Kerrigan in Copenhagen

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  He closes his eyes. The day is hot now and humid, but with an occasional saving breeze. He is dying, it seems, near an end he has no doubt hastened with his imprudent but most enjoyable behavior. And with his eyes closed or with his eyes opened, it is the same, for he is alone and that startles and unsettles him. At such a moment there ought to be a witness. A woman who loves him. A man who admires his work—a man whose own work he himself admires. A woman whose work makes him see. An artist perhaps, who saw into his soul and painted a picture for him of a red frog perhaps.

  How public like a frog.

  An image appears in his mind of the table beside his bed. It is as though he is lying in bed on a humid night, motionless, the hand of death closing ever so slowly, almost imperceptibly, around him, smothering him, and on the bedside table is an 81/2 × 11-inch white pad with pale blue lines the color of water too beautiful to be real—the color of Licia’s bikini. How lovely the pad is. If he could only reach it, he would caress it like a lover’s back, a woman he knew whose back beneath his palm was joy, splendor.

  Who was it? Her again. The Associate. Will he never be free of thoughts of her?

  You have not lived right, Terry boy. I’ve lived the only way I could. You could have done better, been more prudent, careful, you would have lasted longer.

  Who wants it?

  You do. You do.

  Opening his eyes, he realizes he is almost asleep there for a moment. He sees on the surface of the round metal table before him a half-full pint of beer and a book. Lucretius. He opens the book at random, as the Romans used to do to find a sign, and he reads a passage about the dread of death, that men so wish to escape that dread that they are greedy for wealth far beyond their need and shed the blood of others in pursuit of riches, allow others to live in poverty to attain it, and from the same dread envy the power of others, the wealth of others, the fame, the dignity, feel that they themselves live in darkness and filth. To such extremes the dread of death drives the man that he begins to hate life and commits self-murder, completely forgetting that this is the very thing that has driven him with dread from life and toward every sin … It is the dread itself that is to be dreaded. He closes the book, looks into his glass, focuses on the age spot on his hand as the tramping of feet approaches up Butcher Street:

  “Yee! Ha!”

  The Pure Love Militants again. Kerrigan remembers the promise he made to himself to moon them if they came back, but does not move. A life is built on promises unkept.

  It seems such an indifferent number of pen strokes to stop on. Seven. Seven pints of view.

  Perhaps another circuit, maybe this one counterclockwise, starting here with this fine place, with this fine Japanese, Danish-speaking bartender. He thinks of his father’s oft-quoted lines from Housman:

  For I have been to Ludlow Fair

  And left my necktie God knows where

  And carried halfway home or near

  Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer …

  And down in lovely muck I’ve lain

  Happy till I woke again.

  And then I saw the morning sky

  Heigh-ho the tale was all a lie.

  The world it was the old world yet.

  I was I, my things were wet,

  And nothing then remained to do

  But begin the game anew …

  However, he remains seated before an empty pint glass, thinking: She positively could not have said you’re so blind. What are the chances? How many people say that? Who would say it? Licia and Licia alone. A onetime occurrence.

  And she reached into your heart and drew out the image of a red frog. And you are fabricating excuses not to be with her because you are afraid. You opened your heart to her, so wide that she could reach in, and now you are trying to close it again.

  Eight: The Smoke Eaters

  Sin not against the breath.

  —Æ

  Instead of recycling the Coal Square, he follows his seventh pint with a walk back down Butcher Street, east over Højbro Place, past the equestrian statue of Bishop Absalon, founder of Copenhagen, wielding the ax of battle and domesticity. Past the Parliament and the old Stock Exchange, Kerrigan’s lungs labor again so he stops on the pavement and flags a cab to take him over Knippels Bridge, spanning the slit of harbor between Zealand and Amager islands, to Strandgade, left to Christianshavns Kanal and the masts of small pleasure craft tipping with the breeze on the lightly billowing water, mast fittings clanging agreeably. He pays and stands on the wooden bridge for a moment, Wilders Bridge, watching the surface of the water change with the minuscule constant changes of the Danish afternoon light.

  And he calculates: Because all of the seven “pints” he drank were really only four tenths of a liter, he has only had the equivalent of a little over five pints. That he is able to make this calculation so deftly refuels his confidence and renews his thirst.

  Past a stucco wall of ocher yellow, he enters through the door of the Færge Caféen, Ferry Café, with its porthole window. His mouth cannot room more beer just now, or his belly house it, so he orders a gammel dansk. The woman behind the bar, red-gray haired, a face that has lived, her nose broken, its tip twisted, serves him his bitter dram (dram being a measure for snaps originating from the Greek word drakhem—a weight unit equaling 4.25 grams, same root as the Greek currency unit, drachma, soon to be replaced by the European currency unit, foiling all future plans by Greek taxi drivers to pull the old 5,000-to-50,000 drachma-note switcheroo, which trick was once pulled on Kerrigan). She answers his question that the café dates back to 1850. The walls are paneled with ship planks, and a ship’s-wheel lamp hangs from the ceiling. Beside the bar, a brass ship’s bell stands ready to be rung should some generous customer buy a round for the house, and a pool table shrouded with a sheet of green plastic.

  He takes his drink on the canal side of the establishment, gazing across to Wilders Place and the tipping masts while a couple of bureaucrats from the Culture Ministry across the street finish their lunches of liver and bacon and onions and mushrooms. He orders a plate of it for himself and a beer and another bitter snaps, and the nourishment fills the empty pouch of his optimism and enthusiasm.

  The black bitter liquid, he imagines, opening the cells in his lungs to admit more air. You have to go to the doctor, he knows he will be advised if he reveals this to anyone. But like Bartleby the Scrivener, he would prefer not to.

  Kerrigan has developed his own plan of treatment in case of serious disease. In a Vesterbro bar he knew, he visited a fellow he had once met researching an article about the drug culture in Copenhagen. From this fellow, for an exorbitant price, he purchased a Browning No. 1 pistol from the land of Antoine-Joseph Sax (1814–1894) which he loaded with seven cartridges and placed in a cigar box, wrapped around with two stout rubber bands, at the back of the highest shelf in his bedroom closet.

  His plan, should that day come before his health was so badly deteriorated that he could not, is one sunny day to rent a pedal boat and pedal out into the middle of Black Dam Lake. There he will unpack the picnic lunch he will have brought with him in a wicker basket. He will dine on smoked eel and dark rye bread spread thick with fat. And because fish must swim, he will drink cold bottles of beer. Many of them. And iced snaps in his favorite Holmgaard aquavit glass, many of them. While he dines he will watch the swans float past like beautiful white questions that are about to be answered. And to encourage the seagulls—for they are an important part of his plan—he will fling bits of bread and eel up into the air to get them hovering overhead in an excited, crying cluster.

  And then, when he is sufficiently satisfied, sufficiently besotted, but not yet incapacitated, he will take the pistol from his belt, place the snout in his mouth, pointed upward toward his cranial cavity, and pull the trigger to administer one large lead pill to the rippled brain. It will tear a broad path through his skull, spraying bits and clumps of gray matter upward, which the seagulls will catch in their beaks and gobble down, wheeli
ng over the lake, their gullets full of morsels of his thought and personality so that he will sweep across the lake like a great pointillist consciousness on his way to forever.

  He wonders whether he will be able to carry out that plan if he cannot breathe.

  Two bitters and his lungs seem reasonably well functioning again, and head tipped back, Kerrigan wanders off down the cobblestoned street of Wildersgade, named for an eighteenth-century shipbuilder named Wilder, to the Eiffel Bar, over the door of which a red rectangular sign hangs bearing a likeness of the Eiffel Tower. A list of beers and liquors in the window of the gleaming facade announces prices that transport him back a dozen inflationary years.

  The bartender, dressed like a French waiter in a snug black vest advertising Tuborg Classic beer on the back, greets Kerrigan when he enters.

  “Good day,” he says. “So pleased you could come.” A Band-Aid is stuck to his freckled front bald spot. Kerrigan orders a cognac to put a knee on the content of his stomach. He knows that, at this price, it is not cognac but brandy—two-, one-, or no-star brandy no doubt, but welcomes the coarseness of texture. He chats with an elderly man who, he learns, has been the owner since 1960 when he emigrated from the Netherlands. The building is from 1736 and the bar dates back to the 1930s, originally called Café Wilder, then Café Jakob, finally the Eiffel Bar since 1960. At the end of the barroom is an ornate spiral staircase that seems to lead nowhere—at the top of which, he has heard, ladies of the night once held court, though he cannot ascertain if this is mere legend. Kerrigan peers up the spiral staircase anyway, thinking that prostitution in Denmark has in fact been legal since March 17, 1999—a St. Patrick’s Day event, though Irish birth control would surely have ruled over eros that day: Pour it down till you can’t get it up.

  Outside again on Wildersgade, his feet, for which he is thankful, follow the cobbles back to the canal, turn him right to Overgaden Neden Vandet—High Street at the Water—and stroll him slowly past more tipping masts. Over the doorway at number 51B a plaque on the brick wall announces that the resistance group Holger Danske was founded and housed there during the German occupation, 1940–1945.

  Holger Danske is a legendary Viking hero who is said to have been sleeping for hundreds of years and who, it is told, awakens in time of Denmark’s need to come to its aid. Beneath Helsingør Slot—Elsinore Castle, where Shakespeare set Hamlet, based extremely loosely on Saxo’s account of the seventh-century Jutland King Amlet—is a large concrete sculpture of the sleeping giant, seated, sword across his knee, head tipped in slumber, in the shadowy catacombs. And his was the name taken by this Danish resistance group—the sleeping giant who woke to aid his country in need. This legend is similar to that of the warrior giant who sleeps in the earth beneath Dublin, Joyce’s Finn MacCool, dreaming Ireland’s history.

  His feet lead him farther to Christianshavns Boat Rental & Café. Here, on this 101-year-old platform mounted low to the water upon the canal, Kerrigan sits with a glass of beer, gazing upon the view beneath the bridge where covered boats bob on rippling water. A poster beside him celebrates Ernest Hemingway’s hundredth birthday, an event Hemingway himself of course never got to see, having consigned his brains to a shower of shotgun pellets thirty-eight years before when Kerrigan was but eighteen, reminding him of the beginning of a story written the same year by Robert Coover, “Beginnings,” which begins something like, “In order to get started he shot himself, and his blood, unable to resist a final joke, spattered the cabin wall in a pattern that formed the words: It is important to begin when everything is already over.”

  The Hemingway poster includes portraits of two leopards that Papa no doubt would gladly have blown away. Kerrigan once stayed in the Swiss chateau of Hemingway’s German publisher, Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, who introduced paperback books to Germany. He was the German publisher not only of Hemingway but also of Faulkner, Nabokov, Updike, Camus, Sartre, Henry Miller, Thomas Wolfe, and Harold Pinter. During his stay, Kerrigan was given the chateau library to write in for a fortnight, and among the books and papers there he came across a letter from Hemingway to Ledig-Rowohlt from the 1930s in which Hemingway reported being in hospital with an arm broken on a hunting trip. He noted, however, that before he injured the arm he had shot a big-horn mountain sheep ram, two bears, and a bull elk and written 285 pages of his new novel. He mentioned that Dos Passos had been with him when the accident occurred but was not hurt himself and did not succeed in shooting anything. He went on to complain about the German translation of the title of A Farewell to Arms, and with a threat to take his new novel to “a big Jewish publisher” if he is not treated better in future, he closed the letter with warmest regards from himself and Mary, and then no doubt went out to pick a fight with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

  Kerrigan enjoys the beer in his throat and the sunlight on his face, thinks of the time he was here with his friend Thomas McCarthy, an Anglo-Irish story writer and novelist who was supporting himself as an executive for an automobile tire company. How many years ago? McCarthy used to edit the literary journal Passport, which, like many another literary journal, had gone under after a dozen or so semiannual issues. McCarthy himself has published a good many fine short stories and a couple of novels over many years.

  How many people are working like that, Kerrigan wonders, writing and publishing their stories and poems in obscurity for little or no pay, for the sheer pleasure of doing so, of putting into language some deep inner thoughts and visions in order that the envelope of their solitude might be breached, that their inner landscape might be viewed by another, in celebration of human communion.

  He thinks of Calvino’s observation in his essay on “Quickness,” quoting Galileo that the greatest of all inventions was the alphabet, which allowed a person to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person regardless of how distant in place and time, all via the arrangement of twenty-something characters on a page (in the case of Danish, twenty-nine characters).

  And in that way, thinks Kerrigan, the writings of any other of the thousands, millions of little-known authors might be stumbled upon in the years to come, beyond our lifetimes, a hundred years from now when Ernest Hemingway would have been two hundred years old and long beyond shooting any animals or having imaginary or real punch-ups with other writers. Some curious reader might find a yellowed copy of a book or literary journal in a bin outside a used-book shop, if such still exist then, or on the back shelf of some library, written by an unknown or forgotten author, and leaf through it, reading at random the most private thoughts of men and women now long gone from the earth, bringing them back to life for a time in the reader’s mind.

  Then he notices the sunlight moving on the water and remembers—how could he have forgotten?—that first day with Licia. How they had walked here from the university. How she said, Men my age are so uninteresting. (And you are so blind.) How she looked naked back at the west side flat he owned then. He has been thinking about her for years and still she is not finished with him.

  Kerrigan sips his beer, takes out a cigar, feels in his pockets for matches, and finds the lump of lemon soap in one, the hashish in the other, and thinks about hashishinating his consciousness if his lungs will permit. He climbs from the floating bar to the street.

  The hashish is solid and large in his pocket, and he remembers those days decades past when he smoked himself into a languageless trance, sublimely self-hashishinated. He thinks of the Freetown of Christiania, and fingering his stolen pocket hash stash, considers the old Danish proverb, “Hvo der vil have kernen må knække nødden”: “If you want the meat, you have to crack the nut.”

  Across the canal to Skt. Annæ Gade, past Vor Frelsers Kirke (Our Savior Church), and left on Prinsessegade to Christiania—so-called Fristaden—Freetown. A former military fort, it was taken over by squatters in 1971. An area of about 750 acres with 150 buildings, woods and ramparts and moats and a thousand inhabitants. One of the exits is through a gateway over which hangs a sign
: YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE EUROPEAN UNION. Kerrigan contemplates the sign from within the Freetown, smoking a little cigar in the sunlight.

  The Danish population is split fifty-fifty over Denmark’s membership in the, at this writing, fifteen-country union, with ten others waiting to enter and three in special relationship with the union. The Danish opposition fears that Danish life will become standardized, that the Danish language will be lost to the international English that is rapidly becoming the lingua franca of a political entity whose twelve languages are increasingly difficult to manage in administrative meetings. They also fear the common European currency, the euro, against which Denmark, Sweden, and the UK have taken a stand.

  However, the value of the European Union for European civilization is clear—the importance of binding these nations together legally for the future of a continent torn by centuries of internal war.

  The population is also no doubt equally split over whether the Freetown of Christiania should be allowed to continue to exist. In the beginning, the squatters who took it over paid neither taxes nor water nor electric bills. In 1973, the government decided to allow the squatters to run a Freetown there for three years as a social experiment, but five years later, a decision to level the area was supported by the Supreme Court. Some violent episodes, clashes between police and Christianiters, were followed by a continued political tug-of-war, but Christiania is still standing, twenty-eight years after the squatters took it. It is the second-largest tourist attraction—after the Little Mermaid—in Denmark, but that weighs against the fact that it also includes 750 acres of most attractive urban real estate on which developers could turn an enormous profit.

  There was a drug problem for some time involving motorcycle gangs and hard narcotics, but the thousand inhabitants managed to rid the place of the violent elements and hard drugs. Attempts to purchase or sell hard stuff there today are dealt with harshly, but soft drugs are allowed, sold openly (when the police are not around) on a broad dirt pathway called Pusher Street, where varieties of hash, skunk, and pot are sold by weight.