A Table of Green Fields (5 page)

—Verdun was a terrible battle in the First World War. Is Mikkel's daddy Ulf Tidselfnug? Break's over: back at it.

—Do you know him? He prints books. It's fun to go to Mikkel's, where, if we stay in his room, we can do anything we want to, and Mikkel's always answering the door in nothing 
but a T-shirt and wrunkled socks. His mom says that if he turns himself into an idiot how would you notice?

—O pure innocent Danish youth!

Questioning eyes.

—Teasing the model, Samantha said, is Gunnar's way of relating. You'll get used to it. Besides, you can tease him back. Gunnar's jealous, anyway.

TREE HOUSE

 

—How old is this Gunnar?

—He's had a rabbit, a Belgian hare I think it is, in a show, and a naked girl holding one leg by the ankle in another. He did those at the Academy, and then he was in Paris for a year. He was seventeen when he went to the Academy, that's four years, and Paris was just a couple of years back, so he's like twenty-four, yuss? Outsized whacker in his jeans.

—The bint's there all the time?

—Oh no, very busy girl, Samantha. She comes and goes. Spends the night a lot, too, I think.

4

—Brancusi's
Torso of a Boy,
there. My Ariel is to be as pure as that, but with all of you there, representational, as the critics say, thugs, the lot of them.

Nikolai tugged his foreskin into a snugger fit.

—It leks, and it doesn't, you know?

—The thighs make it a boy, and the hips the same girth as the chest. But further than that, in style, you can't go. Gaudier, here, had the genius of the age. Killed in the First World War, only 24. That's his bust of the poet Pound, and that's his
Red Dancer.

—Real brainy is what I'm getting a reputation for, even at home. Would Brancusi have used a model, some French soccer player? He could at least have put in a navel. I'll have my pecker and toms, won't I, as Ariel?

—Shakespeare would insist. He liked well-designed boys and approved of nature.

—I'll bet. Did Brancusi?

—Brancusi's private life is unknown. I think he simply worked, sawing and polishing and chiselling. He did his own cooking. There was a white dog named Polar.

—What would an Ariel by him have looked like?

5

Commandant Nikolai Doyen-Parigot rode his white charger Washington among Peugeots and Citroens to Antoine Bourdelle's studio. Tying Washington to a parking meter, he strode inside. Bourdelle was in his smock. A boy was mixing modelling clay in a tub. Amidst life-size casts of Greek statues Nikolai Doyen-Parigot took off his uniform, handing it piece by piece, epauletted coat and sword and spurred boots and snowy white shirt and suspenders and wool socks slightly redolent of horse and long underwear, to a respectful but blushing concierge.

Herakles with the head of Apollo.

Thick curly hair matted his chest. His dick was as big as his charger's, and his balls were like two oranges in a cloth sack. His wife went around in a happy daze because of them, as did several lucky young actresses and dancers. Restocking the regiment for the next generation he called it.

He took the long bow that Bourdelle handed him and assumed the pose of Herakles killing the Stymphalian birds.

Later he would play soccer, and wrestle with Calixte Delmas. He would march his regiment up and down the street behind a military band.

—What are Stymphalian birds, Gunnar?

—Something Greek. Quit wiggling your head. One of the labors of Herakles.

6

—Sculpture should be a verb not a noun. The
David
is Jack the Giant Killer, handy with strings, so that he can play the harp and have his dark fate in hair, but in his eyes he is the friend of Jonathan,
that sweet rascal from crabstock,
as Grundtvig said. Where Rodin kept going wrong was in sculpting not only nouns but abstract nouns. Nikolai!

—Jo!

—Imagine you can walk on the wind just under the speed of light. There's a magic cunning in your fingers and toes. Fatigue is as unknown to you as to a bee. You have been commanded by the magus Prospero to dart all over an enchanted island to do things impossible for others but easy for you. You have just been given your instructions. The reward of your compliance is freedom. You're about to nip off.

Listening to Prospero, elbows back, chin over shoulder, eyes and mouth wide open, a jump into action, wheeling on toes, and a collision with Samantha who had walked into the studio. A laughing, staggering hug.

—Ariel digging off to execute Prospero's orders.

—Do it again. This time I'll be ready for the hug.

TREE HOUSE

 

The Korczak group will be this Polish doctor who had an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto way back when the shitty Germans were burning up all the Jews and there was a day when the Germans took all the kids and Korczak and a woman named Stefa to die at Treblinka, and they all marched through the streets to the cattle cars. I'm to be the boy that carried their flag, the flag of their republic, the orphanage. Gunnar wants you and me to be two pals in the group, arms around each other's shoulders. You'll like Gunnar. He's real. For balls he has a brace of Grade A large goose eggs and a gooseneck of a 
cock, which his girl Samantha pretends she doesn't go goofy over, I mean all the time he isn't fucking her into fits. She's real, too, and gives me a hard time. Winks at me when I'm posing, and hugs me when we're having a break and stretch. She writes poems and draws posters, and wears badges about Women's Lib. Knows the names of all the butterflies. On his big bulletin board in the studio Gunnar has this list of things Korczak talked to the orphans about every Saturday, or had them swot up, by way of learning about things, famous people like Gregor Mendel and Fabre the bug man, and good and evil, and doing one's duty, and the environment, and how to deal with loneliness, and what sex is, and Samantha has me writing what she calls my responses and ideas, also Gunnar has to write them too, and these go on the bulletin board.

THE YELLOW OF TIME

 

In his Roman garden Bertel Thorvaldsen sat reading Anacreon. A basket of Balkan melons, squash, and runner beans sat under the cool of the fig tree, delivered by a girl out of Shakespeare, soon to be carried into the kitchen by Serafina the cook. He had drunk a gourd of well water brought in a stone jug from the country. It tasted of gourd and stone, and of the depths of the earth. Johan Thomas Lundbye's landscape of a Danish meadow hung in his sitting room. There were letters from Copenhagen, Paris, Edinburgh. On his cabinet of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine coins stood branches of oleander in a yellow jug.

9

—Morning, halfling. You look tumbled and slept in. It's good you can come early on Saturdays.

—Is there more of that coffee? It was time to get up as soon as I got to sleep.

—Am I to ask intelligent questions or leave your private life private?

Thoughtful grin.

—You probably don't want to know. Mikkel is a maniac and I'm his understudy.

—What about we sit in the sun awhile, with our coffee, in the courtyard. You can skinny down to briefs. Cool air and warm sun, with roses and hollyhocks, lavender and sage, to unsnarl cobwebs from the brain.

—O wow.

—An orange juice and a Vienna bread too?

—Better and better. Gunnar, you're a grown-up Lutheran and all that, but you're a pal, too, aren't you, because the briefs I'm wearing are Mikkel's, or mine and Mikkel's swapped back and forth. Mama makes we wear snow-white underwears here, like I was going to the doctor's, but as I spent the night at Mikkel's, if you're following this.

—Are you embarrassed or bragging? Sounds wonderfully imaginative and comradely to my evil ears.

—Fun. Make Samantha hold her nose. Why evil?

—Evil's a vacuum, they say, where good might be. Nature abhors a vacuum. Therefore nature abhors, and excludes, evil. Grundtviggian logic, wouldn't you say? Being friendly with Mikkel is good sound nature.

—You think?

—I know.

Long silence.

—Nature's good.

—What else could she be?

10

 

A time machine, H. G. Wells's as modified by Alfred Jarry, made of brass, walnut, and chromium, with manufacturer's plate in enamel on tin. Levers, dials, a gyroscope, all real.

Nikolai, older, in bronze as the pilot. Trim Edwardian clothes, scarf and backward cycling cap.

11

 

The girl Samantha was like the Modigliani on the big push-pin cork board where forty-eleven postcards, notes, letters, Parisian metro tickets, photographs made a collage for Nikolai to study while he doffed and donned his clothes.

—His mama had, yes, he answered Samantha's question, put it to him, in her arch voice moreover.

—I know mamas, Samantha said with her fetching smile.

—That Gunnar who was at somebody's house where she was, bald brainy people from the university, needed a handsome boy to pose for a statue without a stitch the Georg Brandes Society had commissioned, Ariel he's called, in a play by Vilhelm Shakespeare, and she said she had a rascally son.

—A sensitive son, I imagine she said.

An understanding grin from a crush of soccer jersey pulled up and off.

—Who's just going from cute to goodlooking.

—To adolescent beauty, and who at an astute guess instantly saw in a model's fee skateboards backpacks naughty comicbooks and revolting phonograph records.

On one knee, undoing shoes.

—Ha. What about, the score of the first Bach partita, and new fiddle strings, and these new briefs, see.

Gunnar with sharpened chisels.

—I'm getting acquainted, Samantha said, with this Danish angel with the unangelic plumbing fixtures.

—Do angels pee? Are they even oxygen breathers?

—They're all male in Scripture, I believe. But they don't fuck, as each is the only member of a unique species, and species don't crossbreed.

—What a dreary place, heaven.

—I'm not a species, Nikolai said. Gunnar, did you do this man in handcuffs here in the photograph?

—That's Martin Luther King. It's in a church garden over in Jylland, out from Aarhus.

PONIES ON THE FYN

 

Riding a pony naked through a meadow red with poppies on a sweet day in June, like Carl Nielsen at Østerport (commented on by mallards and green-shanked moorhens as
O a big one with six legs),
Nikolai drank the spring air like a Pawnee and looked for buffalo in the hollows and eagles in the clouds.

—Steady, said Gunnar. You need a break?

—He's miles away, Samantha said. I can see it in his eyes.

—What? Nikolai asked.

—Nikolai's rarely here. He turns up most business-like, sheds his britches, takes his pose, and goes away like Steen to fight the Nazis with the Churchill Gang or in his space pod through phosphorescent interplanetary dust to galaxies with forests of celery and creeping red slime.

13

 

A session of drawing, Gunnar intent, Nikolai bored, tolerant, behaved.

—Why are grown-ups so dumb?

—Those who are in your words dumb, friend Nikolai, have always been like that. They were dumb children.

Nikolai thought about this. The silence contained bees, a violin passage of lazy intricacies, a dense stillness.

—On the other hand you have a kind of point. Bright children do grow up to be dull. I wish I knew why. The century's mystery is that intelligent children become teen-age louts, who grow up to be pompous dullards. I'd like to know why.

—Is this a trick question?

—Brancusi at thirty-four had the liveliness to begin to be Brancusi.

—You talk to me as if I were grown up.

—You want me to talk to you as if you were half-witted?

—Only some grown-ups are morons. Most of 'em. You're OK, Gunnar.

—Thanks.

—Tell me more about Korczak, the republic of children, Poland.

14

 

—It's a meadow that shades off into a marsh with reeds and then does sand banks into the cold wet Baltic, out from Hellerup, we can take the train, want to go? You'll turn honey brown.

—Now?

—Just thought of it, so let's do it.

Their locomotive was the Niels Bohr.

—If you thought of this friendly outing, as you call it, when I turned up to pose, how come Edith had a thermos and snack ready in that satchel?

—Those pants, Nikolai. With the obliging fit.

Imp's grin, musing eyes.

—They're this short from the store, and then Mama took in the crotch at the inseam. Packages my mouse neater. If your look means was it her idea, well no. She's so good at sewing that it took her only a minute to do it, and she whistled in a meaningful way while she was clicking it through the sewing machine. A dry cough in the handing over, but never a word. So how come Edith knew you were going to these marshes?

—A meadow all greenest grass and one million wild flowers with a white strand at its foot. A marsh, too, with grebes and mallards.

—How come Edith knew you were going to this midge heaven? —Second sight. They have it in the Faeroes.

Imp's grin, silly eyes.

Hellerup, a back street, a lane, a field, the meadow sloping down to the strand.

—Drawing block, pencils, sammidges, sunglasses, said Nikolai of the canvas satchel's contents. What's in the thermos?

—A nice couple I know, can't keep their hands off each other, live in that house we passed, in a maze of box hedges. They're now, poor dears, in the United States, at some conference on the economics of cows. This is their property, so we can make ourselves at home.