The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner Page A

is unloading. Yawning people, bicycles, suitcases. At the corner, plasterers are mixing mortar on a square of plywood. Soon the apprentice will be sent for the first round of Tuborg grøn or Carlsberg Hof. During the day he will go out seven or eight times. In the U.S.A. this would be called drinking on the job.
    At the bakery I take a number and stand in line with maids and housewives for brioches and snegle. Then back, carrying the warm fragrant sack through the thinning Bomholm crowd. The sun has burrowed into the overcast after one look at Denmark. A freighter comes up the canal, the Knippelsbro is rising, bicycles on the Amager side back up ten abreast.
    New and fresh. Maybe living on the East River would be a little like this, but there wouldn’t be the smell of warm baked goods and the scaled sheen of cobbles, and Gristede’s would be no substitute for the clean little one-purpose Danish shops, each with its medieval symbol for a sign—bull’s head for butcher, pretzel for baker, and so on.
    We breakfast at the Empire desk by the front windows. When I laid the snegle down this morning and went into the kitchen to put the coffee on, I found the countess in her tweed suit—no robe-and-slippers sloppiness for her, even at seven-thirty—spooning brown sugar onto a bowl of yoghurt. Her back was toward me; somehow it looked depressed. I have hardly seen her since the night of the opera. That was Friday, this is Monday.
    â€œHar De sovet godt?” I said.
    She whirled, her face sharp and startled. Then her thousandcandlepower smile came on and lit up the gloomy kitchen. “You sounded so Danish!”
    â€œThe one-word Dane,” I said. “Et eneste ord.”
    â€œYou see!” Since our first meeting she has taken the position that I am a linguistic prodigy and learn Danish with miraculous speed. (Danes in general are resigned to the fact that nobody can learn it except Danes.) She forgets that I heard it some in childhood, and she doesn’t know that in college I was made to study Anglo-Saxon, which is curiously close in some ways. Also, when I learn a word I don’t hide it under any bushel. “Et eneste!” she said in admiration. “Already you are saying a thing like that which some would never learn.”
    Our eyes splintered against each other, or against some common unspoken embarrassment, and she edged by me, brilliantly smiling, with her tray. Almost persuasive, the smile glowed back down the hall at me through the closing crack of her door. I saw it as a shield turned to cover a retreat.
    A few days ago I was worried that we’d have her in our hair more than we wanted to. Now I wonder if we’re to see her only in these strained, disappearing moments, like Emily Dickinson fleeing the sound of the door knocker.
    What has the woman done? Why, in this city where she has been known and conspicuous all her life, did not one soul speak to Astrid Wredel-Krarup in the theater the other night? She expected it, we expected it. I had some idiotic notion of a brilliant procession of old friends and acquaintances. I was braced for introductions. I suppose it was some such consideration that led us to dress up beyond the seats I’d been able to get—the ladies in long dresses, me in black tie. Moreover, the seats in the front row. ahead of us were unoccupied. We were as conspicuous as if we had been in a box.
    Nothing. Not a visitor, not a flutter of fingers, not a smile. Eyes, yes. Heads leaning to whisper, yes. We were watched in the ten minutes we sat there before the lights went down. We were watched at intermission; and none of us wanted to get up and circulate. We were watched as we edged our way out with the crowd at the end, and I distinctly saw one couple note us and put people between us so that we wouldn’t meet at the doors.
    The opera was that Honegger thing, Joan of Arc at the Stake, in which the female lead neither says nor sings a