he thinks. “You’re quite good-looking, you know.”

  “In the words of the High One, ‘He who flatters gets.’ ”

  Kerrigan’s eyes lower to give him time to think, and he shoves his empty plate aside. To his surprise, not only does he feel wonde
rful, he has also got over his embarrassment about what his Associate did for him the night before when he was unconscious. Born again. He sips the last of his bitter and lights a cigar, looks into her green eyes, and asks, “Did you know that just down the street here, on Randersgade, there’s a cellar club where people go to couple openly and watch others couple? Where couples couple with other couples, and men amuse themselves watching their mates couple with strangers and women are enjoyed simultaneously by two and more men?”

  Her eyes watch his mouth. “And you have been there?”

  “No.”

  “Is this too much even for you, then?” Her smile is wry.

  “It’s not that. It’s just, you can’t get a drink there. What’s love without wine?” He trims his cigar, smiles, can see she is titillated, and he loves it.

  Then she looks teasingly at him. “Do not forget that I have seen you naked.” Her eyes are bold in their greenness. “You looked interesting that way,” she says, and his blush is now spiced with pleasure.

  But there is an undeniable fact to be dealt with first: the emptiness of his belly. “I’m still hungry,” he says.

  On Østerbrogade, East Bridge Street, they cross Trianglen, pass the eastern edge of Black Dam Lake, cross Lille Triangle, Little Triangle, and walk along Dag Hammerskjolds Allé, named for the Swedish UN secretary general killed in an air crash in 1961 on his way to negotiate over the Congo Crisis—for which he was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that year. Past Olaf Palme’s Street—named for the Swedish Social Democratic prime minister assassinated in the 1980s as he and his wife walked home from the movies, never solved—past the elegant old villas that have been purchased for embassies by the British and Russians and the ugly concrete box built by the Americans for theirs. The Americans seem always to have the ugliest embassies—Copenhagen, Oslo, Amsterdam …

  They are headed for Cykelstalden, the Cycle Stall Café, where there is normally jazz only on Wednesdays from five to seven, but this season the owner, Mogens, has decided to add a single weekend. Inside the station they can see the bar, but she takes his arm and leads him to the escalator down. “We have to fill your stomach,” she says. “It’s just one stop on the S-Tog”—the City Train—”and then we will have a feast.”

  She leads him onto the train, and soon the tracks go underground and stop at an underground platform and the two of them climb up and cross Nørreport to Fiølstræde, and on Krystalgade— Crystal Street—they make a left, pass the synagogue, the main library, to a semibasement café—Café Halvvejen. Café Halfway. It is a dark, old-looking place with a curving bar that seats about eight people and five or six tables.

  “This looks old,” Kerrigan says.

  “It is not so old,” she says. “Only perhaps thirty years or so. But it is good if you are hungry.”

  A smiling young woman—the daughter of the owner—comes for their orders and Kerrigan’s Associate asks, “May I order for us both? We’ll have biksemad,” she says. “And Krone snaps. And large Royal drafts.”

  The place is filling up with people ordering “unspecified sandwiches”—a kind of a potluck where you get three open sandwiches of varying fish, meat, vegetable, or egg with varying condiments and garnishes for a very modest price. That’s what Kerrigan would have ordered, but then the biksemad arrives and he realizes he was right to follow his Associate’s conviction.

  The waitress places before each of them a plate deep with diced pork and diced potatoes and onions, each topped with two fried eggs and sided by a little pot of pickled beets with a basket of rye and French bread and small packets of butter and swine fat.

  How optimistic, thinks Kerrigan, to be hungry and to have food, carefully lifting his brimming glass of Krone snaps to his lips. “Meniscus,” he says. “Or is it menisci?”

  “One meniscus,” she says, her green eyes sparkling. “And one womeniscus.”

  “You said before that a womeniscus is called a pussy,” he says.

  “Can you drink a pussy?” she asks.

  Eyes ablaze, he says, “Yes!”

  Belly full of hash, Kerrigan grows meditative on the train back to Østerport station. He knows the bar they are headed for from many years ago. He was working for a private firm, before he had begun to be a fulltime writer and translator, long before he met and was bewitched by Licia—or whatever she had done to him. He ate lunch at Cykelstalden one day and looked up to see the poet Dan Turèll sitting at a nearby table over a bitter snaps. Kerrigan was perhaps in his mid-thirties at the time, and he knew Turèll’s writing, knew him as a great fan of the American beats. Kerrigan was wearing a suit and tie because he was on his way to the embassy for an interview.

  Turèll saw that Kerrigan recognized him and nodded, and Kerrigan wished to show him he was more than a suit and tie, wanted to open his mouth and howl out Ginsberg’s Howl, wanted to stand up and chant Howl’s Whitman epigraph: Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

  He was eating a bowl of vegetable soup with bread and butter and a glass of water, trying to get ready for his interview, and he wanted to send a beer and a bitter over to Turèll—Uncle Danny they called him, or he called himself.

  He wanted this man to know that even if he had not yet published anything, even if he had forsaken his poetry and made his living as a glorified clerk, he was more than a suit and tie and bowl of alphabet soup. But he said nothing. He sat there spooning soup and noodles into his mouth and eating bread and butter, and Dan Turèll finished his bitter and paid, nodded once more at Kerrigan, and left, a tall, slender, bearded man in dark clothes with fingernails polished black, and Kerrigan’s path never crossed his again, although he did see him once more, in 1983, in the Saltlageret, where the planetarium stands now, when Uncle Danny introduced a reading by William Burroughs.

  Turèll published a hundred books in his forty-seven years, and when he was dying in 1993, in his forties, he made a CD of a dozen poems with background music by a composer named Halfdan E. The next-to-last poem on the album is entitled “Last Walk Through the City,” a reminiscence of a lifetime in a city, a last visit to a last bar for a last bitter, a last rummaging through the boxes outside a secondhand bookshop, a last look at the mothers leaning over the sills of their kitchen windows shouting for their children to come up for dinner, stopping here and there to watch or to shake the city from his coat as a dog shakes water from his fur, all of it so swift, so swiftly passing, and finally he takes a last stroll down the pedestrian street in the company of all his friends that only he can see. And without being sentimental, they say good-bye to it all in silent conversation, and then down by the King’s New Square they disappear, and then Uncle Danny does, too, and there is one less shadow in the street.

  Turèll was dead shortly after that recording, but he had written the poem nearly twenty years before, a young man imagining his own death, but never imagining it would come so early.

  Perhaps it is the remnant of his hangover that causes the sound in Kerrigan’s throat, but his Associate glances at him and asks, “Are you all right?”

  He nods, not trusting himself to speak, thinking, The lesson here is when you see someone in a café you want to say hello to, whether you know them or not, don’t hesitate, say hello.

  The train glides into Østerport Station, and they ride the escalator up to street level and enter the bar inside the station through a glass door depicting a single, huge-wheeled bike with a minuscule rear wheel. The jazzmen are already setting up inside Cykelstalden, the Cycle Stall, a long narrow smoky serving house in the back of the station, and his Associate has been conferring with her Moleskine book. She tells him that the station has been in operation since 1897 and Cykelstalden had been a railway authority restaurant, previously much bigger than it is now, with tables out on the street in the warmer months, but now the railway authority has sold or rented most of the old serving house to Nordea Bank, and Cykelstalden has been shoved into the back. For about twenty-five
years, weekly jazz concerts were held here. There was an open view from the outdoor tables all the way to the copper dome of Marmorkirken, the Marble Church, which rises above the low ocher, red-roofed, and red-shuttered buildings of the old naval housing, the Nyboder domiciles.

  The manager, Mogens, in his thirties, is behind the bar, tending the taps. A strikingly pretty blonde waitress named Trine expertly carries a tray with half a dozen golden pints through the corridor of tables. The cold beer down Kerrigan’s throat is a liquid field of wheat, and a curly-haired man comes over and kisses his Associate on her lips.

  “Hej, Lars!” she says cheerily and touches his face, and a shadow drifts across Kerrigan’s mind. They chat while Kerrigan, unintroduced, studies the poster announcing the Stolle and Svare Jazz Quartet featuring Jørgen Svare on sax, Ole Stolle on trumpet, Mikkel Finn on drums, Søren Kristiansen on piano, and Ole “Skipper” Moesgård on bass. Lars and Kerrigan’s Associate are still chatting and Kerrigan’s beer is already more than half empty, and the musicians are milling about, not yet playing. He wishes that Lars would go away, and perhaps communicates that wish, for suddenly the handsome, curly-haired man kisses her again on the mouth, nods to Kerrigan, and withdraws, saying, “I have a family to go home to.”

  “Who’s he?” Kerrigan asks, feeling foolish.

  “Lars.”

  “I gathered. Is he your lover?” Kerrigan can’t help himself and doesn’t want to—he wants to broadcast his desire.

  “Vouldn’t you like to know?”

  The piano player starts in then, and Ole Stolle begins to sing “Blueberry Hill,” and Kerrigan gazes off at what, to his uncorrected eyes, is the impressionistic barroom. Through a back window he can see the blurry harbor, and he thinks of Admiral Nelson and the 1801 Battle of Copenhagen.