A Table of Green Fields, Guy Davenport [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

God's nursery. Kierkegaard looked like a frog with a sorrow.

—Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, Nikolai said. Could be I was named for him, do you think?

—You can say you are. We all live in our imagination, don't we? If we don't make ourselves up, others will make up a self for us, and get us to believe it.

Sweet puzzlement in Nikolai's eyes.

—I wonder, Gunnar said, if we don't make everything up? Man, I mean, is a damned strange animal. He lives in his mind. Of course we don't know how animals think, what their opinions are. What does a horse think about all day?

—Maybe, Nikolai said, they just are. Horses and ducks. But, you know, they have lots to pay attention to.

—What you're sculpting, you know, Samantha said over L'Equipe, which she had abandoned Kierkegaard for in her nest of cushions by the window, is not really Ariel at all, but Eros, Shakespeare's junior senior giant dwarf Don Cupid.

19

 

—It can't be done, Nikolai said, but Mikkel brought me piggyback on his skateboard.

—Hello, said Mikkel.

Blond and pink, with awesome blue eyes, Mikkel was dressed in spatter jeans and a sweater from the Faeroes. Fifteen, at a guess. Dansk fabrikat. Why did Nikolai say thirteen?

—See, Nikolai said of the stone Ariel, it's me, or will be when it's finished.

—Hey! You're good! Mikkel said to Gunnar, who was edging chisels at the grindstone. I mean, it's tremendous, you know?

—I get paid for posing It's like a job. Are you ready, Gunnar boss man? Is it OK if Mikkel watches? He knows he's to stay out of the way.

20

 

On Saturdays at the Children's Republic, after their newspaper had been read and the weekly court had tried and fined those charged with bullying, disrespect, hair pulling, disobedience, fibbing, and other high crimes of their little world, Korczak would give a talk. The subject was chosen by the orphans, from a list on the bulletin board, frequently revised.

—So we have put one of those lists on our bulletin board,

Gunnar said, compiled by Samantha from several sources. That's why The Emancipation of Women leads all other topics. —I have not, Samantha said, sticking out her tongue, fiddled with the order.

21

Fox bark, gruff. Nikolai monkeyed from the bed to the sill, replying with a cub's whimper. Coupled hand and wrist, Nikolai pulled and Mikkel climbed until he had a kneehold, swinging his other bare brown leg into the room. They sat on the floor, grinning at each other in the dark. They crept like panthers, on fingers and toes, to the bed. Nikolai, naked under the blanket, watched Mikkel tug off his jersey, the tuck of his navel, a dab of shadow on his moonlit front.

In their shy and democratic privacy under the sheets Nikolai speculated on the interestingly different warm and cool places of the body, flinching from cold fingers and toes, the climate of a bed, the frankness of hands. Mikkel whispered that they should suppress talk, as parents can hear better than dogs, and, as Nikolai understood, words are scary and inadequate, things named being compromised thereby, and changed. In the tree house one took off one's pants if the other did, with no more than the complicity of a grin. The gossip of boys is largely fiction, anyway: they enjoyed each other's lies.

POLIXENES

 

We were as twin lambs that did frisk in the sun

And bleat the one at the other.

23

 

Nikolai had just returned from the red plains of Mars. He had parked his space cruiser in a meadow in Iceland, and had a leg-stretching walk through wildflowers and sheep. Then he transmitted himself through a hyperspace cavity with a swimming roll like that of the bubble in a spirit level, to Copenhagen, where he changed from his mylar-and-platinum antigravity overall into comfortable jeans and jersey. On Strøget he bought an ice cream and a sack of peapods. As usual, interplanetary travel and ice cream made him amorous, tightened his balls, and made him importantly happy.

At Gunnar's he entered without knocking, though he shouted in a breaking treble that he was there.

Silence, but one that had just gone silent.

—Hey! It's me. Ariel. Nikolai.

Thicker silence.

Whispers upstairs.

—O shit, Nikolai said. Look, I'll go away. When should I come back, huh?

More whispering.

—Come on up, Samantha said. You're friends.

—Better than friends, Gunnar said. You're family.

—I don't want to butt in, Nikolai said with plaintive honesty, imitating grown-up speech. I can come back.

—You can also come up. We're dressed like Adam and Eve before they found the apple tree, but then so are you most of the time you're here.

Nikolai peeked around the bedroom door and lost his voice.

—The fun's over, Samantha said. Over twice, to brag on Gunnar. We were fiddling around with afterplay and mumbling in each other's ear.

Gunnar rolled over onto his back, his hands under his head, the silliest of grins and closed eyes for an expression. Samantha gathered the eiderdown around her shoulders.

—An American sociologist, she said, would make lots of notes if I were to say that we have to get dressed so that Nikolai can take off his clothes to pose.

—Figure and ground, said Gunnar. Or is it context? Maybe just manners?

He sat up with a yawn and stretch, swinging his legs off the bed.

—A game, he said. I put on my shirt, Nikolai takes his off. I button my top button, you unbutton yours.

—It won't work, Samantha said. You can't put on a sock, or your underbritches, while he takes his off, as there's a shoe intervening, jeans intervening.

—OK, then. Off a shoe and I'll put on a sock.

—Still won't work, Samantha said. Nikolai can't take his jeans off over his shoes.

—Got to pee, said Gunnar.

—Undress, quick quick, Samantha said. Get in the bed.

He untied his shoelaces as if he'd never seen a shoelace before, and his fingers on buttons, belt buckle, and zipper were as strengthless as a baby's. He had just dived under the coverlet Samantha was lifting, in his socks and briefs, heart beating like a chased rabbit's, when Gunnar returned.

—Oh ho! The American sociologist has now walked into a wall.

He took off his shirt, raised the eiderdown, and pulled Nikolai into a hug.

—We still have on our briefs