The Lover From an Icy Sea (39 page)

Kit now knew the sound of panic in Swedish. Too bad. He was just then thinking what a fun country this Sweden might be. So why are we going to Denmark? he mused.

The plane shuddered slightly as it began to roll away from the gate, taxied out and, without a minute’s delay, went full-throttle down the runway and took off. Ciao, Milano.

The Alps—first the Italian, then the Swiss—were in plain view as their plane climbed up to a cruising altitude of thirty-three thousand feet. It would’ve been nice—Kit thought momentarily—to spend some time with Daneka at an Alpine resort. Different—very different. He would’ve been on more familiar, less dangerous, turf—less exotic, too. The mountains might’ve made introspection easier. Mountains could do that: could make one feel small, insignificant, more inclined to take one’s own measure against the immensity of natural phenomena. The sea could do it, too; but not a mere gulf—and certainly not a gulf as small and safe as the Gulf of Sorrento.

Their plane climbed steadily and then broke through the clouds into a clear blue sky. At the same time, any further view of the ground beneath them was lost to the nearly opaque cloud-cover that was as much a part of Europe as castles, fine wine, and hand kisses. Art, architecture, music, literature, philosophy—the whole gamut of Western culture, Kit mused—were not so much the result of any particular European genius as the result of a shitty European climate. Give someone—boy or man—a sunny day, and he’d go outside to play. Give him grey skies and any form of precipitation, and he’d naturally stay inside to paint a picture; design a building; compose a sonata; write a story; contemplate and discourse upon phenomena and epiphenomena—or simply comment upon the logic or illogic of it all. Europe was a grand continent, Kit mused. But no one should short the role of shitty climate in its grandeur.

His gaze and thoughts reverse-zoomed back into the cabin and to the contemplation of their present micro-climate. By virtue of a shiny, winged tube now zipping through space, he was about to exchange, in a matter of only a couple of hours, the birthplace of the Renaissance for a country whose principal claims to fame were the Vikings, Copernicus, Tycho Brache, H. C. Andersen, mountains of surplus butter, and a personal income tax structure that could turn bulldogs into Pekinese—or pretzels.

He knew, too, that the Danes had behaved nobly in the second world war—much more nobly, in fact, than had the rest of the civilized world—including, for too long, his own “last, best hope”; that Hitler had dismissed Denmark as “the little country” and had squashed it like an afterthought with his Wehrmacht; but that simple Danish farmers, by their simple Danish example, had demonstrated why French art, German philosophy and Italian opera buffa were as expendable—and as flammable—as the contents of a hot-air balloon.

He appraised this woman sitting next to him; pondered her genesis; wondered—dressed as she was—whether she, too, was the daughter of simple, yet noble, Danish farmers. If so, would her parents even have been born before the end of the second world war? He tried to remember what he’d found out the night in New York he’d Googled to her name, but he couldn’t remember the exact dates. By quick calculation, he decided it was unlikely.

Kit remained absorbed in his thoughts—and Daneka in hers—for the next ninety minutes. Then, with only a short while to go before the start of their descent, he decided to broach one of the many topics that had been troubling him for the several weeks he’d known her.

“
Daneka?”

“
Yes, darling.”

“
Tell me about your family.”

Her face seemed to light up at the prospect. “You’ll see for yourself soon enough.”

“
I know I will. But tell me anyway. You haven’t mentioned brothers or sisters.”

“
There weren’t any. I was an only lonely child.” She raised her hands and eyes in pretend self-pity.

“
Right. And your parents?”

“
Only parents. Only lonely parents of an only lonely child.”

The charade, Kit thought, was wearing thin. “Daneka!” He gave the first syllable of her name an extra pounce; she clearly, finally, understood the weight of it.

“
Oh. Sorry, darling.”

“
That’s okay. I’m patient.”

She reached over to him and pinched his cheek. “I know. That’s what I love about you.”

“
Your parents?”

Daneka sighed. “I haven’t seen my mother in over a year. She’s a simple but good woman. Strong. Quite ‘here and now,’ although her ‘now’ is sixty-plus. She still lives in the same house I was born in. In which she was born—in 1941.”

Kit made another quick mental calculation. If Daneka’s mother had born in 1941, and this was 2003, she would be sixty-two. But Daneka had been born in 1960—which meant that her mother would’ve been only nineteen when Daneka was born and eighteen when Daneka was conceived. So how old when she married? Denmark, Kit knew, was a progressive country. But then, perhaps Denmark’s progress had been made only very much after the second world war had ended….

“
And Germany invaded Denmark in what year?”

“
1940. It was all over in a couple of days.

What a happy coincidence, Kit mused. Germany invades Denmark; the next year, Daneka’s mother is born. He wondered whether the conception was an act of celebration, of defiance, or simply the result of a spontaneous romp for lack of any easy butter to churn.

“
I didn’t really get to know my grandparents. They all died shortly after the invasion. ‘Not in a firing line or anything as dramatic as that. ‘Just died. ‘Maybe of despondency.”

“
But if they all died, who took care of your mother?”

For as long as he’d known her, Daneka had always been ready with a quick answer. This time, however, she wasn’t. She hovered over the question like a bee buzzing around an uncertain flower, apparently struggling to form the first word of an answer, but then closing her mouth again each time and withdrawing into silence.

“
Daneka?”

“
I guess I don’t really know. I never asked, and she never offered.” Again, she paused. “I’m frankly a little ashamed to admit I never really thought about it until now.”

Kit put a hand on top of hers, pressed four fingers down between her fingers and wrapped his thumb around her thumb. “I understand. We all sometimes get a little too absorbed in our own lives to think about the lives of others—ironically, and most especially, about the lives of our parents.”

Daneka remained pensive for another long moment. Then, more to herself than to Kit: “God! To think I never even asked her—.”

Kit took her hand in both of his and leaned down. “It’s not too late, you know. Perhaps this trip is a godsend. Perhaps you were meant to have this opportunity to get to know the woman in the mother you once had, and not just the mother.”

Another long moment of silence, following which Daneka looked into Kit’s eyes. “Perhaps you’re right.” It was the last thing she said before the captain announced their imminent arrival in Copenhagen. Kit took notice of how she’d once again quite effectively eluded the subject of her father.

Chapter 49

Denmark—as far as the eye could see—appeared to be fog-bound. This came as no surprise to Daneka, though Kit was certainly sorry to be deprived of a clear aerial view in this, his first glimpse of a Nordic country. He looked around and noted the expressions of most of his fellow travelers: like the weather outside their window, they’d turned stern and grey. Those same passengers—he’d also noted from time to time during their flight north—had been consuming alcohol like candy. Full bladders, he conjectured, would explain the unusually heavy foot traffic back to the lavatories. For every couple or three passengers who disappeared to the rear of the plane, however, only one seemed to return—and that one was almost always a woman.

Kit craned his neck; glanced back; was somehow not surprised to see a small congregation in tipsy attendance at what he imagined to be the location of the wet T-shirt set. He suspected their conversation and thoughts at this instant would not be on Heidegger, Husserl, Hegel, or even Kierkegaard, but rather on the smörgåsbord of tasties just beyond morally and ethically—not to say legally—acceptable reach to all but the most jaded. Then again, maybe he was merely imputing to the workings of other men’s minds the peculiar gear work of his own—a grinding of wheels and cogs that rarely rested from the calibration, data-entry and cataloguing of women’s faces and bodies—not to mention his penchant for always thinking of them as edibles. Maybe these people really were discussing Kierkegaard.

In any case, he’d never know. The captain’s voice—now tied, it seemed to Kit, to a considerably more sober frame of mind than the one in which that same captain had first greeted them—came over the public address system to ask all passengers to kindly return to their seats, buckle up and prepare for landing.

The captain’s request seemed to rouse Daneka from her brooding, and the sound of her voice spared Kit any further contemplation of his own sorry feet of clay.

“
Now once we get our baggage, darling, we’ll go directly downstairs and grab a train to Øresundsbroen, then take a high-speed ferry via Ystad to Bornholm—you know, the island I told you about. You’ll be happy to know, by the way, that Ystad is in Sweden. The ferry actually lands at Rønne—you know, where my mother lives. But I think I’d rather get a car and drive directly to Svaneke if you don’t mind. It’s located on the other side of the island, and it’s where I have my little cottage. We can visit my mother tomorrow. It’s only ninety-two kilometers from Copenhagen to Rønne, by the way, and shouldn’t take us more than about an hour and a half once we board the train. Sound like a plan?”

“
Sounds like a plan,” Kit said. He was eager to meet Daneka’s mother, but he first wanted to get acclimated, to get a sense of his surroundings, to get a feel for “the little country” and its people—even if just by observation—before he’d actually meet one of them.

Their plane landed with the grace of a water bird: its pilot was obviously adept—at least at piloting. Kit and Daneka disembarked with the other passengers, passed through the distinctly businesslike—albeit cordial—affair of Danish Customs and made their way to the baggage claims area. Kit expected to see a bevy of buxom blonds blow through at any moment. His repeated glances belied the attitude of idle curiosity he was otherwise trying hard to project.

“
Sorry, darling. That plane is taking your pretties directly on to Stockholm. You’ll just have to make do with Danish and coffee today.”

“
My pretties?” Kit asked with a disingenuousness even he found off-putting. Was he so transparent? Or was she—in addition to everything else—also præternaturally intuitive? And this “Danish and coffee.” Was it a clear reference to what he believed was a private penchant? How could she possibly know about that? He chose silence over denial as the better of the two strategies.

“
Qui tacet consentit
, darling,” Daneka said through lips that seemed to Kit at that moment to be made of Roman marble—the old, cold kind. “Don’t forget—Latin is also one of my languages. She reached up and put a hand on Kit’s shoulder. If she meant the gesture to be consoling, the tone in her voice was instead condescending. “So go ahead and dally, darling. Just don’t deny it. And don’t do it in my presence.”

Kit reached for a cigarette.

“
Sorry, darling. This isn’t Italy. You’ll have to step outside for that fag.”

She’d just added banishment to scorn and condescension, and he suddenly remembered their earlier conversation in the restaurant that first night in Portugal. “We can also be vicious and vengeful,” she’d warned. The waiter had interrupted her as she was about to explain how ‘vicious’ and ‘vengeful’ might ultimately evolve into a severe Scandinavian silence.

As he dropped the pack of cigarettes back into his pocket, he shuddered. He’d only just set foot in Scandinavia—in summer, no less—moments earlier. And yet the chill of it, and the chill of her, felt like the dead of winter.

Chapter 50

They collected their bags. Kit renounced his cigarette and followed Daneka down one level to the train station, where she purchased two round-trip tickets from an automat that spelled out København <-> Rønne.

While she was busy with the purchase, Kit looked around and was suitably impressed with what he saw. For all of New York’s inane efforts to implement and operate an effective “train to the plane,” someone might’ve thought to ask the Danes how to do it. Their achievement looked to him like the work of master craftsmen—even if in miniature. Directions in both Danish and English were clear, concise, and color-coordinated so that even travelers who were neither Danish nor English-speaking could, with some ingenuity, manage to find their way about. The platforms were uncluttered; the tracks, clean. Except for occasional announcements over the public address system, the noise-level rarely exceeded that of a dentist’s office. Whenever announcements were made, they were clear, intelligible, given in both Danish and English.

When trains arrived, people wishing to board stepped aside and waited patiently until the last exiting passengers had stepped out. In several instances, those waiting on the platform to depart would first help other, elderly or overburdened passengers; would then, and only then, board themselves. Even the trains were quiet: they entered and exited the station quietly; their doors opened and closed quietly. ‘Quiet’ seemed to be—if not the signature feature of the whole operation—then at least a significant consideration in its design.