Kerrigan in Copenhagen by Thomas E. Kennedy Page A

Werther whose sorrows made Goethe so suddenly famous in 1774, two years before the American War of Independence, sixty-nine years before Kierkegaard’s Johannes walked the banks of this lake (225 years before Kerrigan walks it regretting Licia’s falseness). Johannes is the romantic—bumbling Werther’s cynical, contriving counterpart—articulating visions of a femininity that could only have been meant to reveal the true sadistic nature of the machinations of seduction. Johannes explained that in creating Eve, God struck Adam with a deep sleep because woman is the dream of man and does not awake until she is touched by love. Before that she is a dream, but there are two distinct states in her dream: first, love dreams of her; second, she dreams of love. And he remembers Johannes the Seducer’s speculation that woman will forever provide an endless supply of material for his contemplation.
    Kerrigan asks himself what he dreamed of in Licia and what was in Licia’s mind—was it consciously false, treacherous? Or did her love just cool and turn to a malicious desire to cut free from him, with no consideration for his attachment to Gabrielle? Or to the baby she was carrying. If she really was carrying a baby. If the baby was even his.
    Standing now on the bank of the lake, he watches the swans and the ducks, watches the continuous infinitesimal changes of the Danish light, feeling this long history of a culture around him, this speculation about women and love. He thinks of his Associate’s absinthe-green eyes, and he thinks of his mother who was born here, from whence she was taken by his Irish father via Brooklyn to Dublin, to Copenhagen and back to Brooklyn, then giving birth to him and registering him as a Dane, giving him dual citizenship, allowing him to try to make a new life here after his first life was foundering there, and in his forty-fourth year to meet the beautiful Licia who would make love possible for him and then deprive him of that love.
    The thought strikes him with a force that is physical. He literally staggers as he steps down through the tunnel between the two segments of Black Dam Lake, its walls festooned with ornate graffti scrawled over with obscenities, SUPERFUCKED AND FUCK SPAGHETTIS ANSWERED BY FUK RACISM AND BLOOD AND HONOUR AND FUK YOU NIGGA and again fuk racism. And he looks ahead to the light at the far end and tells himself that when he comes out into the daylight again he will dismiss these thoughts of Licia and Gabrielle.
    As he climbs the inclined path back up into the day, he sees the Kaffesalonen , the Coffee Salon, off to his right, and further on down the long narrow street the spire of the church in which he, himself, was married, Skt. Johannes Kirke , the Church of St. John, and he keeps walking, blanking out his mind with the movement of his legs, his feet striking the dusty path, the swinging of his arms, the breath in his lungs, the sweat in his armpits and on his back, as he fills his eyes with saving details, past the fairy-tale-like white structure of the Søpavillon , the Lake Pavilion, and around the foot of Peblinge Lake. He sees a green bronze sculpture of a lion and lioness fighting for the corpse of a wild boar, sculpted by an artist named Cain in 1878.
    And that name reminds him of Milton’s Adam and Eve in 1674leaving Eden with wandering steps and slow, hand in hand—the work with which Milton set out to justify God’s ways with man, and Housman two and a half centuries later telling Kerrigan’s namesake, Terrence, first read to Kerrigan by his father and still later by Kerrigan himself at a time when he was desperate for justification,
    Terrence, this is stupid stuff …
    Malt does more than Milton can
    To justify God’s ways with man …
    Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
    For fellows whom it hurts to think.
    How fitting it seems then that just across Gyldenløves Street near the bank of Skt.