Nelson, with one detachment of ships, was firing upon the city. The inferior Danish forces were responding so valiantly that the senior British admiral, Parker, signaled Nelson to cease firing. Nelson kept firing, and his first officer called the cease-fire signal to his attention. The one-eyed Nelson took out his telescope but put it to his blind eye. “I see no signal,” he said, and kept the cannons going. Then he sent word to the city that he would set fire to the Danish floating batteries he had captured, with the crews still in them, if the Danes did not surrender. Olfert Fischer, the Danish admiral, carried out the crown prince’s order to cease fire, a surrender. That is the origin of the Danish expression that Kerrigan has always heard translated into English as “putting the monocle to the blind eye.”
Kerrigan pictures Nelson atop the fifty-six-meter-tall pillar at the center of Trafalgar Square in London, a monument to his victory over the French-Spanish fleet in 1805, and ponders with bitter satisfaction the fact that in 1966 the IRA blew up the Nelson Pillar in Dublin. He is annoyed at the thought of Nelson, although he realizes that his annoyance stems from the fact that the curly-haired Lars kissed his Associate, twice, on her pretty lips, while he himself has not done so even once, and is further annoyed that he should be annoyed at that, even as the blonde Trine so young and lovely to gaze upon walks past and smiles right into his eyes so his heart jumps. No reason for annoyance. And little sense to hate Nelson for something he did nearly two hundred years ago, but what good was history if one insisted upon putting the monocle to the blind eye? Which, of course, he realizes is precisely what he does constantly. You are so blind.
If he cranes his neck, he can just glimpse the green copper dome of the Marble Church through the window, just around the corner from Adelsgade—Nobility Street—known in the nineteenth century as “the headquarters of thieves and handlers,” according to High Court Justice Engelhart writing in 1815 in the daily newspaper Berlingske. Engelhart referred to “Jews and other people” who dealt in stolen goods in those days when after eleven at night the streets were full of thieves and burglars, and the populace was protected by watchmen armed with mace-headed spears who would look the other way for a coin.
The death penalty for theft was abolished in 1771, but in 1815 there was a cry to reinstate it for burglary. The “new” law of 1789 was described by a leading lawyer in 1809 as a “beautiful specimen of humanity and wisdom.” It provided for two months to two years in the House of Chastisement for a first theft conviction; three to five years for a second offense; and life for a third offense—a nearly two-hundred-year-old legal provision that resembles a new three-strikes law in parts of America.
In 1815 the prisoners rioted against the food; cooked in a copper kettle, it was served coated with a green, poisonous film. The response was sympathetic but a third riot, in 1817, evoked a decision to execute every tenth prisoner by lottery until a forceful protest by public attorney A. S. Ørsted (brother of the discoverer of electromagnetism) resulted in a revocation of the decision. Ørsted was a strong force for the enactment of a more just penal system, but only in 1837 was interrogation by whip abolished.
Kerrigan’s beer is empty and he attempts, unsuccessfully, to signal the waitress for a fresh one, which embarrasses and annoys him further.
“Are you sulking?” his Associate asks.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“See there,” she says quietly. “The fellow with the beard three tables down. That’s our minister of defense.”
This stretches a grin on Kerrigan’s puss.
“Oh, now you’re in a good mood again.”
“It just reminded me of Mogens Glistrup. Remember when he ran for office and said he would abolish the Danish defense system and replace it with a recorded announcement in English, German, and Russian that kept repeating, We surrender, we surrender, we surrender …”
She grins now, too, but says, “His party has led to an even more nationalistic and xenophobic one that has gained many seats in the parliament, you know. Some would call it almost fascist.” She glances at Mogens the manager, smiling, who nods and brings a new round.
“Is he?” Kerrigan asks.
“Is who what?”
“Lars your lover?”
“Sometimes you remind me of Hans Christian Andersen with all those feelings you have,” she says, and pokes him in the chest with her fingertip. He almost responds to the quick pinprick of indignation this evokes in him, but before opening his mouth realizes that she is teasing and says instead, “Well, you are the perfect Sophie Ørsted, aren’t you? Collecting poets.”
She only smiles, and Stolle and Svare are now going very cool on “Moonlight in Vermont,” and Kerrigan is not afraid of anything with another fresh golden pint on the table before him. He lights a cigar and wants very much to make love to her or at least to kiss her neck or even just the palm of her delicate hand or the arch of her sweet little trotter. He remembers his Swedish friend Morten Gideon in the Casino in Divonne Les Baines once, years ago, sitting with a beautiful blonde Turkish woman he was trying unsuccessfully to seduce; suddenly, in an unexpected moment of silence in the casino, Gideon’s voice was heard to rise clearly out across the entire casino, “I vant to kess your feet!”
Kerrigan is focused on his Associate’s hands and her slender bare arms, thinking how good is the life of the senses.
After a pause, the quintet opens again with a Dixie version of “Toot Toot Tootsie, Good-bye,” and Kerrigan says, “God, when I was a kid that song terrified me.”
She looks curiously at him.
He says, “It was the lyrics, you know that line about, Wait for the mail / I’ll never fail / If you don’t get a letter / Then you’ll know I’m in jail …”
“Why did that terrify you?”
“I don’t know. Somehow it made me think of, or fear, someone I loved going to jail. I think it had something to do with a Dan Dailey film I saw once where this guy has to go to jail, and he didn’t really do anything very bad, nothing violent or anything. It was like some minor fraud or something, grifter-type thing. And when he sang that song, it really scared me, like gave me an idea how unrelenting the law could be. Like fuck up even just a little bit and you’re fucked. There are few things in the world that scare me as much as the thought of going to jail. Or in debt for life, being litigated endlessly, fined—”
“Are you guilty of something?”
“I was raised Catholic. Catholics are always guilty.” He thinks of Licia’s lawyer on the phone, quietly relentless, a light but fearsome reference to Kerrigan’s house and “other assets and allegations,” which Licia had provided information on to pressure him into signing the divorce and custody papers. He might have been under litigation for years, buried in debt for life, his reputation smeared—where there’s smoke … Kerrigan feels an intensity of hatred for Licia that is alien to his nature, yet he feels it as well as despair at the thought of his daughter, growing from him year by year. How can he still love a woman who would do something like that? Yet he does love her still, which makes him wonder about himself and about what love is—delusion? How can he be so blind as still to have feelings for an illusion, a delusion?
His Associate is still watching him. Then she turns away to light a Prince with an elegant silver lighter. “My father,” she says, “went to jail once. For ‘borrowing’ some petty cash from his office and not returning it in time so that it was discovered. It was a small amount. He had run out of money before payday, and in those days they didn’t have these automatic credit provisions. He got three months. No probation. No one told me about it. I was ten, and they sent me to my aunt’s for a weekend when he had to be taken away. My father brought me to her place in the country, and he had a little present for me—a coloring book. He was so loving and gentle—I didn’t understand, but it was so sweet. Then on Sunday afternoon he didn’t pick me up, my mother did, and when I asked where he was, she just said he had to go awa
y for a while. No one would tell me where he was until one day in school—we were in a fine middle-class school, we lived well—one of the other girls asked me if it was true my father was in jail. I just laughed at her. And after school that day I told my mother, expecting her to say how ridiculous, but as soon as I saw her face I knew. That’s how I found out.”
Kerrigan put his hand on hers. “Jesus.”
“Everyone has a sad story,” she says. “Tell me yours.”
“Let’s leave my story out of this.”
“Why?”
He shakes his head, takes his hand from hers.
The musicians are finishing their last set with “Love Me or Leave Me,” and the sky outside has clouded over with a white-gray ceiling.
“Damn,” says Kerrigan. “I want some more jazz.”
“I know a place,” she tells him. “It’s small and dark and the jazz is on CD but it’s good. Just over on Classensgade—Classens Street. We can walk there through my favorite cemetery.”
Outside the train station, he glimpses the ugly concrete box of the American embassy and thinks he could hate Custer as much as Nelson, although putting everything into perspective one could as well sing the praises of any leader who, as Lincoln put it, at least sometimes “listens to the angels of his better nature.” What right does a man have to complain and carp about a system that he only passively enjoys, without contributing a fart himself? Taxes. He contributes taxes. With taxes you build civilization.
They nip in through an iron gate, and Kerrigan sees they are in a graveyard.
“This is Garnison’s Cemetery,” she tells him. “We can take a shortcut back toward Classensgade. Here,” she says, pointing to a broad, tall, fenced-in mansion, “is the Russian embassy. On the other side of the cemetery is the American. And across the street, during the Cold War, there used to be a Chinese restaurant called Beijing. There was great speculation about the tangle of electronics in the basement of that restaurant.”
The cemetery itself is a peaceful place of well-tended graves. Near the gate on a large stone encircled by small trees, an engraving reports that beneath it lie the remains of 226 warriors who died under the Danish flag in 1864, on whose grave grows honor, for they gave all for the fatherland.
Kerrigan pictures their 226 bodies all tangled together in the earth, bare-boned now, skulls grinning at skulls, warriors who died in the last battle—so far—Denmark ever fought, the war they lost to Germany, following which the country was never again a world power, a kingdom that is about the size of an American state, same population as Missouri.
He notes that the various gravestones are cut not only with the name and dates of birth and death of the extinguished lives beneath them, but also with the positions they held in this mortal span, trades, titles, rank—as though they are all doomed to continue playing in eternity the roles they played within their lifetimes.
There lies Colonel Vilhelm de Fine Licht, 1821–1885, and housewife Anna; Baroness Ellen Schaffalitzky and Lieutenant Colonel Ludvig Bernhard Maximilian, aka Baron Schaffalitzky de Muckadell. Kerrigan tries the name on, pictures himself at a conference, offering his hand to his Associate for a shake: “Hi there, Muckadell here. Denmark. Good to see ya. Call me Schaffalitzky if you like.”
“It is a very fine Danish name,” she tells him solemnly as they pass the remains of Staff Sergeant N. F. Petersen and many others—a generaless (apparently the wife of a general), a mason, Customs Inspector Simonsen, a pharmacist, editor in chief; a civil engineer, journalist, priest, actor, grocer, taxicab owner, wine merchant, pilot. There is one Ludvig Fock, profession unidentified, and one Brigadier Percy Hansen.
“We’ve got a whole society here,” he says. “Seal off the gates and you’ve got a complete city of ghosts. See them all on dusty planks performing their functions. But it really is a lovely place. It would be good to lie here.” And he thinks of Dylan Thomas’s grandfather traveling about Wales furiously in a little pony trap looking for a good place to be buried, complaining that one grave he views would not have room enough for him to twitch his toes without putting them in the sea. The townspeople point out that he’s not dead yet and try to tempt him home for strong beer and cake, but the old man only looks off at the sea without speaking, undoubting, a prophet.
Kerrigan turns to his Associate. “If your last dance is not already taken, would you consider lying here beside me?”
“It would be too late for much fun then,” she says with a glint in her green eyes that fires his pulse and inspires his memory with a Marvelous rhyme: “The grave’s a fine and private place but none, I think, do there embrace.”
Her grin is perfunctory but not lacking affection.
They pass through the opposite gate of the cemetery, step across one side of Little Triangle and into Classensgade. Like most of the best Danish bars, the place she leads him to is utterly unremarkable to look at, narrow fronted, tucked in between a narrow North Vietnamese restaurant named Hanoi and the blue barn-door entry of an apartment building courtyard. The door is under the numeral 5 beneath a lintel sign that says VINSTUE BAR, Wine Room Bar, the two words punctuated by the face of a die showing five, and a white-curtained plate window on which is lettered the word Femmeren, the Fiver.
Inside, a handful of regulars at the bar fall silent at the entry of Kerrigan and his Associate. It is a small dark room with vintage posters and advertisements on the walls—one of a strutting old-fashioned sailor advertising Tuborg, another advertising Stjerne Øl, Star Beer, a billboard reproduction of a Brecht-Weil play in German. Behind the bar, a substantial-looking woman in her early sixties perhaps.
They sit at a round table in the corner, and the woman steps from the bar to serve them.
“That’s Ruth, the owner. She opened this place in 1967.”
It occurs to Kerrigan he is sitting just around the corner from Søren Kierkegaard’s 1850 residence as well as that the music playing on the sound system is Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else, which he happens to know was recorded in Hackensack, New Jersey, on March 9, 1958. The number playing is “Autumn Leaves,” perhaps the best variations he has ever heard of it, with Adderley on alto sax, Miles Davis on trumpet, Hank Jones on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Art Blakey on the skins.
He looks up at the backs of the heads of the regulars sitting around the half-square bar. They have now resumed their talk.
A gray-haired, blue-eyed, bearded man at the bar nods at Kerrigan’s Associate. She returns the greeting, tells Kerrigan, “That is Ib Schierbeck, who has owned and managed many bookstores in Copenhagen.” Schier-beck nods at Kerrigan, and Kerrigan recognizes a picture of Wilbert Harrison on the wall. “‘Kansas City’!” he yelps to his Associate, and a very tall man rises from his table to approach theirs. She whispers to Kerrigan, “That is Niels Jørgen Steen, the conductor of the Tivoli Big Band.”
“You are American,” the tall man says in English. “You know Kansas City?”
Kerrigan has been to Kansas City many times, and the man asks, “Then you know Kansas City brought jazz from big band to bebop, right? The birthplace was New Orleans, but jazz was raised in K.C.”
“Ah,” Kerrigan says. “I never thought about that.”
“You know Charlie Parker was born in K.C., right?”
“I do now.”
“And Ben Webster? And Big Joe Turner? And that Jay McShann lived and died there?”
“Actually I didn’t know any of that,” Kerrigan admits, noting from the corner of his eye that his Associate is taking it all down.
The man stares at him for several moments, then says mildly, “You don’t know shit, do you?” and moves back to his own table in the far corner and orders another triple Jack Daniel’s, salutes Kerrigan with his glass. Kerrigan, feeling chastened but enlightened, raises his Tuborg.
Jazz Masters 25 is playing now, Verve label, Getz and Gillespie blowing “Dark Eyes” from ’56. The mere thought of the year fills Kerrigan with wonder. Nineteen fifty-six. He can re
member the Chevies that year clear as day—the way the tail fins had begun to lift a little from the angular line of the ’55, softly curving up, but not yet the sharp fins of the ’57. In ’56 the classic rock was just emerging: Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Wilbert Harrison, Buddy Holly, who would die three years later in a plane crash on February 3, 1959, when Kerrigan was still only fifteen. In 1956, Elvis Presley was still good, even if he sang cleaned-up lyrics, and Kerrigan turned thirteen, just stepping into puberty. School dances at St. Joan’s and the impossible loveliness of Mary Ella Delahanty and Patsie O’Sullivan. He remembers Mary Ella’s smile and Patsie’s blue eyes and still can feel the sweet, pure yearning.
Another figure approaches their table, a smiling-faced man with spaces between his teeth and a wispy mustache. He says very quietly, “Want to hear some good jazz?” and goes behind the bar—apparently half the people in the place are bartenders—to put on a Danish Radio Big Band tribute to Duke Ellington, recorded in honor of what would have been the Duke’s hundredth birthday that year. It begins with “Take the A Train.”
“Billy Strayhorn,” says Kerrigan.
“Niels Jørgen Steen,” says the man with the wispy mustache, nodding back at the corner table where the big man sits drinking triple whiskeys.
It occurs to Kerrigan as he replenishes their drinks that this place is a true Bohemian bar. Nothing trendy. Just a good old low-down neighborhood joint where people who like jazz and reasonably priced drinks and friendly company can come and listen to Adderley and Davis and try to decipher the German on a Brecht poster, raffle for drinks, swap stories, play guessing games, and a man like Niels Jørgen can come and not feel that everyone is staring at his fame.
Gazing at the Brecht poster, Kerrigan yearns to hear poor dead Bobby Darin sing “Mack the Knife.” He asks Ruth if she has that among her CDs, and she shakes her head with a pleasant smile, but his Associate says, “I have it. On an LP.”
“You do?” She nods, and Kerrigan asks in Danish, “Will you invite me for a nightcap then?”
Kerrigan in Copenhagen Page 12