Authors: Erik Valeur
Ugly
, I thought at a very early age, because children sense these things quite clearly.
“
Ugly
,” the mirror on the wall told me whenever I asked. Through the years, I’d asked that question so frequently that the tedious conversation could take up a whole chapter in a fairy tale.
Ugly
, the other kids sneered as soon as they were able to comprehend the oddness of my shape.
At that time, with a stream of healthy, adoption-ready Danish children filling the nation’s orphanages, I wasn’t in demand. If anyone ever fell for my strange appearance—without being disgusted by the lopsidedness they risked having to live with for years to come—they never succeeded in winning Magna’s approval, or that of the Mother’s Aid Society adoption council, which was led by the imposing Mrs. Ellen Krantz.
The strong women who controlled my life felt that, precisely because I was so peculiarly pieced together, I was to be adopted only by an exceptionally normal family. And Magna’s tacit message was clear from the beginning:
The others will be leaving, but you will be staying.
Kongslund is your home.
It was in her scent, and it was affirmed in her embrace.
The children around me all left. One day they would be at the dinner table, eating open-faced sandwiches with pâté; the next day they would leave their seats and disappear behind the house, into the flowing folds of strangers’ coats, into the arms of their new parents who had come from afar and had only one wish: to take them far, far away from the slope, the sound, and their past.
In the following years my nightmare would be repeated each week—because, like never before, childless Denmark could select from a cornucopia of beings streaming out of hospitals and birth clinics. New children arrived—then exited—and were replaced by others, who would also leave. And soon I held the national record in good-byes (no child had witnessed more departures than I).
One of the black-and-white photos in the hall shows me standing at the very end of the bathing pier, waving to the camera. My body stoops slightly to one side, my left arm limp, and if you take a close look—the shot is taken at a distance of some fifty feet—you can see that my hand is clenched into a fist, a dark little shadow under the edge of my coat. My mouth is dark and round and appears to be emitting a hollow, sad note, like wind in a deep ravine
…
don’t go
…
don’t go
…
don’t go
…
don’t go
…
don’t go
…
don’t go
…
don’t go
…
don’t go!
…
it wails in a fit of madness. “But they must go now,” Magna says, smiling to yet another happy couple come to save a Kongslund orphan.
“Come, Marie, let’s go over and wave!” she laughs, calling for me.
But I back away from the coat folds and the slamming car doors. I feel a deadening buzz in my arms. I’m only six years old, but I’ve waved more than any queen.
“Come now, Marie, this is a joyous occasion—the best day Butte and her new family have ever known!” Although the April sun peeks through the clouds, she has dressed me in a hooded red jacket. “Come now, Marie, let’s go wish Butte all the best in her new home!”
But I end up at the pier, half-turned like a bent branch that has lost its sprigs. I can still hear Magna shouting: “Wave, Marie, wave! Wave-wave-wave!” The happy couple honks their horn as they pull between the Chinese stone pillars at the end of the driveway and turn onto Strandvejen. Then it is quiet once more.
This was how I met Magdalene—on the old pier, one spring day when I was alone. Suddenly she was beside me like in a vision, this old woman in a wheelchair.
“Marie, look at me!” she whispered.
I’d known of the mysterious old crippled woman who lived in the white house up the hill, but until then I’d only seen her at a distance. Day after day, she sat—curved and hunched—on her front porch, holding what appeared to be a long telescope in front of one eye, gazing across the sound.
Now she was sitting right where the boards of the pier touched land—and she knew my name.
“Marie, don’t think any more about it!”
I stood frozen on the pier, staring at her.
Slowly she approached, and in one terrifying instant I perceived the strangeness of her body, how it hung over her wheelchair’s armrest—a body more frightening than mine. I saw the black ballpoint pen dangling from a string around her neck, and the little blue notebook in her lap—which seemed even stranger for a woman in her condition.
“Marie!”
But I was unable to respond.
“Marie!” she repeated, more intensely now.
A moment later, something odd happened. A sound pushed its way through my skull, as though the sea behind me had squeezed through a tiny slit in a rock wall: a hiss, a sizzle, a moment of certainty before the water poured through, gushing in cascades so thick and powerful they nearly knocked me down. I will never forget that moment. For several days I sat in Magdalene’s living room in the white villa and talked about my life at Kongslund: the Darkness, the children, the green lamp, the blue elephants, the yellow freesia. And the water flowed everywhere, trickling onto the coffee table, onto her wheelchair, down her white, convulsive fingers, onto the footstool where her feet—which were every bit as strange as mine—had found their place. I was like a drowning person who had only just discovered the sea, and now it threatened to swallow us both.
Maybe she understood how inexhaustible this source was. Hatred must have been one of the few survivors. It puffed its chest, drew breath, and crawled, unseen, from the depths into my soul through an unknown backdoor. It shook itself off, glanced around, and found a suitable residence where it could live discreetly and be left alone to grow. Magdalene didn’t see it—it must have remained hidden from her—but she was the one who released that part of me. A very skilled psychologist might have been able to explain why Hatred’s arrival coincided with the love that Magdalene and I found for each other. Perhaps love and hatred are much closer associates than we assume, but any explanation will remain an academic theory that would have pleased Magna and the Kongslund psychologists much more than those of us who experienced it.
In the beginning I visited my new friend in the white villa nearly every afternoon, and when I returned to Kongslund, Magna looked at me inquisitively, as if she wanted to say, “Don’t tire old Magdalene. She’s had a hard life.” But she didn’t say anything.
Magdalene told me the story of the home I would never leave. Her great-grandfather built Kongslund—and later the villa next door for himself—but both he and Magdalene’s parents had died, and she lived alone. She came from a family of pastors
who’d
been closely connected to the old writer of psalms, Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, and for that reason the family’s daughter had been given the practically biblical name of Ane Marie Magdalene Rasmussen. I laughed when she told me. Her cerebral palsy was severe, and yet she was so vital that everyone who met her felt a breeze from Heaven, as if the Lord himself breathed onto the world through her. Even though her body was completely contorted and had been since birth, she radiated a strength that delighted everyone—whether she rattled or snorted or sat in her wheelchair by a window, completely still, reading aloud from one of her favorite fairy tales:
Thumbelina
,
The Ugly Duckling
,
The Nightingale
,
The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf
. From her very first days onward,
she’d
been surrounded by trees and water and birds and especially children—all those who had passed through Kongslund.
Because of her paralysis, speaking in an intelligible fashion was agonizingly difficult, but over the years
she’d
trained her throat and vocal cords to shape the words she wanted to use. She told me—and it was quite true—that King Frederik VII bequeathed his old telescope to Magdalene’s paternal grandfather, who passed it on to his grandchild who could then, at a distance, observe the world she would never really enter.
When she was roughly twenty-five, she made a decision so incredible that word of mouth carried it all along Strandvejen: she intended to learn to write. Her parents eventually gave in to their stubborn daughter’s absurd wish and bought her a slim, black fountain pen with her initials engraved in tiny, thin gold letters. And all summer and winter, the young woman could be seen at her table before the window with a view of the beeches, bent over her notebook, shaping the tricky little letters into words, one by one.
The following summer, when she sat on the patio connecting her letters, her parents saw the furious flash of both God and the Devil in her half-closed eyes.
During the third summer she looped her words together. With a patience no one comprehended, she pushed them onto the paper, line by line, arch by arch, sometimes only ten or twelve a day, sometimes a complete sentence—and this is how life began for her on the neat white paper in her lap. For this body that would never give birth or be loved by anyone besides her family, the words were presumably the only way to realize her dream of telling her own story, of living on when she was dead and gone. Magdalene wrote about the area around Kongslund and about Skodsborg Hill and the people she observed. One page a month—and in a year or eighteen months, she would fill half a notebook (back when she was young and energetic). In her whole life, she managed to fill twelve diminutive volumes—just as many as there were beech trees on the slope by her house—and in her diaries, I found the genesis of the majestic mansion, with its seven chimneys, that was my home. I read about Magna’s arrival—right before the war—and about the mystery of Kongslund.
There are children who are born in darkness and are unwanted
, she wrote in May 1961, in the aftermath of the discovery of the foundling.
The following summer she added six lines:
The six children who were in the infant room have now all been adopted. Only the seventh child, the one who went through so many surgeries, remains. It is a girl: she is physically defective, but she is beautiful nonetheless.
This was the beginning of our bond, though I didn’t know it then.
She had followed my life year after year, regularly making notes—some of which I would recognize as I grew older. When I was seven I was given, with much fanfare, my own apartment directly above the infant room. This was two years after Magna officially became my foster mother. The governesses filled my new home with a carpet of flowers for the occasion, and the scent lingered in the house for weeks. Magna put my little wooden bed in the room, along with a wicker chair (a present from a Norwegian delegation). By all accounts, it was a great solution. “Marie is so excited about her new home!” Magna’s voice echoed throughout the high-ceilinged rooms.
Yet one day after returning from a visit with Magdalene, I nonetheless asked: “Why was I never adopted?” It was, perhaps, the most fundamental question in my life.
My foster mother looked directly at me for a long moment, and I felt disapproval piercing her love. She smelled of the yellow freesia whose stems
she’d
crushed to bits with a hammer so they would survive longer. Her thick fingers were stained yellow-green.
At last she leaned forward and hugged me tightly. “Oh, but Marie, your hinges were a little crooked when you arrived,” she said. “That’s why we decided that even families who were capable of adopting such a child needed to be extraordinarily well suited. We couldn’t risk having them tire of the trouble after a few years and simply return you.”
Return me.
“Was I that much trouble?” I asked.
Along with the freesia, I could now smell peppermint lozenges and cheroot smoke.
I waited for the answer, holding my breath.
“Most wanted children who were one hundred percent healthy, Marie, even if that meant waiting a couple years.” She took my hand. “ ‘She looks cute, but she’s sewn together a little oddly.’ That’s what they’d say.” Magna sighed deeply. “And if there were other kids in their circle of friends, well, you could be a little frightening because of your unusual
…
”—she sighed even deeper—“because of your unusual facial features.”
“Did they have other children then?”
Early on, Magna and I developed a habit of talking past one another. But it didn’t seem to bother her, because she was always able to stick to her train of thought.
“There were a few who fell for you, Marie,” she said. “But by the time they had gone through the extended interviews and home visits
…
” She let go of my hand. “When the social workers investigated their background
…
” She looked out over the sound and Hven. “Well, it could be a very prolonged ordeal.”
She sighed for the third and final time.
“I’ve never seen a real bedroom,” I said, on the verge of tears.
“But you
have
a real bedroom,” she said. “You’ve got the best room of all—the king himself designed it for us!”
“Was he my dad?”
“We gave you the best home we could find. Here, with us,” she said solemnly, wrapping her bear arms reassuringly around my crooked shoulder. “You know all the best homes are by the water.” She squeezed me tight. I said nothing more.
Days passed. I shuffled endlessly along the long corridors where I often whispered to myself like some ghost, steadily dragging the Japanese pull-along elephant after me on the short, rusty chain I’d found in the basement and cinched around its neck; it wasn’t going anywhere. At night I got up from bed and walked over to the mirror, which was cut from the most beautiful mahogany and embellished with gold. Maybe if I stared into the damn thing long enough, the lopsided cheekbones, the fallen cheek, and the lone staring eye would transform. But these kinds of miracles are the stuff of dreams. In reality, the mirror soon felt a little put out by all the attention and finally asked the burning question that had always passed between us: “Who is the ugliest of them all?”