Kerrigan in Copenhagen

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  “When was this establishment established?”

  With one eye closed she puffs her cigarette, and it wobbles between her lips as she speaks. “Long time. Three generations in any case.”

  Kerrigan notices there is a functioning transom over the entry door, tilted open. “Don’t see many of them around anymore.”

  “You’re right enough there,” the barmaid says without looking at him and trims her cigarette on the edge of a heaped-full black plastic ashtray.

  Half a dozen men sit at a long table gambling for drinks with a leather cup of dice—raffling, they call it. As Kerrigan sips his green, an old guy comes out of the gents’ while a short, broad, crew-cutted woman barges through the front door and stands in the middle of the floor. From a large carpetty purse she pulls out a pistol and points it at the old guy, orders, “Hands up or trousers down!”

  Kerrigan gasps, ducks. The woman shouts, “You’re all wet!” and squeezes the trigger. A limp jet of water squirts into the man’s face. Then, giggling hysterically, she puts the water pistol away again.

  “Daft goose,” the old man mutters and hobbles away, mopping his face with a gray handkerchief, while the woman shouts, “Good day!” and looks at the barmaid. “My God, you do look sexy today, sweetheart!”

  “I usually do,” says the barmaid quietly, and the crew-cutted woman moves to the bar. “Damn, give me a beer, my wife’s been breaking my balls!” Then she turns to the older man beside her, says, “Tivoli is open.” Danish for “your fly is unzipped.” The old man says, “Out doing research again, ey?” She reaches and rearranges the material around his flies, saying, “If you had that cut a little different, it might look like you really had something there, old fellow.”

  “Sweetheart!” the man grumbles in his gravelly voice, “my nuts have been hanging there just like that since before you were born!”

  They both laugh, and she turns to Kerrigan and says, “I got to catch a train back to Sorø so my wife can start breaking my balls again. So if you were thinking of buying me a bitter, you’ll have to be fast. I don’t have much time.”

  Kerrigan lifts his beer. “Did you say Sorø! That’s a charming place. The old Sorø Academy. The Eton of Denmark. The great Ludvig Holberg is buried there in the chapel. I was there once.”

  “Once?” she says. “Try and live there.” She makes mouths of both hands and has them gossip rapidly at each other. “Bla bla bla bla bla …”

  His Associate emerges from the loo and takes a place at the bar on the other side of Kerrigan.

  “Sorry, honey,” says the crew-cutted woman. “I saw him first.”

  “You’re velcome to him,” she says.

  “Well, wait, hel-lo!” says the woman, looking more closely at the Associate. “Where have you been all my life, sweetheart?”

  “Growing up,” says the Associate, and the woman barks a single note of laughter, says, “Don’t go away now, I just have to water my herring.”

  “So what do you have in your Moleskine book about this joint?” Kerrigan asks. His Associate digs it out of her bag, and Kerrigan notices several starfish stickers on the black cover. Endearing, he thinks, as she pages through. “Nothing,” she says finally. “Only that the street was named for Christian Ditlev Frederik Reventlow, 1748–1827, early in this century. He led the way to the end of adscription, which freed the serfs.”

  The crew-cutted woman swaggers back toward the bar. Sotto voce, Kerrigan suggests, “Shall we drink up?” He orders a bitter for the crew-cutted woman to keep her occupied at the bar when they leave.

  They cross the street and move on, look back at a place called The Stick (Pinden), and Kerrigan notices that it has a typical feature of many Copenhagen serving houses. From across the street it looks positively uninviting, particularly with the grafftion its side door. Approached from the same side of the street, however, it is a little more welcoming, with a cutout of a kindly-looking waiter bearing a tray of beer steins by the door. And inside, when they go to hang their coats, the large wardrobe window, painted with a seated black cat, is even better.

  At the bar, they order: a green for him, a bottle of sweet red Tuborg for her. She reads her notes to him. “This place opened in 1907 and was acquired a dozen years later by Betty Nansen. You know, the actress—the theater in Frederiksberg near where we were at Wine Room 90, the Betty Nansen Theater. Its name, The Stick, came from a game of chance played with matchsticks.” She leans closer and lowers her voice. “Only women are allowed to serve in this bar. ‘Kun en pige,’ ” she says. “Only a Girl.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A book. By Lise Nørgaard. The woman who wrote Matador, the television play that ran in about fifty parts telling the whole story of Danish social changes from about 1920 to maybe the late ’60s? Only a Girl is Nørgaard’s memoir of her life in the 1920s and ’30s. Her father opposed her doing anything but girlish stuff.”

  “Isn’t that like against the law or something?” Kerrigan asks her. “Only to hire women for the bar?”

  She comments with an inhalation that is not the usual inhalated Scandinavian affirmative but a subtly bitter expression of irony. He puzzles over it for a moment, then remembers another story she told him last time they were together. Originally it had been her wish in life to be a journalist, but she was “blocked from it.”

  “How blocked?” he asked.

  “Well,” she said mildly. “Let’s say it was because I have a cunt.”

  She was a good student, judged “egnet”—suitable—to proceed from primary school to secondary school in the academic line. There are three categories: suitable, unsuitable, possibly suitable. When a Danish child is thirteen or fourteen, one of these is stamped upon him or her. (His ex-wife Licia revealed to Kerrigan, if she was telling the truth, that she was judged “unsuitable.” But he could never be sure whether she was telling the truth. About anything.) The novelist Peter Høeg, best known for his Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1992), also wrote a novel entitled De Måske Egnede—literally The Possibly Suitable, although it was published under the translated title Borderliners, which does not quite convey the harshness of it. Høeg himself had been judged “possibly suitable” when he was a boy.

  But Kerrigan’s Associate was suitable and went on to gymnasium—the Danish secondary school for those judged suitable to go on to university, which she was. Her father, himself a lawyer at a publishing house, pulled strings to get her a job as a secretary in the editorial offices of Copenhagen’s oldest daily newspaper, Berlingsketidende—Berling’s Times. He said getting into the offices was a foot in the door, better than university. She worked there for a year waiting for the head of personnel to do what her father had promised he would, begin to try her out on small journalistic assignments, obituaries, social notices. Finally, when nothing happened, she approached him about it, and he expressed surprise. He told her there was never any connection between the administrative and editorial or journalistic functions at the paper, that it had never been his idea that she should do anything more than secretarial work. “Du er kun en pige,” he said with a smile. “You are just a girl.”

  “He really said that to you?” Kerrigan asked.

  “It was a conservative paper. It was 1959. And he was a conservative guy.”

  Kerrigan’s Associate confronted her father about it, and he denied ever having promised anything of the sort. She should be happy to work for that fine newspaper. It was a good, solid job. She didn’t have to keep those terrible hours journalists did. It was a good job for a young woman who was not yet married, and she wouldn’t turn hard the way journalists do.

  Kerrigan gazes at her.

  “I was stupid,” she tells him now. “By then I was used to the money. I didn’t know how to fight. Maybe I was afraid to. I met a handsome young lawyer from the newspaper’s legal department. He was seven years older than me and I was …”

  “You were a knockout. I’ve seen pictures of you. Remember? You’re still a knockout.”


  Whether she remembers or not she does not say; instead she says, “I had a cunt instead of a prick. So here I am now, nearly forty years, two husbands, three daughters, and five grandsons later. I see some of them. Once a year. I work as a freelance research secretary. On the weekends I go barefoot around my east side flat in leotards and play at being an artist. I know it’s no excuse,” she says. “But you know what really galls me? Many years later, my father gave me a copy of that book for Christmas. Only a Girl. He got Lise Nørgaard to sign it for me. He knew her. I just don’t understand what he was thinking. Maybe he wasn’t thinking at all. Maybe he just took it for granted. Because I have a cunt.”

  “I certainly hope you don’t hate your cunt.”

  “I really like my cunt,” she says. “But it has been something of a handicap at times.”

  “‘The Speed of Darkness,’ ” Kerrigan says.

  Her eyes hang a question toward him, and he recites a poem by Muriel Rukeyser, as best he can remember it, about the chain of consequence that the person who hates the cunt hates the child.

  The tilt of her head and her mouth expresses skepticism.

  “American poet,” he says. “She died almost twenty years ago.” He pauses for a moment, thinking back to other events, Licia, his babies, but jettisons the memory and continues, “She was writing about the poet not yet born who will be the voice of our time.”

  When she says nothing, he asks politely, “You say you have daughters?”

  “Three. And five grandchildren. Two of the girls live in the U.S., the third in Canada. Once a year one or the other visits me. Or I visit them.”

  He sees a shadow in her gaze. “It really is incredible to think that in my lifetime, only like thirty, forty years ago, women were mocked, cheated of their rights, even had to use titles that revealed whether or not they were married, for Christ’s sake!” And thinks of Licia—the new woman. He slides down from the barstool. “Shall we move on?”

  “Don’t forget your little briefcase now.”

  The thick novel bulges in the satchel. She asks what he is reading, and he finds himself telling her a little about Joyce and Dublin as they step out into Reventlowsgade.

  “Lot of connections between Dublin and Scandinavia,” he says. “Dublin was settled by Vikings, especially the Danes. Joyce believed he had Danish blood in him.”

  “How is the book?” she asks.

  “A rough trudge. But it has its merry moments.”

  Across Reventlowsgade, his Associate points at the back of the Astoria Hotel. She has her Moleskine open in her hands. “When that was built in 1935, they nicknamed it Penalhuset—the Penal House. For obvious reasons.”

  “Good illustration for Kafka’s ‘Penal Colony,’ ” says Kerrigan. “Moody art. You paint, yourself? I hope I can get to see your paintings?”

  “A little,” she says.

  Passing the Central Station, he glances down from the sidewalk bridge to the tracks below. He thinks of the poet Dan Turèll, the long poem he wrote in his thirties, the scene set in this station, imagining his last walk through the city; Turèll could not have known, in his thirties, the poem was predicting his early death at forty-six of throat cancer.

  They cross Vesterbrogade—West Bridge Street—past Fridhedsstøtten, the Liberty Pillar, erected between 1792 and 1797. “It is to commemorate the liberation of the serfs,” she says, “with the repeal in 1788 of adscription; before this, the peasants were the property of the person who owned the land they worked. The pillar is mentioned many times in Tom Kristensen’s 1930 Havoc. You know, Ole ‘Jazz’ Jastrau in Havoc lived just around the corner from the Railway Café where we just were,” she says. “He walks past this monument numerous times in the novel—I think that is saying he belongs in a way to the newspaper he works for.”

  They are passing Tivoli on the other side of the street. “Look at the trees!” she exclaims. They pause to gaze across Vesterbrogade at the front of the Tivoli Park. “The park is more than a hundred and fifty years old now,” she tells him, “and the trees are just that shade of green only once a year.”

  She leads the way to Axeltorv—Axel Square—bounded by the broad front of the Scala Building, the Circus Building across the other end, and the many colors of the Palace Theater, which looks like a birthday cake.

  She says, “Those rainbow pastels in the Palace Theater were done by Paul Gernes, the painter who overturned the idea that hospital rooms have to be sterile white. Which is especially nice for sick kids, to be surrounded by a rainbow of colors. Do you have children, yourself?” she asks, and he feels his face harden.

  “Let’s not go there,” he mutters, caught unawares by the question at a moment when he felt he was expanding, being filled with a sense of place. To know facts is to have a handle.

  She says, “I just thought … you’d make a good father. You’re gentle. And enthusiastic.”

  They stand over the sheer vast pool of the shimmering fountain, so full it seems convex, always about to spill over, but it never does. He is battling memories: how his two-year-old daughter would sit on his lap and point at things for him to name—lamp, table, chair, carpet, repeating the words after him, the delicate features of her fresh-minted face, same blue eyes as her mother’s. He thinks again of Licia, thinks, Cunt! and feels the anger as further loss. Gabrielle would be five now, the little one three. He didn’t even know her name. If there really was a little one. If it was his. If it was just another lie.

  He remembers the Rukeyser poem he quoted for his Associate in the bar, and suddenly in his mind he’s jotting the line of a poem—the cunt giveth and the cunt taketh away—and in his mind he slashes out the line and reminds himself that he is not a poet.

  When he says nothing more, the Associate turns a page in her Moleskine. “This square was built in 1863 when the old Central Station was opened,” and he welcomes the lilting, soothing feminine music of her voice. “The square is named for Bishop Absalon, who founded Copenhagen in 1167, although evidence now proves the city is actually older than that, from the last half of the year 1000. You can see Absalon’s statue on a rearing horse wielding an ax down on Højbro Plads, just off the Strøget, the Walking Street.”

  “A bishop wielding an ax? Interesting. He should ride his horse over to the Town Hall Square and do battle with the evil Burger King.”

  She chuckles, goes on: “The Danish literary critic Georg Brandes spoke at the unveiling of the statue in 1902 and pointed out that the ax was not only a weapon of battle but also a tool of civilization—to chop trees and firewood. Absalon, by the way, is the Hebrew version of the Danish name Axel.”

  “Here’s Axelborg Bodega,” she says, and leads him in. Glad to be delivered of bottled beer, he orders a pint and sits unspeaking, from time to time lifting his glass to his mouth. He does not toast and she respects his silence, which does not fail to escape his attention—he feels her watching him and wishes she would stop, but at the same time thinks of her question about children and hopes she does not pursue the subject. To make sure she doesn’t, he changes it.

  “I hope I can see your pictures sometime,” he says.

  “Let’s see,” she says. “If you’re ever hungry and low on funds, they serve an excellent skipperlabsskovs here—lobscouse, sailor’s stew, a huge portion of potatoes and boiled beef in a pale gravy made with beer—it’s served with dark rye bread and pickled beets.”

  The place is nearly empty, and Kerrigan slowly relaxes, absently watching a man who sits alone at an adjoining table. The man is about his own age, drinking a bottle of Tuborg Påske Bryg, Easter Brew, strong beer, 7 to 8 percent, brewed around the Easter season for a few weeks every year. It has been brewed for over a century. The day it hits the streets—known since 1952 as P-Day (Easter Beer Day)—the young people in Copenhagen go on a rampage with it.

  The man glances at them a couple of times—wistfully, Kerrigan thinks.

  “What does your little book have about Danish beer?” he asks, and her
delicate fingers rattle pages.

  “It’s been brewed in Denmark since around 4000 BC—six thousand years ago. They’ve found a preserved body of a Bronze Age girl—the Egtved Girl—in Jutland at a grave site with a pail of beer between her legs. She was in her mid-twenties, and the beer was made from malt wheat, cranberries, pollen, and instead of hops, bog myrtle for a bitter spice, also known as ‘sweet gale.’ ”

  “Sweet gale. I like that. Beer was known as ‘mead,’ right?”

  “Wrong. Mead is fermented honey. A kind of wine. Beer is made from grain water, yeast, and seasoning. Hops didn’t reach Denmark until about the year 1000. Until then they used sweet gale to give it the bitter taste. The Vikings used to drink to Freja, their goddess of fertility.” She turns a page.

  “But it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the Danish beer really began to excel. Thanks to the German yeast culture provided by Emil Christian Hansen to I. C. Jacobsen—the brewer of Carlsberg. The alcohol content of the various Danish beers—and there are more than 150 types brewed by fifteen breweries—ranges from under 1 percent to nearly 10 percent. Pilsner is 4.6, gold beer 5.8, Easter and Christmas beer are up to 7.9, Giraf is about 7.3 and Elephant is about the same, Jacob’s Cognac Beer is 8.5 percent, and superpremiums up to 9.7. There is another that is 10 or 11 percent, Special Brew. The stronger beer is better with richer, heavier, or spicier food. And the Easter or Christmas beers are best after dinner—nice instead of sweet dessert wine.”

  “How about snaps?”

  “Much younger than beer. Only about six hundred years old. Actually, it was originally known as brændevin, brandywine, and the best of it was called aquavit, ‘water of life’ in Latin, which is also the origin of whiskey—from the Irish uisce beathadh or the Scot Gællic uisge beatha, also literally ‘water of life.’ ”

  She turns another page. “At the end of the 1700s, the word snaps was adopted to replace brandywine. It means ‘dram’ or ‘mouthful’ but also is from snappe—to snap or take quickly—which is when you bite the snaps down in one shot. It was around that time the snaps glass was introduced, too. Otherwise they used to drink from the bottle. Or from a pocket flask. Which in Danish is called a lommelærk, a pocket lark, because it ‘chirps’ when you drink from it. Snaps was very central to Danish life up until 1917. It was also used for toothache, sluggishness, bad stomach, arthritis, all sorts of pain, and as a sleeping medicine for children, and for washing windows. It was 47.5 percent alcohol then, much stronger than now—it’s usually 40 percent now, although some Christmas snaps is stronger. Then in 1917, the tax was raised so the price of a bottle of snaps quintupled, which achieved the goal of reducing consumption. The German and English word is schnapps, but that seems too long to me, don’t you think? Snaps is quicker and better.”