Copenhagen Tales Read online

greatest storytellers: Meȉr Goldschmidt, the Danish-Jewish

  novelist who in his student days notoriously crossed

  pens with the formidable Kierkegaard, and Karen Blixen

  (pen-name Isak Dinesen) of Out of Africa and Babette’s

  Feast fame.

  Goldschmidt’s ‘Nightingale’ is set in and around the

  city’s greatest cultural institution, det Kongelig Teater, the

  Royal Theatre, and in the still extant little streets and alleys

  nearby. This perfectly told tale, in which Copenhagen is

  still a compact middle-size city where seemingly everyone

  knows just about everyone, also gives an insider’s glimpse

  of the rise of the city’s small Jewish community from its

  humble Ashkenazi immigrant origins (still traceable in its

  speech) to comfortably off bourgeoisie. From this same

  background was to emerge the great radical literary critic

  Georg Brandes, one of the most influential thinkers of late-

  nineteenth-century Europe.

  Karen Blixen’s wonderfully atmospheric evocation of

  mid-eighteenth-century Copenhagen is set in the second

  year of the reign of the unstable Christian VII (the ‘mad

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  10 n Introduction

  king’ of the recent very successful film A Royal Affair).

  Lost in the city one wet and eventful night the novice

  monarch stumbles upon the slightly older but far more

  worldly wise poet Johannes Ewald in the company of his

  favourite whore. In the pair’s schnapps-heightened ‘con-

  versation’ about sex and myth-making, might and mortal-

  ity, Blixen revels in the triumphs and absurdities of their

  macho world as if it were her own. Indeed ‘Isak’ Dinesen

  identified very strongly with Ewald, Denmark’s first great

  lyric poet, who wrote his finest work while resident in the

  old inn at Rungsted, the Dinesen family home in which

  she was born.

  The last ‘tale’ is not fiction at all, but a fine journalist’s

  retelling of a fairy-tale moment in the history of her city.

  ‘The Night of Great Shared Happiness’ captures the joy

  and spontaneous need for togetherness—rare in the life of

  any great city—suddenly unleashed by BBC London’s

  surprise announcement, on the evening of 4 May 1945,

  that the five years of Nazi occupation were at an end.

  Events unfold against the backdrop of some of the most

  familiar streets and squares and public buildings of the

  inner city: the historic power centres of Christiansborg

  and the royal palace of Amalienborg, the great public

  spaces of Kongens Nytorv and Rådhuspladsen (the Town

  Hall Square), and two important cultural icons at opposite

  ends of the city centre: the Royal Theatre on Kongens

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  Introduction n 11

  Nytorv, and the head office of the daily paper Politiken on

  Rådhuspladsen.

  In translating these stories, most of them for the first

  time, I have hoped to demonstrate the versatility, range,

  and also beauty (four writers here are first and foremost

  poets) of a great national literature very little known

  beyond Scandinavia, and here encapsulated in seventeen

  tales set in my ordinary and extraordinary city.

  Many people have been instrumental in bringing this

  collection of stories together: my sister Trine, the indefati-

  gable reader; great friends and Denmark lovers, Fleur

  Griffiths and John Lowe; the special little enclave of friends

  in Skamlebæk. Particular thanks go to my brother Jesper

  for his scholarly and excellent help and advice, also to my

  nephew Kristian whose beautiful flat in the centre of the

  old city he generously lent us, and to Rune Backs, who

  took many of the wonderful photos for the book. Thanks

  also to the helpful librarians in Odsherred Library, Asnæs.

  And finally, above all, thanks to Hugh, my husband and

  fellow traveller through life as well as the canon of Danish

  short stories, without whose help this book would not have

  seen the light of day.

  Lotte Shankland

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  The Water Drop

  Hans Christian Andersen

  I dare say you are familiar with a magnifying glass, that

  kind of round spectacle lens which makes everything a

  hundred times bigger than it really is? If you hold it up to

  your eye and look at a drop of water from the pond you

  will see over a thousand queer creatures you never nor-

  mally see in the water, although they are there and they are

  real. It almost looks like a whole plateful of shrimps

  jumping around, and they are so ravenous they tear the

  arms and legs and tops and tails off each other, and yet

  they are happy enough in their own way.

  Now, once upon a time there was an old man whom

  everyone called Creepy-Crawly, for that was his name. He

  always wanted to make the best of everything, and when

  that didn’t work he used magic.

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  14 n Hans Christian Andersen

  One day he was sitting there, holding a magnifying

  glass to his eye and looking at a drop of water taken

  from a puddle of ditch water. Goodness, how everything

  was creeping and crawling in there! All the thousands of

  little beasties were jumping and skipping about, pulling at

  each other and eating each other up.

  ‘Oh dear me, that is quite disgusting’, said old Creepy-

  Crawly. ‘Can’t they be made to live in peace and harmony

  and all mind their own business?’—and he thought and he

  thought but nothing seemed to work, so then he had to use

  magic. ‘I must colour them so they’ll be easier to see’, he said, and so he added something that looked like a little drop of

  wine to the water drop, but it was magic blood, the very best

  for two shillings; and this turned all the queer creatures pink

  all over, and now it looked just like a whole city full of naked

  savages.

  ‘What have you got there?’ asked another old troll who

  didn’t have a name, and that was what was special about

  him.

  ‘Well, if you can guess what it is’, said Creepy-Crawly,

  ‘I will make you a present of it; but it isn’t easy to discover

  if you don’t already know.’

  And the troll without a name looked through the

  magnifying glass. It really did look like a whole city full

  of people running about with no clothes on! It was horri-

  ble, but even more horrible was seeing how they pushed

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  The Water Drop n 15

  and shoved, all picking and pecking, biting and tearing at

  each other. Whichever was underneath had to be on top,

  and whichever was top had to be bottom! ‘Look, look! His

  leg is longer than mine! Slash!—off with it! There’s some-

  one with a little pimple behind his ear, a harmless little

  pimple but it’s tormenting him, so let it tor
ment him even

  more!’ And they pecked at it, and they pushed him over,

  and they ate him for the sake of that one little pimple.

  There was another one sitting as still as a little girl, only

  wanting peace and quiet, but the little girl had to go, and

  they pulled at her and they tore at her and they ate her up!

  ‘That’s exceedingly droll’, said the troll.

  ‘Yes, but what do you think it is?’ asked Creepy-

  Crawly. ‘Can you work it out?’

  ‘That’s easy to see!’ said the other. ‘It must be Copenha-

  gen, or another big city, they’re all alike. A big city, for sure.’

  ‘It’s ditchwater!’ said Creepy-Crawly.

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  Twice Met

  Henrik Pontoppidan

  He went far up into the mountains of Norway—an odd-

  looking lanky fellow in threadbare clothes with a perma-

  nent grin on his lean face. No one could make out where

  he belonged—not whence he came, not whither he was

  bound. But when the ‘Long Dane’, as they came to call

  him, every spring and autumn without fail came striding

  through their valley with his thin oilcloth knapsack on his

  back and that stumpy pipe smouldering under his nose-

  end, not a few on whose doors he knocked to ask for a

  match or a beaker of water could resist the temptation to

  invite him in—to be entertained by his many far-fetched

  stories and his altogether curious figure.

  On the other hand, one wouldn’t particularly have

  wanted to meet him on a lonely path in the hills or the

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  18 n Henrik Pontoppidan

  woods. It was generally agreed there was something unset-

  tling about the way those tiny dark eyes of his flickered

  behind his glasses. His grin wasn’t altogether above suspi-

  cion either, and his hair hung like a tangled mane all over

  his ears and neck. The girls up in the summer pastures

  squealed in terror when he stuck his long, slightly inebri-

  ated nose through a crack in the door.

  No, truth to tell, it was not easy to figure out what the

  devil he was doing roaming about this foreign land, all

  down at heel, when somewhere or other he surely had

  hearth and home waiting to welcome him inside so much

  more warmly. Most people considered him a bit of a ‘queer

  fish’. Others were of the opinion he had likely forsaken his

  place of origin on account of some misdeed or other—

  possibly even murder. He looked capable of anything, that

  fellow! But if you asked him straight out, he would just

  grin and say in his quaint speech that it was so ‘much,

  much bonnier in Norway’.

  Once at some festivity where he had been invited in off

  the road they finally managed to worm out of him that he

  really did come from Denmark, was even a Copenhagener!

  When, however, they went on to enquire whether he felt

  homesick or ever had thoughts of returning to his native

  land, a peculiar dark flush suffused his jutting cheekbones;

  and after gazing silently at the ceiling a long while he

  answered, ‘Yes, when I am needed.’

  He was a riddle.

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  Twice Met n 19

  Come winter, when the snow and the cold drove him

  down from the mountains, he betook himself to Kristiania

  where he found work in his old profession: bookbinding.

  There, every night, he could be found sitting in a modest

  basement tavern, always in the same out-of-the-way cor-

  ner, bent imperturbably over a newspaper which he stud-

  ied from end to end, shrouded in ever thicker fumes from

  that half burned-out little pipe which so rarely left the

  corner of his mouth. But at the very first signs of spring

  the irresistible longing for adventure awoke in his breast

  once more. He strapped on his oilcloth knapsack and

  struck out for the mountains.

  Well now, last summer he turned up again in the usual

  places, where little by little people had got so accustomed

  to his arrival that they almost felt he belonged to spring in

  the same way as the starling and the stork. Only this time

  he was the shadow of his old self. His tall spare frame was

  now almost skeletal, and the little dark eyes flitted hither

  and thither distractedly as though his thoughts were for-

  ever far away, in foreign parts. No less striking was how

  relentlessly he pressed people everywhere for tidings of

  Denmark and the frantic eagerness he showed whenever

  he caught sight of a newspaper and then begged permis-

  sion to read it. On the other hand, if you broached the

  subject of politics, the parlous state of affairs back home in

  the land of his birth, the coup d’etat, the king and the

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  20 n Henrik Pontoppidan

  possibility of a revolution, he would straightway fall silent

  and go all black around the eyes.

  And then it came, that October day with the appalling

  news from Copenhagen: Assassination attempt! Prime

  minister shot at! The story shook up even the Norwegian

  peasants. Now all hell will break loose, they opined. It’s

  surely the last straw! And each morning, caught between

  suspense and concern, they picked up the paper and

  thought with commiseration of the old sister country.

  But where, all of a sudden, was the ‘Long Dane’? He

  had vanished into thin air, right from under the noses of

  the good people of Hallingdalen.

  In fact, at the very first wind of the pistol shots, he had

  set out to cross the mountains by the shortest route to the

  sea. Without pause night or day he had tramped through

  valleys and towns, forest and heath, in an unfamiliar

  landscape, until toward evening after three days’ hard

  march he came to a little coastal town in the west country.

  In one of the many sailors’ taverns along the darkened

  quayside he discovered a German captain whose old tub

  had just taken on a cargo for Riga, and who, after a good

  many objections, in the end agreed to take him as a

  passenger to the waters off Copenhagen.

  They weighed anchor at break of day the very next

  morning.

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  Twice Met n 21

  It was a misty November afternoon when the ship

  finally entered the Sound under a mild north-westerly.

  Reinald—for that was the Dane’s name—stood beside

  the mainmast on the wet and slippery deck, blue with

  cold, with his numbed hands thrust into the sleeves of

  his tightly buttoned coat and his hat pulled down over his

  lank hair above those tiny feverish eyes which seemed to

  flare up each time he glimpsed a section of the familiar

  autumn-brown coast through the mist.

  Most of the interminable crossing he had spent in more

  or less the identical position, and on the selfsame spot.

  Once in a w
hile he had allowed himself a little exercise,

  pacing to and fro in the tight space between mast and rail;

  but when his impatience and agitation became too much

  for him he had sat down on a coil of anchor cable with his

  face buried in his hands. At night he slept below in the

  fo’c’sle between a sailor and a cabin boy who had enjoyed a

  good laugh at the expense of this baffling passenger who

  thrashed about in his hammock like a fish on the line and

  screamed aloud in his dreams.

  In any case, there had been little chance to become

  acquainted. They ran into the foulest weather, with rain

  and gales over the North Sea, and fog over the Kattegat.

  For two days they lay off Hesseloe, compelled to keep

  sounding the ship’s bell; and when the fog finally lifted

  enough to dare set sail again, they were forced to heave to

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  22 n Henrik Pontoppidan

  once more in the lee of Kullen to await a pilot. Not until

  late morning did they slip past Kronborg—and now the

  Sound lay all about them like a thick, lead-grey, rocking

  waste over which the ship slowly crept along.

  It was almost evening before Copenhagen loomed out

  of the mist far up ahead.

  Reinald’s bony body gave a start when he saw the first

  spires rise like fine needles piercing the grey gauze of the

  horizon. Instinctively his hand went to the small of his

  back—to make sure the well-honed pointed knife still sat

  snug in its leather sheath under his coat tails. His entire

  body started trembling with impatience as little by little

  the city emerged from the mist: Vor Frelser’s slender

  corkscrew spire, the brickwork cone of St. Paul’s, the

  plump dome of the Marble Church. And later: the Stock

  Exchange, the Cross of Our Lady, the crane on the old

  battlement of the royal dockyard, and the snow-white

  roofs of the bacon factories.

  For twelve long years he had not set eyes on the city of

  his birth—not since those momentous days at the begin-

  ning of the seventies when, as a very young man, he had

  thrown himself into the socialist class war, never doubting

  that the time for the great reckoning had finally come, the

  dearly bought vengeance of the suffering, the oppressed,

  and the wronged. Right in there, between St. Peter’s and

  Our Lady, high up in a wretched little garret he had lived