Kerrigan in Copenhagen (5 page)

They toast the dead tale-teller with a
skål
, then they drink to a sketched portrait of Tausser on the wall here, too—one that was done by the same man who did his bust, Troels Lybecker. There is another sketched Tausser portrait on the wall, from 1976 by Rune Dyremark. “They say the church was full when Tausser was buried,” Kerrigan's Associate says.

“Pretty good for a homeless guy. How wonderful if there are really ghosts,” says Kerrigan. “If Andersen's spirit were here right now, witnessing our toast. And Tausser.”

“They say when you speak of a dead person, he comes back to life for the time you speak.”

Then they sit in silence among the paintings and dim light of the Nick. Kerrigan is a little tight and wonders if she is really as sober as she seems. He glances at her Moleskine book on the table, wondering how such a slender pad can contain so much information; she dutifully opens it, though he thinks he sees some hesitation pull at the corner of her comely mouth.

“There used to be an expression, ‘Nicolai Bohemians.' It applied to the customers of all the small bars and cafés that were around this square, around the church, Sankt Nikolaj. You know who Saint Nikolaj was?”

He shakes his head.

“Santa Claus! Father Christmas. This café opened in 1904. It was the main café frequented by artists, but they called the whole area the Minefield because there were so many bars here, tempting people.”

Kerrigan considers the nearly century-old café, the seven centuries of church here, the great fire of 1795, places himself in the midst of it. Then he remembers the name of a poet who used to drink here. “I know something about this place,” he says. “A poem. Want to hear?”

“If I say yes, I can preserve the illusion of free will.”

He smiles, says, “Smart-ass,” drinks some porter. “Now you'll have to beg me.”

Her green eyes look up beseechingly at him. “Please?” she says softly, and his blood jumps. He clears his throat, but then he says, “Actually I'm not allowed to. I could get sued for reciting it in public. And the night has a thousand ears. But if you go buy a copy of
Schades Digte—Schade's Poems
from Gyldendal, published earlier this year, you'll find it in toto under the title ‘The Dancing Painter.' “He leans close to her, says, “If you put your ear to my lips, I'll whisper a few lines.”

Her eyes lighten as he whispers, and her excited reaction excites him.

“I don't know his poetry,” she says.

“Ah-ha! So your little junior woodchuck's Moleskine manual doesn't contain
every
thing after all! Poul Borum called Schade the greatest Danish poet of the twenties and the liveliest force in modern Danish literature. Born in 1903, the year before this café opened. He died in '78. He was considered a pornographer for years because he wrote about all the things dearest to our hearts—sex and love and drink. Borum compares him to D. H. Lawrence, E. E. Cummings, and Henry Miller. His first book of poetry,
The Living Violin
, came out in 1926 and was subtitled
spiritual and sensual songs
, and that's his force; he joins body and soul. Borum calls him a happy Baudelaire. But the last book,
I'm Mad About You
, is about eros as obsession, as psychosis.”

“And Borum is dead now, too,” she says.

“They all go into the dark,” says Kerrigan. “You know he once invited me to collaborate with him on a translation. I declined.”

“
Why
?”

“Because I was stupid. I was afraid. I guess I was afraid I couldn't measure up, that Borum, that Denmark maybe, would swallow me alive. Now I know myself a little better. I
know
I can't measure up, so there's nothing to be afraid of. You just have to know that a good translator—as a friend of mine who is a good translator told me, Stacey Knecht—has to put himself second. For many years that was too difficult for me.”

“Have you translated Danish writers?”

“A few, a bit of Pia Tafdrup. Currently mostly Henrik Nordbrandt and Dan Turèll.”

Her green eyes, he notes, lighten when they widen. “Dan Turèll? Uncle Danny!”

“Yes, a painter who'd known Turèll—Barry Lereng Wilmont—saw my translations of Nordbrandt and suggested I translate Turèll. I thought he'd been translated years ago, but no. Barry had promised Dan before he died that he would have him sent across the ocean in translation. Barry introduced me to Dan's widow, Chili, and she gave permission.”

Her gaze rests on his face, as if taking him in again, reassessing him, and a flicker of unexpected hope lights in him. But hope for what? No.

He takes out his Petit Sumatra cigarillos, sees her still watching him,
extends the box, and to his surprise she takes one. He strikes a stick match, holds it across the table, and she lightly guides his hand with her fingertips. The touch runs across the surface of his flesh, and he thinks of Schade in the Copenhagen bars and serving houses, surrounded by the women he loved so—his muses, he called them—drunk on red wine and desire, writing his poetry even under the table. He feels the water in his eyes, thinking of the man, thinking he might have met him once before he died in 1978, had he only stirred himself to action, but in the seventies Kerrigan was trying to reenter society after having squandered the sixties hitchhiking around the United States. His parents died and he cashed in their assets and invested the money in Denmark, where his mother was born, and found work here as a suit, a humanistic, nonprofit suit, while he completed his university work with no time to look and see the world around him. He never met Dan Turèll either, although he had had opportunities. He thinks of all the things he could experience still if only he could stir himself to do so, to overcome his ego, to overcome his fear of what the “false blue eyes and blonde treachery” reduced him to.

“There's another one by Schade set here,” he says. “I think it's called ‘In the Café,' about a song on the jukebox and kissing a girl with ugly teeth and a Finnish girl who shows him her breasts—or is that another one?”

She flicks a crumb of tobacco off her pink tongue, asks, “What is your education?”

“My education? I have a doctorate. A Ph.D.”

“Oh! Can I touch you?”

He thinks of the Norwegian-Danish Aksel Sandemose's novel about the so-called
Jantelov
. “The Law of Jante,” he says. “First commandment,
Thou shalt not think thou art something
. It's just a piece of paper,” he says, “right?”

“Meaning,” she says, “
wrong
, right? That it is something
more
than just a piece of paper,
right
?”

He shrugs, smiles, caught out in his sentimental hypocrisy and seduction and pride. He doesn't mind. He glimpses a mildness lurking beneath her caution and mockery.

“You know James Joyce—the Irish novelist?”

She nods. “A little.”

“Well, he wrote what is considered by many people to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century with one of the most admired and often quoted women lead characters of, well, maybe of all literature, at least since Chaucer's Wife of Bath—actually, you remind me of both those characters; you even have a bit of a gap tooth like the Wife of Bath. Very sexy! The Joyce character is Molly Bloom, and you know what she says in the book about university knowledge? She says, ‘I wouldn't give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning. Why don't they go and create something …'”

His Associate smiles so warmly it gladdens his own heart, and he puts his hand on hers on the table. She looks at his hand, but she does not stop smiling or withdraw from his touch. He squeezes her fingers and takes his own hand away, suddenly shy. In the silence that follows he lights another Sumatra, shadows rippling through his consciousness as he reviews all the things that can be discovered in one snap of the fingers. How you can step through a door to a home and find it empty, everyone gone. As all stories end.

Her eyes are upon him, and she asks, “What was your subject?”

“Literature,” he says, grateful to be drawn back from the shadows. “Specifically, verisimilitude. Want to know more?”

“I think you're going to tell me.”

“No. Only if you want.”

“Please.”

“How writers of fiction seem to create reality.
Veris similis
in Latin.
Vrai semblance
in French. The appearance of reality. The way a writer creates a credible illusion to get the reader to suspend disbelief long enough to listen and experience what the writer wants to transmit. Beneath the illusion, if the writer is serious, lies the stuff of truth, of a deeper reality, that probably has little to do with the trappings of everyday life that were used to build the illusion—unless those actual trappings are what he's writing about. But the reality beneath that illusion
can help us understand something about human existence. The illusion of literature, at its best, relies on a deeper wisdom. Fiction, even the most realistic-seeming fiction, is not existence, but
about
existence. For example, Kafka uses sensory images to make us believe, or at least accept, the preposterous notion that Gregor Samsa has turned into a cockroach, and because we believe that for a little while, we experience some deep mystery of existence. But sometimes writing something defines the essence of the author and changes him. So in that sense fiction, all writing, can be truer than raw life.” He thinks of Hamsun then—the building he saw this morning, where over a hundred years ago Hamsun wrote
Hunger
. “You know Knut Hamsun? The Norwegian writer?
Hunger?
In that, he abandoned many realistic devices of fiction—plot, narrative arc, story even—to portray the consciousness of a man starving to express itself …” Abruptly, he becomes aware of himself lecturing her, trails off.

“What is the word again?” she asks.

“Verisimilitude. It took me half a year just to learn to pronounce it right.”

Her cigar has gone out, and she relights it with a Bic, trims it on the edge of the ashtray. “And now you are writing a book about bars.”

“Please,” he corrects. “Serving houses. So much more elegant in Danish. And what could be more existentially essential? Reason is an unreasonable faculty. It will strangle us if we take it too seriously. It needs damping, and that is why we come to these places,
n'est-ce pas
?”

She smiles wanly and they sit in silence for a time, listening to music from a CD player behind the bar. Bob Dylan is singing “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” Then he sings, “I Threw It All Away,” and Kerrigan finds himself thinking of his life. Looking back upon himself, he sees a man who was young and brash and full of himself and threw all his greatest potential out the window. Or maybe he had no choice. Maybe in his own way he was programmed to do precisely what he did—avoiding love, then falling hard for a woman who was hardly more than a child.

How he wishes he could go back and adjust himself somehow, do it
over, do it better, but in what way, adjust to what? He has spent nearly three years trying to adjust to the deprivation of a life he had been fleeing for decades—then couldn't embrace it fast enough. Was it just because he feared age? They married when he was forty-nine. And she was twenty-nine. Maybe she feared turning thirty also. His beautiful wife. His beautiful little girl. As every story ends. In the recognition of illusion.

He tips his stout bottle over the edge of his empty glass, but not a drop slips out. He wills himself from the gloom, glances at his Associate's handsome face lost in its own distance, its own music. Such a lovely green-eyed face, he thinks, and realizes suddenly that she recognizes that she herself must also bear some blame for the fact that she did not get the education she wished for, and his awareness of her awareness of this touches in him a sense of kinship with her.

We have both been foolish. We both have regrets, and here we sit in our fifties in an old café over empty glasses, empty bottles.

He can feel the drink in his legs as they walk down
Vingårdstræde
—Vineyard Street, where years before someone had attempted, in vain, to cultivate grapes for wine. Not suited to the Danish climate. Somewhere he seems to remember reading of a Roman expedition to Scandinavia—was it in Tacitus?—in which the leader explained his withdrawal by saying:
The land is uninhabitable. There are no olive trees
.

They come out behind
Kongens Nytorv
, the King's New Square, and she points. “That's the National Bank there.”

“Nine hundred and ninetynine million pound sterling in the blue-black bowels of the bank of Ulster.”

“Sorry?”

“Joyce,” he explains, and pats his leather satchel. “
Finnegan
.” When she does not respond, he continues, “You know, Joyce visited Copenhagen. In September 1936. He was convinced he had Viking blood in him. Dublin and Cork owe their origins to Danish Vikings—but he also once told his brother Georgio that he wanted to go to Denmark because the Danes massacred so many of his ancestors. He had taught himself Danish, or Dano-Norwegian, in order to read Ibsen—Norway had
been under Denmark previously. Joyce's first publication, written at the age of seventeen, was a long article about Ibsen's last play,
When We Dead Awaken
from 1899, exactly a hundred years ago. The review was published on April Fool's Day, 1900. Joyce professed to believe that Ibsen was the greatest dramatist of all time, even greater than Shakespeare.”

Then he remembers one particular play Joyce had praised by Ibsen—about the necessity of an artist's renouncing love and marriage—and thinks of his own decades of such renunciation, or avoidance, only to be trapped at forty-nine by the blonde treachery. He takes refuge in thoughts of H. C. Andersen's unhappy experiences of love, taking succor in the many women he himself has known—for a night, a couple of weeks, a season … Kierkegaard also had a fiasco of a love life. By comparison, Kerrigan comforts himself, his is rich in experience—even if it is equally laden with regret.