Kerrigan in Copenhagen (2 page)

They have just come from
Wine Room 90
in the Frederiksberg section, an elegant old establishment that, however, drove him to distraction because of management's insistence that beer be tapped in accordance with some scientific principles that involve frequent work with a spatula in foam and require twenty minutes to draw a single pint. Which meant for him more thirst than the quaffing of it. If it takes twenty minutes to tap a pint and ten minutes to drink it, a serious time deficit is involved. The minutes haunt him with their mocking brevity. All glasses are essentially empty, defining an empty space. Every clock wears the face of a pompously indifferent sadist, measuring life's depletion with a series of equally measured hand strokes.

Kerrigan is the writer, his Associate the researcher; he the form, she the content—or, in another more hopeful context, she will be the form and he the content. As a body fills a grave, he thinks, remembering a line from Malamud's
Fidelman
. Kerrigan is a man of quotes. They substitute nicely for thought. And he is well versed in dates, which seem to place him in history, in relation to persons and events. It is nice to be placed and to have a substitute for thought. He is aware of this as well as of the double bind of his ironic nature. No matter.
Enivrez-vous. Could man be drunk forever, on liquor, love or fights, / Lief would I rise of morning, and lief lie down of night / But men at times are sober, they think by fits and starts, / and if they think they fasten their hands upon their hearts
.

He feels himself perched on the edge of the turning millennium, knows what this past millennium contained, or at least to some personal extent the last fifty-six years of it, yet speculating on the contents of the next seems to him like practicing science fiction.

“Why must it take so long to fill my glass?” he demanded of her, nursing the little bit of beer remaining of his first pint.

“You have an interesting accent,” she said. “Where did you learn your Danish?”

“In bed,” snapped Kerrigan.

“Did you have many instructors?” she asked with a teasing curl to her lip.

He chuckled, sipped a drop of the remaining beer. “You didn't answer
my
question,” he said. “Why does it take so long?”

On the table before her was a slender Moleskine notebook filled with the minute spidery scrawl of her penmanship, a seemingly endless cornucopia of facts. She ran her slender, chiseled finger down the handwritten contents page, thumped with a red pointed fingernail the line she was seeking, and flipped halfway through the book. “I have that right here,” she said with a smile. “They tap it very slowly so the acid foams off, giving it a soft and stomach-friendly taste …”

“Stomach friendly?” he said with a smirk. Her smile was both warm and sphinxlike, slightly naughty, for she could see, he saw, that when he looked into her luminous, in this light, forest-green eyes, the pupils ringed with a thin circle of distinct yellow, he was harboring naughty thoughts about her. This was not the first time she had assisted him with research. Last time they worked together they were close to getting involved and almost did, but not quite. He was about to be a husband then, soon to be a father. Free now, he would not mind taking up where they left off then, though he deeply and sincerely does not want to get involved.

But at the rate the silver-bearded, white-aproned bartender tapped beer, Kerrigan could not get out of Wine Room 90 on Old King's Road fast enough.

Now, in the taxicab, she leans toward him, unbuttoned forest-green woolen coat hanging open, leaving him to wonder if it is her wish for him to see there what he sees in her décolletage—what the Danes call “the cavalier passage” and in English has the harsh and uncharming title of “cleavage.” Always a mystery. Devilish strategy. How lovely, he thinks, is the process of the grain in the blood, and says, “I see a sweet country. I could rest my weapon there. That's a quote from
The Tain
.”

“
The Tain
,” she says, and shifts to English. “Is that not Irish high poetry? Let me respond from Odin's
Sayings of the High One
: “Remember always to praise the voman's radiant body, for he who flatters, gets.” The undertone is ironic, though irony in Danish, Kerrigan knows, is often a mask of affection.

Now, however, she asks the taxi to stop outside the
Railway Café
on Reventlow's Street. The sign outside the bar says
Øl
in red neon and
Bier
in flat blue. A sidewalk placard gives the English translation, BEER. A life-size cardboard cutout of a golden Tuborg girl in an aquamarine frame stands alongside the door, holding a tray with a bottle of gold Tuborg.

“This von is a must,” his Associate says.

He loves the way she says “one.” “Why?”

“Because I haf to pee.”

Kerrigan pays the driver, gets a receipt, and follows her, his leather satchel crooked beneath his arm. In the satchel he carries his fat, oversize, annotated, dog-eared paperback copy of
Finnegans Wake
around with him. Not that he expects ever to finish reading it, but its presence alleviates any danger of his having to worry about being alone with his mind.

Inside the bar there is no tap, so he orders two bottles of green Tuborg while his Associate finds the loo. He sits at the bar and surveys the art on the walls: paintings of locomotives, street scenes of old Copenhagen, a faithful dog, a plashy seascape, photos of steam engines, and a long glass case of HO gauge model trains. This is, after all, across the street from the central station.

“Nice-looking pictures,” he says to the nice-looking, plump, blonde, fortyish barmaid.
A man can never know too many barmaids
, he thinks.

“Yeah,” she says. “Some of them.”

“When was this establishment established?”

With one eye closed she puffs her cigarette, and it wobbles between her lips as she speaks. “Long time. Three generations in any case.”

Kerrigan notices there is a functioning transom over the entry door, tilted open. “Don't see many of them around anymore.”

“You're right enough there,” the barmaid says without looking at him and trims her cigarette on the edge of a heaped-full black plastic ashtray.

Half a dozen men sit at a long table gambling for drinks with a leather cup of dice—raffling, they call it. As Kerrigan sips his green, an old guy
comes out of the gents' while a short, broad, crew-cutted woman barges through the front door and stands in the middle of the floor. From a large carpetty purse she pulls out a pistol and points it at the old guy, orders, “Hands up or trousers down!”

Kerrigan gasps, ducks. The woman shouts, “You're all wet!” and squeezes the trigger. A limp jet of water squirts into the man's face. Then, giggling hysterically, she puts the water pistol away again.

“Daft goose,” the old man mutters and hobbles away, mopping his face with a gray handkerchief, while the woman shouts, “Good day!” and looks at the barmaid. “My God, you do look sexy today, sweetheart!”

“I usually do,” says the barmaid quietly, and the crew-cutted woman moves to the bar. “Damn, give me a beer, my wife's been breaking my balls!” Then she turns to the older man beside her, says, “Tivoli is open.” Danish for “your fly is unzipped.” The old man says, “Out doing research again, ey?” She reaches and rearranges the material around his flies, saying, “If you had that cut a little different, it might look like you really had something there, old fellow.”

“Sweetheart!” the man grumbles in his gravelly voice, “my nuts have been hanging there just like that since before you were born!”

They both laugh, and she turns to Kerrigan and says, “I got to catch a train back to Sorø so my wife can start breaking my balls again. So if you were thinking of buying me a bitter, you'll have to be fast. I don't have much time.”

Kerrigan lifts his beer. “Did you say Sorø! That's a charming place. The old Sorø Academy. The Eton of Denmark. The great Ludvig Holberg is buried there in the chapel. I was there once.”

“
Once
?” she says. “Try and
live
there.” She makes mouths of both hands and has them gossip rapidly at each other. “Bla bla bla bla bla …”

His Associate emerges from the loo and takes a place at the bar on the other side of Kerrigan.

“Sorry, honey,” says the crew-cutted woman. “I saw him first.”

“You're velcome to him,” she says.

“Well, wait, hel-lo!” says the woman, looking more closely at the Associate. “Where have
you
been all my life, sweetheart?”

“Growing up,” says the Associate, and the woman barks a single note of laughter, says, “Don't go away now, I just have to water my herring.”

“So what do you have in your Moleskine book about this joint?” Kerrigan asks. His Associate digs it out of her bag, and Kerrigan notices several starfish stickers on the black cover. Endearing, he thinks, as she pages through. “Nothing,” she says finally. “Only that the street was named for Christian Ditlev Frederik Reventlow, 1748–1827, early in this century. He led the way to the end of adscription, which freed the serfs.”

The crew-cutted woman swaggers back toward the bar. Sotto voce, Kerrigan suggests, “Shall we drink up?” He orders a bitter for the crew-cutted woman to keep her occupied at the bar when they leave.

They cross the street and move on, look back at a place called
The Stick (Pinden)
, and Kerrigan notices that it has a typical feature of many Copenhagen serving houses. From across the street it looks positively uninviting, particularly with the grafftion its side door. Approached from the same side of the street, however, it is a little more welcoming, with a cutout of a kindly-looking waiter bearing a tray of beer steins by the door. And inside, when they go to hang their coats, the large wardrobe window, painted with a seated black cat, is even better.

At the bar, they order: a green for him, a bottle of sweet red Tuborg for her. She reads her notes to him. “This place opened in 1907 and was acquired a dozen years later by Betty Nansen. You know, the actress—the theater in Frederiksberg near where we were at Wine Room 90, the Betty Nansen Theater. Its name, The Stick, came from a game of chance played with matchsticks.” She leans closer and lowers her voice. “Only women are allowed to serve in this bar. ‘
Kun en pige
,' ” she says. “
Only a Girl
.”

“What's that?”

“A book. By Lise Nørgaard. The woman who wrote
Matador
, the television play that ran in about fifty parts telling the whole story of Danish social changes from about 1920 to maybe the late '60s?
Only a Girl
is Nørgaard's memoir of her life in the 1920s and '30s. Her father opposed her doing anything but girlish stuff.”

“Isn't that like against the law or something?” Kerrigan asks her. “Only to hire women for the bar?”

She comments with an inhalation that is not the usual inhalated Scandinavian affirmative but a subtly bitter expression of irony. He puzzles over it for a moment, then remembers another story she told him last time they were together. Originally it had been her wish in life to be a journalist, but she was “blocked from it.”

“How blocked?” he asked.

“Well,” she said mildly. “Let's say it was because I have a cunt.”

She was a good student, judged “
egnet
”—suitable—to proceed from primary school to secondary school in the academic line. There are three categories: suitable, unsuitable, possibly suitable. When a Danish child is thirteen or fourteen, one of these is stamped upon him or her. (His ex-wife Licia revealed to Kerrigan, if she was telling the truth, that she was judged “unsuitable.” But he could never be sure whether she was telling the truth. About anything.) The novelist Peter Høeg, best known for his
Smilla's Sense of Snow
(1992), also wrote a novel entitled
De MÃ¥ske Egnede
—literally
The Possibly Suitable
, although it was published under the translated title
Borderliners
, which does not quite convey the harshness of it. Høeg himself had been judged “possibly suitable” when he was a boy.

But Kerrigan's Associate was suitable and went on to gymnasium—the Danish secondary school for those judged suitable to go on to university, which she was. Her father, himself a lawyer at a publishing house, pulled strings to get her a job as a secretary in the editorial offices of Copenhagen's oldest daily newspaper,
Berlingsketidende—Berling's Times
. He said getting into the offices was a foot in the door, better than university. She worked there for a year waiting for the head of personnel to do what her father had promised he would, begin to try her out on small journalistic assignments, obituaries, social notices. Finally, when nothing happened, she approached him about it, and he expressed surprise. He told her there was never any connection between the administrative and editorial or journalistic functions at the paper,
that it had never been his idea that she should do anything more than secretarial work. “
Du
er
kun en pige
,” he said with a smile. “You
are
just a girl.”

“He really said that to you?” Kerrigan asked.

“It was a conservative paper. It was 1959. And he was a conservative guy.”

Kerrigan's Associate confronted her father about it, and he denied ever having promised anything of the sort. She should be happy to work for that fine newspaper. It was a good, solid job. She didn't have to keep those terrible hours journalists did. It was a good job for a young woman who was not yet married, and she wouldn't turn hard the way journalists do.

Kerrigan gazes at her.

“I was stupid,” she tells him now. “By then I was used to the money. I didn't know how to fight. Maybe I was afraid to. I met a handsome young lawyer from the newspaper's legal department. He was seven years older than me and I was …”