Excerpts from
Copenhagen
By Katrine Marie Guldager
NÖRREPORT
The boy who was sitting on the stone stairway at Nörreport Station was definitely not feeling well. Maybe he was high on something, maybe he was homeless. Anyway, he looked awful, he was sweating. The woman who was passing him on the steps flung a red woolen scarf around herself. And as she passed the boy, she cast a look of scorn in his direction. As she made her way up to the kiosk, she came to think that she had run out of cigarettes.
Whether it was this brief moment of eye contact or something else, she couldn’t determine. But just as she stood there and fumbled around in her purse for some change, she somehow managed to bend her head a bit too far forward. It wasn’t more than an inch or two. But it was enough to make her glasses fall off. And when she stooped over to pick them up, she accidentally stepped on them.
They didn’t break. A friendly man took care of things and made sure that she got them on again.
Outside the station, she waited for the green light and stood across from a woman who seemed to resemble her in many ways, only she was older. The older woman was also wearing a red woolen scarf and as fate would have it, the two red woolen scarves brushed up against each other in the crosswalk.
The older woman walked toward the kiosk and asked for a small bag of candy. As she was waiting to get it, she happened to glance down and noticed that a feather had settled on one of her boots. As she bent down, the filthy-looking boy entered into her field of vision. The boy really looked like he was having a bad time, but the woman thought that probably, he was just very tired. So she removed the feather from her boot and started to move, with careful strides, down the stairway. Her boots were just a bit too high for her, and she was afraid of losing her balance. Suddenly she heard a voice, which frightened her so much that she almost fell over.
– Can you spare some change?
It was the boy who had awakened from his stupor.
But of course she couldn’t.
Instead she concentrated on keeping her balance. She was thinking about a day a few weeks back, when she was walking with her daughter up the concrete steps of Nörreport Station. Maybe the same boy had also been sitting there on that day? Or had the days now started to become fused to-gether inside her distressed mind? No, he had been sitting there. And her daughter had made a remark about how it was really a dumb place to sit, right in the middle of the steps, honestly.
The woman who was walking down Köbmagergade, the pedestrian thoroughfare, was named Bitten. She was supposed to be meeting a girlfriend at a café near the Stork Fountain. The girlfriend, meanwhile, had not managed to progress beyond Vesterport and the train the she was riding in would not be advancing any further for the moment. They were waiting for the police to arrive. There had been a fight in the third carriage’s smoking section. The girlfriend decided to walk the rest of the way. As soon as she reached the top of the escalator and turned to walk down Hammerichsgade, she noticed that one of the women who had been involved in the rumpus was walking right in front of her.
Bitten walked down Köbmagergade and stopped in front of a shoe store. The boots that had captured her interest were just a tad higher than what she was accustomed to. But she wanted to try them on, anyway. She sat down in the middle of the store and started to pull off her old boots. Sud-denly she felt overwhelmed with fatigue, but she picked herself up and started to walk around the store. She decided to buy the boots, after all. The door to the shoe store slammed behind her and this gave a start to the boy on the stone stairway. He stood up and, wobbling, began to walk up the stairs. On one of the last steps, he lost his balance and fell down on the landing. He landed on his front teeth and knocked out the one front tooth, his mouth was bleeding.
The boy’s sister, who had been involved in the rumpus inside the train, arrived at Nörreport at the same time her brother was being laid on the stretcher, but since there was no room for her to ride in the ambulance, she decided to walk to the National Hospital.
Bitten and her friend were drinking their first cup of coffee. They praised each other’s looks. Bitten’s friend explained why she had been delayed and told about the tumult in the train. She told about the woman who had been involved in the brawl. Then the two friends talked about a third woman, with whom they both were friends. She had just been fired from her job. Wasn’t it basically her own fault? Hadn’t she always run into problems in work situations?
The boy, who had now made it as far as the emergency room, was being examined by a nurse. A dentist was summoned in order to take a look at the boy’s teeth. The boy hadn’t understood that his sister had seen him being driven away in an ambulance and he kept on repeating that he was supposed to meet her. He really wanted to know if there was any way to get a message through to her.
The sister was only a few minutes away from the National Hospital, and when she finally reached the emergency room, where her little brother was still lying, she started to bawl him out. The dentist was examining the boy.
– Why did you fall? he asked.
– I was so dizzy, answered the boy.
– Idiot, exclaimed the sister.
The older woman from the pedestrian crosswalk arrived at Ballerup. She got out of the train and flung the red woolen scarf around herself. She was on her way home. But first, she was going to visit the boy for whom she had bought the little bag of candy. She was also going to make him sup-per. When the supper was almost ready, she let him come into the kitchen, where he sat with the down quilt wrapped around him, as if he were one large sore. His parents had gone away on vacation and the boy had fallen ill the moment that the door had slammed behind them.
At Nörreport Station, the boy’s front tooth was still lying on the halfway landing and if it hadn’t been for one very thoughtful young girl wearing headphones who happened to be walking by, it would have been swept away as rubbish. But she caught sight of the tooth under a scrap of candy wrapping and bent down to pick it up. She took a close look at it and made up her mind that it had to be a piece of plastic. She stopped short and stood there and listened a bit. Then she felt her pet rat crawling over her shoulder and kept on walking.
As she was buying a pack of cigarettes in one of the kiosks, she let the tooth slip out of her hand, so that it fell down onto the flagstones and wound up lying there and gleaming in the autumn sunlight. Later on, there were a few wilted leaves that embedded themselves around the tooth, so that it eventually came to lie there and shine like a white gemstone set into a mounting.
By now, the two friends who had been drinking coffee near the Stork Fountain had spent quite a bit of money and felt that they had somehow been working hard. They decided to walk up toward Nörreport.
The boy, still at the National Hospital, was lying there and thinking about his front tooth. He thought about leaving the hospital and going back into town to look for it. He clutched at his mouth and found that he was missing his tooth.
The boy’s sister was on her way down Köbmagergade, where she crossed paths with the two girlfriends who were headed for Nörreport. Bitten put on her red woolen scarf. She took a look at her reflection in a shop window and was quite satisfied with what she saw. As a matter of fact, she was so satisfied that she flashed herself a little smile. The boy’s sister misunderstood the situation and smiled back, with a broad and toothless smile.
As the two girlfriends approached Nörreport, they spotted a boy who was staggering toward the kiosks. They couldn’t really decide whether to help him or not. But at last, they offered him a helping hand and Bitten recognized him as the boy who had been sitting on the concrete steps earlier in the day.
– I’m looking for my tooth, he mumbled.
The two girlfriends exchanged glances with each other and shook their heads.
One of the girls working in the kiosk looked out from her booth.
- Weren’t you picked up by an ambulance earlier today?
– No, said the boy. – It wasn’t me. I just lost my tooth.
Translated by Dan Marmorstein
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