Kerrigan in Copenhagen

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  Various other enterprises also flourish here, most notably the restaurant Spiseloppen—the Eating Flea—and the concert hall where, inter alia, Bob Dylan has sung. There are also a good jazz club, art galleries, and other enterprises. Many artists live here as well—painters, goldsmiths and silversmiths, sculptors, musicians, writers—and the living quarters and social establishments, kindergartens, nurseries, a “woman-smith” blacksmithery, a small bicycle factory, even an enclosed skateboarding hall, are originally and strikingly appointed. It is also now possible to have a guided tour of the area by someone living there. But the only way for a new inhabitant to come in is by becoming the lover of someone who already lives there.

  Kerrigan owns paintings by two Christiania artists, Wiliam Skotte Olsen and Finn Thorstein, and one of his friends, Per Smidl, lived here in a construction wagon while he taught himself to write and went on to publish numerous books, one about his life here, Wagon 537, Christiania.

  He follows the rutted dirt roadway toward Pusher Street. There are no motor vehicles here, only bicycles, and many unleashed dogs wander about or lie in the dusty sunlight. At one of the stalls in the shopping bazaar area, he buys a chillum from a man with one eye and proceeds down Pusher Street. The Christiania Jazz Klub, in the Opera Building, is locked up tight until this evening. Kerrigan has spent many nights in the company of friendly guests and management, stepping outside to share a joint with new friends, where entrance is as cheap as the bottled beer or shooters of Havana Club. At closing, the bartender often brings out an alto or tenor or soprano sax from under the bar and continues jamming until dawn or beyond.

  Continuing past the Klub and past Nemoland, another bar with open concert stage, he comes to the Woodstock Café. From the bar at the end of the long room inside, he orders a black bottle of gold-label beer that he carries to an outdoor table and sits in the sunlight among Inuits and their grumbling, restless dogs. Using his notepad as a workplace and the blade of his tiny Swiss army knife, he cuts a sliver of hash from the lump he has carried in his pocket all day, then segments the sliver and fills the bowl of the chillum.

  Lowering his eyelids in honor of the poor backpacker from whom he filched this hash, he lights it with a Tordenskjold stick match and tentatively, slowly draws the smoke into his lungs. So far, so good. Holds it, not too deep. Then exhales again. He draws three times on the pipe, then lets it go out, tucks it into his shirt pocket, and soothes his palate with strong beer.

  Soon he is joined by three young Asian-looking men, perhaps Inuits. One of them rolls a fat joint and lights it, tokes, and passes to Kerrigan, who thanks him no. The young Asian man glowers at him. Kerrigan smiles. The young man begins to tell the story of his life. He’s thirty years old, born in Taiwan, moved to Denmark as a child, was sent to New York as a teenager to play football in some high school league. Despite his small stature, he was an outstanding kicker from years of playing soccer. He still looks wiry and muscular, good-looking in a sullen way. “I was good,” he says. “I should have stayed. Now I’m bad boy. I’m all the time on hash, on coke.” His older brother, a bank adviser, is the biological son of his Danish mother. Apparently he himself was adopted. Kerrigan doesn’t ask. Instead he suggests that the young man’s multicultural background could be an advantage—all the languages he speaks.

  He glowers at Kerrigan. “Are you fucking blind?”

  Kerrigan freezes in startled silence, hearing echoes of Licia’s words.

  Then the young man continues. “You live in Denmark—don’t you see what racists they are! I get nothing but welfare. Twelve thousand kroner a month. After rent and cigarettes and drugs, what do I have left for myself? A hundred?”

  One of the other boys—he looks very young—laughingly speaks to the Chinese fellow in a language Kerrigan doesn’t understand. He glowers and flings his half-smoked joint in the boy’s face. It bounces back to the table with a scatter of sparks. “You laughing at me! You think I’m a fucked-up Inuit?”

  The boy’s throat bobs as he tries to swallow his fear. The Chinese boy glowers at him, at Kerrigan. He seems to be deciding something—maybe who to punch. Finally he says, “I’m in a bad mood.” He stands, extends his hand. “It was good to talk to you,” he says, and is off and soon the boys follow. Kerrigan thinks, Those anger-management classes paid off.

  Across from where Kerrigan sits, at a broad outdoor café, a woman on a bench piles her long hair upon her head, elbows raised. The sun sparkles in her yellow locks. He smiles. How do they know that makes us long for them?

  He watches a Christiania bike—a three-wheeled bike with a large wooden transport case in front of the handlebars—rumble past, three giggling children in the transport case. An extremely large man in his mid-thirties, wearing shorts and a white T-shirt, stops in front of Kerrigan’s table and asks, in English, “You know about the twelve families that run the world?” Kerrigan says that he’d heard something or other about them. He sits across from Kerrigan at the table. “My name is Viggo, and I’m drunk,” he says, “but this is a fact.” He says that America was an experiment which these twelve families, all royalty, decided to allow, to see what would happen. But now the twelve families are displeased, and America is going down. Somehow then, seamlessly, Viggo is on another subject, telling about his wife, Dorthe, who is twenty-eight and has found a forty-one-year-old plumber who makes her happy. That’s okay with him. He loves his wife for the love that she gives to his two-year-old boy, and he wants her to have love from the plumber. That’s completely okay, but he does not want this plumber to try to be a male role figure for his boy. He plans to advise the man about this. So he will have a warning. But if he doesn’t take the advice, a car will pick him up and take him out into the woods where his bones will be broken with bats by the French mafia.

  “No one knows about the French mafia,” Viggo says. “It’s been around for twelve centuries, and I know the son of the leader.”

  Kerrigan appeals to Viggo not to do that, not to have the plumber’s bones broken. He will risk losing the right to see his son at all, ever again.

  He shakes his head. “There will be no proof, no link to me.”

  Another man appears, not quite as large as Viggo, and says that he has called for a taxi, and the two of them salute good-bye with stiff arms and set off along the dirt street.

  Kerrigan finds himself staring at the earth, which is very interesting to look at. The texture of the dirt is fascinating and several tiny ants wander about, tiny reddish-brown marvels gliding over the brown dusty earth. Specks of magnificent design—living! His mouth is agreeably dry and the chill glass of the beer bottle against his fingertips wonderfully pleasant, and the air of the spring day seems to be sliding unimpeded again into his sipping nostrils.

  It occurs to him that one strategy might be to throw his wallet into the moat on the other side of the flowering ramparts, and then to die here where no one knows who he is. He might never be identified. This seems an interesting strategy.

  Then he thinks of his Associate again, how she would look with her elbows in the air piling her hair up upon her head, and the thought of his Associate reminds him that if he obliterates himself here in Christiania, he will never complete his book about Copenhagen, even though he does not want to complete it but only to continue researching it forever, which would give him some measure of immortality. So to break it off before then, at this particular critical juncture, would seem a sloppy way to die.

  The sun on the skin of his face and hands and the tips of his ears is marvelous as he floats down Pusher Street past the stalls and scales and roaming dusty dogs, the bearded tattooed men and nose-jeweled women. He stops at a barrel manned by a fellow in beard and leather vest who smiles. “Yes, sir. Can I help you?” Kerrigan asks how much for the little bag of skunk buds and is told that it is eighty crowns, the large a hundred. “I think the large then.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you. Hope you enjoy it.”

  Kerrigan pockets the transparent bag, thin
king, A boy never outgrows his need for skunk.

  Out of the sun and into the shade again on the wheel-rutted earth. Kerrigan experiences himself as very far away in this strange place, reenters the EU through the wooden archway, and floats up Prinsessegade toward Torvegade, where he waits for a taxi across from Elephant’s Bastion. No taxi comes. Then he remembers a place just up the road he has passed a thousand times on his way out to the airport and has always meant to visit but never yet has.

  A raveline is a triangular defense work standing in a moat between two bastions, the two outer faces of the raveline protected by ramparts. The Summer Restaurant Ravelinen is built upon the site where a raveline once lay outside of the defensive gate of the island of Amager, a so-called Zone of Servitude, where until 1909 building was limited in order to keep a free field of fire and deny cover to any enemy approaching the city.

  The Restaurant Ravelinen stands where the old fortification used to be. The old yellow sentry building, which dates back to 1728, is now the restaurant’s kitchen. The restaurant consists of two roofed-in sections built of strips of brown wood and an open gravel yard of outdoor tables that look out onto the old city moat and embankment.

  This is where Kerrigan sits with a tall glass of lager staring down to the gravel that crunches beneath the soles of his shoes. He is the only guest.

  The bird of amnesia

  Nests on the head of the smoke-eater

  And steals his wits.

  Thus spake the High One.

  Nonetheless, the gravel reminds him of something very sad, so sad he does not wish to think of it, for his stomach seems to be falling toward its own bottomless center as the not yet recognized memory rises to the surface of his thought. He sits there a long time staring at the gravel. Then he looks up at the wall beside the kitchen doorway across the gravel yard and the ancient yellow sentry post where he sees an advertisement for a Pinse Frokost, a Whitsun Lunch, celebrating Pentecost, Monday, May 25, and he remembers then what the gravel reminds him of.

  He had been at another restaurant with his Associate—M. G. Petersens Family Garden in Frederiksberg, established in 1799, at Pileallé 16, on the west edge of Copenhagen. They sat outside with a drink, and she had gazed down at the gravel, a distant look in her eye. When he asked what she was thinking, she told how she and her first husband’s family used to have a traditional Whitsun celebration each year. They would eat an enormous Danish smørrebrød lunch on the Saturday. Smørrebrød means literally “butter bread,” but such a lunch consists not only of three or four different kinds of bread with butter and swine fat, but also a couple of dozen courses on the table, three or four kinds of herring—pickled, fried, curried, sherried—smoked eel with scrambled egg and chives, caviar, cod roe, smoked salmon with dill and freshly ground pepper, fried plaice fillets, smoked halibut, fresh calf liver paste, wild boar pâté, corned beef, country ham, lamb meatballs, calf meatballs, pork meatballs, half a dozen Danish cheeses … They would drink bottled beer and iced snaps, would skål and sing drinking songs in honor of the women, in honor of the company, in honor of the papa eel that would never come home to his eel family again. They would party all night and on the Sunday morning, at sunrise, they would move over to Hansen’s Family Garden “to see the Whitsun sun dance” as they ate breakfast with strong coffee and morning snaps and many kinds of bread and cheese and sausage and pastry. There was music and dancing to Happy Jazz and people wore old-fashioned straw hats.

  A celebration of this sort requires a certain sense of pace regarding the drink, and this pace was something that her first husband had never mastered. As in many other places, it is customary at Danish gatherings for wives and husbands not to sit together. Thus she and her husband were at separate tables. At one point she saw him down on the ground, swimming in the gravel. He swam from his table through the gravel over to her and reached up to pinch her on the inside of her thigh. Very hard.

  “Did you enjoy dancing with Martin?” he hissed, and then swam back to his own table. Martin was the man on her left with whom she had just danced. Everybody was dancing with everybody. But even while her husband danced with another woman, he watched his wife dancing with another man, and sometimes he pinched her afterward if he didn’t like the way she danced or who she danced with. Or he would tap the tabletop in front of him with his index finger until she stopped dancing and came to sit beside him. If she didn’t stop dancing, she knew what was in store for her later.

  On this occasion, however, one brutal pinch had been sufficient. She rose and went off by herself into the Frederiksberg gardens, through the hedge maze and the stone-path pond. She looked at her leg. There was a still-stinging, nasty red-black spot where he had pinched her. Then she decided not to return to the party. She walked all the way home to their apartment on the other side of the city, packed a bag for herself and for her daughters, who were staying with her aunt, and she left him.

  Two months later she was alone with their three daughters in a two-room apartment. Her husband had cleverly registered everything they had in the name of his parents’ company so she had no claim on it, wanted no claim on it. She wanted only no longer to be pinched and accused of things of which she was not guilty. She wanted her daughters not to be shouted at by a drunken father. She wanted to be free of living with a man who became someone else when he was drunk, which was nearly every evening.

  Kerrigan stares at the gravel, gray and black and white pebbles that slide beneath his shoe as he shifts his feet on them. The sound saddens him. It makes a sound that somehow calls up the word children. He pictures his Associate’s husband swimming in the pebbles, reaching up with a crazed face to pinch her leg, then swimming away again. Kerrigan is sad for the man, that he lost such a beautiful wife, the mother of his daughters, because his ego was so weak it required her subjugation to it.

  The entire world is full of madmen, he thinks. There is no such thing as civilization; it is all just a behavioral veneer. Or rather we live in an illusion of normalcy, of normal, reasonable behavior.

  Close to the surface of his consciousness are images of Licia and his girl he wishes not to see. Faces so far away. How do you survive that? You survive. On the flow of time. You get over it. One day you tell yourself, get over it, and you get over it. Even if you never do.

  His mouth is dry again and he has not touched his beer. He drinks off half the glass in one long succession of swallows, working it down his throat, cold and delicious.

  He wants very much to comfort her at this moment, his Associate, to make her believe in comfort, for it seems to him if he can make her believe, then it will be true. And he wants very much to go and sit alone by his front windows and watch the sun set over the lake, to watch the light—pale red, pale blue—ripple on the water while silhouettes of men and women and children and dogs and joggers move past beneath the silhouetted trees like a picture in some forgotten childhood book.

  He pictures the sad green shadows of his Associate’s eyes. She deserves a man who is not a drunkard, who is not drunk every day, who is not drunk most days.

  Outside on the grassy ramparts beneath the shelter of trees, he watches the sun move lower in the sky and marvels at the thousand colors of light on the water, stippled like an oil painting, and he feels the ellipse of the universe on its slow elliptical course around him and, around that, the mysterious darkness.

  He walks slowly along Torvegade, head tipped back, toward Knippels Bridge, toward the center. On the other side of the street is the small, white, old-fashioned face of Spicy Kitchen at number 56. He stops and looks across, thinks of their spicy lamb curry, their chicken masala, their inexpensive beer and wine. But despite the hashish, he has no appetite. Just as his lungs begin to labor again, he sees the green “free” light on the roof of a cab and raises two fingers.

  Back in his apartment, he sits by the window, hunched over his work, but merely peers at the Montblanc cradled in the crook between his thumb and forefinger, raises his eyes to the lake outside,
silent figures jogging past on the dusky lake bank.

  He reaches to his back pocket and slides out the book of Arnold, thumbs through to “Dover Beach,” and begins to read, hearing within his ears, within the silence of the apartment, the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar …

  Nine: Land of Dreams

  … the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain …

  —MATTHEW ARNOLD

  From a dream in which his wife is chiding him for not having properly divided the fruit in an enormous bowl and offering it around, he wakes with a jolt realizing that he is no longer married and that the wife in his dream was not Licia and that the telephone has been ringing for some time.

  By the time he reaches it, the machine is recording a message. A voice with a Swedish accent speaks into the recorder. “Terrence! Kerrigan! Are you all fugged up or what? Pick up the fugging phone!”

  It is the insistent, demanding voice of Morten Gideon, who visits him from time to time, always unannounced, when he is in from Stockholm to find peace to smoke cigars and drink alcohol, to converse and fulfill secret assignations with the many women with whom he dallies.

  Kerrigan decides he is not up to Gideon today.

  He met Gideon years ago at the Casino Divonne Les Bains, first noticed him there by the loud and clear pronunciation of his Swedish-accented English addressing a ravishing blonde Turkish baccarat table-mate in these words: “I vant to kees your feet!”

  To which the Turkish beauty—a gynecologist by profession Kerrigan would later learn—replied, “Yes, yes, Dr. Gideon. Down, boy.”