Kerrigan in Copenhagen Read online

  “If I say yes, I can preserve the illusion of free will.”

  He smiles, says, “Smart-ass,” drinks some porter. “Now you’ll have to beg me.”

  Her green eyes look up beseechingly at him. “Please?” she says softly, and his blood jumps. He clears his throat, but then he says, “Actually I’m not allowed to. I could get sued for reciting it in public. And the night has a thousand ears. But if you go buy a copy of Schades Digte—Schade’s Poems from Gyldendal, published earlier this year, you’ll find it in toto under the title ‘The Dancing Painter.’ “He leans close to her, says, “If you put your ear to my lips, I’ll whisper a few lines.”

  Her eyes lighten as he whispers, and her excited reaction excites him.

  “I don’t know his poetry,” she says.

  “Ah-ha! So your little junior woodchuck’s Moleskine manual doesn’t contain every thing after all! Poul Borum called Schade the greatest Danish poet of the twenties and the liveliest force in modern Danish literature. Born in 1903, the year before this café opened. He died in ’78. He was considered a pornographer for years because he wrote about all the things dearest to our hearts—sex and love and drink. Borum compares him to D. H. Lawrence, E. E. Cummings, and Henry Miller. His first book of poetry, The Living Violin, came out in 1926 and was subtitled spiritual and sensual songs, and that’s his force; he joins body and soul. Borum calls him a happy Baudelaire. But the last book, I’m Mad About You, is about eros as obsession, as psychosis.”

  “And Borum is dead now, too,” she says.

  “They all go into the dark,” says Kerrigan. “You know he once invited me to collaborate with him on a translation. I declined.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was stupid. I was afraid. I guess I was afraid I couldn’t measure up, that Borum, that Denmark maybe, would swallow me alive. Now I know myself a little better. I know I can’t measure up, so there’s nothing to be afraid of. You just have to know that a good translator—as a friend of mine who is a good translator told me, Stacey Knecht—has to put himself second. For many years that was too difficult for me.”

  “Have you translated Danish writers?”

  “A few, a bit of Pia Tafdrup. Currently mostly Henrik Nordbrandt and Dan Turèll.”

  Her green eyes, he notes, lighten when they widen. “Dan Turèll? Uncle Danny!”

  “Yes, a painter who’d known Turèll—Barry Lereng Wilmont—saw my translations of Nordbrandt and suggested I translate Turèll. I thought he’d been translated years ago, but no. Barry had promised Dan before he died that he would have him sent across the ocean in translation. Barry introduced me to Dan’s widow, Chili, and she gave permission.”

  Her gaze rests on his face, as if taking him in again, reassessing him, and a flicker of unexpected hope lights in him. But hope for what? No.

  He takes out his Petit Sumatra cigarillos, sees her still watching him, extends the box, and to his surprise she takes one. He strikes a stick match, holds it across the table, and she lightly guides his hand with her fingertips. The touch runs across the surface of his flesh, and he thinks of Schade in the Copenhagen bars and serving houses, surrounded by the women he loved so—his muses, he called them—drunk on red wine and desire, writing his poetry even under the table. He feels the water in his eyes, thinking of the man, thinking he might have met him once before he died in 1978, had he only stirred himself to action, but in the seventies Kerrigan was trying to reenter society after having squandered the sixties hitchhiking around the United States. His parents died and he cashed in their assets and invested the money in Denmark, where his mother was born, and found work here as a suit, a humanistic, nonprofit suit, while he completed his university work with no time to look and see the world around him. He never met Dan Turèll either, although he had had opportunities. He thinks of all the things he could experience still if only he could stir himself to do so, to overcome his ego, to overcome his fear of what the “false blue eyes and blonde treachery” reduced him to.

  “There’s another one by Schade set here,” he says. “I think it’s called ‘In the Café,’ about a song on the jukebox and kissing a girl with ugly teeth and a Finnish girl who shows him her breasts—or is that another one?”

  She flicks a crumb of tobacco off her pink tongue, asks, “What is your education?”

  “My education? I have a doctorate. A Ph.D.”

  “Oh! Can I touch you?”

  He thinks of the Norwegian-Danish Aksel Sandemose’s novel about the so-called Jantelov. “The Law of Jante,” he says. “First commandment, Thou shalt not think thou art something. It’s just a piece of paper,” he says, “right?”

  “Meaning,” she says, “wrong, right? That it is something more than just a piece of paper, right?”

  He shrugs, smiles, caught out in his sentimental hypocrisy and seduction and pride. He doesn’t mind. He glimpses a mildness lurking beneath her caution and mockery.

  “You know James Joyce—the Irish novelist?”

  She nods. “A little.”

  “Well, he wrote what is considered by many people to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century with one of the most admired and often quoted women lead characters of, well, maybe of all literature, at least since Chaucer’s Wife of Bath—actually, you remind me of both those characters; you even have a bit of a gap tooth like the Wife of Bath. Very sexy! The Joyce character is Molly Bloom, and you know what she says in the book about university knowledge? She says, ‘I wouldn’t give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning. Why don’t they go and create something …’”

  His Associate smiles so warmly it gladdens his own heart, and he puts his hand on hers on the table. She looks at his hand, but she does not stop smiling or withdraw from his touch. He squeezes her fingers and takes his own hand away, suddenly shy. In the silence that follows he lights another Sumatra, shadows rippling through his consciousness as he reviews all the things that can be discovered in one snap of the fingers. How you can step through a door to a home and find it empty, everyone gone. As all stories end.

  Her eyes are upon him, and she asks, “What was your subject?”

  “Literature,” he says, grateful to be drawn back from the shadows. “Specifically, verisimilitude. Want to know more?”

  “I think you’re going to tell me.”

  “No. Only if you want.”

  “Please.”

  “How writers of fiction seem to create reality. Veris similis in Latin. Vrai semblance in French. The appearance of reality. The way a writer creates a credible illusion to get the reader to suspend disbelief long enough to listen and experience what the writer wants to transmit. Beneath the illusion, if the writer is serious, lies the stuff of truth, of a deeper reality, that probably has little to do with the trappings of everyday life that were used to build the illusion—unless those actual trappings are what he’s writing about. But the reality beneath that illusion can help us understand something about human existence. The illusion of literature, at its best, relies on a deeper wisdom. Fiction, even the most realistic-seeming fiction, is not existence, but about existence. For example, Kafka uses sensory images to make us believe, or at least accept, the preposterous notion that Gregor Samsa has turned into a cockroach, and because we believe that for a little while, we experience some deep mystery of existence. But sometimes writing something defines the essence of the author and changes him. So in that sense fiction, all writing, can be truer than raw life.” He thinks of Hamsun then—the building he saw this morning, where over a hundred years ago Hamsun wrote Hunger. “You know Knut Hamsun? The Norwegian writer? Hunger? In that, he abandoned many realistic devices of fiction—plot, narrative arc, story even—to portray the consciousness of a man starving to express itself …” Abruptly, he becomes aware of himself lecturing her, trails off.

  “What is the word again?” she asks.

  “Verisimilitude. It took me half a year just to learn to pronounce it right.”

  Her cigar has gone
out, and she relights it with a Bic, trims it on the edge of the ashtray. “And now you are writing a book about bars.”

  “Please,” he corrects. “Serving houses. So much more elegant in Danish. And what could be more existentially essential? Reason is an unreasonable faculty. It will strangle us if we take it too seriously. It needs damping, and that is why we come to these places, n’est-ce pas?”

  She smiles wanly and they sit in silence for a time, listening to music from a CD player behind the bar. Bob Dylan is singing “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” Then he sings, “I Threw It All Away,” and Kerrigan finds himself thinking of his life. Looking back upon himself, he sees a man who was young and brash and full of himself and threw all his greatest potential out the window. Or maybe he had no choice. Maybe in his own way he was programmed to do precisely what he did—avoiding love, then falling hard for a woman who was hardly more than a child.

  How he wishes he could go back and adjust himself somehow, do it over, do it better, but in what way, adjust to what? He has spent nearly three years trying to adjust to the deprivation of a life he had been fleeing for decades—then couldn’t embrace it fast enough. Was it just because he feared age? They married when he was forty-nine. And she was twenty-nine. Maybe she feared turning thirty also. His beautiful wife. His beautiful little girl. As every story ends. In the recognition of illusion.

  He tips his stout bottle over the edge of his empty glass, but not a drop slips out. He wills himself from the gloom, glances at his Associate’s handsome face lost in its own distance, its own music. Such a lovely green-eyed face, he thinks, and realizes suddenly that she recognizes that she herself must also bear some blame for the fact that she did not get the education she wished for, and his awareness of her awareness of this touches in him a sense of kinship with her.

  We have both been foolish. We both have regrets, and here we sit in our fifties in an old café over empty glasses, empty bottles.

  He can feel the drink in his legs as they walk down Vingårdstræde—Vineyard Street, where years before someone had attempted, in vain, to cultivate grapes for wine. Not suited to the Danish climate. Somewhere he seems to remember reading of a Roman expedition to Scandinavia—was it in Tacitus?—in which the leader explained his withdrawal by saying: The land is uninhabitable. There are no olive trees.

  They come out behind Kongens Nytorv, the King’s New Square, and she points. “That’s the National Bank there.”

  “Nine hundred and ninetynine million pound sterling in the blue-black bowels of the bank of Ulster.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Joyce,” he explains, and pats his leather satchel. “Finnegan.” When she does not respond, he continues, “You know, Joyce visited Copenhagen. In September 1936. He was convinced he had Viking blood in him. Dublin and Cork owe their origins to Danish Vikings—but he also once told his brother Georgio that he wanted to go to Denmark because the Danes massacred so many of his ancestors. He had taught himself Danish, or Dano-Norwegian, in order to read Ibsen—Norway had been under Denmark previously. Joyce’s first publication, written at the age of seventeen, was a long article about Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken from 1899, exactly a hundred years ago. The review was published on April Fool’s Day, 1900. Joyce professed to believe that Ibsen was the greatest dramatist of all time, even greater than Shakespeare.”

  Then he remembers one particular play Joyce had praised by Ibsen—about the necessity of an artist’s renouncing love and marriage—and thinks of his own decades of such renunciation, or avoidance, only to be trapped at forty-nine by the blonde treachery. He takes refuge in thoughts of H. C. Andersen’s unhappy experiences of love, taking succor in the many women he himself has known—for a night, a couple of weeks, a season … Kierkegaard also had a fiasco of a love life. By comparison, Kerrigan comforts himself, his is rich in experience—even if it is equally laden with regret.

  “But Joyce also admired Andersen,” he continues. “When he was here he even bought a toy as a reminder of Andersen for his five-year-old grandson. He called Andersen Denmark’s greatest writer. He was also full of praise for Carlsberg beer, and his wife was full of praise for the Danish light, its continuous changes, which is one of the things that caused me to fall in love with Denmark, too. Joyce also had a high opinion of Brandes. Also, Tom Kristensen met Joyce when he was here. Ole Jastrau in Havoc is reading Ulysses.”

  She listens attentively to what Kerrigan is telling her, then stops walking and says, “Tell me something. You know so much about Copenhagen already. Are you toying with me? Why do you need my help? Do you have something else in mind?”

  Kerrigan hopes the darkness hides his blush. “I only know a little,” he says. “And very little about the bars or the Danish Golden Age. You know much more than I do.”

  “But,” she says, “you … you are like some kind of university professor. You have read so much.”

  “Have read little. Understood less.” He looks into her eyes and doesn’t tell her that he is quoting Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus.

  He feels heavy as they enter the labyrinthine, cavelike dimness of Hviid’s Vinstue (Hviid’s Wine Room), established in 1723, the same year as the Duke pub in Dublin, older by fifty-three years than the U.S. itself, although there is the White Horse Tavern on Marlborough Street in Newport, Rhode Island, which is older, established in 1673. Hviid’s survived the great fires of 1728, 1794, and 1795 and the British attacks on Copenhagen of 1801 and 1807, just as his father escaped the British occupation of Ireland and his mother the German occupation of Denmark.

  They move past the bar to one of the cubbyhole tables to the side. There are many pictures on the walls, photographs, cutout articles, caricatures. She has her Moleskine book out again, and he has to concentrate on her words.

  “Upstairs here,” she tells him, “used to be the Blue Note and the Grand Café, and these three together were the outer rim of the Mine-field that started around Nikolai Church that I told you about before. In the 1950s and ’60s.”

  The waiter comes to take their orders, and Kerrigan asks for a pint of Carlsberg. “I can’t drink any more beer,” she says, and Kerrigan suggests a Campari. As the waiter crosses back to the bar, Kerrigan says, “He looks like a pug.”

  “That’s Jørgen ‘Gamle’ Hansen,” she tells him. “Old Hansen, they call him, because he fought until he was forty. He used to be welter-weight boxing champion of Europe about twenty years ago. He also was an actor on TV—played a small part in a crime series in the eighties.”

  Kerrigan recognizes him then, and as he returns with their drinks, Kerrigan stands. “May I shake your hand, Mr. Hansen? You look like you’re in just as good shape as when you were champ.”

  Hansen smiles wryly with his broad jaw and hooked, broken nose, and his hand in Kerrigan’s feels like a block of wood. “Appearances deceive,” the old pugilist says.

  Kerrigan watches him list off. He can still remember Hansen’s right that felled Dave Green in the seventies and won him the title. Suddenly, then, he notices her glass and says, “Campari red as breathless kisses.” Her eyes meet his. He can’t read them, but he goes on nonetheless . “Jens August Schade again. The poem is called ‘In Hviid’s Wine Room.’ From 1963.”

  “Can you say it for me?”

  “Night has a thousand ears, remember. Might get sued for reciting it in public. I can tell you this much—it has to do with frog-green absinthe and Campari-red kisses.” He slurs a bit. Her eyes friendly, she asks, “How drunk are you?”

  “Just a wee twisted,” he says. “But not on beer alone.”

  “Meaning?”

  He is picturing her in red panties and nothing else and drinking Campari and kissing him with her tongue, but he says, “Did anyone ever tell you your eyes are green as the woods?”

  “Frequently,” she says, but the subtext he thinks he hears is, Never, I like it, but say it again when you’re sober. Then she writes something in her Moleskine and says, “I really must read Schade.
I’ve heard of him but never actually read him.” She closes the book and he glimpses the star-fish stickers on it as she slips it into her black leather bag, and he recites:

  The starfish crawl upon the wall

  upon the floor and through the door

  the starfish with their many legs

  and not so many eyes

  the starfish that can hug and crush

  never seeing why.

  She sips her red Campari. “You must spend a great deal of time memorizing verses.”

  “Hey, that was my own! I just wrote it right now this minute.” In his own ears, his voice is hoarse from beer and cigars.

  “Sludder,” she says, which means nonsense in Danish, but somehow more effectively, with the double soft d sound of garbage, slush.

  “Not sludder. Sometimes when I get to a certain point, words start leaking out. Like Tom Kristensen said, intoxication is just a poem that hasn’t got a form.”

  “Did you really just make up that rhyme? I’m impressed.”

  “I hoped you would be, even if it’s not very good.”

  “Why? Did you hope?”

  “Because your eyes. Like green lamps.” He tries to think up a rhyme, pauses, knows he’s lost it, has entered the stage that comes after the facile rhymes: “Dark is life, dark dark is death,” he says. “I’m stuck. That’s John Hawkes. I always start quoting stuff when I’m stuck. Like the test patterns on a TV. Remember they used to have those? To let you know it’s still in function, even if there’s no show.”

  “Recite that Schade for me again. The one with the Campari.”

  And Kerrigan thinks how happy he would be if she were wearing red ones. And let him see. “Here, come closer,” he says. “I’ll whisper it.” And feels his lips moving against her warm delicate ear.

  He realizes too late, crossing the King’s New Square toward Nyhavn, New Harbor, that it was a mistake to suggest one more stop. Had they simply ordered a taxi from Hviid’s to his place—or hers … Of course, she only asked for the poem, but he did not fail to see the glint in her eyes over the line about the red panties, which did not fail to set him to puerile speculation over what color hers were: How foolish he feels at his age to wonder breathlessly whether she is wearing red panties. Foolishly happy. Happily foolish. And at what age might that be? Late youth. Advanced late youth.