Copenhagen

Copenhagen becomes, in the narrator’s account, less a place to visit than a stage in the effort to reach A. She travels there for a seminar while grieving his departure, and the journey’s purpose contracts to a postcard she hopes will draw a reply. Her return flight carries the stark measure of that longing: she had wished it would crash if she were never to see him again.

A Journey Recast as a Message

Despite her aversion to meeting people, the narrator agrees to attend a seminar in Copenhagen because the trip offers a discreet way to send A news of her. She has already composed a few sentences; once she arrives, her attention fixes on the practical sequence of buying a postcard, copying them out, and finding a letter box. The seminar recedes behind this small chain of tasks. On the flight home, she recognizes that she has traveled to Denmark simply to send a postcard to a man.

The postcard is more than correspondence: she imagines A will have to answer it. That expectation turns travel into an extension of waiting, a means of keeping open the possibility of contact when the relationship itself has become inaccessible. Copenhagen is the setting for an act directed toward an absent person, not an independent episode of exploration.

The Return Flight and the Measure of Longing

The journey’s emotional stakes surface in the narrator’s retrospective admission that she had wished the plane flying back from Copenhagen would crash if she were never to see A again. The wish makes the prospect of separation feel more intolerable than the danger of the flight. It also reveals the scale of her attachment at that moment: the trip home, ordinarily the end of a journey, becomes bound to the feared finality of losing him.

That extremity belongs to the same period in which ordinary dates and public events were absorbed into the history of the affair. The narrator counts the weeks since A left and treats events in Paris or in the news as occasions to think that he had been there. Even the acquisition of a blender the day before a planned meeting becomes fixed in memory. Copenhagen therefore fits a wider pattern: external places and events acquire meaning through their relation to A, while the narrator’s sense of time remains measured by the possibility of his presence.

Travel, Memory, and Writing

The narrator distinguishes the time of passion from the time of writing. She can attach remembered details of the relationship to specific public events and dates, yet cannot connect particular pages to the fall of the Berlin Wall or the execution of the Ceaușescus. Writing begins about two months after A’s departure, but its pages do not preserve the same calendar-like texture as living through the affair. The Copenhagen journey, recalled through its postcard and return flight, gives that contrast a concrete form: the journey is remembered not as a sequence of seminar experiences but as an attempt to send news to A.

In writing, the narrator wants to remain within the age of passion, when even choices such as a film or lipstick were oriented toward one person. The past tense of the book repeats that time and produces pain, yet writing does not end her grief. Copenhagen’s postcard likewise cannot restore the relationship; it offers hope of an answer without securing one. The place thus marks both the persistence of her effort to communicate and the limits of what travel, memory, and writing can bring back.