Kerrigan in Copenhagen by Thomas E. Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page A

drop slips out. He wills himself from the gloom, glances at his Associate’s handsome face lost in its own distance, its own music. Such a lovely green-eyed face, he thinks, and realizes suddenly that she recognizes that she herself must also bear some blame for the fact that she did not get the education she wished for, and his awareness of her awareness of this touches in him a sense of kinship with her.
    We have both been foolish. We both have regrets, and here we sit in our fifties in an old café over empty glasses, empty bottles.
    He can feel the drink in his legs as they walk down VingÃ¥rdstræde —Vineyard Street, where years before someone had attempted, in vain, to cultivate grapes for wine. Not suited to the Danish climate. Somewhere he seems to remember reading of a Roman expedition to Scandinavia—was it in Tacitus?—in which the leader explained his withdrawal by saying:
The land is uninhabitable. There are no olive trees
.
    They come out behind Kongens Nytorv , the King’s New Square, and she points. “That’s the National Bank there.”
    â€œNine hundred and ninetynine million pound sterling in the blue-black bowels of the bank of Ulster.”
    â€œSorry?”
    â€œJoyce,” he explains, and pats his leather satchel. “
Finnegan
.” When she does not respond, he continues, “You know, Joyce visited Copenhagen. In September 1936. He was convinced he had Viking blood in him. Dublin and Cork owe their origins to Danish Vikings—but he also once told his brother Georgio that he wanted to go to Denmark because the Danes massacred so many of his ancestors. He had taught himself Danish, or Dano-Norwegian, in order to read Ibsen—Norway hadbeen under Denmark previously. Joyce’s first publication, written at the age of seventeen, was a long article about Ibsen’s last play,
When We Dead Awaken
from 1899, exactly a hundred years ago. The review was published on April Fool’s Day, 1900. Joyce professed to believe that Ibsen was the greatest dramatist of all time, even greater than Shakespeare.”
    Then he remembers one particular play Joyce had praised by Ibsen—about the necessity of an artist’s renouncing love and marriage—and thinks of his own decades of such renunciation, or avoidance, only to be trapped at forty-nine by the blonde treachery. He takes refuge in thoughts of H. C. Andersen’s unhappy experiences of love, taking succor in the many women he himself has known—for a night, a couple of weeks, a season … Kierkegaard also had a fiasco of a love life. By comparison, Kerrigan comforts himself, his is rich in experience—even if it is equally laden with regret.
    â€œBut Joyce also admired Andersen,” he continues. “When he was here he even bought a toy as a reminder of Andersen for his five-year-old grandson. He called Andersen Denmark’s greatest writer. He was also full of praise for Carlsberg beer, and his wife was full of praise for the Danish light, its continuous changes, which is one of the things that caused me to fall in love with Denmark, too. Joyce also had a high opinion of Brandes. Also, Tom Kristensen met Joyce when he was here. Ole Jastrau in
Havoc
is reading
Ulysses
.”
    She listens attentively to what Kerrigan is telling her, then stops walking and says, “Tell me something. You know so much about Copenhagen already. Are you toying with me? Why do you need my help? Do you have something else in mind?”
    Kerrigan hopes the darkness hides his blush. “I only know a little,” he says. “And very little about the bars or the Danish Golden Age. You know much more than I do.”
    â€œBut,” she says, “you … you are like some kind of university professor. You have read so much.”
    â€œHave read little. Understood less.” He looks into her eyes and doesn’t tell her that he is quoting Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus.
    He