I pulled my debit card from my wallet and said, “Coffee, please.”
She lifted a ceramic carafe from her cart and poured a long stream of coffee into a paper cup.
“Maelk?” She waved a small blue container at me.
“Yes, please.” I tried out a word I had heard Søren use many times. “Tak?”
“You are very welcome,” she answered in English. I handed her my debit card, hoping it would work. She slid it through her machine, handed it back, and put my coffee down on the table, along with two small blue containers and a shrink-wrapped cookie.
“Tak!” When she wheeled away I realized that I had been holding my breath.
Roskilde was a winding street of white storefronts, their windows all hung with printed TILBUD banners. Søren charged ahead and I raced to keep up, dodging racks and tables of ceramics, women’s clothing, textiles. In one display a miniature family of astrological figurines stared. A centaur, a bull, a ram, a goat. TILBUD! TILBUD! TILBUD!
Søren led me up a low hill toward a redbrick church with two towers topped with pointed spires. To one side stood a domed building of the same brick.
“This is the Roskilde Domkirke,” he said. “The cathedral.”
We continued past it and down the hill to a low white building with a flat roof whose high slanted windows looked out on a small bay. A long wooden ship stood on the grassy shore, covered with a blue tarp.
“Here we are.” Søren frowned. “The Viking Ship Museum.”
The last thing I wanted to see was a bunch of old boats. At the front desk Søren handed me a sticker, a black dragon’s head printed in a white circle.
“Your ticket. Put it on your sweater and go on. I will find the group.”
I drifted down a dark corridor, past lit signs that explained Viking history in three languages. Little pictures hung above the words, but the glass was smudged and scratched. I didn’t see any people.
At the end of the row of panels was a tall coat rack draped with heavy pieces of cloth. A sign urged me to
DRESS LIKE A VIKING!
I took a purple smock from the rack and pulled it on over my sweater, draped myself in a blue cloak trimmed in fake red fur, and passed into a hall, warm for the first time that day. White sun poured over the skeletons of five ships, all shaped like big canoes. The biggest one was suspended above a dais filled with gray pebbles. Most of its hull had been lost to water and time. A few stray boards, the boat’s last remnants, were suspended in a metal grid that represented the whole. The ancient wood was dark, glossy. How many waves had crashed against it?
I did what I was not supposed to do and ran my hand across the old wood, tensing for a reprimand that didn’t come. It felt good. Smooth. Emboldened, I dragged my hand against its length, painting it with the oil from my skin. Bright pain ripped across my hand. A stripe of blood welled below the cushiony top of my palm. The old wood had cut me open. It hurt, but it felt good too.
I’m young, I thought to the ship. I haven’t been around long. Teach me something. Show me how to feel.
“Roxana?” Søren appeared and I shoved my bleeding hand inside the fake fur cape. “I have been searching for you.”
“Sorry,” I said, cutting him off. “You told me to look around.”
He sighed. “I thought you were lost.”
“I’m not,” I said.
He took off his hat and rubbed his scalp. “I have made a mess. The others left Amager much earlier today. The group has already been to the museum, and now they have gone again, on a day excursion of some kind. A boat trip and a picnic? Maybe a picnic on a boat. I am not sure. But they are gone.”
A tiny pool of blood welled in my palm. I cupped my hand away from my body, trying not to stain the costume.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“We cannot catch up with them. You will not be able to join the group today.”
“It’s really okay.”
Søren shook his head. “It is not. Roxana. It is my responsibility to broker a good cultural experience of Denmark for you. I am very sorry.” He stared at the ground. He seemed so disappointed that I wanted to touch him, make him feel better. But I didn’t want him to see my bloody hand.
“Look. I don’t feel so good today.” I said. “My head hurts. If you put me on a boat I would throw up all over everyone. This is the best thing that’s happened to me today.”
He looked up at me from under his brows. “But it is my job, and I failed at it.”
“Are you going to get in trouble?”
He snickered. “No, the inmates are in charge of the asylum at the company. No one cares if things are done well.”
“Only you, huh?” There was something sweet in the slump of his shoulders. I tried to catch his eye. “It’s nice that you care so much. I think you’re doing a good job.”
He shook his head, rolling his eyes. “You have been here over twenty-four hours and all I’ve done is get you juiced and feed you leverpostej.”
I was determined to cheer him up. “Then take me to do something very Danish. Something normal.”
Søren touched his chin. “Well, it is almost lunchtime. You have a hangover. As do I. It is the weekend.” He blinked. “Why are you wearing those clothes?”
“They belong to the museum,” I explained and remembered my hand. “Søren, would you help me? They’re heavy.”
He undressed me gently, draping the Viking costume over his right arm. I inspected my hand while he arranged the clothes on their rack. Brought it to my mouth and sucked the blood. I swallowed, licked, and rubbed away the brown stain, avoiding the wound’s curly white edges.
We were the only customers in a basement restaurant near the cathedral and our food had just arrived. My sandwich was a single slice of grainy rye bread, the same kind Søren had brought me the day before, topped this time with a thin fillet of fried white fish, a salad of tiny pink shrimp, slices of cucumber and tomato, and a dollop of creamy yellow sauce.
“Your smørrebrød is a stjerneskud. A shooting star. We eat them with a knife and fork,” Søren said. “But Americans prefer to use their hands, I know.”
I felt obscurely offended by this, but when I tried to give him a look I ended up just watching him cut a dainty rectangle of his pariserbøf, Parisian steak—a slab of ground beef fried against a piece of bread and topped with caramelized onions—and slip it delicately into his mouth.
“This is traditional Danish food?”
“Yes. But more importantly, we are behaving in a traditionally Danish fashion by chasing away our hangovers with more alcohol.” He sipped his beer.
I winced. “I don’t know. It’s just making me feel worse.”
“Then it is time for another beer. Let us make a preemptive strike.” He mumbled Danish to the bartender, who went to the taps. I drained my glass. The cut in my hand was still tender at its lacy margins. The pain was gone.
We took the six o’clock back to Copenhagen. The sun had barely moved from its high place in the center of the sky. I was grateful when the train ducked into tunnels, draping us in dim artificial light. Across from me, Søren was lost in his thoughts, mouthing the same words over and over to himself. Something in Danish.
I twiddled my thumbs faster and faster, hoping he would recognize it as a sign of boredom. The motion grew more manic as I thought of things that spun round and round. Ferris wheels, dreidels, centrifuges. What was a centrifuge, anyway?
Søren let out a great cough-bark. I looked up. He was doubled over, laughing silently.
“What?”
He raised a hand, shaking his head, and finally wheezed as he caught his breath. “I’m sorry, Roxana. You had such a look of concentration on your face, and you were—I don’t know the English. Trillede tommelfingre, we say.”
I dropped my hands. “Twiddling my thumbs?”
“Yes! So fast, as if it was very important, just staring into space!” He cough-laughed again. It made me happy to see him smile.
“Wh
ere did you go?”
“Nowhere,” he said humorlessly.
“I mean that you’ve been thinking about something since we left Roskilde.”
“You are very perceptive, yes?” He rubbed his head. “I have been lost in my thoughts. In the bookstore in the train station I found a book of criticism recently published by a Danish scholar on the subject of African American literature. My subject. And it seems he makes the same argument I do, or at least have been planning to make, in my thesis. With different books and different terms, of course, but still, the same argument. So I have been worrying about that. If I want half a shot at a PhD, I have to make an innovative argument. To contribute something new to the discipline.”
“That sounds hard.”
He didn’t seem to have heard me. “I have to completely change my approach. It was ridiculous for me to think that I could get anywhere with this argument. I found his handling of it weak, which means that mine must be much worse. Ah, fuck.”
The weather in Søren’s face changed and he lapsed back to worried silence. We didn’t talk for the rest of the trip. I hoped the coffee cart would appear and lighten the mood, but it did not.
“I will take you back to Birthe’s,” Søren said as we arrived in Copenhagen. I saw myself alone in the foxwoman’s weird room in the middle of the night, hearing Robert in the hall, waiting for the sun to go down.
We disembarked and crossed the busy station through a crowd of people dragging suitcases and eating pastries. Just as he had in Roskilde, Søren walked very quickly away from me without looking back. This time I didn’t try to keep up. I let distance fall between us and followed him through the crowd. His shape felt unstable. I remembered his eyes, and the movements of his hands, but separated in the crowd I couldn’t summon the feeling of his height, nor the weight of his body beside me, the spirit outline I could remember so clearly when I thought of Mama or Sylvie or even Hunter. Why did I expect to be able to do that with someone I barely knew?
I found him blinking in the bright sunlight on a sliver of sidewalk. Across the street, a giant sign with photographs of sausages, flames, and smiling men in bow ties advertised a
SERBO-CROATIAN RESTAURANT!!!
We stood staring at it.
“Everywhere there are foreigners,” Søren muttered. He cut his eyes at me. “Roxana, would you like to extend your Danish experience?”
It was like falling into the chorus of one of my favorite songs. Yes, yes, yes, a refrain. I nodded.
He led me to a white cart with a red awning in the center of the square. Printed on its windows, awning, and door was:
DAGMARS POLSEWAGN
“This is very Danish. A hot dog wagon.”
“Chicago is famous for its hot dogs too.”
“Really? How do you dress them?”
“Tomato slices, a pickle, relish, mustard, celery salt, chopped onion, and a sport pepper. On a poppy seed bun. I don’t really like them.”
“Please, what is a sport pepper?”
“A little hot pepper.”
“Ketchup? Mayonnaise?”
“Mayonnaise? Yuck.” Lifting my hair off my neck seemed to help my hangover. “Ketchup is against the Chicago hot dog rules.”
“No ketchup for you. Do you want to try a French hot dog?”
“What is that?”
“You will like it, I think.”
He ordered. With tongs, the old lady inside the cart lifted two thin hot dogs from a container of hot water onto the grill. She picked up a roll, squirted mustard into a hole at one end, lifted a dog from the grill, and pushed it into the hole, then repeated the whole process with ketchup and mayonnaise in the second roll. The hot dogs nestled in the bread cavity, tubes of meat inside a tube of bread. She wrapped the buns in paper sleeves.
Søren paid her with a few large coins and handed the mustard-only dog to me.
“A French hot dog, comme une baguette.” His accent was good.
“You know,” I said, “I was supposed to go to France, not Denmark.”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “Who would rather go to Copenhagen than Paris? Why on Earth are you here?”
I shrugged. “A woman from the company called and said I was bumped to Hyoolee Denmark. What does that mean, anyway?”
“Hyggelige Danmark,” he corrected. “It’s bastardized Danish. Hygge is, how can I explain this, the national virtue? Coziness, cuddliness. A night in with friends in a comfortably arranged room. So the idea is that your experience of Denmark is going to be a lot of that.”
“So far so good,” I said hopefully. “I’m glad I ended up here.”
His face darkened. He must be tired of me. Or thinking about his thesis again.
I took a bite of my hot dog. It was tepid in the middle. A sour pond of mustard gathered at the bottom of my bun. I swallowed the last wad of bread whole.
Søren finished his in three bites, looking distant. “And now, of course, I am thirsty. This way.”
We crossed the square and another street, arriving at a busy cobblestone lane where there were no cars, only people. Two-and three-story buildings rose on either side of us, touristy gift shops, lit boxes selling gloves, cheap sweatpants, and I ♥ COPENHAGEN Tshirts. Their proprietors stood outside, smoking. The restaurants offered faded photographs of food: masses of supposedly Chinese congealed brownness, steakhouse marquees of charred slabs, vast trays of fries, all hung above windows into dim dining rooms. Every other place was colorful and well lit—every shop selling snow globes, Tshirts, leather jackets, amber carvings, tiny windmills—but the eateries were dark. I was glad we had gone to the Polsewagn.
We turned and a different class of restaurants appeared, with steel-accented interiors, bare surfaces, elegantly dressed light-haired customers considering glasses of red wine. I imagined us sipping foamy coffee drinks and fingering fine tablecloths in one of these clean bright places. But he stopped in front of a brick facade with the word BODEGA painted in chipped yellow letters and led me down a short staircase into a crowded bar.
The place was small, all its tables packed with old men drinking and filling glass ashtrays with cigarette butts. They wore heavy coats, even though it was June. In the low light and thick smoke, everything seemed overwhelmingly brown. A man at the bar tapped his pipe, packed a pinch of fresh tobacco, and raised his finger. The bartender, who could have been his twin, pushed a tall green bottle toward him. Their eyes caught, they nodded, and the bartender turned away.
The bartender handed Søren two bottles of Carlsberg, and said something to another patron in a trench coat and tweed hat who was sitting at the table nearest the bar. The man rose and moved to a bar stool. He and the bartender nodded at the table. I followed Søren and we sat down.
“That was nice of them,” I said.
“It is only polite to make way for a larger party,” Søren said. “We would do the same.”
We clinked bottles and drank.
“Søren, you’ve bought so many things for me. Can I pay for these drinks to make up the difference?” I liked that. I could buy him a drink, no big deal, like I did it all the time.
He shook his head. “I said that I am reimbursed for the money I spend on you, but this is inaccurate. International Abroad Experiences gives me a fund from which to pay student expenses, a quite sizable fund, actually. The only requirement is that I submit an itemized receipt at the end of the summer, and by then what small amounts I may or may not have spent on beers with Roxana will be immaterial.”
Like me. “But you have to make the money last, right?”
“The total amount the company gives me is quite high, around ten thousand US.”
“That’s so much!”
“I spend only a small portion. They give me such a large amount in case of an emergency. Lost passports, misplaced train and air tickets.” He slurred derisively. “Children being children.”
We drank. He suddenly seemed to be in a bad mood. Had I done something wrong?
�
��I’m sorry, Roxana,” he said after a few long minutes. “I do not mean to be rude. But I believe I know what happened to your trip to France, and I am angry.” He slipped his hat from his head. The soft black cap deflated in his hand as his head lit in the low light. I wanted to touch it. “You deserve to know.”
I leaned across the table, feeling my breasts shift.
“I have worked for International Abroad Experiences for almost ten years. I started during my gap year. I was nineteen, and had just come to Copenhagen from Farsø. It had been my goal for so long, and then I was here. I was terrified.
“Hummingen, my hometown, is a very small place. Quiet. In the sixties and seventies, when people wanted to move away from the cities to start co-ops, it became quite popular. That’s when my parents bought land there. All the old farmers were dying off, and the sixty-eight generation really thought they were going to remake society. Many families made their own clothes and grew their own crops. Everyone ate these horrible lentil stews, an idea of vegetarian food, but no one had any idea how to cook vegetables without meat. I played in the field alone most of the time. Now it is no place to live. Only pensioners and junkies. Any young person with half a brain leaves for the cities.”
As he spoke I memorized his crowded bottom teeth, the inky dark behind. I wanted to ask questions, but I was afraid that if I interrupted I would never get Søren talking about his past again.
“I left too, of course. For Copenhagen. It was important to me that I not go right to college from gymnasium. I was far too young to begin a degree.”
“How old were you when you began college?”
“Twenty-three.”
If I finished college on time, I’d be out for a year by the time I was twenty-three. “What did you do until you started?”
“Went to concerts, read books in the library, took long walks all over the city. I made friends. Met girls.” A smile lingered on his face. “But I needed a job. My mother had already given me all of the money she had saved during my childhood.” He sipped his beer.
“How were you going to pay for college?”
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