Copenhagen, Spring What I do not wish to reveal will be discovered anyway, because I will inevitably tell it by leaving it out of the record. Such is how desire works. So consider this: thirty-five kilometres north of Copenhagen, on a morning of washed-out light that is not uncommon to the region in April, I was following at an ever-increasing distance for the space of an hour a Middle-Eastern woman in her thirties through a field of heather stretching for acres, which were full of grouse that rose up in a great clattering confusion as I waded through, as if I had aroused them from a sleep that had lasted all of their lives.
She wore a white dress of muslin and intricate lace resembling a sail wrapped about her shoulders, and unlike myself was able to walk noiselessly through the field without a disturbance, leaving no trail behind her as if her feet were floating through the heather. Glancing once over her shoulder, she lifted her veil, and I saw on her face a sense of wonderment, the way a parachutist looks back before leaping into the ether, then she disappeared over the hillside. By the time I reached the crest she was nowhere to be found on the slow undulations of purple and marbled green ending with a collar of fog on a desolate stretch of seacoast that seemed so cheerless and heartbreaking a place as to be all but uninhabitable.
The abandoned lighthouse, plywood in the windows, each with an X on it, conveyed as much. Neither the longer odyssey by which I had arrived at the scrub of dirt and brush and wind-swept trees nor the place I first set sight of her β in a vegetable market or at a petrol station or by a bell tower in a town square β had left any residue by which they might be traced backward, recovered, or recalled without fabrication.
But this knowledge by itself would not stop me from trying. Without realizing it I had fallen for some months into the practice of following women through Copenhagen, which lent my otherwise aimless walks a purpose apart from passing time before sleep.
It was often the case that I would walk the distance of several blocks, sometimes a kilometre or more into entirely different quarters of the city before I became aware I was, as if on autopilot, keeping pace with a woman threading her way through a crowd, late for lunch, or a business meeting, or, as happened once, back to her apartment building where, catching a door of iron roses right before it closed, I followed and turned into an interior courtyard at the last second, as she ascended the stairs to shower or sleep or talk on the phone or wait for her lover, I had no way of knowing.
