A Table of Green Fields (4 page)

***

Dear Lizaveta: Japan! Oh, Japan! Rudolf and I have bought kimonos and roll about in a rickshaw, delighting in views of Fujiyama (a blue mountain with snow on top) through wisteria blossoms and cherry orchards and bridges that make a hump rather than lie flat. The Japanese drink tea in tiny cups. The women have tall hairdos in which they have stuck yellow sticks. Everybody stops what they are doing ten times a day to write a poem. These poems, which are very short, are about crickets and seeing Fujiyama through the wash on the line and about feeling lonely when the moon is full. We are very popular, as the Japanese like novelty. Excitedly, Belinda.

***

Dear Lizaveta: Here we are in China. That's the long wall on the other side of the card. The emperor is a little boy who wears a dress the color of paprika. He lives in a palace the size of Prague, with a thousand servants. To get from his nursery to 
his throne he has a chair between two poles, and is carried. Five doctors look at his poo-poo when he makes it. Sorry to be vulgar, but what's the point of travel if you don't learn how different people are outside Prague? Answer me that. The Chinese eat with two sticks and slurp their soup. Their hair is tied in pigtails. The whole country smells of ginger, and they say
plog
for Prague. All day long firecrackers, firecrackers, firecrackers! Your affectionate Belinda.

***

Dear Lizaveta: We have sailed to Tahiti in a clipper ship. This island is all pink and green, and the people are brown and lazy. The women are very beautiful, with long black hair and pretty black eyes. The children scamper up palm trees like monkeys and wear not a stitch of clothes. We have met a Frenchman name of Gauguin, who paints pictures of the Tahitians, and another Frenchman named Pierre Loti, who wears a fez and reads the European newspapers in the cafe all day and says that Tahiti is Romantic. What Rudolf and I say is that it's very hot and decidedly uncivilized. Have I said that Rudolf is of the royal family? He's a good sport, but he has his limits. There are no
streets
here! Romantically, Belinda.

***

Well! dear Lizaveta, San Francisco! Oh my! There are streets here, all uphill, and with gold prospectors and their donkeys on them. There are saloons with swinging doors, and Flora Dora girls dancing inside. Everybody plays
Oh Suzanna!
on their banjos (everybody has one) and everywhere you see Choctaws in blankets and cowboys with six-shooters and Chinese and Mexicans and Esquimaux and Mormons. All the houses are of wood, with fancy carved trimmings, and the gentry sit on their front porches and read political newspapers. Anybody in America can run for any public office whatever, so that the mayor of San Francisco is a Jewish tailor and his councilmen are a Red Indian, a Japanese gardener, a British 
earl, a Samoan cook, and a woman Presbyterian preacher. We have met a Scotsman name of Robert Louis Stevenson, who took us to see an Italian opera. Yours ever, Belinda.

***

Dear Lizaveta: I'm writing this in a stagecoach crossing the Wild West. We have seen many Indian villages of teepees, and thousands of buffalo. It took hours to get down one side of the Grand Canyon, across its floor (the river is shallow and we rolled right across, splashing) and up the other side. The Indians wear colorful blankets and have a feather stuck in their hair. Earlier today we saw the United States Cavalry riding along with the American flag. They were singing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and were all very handsome. It will make me seasick to write more, as we're going as fast as a train. Dizzily, Belinda.

 ***

Dear Lizaveta: We have been to Chicago, which is on one of the Great Lakes, and crossed the Mississippi, which is so wide you can't see across it, only paddle-steamers in the middle, loaded with bales of cotton. We have seen utopias of Quakers and Shakers and Mennonites, who live just as they want to in this free country. There is no king, only a Congress which sits in Washington and couldn't care less what the people do. I have seen one of these Congressmen. He was fat (three chins, I assure you) and offered Rudolf and me a dollar each if we would vote for him. When we said we were from Prague, he said he hoped we'd start a war, as war is good for business. On to New York! In haste, your loving Belinda.

***

Dear Lizaveta: How things turn out! Rudolf and I are married! Oh yes, at Niagara Falls, where you stand in line, couple after couple, and get married by a Protestant minister, a rabbi, or a priest, take your choice. Then you get in a barrel (what fun!) and ride over the falls—you bounce and bounce at the bottom—
and rent a honeymoon cabin, of which there are hundreds around the falls, each with a happy husband and wife billing and cooing. I know from your parents that my sister in the department store has come to live with you and be your doll. Rudolf and I are going to the Argentine. You must come visit our ranch. I will remember you forever. Mrs. Rudolph Hapsburg und Porzelan (your Belinda).

 1

 

And, yes, the sailboat on a tack for Tisvilde under a tall blue sky piled high with summer clouds was, oh my, slotting through the Baltic at a speed which the calm day and rigged mainsail and jib could in no wise account for.

At the tiller, it was soon easy to see, sat a boy named Nikolai, fetching and trim. He took a beeline for the beach, into the rocky sand of which he crunched his prow, to the amazement of a hundred staring sunbathers.

Deftly lowering his sails with nonchalant ease, he folded them into smaller and smaller triangles, until they were no bigger than handkerchiefs. Then, with a snap here and a snap there, as if he were closing the sections of a folding ruler, whistling a melody by Luigi Boccherini as he worked, he collapsed the boat, mast, rigging, hull, keel, rudder and all, into a handful of sticks and cords. These he doubled over again and again, tucked them in with a napkin's worth of sails, and stuffed the lot into the zippered pocket of his windbreaker. His chart and compass he shoved into the pocket of his smitch of white pants. He rolled and squared his shoulders.

Indifferent to the astonished bathers, one of whom was having some species of fit, and to jumping and hooting children begging him to do it again, he strode with all the aplomb of his twelve years up the beach and across the road into the dark cool of the Troll Wood.

Søren Kierkegaard, most melancholy of Danes, used to walk here, a gnome among gnomes. An eagle in a spruce gazed at Nikolai with golden feral eyes, in acknowledgment of which he put both hands against a mountain pine, the tree friendly to spruce. Without one near, it would not grow. The eagle rolled 
a hunch into its shoulders, and Nikolai hugged the mountain pine.

A glance at the interplanetary mariner's chronometer on his left wrist alerted him to his appointment somewhere near Gray Brothers. So, with meadows and farms flickering past, he ran fifty kilometres in three seconds, slowing to a walk along Strøget.

A shoal of skateboarders flowed around him from the back as he passed a Peruvian gourd band, three games of chess that had been going on since the fourteenth century, and four fresh babies in a pram, each with a cone of ice cream.

The address was in an alley, once a very old street. The number was repeated on a wooden gate, which opened onto the place, one of the places, he'd been looking for all of his life.

Another was a cabin in Norway, deep in spruce and mountain pine near a steep fjord, where he could live like Robinson Crusoe, exactly as he pleased. A room of his very own, in Gray Brothers, free to come and go, to have friends in to spend the night and share hamburgers and polsers in the middle of the floor. A coffee plantation in Kenya. A lighthouse on a rock in the Orkneys, gulls blown past his windows, bleak dawns over a black sea, secure by a neat fire.

But this was just as good, a courtyard with a tree and rows and beds of flowers, a sculptor's studio with a pitched glass roof.

Along a pomp of dahlias in a line, rust mustard brick and yellow, he walked with a steady casualness to the blue door. A wicker basket beside it, for the mail. A stone jug with sweet williams. His mother was keen on botany, so he knew the names of flowers, weeds, and trees. And maybe an angel with nothing better to do would see him through this.

A card fixed to the door with a drawing pin: Gunnar Rung, the name Mama had said. He was about to push the doorbell when the door opened, wrecking his cool.

—Hello, he said in as deep a voice as he could manage. I’m Nikolai Bjerg.

The man who opened the door was tall, in jeans with a 
true fit and an Icelandic sweater, and was much younger than Nikolai had expected. His eyes were as friendly as those of a large dog.

—You're on time, he said. Gunnar Rung here. Come in and let's see you.

Books, drawings on the walls, tables, an unfamiliar kind of furniture. And beyond, through wide double doors slid open, under a glass roof, a tall block of squared rock that must have been hauled in from an alley in back. Nikolai looked at as much as he could, all of it wonderfully strange and likable, with quick glances at Gunnar, who was goodlooking and had wads of rich brown curls, almost not Danish, and hands as big as a sailor's.

—It's an Ariel I have a commission for, Gunnar said walking around Nikolai, looking at him through framing hands. Your mother thought you might do, and would like posing. Have you ever posed before? It's not easy, and can be tedious and boring. There's also a King Matt I'm to do, a boy who's king of an unimaginable Poland, and you might also be him. We'll have to see how you and I get along. What about some coffee? Do you drink it?

—Sometimes. I mean, yes.

Coffee! Gunnar was treating him like a grown-up, so don't trash it.

—You can undress while I'm putting the coffee on. Won't take a minute.

—Everything? Nikolai asked, instantly regretting the question, unbuckling a scout's belt of green webbing, offering his charmingest and toothiest smile.

—That's the way the stone is to be, without a stitch.

Eyebrows bravely up, Nikolai backed out of his short denim pants and knelt to untie his gym shoes. Briefs and thick white socks he pulled off together. Then his jersey over his head.

—Two sugars? There's real cream. You'll get over blushing. Good knees, good toes.

—Sorry. Didn't think I'd blush. The statue will be the same size as me? Hey! Good coffee, you know.

—Life size, oh yes. Keep turning around. Raise your free hand and stretch. Do you think you can keep to a schedule for posing?

—Sure. Why not? I really didn't think I'd go shy. Being naked's fun. My grandma and grandpa, Mama's mama and daddy, are Kropotkinites, and I'm boss in my own pants. My folks are as broad-minded green as they come, no barbed wire anywhere, good Danish liberals, to the point of being fussy. You know what I mean?

A mischievously knowing smile from Gunnar.

—Park your cup, there, and stand on your toes, arms over your head. Legs out more, each side. We can't do a Thorvaldsen nor yet an Eric Gill. I'm what they call a neoclassicist, a realist, and out of it. What's being boss in your own pants mean?

—A licensed devil, according to Mama. Liberal points for what boys do anyway, says Papa. Who's King Matt?

—Another character in a book, by a Polish doctor. Actually the work will be of a boy carrying Matt's flag. At an awful moment. I'll tell you all about it while we're working. You can read the book.

Eyes askew, Nikolai ran his tongue across the plump tilt of his upper lip. While
we're
working.

—You have kids? I guess they're too little to pose.

—No, and no wife, either, just Samantha, whom you'll meet. Arms out. Twist around to the right. You're going to do, you know? You're Ariel, all right.

2

 

Nikolai sat on his clothes piled in a chair. Coffee break.

—Why was Ariel naked?

—He was a spirit of the air. Like an angel.

Nikolai thought about this, guppying his coffee and sprucing the fit of his foreskin.

—Angels wear lots of clothes. Bible clothes. Steen and Stoffer are neat today, did you see? I'll bet this Ariel you're copying me for had pure thoughts and never a hard on, right? There was a Steen and Stoffer where Steen sees monkeys in the zoo jacking off and he says
O gross!
and his mom and pop are suddenly interested in showing him the cockatoos and toucans. Parents.

—What a face, Gunnar said, running his fingers over his cast of Bourdelle's study of Herakles. The model was Doyen-Parigot, military bloke. Physical fitness enthusiast. Used to arrive on his horse at Bourdelle's in full soldierly fig.

—Looks like an opossum, wouldn't you say?

Punktum punktum,

komma, streg!

Sudan tegnes

Nikolaj!

 

Arme, ben,

og mave stor.

Sadan kom han

til vor jord.

—Killed at Verdun. You make Edith glance heavenward when you twitch your piddler. Christian Brother from the Faeroes she is, you know. Though I once had a girl model who played with herself as liberally as you, and as unconcerned for convention, and Edith rather took to leaning around the door to see, in passing.

—What's Verdun? You know Mikkel, the redhead kid, my pal, with terminal freckles and chipmunk teeth? His dad is all for his doing it every day. Says it keeps him happy.