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

named Pierre Loti, who wears a fez and reads the European newspapers in the cafe all day and says that Tahiti is Romantic. What Rudolf and I say is that it's very hot and decidedly uncivilized. Have I said that Rudolf is of the royal family? He's a good sport, but he has his limits. There are no streets here! Romantically, Belinda.

***

Well! dear Lizaveta, San Francisco! Oh my! There are streets here, all uphill, and with gold prospectors and their donkeys on them. There are saloons with swinging doors, and Flora Dora girls dancing inside. Everybody plays Oh Suzanna! on their banjos (everybody has one) and everywhere you see Choctaws in blankets and cowboys with six-shooters and Chinese and Mexicans and Esquimaux and Mormons. All the houses are of wood, with fancy carved trimmings, and the gentry sit on their front porches and read political newspapers. Anybody in America can run for any public office whatever, so that the mayor of San Francisco is a Jewish tailor and his councilmen are a Red Indian, a Japanese gardener, a British earl, a Samoan cook, and a woman Presbyterian preacher. We have met a Scotsman name of Robert Louis Stevenson, who took us to see an Italian opera. Yours ever, Belinda.

***

Dear Lizaveta: I'm writing this in a stagecoach crossing the Wild West. We have seen many Indian villages of teepees, and thousands of buffalo. It took hours to get down one side of the Grand Canyon, across its floor (the river is shallow and we rolled right across, splashing) and up the other side. The Indians wear colorful blankets and have a feather stuck in their hair. Earlier today we saw the United States Cavalry riding along with the American flag. They were singing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and were all very handsome. It will make me seasick to write more, as we're going as fast as a train. Dizzily, Belinda.

 ***

Dear Lizaveta: We have been to Chicago, which is on one of the Great Lakes, and crossed the Mississippi, which is so wide you can't see across it, only paddle-steamers in the middle, loaded with bales of cotton. We have seen utopias of Quakers and Shakers and Mennonites, who live just as they want to in this free country. There is no king, only a Congress which sits in Washington and couldn't care less what the people do. I have seen one of these Congressmen. He was fat (three chins, I assure you) and offered Rudolf and me a dollar each if we would vote for him. When we said we were from Prague, he said he hoped we'd start a war, as war is good for business. On to New York! In haste, your loving Belinda.

***

Dear Lizaveta: How things turn out! Rudolf and I are married! Oh yes, at Niagara Falls, where you stand in line, couple after couple, and get married by a Protestant minister, a rabbi, or a priest, take your choice. Then you get in a barrel (what fun!) and ride over the falls—you bounce and bounce at the bottom—and rent a honeymoon cabin, of which there are hundreds around the falls, each with a happy husband and wife billing and cooing. I know from your parents that my sister in the department store has come to live with you and be your doll. Rudolf and I are going to the Argentine. You must come visit our ranch. I will remember you forever. Mrs. Rudolph Hapsburg und Porzelan (your Belinda).

 

 

 Gunnar and Nikolai

 1

 

And, yes, the sailboat on a tack for Tisvilde under a tall blue sky piled high with summer clouds was, oh my, slotting through the Baltic at a speed which the calm day and rigged mainsail and jib could in no wise account for.

At the tiller, it was soon easy to see, sat a boy named Nikolai, fetching and trim. He took a beeline for the beach, into the rocky sand of which he crunched his prow, to the amazement of a hundred staring sunbathers.

Deftly lowering his sails with nonchalant ease, he folded them into smaller and smaller triangles, until they were no bigger than handkerchiefs. Then, with a snap here and a snap there, as if he were closing the sections of a folding ruler, whistling a melody by Luigi Boccherini as he worked, he collapsed the boat, mast, rigging, hull, keel, rudder and all, into a handful of sticks and cords. These he doubled over again and again, tucked them in with a napkin's worth of sails, and stuffed the lot into the zippered pocket of his windbreaker. His chart and compass he shoved into the pocket of his smitch of white pants. He rolled and squared his shoulders.

Indifferent to the astonished bathers, one of whom was having some species of fit, and to jumping and hooting children begging him to do it again, he strode with all the aplomb of his twelve years up the beach and across the road into the dark cool of the Troll Wood.

Søren Kierkegaard, most melancholy of Danes, used to walk here, a gnome among gnomes. An eagle in a spruce gazed at Nikolai with golden feral eyes, in acknowledgment of which he put both hands against a mountain pine, the tree friendly to spruce. Without one near, it would not grow. The eagle rolled a hunch into its shoulders, and Nikolai hugged the mountain pine.

A glance at the interplanetary mariner's chronometer on his left wrist alerted him to his appointment somewhere near Gray Brothers. So, with meadows and farms flickering past, he ran fifty kilometres in three seconds, slowing to a walk along Strøget.

A shoal of skateboarders flowed around him from the back as he passed a Peruvian gourd band, three games of chess that had been going on since the fourteenth century, and four fresh babies in a pram, each with a cone of ice cream.

The address was in an alley, once a very old street. The number was repeated on a wooden gate, which opened onto the place, one of the places, he'd been looking for all of his life.

Another was a cabin in Norway, deep in spruce and mountain pine near a steep fjord, where he could live like Robinson Crusoe, exactly as he pleased. A room of his very own, in Gray Brothers, free to come and go, to have friends in