The Seventh Child (14 page)

There was nothing more to be said. The retired homicide chief hung up the phone.

Under no circumstances would he approach the man everyone at headquarters had feared right up until that day when
he’d
retired. Of course, Malle never really retired, he set up his own private security consulting business instead, utilizing his contacts with top officials and politicians that had made him the de facto ruler at headquarters for two decades. People were aware of his power, and they fell silent in his presence; where Carl Malle was, fear reigned. And neither the retired chief inspector nor his wife, who obsessed about nothing other than their daughter and the flowers in her garden, wanted to reawaken this fear.

The mystery of the dead woman would have to remain buried in the sand.

6

MAGDALENE

May 7, 2008

Of course Carl Malle had to visit Magna, his old ally. I had no doubt he would.

But even if they’d talked all through the evening they’d still be at wit’s end. They can’t stop the chain of events the letters have set in motion.

If anyone recognizes the name—John Bjergstrand—they’ll get in touch with the newspaper and later with the TV stations, of this I am certain. And they will follow up on the case (with its strong undertone of sex and scandalous deception). Danes like to gossip, and the country is, as Knud Taasing had already written in his paper, quite small. If anybody or anything stood out, it will attract attention.

During these first few days, all signs indicate that he will be proven right.

Fate had its own plans—as always—and perhaps it was my love for Magdalene that started it all.

I was only eight years old when she died, and I cried for eight days; we had only two years together, and that’s too few when you’re that young. Seventy-two years separated us, and she left me—at least in the physical world—the night humankind first set foot on another celestial body; it was peculiar. I’ve always had a feeling that the two events were somehow connected.

I sat on my foster mother’s lap in Søllerød Church as we sang for the dead. I believe the pastor sensed that this ceremony was something extraordinary. The impressive Mrs. Krantz from Mother’s Aid Society was there, as were the governesses and assistants, and so too the new psychologist. My foster mother, Magna, sang the verses of Brorson’s Psalm 15—“Rise up, all things that God has made”—so boisterously that you could almost imagine the words flying over the altar, bumping into the thick, whitewashed walls, and echoing back to the congregation, as though Jesus were out there in the Nothingness, rapping on the church spire with his divine walking cane that made even the blind see.

“How shall I praise the evening sky, the many stars there blinking?” the psalm resounded. And in this good company it really was no question, not to this star parade of Good Women.

I thought of Magdalene and her fears, not of death but of everything else that was about to happen. Her passage into the Land of the Dead, for which she naturally had a plan. “I gather they don’t have wheelchair ramps,” she spluttered a few days prior to the moon landing, before
she’d
cackled and draped herself over her armrest as though struck by a horrible cramp.

During her final year, she had grown more and more certain that her deformed body wouldn’t fit into a normal coffin, and for that reason
she’d
taken precautions to avoid such humiliation. On a piece of loose-leaf paper
she’d
folded up her funeral wishes and filed them in her oak hutch. The same hutch that held her notebooks and the telescope that had belonged to King Frederik VII.

When I am dead, I want to be buried under the Great Beech next to my parents. But don’t put me in a coffin, because that would be embarrassing to all parties, not least to the person writing these words. If my eternally deformed body has to be squeezed into one of those narrow things they sell at the funeral home in Skodsborg, I prefer cremation.

And for good measure,
she’d
added:
I don’t want people to feel ashamed
for me in death. I don’t want any stories to be told about how they had to tuck my arms close to my body and dislocate my knees to make me fit.

Magdalene always thought of others.

I assume they’ll be able to maneuver me into the oven the way I am. In any case, it would be a shame (and an expense) to burn a perfectly good and spacious coffin,
she wrote,
and underscored the last seven words:
They can just leave the wheelchair outside
. She had always been surprisingly practical, and even those basic guidelines must have taken her about a month to write.

Magna, who as the matron of an orphanage was as practical as the deceased, got the wheelchair from the undertaker following the cremation; you never knew when a child might need such an aid. I found it in the janitorial closet and brought it to my room. Every time I felt overwhelmed in missing my friend, I would sit in it. Curiously, every time I sat in it over the years, my longing grew; in the end I spent more time in this sunken monstrosity than in my own mahogany chair made by Thomas Chippendale himself.

People must have thought I was growing stranger. Lonely children develop an ability to make themselves invisible in almost every situation and place. During the years after Magdalene’s death, I became more and more taciturn and practically unnoticeable to adult eyes. For children with the ability, this power is easily invoked, and it resembles the condition of a mirage. You come and go as you please. To many adults, such semi-invisible children can be very disturbing, because they have access to a world they themselves are afraid to visit—and in my case, it was even worse, because no one knew where I came from or where I was going. When visible, I would suddenly enter a room where Magna was hosting fine company and instantly draw all attention to me. I’d stand on the rya, all five feet four of me, like a crooked stem in a mound of soil, with my dark, peculiar aura. I think I knew what they feared when they saw a small child like that.

Magna would laugh aloud to alleviate the tension. “Here at Kongslund we’re in the unique situation of being wholly uninformed about
both ends
of our lives,” she said by way of explanation for the strange child in the doorway. She who could trace her lineage from Børkop through Gauerlund, Gårslev, and Smidstrup parishes, for more than three centuries and eight generations; she, who for a lifetime had been Denmark’s most famous and renowned orphanage director, was unable to understand the most fundamental longing of the lonely child.

What happened after the moon landing and Magdalene’s funeral was therefore quite natural. I have never thought of it as a miracle or a wonder—or as a sign from God or the Devil, both of whom had been banished from this place anyway. My friend simply awakened and returned to me, as though
she’d
never left. Only she stepped into my life gracefully this time, as though
she’d
never suffered any deformity.

I simply assume that she, after being happily released from her earthly body and getting well-deserved rest in Heaven, relished the joy of speaking with her alter ego—the orphan Marie at Kongslund.

Don’t worry about me, Marie. I am with the King of the People, the one who built your home, and we’re dancing under the heavenly beeches, due west of the Andromeda Galaxy. There is no place in the universe more beautiful than this!

Andromeda.
I cried. I was that happy for her.

In the beginning she merely listened to my worries, however large or small, and advised me to avoid the children up at Strandvejen who bullied me about my crooked shoulders and called me the Eskimo because of my cockeyed face under the dark, bristly hair (though it had become lighter over the years).

For they know not what they are doing
, my best friend whispered conciliatorily and with such new and rich wisdom from the Other Side that even I, at age eight, envied her death.
Renounce them and forget them, disappear into yourself
.

It was ancient advice and more of a relief than anyone could imagine.

Soon she was with me everywhere as I plodded along with the old elephant on its chain. And I am sure she deliberately led me to those places that
she’d
long ago decided I should see.

Of course what had to happen did, what we together decided. One day when I stepped into my foster mother’s living room—once again silencing the visitors until they became insecure and lowered their gazes—there was, to my surprise, a little boy in one of Magna’s antique canapés. We studied one another for a while (without any direct eye contact, of course); the living room was practically void of air, and several of the adults had violent coughing fits. With great effort, Magna broke the spell. “Say hello to Orla,” she said, looking directly at me and pointing at the squat little boy with freckles on his nose. “He lived here once. Here at Kongslund, with you. You were in the Elephant Room together.” Then she roared with laughter that sounded like rolling thunder at midsummer. The boy didn’t even blink. Clearly he was one of ours.

In that exact moment I knew he felt the same way I did, and that we both carried silence as a shield when we were among adults. We understood each other’s thoughts perfectly, as though we were shouting with the full force of our voices. And on the occasion of our future reunion, we would form the sentence that all children at Kongslund have learned:
Dear God! Don’t leave us here! For Heaven’s sake!

When I turned nine a few days later, Magdalene discreetly reminded me of her journals, which I had hidden in my bureau—because now I was old enough to read them thoroughly and in order. It was time, she decided, that I gained insight into the world of which I’d become a part.

She had observed thirty-four cohorts of Kongslund children in her time. As I read, she sat in the empty wheelchair by the window and answered all of my questions.

In her words, I saw myself for the first time, standing outside on the past’s steep entrance.

Once again Marie has been down by the water and scolded by Ms. Ladegaard. She seems both willful and stubborn. I think she resembles me,
she wrote in a notebook covering the years 1961 through 1964.

I turned a couple of pages back:
How innocent they are! Today is Constitution Day and there is a flag parade on the lawn. Marie is standing next to Putte and Jønne. Ms. Jensen is holding her hand.

From the previous year, I found one of the more rare autumn notes. November 1963:
President Kennedy has been assassinated. Oh to be a child and know nothing of such wicked times.

Finally I flicked all the way back to the date that was central to my and Kongslund’s story—May 13, 1961. Here
she’d
written:
Sometimes in life you see something you don’t understand and you have no one to share it with.

Even with these few words, I sensed that
she’d
witnessed something very extraordinary, and that’s how I read them:
I had awoken early and heard steps in the gravel.

Without a doubt, she was the only living witness to the arrival of the tiny foundling.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I followed the incident through the king’s telescope. If only my curiosity could sometimes be less strong. It was a messenger, and not a mother. I saw that right away. She simply placed the little one on the steps; there was no farewell, no grief.

She described the arrival of the woman with the carry-cot and her dash back across the slope, and explained how the blockheaded governess, Agnes, had stepped outside a short time later and called for help. How Magna had come running, grabbed the cot, and disappeared into the big villa. And a few weeks later, she concluded with the simple observation that summed up my first weeks at Kongslund:
Some children are born in Darkness and wanted by no one.

In that moment, I heard her voice as clearly as if
she’d
been sitting right there in the wheelchair, hanging crookedly over the armrest like she used to.

Of course you have to find out what happened to them!

She laughed and grabbed my hands.

By that point,
she’d
been dead for more than a year.

Of course you have to find the children who have left Kongslund. Not your parents, who are irrevocably lost, but the children who left and now have their own families. Of course you should make certain there is a home and a bed at the other end. Like here.

I went up to the King’s Room and studied the photo of the seven children in the Elephant Room at Christmas 1961: Orla with his silent, piercing eyes, Asger smiling at the sky, Peter under the branch with his drum, where he had been taught to sit
…