Kerrigan in Copenhagen (14 page)

“Are you jealous?”

“Are you his Mrs., then?” asks the British woman.

“I think I'm his keeper,” she says, without looking from Kerrigan.

“Jesus,” he says. “I love you. You're jealous!”

“Please. Spare me your shit. Sit up and buy me a drink. Better yet, just give me some money, and I'll buy the drink myself.”

“Me, too. Vodka.”

“You can have a Danish water.”

“How the hell'd you find me?” he asks, and she takes a fifty-crown note bearing the portrait of Karen Blixen from the little pile of money on the table, glancing sharply over at the British woman, who huffs and picks up her glass, retires to a table farther toward the front. Kerrigan is sorry to see her go, thinking how nice it might have been to share a bed with both his Associate and the coarse-nosed Brit.

“How
did
you find me?” he asks.

“Easy,” she tells him. “You told me when you called where you would be.”

“Well I might have changed my plans. After your harsh rejection of me. You said you weren't gonna come.”

“I got bored.”

“Ha! You were thinking about me. You missed me,” he says, but she
has already stepped over to the bar. He rallies a bit when she sets a small beer before him, and he lights a Petit cigar, wondering what time it is—he cannot see the clock and is embarrassed to ask. He says, “
Skål
” and “
Nostrovja
” and “
Slanté
” and “
Terviseks
” and “
Multatuli
,” and “Earth, fire, suffering, and ejaculation.”

The effort wears him out. “Now,” he says, “We will take a short but very intense pause,” and lowers his face once again to the cradle of his arms, too blitzed for shame. “Occupational blizzard,” he mutters and is gone, though he hears in the distance sniffing sounds and her voice asking, “What is it that stinks of piss here?”

… the best way to compare
and quickest was by taking off our clothes.
O, we loved long and happily, God knows!

—LOUIS SIMPSON

The very high white ceiling to which he opens his eyes is not familiar. Two blurred, myopic flies move lazily in circles around its faintly crackled surface, the distance to which he tries, blearily and in vain, to determine.

He is in bed. A radio is playing in the next room. Gauzy curtains drift at a tall open window. Beneath an eiderdown, he is naked. And the history of his recent past is obscure. Vague clots of memory tease him from behind a dark curtain.

A door at the corner of the room is ajar and now swings in toward him so he sees his blurred Associate standing there in black jeans and a black tank top.

“He lives,” she says.

He listens, uneasy, with interest, to the words that form on his breath. “I had a very unpleasant dream.”

“It was no dream.”

He fancies that in the blur of her mouth he can see a mixed expression of amusement, chagrin, incredulity, and sadism. He says, “No, I mean, I dreamt I … peed my …”

“It was no dream.”

“You mean I really broke my glasses.”

“Among other things.”

“You
didn't
…?”

She nods.

“Jesus.” His face is hot. “How much do I owe you?”

“If I start taking money for something like that, I shall have to begin to vonder vhat my profession really is.” Her v'ed w's make him aware she is speaking English. Perhaps this situation feels foreign to her. Kerrigan's face is so hot he feels sweat on his brow.

“At least,” she says, “you have the decency to blush.”

She leaves him to his shame, and he buries his mortified head beneath the pillow. The thought of it. Her
seeing
him like that. Removing his wet pants.
Cleaning
him like a baby, or a doddering old man.

He recalls once at a family gathering years ago an aunt had an epileptic fit after dinner—she fell to the floor and began to vomit her entire dinner, it spread like a sea across the hardwood floor. The quantity was awesome. The men present held back in uncertainty and disgust while the women went to work instantly to clean her and the mess. Women could do that.
Would
do that.

And what Licia did.

In washed and ironed drawers, clean shirt, jeans washed and tumble-dried and ironed, hung in the tall open window to air, reborn from a long steaming shower, he brushes his teeth at great length with a throw-away toothbrush, spits in the sink, and studies his pearly whites, which are less than pearly thanks to his increasing cigar appetite. The OTC codeine painkillers his Associate has given him have killed not only his pain but a good bit of his shame as well, and he fairly dances into her enormous plank-floor living room with its three-meter ceiling. Some jazz music on the stereo has him feeling spry-footed, thirties raggy stuff, and he recognizes the voice of Leo Mathisen advising himself to take it easy, smoke a cigar, and let the others do the hard work.

In the sunlight from the window, he can see her age, but she is a trim dancing fay of a girl nonetheless. He wonders if he could get her into bed with him. Always randy with a hangover. Hangover horns. He turns her once across the floor, delighted that she dances along, light as a feather on her feet, in his arms.

“Where are we, by the way?” he asks, endeavoring to slip the question
in nonchalantly in hopes it will not be noticed sufficiently to spotlight the fact he was too drunk yesterday to remember being transported here.

“East side,” she says. “The near east. Holsteinsgade. And I'm not surprised you don't remember.”

“Know it well,” he says briskly. “Home of Holsteins Bodega, where I once went to hear jazz that turned out to be rhythm and blues. Good rhythm and blues. American black guy, great big guy named Dale Smith. Sang ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll,' with the original sexy words that Jesse Stone wrote for Big Joe Turner, not the cleaned-up white-guy cover lyrics.” Kerrigan is feeling hot for her bod, clad in tight black. Hangover horns driving him toward her. And he can see she sees right through him. Her smile is sweetly teasing, and Leo is singing “To Be or Not to Be,” turning Hamlet's question of suicide into a love song.

“I'm hungry,” says Kerrigan.

“You must have
some
constitution, Mr. Kerrigan. I know a good place for lunch.” She gives him a look. “You will keep your powder dry, though, won't you?”

“You,” he says, blushing, “are not a gentleman.”

She blinks. “My ambitions have never been that low.” And, “How sweetly you blush. You know the old Danish proverb, ‘A blush is the color of virtue.' ”

Because she wants to show him another place for lunch, they sit in the sun over a very light brunch of morning bread and cheese, coffee and
gammel dansk
, bitter snaps, while a man and woman in dark clothes dance a tango on the concrete square outside the
Bopa Café
.

With her left hand, his Associate holds the Moleskine open on the table while eating a buttered
rundstykke
roll—a “round piece”—with her right. He notices she occasionally chews with her mouth open so he can see the bread and butter tumbling round on her pink tongue.

He says, “Don't chew with your mouth open, honey,” and she pats her mouth with a paper napkin. “
Tak for sidst
, ey?” she says. Danish for “Thanks for the last time we met,” but also a euphemism for revenge.

“Right. You can have it from the same dresser drawer,” he says, another Danish euphemism for tit-for-tat evening up.

“This was the headquarters of one of the main resistance parties during the Second World War,” she tells him. “BOPA is an acronym for the Danish Borgenes Parti, the Citizens' Party.” She daubs again at her pretty lips with the napkin, chews, swallows, sips coffee, sips bitter snaps, says, “Ummm,” and continues. “Leo Mathisen, in fact, played various places during the war. He was Danish but he wrote and sang in English. English was forbidden by the German occupation forces, so he just sang gibberish versions of the words. Dr. Werner Best was the German commandant under the occupation,” she continues. “He picked the best house in Copenhagen, a mansion just up the coast, actually right outside the city. Your ambassador has it as his residence now.”

“Do you remember the war?” he asks.

As she butters a slice of Graham's bread, she is silent. Then she looks up at his face, as though about to speak, but seems to think better of it and reaches for her Moleskine. She gives him a rundown on the occupation of Denmark, and he watches with infatuation her lips, which he longs unbearably to kiss.

On April 9, 1940, the Germans marched in over the southern border of Jutland. There was a little bit of fighting and an air assault as well, but the Danes decided not to commit heroic suicide. Unlike Norway, where the resistance had the mountains to hide in and fight from, Denmark is completely flat. There were no natural barriers. Also, unlike the Norwegian king, the Danish king, Christian X, stayed in his capital and rode on horseback through Copenhagen every day, as was his custom, all by himself, no guards, no escort.

The Danish ambassador in Washington, D.C., was astute enough to place Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands under the protection of the allied forces, so the Germans were unable to make strategic use of them, which could have been a catastrophe.

Germany plundered the Danish agriculture to feed its troops under the pretense that they would pay back. Some Danes, of course,
did
make money. There was also clandestine ferrying of Jews and communists
across the sound most nights to Malmö, to the safety of Swedish neutrality, particularly during October 1943 when the gestapo attempted to round up the Jews in Denmark. The Swedes were very helpful. They also made a lot of money. Being neutral, they could help everyone. And the boatmen made money, too. But they took chances for it as well.

She lays a slice of medium-old cheese on her buttered sour bread, bites, chews with closed lips, sips coffee, and he imagines how interesting her kiss would be, tasting of old cheese and the nice bittersweet aroma of coffee with cream and the harsh taste of bitter snaps.

Yet he cannot forget that expression on her face earlier, as she looked at him and seemed to be about to tell something.

She continues: In 1943, things started getting hotter. By August, there was a general strike, shooting in the streets. Hostages were taken. The Danes scuttled their own navy in the harbor, and in September, the Freedom Council was set up. In January 1944, the gestapo, accompanied by Danish police, liquidated the outspoken poet-priest Kaj Munk (1898–1944), dragged him from his home and put a bullet in the back of his neck and left him in a ditch.

Throughout that year, there was sabotage and countersabotage. It was nowhere near what happened elsewhere in Europe, but it was bad enough. Nocturnal arrests, liquidations, random terror by the occupying forces and liquidations by the underground, too—perhaps not all of them justified. The lawful police were replaced by a makeshift police department set up by the Germans—the
hilfspolizei
—called
Hipo
for short or, more often,
Hipo svin
, Hipo swine, made up mainly of ex-convicts and criminals.

Meanwhile, in Denmark, hundreds of thousands of German refugees were streaming north from Germany, two hundred thousand in all, starved, filthy, lice-infested. It was clear Germany was losing the war; the question for the Danes was whether Denmark would be the last battlefield. But on May 4, 1945, the Germans capitulated, and Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway were liberated the next day.

Copenhagen was filled with fleeing German officers and Nazis speeding for the border in their jeeps. There was shooting in the streets, and candles burned in all the windows of the towns and cities—all the
candles that Danes always kept in ready because the Germans frequently would cut off the power supply. It was a spontaneous display. The streets of Copenhagen glowed with thousands of candles in the windows. To this day, more than half a century later, there are still people who put lighted candles in the window on May 4 in remembrance of the end of the five-year occupation by the German “cousins.”

“You know,” Kerrigan says, “people say a lot about the European Union. But at least it stopped most of the fighting that's torn Europe apart over the years. Germany against France. France against England. France against the rest of Europe. Germany and Italy against Europe. England occupying Ireland for centuries. All now finally annulled by a treaty tying their fates all together. The United States of Europe.”

Her green eyes sparkle, and instead of singing her praises, he sings the praise of her land.

“Shakespeare picked the right country, the right climate, the right amount of darkness for his melancholy Dane, although I admit I've grown to love the extremes of Danish seasons and light—the dark winters suit me. And the white nights of summer suit me even better. There is nothing like those white nights. The long late sunsets, the yellow skies—hell,
every
color! And the birds singing at three in the morning. You know the Belgian painter Magritte? His painting
Empire of Light
? It purports to show a paradox, as many of Magritte's paintings do—a dark city street beneath a bright sky. But to me that is a realistic portrait of a Danish summer night. You know, you're at a party that runs to half past two and step out in the garden for air and the sky is growing light, the birds are singing—even if the world around you is still dark, it's sunrise. Deep winter, too. In some ways, deep winter is even better. I remember standing on Langebro once—Long Bridge—you know, the one that connects Copenhagen with the island of Amager, in midwinter, and there was snow on the ground, and the sky was white as the snow, and everything else, the water, the bridge, the ships in the water, the smoke rising from their stacks, was shades of white and gray and black. It was a pure black-and-white world. But as I stood there watching,
suddenly my eye began to pick out little blots of color—the red of a bird's plumage, a woman's long wool coat, the green of your eyes …”