Copenhagen Tales
Page 2
greatest storytellers: Meȉr Goldschmidt, the Danish-Jewish
novelist who in his student days notoriously crossed
pens with the formidable Kierkegaard, and Karen Blixen
(pen-name Isak Dinesen) of Out of Africa and Babette’s
Feast fame.
Goldschmidt’s ‘Nightingale’ is set in and around the
city’s greatest cultural institution, det Kongelig Teater, the
Royal Theatre, and in the still extant little streets and alleys
nearby. This perfectly told tale, in which Copenhagen is
still a compact middle-size city where seemingly everyone
knows just about everyone, also gives an insider’s glimpse
of the rise of the city’s small Jewish community from its
humble Ashkenazi immigrant origins (still traceable in its
speech) to comfortably off bourgeoisie. From this same
background was to emerge the great radical literary critic
Georg Brandes, one of the most influential thinkers of late-
nineteenth-century Europe.
Karen Blixen’s wonderfully atmospheric evocation of
mid-eighteenth-century Copenhagen is set in the second
year of the reign of the unstable Christian VII (the ‘mad
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10 n Introduction
king’ of the recent very successful film A Royal Affair).
Lost in the city one wet and eventful night the novice
monarch stumbles upon the slightly older but far more
worldly wise poet Johannes Ewald in the company of his
favourite whore. In the pair’s schnapps-heightened ‘con-
versation’ about sex and myth-making, might and mortal-
ity, Blixen revels in the triumphs and absurdities of their
macho world as if it were her own. Indeed ‘Isak’ Dinesen
identified very strongly with Ewald, Denmark’s first great
lyric poet, who wrote his finest work while resident in the
old inn at Rungsted, the Dinesen family home in which
she was born.
The last ‘tale’ is not fiction at all, but a fine journalist’s
retelling of a fairy-tale moment in the history of her city.
‘The Night of Great Shared Happiness’ captures the joy
and spontaneous need for togetherness—rare in the life of
any great city—suddenly unleashed by BBC London’s
surprise announcement, on the evening of 4 May 1945,
that the five years of Nazi occupation were at an end.
Events unfold against the backdrop of some of the most
familiar streets and squares and public buildings of the
inner city: the historic power centres of Christiansborg
and the royal palace of Amalienborg, the great public
spaces of Kongens Nytorv and Rådhuspladsen (the Town
Hall Square), and two important cultural icons at opposite
ends of the city centre: the Royal Theatre on Kongens
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Introduction n 11
Nytorv, and the head office of the daily paper Politiken on
Rådhuspladsen.
In translating these stories, most of them for the first
time, I have hoped to demonstrate the versatility, range,
and also beauty (four writers here are first and foremost
poets) of a great national literature very little known
beyond Scandinavia, and here encapsulated in seventeen
tales set in my ordinary and extraordinary city.
Many people have been instrumental in bringing this
collection of stories together: my sister Trine, the indefati-
gable reader; great friends and Denmark lovers, Fleur
Griffiths and John Lowe; the special little enclave of friends
in Skamlebæk. Particular thanks go to my brother Jesper
for his scholarly and excellent help and advice, also to my
nephew Kristian whose beautiful flat in the centre of the
old city he generously lent us, and to Rune Backs, who
took many of the wonderful photos for the book. Thanks
also to the helpful librarians in Odsherred Library, Asnæs.
And finally, above all, thanks to Hugh, my husband and
fellow traveller through life as well as the canon of Danish
short stories, without whose help this book would not have
seen the light of day.
Lotte Shankland
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The Water Drop
Hans Christian Andersen
I dare say you are familiar with a magnifying glass, that
kind of round spectacle lens which makes everything a
hundred times bigger than it really is? If you hold it up to
your eye and look at a drop of water from the pond you
will see over a thousand queer creatures you never nor-
mally see in the water, although they are there and they are
real. It almost looks like a whole plateful of shrimps
jumping around, and they are so ravenous they tear the
arms and legs and tops and tails off each other, and yet
they are happy enough in their own way.
Now, once upon a time there was an old man whom
everyone called Creepy-Crawly, for that was his name. He
always wanted to make the best of everything, and when
that didn’t work he used magic.
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14 n Hans Christian Andersen
One day he was sitting there, holding a magnifying
glass to his eye and looking at a drop of water taken
from a puddle of ditch water. Goodness, how everything
was creeping and crawling in there! All the thousands of
little beasties were jumping and skipping about, pulling at
each other and eating each other up.
‘Oh dear me, that is quite disgusting’, said old Creepy-
Crawly. ‘Can’t they be made to live in peace and harmony
and all mind their own business?’—and he thought and he
thought but nothing seemed to work, so then he had to use
magic. ‘I must colour them so they’ll be easier to see’, he said, and so he added something that looked like a little drop of
wine to the water drop, but it was magic blood, the very best
for two shillings; and this turned all the queer creatures pink
all over, and now it looked just like a whole city full of naked
savages.
‘What have you got there?’ asked another old troll who
didn’t have a name, and that was what was special about
him.
‘Well, if you can guess what it is’, said Creepy-Crawly,
‘I will make you a present of it; but it isn’t easy to discover
if you don’t already know.’
And the troll without a name looked through the
magnifying glass. It really did look like a whole city full
of people running about with no clothes on! It was horri-
ble, but even more horrible was seeing how they pushed
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The Water Drop n 15
and shoved, all picking and pecking, biting and tearing at
each other. Whichever was underneath had to be on top,
and whichever was top had to be bottom! ‘Look, look! His
leg is longer than mine! Slash!—off with it! There’s some-
one with a little pimple behind his ear, a harmless little
pimple but it’s tormenting him, so let it tor
ment him even
more!’ And they pecked at it, and they pushed him over,
and they ate him for the sake of that one little pimple.
There was another one sitting as still as a little girl, only
wanting peace and quiet, but the little girl had to go, and
they pulled at her and they tore at her and they ate her up!
‘That’s exceedingly droll’, said the troll.
‘Yes, but what do you think it is?’ asked Creepy-
Crawly. ‘Can you work it out?’
‘That’s easy to see!’ said the other. ‘It must be Copenha-
gen, or another big city, they’re all alike. A big city, for sure.’
‘It’s ditchwater!’ said Creepy-Crawly.
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Twice Met
Henrik Pontoppidan
He went far up into the mountains of Norway—an odd-
looking lanky fellow in threadbare clothes with a perma-
nent grin on his lean face. No one could make out where
he belonged—not whence he came, not whither he was
bound. But when the ‘Long Dane’, as they came to call
him, every spring and autumn without fail came striding
through their valley with his thin oilcloth knapsack on his
back and that stumpy pipe smouldering under his nose-
end, not a few on whose doors he knocked to ask for a
match or a beaker of water could resist the temptation to
invite him in—to be entertained by his many far-fetched
stories and his altogether curious figure.
On the other hand, one wouldn’t particularly have
wanted to meet him on a lonely path in the hills or the
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18 n Henrik Pontoppidan
woods. It was generally agreed there was something unset-
tling about the way those tiny dark eyes of his flickered
behind his glasses. His grin wasn’t altogether above suspi-
cion either, and his hair hung like a tangled mane all over
his ears and neck. The girls up in the summer pastures
squealed in terror when he stuck his long, slightly inebri-
ated nose through a crack in the door.
No, truth to tell, it was not easy to figure out what the
devil he was doing roaming about this foreign land, all
down at heel, when somewhere or other he surely had
hearth and home waiting to welcome him inside so much
more warmly. Most people considered him a bit of a ‘queer
fish’. Others were of the opinion he had likely forsaken his
place of origin on account of some misdeed or other—
possibly even murder. He looked capable of anything, that
fellow! But if you asked him straight out, he would just
grin and say in his quaint speech that it was so ‘much,
much bonnier in Norway’.
Once at some festivity where he had been invited in off
the road they finally managed to worm out of him that he
really did come from Denmark, was even a Copenhagener!
When, however, they went on to enquire whether he felt
homesick or ever had thoughts of returning to his native
land, a peculiar dark flush suffused his jutting cheekbones;
and after gazing silently at the ceiling a long while he
answered, ‘Yes, when I am needed.’
He was a riddle.
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Twice Met n 19
Come winter, when the snow and the cold drove him
down from the mountains, he betook himself to Kristiania
where he found work in his old profession: bookbinding.
There, every night, he could be found sitting in a modest
basement tavern, always in the same out-of-the-way cor-
ner, bent imperturbably over a newspaper which he stud-
ied from end to end, shrouded in ever thicker fumes from
that half burned-out little pipe which so rarely left the
corner of his mouth. But at the very first signs of spring
the irresistible longing for adventure awoke in his breast
once more. He strapped on his oilcloth knapsack and
struck out for the mountains.
Well now, last summer he turned up again in the usual
places, where little by little people had got so accustomed
to his arrival that they almost felt he belonged to spring in
the same way as the starling and the stork. Only this time
he was the shadow of his old self. His tall spare frame was
now almost skeletal, and the little dark eyes flitted hither
and thither distractedly as though his thoughts were for-
ever far away, in foreign parts. No less striking was how
relentlessly he pressed people everywhere for tidings of
Denmark and the frantic eagerness he showed whenever
he caught sight of a newspaper and then begged permis-
sion to read it. On the other hand, if you broached the
subject of politics, the parlous state of affairs back home in
the land of his birth, the coup d’etat, the king and the
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20 n Henrik Pontoppidan
possibility of a revolution, he would straightway fall silent
and go all black around the eyes.
And then it came, that October day with the appalling
news from Copenhagen: Assassination attempt! Prime
minister shot at! The story shook up even the Norwegian
peasants. Now all hell will break loose, they opined. It’s
surely the last straw! And each morning, caught between
suspense and concern, they picked up the paper and
thought with commiseration of the old sister country.
But where, all of a sudden, was the ‘Long Dane’? He
had vanished into thin air, right from under the noses of
the good people of Hallingdalen.
In fact, at the very first wind of the pistol shots, he had
set out to cross the mountains by the shortest route to the
sea. Without pause night or day he had tramped through
valleys and towns, forest and heath, in an unfamiliar
landscape, until toward evening after three days’ hard
march he came to a little coastal town in the west country.
In one of the many sailors’ taverns along the darkened
quayside he discovered a German captain whose old tub
had just taken on a cargo for Riga, and who, after a good
many objections, in the end agreed to take him as a
passenger to the waters off Copenhagen.
They weighed anchor at break of day the very next
morning.
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Twice Met n 21
It was a misty November afternoon when the ship
finally entered the Sound under a mild north-westerly.
Reinald—for that was the Dane’s name—stood beside
the mainmast on the wet and slippery deck, blue with
cold, with his numbed hands thrust into the sleeves of
his tightly buttoned coat and his hat pulled down over his
lank hair above those tiny feverish eyes which seemed to
flare up each time he glimpsed a section of the familiar
autumn-brown coast through the mist.
Most of the interminable crossing he had spent in more
or less the identical position, and on the selfsame spot.
Once in a w
hile he had allowed himself a little exercise,
pacing to and fro in the tight space between mast and rail;
but when his impatience and agitation became too much
for him he had sat down on a coil of anchor cable with his
face buried in his hands. At night he slept below in the
fo’c’sle between a sailor and a cabin boy who had enjoyed a
good laugh at the expense of this baffling passenger who
thrashed about in his hammock like a fish on the line and
screamed aloud in his dreams.
In any case, there had been little chance to become
acquainted. They ran into the foulest weather, with rain
and gales over the North Sea, and fog over the Kattegat.
For two days they lay off Hesseloe, compelled to keep
sounding the ship’s bell; and when the fog finally lifted
enough to dare set sail again, they were forced to heave to
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22 n Henrik Pontoppidan
once more in the lee of Kullen to await a pilot. Not until
late morning did they slip past Kronborg—and now the
Sound lay all about them like a thick, lead-grey, rocking
waste over which the ship slowly crept along.
It was almost evening before Copenhagen loomed out
of the mist far up ahead.
Reinald’s bony body gave a start when he saw the first
spires rise like fine needles piercing the grey gauze of the
horizon. Instinctively his hand went to the small of his
back—to make sure the well-honed pointed knife still sat
snug in its leather sheath under his coat tails. His entire
body started trembling with impatience as little by little
the city emerged from the mist: Vor Frelser’s slender
corkscrew spire, the brickwork cone of St. Paul’s, the
plump dome of the Marble Church. And later: the Stock
Exchange, the Cross of Our Lady, the crane on the old
battlement of the royal dockyard, and the snow-white
roofs of the bacon factories.
For twelve long years he had not set eyes on the city of
his birth—not since those momentous days at the begin-
ning of the seventies when, as a very young man, he had
thrown himself into the socialist class war, never doubting
that the time for the great reckoning had finally come, the
dearly bought vengeance of the suffering, the oppressed,
and the wronged. Right in there, between St. Peter’s and
Our Lady, high up in a wretched little garret he had lived