Free Kerrigan in Copenhagen by Thomas E. Kennedy

and soon there were many hundreds throughout the city, but with the advent of international fast-food joints like McDonald’s and Burger King, their numbers dwindled again to a hundred fifty or so at present.
    Within the wagon, Preben sits, big-bellied, spacey-toothed, whiskered, gazing across the variety of sausages sizzling on his grill. “Got a hole to fill?” he asks.
    â€œ
En ristet med brød, tak
,” says Kerrigan. A fried sausage with bread, thanks. And is given a piece of waxed paper with a dollop of mustard and ketchup on it, flat on the counter, a fried sausage, and a little heated bun. He asks for chopped raw onion as well, nips a sheet of napkin from the dispenser, wraps it around the end of the sausage. The sausage is hot. He likes hot sausage. He dips the sausage into the mustard and then into the ketchup, turns it in the little pile of chopped onion so that onion flakes cling in the ketchup and mustard.
    The sweet smell of sausage grease touches his nostrils. He likes the smell of sausage grease. He bites the sausage and feels the hot juices burst upon his tongue. His tongue is very sensitive, and the sausage is a little too hot still. Steam rises from inside it. But he relishes the sensation, the taste. He chews the sausage and all that exists for him in this moment is taste, the fullness of his mouth, the ascent of the fats to his brain.
    He dips the end of the bun into the ketchup and into the mustard and bites off an end so that the bread mixes in his mouth with the sausage. Happily he chews the two things together, smiling as he munches. He feels good. He likes this sausage wagon. It is a good sausage wagon. He likes Preben. He pops the last bit of sausage and bun into his mouth, chews, swallows, belches discreetly behind his fist, says, “
Tak
,” and Preben the sausage man says, “
Selv tak
.” Thanks yourself.
    â€œ
Hej hej
,” he says, which is pronounced “Hi hi.”
    â€œ
Hej, hej nu
,” says Preben the sausage man.
    It tickles Kerrigan that doubling hello means good-bye, just as it tickles him to literally translate what Danes sometimes say when they receive a very beautiful present: “
Hold kæft er du ikke rigtig klog
?” Literally, “Shut up, are you not rather unclever?”
Saft susser mig
—juice-sizzle me, and “Now you’re really in the
suppedasen
”—shit soup. Not to forget the Danish word for
brassiere—brystholder
, literally “breast holder,” to contain the two happy miracles.
    He enjoys Danish wisdom.
Lasternes sum er constant
, or, “The sum of the vices is constant,” the truth of which he learned years ago when he quit smoking cigarettes and began to inhale his wine. Or what Danes say when they go to a dinner party where you are not urged to take more: “The food was good but the pressing was not so good.” And Danish curses:
Kraft æder mig
—Cancer eat me;
Fanden bank mig
—The devil hammer me;
Fanden tag mig
—The devil take me; or simply,
For Satan!
or
For helvede!
—so innocent sounding in English, The devil! Hell!—but serious matters in Danish. And he loves the low Danish—
Øl, fisse og hornmusik
(Beer, pussy, and horn music)—and the elegant irony and understatement of the Danes, manners left from the day when Denmarkwas a world power for centuries, now fallen to a small power but surviving and doing it well. The year Søren Kierkegaard was born, 1813, the Danish state went bankrupt, following the British bombardments and the loss of her fleet and of Norway following the Napoleonic Wars. Fifty years later, the war over South Jutland finally reduced her to a small country. But she never lost her tongue or her culture, her eye for beauty and for harmonious surroundings—all perhaps inspired by her magnificent light and the ascendancy of her humanism leading finally to comprehensive health care for all, free education to