To Copenhagen with love,
its seasons, its light, its dark, its people,
home of homes.
… Autumn is motionless.
Because the sun so hesitates in this decay
I think we still could turn,
Speak to each other in a different way …
… we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
—Philip Larkin
Contents
Characters (In Order of Appearance)
Wednesday: The Mumble Club
1. Frederick Breathwaite
2. Harald Jaeger
3. Birgitte Sommer
4. Claus Clausen
5. Vita Jaeger
6. The Mumble Club
7. Harald Jaeger
8. Frederick Breathwaite
9. Kirsten Breathwaite
10. Harald Jaeger
Thursday: Dome of the Rock Key & Heel Bar
11. Martin Kampman
12. Adam Kampman
13. Jytte Andersen
14. Adam Kampman
15. Karen Kampman
16. Harald Jaeger
17. Jes Breathwaite, Jalál al-Din
18. Frederick Breathwaite
19. Adam Kampman
20. Breathwaite’s Whiskey
21. Harald Jaeger
22. Martin Kampman
23. Adam Kampman
24. Martin Kampman
Friday: Vita Nuova
25. Martin Kampman
26. Harald Jaeger
27. Frederick Breathwaite
28. Adam Kampman
29. Birgitte Sommer
30. Harald Jaeger
31. Adam Kampman; Harald Jaeger
32. Adam Kampman
33. Harald Jaeger
34. Adam Kampman
Saturday: Fuck you, dad
35. Adam Kampman
Monday, Monday: A Boy Named Isaak
36. Martin Kampman
37. Frederick Breathwaite
38. Martin Kampman
39. Adam Kampman
40. Martin Kampman
41. Jes Breathwaite
42. Frederick Breathwaite
43. Jes Breathwaite
Irish Night: Wine comes in at the Mouth
44. Karen Kampman
45. In the Hotel Bar
Aftermath: While there is Still Time
46. Frederick Breathwaite
47. Harald Jaeger
48. Martin Kampman
49. Birgitte Sommer
50. Adam Kampman
51. Jalál al-Din
52. Jes Breathwaite
53. Frederick Breathwaite
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
By the same Author
Characters (In Order of Appearance)
EMPLOYEES OF THE TANK
Frederick Breathwaite, married to Kis (Kirsten) Breathwaite
Parents of twenty-two-year-old Jes Breathwaite
Harald Jaeger, divorced from Vita Jaeger
Parents of six- and four-year-old Amalie and Elisabeth
Birgitte Sommer, married to Lars
Claus Clausen, unmarried, friend of Harald Jaeger
Martin Kampman (CEO of the Tank), married to Karen Kampman
Parents of seventeen-year-old Adam Kampman and five-year-old twins, Helle and Hanne
OTHERS
Jytte Andersen, the Kampmans’ seventeen-year-old au pair
Jalâl al-Din (owner of Dome of the Rock Key & Heel Bar), married to Khadiya
Parents of Zaid (teenage son, estranged from father)
Tatyana, Polish mistress of Harald Jaeger
Wednesday
The Mumble Club
1. Frederick Breathwaite
Breathwaite woke to a screaming from the courtyard. He knew who it was. Still groggy, he amused himself in the dark behind his eyelids, assembling the Winchester underlever locked away at the bottom of the antique chest in the hall, screwed on the telescopic sight, braced his elbow on the ledge of the back terrace, and targeted the screamer, a bawling red-faced four-year-old. Pick her off and her coddling self-loving yuppie parents, too. Bing bing bing. One, two, three. Thank you, Charlton Heston.
Assassinations complete, he slipped back down for another half hour of blessed nothing.
He had fallen asleep reading the night before and woke this time in a beam of rare October sunlight through the bedroom window of his Østerbro, East Bridge, apartment, book splayed open on his chest. Beside him in the antique four-poster bed, slight and blond as a Renaissance angel, Kirsten lay curled against his shoulder, delicate fists tucked up beneath her chin. Conscious of his own bulk, he studied the calm repose of her face, still mysterious to him after half a lifetime together. Who knows the mind of a woman? He imagined the silken feel of her skin to his fingertips. But he did not touch her.
Kirsten was a morning lover, even now, in her sixties, but despite the fact that he was younger, he had alas nothing left to offer in that department, morning, noon, or night. When he was a boy, hostage to desire, he used to pray to be free of it; now, it seemed, he was, and he would never have guessed how utterly it changed everything, how quintessential was appetite. Kis was five years older, but her appetite still flamed briskly on.
He slid from beneath the eiderdown and slippered softly across the broad-planked bedroom floor to the bath. Sitting to pee, he looked into the novel he’d been reading, at two lines he had underscored: Choose carefully who you pretend to be, for that is who you will become.
Shoving the paperback into the wall rack beside the bowl, he spied an advertisement on the back of a magazine there—men in suits seated around a table—and remembered the meeting today. He had a premonition something might be coming.
He rose and washed his hands, crossed twenty meters of gleaming hardwood floor, an archipelago of antique carpets—from Iran, Afghanistan, Tibet—through the library with its ceiling-high shelves and gliding ladder, to the long, dark kitchen. He thrived in large rooms. These rooms. Broad floors, high ceilings, tall windows. Space. Without them he would smother. He brewed coffee and took it on the chilly, sunny fifth-floor balcony in his dark blue robe, a CD playing softly from the player inside: Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, “Autumn Leaves.” Moody variations of dead men celebrating death’s prelude.
He tugged the lapels of his robe closer to his throat. He was proud of the robe, an elegant one from Magasin du Nord, a gift from his colleagues at the Tank two years before, on the occasion of his twenty-fifth anniversary on the job. His secretary told him it had cost two thousand crowns, money contributed voluntarily, out of pocket, from the headquarters staff. They had lined the long hallway when he’d come in that day, unsuspecting, and when he’d stepped off the elevator he had proceeded through a gauntlet of them, waving paper Danish flags and cheering him. At the end of the gauntlet stood the new CEO, Martin Kampman, holding aloft between thumb and finger a minuscule paper flag on a toothpick, which he’d flicked back and forth at a twitch of his wrist, smiling—a small, horizontal smile bracketed between tiny verticals.
Coffee cheer lifted his brain. The day was immaculate. Vast, flawless, blue autumn sky above his head, yellow and red sunlit leaves on the treetops below, and golden sunlight warming the green-copper towers of Copenhagen, the adopted city that had become his home, where his sons were born, his grandchildren. This sunlight he recognized as the gift it was, the most beautiful autumn he had seen in his decades here, where sunlight and warmth could never be relied on. The days were already being chewed short to feed the lengthening nights as winter prepared to pipe in the darkness. Even that he had grown to love about the country that was now his h
ome, the yearly share of death, later repaid to those who survived by the white nights of summer.
The moody, cozy notes of Miles Davis’s trumpet lulled him into an agreeable melancholy.
Curious, he thought, that there is no religious festival to celebrate autumn, no sacred autumnal ceremony. Harvest, of course, but that was end of summer, that was the feast of plenty, not the first smell of death. Not that the Danes had so very much religion to start with, though they were a Christian nation, their whole society built on its secular equivalent. And they had their ritual seasonal touchstones—Easter, Christmas, even Pentecost, Whitsunday, which they celebrated by drinking all night until the sun danced at dawn and them with it. But nothing for autumn. St. Morten’s Eve was a ritual-less feast of roast duck or goose. No. There were only the falling leaves to mark the secret reverence of accepted sorrow, reverent natural metaphor of inevitable death. Rake the leaves and strike a match, witness beauty consumed in flame, rising to the sky in smoke.
From the breast pocket of his robe he lifted a Don Tomás, smelled and wet it before striking a match to roast its nose in a cedar flame and filling his mouth with the fine Honduras smoke. His cheeks hollowed deeply as he drew on the cigar, then puffed out as he released the white smoke through pursed lips. He smiled at the Chinese archer on one knee in the corner of the stone balcony. He had purchased the sculpture for a song at a Bruun Rasmussen auction on the other side of Langelinie Bridge. Why an archer? he wondered. Why an antique kneeling Chinese archer on their balcony? He could find no other reason than that the bid had been so low and easy, the only piece of art they owned that he’d bought because it was cheap. All the other pieces—paintings, masks, sculptures—he had acquired because they would not give him peace until he did. Didn’t matter what they were worth in money. Fortunately, he and Kirsten—Kis—shared the same taste. They liked pieces that unsettled them or made them smile or, in the best case, both: an ironically ferocious Inuit mask; an enormous Gunleif oil of an angel sitting like a hen on a woman’s head; a cast-iron blue-and-red amphibian that looked like a cross between a snail and a pterodactyl, by the Finnish sculptor Heikki Virolainen; a three-foot ebony Senafu bird with a meter-long bill in profile; a ram’s head, tongue jutting downward while a rainbow bird pecked into its brain …
And an antique kneeling Chinese archer for a song? He chuckled at his own evident corruption, even of his taste for art.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” Kis asked softly from behind him, standing between the white-lacquered frames of the double glass doors.
He turned his smile to her. “Because I wanted you to miss me, skat.” Treasure. The word was not ironic.
“Don’t you come back to bed?” A tender question, tentative. She knew he had a problem but would not let him think she was not willing to help and reminded him discreetly from time to time that such problems passed, but also that problems should be addressed. Difference between men and women: Women wanted to talk about everything, even if doing so caused pain and confusion.
“Wouldn’t blame you if you took a lover,” he said.
“Such rubbish!” she growled, the way Danish women growl to indicate no-nonsense honesty. “Have you one of those meetings today? They always put you in a sour mood.”
“What a blessing this sun is,” he said, and warmed his eyes on her sweet aging blond face.
2. Harald Jaeger
Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine … Due north from Breathwaite’s east-side windows, Harald Jaeger did push-ups on the dusty wall-to-wall of his Nørrebro, North Bridge, two-room. He entertained the fact that he was halfway to Friday to avoid thinking about the Wednesday morning management meeting he would soon have to suffer at the Tank. The Mumble Club.
Pleasure burned through his blood with the tensing and flexing of his biceps and triceps as he pressed up from and dipped down again to the dirty beige carpet, enjoying the gathering sweat on his brow, beneath his arms and T-shirt.
Demons lurked around the dim little room. He held them at bay with the steamy images assembling in his brain as he worked his blood and muscle, sculpting his arms, his abs, his pecs, feeling the radiation down to the cherished clockwork at the center of his universe.
Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight … Finally, midway on the hundred and first, his arms gave out and he dropped to his belly, panting. He sneezed, nostrils tickled by the dust particles dancing in a beam of smeary light. Then he leapt to his feet, shoved a CD into the stereo, and threw himself into the rhythm of Manu Chao, dancing himself into a lather, stepping, dipping, leaping, twisting, until he collapsed into his armchair, gasping, halfway through “Welcome to Tijuana.”
Calm then, he wiped the corners of his eyes, demon free, guzzled half a liter of cold grapefruit juice, belched with openmouthed pleasure, scratched his butt, and stepped under a steaming shower. Beneath the scalding water, behind his pink-black eyelids, images of Amalie and Elisabeth drifted across his consciousness.
No. Not today. Please.
No use. He remembered when last he had phoned, and six-year-old Amalie told him she thought about him every single night when she lay down in bed, kept seeing his face in the dark. The demons moved closer again. Wrapped in a black plush bath towel, he dialed, only too aware what the voice of his ex could do to him if he caught her in the wrong mood—and when was Vita ever in the right mood? The phone burred half a dozen times before he dropped it back into the cradle and sat there, palms on knees, staring at the grimy sun-smudged window, thinking what a fucked-up mess he’d made of his life, of their poor sweet innocent lives.
No.
He rose again to the all-important oblations at the glass altar of his little bathroom sink. With a snazzy black plastic razor, he shaved the hairless portions of his lower face—cheeks, neck, up to the sculpted slant of his midear burns, tiny arrowheads pointing to the corners of his ’stache, sculpting his motherfucker beard, as it was called. He wondered why: Because bad guys sported the style? Or guys who fucked mothers? Mystery there. All mothers would have had to be fucked, making every father a motherfucker. Or was it the sexy motherfucker that Prince sang about? What exactly did the Americans mean by this term?
He selected the tiny folding scissors given him as a gift thirteen years before by a woman whose sexual beauty he remembered in detail to this day. Mystery there. Why had he chosen the irascible dark Vita over the light loveliness of Janne? Complicated by the fact that Janne was, in fact, the dark-eyed brunette, Vita the blue-eyed blonde. Ice blue.
Thumb and finger in the handle holes of the little scissors, reverently recollecting the vision of Janne’s perfect, pear-stemmed breasts and shy, bright smile, he inserted the pointy tips of the blades into his nostrils and snipped short the bristling red nose hairs, trimmed his blond mustache and its architectural extensions to the neat, square beard that framed his square, dimpled chin under the clear expanse beneath his full lower lip.
He viewed the beard with satisfaction, trimmed a stray darker blond hair from his eyebrow, spotted a boary bristle from the chamber of his left ear, and clipped that, saw as it fell to the edge of the black porcelain sink that it was not blond but gray. He picked it up between thumb and finger and held it close before his eyes. No doubt. Gray. He leaned closer to the mirror for a minute inspection of his beard, but it was blond, all blond, no gray at all. Not yet.
Relaxing again, he reverently refolded the scissors, laid the minuscule folded instrument in the palm of his hand, and gazed at it tenderly, thinking again of Janne and how she had been, how she had looked last time he’d seen her, only a few weeks ago, in the supermarket, wheeling an unpleasant-looking child in her grocery cart, her own face bloated almost beyond recognition. It had become a face that Jaeger could not love, a face that precluded desire, a fact he acknowledged with disagreeable self-awareness but acknowledged nonetheless. No more games, he thought. I am what I am. For better or worse. He smirked. Till death do I part.
His eyes were still on the blond beard reflecte
d in the frame-lit mirror above the sink, one of the few beautiful things in this dingy little apartment to which the divorce had relegated him. He was ashamed to take most women home to it, had to prepare them for the shock, fearing the surprised disappointment that might flash across their faces. A man of your position! A man of your background! Or just, You live here?
The neighborhood was okay, no problem there, fashionable even, or on its way to becoming so, though he was half a generation too old for it. But the building was terrible—right from the battered and graffiti-spattered outside door and on up. There was not even a lobby and the shabby, dumpy stairwell no self-respecting academic would, as the saying went, subject his mother-in-law to. No elevator, either, so you were forced to mount by foot every dingy landing, through the lingering stench of gone generations of brown-cabbage eaters, to the fourth floor, only to find at the end of the ascent a shabby two-roomer that matched the stairwell.
Thank God his mother and father had not lived to see this downward turn, this further downward turn. By half. He had married up economically—Vita was the daughter of a plumbing contractor—down socially. He was a third-generation academic, Vita a never-employed dental assistant and cultural autodidact. He did it all to himself, he knew, and had no one else to thank.
Harald Jaeger, this is your life.
But his face, illuminated in the frame-lit mirror, was still blond and young and, he had to admit, though one wished not to be self-loving, handsome. Handsome enough, anyway. His dark blue eyes were almost violet and his lashes and brows so much darker than his beard and head hair that a woman had once asked him, with evident fascination, if he used eye makeup.
“Women sense my power,” he said aloud to his reflected face, quoting one of his favorite films. “I do not avoid women, but I do deny them my essence.”
But that was the trouble. It was theirs for the taking. Women were his everything. Women. Plural. He knew it, no need trying to deny it. He was a ladies’ man, and that was it. Not a skirt chaser, but a woman adorer.
From the elegant bottle of Armani Acqua di Giò, he dashed a generous puddle into his palm and anointed his shining cheeks with the agreeable scented sting. Dashed a bit beneath his arms, inside of his thighs, on the butt cheeks. Never knew when you might be glad you did.
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