A Meeting In Copenhagen

We are sitting at an airport in Copenhagen drinking a lot of coffee. It was most elegant there, and comfortable, and refined to the point of lassitude. Then suddenly he appeared- that old man- in a plain green parka with a hood, his face deep tanned by salt and wind- loomed up rather than appeared. He walked, furrowing through a crowd of tourists, as if he’d just been sailing a boat, and like the sea foam his beard, whitening it, fringed his face. With grim victorious determination he walked, generating a big wave, that swept through the modernized antique, through every sort of antiqued modernity. And pulling open the coarse collar of his shirt, he, rejecting a vermouth and a pernod, ordered a glass of Russian vodka at the bar and pushed back the tonic with his hand: 'No! ' With rough-hewn hands, all scarred and dented, in boots that made a mighty clatter, in trousers indescribably stained and greasy, he looked more spruce than anything nearby. The earth seemed to bend beneath him- so heavily did he tread upon it. And one of us said to me with a smile: 'Just look! The very spit of Hemingway! ' Expressed in each brief gesture, he strode off with a fisherman’s ponderous gait, all out of granite crudely hewn, strode as men stride through gunfire, through the ages, He strode as if stooping in a trench; strode shoving chairs and men aside... He resembled Hemingway so much! Later I learned it was, indeed, Hemingway! Translated by George Reavey