Europe @ 2.4 km/h (12 page)

After he introduces himself as a fellow Australian we lapse into small talk about my hometown (Melbourne) and his — although there is never really any small talk about Sydney. And, while musing on the legendary gulf separating those two fine metropolises, he delivers himself of the Wildean apothegm ‘In Melbourne it’s who you know; in Sydney it’s who you are’.

Leading me, of course, to ask, Who is
he
? I suppose only the famous, or their relatives, can get away with dropping their own name. ‘Shand Turnbull,’ he answers. ‘Malcolm keeps calling me Dad but I tell him we’re not family.’

264 km

I’ve never before been in a country where bicycles have human rights. Today, my second day of train travel in Denmark, I have learnt the hard way what this means. On the Frederikshavn line four people boarded along with me and chained their bikes to the only available seats. Maas, the conductor, seeing I’m new to Denmark, explained before I could put my grievance into words, ‘They reserve seats for their bikes, too’.

Nursing my grievance, I thought how odd it was to be a living, breathing, sapient being with my own set of wheels and a ticket yet forced to be a strap-hanger. Maas could read my mind. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked in exasperation. ‘Throw them off?’ He could decipher my answer by looking at my eyebrows raised in hope. At the risk of provoking him further, I pointed to the signs above the bicycles’ seats, which mentioned that they were reserved for the users of prams or wheelchairs — but, significantly, not bikes. Unfazed, Maas had an answer for that, too. ‘We can’t put all the signs up.’

Another day, on another train, I was lucky enough to get a seat but foolish enough to lose it by popping into the ‘disabled WC’ for five minutes. When I returned, the proud usurper who had shackled his two-wheeler to my former spot proclaimed, ‘In Denmark our bicycles have seats’. I turned to the bike and muttered, ‘I hope you’re comfortable’. It seemed more productive to talk to the machine.

This nation is built to Toytown scale, whether you are talking residential streets or commercial precincts. It is, of course, utterly charming. At first glance there are not many differences between Sweden and Denmark — apart from that of scale just mentioned — and before long I begin to think of them almost as one country, call it Swedenmark. But that is not the view from within. The Danes are considered — by themselves and others — to be decidedly un-mellow, in fact raucous in public, far more willing to give you their opinion unasked. They don’t play their cards close to their chest; they put them all on the table.

274 km

Back in mid-May, somewhere in Russia, I saw on
BBC World
News
an item about an initiative being undertaken by PEN, the international author-advocacy group, to create International Cities of Refuge for persecuted writers.

Such a move seemed brave but risky, worth two cheers. Was it going to invite daring assaults on writers who might have been safer out of the limelight? Would PEN provide round-the-clock bodyguards for selected scribes?

The TV report mentioned that one writer — Chinese dissident Jun Feng — had already been afforded this status, in Denmark. I wrote to the secretary of Danish PEN, who had been interviewed in the report, and she put me in touch with him. It seemed to me that one thing Europe stood for — as Jean Cedric Ménard would define it — was ‘freedom of expression’. That Jun Feng agreed to meet me (when, let’s face it, I could have been hired by his persecutors) demonstrated Europe’s openness.

For fifteen years, Jun — a native of Shanghai — has lived in Odense, Denmark’s second city. As the bus carrying me from Jutland pulls into the city terminus, there he is waiting for me. Bald-headed and clad in a cotton tunic, Jun — who still looks like the Buddhist monk he once was — cheerfully helps carry my bags. It doesn’t take long for me to see that, for a writer who was once persecuted, he has a surprisingly ready laugh. Jun apologises for his English but, as you will see, has little need to do so. In any case, his thoughts are original.

Maybe you heard his name long ago. He opposed Beijing vociferously in a 1987 protest that was dwarfed in importance only by the bloodbath of Tiananmen Square two years later. If I had to pigeonhole Jun by his views, I would call him a libertarian, perhaps an anarchist. ‘Beijing used the slogan “Democracy” but didn’t know what it was,’ he tells me at the terminus café. ‘It is not just “majority decide”. I think that if my girlfriend and me want to kiss and the majority say no, then fuck the majority.’

How Jun came to live in Denmark — from his house arrest through daring escapades in the east and south of China to his arrest and imprisonment in Laos — is all told with verve in his autobiography.
⁹

United Nations intervention led to a demurely worded exile offer, Is it OK for you to go to Denmark? ‘At that time I knew about Hans Christian Andersen and that was about it. Oh, and they had a queen. I thought, Such a big country! … But I was thinking of Greenland, not Denmark.’ (Infectious laughter.)

‘In that time I thought I was an anti-communist. Now I realise I am an ethical communist. Being so, my first task is to fight against the party because they violate the communist ideals.’ How they must wince in Beijing at such blasphemy.

What can he tell me about the Danes? ‘They have a very distinctive sense of humour.’ (See, there are differences within Swedenmark!) ‘But it’s always directed against other people. It has a sarcastic point. Danes have a high regard for individualism and personal autonomy. But sometimes I think Danes may be spoiled. They have a big reputation in the world; they forget that can also have a bad side.’

‘Are you a European?’ He laughs again. ‘I’m a Danish Chinese. I don’t think it’s the same thing. Denmark can be very nationalistic; you don’t meet many Europeans here.’

But has living in Europe inspired him to write any poems? Over our cappuccinos Jun replies by handing me a copy of the only verse he has had published in English, but he soon emails me another one written after comparing his old and new lives.

279 km

I escape the driving rain by visiting the ‘house’ of Hans Christian Andersen, a museum for the past 99 years. This morning’s weather is good for ducklings, ugly and otherwise. The only problem is, he probably didn’t live here. His admirers made it all up, a fairytale.

Unafraid of being thought eccentric, Andersen was another Odense writer who was fiercely individualistic. An information board relates that, fearing he would suddenly fall victim to an epidemic, ‘as a young man he would sometimes place a note on his bedside table that read, “I am apparently dead.”’

One of the great travellers of his age, he was inspired by, and saw most of, Europe, making his 30th and final journey two years before his death. Audio readings are a highlight of any visit here. One, by Sir John Gielgud, of
The Emperor’s New Clothes,
reminds me how wonderfully subversive the fabulist’s tales were, able to charm innocent children while packing a powerful satirical punch not lost on their elders.

When this bare-earth abode in the most squalid part of town was later identified as his birthplace, Andersen declared, ‘I wasn’t born in such a hovel’. Perhaps he had forgotten himself. For eight years earlier he had written in
The Ugly Duckling
, ‘It doesn’t matter about being born in a duckyard so long as you’re hatched from a swan’s egg’.

282 km

Hours ago, a distant family member, Steen Thomsen, greeted me at Copenhagen’s central station (København H), and we caught buses out to his ‘pad’ in the suburbs. This evening we took in the music — a swing band — and the fireworks display provided every Saturday night at eleven o’clock in the city’s world-famous Tivoli Gardens. A great way to say goodbye to one memorable month and hello to another.

284 km

1 July. 4.56 pm AEST. On Steen’s PC I read an email from the True North. Mayoral candidate Marius Nilsen informs he has just been to Oslo with postmaster Oot Bjorn and Oot’s two children to attend an Ozzie Osbourne concert. And then he writes,

‘For me Oslo is a lot of women and partying. Mehamn is too small for me as coming mayor for these activities.’

Does he realise this stuff could be campaign dynamite if it fell into the wrong hands — his wife’s? Apparently not, as he closes with an Arctic weather report.

‘Today we have summer, 15 Celsius. Yesterday only 7º.’

285-289 km

Copenhagen is as delightful — or, to quote Danny Kaye, as ‘wonderful, wonderful’ — as it is said to be. Buskers, alleys, canals, boutiques. This city has all the features of which others have only some — and more. At 800 years of age, Old Square lives up to its name. War against England, from 1807-1814 — in which Denmark backed Napoleon and lost Norway to Sweden — was a turning point in the nation’s history. The English bombed Copenhagen in the first year of that campaign, and Steen — full of that nationalism Jun mentioned — speaks with evident passion against the English because of it. Pointing out where a cannonball has been left lodged in a wall as a reminder of perfidious Albion, he says, ‘We suffered the first terrorist attack of modern times’ as if it happened only yesterday rather than two centuries ago.

Nevertheless he can be refreshingly realistic. Don’t waste time going to Frihedsmuseet, a museum in honour of Danish wartime resistance, he cautions, ‘There was actually very little resistance to the Nazi occupiers here, but of course they don’t want you to know that’.

On our city tour he spies a statue of Admiral Niels Juel — one of his ancestors, he proudly points out, and victor of the Battle of Køge Bay in July 1677. Further along the harbourside I see another statue — this one more familiar than familial. But this one’s a copy. Yes, you can visit Copenhagen and see
David
— if not in the marbled flesh, at least looking bronzed.

292-293 km

Johanne, our tour guide to Christiansborg Palace, reminds us that, before the EU came along, royalty did more to promote ‘Europeanism’ than any other body — if only because most of Europe was governed by members of the same extended royal family. (It didn’t stop World War I, but let that pass …)

‘Most of the royal blood of Europe stems from a Dr Struensee who married our Mathilde and introduced reforms in Denmark but who was executed in the public square.’ Now Johanne’s tour is sounding like a potted history of revolution mixed in with a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale.

Speaking of literature, we pass through a room containing the royal library inherited by Australia’s very own gift to Denmark, Tasmanian Princess Mary. Among the 10,000 books on display in the room, I point out to Johanne one whose golden-lettered spine caught my eye:
The Fall of a Throne
. Uneasy lies the head? It needn’t: the Danes, along with Australian magazine publishers, adore Mary so she should treat that work as light fiction.

Even a practised speaker like Johanne admits to being awed by royalty. ‘When I met the princess it was a Christmas reception and I thought I wouldn’t be nervous,’ she tells us. ‘But suddenly I was number two in a line of four hundred people and somebody said, “You must tell your name and occupation when you meet Frederik and Mary.” I gave the princess my hand and my voice disappeared. When I recovered it, all I could say, without thinking, was, “Hi, Mary.” She was very gracious about it.’ Now that’s a Tasmanian upbringing for you.

302-304 km

Christiania, alias ‘Freetown’, entered the world as a 1970s hippie-style experiment in alternative living. Nearly 40 years on, Denmark’s conservative Government has made no secret of the fact that it couldn’t care less if the settlement died of natural causes.

In 1971 the ‘alternatives’ broke into a military barracks and declared it a zone of peace. They, or rather their spiritual (and in some cases biological) descendants, are still there despite a police raid in 2004 that cleared out dozens of drug dealers.

Seated on a step watching her granddaughter is Lene, an ‘eternal child’ of 60, her hair in golden plaits. She has been a resident here for 30 years, and her daughter Hellene (a.k.a. Liv) is visiting. It is her fifteen-month-old baby, Karl Anton, that Lene watches playing in the grass (no, not smoking it). ‘My own mother thought I was mad,’ Lene recalls. ‘She only became reconciled to it when she came here after a few years and saw it for herself.’