Kerrigan in Copenhagen (31 page)

Then he thinks of his Associate again, how she would look with her elbows in the air piling her hair up upon her head, and the thought of his Associate reminds him that if he obliterates himself here in Christiania, he will never complete his book about Copenhagen, even though he does not want to complete it but only to continue researching it forever, which would give him some measure of immortality. So to break it off before then, at this particular critical juncture, would seem a sloppy way to die.

The sun on the skin of his face and hands and the tips of his ears is marvelous as he floats down Pusher Street past the stalls and scales and roaming dusty dogs, the bearded tattooed men and nose-jeweled women. He stops at a barrel manned by a fellow in beard and leather vest who
smiles. “Yes, sir. Can I help you?” Kerrigan asks how much for the little bag of skunk buds and is told that it is eighty crowns, the large a hundred. “I think the large then.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you. Hope you enjoy it.”

Kerrigan pockets the transparent bag, thinking,
A boy never outgrows his need for skunk
.

Out of the sun and into the shade again on the wheel-rutted earth. Kerrigan experiences himself as very far away in this strange place, reenters the EU through the wooden archway, and floats up Prinsessegade toward Torvegade, where he waits for a taxi across from Elephant's Bastion. No taxi comes. Then he remembers a place just up the road he has passed a thousand times on his way out to the airport and has always meant to visit but never yet has.

A raveline is a triangular defense work standing in a moat between two bastions, the two outer faces of the raveline protected by ramparts.
The Summer Restaurant Ravelinen
is built upon the site where a raveline once lay outside of the defensive gate of the island of Amager, a so-called Zone of Servitude, where until 1909 building was limited in order to keep a free field of fire and deny cover to any enemy approaching the city.

The Restaurant Ravelinen stands where the old fortification used to be. The old yellow sentry building, which dates back to 1728, is now the restaurant's kitchen. The restaurant consists of two roofed-in sections built of strips of brown wood and an open gravel yard of outdoor tables that look out onto the old city moat and embankment.

This is where Kerrigan sits with a tall glass of lager staring down to the gravel that crunches beneath the soles of his shoes. He is the only guest.

The bird of amnesia

Nests on the head of the smoke-eater

And steals his wits.

Thus spake the High One.

Nonetheless, the gravel reminds him of something very sad, so sad he does not wish to think of it, for his stomach seems to be falling toward its own bottomless center as the not yet recognized memory rises to the surface of his thought. He sits there a long time staring at the gravel. Then he looks up at the wall beside the kitchen doorway across the gravel yard and the ancient yellow sentry post where he sees an advertisement for a
Pinse Frokost
, a Whitsun Lunch, celebrating Pentecost, Monday, May 25, and he remembers then what the gravel reminds him of.

He had been at another restaurant with his Associate—
M. G. Petersens Family Garden
in Frederiksberg, established in 1799, at Pileallé 16, on the west edge of Copenhagen. They sat outside with a drink, and she had gazed down at the gravel, a distant look in her eye. When he asked what she was thinking, she told how she and her first husband's family used to have a traditional Whitsun celebration each year. They would eat an enormous Danish
smørrebrød
lunch on the Saturday.
Smørrebrød
means literally “butter bread,” but such a lunch consists not only of three or four different kinds of bread with butter and swine fat, but also a couple of dozen courses on the table, three or four kinds of herring—pickled, fried, curried, sherried—smoked eel with scrambled egg and chives, caviar, cod roe, smoked salmon with dill and freshly ground pepper, fried plaice fillets, smoked halibut, fresh calf liver paste, wild boar pâté, corned beef, country ham, lamb meatballs, calf meatballs, pork meatballs, half a dozen Danish cheeses … They would drink bottled beer and iced snaps, would
skål
and sing drinking songs in honor of the women, in honor of the company, in honor of the papa eel that would never come home to his eel family again. They would party all night and on the Sunday morning, at sunrise, they would move over to Hansen's Family Garden “to see the Whitsun sun dance” as they ate breakfast with strong coffee and morning snaps and many kinds of bread and cheese and sausage and pastry. There was music and dancing to Happy Jazz and people wore old-fashioned straw hats.

A celebration of this sort requires a certain sense of pace regarding the drink, and this pace was something that her first husband had never mastered. As in many other places, it is customary at Danish gatherings
for wives and husbands not to sit together. Thus she and her husband were at separate tables. At one point she saw him down on the ground, swimming in the gravel. He swam from his table through the gravel over to her and reached up to pinch her on the inside of her thigh.
Very
hard.

“Did you enjoy dancing with Martin?” he hissed, and then swam back to his own table. Martin was the man on her left with whom she had just danced. Everybody was dancing with everybody. But even while her husband danced with another woman, he watched his wife dancing with another man, and sometimes he pinched her afterward if he didn't like the way she danced or who she danced with. Or he would tap the tabletop in front of him with his index finger until she stopped dancing and came to sit beside him. If she didn't stop dancing, she knew what was in store for her later.

On this occasion, however, one brutal pinch had been sufficient. She rose and went off by herself into the Frederiksberg gardens, through the hedge maze and the stone-path pond. She looked at her leg. There was a still-stinging, nasty red-black spot where he had pinched her. Then she decided not to return to the party. She walked all the way home to their apartment on the other side of the city, packed a bag for herself and for her daughters, who were staying with her aunt, and she left him.

Two months later she was alone with their three daughters in a two-room apartment. Her husband had cleverly registered everything they had in the name of his parents' company so she had no claim on it, wanted no claim on it. She wanted only no longer to be pinched and accused of things of which she was not guilty. She wanted her daughters not to be shouted at by a drunken father. She wanted to be free of living with a man who became someone else when he was drunk, which was nearly every evening.

Kerrigan stares at the gravel, gray and black and white pebbles that slide beneath his shoe as he shifts his feet on them. The sound saddens him. It makes a sound that somehow calls up the word
children
. He pictures his Associate's husband swimming in the pebbles, reaching up with a crazed face to pinch her leg, then swimming away again. Kerrigan
is sad for the man, that he lost such a beautiful wife, the mother of his daughters, because his ego was so weak it required her subjugation to it.

The entire world is full of madmen
, he thinks.
There is no such thing as civilization; it is all just a behavioral veneer. Or rather we live in an illusion of normalcy, of normal, reasonable behavior
.

Close to the surface of his consciousness are images of Licia and his girl he wishes not to see. Faces so far away. How do you survive that? You survive. On the flow of time. You get over it. One day you tell yourself, get over it, and you get over it. Even if you never do.

His mouth is dry again and he has not touched his beer. He drinks off half the glass in one long succession of swallows, working it down his throat, cold and delicious.

He wants very much to comfort her at this moment, his Associate, to make her believe in comfort, for it seems to him if he can make her believe, then it will be true. And he wants very much to go and sit alone by his front windows and watch the sun set over the lake, to watch the light—pale red, pale blue—ripple on the water while silhouettes of men and women and children and dogs and joggers move past beneath the silhouetted trees like a picture in some forgotten childhood book.

He pictures the sad green shadows of his Associate's eyes. She deserves a man who is not a drunkard, who is not drunk every day, who is not drunk most days.

Outside on the grassy ramparts beneath the shelter of trees, he watches the sun move lower in the sky and marvels at the thousand colors of light on the water, stippled like an oil painting, and he feels the ellipse of the universe on its slow elliptical course around him and, around that, the mysterious darkness.

He walks slowly along
Torvegade
, head tipped back, toward Knippels Bridge, toward the center. On the other side of the street is the small, white, old-fashioned face of
Spicy Kitchen
at number 56. He stops and looks across, thinks of their spicy lamb curry, their chicken
masala, their inexpensive beer and wine. But despite the hashish, he has no appetite. Just as his lungs begin to labor again, he sees the green “free” light on the roof of a cab and raises two fingers.

Back in his apartment, he sits by the window, hunched over his work, but merely peers at the Montblanc cradled in the crook between his thumb and forefinger, raises his eyes to the lake outside, silent figures jogging past on the dusky lake bank.

He reaches to his back pocket and slides out the book of Arnold, thumbs through to “Dover Beach,” and begins to read, hearing within his ears, within the silence of the apartment, the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar …

… the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain …

—MATTHEW ARNOLD

From a dream in which his wife is chiding him for not having properly divided the fruit in an enormous bowl and offering it around, he wakes with a jolt realizing that he is no longer married and that the wife in his dream was not Licia and that the telephone has been ringing for some time.

By the time he reaches it, the machine is recording a message. A voice with a Swedish accent speaks into the recorder. “Terrence! Kerrigan! Are you all fugged up or what? Pick up the fugging phone!”

It is the insistent, demanding voice of Morten Gideon, who visits him from time to time, always unannounced, when he is in from Stockholm to find peace to smoke cigars and drink alcohol, to converse and fulfill secret assignations with the many women with whom he dallies.

Kerrigan decides he is not up to Gideon today.

He met Gideon years ago at the Casino Divonne Les Bains, first noticed him there by the loud and clear pronunciation of his Swedish-accented English addressing a ravishing blonde Turkish baccarat table-mate in these words: “I vant to kees your feet!”

To which the Turkish beauty—a gynecologist by profession Kerrigan would later learn—replied, “Yes, yes, Dr. Gideon. Down, boy.”

Spying Gideon again next morning at the breakfast buffet where he
sat nursing a Fernet Branca and soft-boiled egg, Kerrigan could not resist extending his compliments and inquiring whether Gideon's proposal had brought him into contact with the lovely Turkish trotters.

“It is all a dream in the dark,” said Gideon, inviting Kerrigan to join him in a Branca, the beginning of an extended friendship.

The message now is: “Meet me, Kerrigan. Let me invite you out to dinner. I want you to meet this woman and tell me what you think. Meet me in the bar at the D'Angleterre. My plane gets in in two hours. Meet me there at three. I want you to tell me what you think of this sweet kid I met. Skin like milk! Be there!”

But the subtext is:
Legitimize the fact that I am having dinner with this sweet kid and then disappear so I can shag her
.

Gideon is the chairman of half a dozen different international companies. With kinky blond hair and thick lips, big dark-framed eyeglasses and black Armani suits and big glossy black shoes, he rules whatever he puts his hand to. To Gideon every woman is a challenge, but he is not content to look. He wants the comfort of their bodies, of their acquiescence.

“Hey,” he says, “I'm a passionate guy. I need love.”

He has just married his fourth wife, who is thirty years younger than he. He has seven children by various women. He is an intellectual businessman and has excellent taste in cigars with a budget to keep it busy.

Kerrigan splashes several palmsful of cold water into his face, leans on the sink for a while, assessing how he feels. His lungs are heavy but seem to be functioning. So far.

Moving barefoot to his dining table, he sees a fat stack of freshly written yellow pages, inspired by his reading of Arnold and Lucretius and the hashishination of his frontal lobe. He does not dare read them. He peeks. First sentence looks good. Second, third, fourth, too. Cheered, he decides not to read further just now.

His head is light so he switches on the radio to the classical channel, hears Johann Strauss II (1825–1899), “Little Woman of the Danube,” and the swaying rhythms of the waltz soothe his mind. His gaze rests on the smooth lake, paddling ducks, bobbing joggers. A couple strolls beneath
the green chestnuts and a woman passes pushing a stroller as memories carry on the strings of the Vienna Philharmonic—the New Year's Day brunch Licia always prepared for the two of them to dine on as they watched the Vienna Concert on television, “Tales of the Vienna Woods,” “The Blue Danube,” “On the Beautiful Blue Danube,” “The Champagne Gallop,” Von Suppé's “Charge of the Light Cavalry” …

They ate scrambled eggs and drank champagne, and the year that had just begun could not have begun more elegantly. None of the petty cares of daily life mattered then, no quibbles, grievances, petty jealousies, nothing. There were only the Strausses, I and II, the century-and-a-half-old music, the bubbly, the winter sun through the living room's plate window, the food on the smoked-glass coffee table—yellow eggs on a blue china platter, smoked eel in gray-white strips on a bone-white plate ready for the chives and pepper, delicate sausage slices, black pudding, cheese—of the cow, the goat, the sheep—fresh fruit, juices, toast, jams and marmalades, a basket of assorted rolls fresh from the bakery. And on the color screen of the TV the beautiful young Austrian women in their colorful gowns, the young cavaliers in their waistcoats and colored butterflies and cummerbunds, waltzing with such fluent grace.