Copenhagen, Spring 2010

 

    What I do not wish to reveal will be discovered anyway, because I will inevitably tell it by leaving it out of the record. Such is how desire works. So consider this: thirty-five kilometres north of Copenhagen, on a morning of washed-out light that is not uncommon to the region in April, I was following at an ever-increasing distance for the space of an hour a Middle-Eastern woman in her thirties through a field of heather stretching for acres, which were full of grouse that rose up in a great clattering confusion as I waded through, as if I had aroused them from a sleep that had lasted all of their lives. She wore a white dress of muslin and intricate lace resembling a sail wrapped about her shoulders, and unlike myself was able to walk noiselessly through the field without a disturbance, leaving no trail behind her as if her feet were floating through the heather. Glancing once over her shoulder, she lifted her veil, and I saw on her face a sense of wonderment, the way a parachutist looks back before leaping into the ether, then she disappeared over the hillside. By the time I reached the crest she was nowhere to be found on the slow undulations of purple and marbled green ending with a collar of fog on a desolate stretch of seacoast that seemed so cheerless and heartbreaking a place as to be all but uninhabitable. The abandoned lighthouse, plywood in the windows, each with an X on it, conveyed as much. Neither the longer odyssey by which I had arrived at the scrub of dirt and brush and wind-swept trees nor the place I first set sight of her — in a vegetable market or at a petrol station or by a bell tower in a town square — had left any residue by which they might be traced backward, recovered, or recalled without fabrication. But this knowledge by itself would not stop me from trying. Without realizing it I had fallen for some months into the practice of following women through Copenhagen, which lent my otherwise aimless walks a purpose apart from passing time before sleep. It was often the case that I would walk the distance of several blocks, sometimes a kilometre or more into entirely different quarters of the city before I became aware I was, as if on autopilot, keeping pace with a woman threading her way through a crowd, late for lunch, or a business meeting, or, as happened once, back to her apartment building where, catching a door of iron roses right before it closed, I followed and turned into an interior courtyard at the last second, as she ascended the stairs to shower or sleep or talk on the phone or wait for her lover, I had no way of knowing. I rested for an hour, while I stared at the crumbling stones and up at a parcel of sky on a soundless day through which, miraculously enough, a zeppelin glided overhead like a mechanical whale, and I was convinced for a moment it was 1901 again and everyone and everything would be okay for a while. I would never speak to these women — maybe a hundred or more in total — and I would take caution to hang back a few metres to feign a casual coincidence but close enough to breathe a trail of perfume, realizing any recognition would prematurely end the spell I was under and wake me to the ruins of the day. I can only speculate upon what drew me to them other than they walked with an assurance and direction that each step carried them into a future self-determined and entirely their own, while I myself felt each year recede into the past, like a broken ice shelf and on its drift the explorer who having found what he wanted refuses to leave. By the time she would enter an elevator or rendezvous with a companion, which I took as a signal my pursuit was over, I would invariably find myself leaning in a doorway hastily transcribing her height, weight, hair colour, son habillement, the shape of her earrings, and then I would invent a name fitting for her, vines scrolling down my pages. Consulting my notebook I can confirm the evening before the woman disappeared through the heather, I had slept in the Inn Bonne Esperance and though I had no appetite despite having not eaten in over thirty hours, had alone taken a dinner of melon, roasted salmon, white tea on a heated patio decorated with holiday lights strung in a few potted begonias, had spoken briefly with the elderly keeper who, so barely animated he seemed to have survived his own death and was now biding his time, proceeded precisely at nine to show me my room. It was strangely adorned with two antique diverging mirrors that were meant to open up the claustrophobic quarters, but which created instead a debilitating sense of disorientation, as if space itself around me were beginning to bend. That night the simplest movements became a trial. Each time I would cross the floor for a glass of water or to retrieve my wallet, multiple versions of myself appeared out of unfathomable recesses in the mirrors, converged in the centre and then dispersed, one turning a corner back into the corridor that now seemed to lead to the basement, two others climbing perpendicular up the walls in different directions, a fourth hanging from the ceiling as I paused. All of this induced a paranoia that I had begun to project onto any surface reflexive of my desire a desire to be seen. I was nauseated, as I always felt when looking at an M.C. Escher lithograph which now I was sure I was in danger of becoming trapped within and so, exiting the room with care, I ventured downstairs to find the owner to request another accommodation, but to judge by all of the open doors he, along with the other two guests, a Jewish couple travelling to Munich, seemed to have departed. It was only later I learnt from reading on the early period of European demonology that convex mirrors were an effective tool for ridding a room prone to unfriendly spirits. It was not a haunting I felt, then or now. Not precisely, unless you can haunt yourself, the former life clawing out of the dead leaves and soil. As I gather my thoughts like the threads of a tapestry, the window I stand in surveys the city’s aquamarine office towers populated with accountants, financial analysts, insurance underwriters whose lives, which make ours possible, I cannot begin to imagine, and a few metres below is a cemetery of mature oaks, a storage house enshrouded in such ivy to remove it would cause the roof to cave, and perhaps a hundred tombstones tilted on a slope that steps down to a small river popular with mallards in summer. I know nearly nothing of those buried in the family plots and sepulchres whose eroded inscriptions I can almost read on a clear, dry day with a pair of opera glasses, lives given in battle, victims of cholera, death by isolation, stillbirths, erased suicides. I was once informed graveyards old as this no longer have bodies in them, only names and sun in the branches and an inkling of the future robins bring. Twice a month in late afternoon, two nuns appear, though I never see their arrival, to repair a broken link in the fence, pruning underbrush around the mossy stones with a pair of small scythes, a bit of dirt on the wrist which gets smudged on her forehead and suddenly it is Ash Wednesday, and the sky is unfolding and they have gathered leaves into a wicker basket in the medieval lanes with the dedication of a gardener poised before the fragility of his orchids: White Moth, Flower of San Sebastian, Mother of Pearl, Apollinaire, Tiger, Hider of the North.