—So you’re a botanist. Poor fellow, the blind man.
—A sweet, gentle man. With a fine voice and a great repertory of songs, probably medieval, some of them.
—A good photograph that would make, Pascal said, the slats of late afternoon light across the bedtable. Underpants, the book of Isak Dinesen’s flowers, one sock. Russian Constructivist, all the diagonal lines. Tell me more about the blind folksinger.
YELLOW MAPLE, AUTUMN MIST
Alexandra, blue silk scarf fluttering at her throat, was on the far side of the soccer field, white jeans, red sweater, in dialogue with Franklin by arm semaphore. Pascal, coming from the gym, hair wet, sneakers fashionably untied, joined in. Franklin to Pascal. Pascal to Alexandra. Alexandra to both.
—Kære gud! Joe said to Holger. Did you read that?
—Afraid so.
85
Across a slant and mellow radiance a spider had knit her web in the barley. Further along, grebes foraging. Holger thought of the mosses and gannets of Iceland, of huldufolk in a bramble, of Pascal at sixteen, at twenty, how handsome he would be. Shared time doubles.
CHARLES IVES: STRYGEKVARTET NUMMER 2 1907–1913)
A smiling Jos said after the concert by the Copenhagen String Quartet in the auditorium that however the music went down with the Grundtvig smart set and all the townies they at least got to see him in a jacket, shirt and tie, Sunday trousers, and shoes. Hair combed, too. Shirt and tie were Rutger’s, but the rest was his own togs.
—Not only me in my finery, but in Holger’s company. Didn’t believe it when you asked me. Underwear and socks, Rutger’s, too. Tie clasp. Did I behave?
—Exemplary, Holger said. And seemed to like it, even.
—O ja! Love fiddle music. Got to pee.
—Here?
—Not to play the game. Modesty’s pride. Pride’s class hegemony. Very bad, according to Nils.
—Kære gud! Hugo said, coming over from the dispersing crowd, the Ives, the Ives! Every so often something other than Whitman, cornflakes, and blue jeans comes out of the USA. I’m not saying a word, you’ll notice, about Jos watering the oleanders, though he is facing away from the Eglunds and Pastor Bruun.
—Being Danes, we had to have the Nielsen, and being lucky, we got to hear the Ives, but what sin were we being punished for with the Stravinsky? Ho, Mariana!
—It’s sexist to piddle in public, she said, as you know I can’t.
—Why not? Jos asked. Meg would, and has, if you count the woods and ferns. The showers. Scandalized Asgar.
—I’d ask you over, Holger said, except that Pascal and Alexandra are there.
—Horrifying, Jos said, zipping up. Isn’t Pascal going to have to go to a rest home with an ice pack on his balls? Diet of thin gruel and wheatmeal biscuits? Babbling.
—Can’t, anyway, Hugo said. We promised Franklin, who’s sitting Barnabas, we’d be straight back. I gathered from some concupiscent observations he was making to Barnabas, who gurgled his approval, we can only suppose, that Alexandra had planned to be ravished by him this evening. But you say she’s with Pascal.
—Worse and worse, Jos said, Hugo pretending to have forgotten the facts of life. I’m going to Holger’s, infants fuckering in the middle of the floor or not. Mariana is going to kiss me goodnight.
—So’s Hugo, said Hugo.
—Ork jo, Jos said. Style’s all. When I have more style than anybody else in Denmark, the papers will ask me how I did it, and I’ll say some from Mariana, some from Hugo, some from Holger, and NFS Grundtvig will be famous for something other than scouts who hold hands and thirteen-year-olds who are mistaken by the Geological Society for professors with beards down to here. Do we barge in, or is there a signal? We could go over the wall and give them a rude shock just as they’re squishing in bliss. Barnabas has an orgasm from the top of his head to his pink toes when he’s feeding at Mariana’s teat, and so would I.
—Door’s unlocked, Holger said.
—Ho! Jos called. Cultivated intellectuals back from the concert! Decent Lutherans wearing neckties!
—Alexandra’s in the bathroom, Pascal said, getting dressed. Jos looks like the Stock Exchange.
—Why is Alexandra getting dressed? Jos asked. Why do I look like the Stock Exchange? Why are you kissing Holger and not me, too? Why don’t you have on any clothes?
—Holger, hi, Alexandra said, tidying the sleeves of her sweatshirt. Hello, Jos.
—Hi, sprat. We, Holger and I, have been to hear the København Strygekvartet.
—They’re lovely, Alexandra said.
—Hence these togs. At least one person, McTaggart the goofy English master, didn’t recognize me. So what have you two been doing?
—Mind your manners, Jos, Holger said. I didn’t recognize you when I first saw you this evening. Your eyes are shining, Pascal.
—Jos has manners, Alexandra said. I couldn’t be the only person to see through Jos. He does everything a nice person can think of to be thought a big happy lout, whereas he’s as gentle and well-bred a Grundtvigger as there is.
—And handsome, Jos said. Don’t leave out handsome. So what were you doing?
—Well, Alexandra said, sitting and curling her naked toes, Pascal read me some of Holger’s book, about fossil flowers and leaves, and some of an article of his about une enfance différente, un peu effrayant mais pour la plupart sensible et bien pensé.
—Style, Jos said. That’s what I must work on. Style. Even Rutger has style. Nature’s busy imperative stiffens his member when he sees Meg, but he talks a little politics and what’s new in shirt collars before he shoves it in. Pascal and Holger snuggle in a sleeping sack in the wilds and talk about Finnish mosses and the poultry of Armenia.
—Welwitschia mirabilis, Pascal said, cogging his fingers among Alexandra’s toes. Gnetophyta, country cousin with buck teeth of the conifers three hundred million years back. Genus with one species, as with angels.
—As with human beings, Holger said.
—They talk like this all the time, Alexandra sprite, and I’m going to talk like this, too, when I get the style down. As Pascal, who grew up with his nose in a book, turns into me, I need to turn into Pascal. I’ve worn the paper cutout wolfcub mask, crepitating on all fours, in red sneakers and whiffety blue pants, whining like a puppy, yapping silver yelps, and wagging my behind, sexy little tyke, and people were always taking my whiffety blue pants off, for one reason or another. This summer I sailed kites over at Malmö, in a park. All you wear’s a pod of gauze strapped around the hips and up the crack of your butt. And bounced over the bay on a sailboard naked as I was born, curveting and skimming, hugging and tacking. And here I am, wanting to be Pascal, so’s I can be an anthropologist and know all about people.
—I can’t decide, Alexandra said, between anthropology and archaeology. I imagine I have a romantic view of both. I do, I’m afraid, of most things.
—Some more than others, Pascal said.
—What I want, Alexandra said, is a world where difference is not a way of being the same.
—Wait, Jos said, till I figure that out. I’m different, and stick out in the Grundtvig sameness. Why is Holger smiling?
—The really different person an outsider sees at Grundtvig is Mariana.
—O ja, Jos said. We all pant for Mariana, and slobber.
—Don’t play the lout, Jos. Over at ES Brugge we’re all being groomed for men like Hugo, even if they’re too feminist to admit it, and Hugo goes for a woman who.
—Girl, Pascal said. Mariana’s a girl.
—A woman who’s decidedly lower class and of no family, as unsophisticated as she is ungrammatical.
—I hadn’t noticed, Holger said. I mean, Mariana is Mariana. Hugo loves her. Clarissa Eglund consults her about hats, flowers, and sauces.
—Owl call, Jos said. Owl name of Franklin.
—Lend a back, Jos, Pascal said, to heave Alexandra over the wall.
87
Walt Whitman, sending so
me doughnuts to Horace Traubel’s mother, wrote on the bag not doughnuts but love. It is, Holger said to Hugo, a useful formula. Of the yellow maple there in this autumn mist we might say non acer est sed angelus.
—It is, indeed, Hugo said. The opposite of a troll, wouldn’t you say?
88
To The British Grenadiers on Pascal’s fife and Sebastian’s drum, followed by Kim with the guidon and Hugo with Barnabas on his back, the NFS Grundtvig Frispejderne, Tom White Gruppe, in two files of pairs holding hands, marched by Headmaster Eglund’s house, out across the soccer field, and onto the country road.
—Aren’t they, the headmaster asked Mariana, who was gathering roses with Clarissa Eglund, in different uniforms? I thought scouts were green and brown, not yellow and blue?
—And, Clarissa said, unless my eyes are deceiving me, little Barnabas has a uniform like the others. Did you see, Edward dear?
—I made it, Mariana said, exactly like the others, but with buttons on the blouse to anchor it to the pants. The pockets, of which there are six, gave me fits. Also made the flag. They’re only going down the road a bit, for a practice patrol, and will be back in an hour or so, or Barnabas, who’s the mascot, wouldn’t be along.
—Sebastian, I believe, used to be a Tivoli drummer? What spirit to a drum and fife!
—Barnabas agrees, Mariana said. He does a kind of devil dance when Sebastian and Pascal practice. Hugo worked it out over the summer, I thought you knew. He made a scout troop of the revolutionaries. Denmark has about forty different kinds of scouts, Baptister Spejderkorps, Frivilligs, Communists, the Socialdemokratiske Ungdom, the fellowship this and the fellowship that, Greenland Pioneers, and whichwhat, so here’s another. His own troop remains, the green and browns, with blue for the cubs, hr. Eglund was speaking of.
—Edward, please. So what are the mustards and slate blues?
—The Tom White group. They’re like the Theban Band, it’s called, in ancient Greece, pairs of friends. That’s why they march holding hands, two by two. Jos keeps an eye on them, as an anthropologist he says, and Hugo has them all wanting to learn Greek and history, and Holger gave a wonderful talk to them on sharing time and space. A friend is another self, he said. Used words like respect and adoration and loyalty. Hugo said it was a sermon his father might have given. Barnabas, who was there with me, slept through lots of it.
—It’s all well over my head, hr. Eglund said. Shall I do a bowl of roses, Clarissa dear? Anything to keep them out of mischief.
—Why, Clarissa asked, are they named for Tom White, and who was he?
—Somebody in the English army, I believe, Mariana said. Back when they wore red coats. Died terribly young. Hugo can tell you more about him.
—Yes, Edward, a bowl of roses for the table would be splendid.
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—See? Pascal said, handing Holger a bunch of chicory and red valerian, they’re flowers, for you, because Franklin brings them to Hugo, who puts them in a jar of water and says he likes them. They’re sort of from the edge of fru Eglund’s garden.
Holger laid a postcard in Kierkegaard’s Philosophiske Piecer, to keep his place, and stared at the disarray of Pascal’s hair, the livid welt on his cheek, his swollen lip that he played his tongue over.
—So will I put them in a vase, Holger said, if I have such an article. Which I absolutely don’t.
—The marmalade, Pascal said, is down to just about enough to go on a slice of bread, with some butter, and then you’d have that to put the flowers in. Hugo keeps pencils in a marmalade jar.
A tear fattened in the corner of an eye and slid down his cheek, over the reddening welt.
—Ingenious solution, Holger said. And who do we know fossicking for tucker to finish off the marmalade with a cup of tea, perhaps?
—Milk, a big glass of cold milk. There’s half a bottle and one not opened yet. You’ve been grading papers, all done, with the rollbook on top and a rubber band around the lot. And reading.
—Kierkegaard. Danish grasses and wildflowers, the papers. Now tell me what in the name of God has happened to you?
Pascal, eyes as round as kroner, was wiping marmalade out of the jar with his fingers.
—Franklin and I have had a fight. Alexandra’s his girl only, now. I had it coming to me. Everything’s OK, sort of. That is, we hit each other pretty hard. But he caught up with me afterward, when he cooled down a bit, to see if he’d hurt me. So we kissed and hugged, sort of.
His sandwich built of wedges of butter and runnels of marmalade, Pascal took as large a bite as he could, for the comedy of it, accepting a tumbler of milk from Holger.
—Pascal?
—All yours. Forever.
THE RINGDOVE SIGN
1
The Arctic Circle, Mariana said, and here’s that light again. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. We’re deep in conifers and aspen, and when their shadows begin to stretch out long, as now, all the hard accurateness of the light out here in the woods becomes this brilliant softness that lasts for hours, greens going blue, the sky violet, with neat lines of gold on the edges of things. Splendid is the word, Hugo said. And the midges dance out in hordes. Their jigs in spirals, their jigs in rounds. The gnats and leafhoppers here, Hugo said, are so many silly innocents compared to the ferocious samurai mosquitoes up north. On the Arctic Circle. You’d think the silence at the top of Sweden would be absolute. Not a bit of it. For one thing, the silence itself is an oppression, a density in the ear, so that the whine of mosquitoes and the hum of big black flies make a drone you wouldn’t otherwise hear. We’d got to Boden by train, and marched out to the Circle in stages, great fun at that age. A devil, Mariana said. No I wasn’t, I was sweet and shy. Ask Papa. We were joining a troop of Swedish Scouts, boys and girls together. A fine August day. For the North Pole. Which is considerably beyond, Smarty. On the Circle all the trees are dwarfs, as they grow so slow in that climate, getting root water only a few months of the year. Swamps of peat, fields of moss all warped and wavy. The evergreens are giving way to birches. When the Swedes saw our guidon down the path, the loneliest scraggiest worn path in the world, they turned out their brass band, and chose to greet us with I Fratelli d’Italia, Garibaldi’s battle hymn, as handsome a piece as there is, always excepting Wilhelm of Nassau. I remember that the band all looked alike, peas in a pod, longish blond hair and cornflower-blue eyes, and almost uniform. The cornet was barefoot, and here and there one saw a shirttail out and an unbuttoned button, an unzipped fly, a haywire shoelace. But they played with spirit and dash, and to be met in that northern emptiness, that world of scrub and wild desolation, made us feel wonderful. We formed into a double file, and marched in to the music, left foot in time to the drum. Our scoutmaster, a freckly math teacher in steel-rimmed specs and a race of coppery hair across his forehead, to be in style with his charges, saluted the Swedish master, or mistress, for she was a woman, and shook hands. The Swedes have the damnedest sense of humor. They told, over and over, with richer merriment every repeat, how the band got into its uniforms faster than it had ever before dressed, and how the trombone could not for the longest be found, and how they had a squabble as to whether they should play King Kristian or Du Gamla, du Fria, and compromised with Goffredo Mameli, as symbolic of idealism, youth, and liveliness. Mariana said, I’ve seen Franklin laugh at the bubbles in Perrier water.
2
When a mouse looks at the world, Einstein said, the world does not change. Yes it does, Niels Bohr replied. A little.
LONG SHADOWS BEFORE THE FIRST STAR
The Summer Box, Papa calls it, Hugo said. I can remember talk as to whether it’s a cabin or a hut. We came here for a month at least every summer, Papa and Mama (you would have liked her, and she would have liked you) and I, and on the odd weekend, when I could bring along a friend. The inconvenience of it is its charm for Papa, having to survive on what you bring. He divides people into those who like coming here and those who don’t. Put me in the first lot, Mari
ana said. And Franklin and Pascal when they get here, day after tomorrow, isn’t it? If they get on the right train, if they get on the right bus, if Pascal’s folks delivered him at Papa’s. Those two, Mariana said.
BLUE RIVER WITH WILLOWS
My buddy Asgar and I were certain our scoutmaster was largely unacquainted with the female of the species other than his mother and aunts. He’d certainly never before seen a woman scoutmaster, especially one who laughed at the bubbles in Perrier water. it took a while to sort out the sex of the Swedish Scouts. They were all dressed exactly alike, had the same length of hair, and names weren’t all that much help. A girl I thought for sure was a boy turned out not to be. We were supposed to communicate in Esperanto. We fell back on English. We pitched our tents in a line facing theirs and went off to a blue river lined by willows. There’s no underbrush up there, no ferns like here, or berry bushes. Only moss, rock, stunted grass. The Swedish mistress said we must undress quickly, and get into the water, or the mosquitoes would quite literally eat us alive. Was she ever right.
TRACTATUS 1.21
Any one fact can be the case, or not the case, and everything else remains the same.
AUGUST
Hayfoot strawfoot, Hugo said, crunching larch cones, Pascal copying Franklin, off the forest trail to our campsite on the river. That’s lovely, Mariana said, Pascal copying Franklin. I wouldn’t have guessed that anybody would copy Franklin in anything. It’s Franklin who’s the champion copycat. After you appropriated me, which has, willy-nilly, involved appropriating Franklin too, he has taken you as the authority for all of life’s surfaces and corners. He brushes his teeth, bathes, combs his hair. And now here’s a well-off tyke at Grundtvig who seems to be the apple of his housemaster’s eye and who talks like a book and as you’ve told me has the highest IQ in the school looking up to Franklin. Oh it’s more than lovely, Hugo said. It began, you know, with that fight when Franklin took Pascal’s side, wholly inexplicably, and then Holger asked me if I would take Pascal on an outing, to give him some sense of the practical and some measure of self-confidence. So when we had our tent pitched, the flaps reefed, and ringed rocks and set up a spit, we were in thick summer pastoral peace: frogs talking to each other across the river, a raven cawing, dragonflies glinting green. Pascal was whistling Mozart as we made camp, and so was Franklin, a musical ear I hadn’t suspected. So the copycatting goes both ways. We’d crossed paths earlier on in the afternoon with some Wandervögel from Stuttgart, rather raunchily ahead of the times. One of them, sienna brown and as towheaded as an English sheepdog, eyes china blue, was wearing jeans shorts that would have fitted Franklin better, and their zipper was on the fritz so that the pod of his briefs, rusty yellow, stuck out through his fly. His girl, freckled pink and gold her whole face over, seemed to be wearing his shirt and nothing else. There were two boys in scarcely anything except packs and red caps who were holding hands. Another girl was sweetly barebreasted. They hailed us jovially. Pascal had questions, to which Franklin made up answers of an outrageous sort.
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