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

talking to your, that is, to Nikolai Bjerg's mother fairly often. And I talked with her several times on the phone. Good God! What a talent for the criminal you two little buggers have. You have a career in espionage.

—So here I am.

—And where do your parents think you are?

—I don't have any. I stay with an uncle, who's sort of not all there. The clothes I've worn here were all Nikolai's. I have some of my own now, from my pay from you for posing.

Gunnar speechless for an uncomfortably long time. He went to the front door and locked it.

—Could I have something to eat? Mikkel asked. I can fix it myself.

—Let's fix something together. Ham and eggs, toast and jelly. Tall cold glasses of milk. But come upstairs first. Let's make you feel at home.

—Gunnar.

—Right here, Mikkel. I'll have to practise. Mikkel, Mikkel.

—Are we friends?

—Friends.

Big crushing hug.

—Sit on the bed. I've watched you undressing so many times, and now I'm going to do it, starting with these knotted laces which surely Nikolai tied, not you. Socks that smell of dough. Stand up. Now we unbutton one shirt with a whiff of vinegar underarm. Scout belt. Slides right through, right? Zipper. And by the God of the Lutherans, you're liking this. Pants and nice briefs down and off. Now you're in Nikolai's work clothes, but you've changed from Nikolai to Mikkel, with Shakespeare grinning down from heaven, don't you imagine? So I'm seeing Mikkel stitchless for the first time. But as it's chilly, let's, if I can find it, here we go, put this on you.

—Sweat shirt. Royal Academy of Art. Golly.

—Sort of covers your butt halfway to the back of the knees and swallows your hands. Here, let's add the American baseball cap and have our eats.

—Gunnar.

—Mikkel.

39

The high fields of Olympos. Yellow sedge in a meadow. Sharp blue peaks beyond, seamed with snow. The eagle sank out of the cold sky and set him in the field of yellow sedge.

But there was no eagle when he turned, heart still thumping so hard that he had to breathe through his mouth, only a man.

—So, said the man, in a splendid Greek that was neither of the farm or the city, we are here.

—Where be the eagle, Mister Person? It clutched onto me and grabbed me up away from my sheep, and carried me through the air. Closed my eyes, peed and prayed. Where be we?

—On Olympos, that great place. We walk over that knoll yonder and into the palace that rules the world, save for some infringements by fate and necessity, love and time, which are tyrants over us all. Everything that's evil comes from the north. But in the south of time I am king.

—Never been so mixed up in all my life. How do I git home from here, Mister Person? 'Cause that's all I aim to do: git home, and fast.

—You will not age here, and when you go home your sheep will not have noticed you've been gone. I can splice time onto time, with a bolt or two of eternity.

—Shit!

—You need not even imagine that you are here, now. Because on Olympos there is neither here nor now. You are so many words written by a polished writer named Loukianos, of Samosata in Kommagene, who will live two millennia from now. Look you, here before the gate, these are friendly trees. The one will not grow without the other.

The curving street inside the gate (it opened of itself) was paved with stones laid down when Ilion was a forest. They walked along narrow paths among trees which the boy Ganymed could not name until they arrived at a building with cyclopean rock fitted together in irregular hexagons.

—It sure is foreign here, Mister.

—A sweet soul, Loukianos. There was a time when he was an Aethiopian named Aisopos, who understood the speech of animals.

—I can talk sheep. Baa baa.

Later, when Zeus had shown Ganymed to some very strange people, a nice lady who only looked at him briefly from her loom, a fat lady who sniffed, a handsome gentleman writing music and couldn't be bothered to look, an amiable red-faced blacksmith who squeezed his arm, and lots of others. At a long family table with buzzing talk, Zeus lifted him onto his lap and said that after so exciting a day they were going to bed, together.

—Don't recommend it, said Ganymed. I sleep with Papa at home, and he says that I twist and turn all night, and talk in my sleep, and that my knees and elbows are as sharp as stakes. —I will not mind.

—Besides, I want to sleep with that fellow down there, name of Eros, your grandson. He's neat.

Whereupon the fat lady laughed so hard that she had to be helped from the table.

40

 

Sunlight through sheets. Twenty toes. The phone.

—Accept a call from the Fyn? Oh yes. Hello, hello! Yes, I'm probably awake. Nikolai's here in the bed with me. Well, he spent the night. Listen carefully. He's not Nikolai and never has been. He stood in for Nikolai, who was having some kind of torrid affair with a bint, while his adoring trusting parents thought he was being an Ariel for Denmark's most promising young sculptor. He's Mikkel, the friend Nikolai talked about so much, I mean of course the Mikkel Mikkel talked about so much. Don't scream into the phone: it bites my ear. No, I'm not drunk and I haven't lost my mind. You should see him. Mikkel, that is. We've only seen him charmingly nude. Now he's decidedly naked, and his hair looks like a cassowary. Oh yes, you know what boys are like. Disgraceful, yes, and frowned on by psychologists and the police, but lots of fun. The clergy are of two minds about it, I believe. Actually, he went to sleep while we were talking about how friendly it was sharing a bed. I'm putting him on the thread.

A good cough, first.

—'lo, Samantha. I'm not as awake as Gunnar. Congrats on being pregnant. Gunnar told me last night. You must show me how to change diapers and dust on baby powder. None of last night happened, you know? Yes, I'm Mikkel.

Listening, head cocked, tongue over lips.

—And I'll give you a big hug, too, when you get