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

The music was outside, in Gray Brothers. Gunnar and Edith were spreading a board for supper in the courtyard.

—The Lord makes allowances for the young, Edith said. It's a blessing he has on clothes.

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Feeling friendly toward the bobble of red dahlias outside the windows, where the afternoon stood as a tall box of solid and perpendicular light, Nikolai began with a dip to undress. It was a remote out-in-the-country farmyard light, between kitchen and barn, with chickens, a well, old bricks with a felt of moss in corners and under trees. Butterflies, bees, midges.

—Your courtyard is a farm on Fyn, you know? Pushing down his jeans, he mouthed to the empty air I am Batman.

A new book lay on the coffee table, essays on Wittgenstein edited by Jaakko Hintikka.

—Who in private life is a reindeer. It's Wittgenstein you've done a bust of, right? Tall neck and gaze. In a leather jacket with zipper.

Briefs down, he tickled the neb of his penis, a baby's innocence in his smile. The drawing block, colored pencils.

—Today we're drawing. Pull your briefs up, leave your socks on, shirt off. Your hair's a nice muss today. Light's splendid, as you've said. And for reasons I probably oughtn't to pry into, you're sweetly happy, pleased with yourself.

—Happy with just being here, Gunnar. Can I say that? There are lots of good places, the Troll Wood, my room at home, Mikkel's room, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and whichwhat, but this is my best place.

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—We sculptors have no interest in time, and therefore have no language. What we and the critics say about sculpture is usually pig swill.

—Potato peels, mash, and buttermilk, Nikolai said. I've seen it. Tasted it. On a dare from my cousin on the farm. Pigs are delicate eaters, you know.

—Beautiful beasts they are, too.

—Part dog, part hippo.

KORCZAK TO JOSEF ARNON

 

Don't you think I look like an old tree filled with children playing like birds in my branches? I'm trying to exclude everything temporal from my thoughts, to relive all that I've ever experienced through the silence within silence.

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Samantha throwing off a shawl and kicking off her shoes.

—Whatever will we do when the Ariel's finished and there's no Nikolai to do his fetching striptease and be beautiful and talk nasty?

—I can still drop in, can't I?

—There's the Korczak group, Gunnar said over the whirr of his grindstone. I have other ideas, too. And then, if I wanted to, I could be jealous.

Samantha kissing Nikolai on the mouth.

—I saw that, said Gunnar.

—I'm in love, Nikolai said.

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Having peed shoulder to shoulder at a urinal off The Greening toward the Fortress, Mikkel and Nikolai grinned at each other in purest idiocy.

—Some days, Mikkel said, I'm only half horny, you know? As if I were grown up or there's a hormone short out, but most days I wake up to a prosperous stiff cock that's going to butt my fly all day, and hums to itself, and plumps my balls up tight. Are you like that?

—Worse, I hope.

—Today's a hormone overload. Why do ducks come in threes? Two drakes and a hen. Is one her spare? Or is one drake the other's friend?

They walked, bumping shoulders, up the path behind the regimental chapel to the ramparts.

—Kierkegaard used to walk here, Nikolai said, round and around. Gunnar told me that the other afternoon. He said he only knew me as a kid who turned up on time, posed in the altogether, jabbered polite and awful nonsense, and went away. A walk is how you get to know people, he said, and we came up here. Said he liked the light and the trees and the quiet.

—And Nikolai.

—This is where Niels Bohr's father explained to him how a tree works, photosynthesis and water through the roots and all, and little Niels said, But, Papa, if it weren't like that it wouldn't be a tree. Gunnar likes me? Mna. I look like what he thinks Ariel looked like.

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—The Korczak group will be bronze. With rock you have to know exactly what you're shaping, where Nikolai Ariel is inside, which 1 do, and which I need to get to all at a go.

Gunnar wore sneakers and an American baseball cap only, his naked body powdered over with marble dust.

Industrial yellow-and-blue work gloves, mallet, chisel.

—So your posing is for the finding you in the stone, that's behind us, and for the finishing and smoothing, which begins tomorrow. By tonight it will be here. I got up this morning with it in my eye, in my hands, all the thousand decisions made.

—Golly.

—Golly exactly.

—You want me around? Can I stay and watch?

—Hand me those goggles over there on the shelf. There's going to be dust when 1 bite into this fucker with the power saw. Samantha's bringing gauze masks, and sandwiches. Edith's away at her sister's. Said something about idols as she left. What she was thinking is that when I'm bringing a work up to the finish line I get raving horny.

—O wow.

—Probably make a little Dane as well as an Ariel, all in a day's work. Get the broom and dustpan and start sacking up the rubble. Into those paper bags it goes, and the bags you put in a neat line in the alley. First, find the wire brush.

Diligence of Nikolai, with stares at Gunnar.

—When did you start, Gunnar? Yesterday the block was my head and shoulders and the outside of my arms and legs, and you were working down the back to my butt. Now about half the rock I was in is on the floor and there're spaces between my arms and body and between my legs, and I can see how the legs are going to be.

—Six this morning. Shooed Edith away around half eight, quoting Scripture. Samantha turned up around nine, made coffee, and got fucked.

—Want me to make more coffee? I get horny, too, posing.

—We can imagine that Shakespeare writing the play, and rehearsing it, and probably acting in it, was not a Lutheran Swede in his great heart.

—First time I was here I went away with balls as tight as a green apple and my handbrother throbbing.

—Goggles. I hear Samantha at the door. And you jacked off twice, panting and