Kerrigan in Copenhagen (15 page)

“You should have been a painter.”

“If I was, I would like to paint you.”
In red panties
, he thinks. “You're quite good-looking, you know.”

“In the words of the High One, ‘He who flatters gets.' ”

Kerrigan's eyes lower to give him time to think, and he shoves his empty plate aside. To his surprise, not only does he feel wonderful, he has also got over his embarrassment about what his Associate did for him the night before when he was unconscious. Born again. He sips the last of his bitter and lights a cigar, looks into her green eyes, and asks, “Did you know that just down the street here, on Randersgade, there's a cellar club where people go to couple openly and watch others couple? Where couples couple with other couples, and men amuse themselves watching their mates couple with strangers and women are enjoyed simultaneously by two and more men?”

Her eyes watch his mouth. “And you have been there?”

“No.”

“Is this too much even for
you
, then?” Her smile is wry.

“It's not that. It's just, you can't get a drink there. What's love without wine?” He trims his cigar, smiles, can see she is titillated, and he loves it.

Then she looks teasingly at him. “Do not forget that I have seen you naked.” Her eyes are bold in their greenness. “You looked interesting that way,” she says, and his blush is now spiced with pleasure.

But there is an undeniable fact to be dealt with first: the emptiness of his belly. “I'm still hungry,” he says.

On
Østerbrogade
, East Bridge Street, they cross
Trianglen
, pass the eastern edge of Black Dam Lake, cross
Lille Triangle
, Little Triangle, and walk along
Dag Hammerskjolds Allé
, named for the Swedish UN secretary general killed in an air crash in 1961 on his way to negotiate over the Congo Crisis—for which he was posthumously awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize that year. Past Olaf Palme's Street—named for the Swedish Social Democratic prime minister assassinated in the 1980s as he and his wife walked home from the movies, never solved—past the elegant old villas that have been purchased for embassies by the British and Russians and the ugly concrete box built by the Americans for theirs. The Americans seem always to have the ugliest embassies—Copenhagen, Oslo, Amsterdam …

They are headed for
Cykelstalden
, the Cycle Stall Café, where there is normally jazz only on Wednesdays from five to seven, but this season the owner, Mogens, has decided to add a single weekend. Inside the station they can see the bar, but she takes his arm and leads him to the escalator down. “We have to fill your stomach,” she says. “It's just one stop on the S-Tog”—the City Train—”and then we will have a feast.”

She leads him onto the train, and soon the tracks go underground and stop at an underground platform and the two of them climb up and cross Nørreport to Fiølstræde, and on
Krystalgade—
Crystal Street—they make a left, pass the synagogue, the main library, to a semibasement café—
Café Halvvejen
. Café Halfway. It is a dark, old-looking place with a curving bar that seats about eight people and five or six tables.

“This looks old,” Kerrigan says.

“It is not so old,” she says. “Only perhaps thirty years or so. But it is good if you are hungry.”

A smiling young woman—the daughter of the owner—comes for their orders and Kerrigan's Associate asks, “May I order for us both? We'll have
biksemad
,” she says. “And Krone snaps. And large Royal drafts.”

The place is filling up with people ordering “unspecified sandwiches”—a kind of a potluck where you get three open sandwiches of varying fish, meat, vegetable, or egg with varying condiments and garnishes for a very modest price. That's what Kerrigan would have ordered, but then the
biksemad
arrives and he realizes he was right to follow his Associate's conviction.

The waitress places before each of them a plate deep with diced pork and diced potatoes and onions, each topped with two fried eggs and
sided by a little pot of pickled beets with a basket of rye and French bread and small packets of butter and swine fat.

How optimistic, thinks Kerrigan, to be hungry and to have food, carefully lifting his brimming glass of Krone snaps to his lips. “Meniscus,” he says. “Or is it menisci?”

“One meniscus,” she says, her green eyes sparkling. “And one womeniscus.”

“You said before that a womeniscus is called a pussy,” he says.

“Can you drink a pussy?” she asks.

Eyes ablaze, he says, “
Yes!
”

Belly full of hash, Kerrigan grows meditative on the train back to Østerport station. He knows the bar they are headed for from many years ago. He was working for a private firm, before he had begun to be a fulltime writer and translator, long before he met and was bewitched by Licia—or whatever she had done to him. He ate lunch at
Cykelstalden
one day and looked up to see the poet Dan Turèll sitting at a nearby table over a bitter snaps. Kerrigan was perhaps in his mid-thirties at the time, and he knew Turèll's writing, knew him as a great fan of the American beats. Kerrigan was wearing a suit and tie because he was on his way to the embassy for an interview.

Turèll saw that Kerrigan recognized him and nodded, and Kerrigan wished to show him he was more than a suit and tie, wanted to open his mouth and howl out Ginsberg's
Howl
, wanted to stand up and chant
Howl's
Whitman epigraph:
Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

He was eating a bowl of vegetable soup with bread and butter and a glass of water, trying to get ready for his interview, and he wanted to send a beer and a bitter over to Turèll—Uncle Danny they called him, or he called himself.

He wanted this man to know that even if he had not yet published anything, even if he had forsaken his poetry and made his living as a glorified clerk, he was more than a suit and tie and bowl of alphabet soup. But he said nothing. He sat there spooning soup and noodles into
his mouth and eating bread and butter, and Dan Turèll finished his bitter and paid, nodded once more at Kerrigan, and left, a tall, slender, bearded man in dark clothes with fingernails polished black, and Kerrigan's path never crossed his again, although he did see him once more, in 1983, in the Saltlageret, where the planetarium stands now, when Uncle Danny introduced a reading by William Burroughs.

Turèll published a hundred books in his forty-seven years, and when he was dying in 1993, in his forties, he made a CD of a dozen poems with background music by a composer named Halfdan E. The next-to-last poem on the album is entitled “Last Walk Through the City,” a reminiscence of a lifetime in a city, a last visit to a last bar for a last bitter, a last rummaging through the boxes outside a secondhand bookshop, a last look at the mothers leaning over the sills of their kitchen windows shouting for their children to come up for dinner, stopping here and there to watch or to shake the city from his coat as a dog shakes water from his fur, all of it so swift, so swiftly passing, and finally he takes a last stroll down the pedestrian street in the company of all his friends that only he can see. And without being sentimental, they say good-bye to it all in silent conversation, and then down by the King's New Square they disappear, and then Uncle Danny does, too, and there is one less shadow in the street.

Turèll was dead shortly after that recording, but he had written the poem nearly twenty years before, a young man imagining his own death, but never imagining it would come so early.

Perhaps it is the remnant of his hangover that causes the sound in Kerrigan's throat, but his Associate glances at him and asks, “Are you all right?”

He nods, not trusting himself to speak, thinking, The lesson here is when you see someone in a café you want to say hello to, whether you know them or not, don't hesitate, say hello.

The train glides into
Østerport Station
, and they ride the escalator up to street level and enter the bar inside the station through a glass door depicting a single, huge-wheeled bike with a minuscule rear wheel. The
jazzmen are already setting up inside Cykelstalden, the Cycle Stall, a long narrow smoky serving house in the back of the station, and his Associate has been conferring with her Moleskine book. She tells him that the station has been in operation since 1897 and Cykelstalden had been a railway authority restaurant, previously much bigger than it is now, with tables out on the street in the warmer months, but now the railway authority has sold or rented most of the old serving house to Nordea Bank, and Cykelstalden has been shoved into the back. For about twenty-five years, weekly jazz concerts were held here. There was an open view from the outdoor tables all the way to the copper dome of
Marmorkirken
, the Marble Church, which rises above the low ocher, red-roofed, and red-shuttered buildings of the old naval housing, the
Nyboder
domiciles.

The manager, Mogens, in his thirties, is behind the bar, tending the taps. A strikingly pretty blonde waitress named Trine expertly carries a tray with half a dozen golden pints through the corridor of tables. The cold beer down Kerrigan's throat is a liquid field of wheat, and a curly-haired man comes over and kisses his Associate on her lips.

“
Hej
, Lars!” she says cheerily and touches his face, and a shadow drifts across Kerrigan's mind. They chat while Kerrigan, unintroduced, studies the poster announcing the Stolle and Svare Jazz Quartet featuring Jørgen Svare on sax, Ole Stolle on trumpet, Mikkel Finn on drums, Søren Kristiansen on piano, and Ole “Skipper” MoesgÃ¥rd on bass. Lars and Kerrigan's Associate are still chatting and Kerrigan's beer is already more than half empty, and the musicians are milling about, not yet playing. He wishes that Lars would go away, and perhaps communicates that wish, for suddenly the handsome, curly-haired man kisses her again on the mouth, nods to Kerrigan, and withdraws, saying, “I have a family to go home to.”

“Who's he?” Kerrigan asks, feeling foolish.

“Lars.”

“I gathered. Is he your lover?” Kerrigan can't help himself and doesn't want to—he wants to broadcast his desire.

“Vouldn't you like to know?”

The piano player starts in then, and Ole Stolle begins to sing “Blueberry Hill,” and Kerrigan gazes off at what, to his uncorrected eyes, is the impressionistic barroom. Through a back window he can see the blurry harbor, and he thinks of Admiral Nelson and the 1801 Battle of Copenhagen.

Nelson, with one detachment of ships, was firing upon the city. The inferior Danish forces were responding so valiantly that the senior British admiral, Parker, signaled Nelson to cease firing. Nelson kept firing, and his first officer called the cease-fire signal to his attention. The one-eyed Nelson took out his telescope but put it to his blind eye. “I see no signal,” he said, and kept the cannons going. Then he sent word to the city that he would set fire to the Danish floating batteries he had captured, with the crews still in them, if the Danes did not surrender. Olfert Fischer, the Danish admiral, carried out the crown prince's order to cease fire, a surrender. That is the origin of the Danish expression that Kerrigan has always heard translated into English as “putting the monocle to the blind eye.”

Kerrigan pictures Nelson atop the fifty-six-meter-tall pillar at the center of Trafalgar Square in London, a monument to his victory over the French-Spanish fleet in 1805, and ponders with bitter satisfaction the fact that in 1966 the IRA blew up the Nelson Pillar in Dublin. He is annoyed at the thought of Nelson, although he realizes that his annoyance stems from the fact that the curly-haired Lars kissed his Associate, twice, on her pretty lips, while he himself has not done so even once, and is further annoyed that he should be annoyed at that, even as the blonde Trine so young and lovely to gaze upon walks past and smiles right into his eyes so his heart jumps. No reason for annoyance. And little sense to hate Nelson for something he did nearly two hundred years ago, but what good was history if one insisted upon putting the monocle to the blind eye? Which, of course, he realizes is precisely what he does constantly.
You are so blind
.

If he cranes his neck, he can just glimpse the green copper dome of the Marble Church through the window, just around the corner from
Adelsgade
—Nobility Street—known in the nineteenth century as “the headquarters of thieves and handlers,” according to High Court Justice Engelhart writing in 1815 in the daily newspaper
Berlingske
. Engelhart referred to “Jews and other people” who dealt in stolen goods in those days when after eleven at night the streets were full of thieves and burglars, and the populace was protected by watchmen armed with mace-headed spears who would look the other way for a coin.

The death penalty for theft was abolished in 1771, but in 1815 there was a cry to reinstate it for burglary. The “new” law of 1789 was described by a leading lawyer in 1809 as a “beautiful specimen of humanity and wisdom.” It provided for two months to two years in the House of Chastisement for a first theft conviction; three to five years for a second offense; and life for a third offense—a nearly two-hundred-year-old legal provision that resembles a new three-strikes law in parts of America.

In 1815 the prisoners rioted against the food; cooked in a copper kettle, it was served coated with a green, poisonous film. The response was sympathetic but a third riot, in 1817, evoked a decision to execute every tenth prisoner by lottery until a forceful protest by public attorney A. S. Ørsted (brother of the discoverer of electromagnetism) resulted in a revocation of the decision. Ørsted was a strong force for the enactment of a more just penal system, but only in 1837 was interrogation by whip abolished.