The Lover From An Icy Sea Page 28

  He eventually found what looked like a well-stocked shop; went first to the cigarette section where, not finding his beloved Lucky Strikes, he at least found non-filter Camels—and grabbed a carton. He next went looking among the selection of champagnes for a bottle of Veuve Cliquot; found it and took two; thought about Daneka’s mother and went looking among the bottles of port; found a twenty-year-old tawny and took it; made his way to the register, presented his boarding pass and paid for all of it with his credit card. In five minutes, he was on his way back to their departure gate via the smoking section, where he spent another five minutes in quiet gratitude for Italy’s laissez-faire attitude in the matter of certain personal vices. A country in which smokers and non-smokers could comfortably coexist was, Kit thought, one he could get easily used to.

  As he passed once again by Customs on his way back to their gate, he saw the same group of girls he’d seen twice before. Their mood seemed to be striking an uncomfortable balance between dour and tense as the charade of baggage inspection began to impinge upon the less frivolous, less fanciful fact of airline schedules and final departure calls. Youth and beauty had their privileges, Kit thought, but also their price. He suspected the ordeal would continue right up until the final, nervous minute, but that even Italian Customs officials would then have to defer to a flight schedule and let the girls get to their gate.

  He spotted Daneka, already in line to board, and made his way forward to join her. “I bought a little something for your mother—also for us,” he said as he opened the top of his shopping bag and showed her the contents.

  “You’re an absolute darling, darling,” she said and pinched his cheek. They walked down the inflated, wormlike umbilical cord joining building to jet. Until that moment, Kit had ignored—and not thought to ask—what airline they were flying to Copenhagen. He now did.

  “Why, SAS, darling—but of course!” Daneka answered as if there were simply no reason to consider any other.

  As they prepared to enter the aircraft itself, Kit got his first look at what, he supposed, gave Scandinavia its particular fame; also of what—if she was any indication of the bounty to come once they landed in Denmark—promised to be eye-candy as deliciously vanilla as her Italian counterparts had been deliciously chocolate. ‘Judicious’ took precedence over ‘delicious,’ however, and he resolved to keep his saccharine metaphors to himself. The flight attendant looked at Kit briefly, then looked at Daneka. Whether the attendant’s thoughts in that instant mulled into metaphor, or simply into calculation, Kit couldn’t determine. However, she did seem to reach some personal decision with regard to Daneka—on the basis of what, exactly, Kit couldn’t even begin to guess—and addressed her in what Kit supposed was Danish.

  “God morgon!” she said. “Får jag be om biljetterna, tack.”

  “Javisst,” Daneka answered—Kit supposed—for them both. And although his head told him there was absolutely nothing extraordinary about the fact that she’d be perfectly at ease in her own language, he still couldn’t help marveling at the miracle of it, and of her, speaking in sounds he couldn’t even begin to decipher.

  With a gesture, the flight attendant pointed them in the direction of the aisle at the further side of the cabin. “Här borta är det.”

  “Tack så mycket,” Daneka again answered for them both.

  It was only once they’d managed to stow their carry-on luggage and get buckled in that Kit allowed himself to express his quiet admiration, practically bubbling over since he’d heard her utter her first syllable. “So that’s Danish. It’s beautiful! And you’re beautiful speaking it!”

  Still settling in, Daneka looked at Kit as if over the rims of a pair of ill-fitting glasses. “That wasn’t Danish, darling.”

  Kit stared at Daneka in complete befuddlement. She took a moment to savor her easy conquest, buckled her seatbelt and straightened out her dress, then turned back to him and pretended to look once again over the rims of the same pair of ill-fitting glasses. “That was Swedish.”

  He blinked. “Swedish? You also speak Swedish?” Then, after a slight pause, and before getting the obvious answer to a senseless question: “But why were the two of you speaking Swedish?”

  Daneka might’ve blushed with pride if it hadn’t all been too obvious. “Danes have no choice in the matter, Kit. Nor, by the way, do Finns, Norwegians or Icelanders. Swedish, darling, is the first language of Scandinavia—and the language we all learn even before we learn English. If you ask the Swedes, by the way, they’ll tell you it’s not the first, but the only language of Scandinavia—so why should the rest of us even bother with our own silly little dialects?”

  Kit was beginning to suspect that Swedes and all things Swedish were not so perfectly popular as he’d always assumed—at least not among a certain subset of Danes. His suspicions were only further confirmed as the giddy group of girls they’d only recently left behind came bouncing down the aisle towards their seats somewhere in the rear of the plane. Daneka acknowledged their presence by taking a sudden and intense interest in the tarmac outside her window—more particularly, in the heat waves rising up from it. Not wishing Kit to be deprived of the spectacle, she gently but firmly took his face in her hand and steered his gaze out.

  “Isn’t it fascinating, darling, how the heat seems to make the air almost boil! I don’t know that I’ve ever seen something so marvelous, have you?”

  Yes, Kit thought—but thought it only to himself. Probably no fewer than ten thousand times in his life. He also remembered having been stoned once—and so fascinated by the itinerary of a slug across a windowpane that he’d watched it for almost an hour. The spectacle of the slug—by contrast with the simmering of heat waves on this tarmac—had been fireworks.

  “Yes, darling. It’s absolutely riveting.” Slightly more riveting, of course, was the parade of young legs, hips and breasts walking just past his shoulder and which made his sockets scream with the strain of peripheral vision as he pretended to stare directly at the tarmac. “Riveting!”

  “Well,” Daneka said with a huff. “I’m glad we agree on something!”

  The girls, meanwhile, had passed on and out of even his peripheral vision. Kit reflected: however close his bladder might come to bursting during the next two hours and five minutes aloft, he might be better advised to abjure a trip to the toilet.

  The captain’s voice came over the intercom and droned on as captains’ voices the world over tend to do. “Mina damer och herrar … ” Kit listened, academically, to the length of his address. The language had its sing-song charm, no doubt about it. But he decided on the spot he preferred it out of a woman’s mouth—as he did most foreign languages. He was about to ask Daneka for a translation when he noticed that several of his fellow male passengers were chuckling. Daneka, he observed at the same time, was turning a bright shade of red. From the ruthlessness with which she pursed her lips, Kit suspected it was not embarrassment she was feeling, but something a bit more visceral. He opted for discretion.

  The captain paused momentarily, and Kit thought he’d finished. Then, however, the same voice came back over the public address system in English. The news he delivered was anything but extraordinary: welcome on board; crew members by name; tentative departure and arrival times; weather conditions at ten thousand meters. So what’s the big deal? Kit wondered. Then, in a slightly clumsier English because the vocabulary for it was not canned, had not been repeated—with minor variations—three or four times a day over the course of twenty years, the captain extended a special welcome to a group of young ladies on their way back to university, in Uppsala, who’d apparently represented Sweden—and “rather amply,” he added, though ‘amply’ sounded to Kit’s ear more like ‘apple-y’ —in Milan’s annual wet T-shirt competition.

  Unfortunately for Kit’s clear comprehension, but quite fortunately for his cynical sense of humor, the captain’s reach with English-language metaphors greatly exceeded his grasp. He (the captain) wanted to say, in co
nclusion, that ‘it had been his privilege to personally attend the competition, and that he could assure all present, and especially the young ladies, that no flag had been left unfurled, no stone unturned.’ As for ‘the lassies’—and here Kit suddenly had a vision of bare-breasted collies—‘they’d displayed their very best for God, King and country.’ He then suggested that the same country that had given a solid piece of Swedish engineering to the world and had had the temerity to call it a ‘Volvo’ was a country that would, no doubt, find a way to commemorate these lovely ladies’ accomplishments with an engineering feat of equally extrapopalonius finesse—or something to that effect.

  “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen for flying SAS, and have a good day.”

  Have a good day indeed! Kit thought as he caught a glimpse of Daneka out of the corner of his eye and saw that she was no more amused by the English translation than she’d been by the original address in Swedish. He kept his comments to himself and prepared to enjoy another quiet flight.

  Unfortunately, however, the captain had neglected to turn off the public address system, and the entire cabin could hear his ongoing conversation in the cockpit. It was in Swedish, and so Kit caught none of it. He could, however, deduce from the snickers and occasional guffaws from several of the passengers around him—male and female, he noted, though Daneka was decidedly not among them—that the content was probably rather burlesque. At one point, former snickers and occasional guffaws became a general uproar. Just then, a flight attendant whom Kit hadn’t seen up until that moment went running past him up the aisle and in the direction of the cockpit. He caught only a glimpse of rather nicely curved calf muscles and a skirt bouncing to mid-thigh as she ran. The last thing he heard before the address system went dead was the voice of a woman—perhaps an octave or two higher, and several decibels louder—than he would’ve thought appropriate for collegial discourse.

  Kit now knew the sound of panic in Swedish. Too bad. He was just then thinking what a fun country this Sweden might be. So why are we going to Denmark? he mused.

  The plane shuddered slightly as it began to roll away from the gate, taxied out and, without a minute’s delay, went full-throttle down the runway and took off. Ciao, Milano.

  The Alps—first the Italian, then the Swiss—were in plain view as their plane climbed up to a cruising altitude of thirty-three thousand feet. It would’ve been nice—Kit thought momentarily—to spend some time with Daneka at an Alpine resort. Different—very different. He would’ve been on more familiar, less dangerous, turf—less exotic, too. The mountains might’ve made introspection easier. Mountains could do that: could make one feel small, insignificant, more inclined to take one’s own measure against the immensity of natural phenomena. The sea could do it, too; but not a mere gulf—and certainly not a gulf as small and safe as the Gulf of Sorrento.

  Their plane climbed steadily and then broke through the clouds into a clear blue sky. At the same time, any further view of the ground beneath them was lost to the nearly opaque cloud-cover that was as much a part of Europe as castles, fine wine, and hand kisses. Art, architecture, music, literature, philosophy—the whole gamut of Western culture, Kit mused—were not so much the result of any particular European genius as the result of a shitty European climate. Give someone—boy or man—a sunny day, and he’d go outside to play. Give him grey skies and any form of precipitation, and he’d naturally stay inside to paint a picture; design a building; compose a sonata; write a story; contemplate and discourse upon phenomena and epiphenomena—or simply comment upon the logic or illogic of it all. Europe was a grand continent, Kit mused. But no one should short the role of shitty climate in its grandeur.

  His gaze and thoughts reverse-zoomed back into the cabin and to the contemplation of their present micro-climate. By virtue of a shiny, winged tube now zipping through space, he was about to exchange, in a matter of only a couple of hours, the birthplace of the Renaissance for a country whose principal claims to fame were the Vikings, Copernicus, Tycho Brache, H. C. Andersen, mountains of surplus butter, and a personal income tax structure that could turn bulldogs into Pekinese—or pretzels.

  He knew, too, that the Danes had behaved nobly in the second world war—much more nobly, in fact, than had the rest of the civilized world—including, for too long, his own “last, best hope”; that Hitler had dismissed Denmark as “the little country” and had squashed it like an afterthought with his Wehrmacht; but that simple Danish farmers, by their simple Danish example, had demonstrated why French art, German philosophy and Italian opera buffa were as expendable—and as flammable—as the contents of a hot-air balloon.

  He appraised this woman sitting next to him; pondered her genesis; wondered—dressed as she was—whether she, too, was the daughter of simple, yet noble, Danish farmers. If so, would her parents even have been born before the end of the second world war? He tried to remember what he’d found out the night in New York he’d Googled to her name, but he couldn’t remember the exact dates. By quick calculation, he decided it was unlikely.

  Kit remained absorbed in his thoughts—and Daneka in hers—for the next ninety minutes. Then, with only a short while to go before the start of their descent, he decided to broach one of the many topics that had been troubling him for the several weeks he’d known her.

  “Daneka?”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “Tell me about your family.”

  Her face seemed to light up at the prospect. “You’ll see for yourself soon enough.”

  “I know I will. But tell me anyway. You haven’t mentioned brothers or sisters.”

  “There weren’t any. I was an only lonely child.” She raised her hands and eyes in pretend self-pity.

  “Right. And your parents?”

  “Only parents. Only lonely parents of an only lonely child.”

  The charade, Kit thought, was wearing thin. “Daneka!” He gave the first syllable of her name an extra pounce; she clearly, finally, understood the weight of it.

  “Oh. Sorry, darling.”

  “That’s okay. I’m patient.”

  She reached over to him and pinched his cheek. “I know. That’s what I love about you.”

  “Your parents?”

  Daneka sighed. “I haven’t seen my mother in over a year. She’s a simple but good woman. Strong. Quite ‘here and now,’ although her ‘now’ is sixty-plus. She still lives in the same house I was born in. In which she was born—in 1941.”

  Kit made another quick mental calculation. If Daneka’s mother had born in 1941, and this was 2003, she would be sixty-two. But Daneka had been born in 1960—which meant that her mother would’ve been only nineteen when Daneka was born and eighteen when Daneka was conceived. So how old when she married? Denmark, Kit knew, was a progressive country. But then, perhaps Denmark’s progress had been made only very much after the second world war had ended….

  “And Germany invaded Denmark in what year?”

  “1940. It was all over in a couple of days.

  What a happy coincidence, Kit mused. Germany invades Denmark; the next year, Daneka’s mother is born. He wondered whether the conception was an act of celebration, of defiance, or simply the result of a spontaneous romp for lack of any easy butter to churn.

  “I didn’t really get to know my grandparents. They all died shortly after the invasion. ‘Not in a firing line or anything as dramatic as that. ‘Just died. ‘Maybe of despondency.”

  “But if they all died, who took care of your mother?”

  For as long as he’d known her, Daneka had always been ready with a quick answer. This time, however, she wasn’t. She hovered over the question like a bee buzzing around an uncertain flower, apparently struggling to form the first word of an answer, but then closing her mouth again each time and withdrawing into silence.

  “Daneka?”

  “I guess I don’t really know. I never asked, and she never offered.” Again, she paused. “I’m frankly a little ashamed to admit I never really
thought about it until now.”

  Kit put a hand on top of hers, pressed four fingers down between her fingers and wrapped his thumb around her thumb. “I understand. We all sometimes get a little too absorbed in our own lives to think about the lives of others—ironically, and most especially, about the lives of our parents.”

  Daneka remained pensive for another long moment. Then, more to herself than to Kit: “God! To think I never even asked her—.”

  Kit took her hand in both of his and leaned down. “It’s not too late, you know. Perhaps this trip is a godsend. Perhaps you were meant to have this opportunity to get to know the woman in the mother you once had, and not just the mother.”

  Another long moment of silence, following which Daneka looked into Kit’s eyes. “Perhaps you’re right.” It was the last thing she said before the captain announced their imminent arrival in Copenhagen. Kit took notice of how she’d once again quite effectively eluded the subject of her father.

  Chapter 49

  Denmark—as far as the eye could see—appeared to be fog-bound. This came as no surprise to Daneka, though Kit was certainly sorry to be deprived of a clear aerial view in this, his first glimpse of a Nordic country. He looked around and noted the expressions of most of his fellow travelers: like the weather outside their window, they’d turned stern and grey. Those same passengers—he’d also noted from time to time during their flight north—had been consuming alcohol like candy. Full bladders, he conjectured, would explain the unusually heavy foot traffic back to the lavatories. For every couple or three passengers who disappeared to the rear of the plane, however, only one seemed to return—and that one was almost always a woman.