Kerrigan in Copenhagen (30 page)

The Hemingway poster includes portraits of two leopards that Papa no doubt would gladly have blown away. Kerrigan once stayed in the Swiss chateau of Hemingway's German publisher, Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, who introduced paperback books to Germany. He was the German publisher not only of Hemingway but also of Faulkner, Nabokov, Updike, Camus, Sartre, Henry Miller, Thomas Wolfe, and Harold Pinter. During his stay, Kerrigan was given the chateau library to write in for a fortnight, and among the books and papers there he came across a letter from Hemingway to Ledig-Rowohlt from the 1930s in which Hemingway reported being in hospital with an arm broken on a hunting trip. He noted, however, that before he injured the arm he had shot a big-horn mountain sheep ram, two bears, and a bull elk and written 285 pages of his new novel. He mentioned that Dos Passos had been with him when the accident occurred but was not hurt himself and did not succeed in shooting anything. He went on to complain about the German translation of the title of
A Farewell to Arms
, and with a threat to take his new novel to “a big Jewish publisher” if he is not treated better in future, he closed the letter with warmest regards from himself and Mary, and then no doubt went out to pick a fight with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Kerrigan enjoys the beer in his throat and the sunlight on his face, thinks of the time he was here with his friend Thomas McCarthy, an Anglo-Irish story writer and novelist who was supporting himself as an executive for an automobile tire company. How many years ago? McCarthy used to edit the literary journal
Passport
, which, like many another literary journal, had gone under after a dozen or so semiannual issues. McCarthy himself has published a good many fine short stories and a couple of novels over many years.

How many people are working like that, Kerrigan wonders, writing and publishing their stories and poems in obscurity for little or no pay, for the sheer pleasure of doing so, of putting into language some deep inner thoughts and visions in order that the envelope of their solitude
might be breached, that their inner landscape might be viewed by another, in celebration of human communion.

He thinks of Calvino's observation in his essay on “Quickness,” quoting Galileo that the greatest of all inventions was the alphabet, which allowed a person to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person regardless of how distant in place and time, all via the arrangement of twenty-something characters on a page (in the case of Danish, twenty-nine characters).

And in that way, thinks Kerrigan, the writings of any other of the thousands, millions of little-known authors might be stumbled upon in the years to come, beyond our lifetimes, a hundred years from now when Ernest Hemingway would have been two hundred years old and long beyond shooting any animals or having imaginary or real punch-ups with other writers. Some curious reader might find a yellowed copy of a book or literary journal in a bin outside a used-book shop, if such still exist then, or on the back shelf of some library, written by an unknown or forgotten author, and leaf through it, reading at random the most private thoughts of men and women now long gone from the earth, bringing them back to life for a time in the reader's mind.

Then he notices the sunlight moving on the water and remembers—how could he have forgotten?—that first day with Licia. How they had walked here from the university. How she said, Men my age are so uninteresting. (And you are so blind.) How she looked naked back at the west side flat he owned then. He has been thinking about her for years and still she is not finished with him.

Kerrigan sips his beer, takes out a cigar, feels in his pockets for matches, and finds the lump of lemon soap in one, the hashish in the other, and thinks about hashishinating his consciousness if his lungs will permit. He climbs from the floating bar to the street.

The hashish is solid and large in his pocket, and he remembers those days decades past when he smoked himself into a languageless trance, sublimely self-hashishinated. He thinks of the Freetown of Christiania, and fingering his stolen pocket hash stash, considers the old Danish
proverb, “
Hvo der vil have kernen må knække nødden
”: “If you want the meat, you have to crack the nut.”

Across the canal to
Skt. Annæ Gade
, past
Vor Frelsers Kirke
(Our Savior Church), and left on
Prinsessegade
to
Christiania
—so-called
Fristaden
—Freetown. A former military fort, it was taken over by squatters in 1971. An area of about 750 acres with 150 buildings, woods and ramparts and moats and a thousand inhabitants. One of the exits is through a gateway over which hangs a sign: YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE EUROPEAN UNION. Kerrigan contemplates the sign from within the Freetown, smoking a little cigar in the sunlight.

The Danish population is split fifty-fifty over Denmark's membership in the, at this writing, fifteen-country union, with ten others waiting to enter and three in special relationship with the union. The Danish opposition fears that Danish life will become standardized, that the Danish language will be lost to the international English that is rapidly becoming the lingua franca of a political entity whose twelve languages are increasingly difficult to manage in administrative meetings. They also fear the common European currency, the euro, against which Denmark, Sweden, and the UK have taken a stand.

However, the value of the European Union for European civilization is clear—the importance of binding these nations together legally for the future of a continent torn by centuries of internal war.

The population is also no doubt equally split over whether the Freetown of Christiania should be allowed to continue to exist. In the beginning, the squatters who took it over paid neither taxes nor water nor electric bills. In 1973, the government decided to allow the squatters to run a Freetown there for three years as a social experiment, but five years later, a decision to level the area was supported by the Supreme Court. Some violent episodes, clashes between police and Christianiters, were followed by a continued political tug-of-war, but Christiania is still standing, twenty-eight years after the squatters took it. It is the second-largest tourist attraction—after the Little Mermaid—in
Denmark, but that weighs against the fact that it also includes 750 acres of most attractive urban real estate on which developers could turn an enormous profit.

There was a drug problem for some time involving motorcycle gangs and hard narcotics, but the thousand inhabitants managed to rid the place of the violent elements and hard drugs. Attempts to purchase or sell hard stuff there today are dealt with harshly, but soft drugs are allowed, sold openly (when the police are not around) on a broad dirt pathway called
Pusher Street
, where varieties of hash, skunk, and pot are sold by weight.

Various other enterprises also flourish here, most notably the restaurant Spiseloppen—the Eating Flea—and the concert hall where, inter alia, Bob Dylan has sung. There are also a good jazz club, art galleries, and other enterprises. Many artists live here as well—painters, goldsmiths and silversmiths, sculptors, musicians, writers—and the living quarters and social establishments, kindergartens, nurseries, a “woman-smith” blacksmithery, a small bicycle factory, even an enclosed skateboarding hall, are originally and strikingly appointed. It is also now possible to have a guided tour of the area by someone living there. But the only way for a new inhabitant to come in is by becoming the lover of someone who already lives there.

Kerrigan owns paintings by two Christiania artists, Wiliam Skotte Olsen and Finn Thorstein, and one of his friends, Per Smidl, lived here in a construction wagon while he taught himself to write and went on to publish numerous books, one about his life here,
Wagon 537, Christiania
.

He follows the rutted dirt roadway toward Pusher Street. There are no motor vehicles here, only bicycles, and many unleashed dogs wander about or lie in the dusty sunlight. At one of the stalls in the shopping bazaar area, he buys a chillum from a man with one eye and proceeds down Pusher Street. The
Christiania Jazz Klub
, in the Opera Building, is locked up tight until this evening. Kerrigan has spent many nights in the company of friendly guests and management, stepping outside to share a joint with new friends, where entrance is as cheap as the bottled beer or shooters of Havana Club. At closing, the bartender often brings
out an alto or tenor or soprano sax from under the bar and continues jamming until dawn or beyond.

Continuing past the Klub and past
Nemoland
, another bar with open concert stage, he comes to the
Woodstock Café
. From the bar at the end of the long room inside, he orders a black bottle of gold-label beer that he carries to an outdoor table and sits in the sunlight among Inuits and their grumbling, restless dogs. Using his notepad as a workplace and the blade of his tiny Swiss army knife, he cuts a sliver of hash from the lump he has carried in his pocket all day, then segments the sliver and fills the bowl of the chillum.

Lowering his eyelids in honor of the poor backpacker from whom he filched this hash, he lights it with a Tordenskjold stick match and tentatively, slowly draws the smoke into his lungs. So far, so good. Holds it, not too deep. Then exhales again. He draws three times on the pipe, then lets it go out, tucks it into his shirt pocket, and soothes his palate with strong beer.

Soon he is joined by three young Asian-looking men, perhaps Inuits. One of them rolls a fat joint and lights it, tokes, and passes to Kerrigan, who thanks him no. The young Asian man glowers at him. Kerrigan smiles. The young man begins to tell the story of his life. He's thirty years old, born in Taiwan, moved to Denmark as a child, was sent to New York as a teenager to play football in some high school league. Despite his small stature, he was an outstanding kicker from years of playing soccer. He still looks wiry and muscular, good-looking in a sullen way. “I was good,” he says. “I should have stayed. Now I'm bad boy. I'm all the time on hash, on coke.” His older brother, a bank adviser, is the biological son of his Danish mother. Apparently he himself was adopted. Kerrigan doesn't ask. Instead he suggests that the young man's multicultural background could be an advantage—all the languages he speaks.

He glowers at Kerrigan. “Are you fucking blind?”

Kerrigan freezes in startled silence, hearing echoes of Licia's words.

Then the young man continues. “You live in Denmark—don't you see what racists they are! I get nothing but welfare. Twelve thousand kroner
a month. After rent and cigarettes and drugs, what do I have left for myself? A hundred?”

One of the other boys—he looks very young—laughingly speaks to the Chinese fellow in a language Kerrigan doesn't understand. He glowers and flings his half-smoked joint in the boy's face. It bounces back to the table with a scatter of sparks. “You laughing at me! You think I'm a fucked-up Inuit?”

The boy's throat bobs as he tries to swallow his fear. The Chinese boy glowers at him, at Kerrigan. He seems to be deciding something—maybe who to punch. Finally he says, “I'm in a bad mood.” He stands, extends his hand. “It was good to talk to you,” he says, and is off and soon the boys follow. Kerrigan thinks,
Those anger-management classes paid off
.

Across from where Kerrigan sits, at a broad outdoor café, a woman on a bench piles her long hair upon her head, elbows raised. The sun sparkles in her yellow locks. He smiles. How do they know that makes us long for them?

He watches a Christiania bike—a three-wheeled bike with a large wooden transport case in front of the handlebars—rumble past, three giggling children in the transport case. An extremely large man in his mid-thirties, wearing shorts and a white T-shirt, stops in front of Kerrigan's table and asks, in English, “You know about the twelve families that run the world?” Kerrigan says that he'd heard something or other about them. He sits across from Kerrigan at the table. “My name is Viggo, and I'm drunk,” he says, “but this is a fact.” He says that America was an experiment which these twelve families, all royalty, decided to allow, to see what would happen. But now the twelve families are displeased, and America is going down. Somehow then, seamlessly, Viggo is on another subject, telling about his wife, Dorthe, who is twenty-eight and has found a forty-one-year-old plumber who makes her happy. That's okay with him. He loves his wife for the love that she gives to his two-year-old boy, and he wants her to have love from the plumber. That's completely okay, but he does not want this plumber to try to be a male role figure for his boy. He plans to advise the man about this. So he will have a warning. But if he doesn't take the advice, a car will pick
him up and take him out into the woods where his bones will be broken with bats by the French mafia.

“No one knows about the French mafia,” Viggo says. “It's been around for twelve centuries, and I know the son of the leader.”

Kerrigan appeals to Viggo not to do that, not to have the plumber's bones broken. He will risk losing the right to see his son at all, ever again.

He shakes his head. “There will be no proof, no link to me.”

Another man appears, not quite as large as Viggo, and says that he has called for a taxi, and the two of them salute good-bye with stiff arms and set off along the dirt street.

Kerrigan finds himself staring at the earth, which is very interesting to look at. The texture of the dirt is fascinating and several tiny ants wander about, tiny reddish-brown marvels gliding over the brown dusty earth. Specks of magnificent design—living! His mouth is agreeably dry and the chill glass of the beer bottle against his fingertips wonderfully pleasant, and the air of the spring day seems to be sliding unimpeded again into his sipping nostrils.

It occurs to him that one strategy might be to throw his wallet into the moat on the other side of the flowering ramparts, and then to die here where no one knows who he is. He might never be identified. This seems an interesting strategy.