Kerrigan in Copenhagen Read online

  Kerrigan asks himself what he dreamed of in Licia and what was in Licia’s mind—was it consciously false, treacherous? Or did her love just cool and turn to a malicious desire to cut free from him, with no consid eration for his attachment to Gabrielle? Or to the baby she was carrying. If she really was carrying a baby. If the baby was even his.

  Standing now on the bank of the lake, he watches the swans and the ducks, watches the continuous infinitesimal changes of the Danish light, feeling this long history of a culture around him, this speculation about women and love. He thinks of his Associate’s absinthe-green eyes, and he thinks of his mother who was born here, from whence she was taken by his Irish father via Brooklyn to Dublin, to Copenhagen and back to Brooklyn, then giving birth to him and registering him as a Dane, giving him dual citizenship, allowing him to try to make a new life here after his first life was foundering there, and in his forty-fourth year to meet the beautiful Licia who would make love possible for him and then deprive him of that love.

  The thought strikes him with a force that is physical. He literally staggers as he steps down through the tunnel between the two segments of Black Dam Lake, its walls festooned with ornate graffti scrawled over with obscenities, SUPERFUCKED AND FUCK SPAGHETTIS ANSWERED BY FUK RACISM AND BLOOD AND HONOUR AND FUK YOU NIGGA and again fuk racism. And he looks ahead to the light at the far end and tells himself that when he comes out into the daylight again he will dismiss these thoughts of Licia and Gabrielle.

  As he climbs the inclined path back up into the day, he sees the Kaffesalonen, the Coffee Salon, off to his right, and further on down the long narrow street the spire of the church in which he, himself, was married, Skt. Johannes Kirke, the Church of St. John, and he keeps walking, blanking out his mind with the movement of his legs, his feet striking the dusty path, the swinging of his arms, the breath in his lungs, the sweat in his armpits and on his back, as he fills his eyes with saving details, past the fairy-tale-like white structure of the Søpavillon, the Lake Pavilion, and around the foot of Peblinge Lake. He sees a green bronze sculpture of a lion and lioness fighting for the corpse of a wild boar, sculpted by an artist named Cain in 1878.

  And that name reminds him of Milton’s Adam and Eve in 1674 leaving Eden with wandering steps and slow, hand in hand—the work with which Milton set out to justify God’s ways with man, and Housman two and a half centuries later telling Kerrigan’s namesake, Terrence, first read to Kerrigan by his father and still later by Kerrigan himself at a time when he was desperate for justification,

  Terrence, this is stupid stuff …

  Malt does more than Milton can

  To justify God’s ways with man …

  Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink

  For fellows whom it hurts to think.

  How fitting it seems then that just across Gyldenløves Street near the bank of Skt. Jørgens Sø, St. George’s Lake, stands Andreas Kolberg’s sculpture A Drunken Faun (1857)—a smiling boyish satyr drinking wine from a horn held high over his head so the wine runs down his face. He has feet rather than hooves and drags a half-empty wine sack along the ground behind him. His stick is discarded at his feet and his lion skin has slipped back, exposing his sex. Carl Jacobsen, the Carlsberg brewer, gave this faun to Copenhagen—a laughing, happily drunken lad, and, this being Copenhagen, there is no moral intent beyond the moral pleasure of joy.

  Yet as Kerrigan crosses the little park on the bank, he stops to consider a sculpture cut from the stump of a dying elm tree, infected by the epidemic that hit Copenhagen’s elms in the 1990s. This sculpture is by Ole Barslund Nielsen—a naked woman rises from the center of the broken double-trunked stump, a child to one side, and below, a seated figure in a hollowed arch in the trunk itself. It is entitled In the Beginning Was the Word. And in the end this tree sculpture will be worn away by the elements, like everything and every story.

  He loops across Gyldenløves Street to Ørstedsparken, can see from the street the statue of the great man himself: H. C. Ørsted (1777–1851), discoverer in 1821 of electromagnetism as well as of aluminum, comforter forter of Hans Christian Andersen. Kerrigan enters the park and his feet carry him further along its paths, past rows of antique bronze sculptures as his present moment melts continuously into his past and the present adds one increment of the future to itself, beneath the willows and beeches. He comes upon The Dying Gaul, a bronze made from a two-thousand-year-old Roman cast, itself made from an even older Greek one. The Gaul is wounded, naked, dying, balanced on hip and hand, head lowered, mouth in pain, eyes meeting death, his sword discarded on the bronze earth alongside his bronze hand, the warrior’s gold braid about his neck. What, Kerrigan wonders, is meant by the quiet agony of that face? And the response is from Chaucer, the dying White Knight’s song:

  What is this life

  What asketh man to have

  Now with his love

  Now in his cold grave.

  He turns back toward the lake.

  Kerrigan is exhausted. His wet shirt sticks to his back as he reaches Peblinge Sø, the lake bank where Hans Christian Andersen wept. He sits on a bench, closes his eyes, and remembers the lake two winters before, skaters and strollers on the frozen water before the Lake Pavilion on a freezing sunny winter Sunday.

  In the darkness behind his eyelids, his thoughts turn back to Kierkegaard and Johannes the Seducer and Goethe’s Young Werther. They are both dead, Goethe and Kierkegaard, two men from two centuries, sharing a part of the nineteenth, writing about the same thing from different angles. A Dane and a German. And an Irish-Danish American contemplates another aspect of the same thing that has very nearly undone him.

  The Sorrows of Young Werther inaugurated a life of fame for Goethe at the age of twenty-five. It is the story of a young upper-middle-class man of foolish sentiments, quick and self-centered, who falls in love with another man’s woman and commits suicide. W. H. Auden has said that the book made Goethe the first writer or artist to become a public celebrity. Auden opined that it was not a story of tragic love at all, but a portrait of a totally egotistical young man who is not capable of loving anyone but himself. There are other views of young Werther, however—speculations that Lotte strung him along, bewitching him with touches and glances to his destruction. La belle Lotte sans merci.

  If Werther killed himself in frustration over being unable to have Lotte, Kierkegaard’s Johannes sets about with incisive determination to have Cordelia, and he does have her via the fact, at the source of his strength, that he always has the idea on his side, a secret, like Samson’s hair, that no Delilah can pry from his mind.

  It seems clear that this is not the philosophy of Kierkegaard—who spoke of the greater sins of reason than passion—but the casual reader of the Diary might take it literally and believe Johannes’s delusion that a man’s relationship to a woman is a question, her choice of life only a response to that question.

  Johannes stands on Bleacher’s Green (now Blegdamsvej) and readies his attack, his soul like a bent bow, his thought an arrowhead about to enter her flesh, her veins. And when his labors are done, when he has had her in one fizzling gulp, like a glass of champagne, he leaves swiftly, done, with no sweet parting sorrow because he views with disgust a woman’s tears, which change everything but are meaningless. He has had her now and she no longer can fascinate his erotic imagination.

  Kerrigan entertains an idea that Kierkegaard’s Diary is inter alia a response to Goethe’s Sorrows. In 1841, Kierkegaard broke his engagement to the woman he loved, Regine Olsen, and traveled to Berlin where he lived at the Hotel Saxen on Jägerstrasse 57 and wrote, first, Either/Or and then Fear and Trembling, both published in 1843, when he returned from Berlin. He had broken with Regine for reasons that he himself did not quite understand and spent years speculating about. However, he concluded that he could be happier in his unhappiness without her than with her, would be required to hide so much from her, to base the entire relationship on something that was untrue.

  Whet
her you marry or not, you will regret it.

  He sent back the ring, fabricated the appearance that it was she who broke off the engagement, but she refused to go along with that lie, explaining that if she could bear the rejection she could bear the disgrace as well. Kierkegaard was miserable but he hid his misery from the world, behaved as usual. His brother, who heard him weeping all night, wanted to go to Regine’s family and tell them, to prove he was not dastardly, but Kierkegaard threatened to put a bullet in his brother’s head if he did.

  In his journal, on August 24, 1849—eight years later—he wrote that he traveled to Berlin and suffered with his thoughts of her every day. In Berlin he worked on Either/Or, completing it in about eleven months. There he would write that his grief was his castle. And that pleasure was not in the thing that you enjoy but in the consciousness of it. And finally that his yearning for his first love was only a yearning for that yearning.

  Kerrigan, too, yearns for his first yearning for Licia, but what did Licia yearn for; he had thought their yearnings were for each other, and he remembers only one thing that seemed to indicate something else might have been going on behind the facade of her sweet blue gaze, her mild light manner. One summer night in the garden of their new house in fashionable Hellerup, where she had always dreamed of living, just north of Copenhagen, the baby asleep, he opened a second bottle of wine, and as evening darkened to night, the sky still yellow, she seemed to be staring at him without seeing, and she said, “You are so blind.”

  He could have sworn she said that. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

  “Blind,” she repeated with drunken deliberateness. “Blind!” And stomped off into the house. He sat smoking a cigar, trying to understand what had just happened. Throwing the cigar into the still glowing coals of the grill, he rose and followed, but she lay fully clothed atop the covers, dissecting the width of their bed, and he could not rouse her.

  Next morning over breakfast, he asked, “How do you feel?”

  “Not good.”

  “What did you mean?” he asked. “By what you said just before you went to bed?”

  “What I said? Did I say something?” He interpreted the fear evident in her voice as embarrassment.

  He looked into her blue eyes. He loved her eyes so, her blonde hair. He loved the silken skin of her back, inside her thighs, her mild gentle manner, loved the way she made love. He adored her. Her face was still aimed at him, her own question hanging in the air, but he would not subject her to his question again, would not repeat what she had said.

  Were there other things as well? Things he ignored? Things he did not see? Things he was indeed blind to?

  There was that time when she seemed not displeased that he lost a contract for the translation of several significant books. He thought he saw a glint in her eye, heard a mocking taunt in her voice, but did not believe it, still does not know whether it really was there.

  What else?

  Of course: her gentle persistent insistence that they merge their bank accounts. And what argument did he have against it? What argument would he even think to pose against it? Not even the fact that his account contained the liquidated assets of his inheritance from his parents while hers contained only the few thousand kroner she had saved from her earnings. Not even when she suggested she take over the finances—she was, after all, better at it. And she was his wife, the mother of his newborn daughter. He loved her forever. Their lives and fortunes were joined, one.

  Contemplating these ironies and conflicts on his bench on the bank of Peblinge Lake where Andersen once wept and Johannes stalked Cordelia, Kerrigan watches a swan drift past like a beautiful white question. He feels the presence of all this history, all this hurt and hurting, this love and rejection, weeping, sickness, pride, haughtiness, death, and he cannot stop feeling his own pain of absence of Licia, puzzling miserably over it still, after three years, wondering how he could have been so wrong about a person, have failed to understand her as he continues to fail to fathom what might have been in her mind.

  Yet he is not specifically unhappy in his general unhappiness. He has no reason to be. Happiness would be too much to wish for, but at least there might be spells of not being unhappy in unhappiness, fits of pleasure in the senses, in the dimensions of the mind. Licia’s treachery extinguished much, but not everything. Yet he was not happier in his unhappiness without her. He would take her back in a second. Perhaps. Even if he still didn’t know whether she was lying? Perhaps.

  In the buildings behind where he now sits on Nørre Søgade, North Lake Street, on the right side of the third floor is the building where Ben Webster lived from 1965 until his death. There he would sit, as Bent Kauling tells it, with the superintendent of the building, drinking beer and staring out the window over the lake. The superintendent, Olsen, could not speak English—he called Webster “Wesper”—and Webster spoke virtually no Danish, so they sat in silence, saying no more than Skål, and drank their beer, enjoying what Webster called “the world’s luckiest conversation.”

  Two silent men drinking beer, watching the lake.

  And a friend of Kerrigan’s, Dale Smith, the African-American bluesman from St. Louis who has lived in Copenhagen for decades, tells of Webster getting fed up one night in the club Montmartre with the tootling of some very postbop saxophonists and barking, “Practice at home, motherfuckers!”

  Kerrigan has a CD recorded in Los Angeles in 1959: Ben Webster on tenor sax, Gerry Mulligan on baritone, playing Billy Strayhorn’s “Chelsea Bridge,” seven minutes and twenty seconds of a black man and a white man fingerfucking heaven. Kerrigan knows of no cut as beautiful and moving unless perhaps it is Stan Getz blowing his tenor in alto range on Strayhorn’s “Blood Count,” recorded at the Montmartre in Copenhagen on July 6, 1987, when Getz had begun dying of cancer. Strayhorn himself wrote the number just twenty years before when he was in the hospital riding his own cancer to its end. Getz said that he thought about Strayhorn when he played that song. “You can hear him dying … you can hear the man talking to God.”

  Strayhorn wrote it for Duke Ellington to play in Carnegie Hall in 1967. It was the last piece Strayhorn ever wrote. He was Duke Ellington’s right hand and Ben Webster had been lead solo in Ellington’s orchestra at its best, Billie Holiday’s favorite soloist, who accompanied her on The Silver Collection. He came to Copenhagen to live, the only city in the world where he felt he could go out without his knife, and he died on tour in Amsterdam in 1973. Webster, about whom, on the day of Kerrigan’s birth, September 18, 1943, Jack Kerouac, at twenty-one, had written: “Caught Ben Webster at the Three Deuces on 52nd. No one can beat his tone; he breathes out his notes.”

  Webster, Getz, Strayhorn, Holiday, Ellington, Mulligan, Kerouac, all gone now. And Chet Baker, too, who fell or was pushed to his death out the window of the Hotel Prince Hendrick on Prince Hendrickstraat in Amsterdam on May 18, 1988. All gone. And that’s how every story ends, says the “Knight of Infinite Resignation,” Søren Kierkegaard, in harmony with H. C. Andersen.

  But still Kerrigan can hear in his mind, clear as if he were hearing a CD, Webster’s horn blowing “Chelsea Bridge,” cut into wax with Mulligan’s baritone eight thousand miles from here, forty years ago, fingerfucking heaven. So they live in his mind, at least until his mind is reduced to a small quantity of gray dust inside his skull.

  A wind is rising on the water, and laughing in his heart he quotes foolish Werther without moving his lips: And may I say it? She would have been happier with me than with him. It occurs to him that his green-eyed Associate might have another man and wonders why he should be worrying about that, whether he truly cares.

  He rises from the bench, feels the now swiftly moving air across his face, sees it chopping on the silver surface of the lake, alive in the ever-changing light of Copenhagen, and he has successfully banished the memory of Licia who successfully terminally savaged for him the trust and hope he had foolishly allowed her to create for him.

  Silver
speckles glitter on the lake, and the beggar swans float in like questions, one, another, two more. A purple-necked duck waddles up onto the bank to see if Kerrigan has bread for him. The dirty lake water rolls in harmless beads like oil down its back, and Kerrigan experiences the optimism of hunger and thirst. “Adieu,” Kerrigan whispers, savoring irony. “I see no end to this misery except in the grave.”

  The duck sees he has no bread and waddles away, laughing.

  Kerrigan laughs, too, and sets off at a brisk pace toward the opposite end of the lake, entertaining himself with the thought that in the dead of one November night in 1970, the East German authorities, in great secrecy, removed the remains of Goethe from the ducal crypt in Weimar where they had lain alongside those of the poet Friedrich Schiller since 1832, 138 years before. The flesh remaining on his bones was macerated and the bones themselves strengthened. The laurel crown affixed to his skull was removed, cleaned, and reaffixed, and then he was—still secretly—returned to his crypt, though they forgot to return his shroud and did not dare or bother to reopen the crypt to do so. No doubt some official hung it on his social-realist bureaucratic wall.

  All this was discovered from records released in March 1999. The records also showed that among other things, the interior of the poet’s skull had been examined, and it was recorded that found inside was “a small quantity of gray dust.” Kerrigan pictures the official pilfering the dust, preserving it in a little drawstring pouch, carrying it about in his pocket for luck.

  Dust particles carry on the wind that rolls across the lake, whirlpooling on the dirt walkway, smacking Kerrigan’s face as he walks forward at a slant through it. At the far end of the lake, he takes a table outside Det Franske Café, the French Café, across the boulevard from where Kierkegaard’s 1850 residence might still have been standing had it not been torn down to let Willemoesgade, Willemoes Street, run past between the twin towers erected there in 1892.