Kerrigan in Copenhagen Read online

  The words please him, even if the essence of them is cribbed from a letter written by Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo from October 1884, six years before his death in 1890 at the age of thirty-seven, the same year Hamsun wrote Hunger at the age of twenty-nine.

  The Van Gogh sentences kick-start him. The words are slow and clogged at first, but he keeps the pen in motion, and a space clears in the milchy surface of his mind. Words begin to flow, and it is as if he has found the words necessary for him to know he is alive and to start the day.

  He pauses, looks up from the pad, and sees the window alongside his writing table. The day smiles to him. He opens the window to gaze upon a chestnut, at the lake behind it. A man in black cycles away on a red bike. He leans out to see the tree even more fully; in its fullness, it fills his senses with its furry-green scent, its color, the gentlest rustling of its leaves beneath the cloudless blue sky. Light sparkles on the surface of the lake and he thinks of the elfin women, thinks of his Associate whom he will not see again until Monday. Two days. He wonders what she is doing, pictures her barefoot, painting, and the wondering turns to a dryness at the back of his throat, thirst. He looks at his watch. Too early, much too early, but he has to move, remembering in John Cheever’s diary where he records that his days have turned into a struggle to keep from taking the first gin before noon, a fight he more often than not lost.

  Will that be the end I reach?

  The bathing of the head and breast in water, brushing of teeth, scraping clean the stubble from the jowels, the anointment with stinging scented fluids and donning of clear fresh raiment—his expensive Italian jeans, a tie of plum-colored French silk, a jacket of fine handwoven Irish tweed—console and heal the spirit of torment as he heeds the advice of the Divine Ale Wife to Gilgamesh: Let thy garments be sparkling fresh, thy head be washed …

  Then he is jogging down the stairs, out upon the street, and stares over the lake, inhales profoundly.

  A brisk walk he needs, but first he must tend to the demands of a growling belly, a hungering mouth, a brain that calls for fried fats. It is the hunter in us, he thinks, that craves fat, to sustain us over the long chase. On quick-moving legs he ducks across the streets of the Potato Rows, Kartoffelrækkerne, where he lives—workers’ housing erected in the last quarter of the last century that now houses artists, writers, young professionals, politicians, architects, and self-loving curmudgeons, row after row of narrow three-story brick row houses, a dozen short streets of them, each named for a Danish “Golden Age” (1800–1850) painter or other notable.

  He crosses Webersgade and Silver Square, Sølvtorvet, and visits Preben’s Pølsemester—the Sausage Master Wagon, a tiny sausage restaurant on wheels, one of the so-called cold foot cafés. The first such wagons were set up on the streets of Copenhagen in the twenties by a prosperous butcher. They caught on and soon there were many hundreds throughout the city, but with the advent of international fast-food joints like McDonald’s and Burger King, their numbers dwindled again to a hundred fifty or so at present.

  Within the wagon, Preben sits, big-bellied, spacey-toothed, whiskered, gazing across the variety of sausages sizzling on his grill. “Got a hole to fill?” he asks.

  “En ristet med brød, tak,” says Kerrigan. A fried sausage with bread, thanks. And is given a piece of waxed paper with a dollop of mustard and ketchup on it, flat on the counter, a fried sausage, and a little heated bun. He asks for chopped raw onion as well, nips a sheet of napkin from the dispenser, wraps it around the end of the sausage. The sausage is hot. He likes hot sausage. He dips the sausage into the mustard and then into the ketchup, turns it in the little pile of chopped onion so that onion flakes cling in the ketchup and mustard.

  The sweet smell of sausage grease touches his nostrils. He likes the smell of sausage grease. He bites the sausage and feels the hot juices burst upon his tongue. His tongue is very sensitive, and the sausage is a little too hot still. Steam rises from inside it. But he relishes the sensation, the taste. He chews the sausage and all that exists for him in this moment is taste, the fullness of his mouth, the ascent of the fats to his brain.

  He dips the end of the bun into the ketchup and into the mustard and bites off an end so that the bread mixes in his mouth with the sausage. Happily he chews the two things together, smiling as he munches. He feels good. He likes this sausage wagon. It is a good sausage wagon. He likes Preben. He pops the last bit of sausage and bun into his mouth, chews, swallows, belches discreetly behind his fist, says, “Tak,” and Preben the sausage man says, “Selv tak.” Thanks yourself.

  “Hej hej,” he says, which is pronounced “Hi hi.”

  “Hej, hej nu,” says Preben the sausage man.

  It tickles Kerrigan that doubling hello means good-bye, just as it tickles him to literally translate what Danes sometimes say when they receive a very beautiful present: “Hold kæft er du ikke rigtig klog?” Literally, “Shut up, are you not rather unclever?” Saft susser mig—juice-sizzle me, and “Now you’re really in the suppedasen”—shit soup. Not to forget the Danish word for brassiere—brystholder, literally “breast holder,” to contain the two happy miracles.

  He enjoys Danish wisdom. Lasternes sum er constant, or, “The sum of the vices is constant,” the truth of which he learned years ago when he quit smoking cigarettes and began to inhale his wine. Or what Danes say when they go to a dinner party where you are not urged to take more: “The food was good but the pressing was not so good.” And Danish curses: Kraft æder mig—Cancer eat me; Fanden bank mig—The devil hammer me;Fanden tag mig—The devil take me; or simply, For Satan! or For helvede!—so innocent sounding in English, The devil! Hell!—but serious matters in Danish. And he loves the low Danish—Øl, fisse og hornmusik (Beer, pussy, and horn music)—and the elegant irony and understatement of the Danes, manners left from the day when Denmark was a world power for centuries, now fallen to a small power but surviving and doing it well. The year Søren Kierkegaard was born, 1813, the Danish state went bankrupt, following the British bombardments and the loss of her fleet and of Norway following the Napoleonic Wars. Fifty years later, the war over South Jutland finally reduced her to a small country. But she never lost her tongue or her culture, her eye for beauty and for harmonious surroundings—all perhaps inspired by her magnificent light and the ascendancy of her humanism leading finally to comprehensive health care for all, free education to all, and welfare to all those who need it. Three sine qua nons of a true civilization, purchased with taxation.

  Turning from the sausage wagon, he realizes he has to relieve himself, considers stepping down into the Café Under Uret, the Café Under the Clock, an old establishment he sometimes visits on a fair afternoon when the tables are out front just at the rounded corner of Silver Square. It was established in 1883, the year Franz Kafka was born, originally as Café Roskilde, but a watchmaker moved in to the rooms above the café in 1906 and hung a large illuminated clock in the corner window above the café. When the watchmaker died, the owners of the café left the clock in place and changed the name of the café in its honor.

  Instead he makes use of the green wrought-iron pissoir just across Stockholmsgade, facing toward the National Museum of Art in the square named for Georg Brandes (1842–1927), commemorated there by a bust sculpted by Max Klinger in 1902. Brandes was the influential Danish literary critic who raised the work of Søren Kierkegaard out of international obscurity some twenty years after the philosopher’s death, writing about him and lecturing on his work in Germany, making it possible for the remainder of Europe to know his writings and for Frenchmen like Sartre and Camus, studying in Berlin half a century later, to fashion, of its basic tenets, braided with those of others such as Nietzsche, modern existentialism: existence precedes essence. And that made it possible for Camus to write The Stranger the year before Kerrigan was born, and for Kerrigan to read the novel twenty years later and understand from it that while each person is sentenced to death and might die at any moment, by leaping a
cross the brook between reason and faith he could attain an hour’s peace, “and that anyhow was something.”

  Kerrigan stands over the zinc trough, eyes closed with pleasure, his water sizzling on the residue of leaves there, pleasantly redolent of Boy Scout outings in New Jersey of years gone by, as he thinks these things. The Stranger saved Kerrigan’s sanity, such as it is, when he read it in 1961 as a soldier stationed at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis, undergoing a security investigation for a top secret clearance where the investigators became acutely interested in the fact that he replied honestly to the question of whether he had ever had normal sexual relations with a woman. The investigator expended many hours over many months involving polygraph machines to explore the reasons for his virginity and to determine whether he had ever had abnormal sexual relations with a woman, whatever they were, or sexual relations with another man or with a beast.

  Finally they were satisfied with the obvious explanation: He was eighteen years old, had been educated by Irish Christian Brothers at all-boys schools for twelve years, and was shy. But in the meantime, Kerrigan had learned to identify intensely with the fate of M. Meursault in Algiers and with Josef K in Kafka’s The Trial.

  One scene from The Stranger continues to resonate in him more than thirty-five years later, straight out of Kierkegaard: Meursault sits in his prison cell considering all the things that might happen to him, one by one, all the way through to the possibility that they might come in that very day and execute him, and once he has run through the whole list of terrifying possibilities, he wins for himself an hour’s peace and thinks, “And that anyhow was something.” A reflection of Kierkegaard’s “Leap of Faith,” by which one runs through all the arguments for and against the existence of God, reaches the end point of final utter ignorance, then chooses the only way forward—the leap across the gap of that ignorance to the embrace of faith—be it a faith in God or the pleasure of sensual existence or the simple assertion that although one dies and is unhappy, one insists on living and being happy.

  He shakes and zips with a nod of thanks toward Brandes Place, walks up Stockholmsgade—Stockholm Street—to number 20, the Hirschsprung Collection, named for the Danish cigar manufacturer Heinrich Hirschsprung, whose trademark was a leaping deer, the meaning of his name in German. He gazes up at the statue on the lawn of an equestrian barbarian sculpted by Carl Johan Bonnesen in 1890.

  Kerrigan considers the short muscular helmeted figure, armed with knife and scimitar, mounted upon a short strong steed, two decapitated human heads dangling from one side of his saddle, a third from the other. Odd motif, thinks Kerrigan, just across the trees from the civilized Brandes, a mere bronze head in comparison to the muscular body of this armed man and powerful horse with the severed-head trophies.

  Crossing back through the Potato Row houses to Østersøgade, East Lake Street, Kerrigan stands on the bridge that bisects Black Dam Lake—called the Peace Bridge, Fredensbro. Across the lake stands a tall monolithic sculpture titled Fredens Port, the Peace Gate, erected in 1982, by Stig Brøgger, Hein Hansen, and Møgens Møller. It rises at a tilt from the grass of tiny Peace Park: Like modern society, the monument seems locked in a constant fall that never concludes.

  To his right, framed between two chestnut trees, behind the buildings on the opposite bank of the lake, the top of the state hospital looms up like a huge steamship sailing beneath a white ceiling of cloud. He stands now on the bridge and, belching into his fist, remembers the fried sausage he has just eaten. It occurs to him that the two sides of the lake are like kidneys on either side of the spine of the bridge. He realizes this is far-fetched, but it makes him chuckle nonetheless as he sees a filthy fish nip a fly from the filthy surface of the water. Big two-kidneyed lake, he thinks, remembering how vindictive Hemingway could be when ridiculed, physically attacking the author of a review of Death in the Afternoon, titled “Bull in the Afternoon,” when he met him in Max Perkins’s office one afternoon; Hemingway wound up on his butt, spectacles askew, though to his credit he came up chuckling at himself.

  Those were the days, thinks Kerrigan, when an American man defended his honor with his fists, as though power and honor are synonymous or fists can do anything but silence the opposing view. He recalls Hemingway’s statement about his progress as a writer, that he began by beating Turgenev and then trained arduously and beat Maupassant, fought two ties with Stendahl but had the edge in the second; however, he would not get into the ring with Tolstoy unless he got a lot better. True bull in the afternoon. As bad as the ridiculous practice of fighting duels over one’s honor—which killed Alexander Pushkin and Alexander Hamilton.

  Kerrigan chuckles aloud and realizes he is still slightly intoxicated from the evening before. Hemingway, he realizes, would soon have been one hundred years old had he not blown out his brains just before he was to turn sixty-two. Yet there is something else that cannot be denied: Hemingway was physically courageous; Kerrigan, he himself recognizes, is not. Amen.

  He decides to remain on this side of the bridge, to take a brisk walk around the entire circumference of this lake and the next, Peblinge Lake, get his blood pumping and his lungs working. As he trudges past an old disused bomb shelter on the bank, his thoughts reach back toward the year of his birth, 1943, the year after Camus wrote The Stranger, the third year of the German occupation of this city, this country, and yet another century back again to 1843, the year Søren Kierkegaard published Either/Or, the first of his most important works, written when he was thirty. He died when he was forty-two—would have been two years before the age Kerrigan was when he met Licia and fell under her spell. He asks himself whether he is too hard on her, too easy with himself. But she did do what she did do—what else to call that but falseness and treachery? She had seemed made for him, and he for her; according to Kierkegaard, that was the moment when a couple should have the courage to break it off. But Kerrigan was in her thrall.

  Somewhere in Kierkegaard’s writings, he said, “Whether you marry or not you will regret it.” Kerrigan both regrets it and not. Licia was such a beautiful illusion. For a time. And his beautiful baby girl, taken from him so young. She surely hardly remembers him now, or if she does at all it is as a vague fragment of a dream she dreams wherever she might be now.

  He thinks about Kierkegaard and his beloved Regine Olsen—with whom he broke off the engagement, then spent the remainder of his short life contemplating and writing about it.

  Subtitled A Fragment of Life, Either/Or is a gathering of aphorisms, essays, a sermon, and, lodged within it all, a novel in the form of a diary, The Seducer’s Diary—all written under different pseudonyms.

  The concept of “either/or” was Kierkegaard’s response to the Hegelian concept of mediation—the negotiation of contradictory ideas—“thesis” and “antithesis”—into “synthesis,” which is meant to include and reconcile them both. Either/or was Kierkegaard’s refutation of this “both/and” approach to thought. But this aspect of it has no interest to Kerrigan. He picks and chooses from the book in accord with Kierkegaard’s own prescription in that book, “The Rotation Method,” whereby one picks a part of a book or a play or a poem and makes of it perhaps quite another experience than the author thought he was preparing for the reader.

  The Seducer’s Diary, the novel within the book, captures Kerrigan, for in it the first-person narrator, Johannes, walks the banks of this lake Kerrigan now walks, more than 150 years later, beneath the six windows of Kerrigan’s apartment, dreaming of the object of his desire, Cordelia.

  On the banks of these lakes where Kerrigan now pauses to watch a swan glide along the stippled glittering water, Hans Christian Andersen also stood weeping real salt tears over his mistreatment by the world while Kierkegaard’s fictional Johannes the Seducer stalked his beautiful young Cordelia in the pages of the fictional diary set like a substantial dark gem in a book of philosophy and meditation. Kerrigan himself now strolls this path by the water regretting and not his marriage of fou
r years—the length of a college education—preceded by four years as lovers, another college education. But what did he learn from it? The equivalent of a B.S. in being the victim of treachery. That while he was lecturing her about the creation of illusion in literature, she was busy creating an illusion for him with her bright, light smiling eyes. Is this melodramatic? he asks himself. Is this bitterness? Am I growing to like the taste of my wounds as I lick them?

  To Kerrigan’s mind, the fictional Johannes is as real, more real perhaps, than the figures of history who walked here. More real to him in any event. For though he knows that Andersen and Kierkegaard were men of flesh and blood, equally wounded in love as Kerrigan, the very intimate record available of them is still mostly indirect, while in Johannes we have a mind and a soul laid open for study in detail throughout the course of an extreme action. Even if Johannes is the cynical one in that action, Licia the cynical one in Kerrigan’s life.

  Then he thinks of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, which sorrows were self-inflicted, and he tries to see himself in young Werther. Had Goethe not died in 1832 but lived another dozen years, he might have seen in Kierkegaard’s Johannes the Seducer some ironic reflection of the Young Werther whose sorrows made Goethe so suddenly famous in 1774, two years before the American War of Independence, sixty-nine years before Kierkegaard’s Johannes walked the banks of this lake (225 years before Kerrigan walks it regretting Licia’s falseness). Johannes is the romantic—bumbling Werther’s cynical, contriving counterpart—articulating visions of a femininity that could only have been meant to reveal the true sadistic nature of the machinations of seduction. Johannes explained that in creating Eve, God struck Adam with a deep sleep because woman is the dream of man and does not awake until she is touched by love. Before that she is a dream, but there are two distinct states in her dream: first, love dreams of her; second, she dreams of love. And he remembers Johannes the Seducer’s speculation that woman will forever provide an endless supply of material for his contemplation.