Free Kerrigan in Copenhagen by Thomas E. Kennedy Page B

is unhappy, one insists on living and being happy.
    He shakes and zips with a nod of thanks toward Brandes Place, walks up Stockholmsgade —Stockholm Street—to number 20, the Hirschsprung Collection , named for the Danish cigar manufacturer Heinrich Hirschsprung, whose trademark was a leaping deer, the meaning of his name in German. He gazes up at the statue on the lawn of an equestrian barbarian sculpted by Carl Johan Bonnesen in 1890.
    Kerrigan considers the short muscular helmeted figure, armed with knife and scimitar, mounted upon a short strong steed, two decapitated human heads dangling from one side of his saddle, a third from the other. Odd motif, thinks Kerrigan, just across the trees from the civilized Brandes, a mere bronze head in comparison to the muscular body of this armed man and powerful horse with the severed-head trophies.
    Crossing back through the Potato Row houses to Østersøgade, East Lake Street, Kerrigan stands on the bridge that bisects Black Dam Lake—called the Peace Bridge, Fredensbro. Across the lake stands a tall monolithic sculpture titled
Fredens Port
, the Peace Gate, erected in 1982, by Stig Brøgger, Hein Hansen, and Møgens Møller. It rises at a tilt from the grass of tiny Peace Park: Like modern society, the monument seems locked in a constant fall that never concludes.
    To his right, framed between two chestnut trees, behind the buildings on the opposite bank of the lake, the top of the state hospital looms up like a huge steamship sailing beneath a white ceiling of cloud. He stands now on the bridge and, belching into his fist, remembers the fried sausage he has just eaten. It occurs to him that the two sides of the lake are like kidneys on either side of the spine of the bridge. He realizes this is far-fetched, but it makes him chuckle nonetheless as he sees a filthy fish nip a fly from the filthy surface of the water. Big two-kidneyed lake, he thinks, remembering how vindictive Hemingway could be when ridiculed, physically attacking the author of a review of
Death in the Afternoon
, titled “Bull in the Afternoon,” when he met him in Max Perkins’s officeone afternoon; Hemingway wound up on his butt, spectacles askew, though to his credit he came up chuckling at himself.
    Those were the days, thinks Kerrigan, when an American man defended his honor with his fists, as though power and honor are synonymous or fists can do anything but silence the opposing view. He recalls Hemingway’s statement about his progress as a writer, that he began by beating Turgenev and then trained arduously and beat Maupassant, fought two ties with Stendahl but had the edge in the second; however, he would not get into the ring with Tolstoy unless he got a lot better. True bull in the afternoon. As bad as the ridiculous practice of fighting duels over one’s honor—which killed Alexander Pushkin and Alexander Hamilton.
    Kerrigan chuckles aloud and realizes he is still slightly intoxicated from the evening before. Hemingway, he realizes, would soon have been one hundred years old had he not blown out his brains just before he was to turn sixty-two. Yet there is something else that cannot be denied: Hemingway was physically courageous; Kerrigan, he himself recognizes, is not. Amen.
    He decides to remain on this side of the bridge, to take a brisk walk around the entire circumference of this lake and the next, Peblinge Lake, get his blood pumping and his lungs working. As he trudges past an old disused bomb shelter on the bank, his thoughts reach back toward the year of his birth, 1943, the year after Camus wrote
The Stranger
, the third year of the German occupation of this city, this country, and yet another century back again to 1843, the year Søren Kierkegaard published
Either/Or
, the first of his most important works, written when he was thirty. He died when he was forty-two—would have been two years before the age Kerrigan was when he met Licia and