A Fairy Tale (24 page)

I
'
m holding the coaster with Kasper's address in my hand. It's early afternoon. He's waiting for me in front of a red-brick building. I follow him around the block and into the courtyard.

“I've seen you doodling at work,” he says. We walk down the steps to the basement, he finds some keys. “Every time we're on a break or when you're waiting for the next crate, you get your pen out.”

The basement passage is damp and dark. We walk past peeling wooden doors with numbers daubed on in white paint and end up in front of a door with a big padlock. Again Kasper fumbles with some keys.

“This isn't really my own storage space. Mine's a lot smaller, but I have an arrangement with the caretaker.”

When he opens the door, all I can see are cardboard boxes piled from floor to ceiling. There are so many of them that I can't get a sense of the size of the room.

“If you get lost, hoot like an owl and I'll try to find you.”

I follow him through a narrow path with walls of brown cardboard on both sides.

“One of my friends used to work in the parcel section. What he didn't sort, he nicked.”

At the centre of the room Kasper has cleared some space and furnished the place with a worn Afghan rug and an old brown leather armchair.

He picks up a ceramic ashtray from the floor, tips joint butts into a black garbage bag, then switches on an electric heater and a couple of wonky-looking standard lamps.

“I don't live here,” he says, a little too quickly. “I just prefer it to my apartment.”

He removes a box from the cardboard wall and disappears through the gap.

“It became a bit of an obsession for my friend.” Kasper's voice is laboured, as though he's crawling through several more gaps. “He just had to nick parcels. He no longer cared about opening them. At first he filled up his own apartment. Then he asked if he could put a few of them in the basement. I'm afraid I said yes and then they caught him.”

The first thing to emerge from the hole is a long, rectangular parcel. It's followed by several smaller ones. Finally Kasper himself appears. He has cobwebs in his hair and he's licking a fresh scratch on his hand.

“Come on, open it.”

I tear off the paper and find a box of small tubes and five brushes wrapped in cellophane.

“It's supposed to be the best paint you can get. Top quality.”

I tickle my palm with one of the brushes; I can feel the fine animal hairs against my skin.

“I don't paint,” I say.

“Of course you do.”

Kasper rips the paper off the big parcel and an easel appears. He puts it up on the floor. The next parcel he opens contains rolled-up canvases. He attaches one to a wooden board with a nail gun and places it on the easel.

Then he disappears back through the gap. When he reappears, he has a piece of chipboard in his hand.

“Your palette,” he says, and makes himself comfortable in the armchair. “Start painting.”

He reaches down one side of the armchair and produces a large plastic bag of pot. I'm still standing with the brush in my hand while he rolls a joint.

“If you can't think of anything, you can always paint a mournful landscape from the Andalusian plain of your homeland.”

“Anatolian.”

“That's right, the one down in Turkey, with the goats and feta cheese.”

“What do you have against Turks?”

“Nothing.”

“No?”

“I just don't believe that you're Turkish. Now get painting.”

I open the first tube, breaking the small metal seal with the end of the brush. Vermillion red from China. Red like the inside of your mouth and highly toxic.

I squeeze out a little blob on the board, then I open the next tube.

Ebony black, made from bird and animal bones. So black that each line looks like a hole in the canvas. Then a little ultramarine, a smudge of Nepal yellow.

Kasper passes me the joint, I hesitate, I haven't smoked for years. Then I fill my lungs, I exhale the smoke slowly. I get red paint on the thin paper. I take another drag.

P
etra brushes the hair away from her face with her very white hands.

“Anything else?”

My packet of cigarettes lies on the counter. A small line is starting to form behind me.

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” I ask, and at first I'm not sure if I've said it out loud.

She looks at me. The line behind me is growing.

She says yes as though I've asked if they sell football pools coupons.

I wait outside the
supermarket. When she comes out, she has changed from the supermarket's golf shirt to a black turtleneck sweater. She hides her hands in her sleeves so only the tips of her fingers stick out.

We walk beside each other.

I've been to every bar in the neighbourhood, but none of the cafés.

I pick one at random and we enter. People speak in loud voices, they laugh and eat sandwiches and flick through newspapers. The espresso machine makes as much noise as a small spaceship about to take off.

Petra looks out at the street. I take the menu from the table; it says they have caffè latte, macchiato, mocha.

Lemon coffee from Bali. Indian hemp coffee.

I ask Petra what she'd like. At first I don't think she's heard me.

“Coffee,” she finally replies, without taking her eyes off the cars outside the window.

Petra sips her coffee
delicately, taking care not to spill. She leaves no brown coffee stains on the cup.

Beside her cup lies a small hard biscuit which she nibbles.

“Have you worked at the supermarket for long?” I ask, even though I already know the answer; I remember the week she started. In the winter she always looks cold, in the summer she never tans.

Petra nods and removes biscuit crumbs from the saucer with her index finger.

“Do you like it there?”

Again she looks out at the cars.

“It's a job,” she shrugs.

I push my biscuit across the table to her.

“Thank you,” she says. “It's nice to sit here.”

When she speaks she sounds as if she has learned the words phonetically and doesn't quite understand what they mean.

We walk across the bridge from the city centre to Christianshavn; we walk along the canal. She takes out her keys.

“I like my apartment,” she says, letting us in.

The kitchen floor is covered with chequered linoleum. A cat is sitting on one of the white squares. It follows us with its eyes without otherwise moving.

“Its name is Kot,” she says. “It means ‘cat' in Polish.”

The cat is skinny; its fur is grey with a bald spot at the back of its head.

“It's a very sad cat, I don't know why.”

She opens a tin of cat food, tips the contents into a bowl. The cat sniffs the food and takes a single bite before losing interest.

“I give it the most expensive cat food money can buy. But its fur won't shine. And it refuses to smile.”

“Do cats smile?”

“You know when they don't smile.”

We smoke cigarettes in the kitchen while the cat looks at us. We stub them out in the sink and I follow her into the bedroom.

She undresses as if she were at the doctor's; her movements are stiff and practical. She folds her clothes and puts them on a chair.

Her body is almost as white as her hands, with visible blue veins right under her skin.

I can feel her heels on my back. Her skin flares up and she gets red blotches on her chest and inner thighs like an allergic reaction.

Her cat watches us from the doorway. She's right, it doesn't smile.

“
Podobasz mi się
,” Petra
says, when we're both lying on our backs in the bed. The words and her accent sound Slavic.

“My dad's Polish,” she says, in answer to the question I haven't asked. She lights two cigarettes and hands me one of them.

“When I was a child I only spoke Polish.” She tries to make a smoke ring, but fails.

“Last year I met some Polish students. They asked me to show them Copenhagen. Every time I opened my mouth, they laughed and said I spoke like someone in an old movie.” She scratches one breast, the nipple is small and pink. “I miss someone I can speak Polish with.”

“I can learn Polish,” I say, but I only succeed in making her smile.

“
Podobasz mi się
,” she repeats. “I like you.”

I tie my shoelaces. She asks for my telephone number.

I tell her that I live with an old lady. It sounds like a lie.

“I won't see you again, will I?” she says, when I'm standing in the doorway.

“I'll always need cigarettes.”

She smiles as if her question was merely a joke.

The cat sits on the same square in the kitchen; it follows me with its eyes as I leave.

Now when I shop
for Elsebeth, I have to walk for another ten minutes, past the supermarket where Petra works. I walk on the opposite side of the street to the next supermarket, where the choice is worse and the prices higher. When I've done the shopping, I put an extra ten kroner in the pocket where I keep Elsebeth's change.

K
asper is waiting for me in the street. I follow him down to the basement. There's a fresh white canvas on the easel. When I was here a couple of days ago, the black paint was nearly used up; the tube was the size of a thumbnail. Now a new tube is ready and waiting for me. Kasper doesn't look up from his bag of pot when I ask about it. He just shakes his head. We're not going to talk about it. It's not important.

Kasper rolls joints, I paint.

When I look up from the canvas, he's asleep in the armchair, his mouth slightly open. I find the white paint and paint his outline.

He starts to wake up, looks at me with one eye. “I hope you're not painting me?”

I shake my head.

“I've a friend you should meet,” he mumbles, and goes back to sleep.

We're somewhere in Vesterbro
,
possibly Frederiksberg. Kasper is leading the way.

“His real name isn't Karlsson, obviously,” he says, referring to a character from an Astrid Lindgren children's book, “but he does live on a roof like him.”

We stop at a corner store; it's best if I bring something. I buy cherry brandy and a pouch of tobacco, things Kasper says Karlsson likes.

We enter a stairwell with no entry system and walk up the stairs to the top landing. There's only one door and it doesn't have a nameplate.

Kasper presses his shoulder against it and wiggles the handle until we hear a click and the door opens. We walk past attic rooms on both sides over to a short metal ladder that leads to a hatch in the ceiling.

Kasper climbs the ladder. He pushes open the hatch; light appears in the crack.

“This is never very easy,” he says out of the corner of his mouth. He's holding a small key between his lips.

“Can I do anything?”

He shakes his head, sticks his hand out through the gap, and grabs hold of a strong chain with a padlock.

We've reached the roof, which overlooks Copenhagen. There's a small shed and a deck chair a little ways away from us.

I'm about to go over there when Kasper grabs my arm.

“I'm not sure what he might do if we knock on his door without warning.”

Kasper picks up a handful of small white shingles. He throws them in a soft arc onto the roof of the shed.

“Doesn't he know we're coming?”

“Yeah, of course . . . But he's not very good with dates or times.”

A few more pebbles and a door opens. The man who comes out wears an anorak over two sweaters. He has a full beard and his cap is pulled over his ears. He must be in his mid-twenties, but his skin is weather beaten and ruddy. He gives Kasper a big hug and shakes my hand.

“We brought you presents,” Kasper says.

I hold out the bag. The man looks inside it and nods happily. Then he shows us around the roof, pointing out the Chinese Tower in the zoo and the Round Tower. On a clear day you can see all the way to the Barsebäck nuclear power plant on the Swedish coast.

He shows us the gutter that he fixed himself. He tells us that he did it late one night with a flashlight. He nearly fell off the roof, but the gutter kept leaking and eventually someone would've come up here to repair it.

He also mended the deck chair himself with a needle and thread — that was all it took. He says that he sits in it in the summer and puts cucumber slices on his eyelids. In winter he wraps up warm and sits outside while he reads and drinks coffee from a Thermos.

We enter the shed.

“My humble abode,” he says, showing me the sleeping bag and mat in the corner, the Primus stove, and the kitchen utensils hanging from hooks on the wall.

We sit down at a small folding table. Kasper and I get the two chairs, Karlsson takes a beer crate for himself. He opens the cherry brandy and pours it into three chipped mugs.

“I was training to be an insurance agent,” he says, by way of explanation. “I had a girlfriend, I thought my life was quite good. Once I'd qualified, there'd be no reason not to start a family.”

Kasper has started to roll the first joint; he looks as if he has heard this story many times before.

“One day when I came home, she'd packed up all my things. She said I made her sad. She said it was her apartment. I'd forgotten that.”

He wipes cherry brandy off his lips.

“I walked the streets. It was winter. I'd left my wallet behind in the apartment and I didn't want to go back for it. It was then that I remembered my afternoons up on the roof as a child. My uncle was the caretaker and used to bring me up here. We drank hot chocolate and played Old Maid. I found a screwdriver in a bike shed. All the padlock needed was a small twist.”

Darkness falls. Karlsson lights his two petroleum lamps. He fries sausages and potatoes for us on the Primus stove.

“The first few weeks I lived on stale bread from bakeries. But I started to get dizzy. I needed to eat some meat.”

Karlsson shares out the food between us.

“I used my last few crumbs to catch a pigeon. Just like in the cartoons: the pigeon follows the trail of crumbs under a box and then you pull the string.”

Kasper takes a couple of bites of sausage before pushing the potatoes around with his fork. When we've finished, Karlsson gathers up the leftovers and puts them out on the roof where they'll keep cold.

He sits down on the beer crate again, pours more cherry brandy, and rolls a cigarette with the tobacco I gave him.

“I ate a gull.” Karlsson's voice is soft. “I was starving. At first I tried to scare it off. But it refused to go away. It just stood there under the box, stuffing its face. You don't ever want to eat a gull.”

I nod, I believe him.

“I stood here on the roof licking its bones, thinking about jumping. But I didn't want to do it on an empty stomach. First I wanted to have a hot dog with all the toppings and then run off without paying. I met Kasper at the hot dog stand.”

“We went to school together.” Kasper lights yet another joint.

“He lent me some money. I don't need very much; I just don't want to eat gulls.”

“That was before I started the acid business.”

“I sell it,” Karlsson says. “Old hippies don't care what I look like. And they can afford to pay for quality.”

“Most of the pills you get from Germany are crap. Largely chalk and codeine. Sometimes even rat poison,” Kasper says.

“We sell good acid. Real acid, like the stuff The Mamas and the Papas drove around with in a big jam jar.”

When we've emptied the third bottle of cherry brandy, I need to pee. I've held it in for some time because Karlsson hasn't stopped talking.

“There's a bucket outside,” he says. “Don't pee over the roof. I know it's tempting, but don't do it.”