A Table of Green Fields by Guy Davenport (ebook reader .txt) 📕

country. It tasted of gourd and stone, and of the depths of the earth. Johan Thomas Lundbye's landscape of a Danish meadow hung in his sitting room. There were letters from Copenhagen, Paris, Edinburgh. On his cabinet of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine coins stood branches of oleander in a yellow jug.

9

—Morning, halfling. You look tumbled and slept in. It's good you can come early on Saturdays.

—Is there more of that coffee? It was time to get up as soon as I got to sleep.

—Am I to ask intelligent questions or leave your private life private?

Thoughtful grin.

—You probably don't want to know. Mikkel is a maniac and I'm his understudy.

—What about we sit in the sun awhile, with our coffee, in the courtyard. You can skinny down to briefs. Cool air and warm sun, with roses and hollyhocks, lavender and sage, to unsnarl cobwebs from the brain.

—O wow.

—An orange juice and a Vienna bread too?

—Better and better. Gunnar, you're a grown-up Lutheran and all that, but you're a pal, too, aren't you, because the briefs I'm wearing are Mikkel's, or mine and Mikkel's swapped back and forth. Mama makes we wear snow-white underwears here, like I was going to the doctor's, but as I spent the night at Mikkel's, if you're following this.

—Are you embarrassed or bragging? Sounds wonderfully imaginative and comradely to my evil ears.

—Fun. Make Samantha hold her nose. Why evil?

—Evil's a vacuum, they say, where good might be. Nature abhors a vacuum. Therefore nature abhors, and excludes, evil. Grundtviggian logic, wouldn't you say? Being friendly with Mikkel is good sound nature.

—You think?

—I know.

Long silence.

—Nature's good.

—What else could she be?

10

 

A time machine, H. G. Wells's as modified by Alfred Jarry, made of brass, walnut, and chromium, with manufacturer's plate in enamel on tin. Levers, dials, a gyroscope, all real.

Nikolai, older, in bronze as the pilot. Trim Edwardian clothes, scarf and backward cycling cap.

11

 

The girl Samantha was like the Modigliani on the big push-pin cork board where forty-eleven postcards, notes, letters, Parisian metro tickets, photographs made a collage for Nikolai to study while he doffed and donned his clothes.

—His mama had, yes, he answered Samantha's question, put it to him, in her arch voice moreover.

—I know mamas, Samantha said with her fetching smile.

—That Gunnar who was at somebody's house where she was, bald brainy people from the university, needed a handsome boy to pose for a statue without a stitch the Georg Brandes Society had commissioned, Ariel he's called, in a play by Vilhelm Shakespeare, and she said she had a rascally son.

—A sensitive son, I imagine she said.

An understanding grin from a crush of soccer jersey pulled up and off.

—Who's just going from cute to goodlooking.

—To adolescent beauty, and who at an astute guess instantly saw in a model's fee skateboards backpacks naughty comicbooks and revolting phonograph records.

On one knee, undoing shoes.

—Ha. What about, the score of the first Bach partita, and new fiddle strings, and these new briefs, see.

Gunnar with sharpened chisels.

—I'm getting acquainted, Samantha said, with this Danish angel with the unangelic plumbing fixtures.

—Do angels pee? Are they even oxygen breathers?

—They're all male in Scripture, I believe. But they don't fuck, as each is the only member of a unique species, and species don't crossbreed.

—What a dreary place, heaven.

—I'm not a species, Nikolai said. Gunnar, did you do this man in handcuffs here in the photograph?

—That's Martin Luther King. It's in a church garden over in Jylland, out from Aarhus.

PONIES ON THE FYN

 

Riding a pony naked through a meadow red with poppies on a sweet day in June, like Carl Nielsen at Østerport (commented on by mallards and green-shanked moorhens as O a big one with six legs), Nikolai drank the spring air like a Pawnee and looked for buffalo in the hollows and eagles in the clouds.

—Steady, said Gunnar. You need a break?

—He's miles away, Samantha said. I can see it in his eyes.

—What? Nikolai asked.

—Nikolai's rarely here. He turns up most business-like, sheds his britches, takes his pose, and goes away like Steen to fight the Nazis with the Churchill Gang or in his space pod through phosphorescent interplanetary dust to galaxies with forests of celery and creeping red slime.

13

 

A session of drawing, Gunnar intent, Nikolai bored, tolerant, behaved.

—Why are grown-ups so dumb?

—Those who are in your words dumb, friend Nikolai, have always been like that. They were dumb children.

Nikolai thought about this. The silence contained bees, a violin passage of lazy intricacies, a dense stillness.

—On the other hand you have a kind of point. Bright children do grow up to be dull. I wish I knew why. The century's mystery is that intelligent children become teen-age louts, who grow up to be pompous dullards. I'd like to know why.

—Is this a trick question?

—Brancusi at thirty-four had the liveliness to begin to be Brancusi.

—You talk to me as if I were grown up.

—You want me to talk to you as if you were half-witted?

—Only some grown-ups are morons. Most of 'em. You're OK, Gunnar.

—Thanks.

—Tell me more about Korczak, the republic of children, Poland.

 

14

 

—It's a meadow that shades off into a marsh with reeds and then does sand banks into the cold wet Baltic, out from Hellerup, we can take the train, want to go? You'll turn honey brown.

—Now?

—Just thought of it, so let's do it.

Their locomotive was the Niels Bohr.

—If you thought of this friendly outing, as you call it, when I turned up to pose, how come Edith had a thermos and snack ready in that satchel?

—Those pants, Nikolai. With the obliging fit.

Imp's grin, musing eyes.

—They're this short from the store, and then Mama took in the crotch at the inseam. Packages my mouse neater. If your look means was it her idea, well no. She's so good at sewing that it took her only a minute to do it, and she whistled in a meaningful way while she was clicking it through the sewing machine. A dry cough in the handing over, but never a word. So how come Edith knew you were going to these marshes?

—A meadow all greenest grass and one million wild flowers with a white strand at its foot. A marsh, too, with grebes and mallards.

—How come Edith