Kerrigan in Copenhagen (3 page)

“You were a knockout. I've seen pictures of you. Remember? You're still a knockout.”

Whether she remembers or not she does not say; instead she says, “I had a cunt instead of a prick. So here I am now, nearly forty years, two husbands, three daughters, and five grandsons later. I see some of them. Once a year. I work as a freelance research secretary. On the weekends I go barefoot around my east side flat in leotards and play at being an artist. I know it's no excuse,” she says. “But you know what really galls me? Many years later, my father gave me a copy of that book for Christmas.
Only a Girl
. He got Lise Nørgaard to sign it for me. He knew her. I just don't understand what he was thinking. Maybe he wasn't thinking at all. Maybe he just took it for granted. Because I have a cunt.”

“I certainly hope you don't hate your cunt.”

“I really like my cunt,” she says. “But it has been something of a handicap at times.”

“‘The Speed of Darkness,' ” Kerrigan says.

Her eyes hang a question toward him, and he recites a poem by Muriel Rukeyser, as best he can remember it, about the chain of consequence that the person who hates the cunt hates the child.

The tilt of her head and her mouth expresses skepticism.

“American poet,” he says. “She died almost twenty years ago.” He pauses for a moment, thinking back to other events, Licia, his babies, but jettisons the memory and continues, “She was writing about the poet not yet born who will be the voice of our time.”

When she says nothing, he asks politely, “You say you have daughters?”

“Three. And five grandchildren. Two of the girls live in the U.S., the third in Canada. Once a year one or the other visits me. Or I visit them.”

He sees a shadow in her gaze. “It really is incredible to think that in my lifetime, only like thirty, forty years ago, women were mocked, cheated of their rights, even had to use titles that revealed whether or not they were married, for Christ's sake!” And thinks of Licia—the new woman. He slides down from the barstool. “Shall we move on?”

“Don't forget your little briefcase now.”

The thick novel bulges in the satchel. She asks what he is reading, and he finds himself telling her a little about Joyce and Dublin as they step out into Reventlowsgade.

“Lot of connections between Dublin and Scandinavia,” he says. “Dublin was settled by Vikings, especially the Danes. Joyce believed he had Danish blood in him.”

“How is the book?” she asks.

“A rough trudge. But it has its merry moments.”

Across Reventlowsgade, his Associate points at the back of the Astoria Hotel. She has her Moleskine open in her hands. “When that was built in 1935, they nicknamed it
Penalhuset
—the Penal House. For obvious reasons.”

“Good illustration for Kafka's ‘Penal Colony,' ” says Kerrigan. “Moody art. You paint, yourself? I hope I can get to see your paintings?”

“A little,” she says.

Passing the Central Station, he glances down from the sidewalk
bridge to the tracks below. He thinks of the poet Dan Turèll, the long poem he wrote in his thirties, the scene set in this station, imagining his last walk through the city; Turèll could not have known, in his thirties, the poem was predicting his early death at forty-six of throat cancer.

They cross Vesterbrogade—West Bridge Street—past
Fridhedsstøtten
, the Liberty Pillar, erected between 1792 and 1797. “It is to commemorate the liberation of the serfs,” she says, “with the repeal in 1788 of adscription; before this, the peasants were the property of the person who owned the land they worked. The pillar is mentioned many times in Tom Kristensen's 1930
Havoc
. You know, Ole ‘Jazz' Jastrau in
Havoc
lived just around the corner from the Railway Café where we just were,” she says. “He walks past this monument numerous times in the novel—I think that is saying he belongs in a way to the newspaper he works for.”

They are passing Tivoli on the other side of the street. “Look at the trees!” she exclaims. They pause to gaze across Vesterbrogade at the front of the Tivoli Park. “The park is more than a hundred and fifty years old now,” she tells him, “and the trees are just that shade of green only once a year.”

She leads the way to Axeltorv—Axel Square—bounded by the broad front of the Scala Building, the Circus Building across the other end, and the many colors of the Palace Theater, which looks like a birthday cake.

She says, “Those rainbow pastels in the Palace Theater were done by Paul Gernes, the painter who overturned the idea that hospital rooms have to be sterile white. Which is especially nice for sick kids, to be surrounded by a rainbow of colors. Do you have children, yourself?” she asks, and he feels his face harden.

“Let's not go there,” he mutters, caught unawares by the question at a moment when he felt he was expanding, being filled with a sense of place. To know facts is to have a handle.

She says, “I just thought … you'd make a good father. You're gentle. And enthusiastic.”

They stand over the sheer vast pool of the shimmering fountain, so
full it seems convex, always about to spill over, but it never does. He is battling memories: how his two-year-old daughter would sit on his lap and point at things for him to name—lamp, table, chair, carpet, repeating the words after him, the delicate features of her fresh-minted face, same blue eyes as her mother's. He thinks again of Licia, thinks,
Cunt!
and feels the anger as further loss. Gabrielle would be five now, the little one three. He didn't even know her name. If there really was a little one. If it was his. If it was just another lie.

He remembers the Rukeyser poem he quoted for his Associate in the bar, and suddenly in his mind he's jotting the line of a poem—
the cunt giveth and the cunt taketh away
—and in his mind he slashes out the line and reminds himself that he is not a poet.

When he says nothing more, the Associate turns a page in her Moleskine. “This square was built in 1863 when the old Central Station was opened,” and he welcomes the lilting, soothing feminine music of her voice. “The square is named for Bishop Absalon, who founded Copenhagen in 1167, although evidence now proves the city is actually older than that, from the last half of the year 1000. You can see Absalon's statue on a rearing horse wielding an ax down on
Højbro Plads
, just off the
Strøget
, the Walking Street.”

“A bishop wielding an ax? Interesting. He should ride his horse over to the Town Hall Square and do battle with the evil Burger King.”

She chuckles, goes on: “The Danish literary critic Georg Brandes spoke at the unveiling of the statue in 1902 and pointed out that the ax was not only a weapon of battle but also a tool of civilization—to chop trees and firewood. Absalon, by the way, is the Hebrew version of the Danish name Axel.”

“Here's
Axelborg Bodega
,” she says, and leads him in. Glad to be delivered of bottled beer, he orders a pint and sits unspeaking, from time to time lifting his glass to his mouth. He does not toast and she respects his silence, which does not fail to escape his attention—he feels her watching him and wishes she would stop, but at the same time thinks of
her question about children and hopes she does not pursue the subject. To make sure she doesn't, he changes it.

“I hope I can see your pictures sometime,” he says.

“Let's see,” she says. “If you're ever hungry and low on funds, they serve an excellent
skipperlabsskovs
here—lobscouse, sailor's stew, a huge portion of potatoes and boiled beef in a pale gravy made with beer—it's served with dark rye bread and pickled beets.”

The place is nearly empty, and Kerrigan slowly relaxes, absently watching a man who sits alone at an adjoining table. The man is about his own age, drinking a bottle of Tuborg
PÃ¥ske Bryg
, Easter Brew, strong beer, 7 to 8 percent, brewed around the Easter season for a few weeks every year. It has been brewed for over a century. The day it hits the streets—known since 1952 as P-Day (Easter Beer Day)—the young people in Copenhagen go on a rampage with it.

The man glances at them a couple of times—wistfully, Kerrigan thinks.

“What does your little book have about Danish beer?” he asks, and her delicate fingers rattle pages.

“It's been brewed in Denmark since around 4000
BC
—six thousand years ago. They've found a preserved body of a Bronze Age girl—the Egtved Girl—in Jutland at a grave site with a pail of beer between her legs. She was in her mid-twenties, and the beer was made from malt wheat, cranberries, pollen, and instead of hops, bog myrtle for a bitter spice, also known as ‘sweet gale.' ”

“Sweet gale. I like that. Beer was known as ‘mead,' right?”

“Wrong. Mead is fermented honey. A kind of wine. Beer is made from grain water, yeast, and seasoning. Hops didn't reach Denmark until about the year 1000. Until then they used sweet gale to give it the bitter taste. The Vikings used to drink to Freja, their goddess of fertility.” She turns a page.

“But it wasn't until the nineteenth century that the Danish beer really began to excel. Thanks to the German yeast culture provided by Emil Christian Hansen to I. C. Jacobsen—the brewer of Carlsberg. The
alcohol content of the various Danish beers—and there are more than 150 types brewed by fifteen breweries—ranges from under 1 percent to nearly 10 percent. Pilsner is 4.6, gold beer 5.8, Easter and Christmas beer are up to 7.9, Giraf is about 7.3 and Elephant is about the same, Jacob's Cognac Beer is 8.5 percent, and superpremiums up to 9.7. There is another that is 10 or 11 percent, Special Brew. The stronger beer is better with richer, heavier, or spicier food. And the Easter or Christmas beers are best after dinner—nice instead of sweet dessert wine.”

“How about snaps?”

“Much younger than beer. Only about six hundred years old. Actually, it was originally known as
brændevin
, brandywine, and the best of it was called
aquavit
, ‘water of life' in Latin, which is also the origin of whiskey—from the Irish
uisce beathadh
or the Scot Gællic
uisge beatha
, also literally ‘water of life.' ”

She turns another page. “At the end of the 1700s, the word
snaps
was adopted to replace brandywine. It means ‘dram' or ‘mouthful' but also is from
snappe
—to snap or take quickly—which is when you bite the snaps down in one shot. It was around that time the snaps glass was introduced, too. Otherwise they used to drink from the bottle. Or from a pocket flask. Which in Danish is called a
lommelærk
, a pocket lark, because it ‘chirps' when you drink from it. Snaps was
very
central to Danish life up until 1917. It was also used for toothache, sluggishness, bad stomach, arthritis, all sorts of pain, and as a sleeping medicine for children, and for washing windows. It was 47.5 percent alcohol then, much stronger than now—it's usually 40 percent now, although some Christmas snaps is stronger. Then in 1917, the tax was raised so the price of a bottle of snaps quintupled, which achieved the goal of reducing consumption. The German and English word is
schnapps
, but that seems too long to me, don't you think?
Snaps
is quicker and better.”

“Let's have one,” says Kerrigan, and signals the waiter by tipping an imaginary snaps glass to his lips. The waiter comes with a bottle of Jubilaeum and two glasses.

“Doubles, please,” says Kerrigan.

“Adult size,” says the barman, and fills the glasses to the lip so that the liquor is almost convex atop the glasses.

“Know what that is called?” she asks, pointing to the top of the pour. “A meniscus.”

They raise the glasses by the stems carefully, nod, snap them dry. “To the meniscus,” he says. “Sounds a bit naughty. Is there also something called a womeniscus?”

She smiles. “That's called a pussy.”

The man with the
PÃ¥ske Bryg
looks over again, still wistful, and his wistfulness makes Kerrigan feel fortunate by comparison.

They cross
H. C. Andersens Boulevard
to the
Town Hall Square
, pausing to glance at the statue of Hans Christian Andersen seated in bronze, gazing up toward
Tivoli Gardens
. She is into her Moleskine again.

“This was done by Henry Luckow-Nielsen in the fifties.” They stand gazing at Hans Christian in his bronze chair.

“There's also another, much older one in
Kongens Have
, the King's Garden,” she tells him. “The Erotic Museum on
Købmagergade
used to have a big poster of that Andersen sculpture with a naked woman seated on his knee. How Andersen would have blushed. That sculpture was made during his lifetime. There was a competition for his seventieth birthday, and the first couple of entries Andersen looked at showed him reading to children—which had been stipulated in the competition guidelines. He didn't like it. ‘Madonna with child,' he hissed. He picked the winner—his solitary self, telling a story to an imaginary audience he didn't have to share his pedestal with. He was a vain man in his old age. All his life, actually. Poor H. C.,” she says, pronouncing the
h
as “ho” in the Danish fashion. “Poor Ho. C. Such success and so unhappy. All the women he adored, to no avail, poor man. He was always being spurned. But he always ‘got his money back,' as he referred to writing about his sorrows—whether it was a toothache or a heartache. He puts one of his spurners, Louise Collin, in his tale ‘The Swineherd' as the haughty
princess, and in ‘The Little Mermaid' as the prince. Hans Christian himself was the mermaid, by the way.”