Kerrigan in Copenhagen (19 page)

“How in the name of God do you get all that into that little notebook, Annelise?”

“My script is very fine,” she says and gazes sweetly at him. “Terrence,” she adds. “To speak a person's name is like a caress,” she says and touches his cheek. “Terrence.”

“Shall we have a touch of the green peril, Annelise?”

“I should prefer the green fairy.”

“I would prefer green panties,” he suggests, fluttering his eyebrows.

She says, “I think you are quoting Schade again,” making a face that somehow seems to encourage by discouraging.

The absinthe comes in tiny measures, two centiliters. They taste it straight but it is too bitter, so they dilute it with sugar and water. She consults the Moleskine once more. “Oscar Wilde said the first makes you see things as you wish they were, the second as they are not, and the third as they really are, which is the most horrible thing in the world.”

Chuckling, he peers at her, one eye cocked.

“You have the leer of the sensualist about you, Mr. Kerrigan,” she says.

“Thank you. And let it be remembered that my subject is Celtic and my season spring. One other thing about absinthe,” says Kerrigan. “They drank it in Tom Kristensen's
Havoc
in a variation known as the Blom cocktail, a kind of martini with four parts absinthe to one part
gin.” He shudders. “I understand people were drinking absinthe here in Copenhagen right up to the nineteen fifties when it was banned.”

The jazz group is setting up now, featuring their old friend Asger Rosenberg with the mellifluous pipes. Kerrigan orders another, though Annelise goes over to white wine. He leans back in his chair and gazes through the window behind Bjørn Holstein, the yellow-shirted drummer, at the long pale street. A child runs in the direction of the lake at the other end of the street beneath a few flurries of April snow. The snow turns to a slushy rain that ends almost as soon as it starts, and sunlight colors the gray buildings across the way.

With his glasses on, he feels pleasure in seeing every brick in the gray-brown wall, and as Asger on bass behind Mogens Petersen on piano sings Benny Carter's “When Lights Are Low,” Kerrigan finds himself contemplating the bricks, thinking of the hands that laid brick on brick to construct the wall, the building, the entire city. Thinking of the hands that made the bricks themselves, the hands that drew the plans, the people who envisaged it all, who led the work. Men driven by ambition, greed, passion, the desire to be part of the force that raised a block of dwellings, a street, a city, a civilization. And the German soldiers who marched in under orders of an evil madman and seized it, tried taking it away.

Asger is now singing Frank Loesser's “I Wish I Didn't Love You So.”

Kerrigan is into his third absinthe and his thoughts ride the music into their own flight of ideas, back to Germany, to Alsace, where one of his father's ancestors fled, driven from Ireland in the eighteenth century by the Penal Laws, which denied Catholics the rights of citizens. Kerrigan's ancestor ended in Baden-Baden, where
his
son's son, Fred, in 1869, under pressure of conscription in the Franco-Prussian War, returned to Ireland and ended in Brooklyn in 1880, the year Maupassant (1850–1893) published his first story, “Boule de suif” (“Butterball”), shortly before his mentor, Gustave Flaubert, died.

In a French humor, Kerrigan contemplates the story that made Maupassant famous and was about the Franco-Prussian War, a French prostitute, a hypocritical group of well-offFrench citizens, and a wasp-waisted
German commander. The German marches his troops into Tôtes, making the pavement resound under their hard rhythmic step, driving the inhabitants into their rooms, experiencing the fatal sensation engendered every time the established order is overturned by force, when life is no longer secure, and the people in a society find themselves at the mercy of unreasoning brutality. The detachments rap at doors and enter the houses and occupy the town.

A small group of people use their influence to obtain permission to leave in a large stagecoach to flee to Dieppe, where they can find safety. In the coach are a variety of people representing a cross section of French society, from a count down to the simple woman mentioned in the title, the eponymous
boule de suif
, a butterball, a chubby woman with a sensual mouth; the implication is that she is little more than a prostitute.

At first the others in the carriage shun her. But their journey through the snowy fields proves much more difficult than expected. They go more than half a day without food and no prospect of getting any. Then they discover that she is the only one who has thought to bring provisions, a well-filled food hamper beneath her seat. Distracted by hunger, one by one they condescend to accept her humbly offered hospitality. They gorge themselves on the delicacies she has packed—chickens, pâté, glacé fruit, sweetmeats, wine, savories. In a few hours they eat food that could have lasted for days.

They come finally to Tôtes, where they are to spend the night, but find that it is occupied by Prussians. The commandant, the tall, slim wasp-waisted man, examines their credentials before they go to their rooms, and he calls aside the
boule de suif
. Elizabeth Rousset. He wants to sleep with her, but she refuses vehemently. In the morning, they find that the stagecoach does not have permission to travel on. When they inquire why, the commandant replies simply, “Because I wish for it not to.”

Each day, he sends a servant to ask Mademoiselle Rousset if she has changed her mind, and each day she assures him she will
never
do so.

Her traveling companions are initially outraged, but soon think it over and tacitly agree to try to convince her to give the man that which
she has so freely given so many others. They conspire to convince her it is her patriotic duty to do so. When with extreme reluctance she does give in, they gather in the dining room and drink champagne to celebrate their impending deliverance—all but one of them, Cornudet, a beer-swilling democrat. The others grow intoxicated and bawdy, tittering over what is being perpetrated in the rooms above. Only Cornudet reprimands them for their disgraceful behavior, but after he has stomped off to bed, another of them, who has lurked in the corridors, spying, tells them that two nights before, Cornudet unsuccessfully propositioned the
boule de suif
, and the others resume their merriment, content that Cornudet's outrage has nothing to do with honor or disgrace but with mere jealousy.

When the couples retire to their chambers, they are charged with passion stimulated by the act of prostitution that will soon free them.

In the morning, however, when the
boule de suif
appears at the carriage that the commandant has now released, they turn their backs on her. And as the carriage continues toward Dieppe, this time it seems that she is the only one who has not thought—or had time—to bring along provisions. The others dine on theirs and ignore her, letting her go hungry while they stuff themselves.

Finally this injustice brims up in her and tears slide down her cheeks, and one of the goodwives mutters that the woman weeps with shame. Cornudet plops his feet on the seat across from him and, with an expression of disdain for the company, whistles “The Marseillaise,” and his tune and the sobs of the
boule de suif
echo between the two rows of people in the shadows.

Asger leans over his bass squinting at the sheet music, singing how in his woman's eyes he sees strange things that her kiss seems to deny, and the image brings Kerrigan back from Alsace as Licia invades his mind again, her eyes that never revealed her lack of love, so he saw no strange things in them that her kiss had to deny.

How still he feels. Perhaps it is the frog-green absinthe. The room
seems frozen as he views its small movements from within the deep stillness of loss in which he is engulfed while Asger croons.

Her fingernails are long and polished a deep green, he notices now, as they lift slowly to caress the back of his neck. His eyes turn toward the green shadows of her gaze.

“Hey, Terrence,” she whispers. “You're not alone.”

It is forbidden
to throw foreign particles
in the VC bowl

—NOTICE ON THE OSLO BOAT

A long walk on a chilly May morning chases demons. For a time. Unshaven but bathed, he hikes briskly, fleeing a fragment of memory about his Associate that unnerves him. Away from the lakes toward Strøget, the Walking Street, a mile-long pedestrian walk curving through the heart of Copenhagen.

At
Gammel Torv
, the Old Square, he pauses to consider
Caritas Springvanden
, the Charity Fountain, Copenhagen's oldest surviving public monument, erected nearly four hundred years ago, between 1607 and 1609. A large, round, late-renaissance-style fountain, a pillar rising from the center on which stands Charity as the
Virgo Lactans
(in Danish
den diegivende jomfru
, literally “the tit-giving virgin”). Charity is holding a little child with a larger one beside, each holding a flaming heart, symbol of the love of God. At their feet three dolphins play, and the fountain's water flows from the virgin Charity's nipples.

Kerrigan gazes upward at the overflowing nipples and remembers tasting Licia's sweet milk when his daughter was an infant. The memory whets the desire of his tongue for a drink of the Lethe waters known as beer. He gazes across
Gammel Torv
to
Ny Torv
—Old Square to New Square—toward the tall columns of the City Court (
Byretten
), built between 1803 and 1816 by the architect C. F. Hansen. The building is tall and light; chiseled above the pillars in Danish are the words ON LAW A LAND IS BUILT from the Danish Law of 1241. In the middle of the square is where beheadings used to be conducted, and off beyond the
court house is
Slutterigade
(Prison Street), beneath the Bridge of Sighs, across which prisoners are led from jail to judgment.

He hikes down toward
Pilestræde
, Willow Lane, to
Charlie's
, but stands peering in through a locked front gate, not open till four. Some twenty years before, this was a bookshop owned by an Englishman named Charlie who was losing money on books, so he turned it into a wine room that is still thriving, even after Charlie's death, though its focus now has turned to beer. Kerrigan perfunctorily rattles the metal gate, turns away, up past the
Bobi Bar
at
Klareboderne 14
, where inter alia journalists and literati drink, but he really doesn't have time. He has made a Tivoli Gardens luncheon appointment in a short while with a Norwegian psychiatrist named Thea Ylajali who has promised him much-needed advice about his Associate and about himself.

He crosses past Nørreport toward the
King's Garden
and enters the gate at
Brandes Plads
with a nod to the bust of Georg Brandes, brother of Edvard, who in 1888, having read the first thirty-page fragment of Knut Hamsun's
Hunger
, correctly predicted for him a great literary future, encouraging him to expand it into a novel, though he could not know Hamsun would end in shame due to a combination of senility and 1930s National Socialist sentiments.

The blood pounds in his pumping legs as he passes Aksel Hansen's sculpture
Echo
from 1888—a realistic representation of the doomed nymph unable to express her love, able only to call out a repetition of the last word spoken to her. Her form is alert and distressed amid the beech trees, and Kerrigan thinks of her vainly pursuing Narcissus, himself doomed to love only his own reflection. He considers the fact that this ancient Greek myth is embodied here in this sculpture in a Danish public garden. Why? As a warning? Against being lost in oneself? He wonders if he will ever again open his heart to love. If he ever really has in the first place.

Kerrigan marvels that in his fifties he is still seriously asking what love is. Beyond passion, custom, tradition, social commitment? He thinks of Licia, asks himself if his love for her had been genuine or mere delusion, and the thought touches off emotion so terrifying he feels he
could be cast in stone by fear, trapped in it like Echo, like Narcissus, like a child hiding under a bed in terror of the unknown gods who drive the wind and rain, hurl spears of lightning, rouse the booming of thunder.

His legs begin to tire, but he will not slow while the demons are after him. He leaves the park at a fast clip, cuts toward
H. C. Andersens Boulevard
, loops around
Dantesplads
, Dante's Place, named for the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) on the occasion of the six hundredth anniversary of his death “so that the Danish people might strengthen their soul with Dante's spirit.”

From the center of the traffic island in the middle of the boulevard rises
Dantesøjlen
, the Dante Pillar, sculpted by Einar Utzon-Frank. Atop the pillar stands not Dante Alighieri but his beloved Beatrice, who, in the paradise of
The Divine Comedy
, guides him to the supreme bliss of contemplating God. Inscribed on the base of the pedestal are the words
Incipit Vita Nova
; Here begins the new life.

Kerrigan crosses to the opposite side of H. C. Andersens Boulevard, wondering if he is lost in a dark wood of his life, far from the right road, if his life will ever find a place for the true bliss of theological contemplation, if he even desires or believes in that. Where is he now in truth? Back amid the song of Augustine's cauldron of unholy loves in the Carthage of Copenhagen? Or in the proper place of mankind, the temporal joys of the carnal world, for the joy of the senses is also consolation while one lives, competing with the
donna gentile
of philosophy. How could he still be so lost in his fifties?