by John Irving
The Swede proceeded to pull up the left leg of his pants. “I got this in Stockholm,” he said.
There on his calf was quite a good tattoo—good enough to have been one of Tattoo Ole’s or Daughter Alice’s. A dagger with an ornate green-and-gold handle had been thrust through a rose; both the petals of the rose and the hilt of the dagger were edged with orange, and twisted around the rose and the dagger was a green-and-red snake. (Evidently the Swede was fond of serpents.)
Jack could tell by his mom’s expression that she admired the needlework; even Tattoo Ole agreed it was good. Ladies’ Man Madsen was speechless with envy, or perhaps he was imagining his near-certain future in the family fish business.
“Doc Forest did it,” the Swede said.
“What shop is he in?” Ole asked.
“I didn’t know Stockholm had a shop!” said Lars.
“He works out of his home,” the Swede reported.
Jack knew that Stockholm was not on their itinerary; it wasn’t on his mom’s list.
Alice was gingerly bandaging the boy with the sore ribs. He had wanted the Rose of Jericho on his rib cage so that the petals of the flower would move when he breathed.
“Promise me you won’t show this to your mother,” Alice said to the boy. “Or if you do, don’t tell her what it is. Make sure she doesn’t take a long look.”
“I promise,” the boy told her.
The old sailor was flexing his forearm, admiring how the contractions of his muscles moved the mermaid’s tail, which still needed to be colored in.
It was almost Christmas; the tattoo business was good. But the apparent news that William had escaped—to Stockholm, of all places—did little to lift Alice’s holiday spirits, or Jack’s.
And it was always dark when they left the shop on Nyhavn, even at four or five in the afternoon. Whatever time it was, the restaurants on Nyhavn were already cooking. By now Jack and Alice could distinguish the smells: the rabbit, the leg of deer, the wild duck, the roasted turbot, the grilled salmon, even the delicate veal. They could smell the stewed fruit in the sauces for the game, and many of those Danish cheeses were strong enough to smell from a winter street.
For good luck, they always counted the ships moored along the canal. Perhaps because it was almost Christmastime, the lighted arch that stood over the statue in the square by the D’Angleterre seemed to them an abiding kind of protection; the hotel itself was decorated with lighted Christmas wreaths.
On the way to their chambermaids’ rooms, Jack and his mom often stopped for a Christmas beer. The beer was dark and sweet, but strong enough that Alice diluted Jack’s with water.
One of Alice’s clients at Tattoo Ole’s—a banker who had different denominations of foreign currency tattooed on his back and chest—told her that Christmas beer was good for children because it prevented nightmares. The boy had to admit that, since he’d been drinking it, the banker’s remedy for bad dreams seemed plausible: either he’d not had a nightmare in a while or he’d not had one he could remember.
In Jack’s dreams, he missed Lottie—how she had hugged him, without reservation, how they’d held their breath and felt their hearts beating chest-to-chest. One night at the D’Angleterre, Jack had tried to hug his mom that way. Alice had been impatient about holding her breath. Feeling the thump of her heart, which seemed to beat at a slower, more measured pace than Lottie’s, Jack said: “You must be alive, Mom.”
“Well, of course I am,” Alice replied, with more detectable impatience than she had demonstrated when he’d asked her to hold her breath. “You must be alive, too, Jackie—at least you were, the last time I looked.”
Without his knowing exactly how or when, she had already managed to extricate herself from the boy’s embrace.
The next day, before the sun was up—in Copenhagen, at that time of year, this could have been after eight o’clock in the morning—Jack’s mother took him to the Frederikshavn Citadel. “Kastellet,” the historic fortification was called. In addition to the soldiers’ barracks, there was the commandant’s house and the Citadel Church—the Kastelskirken, where William Burns had played.
Is there a boy who doesn’t love a fort? How exciting for Jack that his mom had brought him to a real one! He was more than happy to amuse himself, as Alice asked him to do.
“I would like to have some privacy when I speak to the organist,” was how she put it.
Jack was given the run of the place. His first discovery was the jail. It was behind the Citadel Church, where a prison aisle ran along the church wall; there were listening holes in the wall, to enable the prisoners to hear the church service without being seen. It was a disappointment to Jack that there were no prisoners—only empty cells.
The organist’s name was Anker Rasmussen—a typical Danish name—and according to Alice, he was both respectful and forthcoming. Jack later found it odd that the organist was in uniform, but his mother would explain that a soldier-musician was what one might expect to find in a citadel church.
During William’s brief apprenticeship to Rasmussen, the young man had mastered several Bach sonatas as well as Bach’s Präludium und Fuge in B Moll and his Klavierübung III. (Jack was impressed that his mom could remember the German names of the pieces his dad had learned to play.) William was quite the hand at Couperin’s Messe pour les couvents, too, and Alice had been right about the Christmas section from Handel’s Messiah.
As for the seduced parishioner, the military man’s young wife, Jack’s mother told him little—only enough that the boy assumed his father hadn’t been asked to leave Kastelskirken for flubbing a refrain.
When Jack tired of the jail, he walked outside. It was freezing cold; the medium-gray daylight merely darkened the sky. While the boy was thrilled to see the soldiers marching about, he kept his distance from them and went to have a look at the moat.
The water around Kastellet was called the Kastelsgraven; to a four-year-old’s eyes, the moat was more of a pond or a small lake—and to Jack’s great surprise, the water was frozen. He’d been told in Tattoo Ole’s shop that the Nyhavn canal rarely froze, and that the Baltic Sea almost never froze; except in only the coldest weather, seawater didn’t freeze. What, then, was in the moat? It had to be freshwater, but Jack knew only that the water in the moat was frozen.
There are few wonders to a child that equal black ice. And how did the four-year-old know the water was frozen? Because the gulls and ducks were walking on it, and he didn’t think the birds were holy. Just to be sure, Jack found a small stone and threw it at them. The stone bounced across the ice. Only the gulls took flight. The ducks raced to the stone as if they thought it might be bread; then they waddled away from it. The gulls returned to the ice. Soon the ducks sat down, as if they were having a meeting, and the gulls walked disdainfully around them.
At times far away, at other times marching nearer, the soldiers tramped around and around. There was a wooden rampart near the frozen moat’s edge; it was like a thin wooden road with sloped sides. Jack easily climbed down it. The round-eyed staring of the gulls taunted him; the ducks just plain ignored him. When the boy stepped onto that black ice, he felt he had found something more mysterious than his missing father. He was walking on water; even the ducks began to watch him.
When Jack reached the middle of the moat, he heard what he thought was the organ in the Citadel Church—just some low notes, not what he would have called music. Maybe the organist was calling upon the notes to enhance a story he was telling Alice. But Jack had never heard notes so low on the scale. It wasn’t the organ. The Kastelsgraven itself was singing to the boy. The frozen pond was protesting his presence; the moat around the old fort had detected an intruder.
Before the ice cracked, it moaned—the cracks themselves were as loud as gunshots. A spiderweb blossomed at Jack’s feet. He heard the soldiers yelling before he felt the frigid water.
The boy’s head went under for only a second or two; his hands reached up and caught a shelf of ice a
bove him. He rested his elbows on this shelf, but he hadn’t the strength to pull himself out of the water—nor would the shelf of ice have held his weight. All Jack could do was stay exactly where he was, half in and half out of the freezing moat.
The gulls and ducks were put to flight by the racket of the soldiers’ boots on the wooden rampart. The soldiers were shouting instructions in Danish; a bell in a barracks was ringing. The commotion had brought Alice and a man Jack assumed was the organist. In a crisis of this kind, what good is an organist? Jack was thinking. But Anker Rasmussen, if that’s who he was, at least looked more like a military man than a musician.
Alice was screaming hysterically. Jack worried that she would think this was all his father’s fault. In a way, it was, the boy considered. His own rescue struck him as uncertain. After all, if the ice hadn’t held him, how would it hold one of the soldiers?
Then Jack saw him, the littlest soldier. He’d not been among the first of the soldiers to arrive; maybe Anker Rasmussen had fetched him from one of the barracks. He wasn’t in uniform—only in his long underwear, as if he’d been asleep or was sick and had been convalescing. He was already shivering as he started out across the ice to Jack—inching his way, as Jack imagined all soldiers had been trained to do, on his elbows and his stomach. He dragged his rifle by its shoulder strap, which he clenched in his chattering teeth.
When the soldier had crawled to the hole Jack had made in the ice, he slid the rifle toward Jack—butt-end first. Jack was able to grasp the shoulder strap in both hands while the soldier took hold of the barrel at the bayonet-end and pulled the boy out of the water and across the ice to him.
Jack’s eyebrows were already frozen and he could feel the ice forming in his hair. When he was on the surface again, he tried to get to all fours, but the littlest soldier yelled at him.
“Stay on your stomach!” he shouted. That he spoke English didn’t surprise Jack; the surprise was that he didn’t have a soldier’s voice. To Jack, the soldier sounded like a fellow child—a boy, not yet a teenager.
As if Jack were a sled, he lay flat and let the littlest soldier pull him across the frozen moat to the rampart’s edge, where Alice was waiting. His mom hugged and kissed him—then she suddenly slapped him. It was the only time Jack Burns remembered his mother striking him, and the second she did so, she burst into tears. Without hesitation, he reached for her hand.
Jack was wrapped in blankets and carried to the commandant’s house, although he didn’t remember meeting the commandant. The littlest soldier himself found clothes for Jack. They were too big for him, but Jack was more surprised that they were civilian clothes—not a soldier’s uniform.
“Soldiers also have off-duty clothes, Jack,” his mom explained—not an easy concept for a four-year-old.
When Jack and his mother were leaving Kastellet, Alice kissed the littlest soldier good-bye; she had to bend down to do it. Jack saw him standing on his toes to meet her kiss halfway.
That was when Jack got the idea that his mom should offer his rescuer a free tattoo—surely soldiers, like sailors, were fond of tattoos. Alice seemed amused at the notion. She approached the littlest soldier again, this time bending down to whisper in his ear instead of kissing him. He was certainly excited by what she said; her offer clearly appealed to him.
It turned out that Jack and Alice had more reason to go to Stockholm than to meet the talented Doc Forest. Anker Rasmussen told Alice that the organist at the Hedvig Eleonora Church in Stockholm, Erik Erling, had died three years ago. He’d been replaced by a brilliant twenty-four-year-old, Torvald Torén. Torén was rumored to be looking for an assistant.
Alice expressed surprise that William would seek a position as an assistant to an organist younger than he was. Anker Rasmussen took a different view: William was clever and talented enough to be a good organist; now was the time for him to travel, to play on different organs, to pick up what he could learn or steal from other organists. In Rasmussen’s opinion, it was not just the trouble with women that kept motivating William to move on.
Jack’s mother told him that she was disconcerted by Anker Rasmussen’s theories; she had fallen in love with William Burns because of how he played the organ, yet she’d not considered that the instrument itself had seduced him. Did William restlessly need to be around a bigger and better organ, or at least a different one? Was it in the tradition of the way a young girl can love horses? (No doubt it further disconcerted Alice to realize that William might have liked trading mentors as much as he liked trading women.)
Jack assumed they would be leaving for Stockholm right away, but his mother had other ideas. Through the Christmas holiday, there was much money to be made at Tattoo Ole’s. If a tattoo artist as good as Doc Forest was working out of his home in Stockholm, tattooing was barely legal there. Alice decided that it wouldn’t be easy for her to make money in Stockholm; she thought she should take advantage of the holiday season at Tattoo Ole’s before she and Jack continued their journey.
At Nyhavn 17, they said a prolonged good-bye. Jack didn’t remember posing for a photograph there, on the street in front of Tattoo Ole’s, but the sound of the camera shutter was overfamiliar to him. Obviously someone was snapping pictures.
Alice was so popular with the clients, many of them sailors on Christmas leave, that she worked until late at night. Ladies’ Man Madsen was less in demand. He often walked Jack to the D’Angleterre while Alice tattooed on.
Lars would sit on the bed in Jack’s room while the boy brushed his teeth; then the Ladies’ Man would tell Jack a story until Jack fell asleep. Madsen’s stories never kept Jack awake for long. They were self-pitying tales of Lars himself as a child. (Mostly misadventures with fish, which struck Jack as easily avoidable; yet these catastrophes were of immeasurable importance to Lars.)
While the boy slept in the narrower of the chambermaids’ rooms, which was divided from his mother’s bedroom by a bathroom with two sliding doors, Ladies’ Man Madsen read magazines on the toilet. Jack sometimes woke and saw Lars’s silhouette through the frosted glass of the bathroom door. Often he fell asleep on the toilet with his head on his knees, and Alice would have to wake him up when she came home.
At his request, Alice gave Lars a tattoo. He wanted a broken heart above his own heart, which he claimed was broken, too. Alice gave him a blushing-red heart, torn in half horizontally; the jagged edges of the tear left a bare band of skin, wide enough for a name, but both Alice and Tattoo Ole urged Ladies’ Man Madsen against a name. The ripped-apart heart, all by itself, was evidence enough of his pain.
Lars, however, wanted Alice’s name. She refused. “Your heart’s not broken because of me,” she declared, but maybe it was.
“What I meant,” said Ladies’ Man Madsen, summoning an unexpected dignity, “was that I wanted your tattoo name.”
“Ah—a signature tattoo!” cried Tattoo Ole.
“Well, okay—that’s different,” Alice told Lars.
On the very white skin between the pieces of his torn heart, she needled her name in cursive.
Daughter Alice
For his thoughtful care of Jack, Alice was grateful to the Ladies’ Man. “There’s no charge,” she told him, as she bandaged his broken heart.
Jack didn’t know what gift his mom might have made to Ole. Perhaps there was no gift for Ole—not even Alice’s coveted Rose of Jericho, which Tattoo Ole much admired.
Their last night in Copenhagen, Ole closed the shop early and took them to dinner at a fancy restaurant on Nyhavn. There was an open fireplace and Jack had the rabbit.
“Jack, how can you eat Peter Cottontail?” his mom asked.
“Let him enjoy it,” Lars told her.
“You know what, Jack?” Tattoo Ole said. “That can’t be Peter Cottontail, because Danish rabbits don’t wear clothes.”
“They just get tattooed!” cried Ladies’ Man Madsen.
When no one was looking, Jack scrutinized the rabbit for tattoos but didn’t find a
ny. The boy went on eating, but he must not have had enough Christmas beer.
That night, very late, he had a nightmare. He woke up naked and shivering. He had just fallen through the ice and drowned in the Kastelsgraven. More terrible, Jack was joined in death, at the bottom of the moat, by centuries of soldiers who had drowned there before him. The cold water had perfectly preserved them. Illogically, the littlest soldier was among the dead.
As always, the light in the bathroom had been left on—as a night-light for Jack. He slid open the two doors of frosted glass and entered his mother’s bedroom. Whenever he had a bad dream, he was permitted to crawl into bed with her.
But someone had beaten him to it! At the foot of his mom’s bed, which was as narrow as his own, he saw her upturned toes protruding from the bedcovers. Between her feet, Jack saw the soles of two more feet—these toes were pointed down.
At first, for no comprehensible reason, the boy believed it was Ladies’ Man Madsen. But closer inspection of the stranger’s bare feet revealed to Jack two un-tattooed ankles. Also, the feet between his mother’s feet were too small to belong to Lars. They were even smaller than his mom’s—they were almost as small as Jack’s!
In the light from the bathroom, something else caught the boy’s eye. On the chair, where his mother often put her clothes, was a soldier’s uniform, which Jack thought was about his size. However, when he put the uniform on, it was bigger than he’d estimated. He had to roll up the cuffs of the pants and cinch the belt in its last notch, and the shoulders of the shirt and jacket were much too broad. The epaulets touched his upper arms—the sleeves entirely covered his hands.
If he’d had to guess, Jack would have said that the littlest soldier’s uniform was at least a size larger than his civilian clothes—the ones Jack had borrowed to wear following his misadventure in the moat. (The soldier’s off-duty clothes, his mom had called them.)
Undaunted by this clothing mystery, which seemed of no consequence at the time, Jack was determined to stand at attention at his mother’s bedside. When she and the littlest soldier woke up, Jack would salute them—as soldiers do. (Given the costume and the boy’s intentions, his mom would later refer to this episode as Jack’s first acting job.) But while he was standing there, at attention, he realized they were not asleep. The gentle movement of the bed had at first escaped his notice. Although his mother’s eyes were closed, she was awake; her lips were parted, her breathing was rapid and shallow, and the muscles of her neck were straining.
