The Souvenir Museum, Elizabeth McCracken [bill gates best books .txt] 📗

ice cream, and you will understand.” Clearly the man had never been to Legoland, where even ice cream required a half hour’s wait in line, and then was a tragedy of dullness.

They stopped at a self-serve slush stand that allowed you to mix all the flavors you wanted into a tall plastic glass that looked like a bong. Leo’s personal cocktail came out army green. This had always happened to his Play-Doh, too, when it got mixed together. He drank it with his eyes closed and winced. He most resembled his late grandfather when unhappy.

“Poor bunny, you’re jet-lagged. Here. Let’s sit.” They sat on the bench next to the Lego Hans Christian Andersen, and Joanna had a sense that they shouldn’t, they should leave the space clear for people who wanted pictures of themselves with a Lego Hans Christian Andersen. But why should those people get their way?

“I’m not jet-lagged,” he said.

“Do you want to just go to the hotel room?”

“Is the hotel room in Legoland?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Oh.” Then, “I hate it here.”

“Denmark?”

He looked at her aghast. “This isn’t Denmark,” he said. “Can we go? It’s not what I thought it would be like.”

“Yes,” said Joanna, grateful and motherly, a good mother, indulgent. “What did you think it would be like?”

But she knew. In our private Legolands we are the only human people.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said, and she handed Leo her phone. “You choose. Wherever you want to go, we’ll go. I know Vikings aren’t your favorite, but I have a friend at that Viking village—”

“What Viking village?”

“A Viking village,” she said. “We’ll go at the end of the week. In the meantime, do some research. Plan the next three days. If you want, we can come back to Legoland—”

“I’m never going to come back to Legoland,” he said passionately.

When our children love what we love, it is a blessing, but O when they hate what we hate!

Denmark was studded with little museums dedicated to misery and wealth and the unpleasant habits of men, and Leo wanted to go to every one. He was warming to the Vikings. There was a kind of gentle boredom to Denmark, which was in itself interesting: archaeological museums whose captions were entirely in Danish, with displays of pottery, shards and nails and swords and bits of armor. To become interested in a boring subject was a feat of strength. A splinter of Viking armor was more interesting than the whole suit, to Leo, because even though it was in a glass box it might fit in your pocket. Perhaps he liked bits because of his nearsightedness—now that he had glasses, it was disquieting what loomed on the horizon—but entire objects told the entire story, and therefore belonged to everyone. Looking at a piece of a thing, he might think, deduce, discover something nobody ever had, which was all he wanted in the world.

They took a ferry to the island of Ærø. In the old shipyard Leo made rope with a crank-operated machine, and, with the help of a blacksmith, a plain iron hook. The blacksmith was a lean man with a sad, rectilinear face and hair the color of clapboard. The black iron glowed orange when you put it in the forge, and when you hammered it orange sparks flew off and then you were left with something so black and solid you couldn’t imagine it had ever been otherwise.

They went to the Workhouse Museum, three maritime museums, the Danish Railway Museum. Of course Joanna missed her father, seeing his dullest passions alive in his grandson. Who else could love trains so much that they were still interesting in a museum, where they were robbed of their one power, movement? Not Joanna, but she could love somebody who did. She felt a useless pride in Leo’s peculiar enthusiasms; Leo’s pleasant father liked action movies and video games, like any American boy.

Joanna had arrived with three pieces of Danish: Taler du engelsk? (The answer was always yes, I do), tak!, and the words for excuse me, which she remembered because it sounded—she thought it sounded; she had a terrible ear—like unskilled. Unskilled! Taler du engelsk? Tak! Soon she picked up the vocabulary of ice cream—Aksel was right, vanilla ice cream in Denmark was hallucinogenically delicious—kugler, waffler, softice, flødebolle, though a month after they got home Joanna would wake up in the middle of the night wondering, Is the Danish word for thanks pronounced tock or tack? And which pronunciation had she used? The wrong one, she was sure.

Aksel’s watch was in her pocket. She’d put it in a Ziploc bag to keep it clean and hadn’t so much as wound it. It wasn’t hers to wind. She liked the weight of it about her person.

Did she still love Aksel? No, but the memory of him came in handy sometimes.

They found the Souvenir Museum the old-fashioned way: first one roadside sign, then another. The museum was in the grounds of a modest castle. Like Legoland, the name was full of promise. Souvenir: a memory you could buy. A memory you could plan to keep instead of being left with the rubble of what happened.

A teenage girl with a drowsy, dowsing head slid a pamphlet across the ticket desk, and then pointed to the door to the museum. Leo opened the pamphlet. The museum was made of six rooms. He was startled to see that the last one was called Forbidden Souvenirs.

A year ago Leo might have asked his mother what Forbidden Souvenirs meant. Now he was seized with a terrible, private fear that he didn’t want her to disturb or dispel. He read books about war; his mother didn’t. Soldiers took souvenirs: ears, teeth, shrunken heads, scalps.

His mother, innocent, admired the first glass case, which was filled with salt and pepper shakers. Two Scottish terriers, black and white. One Scottish terrier (salt) lifting its leg in front of a red fire hydrant (pepper). The next glass case was also filled with salt and pepper