Kerrigan in Copenhagen (9 page)

On the banks of these lakes where Kerrigan now pauses to watch a swan glide along the stippled glittering water, Hans Christian Andersen also stood weeping real salt tears over his mistreatment by the world while Kierkegaard's fictional Johannes the Seducer stalked his beautiful young Cordelia in the pages of the fictional diary set like a substantial dark gem in a book of philosophy and meditation. Kerrigan himself now strolls this path by the water regretting and not his marriage of four years—the length of a college education—preceded by four years as lovers, another college education. But what did he learn from it? The
equivalent of a B.S. in being the victim of treachery. That while he was lecturing her about the creation of illusion in literature, she was busy creating an illusion for him with her bright, light smiling eyes.
Is this melodramatic?
he asks himself.
Is this bitterness? Am I growing to like the taste of my wounds as I lick them?

To Kerrigan's mind, the fictional Johannes is as real, more real perhaps, than the figures of history who walked here. More real to him in any event. For though he knows that Andersen and Kierkegaard were men of flesh and blood, equally wounded in love as Kerrigan, the very intimate record available of them is still mostly indirect, while in Johannes we have a mind and a soul laid open for study in detail throughout the course of an extreme action. Even if Johannes is the cynical one in that action, Licia the cynical one in Kerrigan's life.

Then he thinks of Goethe's
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, which sorrows were self-inflicted, and he tries to see himself in young Werther. Had Goethe not died in 1832 but lived another dozen years, he might have seen in Kierkegaard's Johannes the Seducer some ironic reflection of the Young Werther whose sorrows made Goethe so suddenly famous in 1774, two years before the American War of Independence, sixty-nine years before Kierkegaard's Johannes walked the banks of this lake (225 years before Kerrigan walks it regretting Licia's falseness). Johannes is the romantic—bumbling Werther's cynical, contriving counterpart—articulating visions of a femininity that could only have been meant to reveal the true sadistic nature of the machinations of seduction. Johannes explained that in creating Eve, God struck Adam with a deep sleep because woman is the dream of man and does not awake until she is touched by love. Before that she is a dream, but there are two distinct states in her dream: first, love dreams of her; second, she dreams of love. And he remembers Johannes the Seducer's speculation that woman will forever provide an endless supply of material for his contemplation.

Kerrigan asks himself what he dreamed of in Licia and what was in Licia's mind—was it consciously false, treacherous? Or did her love just cool and turn to a malicious desire to cut free from him, with no consid
eration for his attachment to Gabrielle? Or to the baby she was carrying. If she really was carrying a baby. If the baby was even his.

Standing now on the bank of the lake, he watches the swans and the ducks, watches the continuous infinitesimal changes of the Danish light, feeling this long history of a culture around him, this speculation about women and love. He thinks of his Associate's absinthe-green eyes, and he thinks of his mother who was born here, from whence she was taken by his Irish father via Brooklyn to Dublin, to Copenhagen and back to Brooklyn, then giving birth to him and registering him as a Dane, giving him dual citizenship, allowing him to try to make a new life here after his first life was foundering there, and in his forty-fourth year to meet the beautiful Licia who would make love possible for him and then deprive him of that love.

The thought strikes him with a force that is physical. He literally staggers as he steps down through the tunnel between the two segments of Black Dam Lake, its walls festooned with ornate graffti scrawled over with obscenities, SUPERFUCKED AND FUCK SPAGHETTIS ANSWERED BY FUK RACISM AND BLOOD AND HONOUR AND FUK YOU NIGGA and again fuk racism. And he looks ahead to the light at the far end and tells himself that when he comes out into the daylight again he will dismiss these thoughts of Licia and Gabrielle.

As he climbs the inclined path back up into the day, he sees the
Kaffesalonen
, the Coffee Salon, off to his right, and further on down the long narrow street the spire of the church in which he, himself, was married,
Skt. Johannes Kirke
, the Church of St. John, and he keeps walking, blanking out his mind with the movement of his legs, his feet striking the dusty path, the swinging of his arms, the breath in his lungs, the sweat in his armpits and on his back, as he fills his eyes with saving details, past the fairy-tale-like white structure of the
Søpavillon
, the Lake Pavilion, and around the foot of Peblinge Lake. He sees a green bronze sculpture of a lion and lioness fighting for the corpse of a wild boar, sculpted by an artist named Cain in 1878.

And that name reminds him of Milton's Adam and Eve in 1674
leaving Eden with wandering steps and slow, hand in hand—the work with which Milton set out to justify God's ways with man, and Housman two and a half centuries later telling Kerrigan's namesake, Terrence, first read to Kerrigan by his father and still later by Kerrigan himself at a time when he was desperate for justification,

Terrence, this is stupid stuff …

Malt does more than Milton can

To justify God's ways with man …

Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink

For fellows whom it hurts to think.

How fitting it seems then that just across Gyldenløves Street near the bank of Skt. Jørgens Sø, St. George's Lake, stands Andreas Kolberg's sculpture
A Drunken Faun
(1857)—a smiling boyish satyr drinking wine from a horn held high over his head so the wine runs down his face. He has feet rather than hooves and drags a half-empty wine sack along the ground behind him. His stick is discarded at his feet and his lion skin has slipped back, exposing his sex. Carl Jacobsen, the Carlsberg brewer, gave this faun to Copenhagen—a laughing, happily drunken lad, and, this being Copenhagen, there is no moral intent beyond the moral pleasure of joy.

Yet as Kerrigan crosses the little park on the bank, he stops to consider a sculpture cut from the stump of a dying elm tree, infected by the epidemic that hit Copenhagen's elms in the 1990s. This sculpture is by Ole Barslund Nielsen—a naked woman rises from the center of the broken double-trunked stump, a child to one side, and below, a seated figure in a hollowed arch in the trunk itself. It is entitled
In the Beginning Was the Word
. And in the end this tree sculpture will be worn away by the elements, like everything and every story.

He loops across Gyldenløves Street to
Ørstedsparken
, can see from the street the statue of the great man himself: H. C. Ørsted (1777–1851), discoverer in 1821 of electromagnetism as well as of aluminum, comforter
forter of Hans Christian Andersen. Kerrigan enters the park and his feet carry him further along its paths, past rows of antique bronze sculptures as his present moment melts continuously into his past and the present adds one increment of the future to itself, beneath the willows and beeches. He comes upon
The Dying Gaul
, a bronze made from a two-thousand-year-old Roman cast, itself made from an even older Greek one. The Gaul is wounded, naked, dying, balanced on hip and hand, head lowered, mouth in pain, eyes meeting death, his sword discarded on the bronze earth alongside his bronze hand, the warrior's gold braid about his neck. What, Kerrigan wonders, is meant by the quiet agony of that face? And the response is from Chaucer, the dying White Knight's song:

What is this life

What asketh man to have

Now with his love

Now in his cold grave.

He turns back toward the lake.

Kerrigan is exhausted. His wet shirt sticks to his back as he reaches
Peblinge Sø
, the lake bank where Hans Christian Andersen wept. He sits on a bench, closes his eyes, and remembers the lake two winters before, skaters and strollers on the frozen water before the Lake Pavilion on a freezing sunny winter Sunday.

In the darkness behind his eyelids, his thoughts turn back to Kierkegaard and Johannes the Seducer and Goethe's
Young Werther
. They are both dead, Goethe and Kierkegaard, two men from two centuries, sharing a part of the nineteenth, writing about the same thing from different angles. A Dane and a German. And an Irish-Danish American contemplates another aspect of the same thing that has very nearly undone him.

The Sorrows of Young Werther
inaugurated a life of fame for Goethe at
the age of twenty-five. It is the story of a young upper-middle-class man of foolish sentiments, quick and self-centered, who falls in love with another man's woman and commits suicide. W. H. Auden has said that the book made Goethe the first writer or artist to become a public celebrity. Auden opined that it was not a story of tragic love at all, but a portrait of a totally egotistical young man who is not capable of loving anyone but himself. There are other views of young Werther, however—speculations that Lotte strung him along, bewitching him with touches and glances to his destruction.
La belle Lotte sans merci
.

If Werther killed himself in frustration over being unable to have Lotte, Kierkegaard's Johannes sets about with incisive determination to have Cordelia, and he
does
have her via the fact, at the source of his strength, that he always has the idea on his side, a secret, like Samson's hair, that no Delilah can pry from his mind.

It seems clear that this is
not
the philosophy of Kierkegaard—who spoke of the greater sins of reason than passion—but the casual reader of the
Diary
might take it literally and
believe
Johannes's delusion that a man's relationship to a woman is a question, her choice of life only a response to that question.

Johannes stands on Bleacher's Green (now
Blegdamsvej
) and readies his attack, his soul like a bent bow, his thought an arrowhead about to enter her flesh, her veins. And when his labors are done, when he has had her in one fizzling gulp, like a glass of champagne, he leaves swiftly, done, with no sweet parting sorrow because he views with disgust a woman's tears, which change everything but are meaningless. He has had her now and she no longer can fascinate his erotic imagination.

Kerrigan entertains an idea that Kierkegaard's
Diary
is inter alia a response to Goethe's
Sorrows
. In 1841, Kierkegaard broke his engagement to the woman he loved, Regine Olsen, and traveled to Berlin where he lived at the Hotel Saxen on Jägerstrasse 57 and wrote, first,
Either/Or
and then
Fear and Trembling
, both published in 1843, when he returned from Berlin. He had broken with Regine for reasons that he himself did not quite understand and spent years speculating about. However, he concluded that he could be happier in his unhappiness
without her than with her, would be required to hide so much from her, to base the entire relationship on something that was untrue.

Whether you marry or not, you will regret it
.

He sent back the ring, fabricated the appearance that it was she who broke off the engagement, but she refused to go along with that lie, explaining that if she could bear the rejection she could bear the disgrace as well. Kierkegaard was miserable but he hid his misery from the world, behaved as usual. His brother, who heard him weeping all night, wanted to go to Regine's family and tell them, to prove he was not dastardly, but Kierkegaard threatened to put a bullet in his brother's head if he did.

In his journal, on August 24, 1849—eight years later—he wrote that he traveled to Berlin and suffered with his thoughts of her every day. In Berlin he worked on
Either/Or
, completing it in about eleven months. There he would write that his grief was his castle. And that pleasure was not in the thing that you enjoy but in the consciousness of it. And finally that his yearning for his first love was only a yearning for that yearning.

Kerrigan, too, yearns for his first yearning for Licia, but what did Licia yearn for; he had thought their yearnings were for each other, and he remembers only one thing that seemed to indicate something else might have been going on behind the facade of her sweet blue gaze, her mild light manner. One summer night in the garden of their new house in fashionable Hellerup, where she had always dreamed of living, just north of Copenhagen, the baby asleep, he opened a second bottle of wine, and as evening darkened to night, the sky still yellow, she seemed to be staring at him without seeing, and she said, “You are so blind.”

He could have sworn she said that. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

“Blind,” she repeated with drunken deliberateness. “
Blind!
” And stomped off into the house. He sat smoking a cigar, trying to understand what had just happened. Throwing the cigar into the still glowing coals of the grill, he rose and followed, but she lay fully clothed atop the covers, dissecting the width of their bed, and he could not rouse her.

Next morning over breakfast, he asked, “How do you feel?”

“Not good.”

“What did you mean?” he asked. “By what you said just before you went to bed?”

“What I said? Did I say something?” He interpreted the fear evident in her voice as embarrassment.

He looked into her blue eyes. He loved her eyes so, her blonde hair. He loved the silken skin of her back, inside her thighs, her mild gentle manner, loved the way she made love. He adored her. Her face was still aimed at him, her own question hanging in the air, but he would not subject her to his question again, would not repeat what she had said.

Were there other things as well? Things he ignored? Things he did not see? Things he was indeed blind to?

There was that time when she seemed not displeased that he lost a contract for the translation of several significant books. He thought he saw a glint in her eye, heard a mocking taunt in her voice, but did not believe it, still does not know whether it really was there.