Kerrigan in Copenhagen Read online

  He sips his amber beer and wonders who might be dying today that he had never even or only vaguely heard of. For a fleeting instant he pictures Licia dying, dead, relishes it, but instantly withdraws the thought, not to wish his little girl motherless, wherever she might be. Anyway, Licia will surely outlive him. And then he thinks of Licia as an April day that danced away while his back was turned.

  The sun has slid away from the Le Saint Jacques tables, slants across the other side of the little square. Kerrigan drains his beer, crosses Skt. Jakobs Place to the sunny side and Theodor’s. The tables are all taken, but anyway he sees what the pattern of his day will be: He already has to pee again. Good day to sit closer to the loo than to the bar. And he composes a bit of doggerel on his way to the gents’:

  A Mystery

  If I sit closer to the loo

  Than to the bar, I think

  That’s ’cause I piss more than I drink.

  How that can be so, I do not know.

  I only know it’s true.

  Inside the black-and-chrome interior he finds the gents’, repeats the fate of the exasperated spirit, proceeding from urinal to urinal. Room made for more beer, he strolls across the barroom toward the outside tables, but notices a note on the glass door: WE LIKE BABIES, BUT BREAST-FEEDING IS NOT PERMITTED ON THESE PREMISES, thinks how curiously un-Danish to be opposed to breast-feeding, the breast being (in the words of Knut Hamsun in Hunger) a “sweet miracle” as well as the one human organ that can only nurture and cannot be used to strike, gouge, fire a projectile, or cause any manner of pain other than the sweet agony of longing.

  He finds an empty chair, sits, orders, lights a Christian. He holds the match before his eyes. The air is now so still that the flame seems not to move at all, seems perfectly still yet vibrant, eating the wood of the match-stick, violent yet stable—structured in a perfect symmetrical spire, at one and the same moment beautiful, fearsome, mysterious. He wants to ask the waiter why the breast-feeding prohibition, but is in no mood for controversy. Remembers Licia allowing him to taste her milk—such a miracle.

  Then he notes a newspaper section on the chair beside him, takes it up. It is the Copenhagen section of the Jutland Post, Jyllandsposten, folded open to an article about a hundred-year-old telephone kiosk that is about to be auctioned off on Kongens Nytorv—the King’s New Square. The starting bid is $60,000. It is the first of a number of telephone kiosks designed by Fritz Koch in 1886, roomy and richly appointed with wood and copper and glass, large enough for an office with a panorama of windows. There are only a handful of them left. That they survive out on the streets without being vandalized is a tribute to Danish civilization. It occurs to Kerrigan to buy it, use it for an office. Sit there in his oversize telephone box on the King’s New Square surrounded by a wide circle of elegant buildings, the Royal Theater with its great seated sculptures of Ludvig Holberg, considered the Danish Molière, and Adam Oehlenschläger, the early-nineteenth-century romantic poet whose little sister Sophie married H. C. Ørsted’s older brother and was loved by many poets, including of course Hans Christian Andersen.

  To sit in his elegant telephone box and write and watch the world of the elegant core of Copenhagen through 360 degrees of window all for a mere $60,000. An idiotic idea. Where would he get the money? Nowhere. He could take out a new mortgage on his apartment.

  Which apartment he was able to purchase only by selling the house he and Licia had purchased on loaned money. Not a week after her disappearance, he received a letter from her lawyer with divorce papers enclosed. I’m so sorry, I don’t love you. I have to find a life for myself and the baby was all the note she had left him in the empty house when he returned from a week in Edinburgh. Not even addressed or signed, printed in block letters. Gone with two-year-old Gabrielle and the seed that was or was not Kerrigan’s and was or was not in her womb for a month. Gabrielle used to sit on his lap and have him name things for her in Danish and English: Lamp—lampe. Table—bord. Head—hoved. Eyes—øjne. Mouth—mund. Nose—næse. Hug—kram. And then she would give him a hug. Kys—kiss, then a kiss.

  I’m so sorry, I don’t love you. Jeg er så ked af det, jeg elsker dig ikke.

  On the phone, the lawyer was taciturn. Licia was in another country.

  Where is she? Who is she with?

  I’m not at liberty to divulge that, she said, her voice hard as business.

  You’re not at liberty to divulge that. She stole my kid, and you are not at liberty to divulge where she is?

  The country where she is living recognizes the right of the mother to sole custody. Especially when there are allegations of, let’s say, unseemly behavior with the girl.

  Fury kindled in him, which he suppressed. Quietly, he said, That’s a lie.

  Allegation against allegation. Possession is nine points of the law. No charges have been filed about any allegations. To date. And she is not planning on asking for half the value of the house and its contents.

  Oh, how kind of her. She did, however, take half of my life’s savings.

  Well, after all, the two of you were on a shared economy.

  She told me she was pregnant again.

  I’m sorry—it wasn’t yours.

  He hears one thing first, another second. The statement. The past tense.

  She is not asking support for the child, the lawyer said. She is asking for nothing more. Only your signature on the divorce paper.

  And if I don’t sign?

  Let go, Mr. Kerrigan. She is with another. She is happy. You won’t get her back. The child is so young—she has already forgotten you. Don’t get embroiled in the courts over the house and your possible other assets. And other allegations.

  A pinprick of molten fury burnt off inside him, leaving him bewildered. Let me ask something? Why didn’t she just tell me.

  With your temper?

  I don’t have a bad temper.

  Allegation against allegation.

  Blonde treachery.

  He has no money to buy kiosks. Still, he cannot put it out of his mind.

  On the King’s New Square, he sees it. The shutters are raised and a small truck is parked outside from which a waiter carries a tray into the door of the little pavilion, beneath its green copper spire. Inside is just room enough for a white-clothed table at which a young blond couple sit, a feast spread before them, candles burning in crystal sticks, polished silver on white linen.

  The waiter pours wine into a sparkling goblet and waits while the young man tastes it, contemplates, rolling it on his tongue, nods. The waiter withdraws to the truck.

  “I thought this was up for auction,” says Kerrigan.

  “Was,” the waiter tells him, readying the next course from the back of the truck. “Went to the hammer last week. Seven hundred thousand crowns”—$115,000. “Bought by a Dane living in New York. Banker.”

  Kerrigan looks again at the newspaper he has carried beneath his arm. It is dated two weeks back. So much for synchronicity. He pitches it into a trash receptacle, trudges off across the square that is in fact a circle, yet finds himself stopping to look back at the kiosk. The candles are tiny yellow spires in the windows and the faces of the young couple gaze upon one another silently and the wine sparkles red in their crystal goblets as they raise them to their lips, and he thinks of his own plan to sit in there by himself writing, watching the world move about outside.

  He looks across to the 275-year-old Hviid’s Wine Room beneath where the Blue Note and Grand Café used to be and where Jens August Schade wrote about the Finnish girl who pulled up her blouse to show him her breasts. Kerrigan savors the vicarious pleasure of such a moment. And it occurs to him once again that he would never know, if she was lying to him, what she was lying about. About being pregnant. About anything. It wasn’t yours. And he thinks the unaskable: Was Gabrielle?

  Inside the cavelike room, he goes straight for the pay phone with beer in hand and sifts through his wallet for the number of his green-eyed Associate. He long
s for her little Moleskine book with its starfish stickers on the covers. Even as he dials the number, he wonders if she will be home at all on a late Saturday afternoon, if she has a man, if she will find him out of order, foolish, and the telephone line sends its little burring sound into his ear as he waits breathlessly, convinced she is already out somewhere with someone else and not walking barefoot around her apartment painting pictures from a palette of oils or acrylics.

  Then her voice is in his ear, and he is thrilled that she recognizes his at once, from the single syllable of his greeting.

  “And how did you spend the day on your own without your ‘Associate?’ ” she asks.

  “Miserably,” he says. “I’m no good without you and your little Moleskine. I wandered around the lakes and thought morbid thoughts.”

  She says nothing, and Kerrigan falls silent. He peers into the foam of his lager and lines up coins on the shelf beneath the phone and looks at a small cardboard sign propped on a table—a drawing of this place where three men in old-fashioned suits stand at the bar with a naked woman. He wonders if the woman is supposed to be a hallucination. He thinks of the Finnish girl Schade wrote about in 1962.

  “And what is Mr. Kerrigan calling for at this blue hour?”

  He knows she knows what he is calling for, but he tells it in another way. “I’m on my way up to the White Lamb. To hear some happy jazz.”

  “Happy jazz?”

  “Right. That’s what they call it. Dixieland, I guess. I thought you might care to join me.”

  Her chuckle is complex. “Oh, you did, did you? Well, you know it’s time and a half after six. Come to think of it, double time on weekends.”

  “Oh, well, I meant, you know, like, personally.”

  “You mean you meant you want me to do what I do for free?”

  “I thought perhaps you might care to join me for dinner.”

  “I think Mr. Kerrigan is the Prince of Cups this evening.”

  He realizes then that is the reason for the note of sarcasm in her voice, her resistance. She can hear that he’s been drinking. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to …”

  “Besides, I’ve already eaten,” she says. “I had a lovely pineapple sandwich.”

  Mr. Kerrigan, he thinks, is going to be sick. “Are you painting?” he asks. “Are you barefoot?” How he wished she would invite him over for a coffee.

  “So many questions. Oh! there’s the doorbell, got to run …”

  So who needs her, thinks Kerrigan, and takes a seat at the little table near the door where he can survey the bar and the entries to the first two cavelike rooms. He drinks a pint of lager with a double Finlandia vodka in a snaps glass in honor of Finnish girls who raise their blouses. A double in Denmark is a single in the U.S. is two thirds of a single in Sweden and half a single in Eastern Europe.

  He raises his vodka and says, “Multatuli,” snaps it down, chases it with cold beer, says, “Earth, fire, I have suffered greatly, I haf just hod an orgasm.” The bartender in white shirt and black vest glances over—it is not Old Hansen. Kerrigan has committed a Danish sin: at gøre sig bemærkede—to call attention to oneself. He raises his vodka again, but the glass is empty.

  “Once more, please,” he says, and when the bartender brings the bottle to refill his glass, he nods formally. This time he keeps his toast to himself, thinks, Earth, fire, suffering, come, and snaps down the vodka. He yearns back in memory for the Swedish girl who once fed him svartsuppa, black soup—goose-blood soup, and her teeth gleamed in the candlelight, her face so pale and eyes so very very blue.

  Something about the Swedish girl makes him think of Santa Lucia and the Scandinavian celebration each mid-December where the young virgins dress in white, wearing crowns of candles in their hair, and march in a procession singing in angelic voices about Santa Lucia, whose eyes were put out in her defense of her purity. And he will never see Gabrielle dressed in white, walking in that procession of candles.

  Everywhere he turned—a lawyer, the police, even a private detective agency—he was met by the same skepticism and doubt. If he took it to court, he was advised, the judge would likely suspect that a woman who was willing to go so far to be free of him must have her reasons. She certainly had found the means. He didn’t even reveal the “allegations” that Licia’s attorney had hinted at. That was a swamp he didn’t want to dip even a toe in. He was left trying to guess at what was in Licia’s head and trying to identify what of his behavior might have provoked judgments in her that she kept secret from him. With your temper? Did she perceive him as frightening? Bullshit. He thinks of his Associate—I think Mr. Kerrigan is the Prince of Cups this evening. Was it because he drank too much? But Licia drank plenty herself. Still, the words of his Associate bother him. Is it time to taper off?

  Bullshit!

  Finally he went to a psychologist, told him about what Licia had hinted at.

  “Did you do anything unseemly?”

  “No! Not that I’m aware of.”

  “If you had done something, you would be aware of it. Then that is just a very cheap trick that she is using.” But in the end the psychologist more or less agreed with lawyer, police, and detective, advising him to drop it, get on with his life.

  He perambulates. Up Gothersgade, Gothers Street, past Kongens Have, the King’s Garden, hooks left at Nørrevoldgade, North Rampart Street, down Fiolstræde, Violin Street, pauses at the mouth of a slanted dash of a street, Rosengården, the Rosen Court, that runs quickly across to Kultorvet, the Coal Square.

  He enters the door of a place so unremarkable it seems designed to be ignored, Rosengårdens Bodega, the Rosen Court Bodega. Smoke-darkened paintings with cracked oils hang on the dark brown and yellow walls, an old-fashioned claustrophobic telephone booth with a tiny O of a window in the door and an old water pump mounted above it. A single customer nurses a beer at one of maybe eight tables.

  Kerrigan takes a stool at the bar, orders a large draft lager, running a rough tally of how many he has had so far today. Half a dozen perhaps. And three vodkas. A mere drop in the national bucket considering that on average every Dane drinks 104.6 liters of beer per annum. And that includes the ones who do not drink at all. And how many snaps and vodkas and other spirits? He is aware of trying to excuse his consumption, obfuscate it.

  He can feel the beer, but not badly, and he’s been walking a lot, too. His legs are tired and that is good. It helps keep him from thinking about whether he feels more foolish or forlorn, keeps him from remembering the impotence he felt when he dated and signed that lawyer’s papers and returned them in the self-addressed stamped envelope.

  The bartender is a woman, voluptuous, and she smiles at him. He orders a draft in English, forgetting himself, and she answers in English, but it sounds Jamaican. Which seems odd because she is blonde and blue-eyed. He asks.

  “Just spend a lot of time in Tri-ni-dad,” she says.

  She has a stool behind the taps. Kerrigan offers a drink and asks what she can tell him about this place.

  “Building’s been here since 1850,” the woman says. “There’s a funny story.” She puts down her beer stein. “Or maybe not so funny.” She removes a stack of books from a low shelf on the wall behind the bar and points to a hole in the wall. “That’s from a bullet,” she says. “The bullet is still in there. From a liquidation during the war. There was a gestapo informer, a Dane, they called him the Horse Thief, Hestetyven. He came in here one day, and the resistance was after him. It was on Hitler’s fifty-fifth birthday, on April 20, 1944. The Germans had occupied the country since 1940. Two resistance guys came on bicycles and saw another kid in the movement and asked him to watch the bikes weren’t pinched—during the war, things were scarce—and two of them came in and one of them shot the Horse Thief. Seven bullets. Say he squealed like a pig, big as he was, but everyone sitting here just looked the other way. No one saw a thing. Say when the two come running out again and jumped on their bikes, they were so jittery they crashed into each o
ther, knocked themselves to the street. But they got away. That was a birthday present for the führer.”

  The barmaid falls silent then, and Kerrigan isn’t much in the mood to talk. He sits, looking at the bullet hole, and thinking about the German occupation, the use of force, one people subjugating another, the very idea of weapons, pistols, projectiles designed to penetrate and kill the body.

  A hundred meters toward the Coal Square (Kultorvet), on the corner, Kierkegaard, in 1838, had an apartment in number 11 where Café Klaptræet (the Clapboard) is now. Kerrigan looks up at the corner building where Kierkegaard lived 160 years before, pictures him there, his slanted body hunched over a book. This would have been five years prior to the publication of his first great work, Either/Or, when he roamed the streets—he loved to walk in the city.

  From Kierkegaard’s window here, he would have been able to see Det Hvid Lam, the White Lamb serving house at Kultorvet 5, established in 1807, the year of the three-day English bombardment that destroyed much of Copenhagen and killed almost 2 percent of the civilian population, about sixteen hundred people, plus a few hundred military men. The White Lamb was hit, too—the top of the building was blown off, but the newly opened serving house in the semibasement survived intact, and beer is still tapped here today to a jazz background on the sound system, with live jazz most nights. The Duke of Wellington blew the roof off in 1807, but he is now dust in his grave, and the only duke who blows the roof off now is Duke Ellington. The building is from 1754 so it survived not only the British bombardment but also the great fires of 1794 and 1795.

  Kerrigan steps back to look up at the building above the White Lamb in the semibasement, hand-lettered luncheon signs offering sardines on coarse rye or “unspecified sandwiches”—three open sandwiches on slabs of dark grainy bread. Take what you get. Caveat emptor. But they’re all good with a beer and a snaps.

  He looks up the red facade of the building toward the red-tiled roof and tries to imagine the cannon from Wellington’s fleet in the harbor—twenty-five ships of the line, forty smaller warships, thirty thousand men—shelling that roof, smashing tiles, rubble raining down on the square, people stunned then screaming, sprinting in mad confusion, horse wagons smashed beneath falling walls, civilians—men, women, children—pitched by shells, bodies blown out of windows, falling with chunks of brick, weeping blood, bones snapping through flesh. Broken-backed horses trying to tug free of harnesses hitched to wagons buried in broken bricks and pulverized stone. He imagines men and woman amid dust clouds and smoke, flames crackling in wood buildings, running first one way then the other in a chaotic knot around the square, mowed down by yet another shell, inhaling the heat of flames, smoke, dust—three hundred buildings totally destroyed, sixteen hundred badly damaged.