Kerrigan in Copenhagen
Read Kerrigan in Copenhagen Online
Authors: Thomas E. Kennedy
For Copenhagen,
city of the ever-changing light,
with love
With deep and sincere thanks to
Anton Mueller & Helen Garnons-Williams &
all their associates at Bloomsbury
Nat Sobel & Judith Weber & all their associates at Sobel Weber
Roger & Brenda Derham & Valerie Shortland
Duff Brenna, Walter Cummins, Greg Herriges, Mike Lee,
Robert Stewart & Gladys Swan
With special thanks to
Junot DÃaz, Alain de Botton & Andre Dubus III for their invaluable encouragement
Always for Daniel, Isabel, Søren & Leo
Six: A Foray into the Black Pool
Kerrigan, Kerrigan,
Whither rovest thou?
âGILGAMESH
Terrence Einhorn Kerrigan is in love.
When his wife and child were taken from him, he told himself he would never love a woman again, and he never has, not in the way that requires a surrender of the sovereign spirit. But a man must love nonetheless, and thus a love affair begins this storyâa love affair with a city.
Here he has made his home, returning after the death of his parents to the city of his mother, a city whose moods are unpredictable, unfathomable, unimpeachable as a woman's, often still and dark, perfidious as its April weatherânow light and sweet as the touch of a summer girl who fancies you, now cold as snow, false as ice, merciless as the howling beating wind that swoops around his building, now quietly enigmatic as the stirring of the great chestnut trees that line the banks of the lake beneath his windows.
The city is Copenhagen, the city of the Danish smile and blue eye, the Danish national character that one of its great unknown sons, Tom Kristensen, described in his great unknown 1930 novel
Hærværk
, made into the great unknown 1977 film
Havoc
, as “false blue eyes and blond treachery.”
Here he will clothe himself in its thousand years of history, let its wounds be his wounds, let its poets' songs fill his soul, let its food fill his belly, its drink temper his reason, its jazz sing in the ears of his mind, its light and art and nature and seasons wrap themselves about him and keep him safe from chaos.
It is the city of a hundred vices and fifteen hundred serving houses, bars, cafésâmore of them than one will ever come to know in a lifetime
without a very major effort. Kerrigan has decided to make that effort. He came to Copenhagen to find serenity, to find a life, and was surprised to find love, and then astonished to lose it, and he searched for it, searched his heart for it, but like Gilgamesh he kept finding instead a Divine Alewife who filled his glass and chanted:
Kerrigan Kerrigan
Whither rovest thou?
What you seek, you shall not find.
Rather, let full be your belly.
Make merry day and night
And forget the darkness.
Of each day make you a feast of light.
Let your raiment be sparkling and fresh.
Wash your head and bathe in water.
Scrape smooth the stubble from your jowls.
And reach for the hand of the little one
Who reaches for yours.
Lay with the woman who delights in you,
For this is the greatest a man can achieve.
Kerrigan agrees, even if there is no little one anymore. Gone the woman who delights in him. Gone the child. And that is how all stories end. With the naked, withered Christmas tree tilted against the trash barrel.
Yet he knows no better city in which to follow the Alewife's bidding, as far as he is able.
He does not know precisely how many serving houses there are in Copenhagen. He has not yet decided how many of them he will visit over what time scale or how many of them he will include in his book. He has no idea what might happen in each of the places he visits, what adventures he might encounter, what dark nights of the soul he might descend to, what radiant bodies he might win with a flattering tongue.
And not to know, he decides, is good.
Whiskey, it keepeth the reason from stifling.
âRAPHAEL HOLINSHED, 1577
Kerrigan's path to meet his Research Associate and her jade-green eyes leads him diagonally across the Botanical Gardens to Nørreport. He hoofs over to Fiolstræde; then, at the intersection of Skindergade, it occurs to him that he still has some time and that there are three choices open to him. There are always three choices.
He has a good hour before he will meet his Associate and considers whether to turn left to the
Booktrader
, right to
Charlie Scott's Pub
, or continue directly forward through Jorck's Passage to
Farrelly's Irish Rover
.
If he goes left to the Booktrader, at Skindergade 23, he will enjoy the company of his good friend, the antiquarian bookseller Lars Rasmussen, in addition to the possible company of an artist and a bookbinder, Natacha and Iben, two lovely young women who are often there, and diverse others: artists, singers, musicians, poets, professors, writers, a criminologist friend named Dave from New York who includes Kerrigan on his field trips to Danish prisons, an ornithologist in the employ of Kastrup airport to discourage the birds from being sucked into jet motors, and a found-art practitioner who collects what she calls
kussesten
âstones found along the beach and in the forest that resemble
kusse
, Danish for
cunt
âthus, cunt-stones. (Danes rarely call a spade a shovel.) At the Booktrader, Kerrigan would stand leaning on the remainder table of books for a buck and a half (ten crowns) beneath the elaborate plaster sculpture on the ceiling titled
The Book Lovers
by Kasper Holtenâa wreath of nine naked figures coiling out of a book, each performing some variety of erotic act on the next and the whole wreath of them
spiraling toward a distant heart. But he will also be tempted to drink the wine poured liberally by Lars into glasses that hold more than they would appear to, and on top of what he has had already he will get drunk and show up late and sloppy to meet his Associate, and he does not wish to see his bad behavior reflected in her jade-green eyes.
If he goes right, to Charlie Scott's at Skindergade 53, he will have the opportunity to enjoy Jazz Under the Stairs, featuring the astonishingly energetic Australian clarinetist and singer Chris Tanner, and possibly bump into guitarist and composer Billy Cross, who is the nephew of Lionel Trilling and does the best arrangement of “Blue Suede Shoes” that Kerrigan has ever heard and who inter alia has been lead guitar for Bob Dylan and occasionally comes into Charlie Scott's, although there, Kerrigan no doubt will drink many pints of inexpensive pilsner and will also be drunk and late for his Associate.
On the third hand, he is more hungry than he is thirsty. He has been roaming this midmorning and early afternoon around the north side, sampling pints here and there, and wandered past the building at Skt. Hans Gade 18 where Knut Hamsun in 1890 wrote the novel
Hunger
about a consciousness starving to express itself. Kerrigan is literally feeling peckish, and he knows that if he walks straight ahead through Jorck's Passage, a half turn to the right will put him at Vimmelskaftet 46, on the Walking Street, outside Farrelly's Irish Rover, where at all hours he can get a full or, alternatively, diminutive Irish breakfast served by his favorite Irish-American waitress, Cathy.
His choice has been chosen.
It's a bit nippy for the outdoor tables so he steps inside the great dark cave of the bar, and Cathy greets him instantly with her Chicago accent, “Gad, Kerrigan, where you been hidin'? Want Irish breakfast? Big or little?”
“Little, please.”
“You always let me down!”
Round and blue-eyed with some manner of sweet street-smart curl to her lips, she approaches his table with cutlery wrapped in a skimpy green paper napkin and a tumbler of ice and amber fluid.
“What's this?” Kerrigan asks with alarm, and sips.
“It's Paddy's,” she whispers, “and keep your voice down, cancha? You wanna get me in trouble?”
“A goddamn full glass of Irish whiskey? I can't drink all this on top of what I already had!”
“Aw, you fuckin' drama queen!”
“I have a meeting with my research associate!”
“And you don't wanna fuck
that
up!”
“I can't drink this.”
“You always disappoint me, Kerrigan! Get it down your neck now. It's good for you.”
Despite himself he sips the Paddy's, knowing he must come up for a spell of air soon, and suddenly knows that that air must be the air of Dubh Linâfort of the Dane, Garrison of the Saxonsâon the banks of the River Liffy. Why, he wonders, does he feel he must go to Dublin? The compulsion seems to take force from a constellation of coincidences: the fact that the lake outside the window of his east side apartment here is called Sortedams Sø, which means Black Dam Lake, and Dubh Lin means Dark Pool, and his own name, Kerrigan, is originally Ciarogan, a double diminutive of
ciar
âdark, blackâand incredibly his mother's maiden name was Mørk, Danish for dark. He discovered these facts one by one with an increasing sense of amazement. Moreover, Dublin was also founded by the Danes twelve hundred years ago, and his branch of the Kerrigans originated, according to his father, on the curving street that is said to be the bank of the Dark Pool into which the Vikings sailed.
He intuits a connection between the Dark Pool and the Black Lake, between the Vikings there and the Irish here, between his Irish father and his Danish mother and the origin of his name, that he might find a life in wrapping the cloak of these international, cross-cultural, historical facts around him, the life and love that had been stolen from him by Licia.
This is at least part of it. This is definitely part of it, part of what he must fill his mind with. Sometimes, lying in his solitary bed some nights, some mornings, he feels disconnected from all of time, existing purely
in the present, as though he has had no past, as though he only just arrives each moment in the present and all of the past is mere illusion, the future melting back into the present, the present disappearing in the unfathomable bottomless past â¦
Maybe
, he thinks,
I have been drinking too much
.
The time is not right, he knows, to go to Dublin. First he must meet his newly employed Associate and must begin his project with her.
He manages to get out of the Irish Rover after only one whiskey by leaving money on the table, ducking out while Cathy's in the back. He leaves a generous tip to discourage her from future compulsions to serve him gratis whiskey. He dodges around to Skindergade again, heading for Frederiksberg, where he is to meet his Associate, at Wine Room 90.
And now it is there againâthe illusion. Suddenly the day is gone, and he and his Associate sit close in the little taxi, knees touching occasionallyâby accident? Kerrigan wonders. Late-afternoon pastel facades of west Copenhagen reel past the window on either side. Secretly he hopes their project will never conclude.
Quite another matter is his Associate herself, a handsome woman of seven and fifty years who in her youth was a beauty.
Why is a young girl so pretty and why does it last so short a time?
Søren Kierkegaard asked in
Either/Or
. Or was it in
Seducer's Diary
? Same thing. On the other hand, his Associate is not bad at all. Not bad at all, Kerrigan speculates. Anyway he himself is only a year younger.
His project, what he has contracted for, what he is being paid to do, is to select a sampling of one hundred of the best, the most historic, the most congenial of Copenhagen's 1,525 serving houses and write them up for one of a one-hundred-volume travel guide:
The Great Bars of the Western World
. Kerrigan thinks of himself as a failed poet, which is a less complicated concept than a failed human being, and he has accepted this commission under false pretenses. He does not wish the book to be written. He wants only to research it. Forever. For whatever of forever remains him.