The Seventh Child (15 page)

Of course you should.

That day I dragged my Japanese pull-along elephant onto the pier and unhitched its rusty chain, letting it roll by itself into the sea. I stared into the bubbling water where it had disappeared and felt nothing. Then rage filled me, and I turned away from the water and the distant island.

I’d finally found my courage.

In the beginning my sources for locating the children in the photo included Magna’s scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings and postcards, and my discreet conversations with governesses and assistants—especially Gerda Jensen, who sensed that I was moving into dangerous (and surely forbidden) territory but doubtlessly found an element of her own strength in my tenacity. I was a precocious child.

One day she happened to casually reveal where Magna kept her spare key for the office that contained all Kongslund’s old records, and it was such a precious and astonishing confidence that we instinctively lowered our voices to a whisper and kept them at that level for several minutes. It’s a secret I have never shared with anyone because the records contain information about thousands of adoptive families and the children, information that no outsider ought to have.

I let myself into the office, and on the shelves over the desk were the documents held in ring binders: blue for Danish children, green for the Greenlandic children (who arrived in the 1960s and 1970s), yellow for the Korean children and children of other nationalities (they arrived in the 1970s and 1980s), and brown for the children now residing in the home.

I was interested in the blue binders, which provided a curious person with the children’s original names: what they were called before their mother gave them up; what they were called when they were here; and finally what Magna had recorded when they had a new family. Of course most had changed names, because many adoptive parents have a strong desire to erase the past—not least the memory of the biological parents—as efficiently as possible. Many years later, those adopted children could try to locate their roots by using the official records, but from time to time the papers were missing, or their biological source had disappeared. And in those cases, they would only be able to track them down using the details Magna had so carefully recorded in her binders, which she didn’t dare hand over to Mother’s Aid Society.

This treasure trove stood on the shelves in her office next to a chrome statue of Sir Winston Churchill, a distinction awarded to the orphanage in recognition of its effort during the Resistance. I locked the door and began my long-lasting and systematic search, guided by Magdalene’s soft whisper. In the beginning she had spoken to me with the same lisp
she’d
had when alive, but for some reason that I didn’t understand it had nearly vanished by the end of the first year after the funeral.

My search focused on seven stories, or, rather, six, since I knew my own.

I climbed onto a chair and lifted the big blue binders from the shelves. I put them on my lap and turned the pages patiently, the way that children who have learned patience are able to. For hours, I sat in Magna’s elegant antique birch-tree sofa with the gray silk upholstery, studying my findings. When I found one of the children I was searching for (and who could be traced to the infant room, Christmas 1961), I wrote the name on a pad along with the words from the adjacent columns in the records. Later, Magdalene helped me interpret the information from her heavenly perch. We would whisper eagerly back and forth, but fall silent whenever we heard creaking in the old house. Magna moved about as though she knew I was up to something. But her sound and familiar scent of freesia and cheroot smoke always gave her away.

This first part of the hunt lasted over a year—and my tension grew to palpable nervousness. It was only because my foster mother’s workload had ballooned during that time that she didn’t discover what was going on. Whenever she took the bus to Mother’s Aid Society in Copenhagen, I locked myself in her office and continued my investigation. Fortunately these were long days away for Magna. Mother’s Aid Society in its undisputed wisdom determined the outcome of the many adoption cases that were placed on its table. On those visits Magna would sit at one end of the table and the almighty Mrs. Krantz at the other.

One time, my foster mother had mistaken the meeting date—Easter Monday—and had to leave Mother’s Aid Society empty-handed.
She’d
insisted, of course, that the other nine members of the council had made the mistake (as far as she was concerned, they’d all noted the wrong date in their calendars). I only just managed to put the two binders back on the shelf, lock the door from the inside, and jump behind the heavy mahogany reading chair that was Magna’s pride and had belonged to Captain Olbers (upholstered in light-blue buffalo skin brought from the Congo) before I heard her on the stairs.

The chair hid me completely. For close to three hours, I lay huddled up awkwardly and deathly silent while she worked at her desk. This was not a particularly difficult feat for a child who had spent many years lying still and staring into complete darkness, waiting for morning to arrive.

My investigation picked up speed during the fall of 1971—two years after Magdalene’s funeral—and it grew more intense as time passed. After I’d exhausted the records, I moved on to Magna’s letters, which were by the window in the tall hutch whose drawers opened and closed easily and soundlessly. After that I began studying her notes and listening in on her conversations. The door to her office was almost always open. Now and then I picked up relevant information, because she still used the children’s nicknames whenever she contacted the families that had adopted them: Tønde, Butte, and Marilyn (after the actress), de Gaulle, Khrushchev, and Little Gagarin (after the Russian cosmonaut). There was even one called Prince Knud because he was so slow and such a terrible walker, just as the queen’s Uncle Knud had supposedly been.

Some of the adoptive parents
who’d
told their children about the orphanage in Skodsborg regularly visited the home. Orla Berntsen was one of these children. For over a year I’d had a duplicate of his journal in a ring binder of my own, which I hid with the other notes in the tall cabinet, behind the lemon-tree carvings, in the secret compartment Magna never found.

Later, I sat in my old friend’s wheelchair staring out at the sound toward the Swedish coast.

What’s on your mind, Marie?
she asked from up above, as patiently as when
she’d
been alive. Often she comforted me with long stories about the King of the People, who had always fascinated her and who
she’d
finally located on the Other Side.

“More than anything I want to know how they live,” I said, staring into the mirror, wishing I could melt into her on the Other Side. I knew
she’d
understand; we hated our shared ugliness. I think the mirror sensed our joint strength and kept quiet for once.

Well, I understand that,
my friend said.

“Maybe I could
…
?”

Of course you can, Marie. But you’ll have to be careful and keep a distance. Don’t reveal who you are, because they don’t remember Kongslund—and maybe their parents never told them about us.

“Yes, of course,” I said impatiently. “I get it,” I added in a weak attempt to convince her that I wouldn’t do anything rash.

We talked every night, after Kongslund had settled, about my investigations and about our careful notes and our expectations for the discoveries that lay ahead of us—and I was finally ready.

Early one morning, I got up and unfastened the telescope from the brass mounting plate that held it to the wheelchair, put it into a gray shoulder bag, and took the bus to the Town Hall Square. From there I went to Emdrup Square and then Søborg Square, where I changed to line 168 that dropped me off at the corner of Gladsaxevej and Maglegaards Boulevard, and then followed the street signs to the red brownstones I was searching for.

Everything was as I had imagined from the few scraps of information I’d gleaned from Magna’s secret journals. This became my favorite trip during the first summer of my new life, and I repeated it time and time again without telling anyone but Magdalene, who I knew would keep quiet regardless of how her new world was put together. She wouldn’t even tell the King of the People (whom for some reason, I was sure she was courting).

Orla was the first one that I sought because he was the one I remembered the best when he visited Kongslund as a child with his mother. On a piece of paper in a ring binder containing medical notes, someone had written:
Psychologist dispatched to Søborg again, Orla Pil Berntsen. A grave case, urgent.

To me, it seemed very dramatic and it stretched my curiosity to the limit.

From my hiding place in the wetlands, I spied through Magdalene’s telescope, Orla crouching on a boulder. There he sat, dreaming and nervously sniffling at all the troubles that awaited him back at home—and in the distant future. Children sense these kinds of things. If anyone had ever predicted then he would ascend to the second-most important position at the Ministry of National Affairs, no one would have believed it.

At night I returned home and wrote down all the details, keeping long, painstaking journals the way my foster mother had always done.

While all the other children sat in their comfortable playrooms with their Meccano construction sets, I struggled to put together all the screws and joints of the life I had spied on. My increasing absence was never really noticed because in those years, after the legalization of abortion made it necessary to adopt children from ever more distant parts of the globe, Magna ruled her orphanage with an incredible energy. The way she saw it, I was fully repaired and able to take care of myself. And just to assure her of that, I sometimes told her I was going for a walk in Jægersborg Deer Park with a friend named Lise (who didn’t exist except in some old children’s song). Absurd as it was, she must have accepted it, because she never even asked me where this Lise lived.

During those months, I went off to meet the world I’d always known existed out there. And what I discovered was that I envied and feared the life I found with a force nobody had warned me about. Maybe, in her supernatural state, Magdalene couldn’t see the danger. She had already once failed to see the demons that lived so deep in the core of my being.

Or maybe she simply understood that no warning would have stopped me.

7

ORLA

1961–1974

The first night after her death, Magdalene underscored the point that applies to every child, which I would never forget:
If you find a friend, you’ve got a chance. If you find none, you will succumb
. Nobody knew this better than she.

Orla’s short and brutal childhood is, as I see it, the story of parents who thoughtlessly repeated the sins of their fathers and mothers, and this includes most parents.

In some children the fear grows unobserved, and the adults who ought to be closest discover nothing; perhaps they hear a sound behind a wall one night when everything is supposed to be quiet but think nothing of it—and therefore continue the destruction.

I always thought of him as Orla the Lonely because he fled through the row-house subdivision as though he had entire regiments of demons nipping at his heels, and nobody intervened. I know that some of the psychologists at Kongslund were scared of him outright, not least after the killing of the Fool in the wetlands.

Hidden behind a hawthorn early one spring, I observed Orla Berntsen. His middle name, Pil, derived from a father
he’d
never known and, strictly speaking, couldn’t prove existed.

There he was, eleven years old, in the shade behind the garages in the Glee Court subdivision, with thick lips and a freckled nose smack in the middle of his pear-shaped face, all of it surrounded by the bristly, blond hair that he never really combed. A short, stocky boy who exaggerated his innate clumsiness to play the role of the clown to his mates and who always tried his hand at breakneck performances; always laughing a little too loudly and speaking a little too fast, running some twenty-five feet behind the other boys; always the last in the line when teams were picked for soccer games in the wetlands. There he stood at the conclusion of the game—unchosen, unwanted, laughing at himself—because what else could he do?

The other boys terrified him with stories of the wetlands’ infamous child molester and ran hooting through the woods as they fled haunting spirits and demons, leaving him standing on the wrong side of the bridge—in the little grove to the east of the creek—with fantasies so menacing that his knees trembled and his freckled nose sniffled from sheer horror.

As if anyone in his wildest imagination would ever consider kidnapping little Orla Pil Berntsen, the illegitimate child of Gurli Berntsen, single mother and office mouse, barely tolerated in their petit bourgeois suburb.

It was a preposterous thought.

His mother was respectable, no doubt about that, but
she’d
become so too late, many thought, and Orla was proof of that. He was an illegitimate child at the tail end of an era when those who weren’t part of an unbreakable family were considered alien, and the one held responsible for this sin (and who was therefore the target of all condemnation) was always the woman who raised the child on her own.

His childhood neighborhood consisted of two short streets and three low townhouses inhabited by office workers, civil servants, school teachers, and, all the way down by the garages, a retired tobacconist who owned two white poodles. One beautiful spring day, a tall, stooped pianist moved into No. 14 with his wife and two sons. He would fold his long body over the grand black piano and pour onto the keys all the melancholy of this Copenhagen suburb, concluding with a bass tone that reverberated in the walls long after
he’d
closed the instrument. One sunny Sunday, the piano tones drifted out the open patio door, over the hedges, and across the lawns from patio to patio where fathers, weeding their gardens, growled as they grudgingly tolerated these exercises. After all, the man did play on National Radio between reports from Vietnam and Suez and news of street riots in Copenhagen and Paris. His keystrokes were so powerful that they blew the evil away, leaving only a soft clatter from the silver spoons on the cake trays under the sunshades.

One day something strange happened, something that nobody was really able to explain. As the music gained strength, the pianist’s two sons would always run back and forth in the yard as though whipped by an invisible baton, and on this particular afternoon they ran ever faster up and down the long, narrow patch of grass, like two crazy notes in an insane score, up and down and up and down, until the tempo had reached its climax and they managed the impossible: to fall at the same spot within seconds of each other and bite off the tips of their tongues with identical precision. Both were taken by ambulance to the emergency room at Bispebjerg Hospital where doctors performed two small, parallel miracles as they stitched the two tongue tips back on.

In this newly constructed suburban neighborhood where everybody sort of knew everybody yet knew nothing for sure, this bizarre coincidence made both children and adults wonder whether there might be a higher power up there—a shared destiny connecting people and controlling life’s chain of events. For Orla Berntsen, who watched the ambulances arrive and depart, the episode signified something altogether different and much more mundane. In the end, the younger brother had fallen first, and as a single child, Orla understood that the older brother had known and accepted his fate ever since
he’d
first seen his brother in the crib. To fall and bite off his tongue a few seconds later was just a small part of his universal duty, an example of the unconditional love that Orla knew existed but had never experienced himself: the love of a brother, the loyalty of a friend, an unbreakable camaraderie, knowing that one is contained inside another regardless of what happens.

Without a doubt, I was the only one who heard his weeping as he walked home, alone, as always.

Very quickly I understood that Orla Berntsen’s problems were of a completely different nature than two bitten-off tongues, and unlike those tongues they couldn’t be reattached with some surgical thread and the sincere efforts of a good doctor. Sometimes he didn’t leave the house for days, and no one knew why. Then he showed up again, a little more hunched than normal, paler, nervously sniffling, his clear brown eyes like glass and his mop of hair sticking out as though
he’d
just arisen from a gravel heap. There were rumors that his mother beat him, but no one could prove it (and, besides, it was their own business, people at Glee Court thought).

Every afternoon when Gurli Berntsen returned from the office, she sat down in a blue armchair by the west-facing window and read
Billed Bladet
, exploring the parallel universe where her dreams lived. From a distance, I tried to figure out what she was seeing and what she was longing for, but I never succeeded. And it has occurred to me since that her silence, as she was sitting there, was one of the main forces that drove Orla toward the wetlands and the creek where his life’s worst disaster occurred.

So maybe she should have told him everything before it was too late.

About her pregnancy and her shame.

About the man who disappeared. About the smell of damp, unclean carpets and study rooms. About the view to the garden where
she’d
grown up, and the feeling on her skin of the red kimono that had belonged to her mother and her grandmother before that, and which had lain on her flat, shiny stomach when
she’d
committed her irrevocable sin.

About her father who sat in the wing chair, rubbing his strong thumbs on the armrest, in eternally circling movements, round and round and round, traveling across the ridges in the cloth where the blue plush had once been, as though this is all that remained of the grand and mighty life force that was ebbing away.

For this kind of retirement, reproach is like a gift; he didn’t even have to look at his daughter, all he had to do was fix his gaze on the naked wall above her head and keep quiet as his fingers did the talking, speaking to her across generations through the threadbare cloth, letting her know that sin had arrived in the life of a reckless woman, the greatest sin of all: to give birth to a fatherless child.

During those years, no one could escape so egregious a sin. No one would forget it. Reproach would be present at every single moment and in every single thought for the rest of her life. No motherly or fatherly love was strong enough to erase it.

When Gurli Berntsen realized this truth, she swallowed a whole bottle of the strongest sleeping pills she could find and slept for three days before waking and throwing up for another three days. Two days later she slid down into the harbor basin by Svanemøllen Station, but she was discovered by a passerby and dragged out.

The hospital reported the incident to her parents in Jutland; her father reacted—as men of his type do in that situation—with anger. Naturally. But in the end, there are stronger forces in the world than male rage, as Magda and her girls had always demonstrated (if Kongslund symbolized anything, that was it), and on the third day after the second suicide attempt, Gurli’s mother withdrew the family’s entire savings and bought No. 12 in the newly built townhouse subdivision, with the long and narrow backyards and the sheltering hedges. Shortly thereafter, Orla was born.

The young woman gave birth to her son at Obstetric Ward B at Rigshospital, and she begged the young nurses to take her child away, away from her belly, away from her shame. But her mother, Orla’s grandmother, had the brand new baby baptized in the hospital church, and in a prescient moment, gave him her husband’s middle name so the little one came to carry his grandfather’s name—a decision that demonstrated the insight of such women into issues of masculine self-esteem.

Reluctantly, the new grandfather entered the church and for a moment let his fingers rest on the hard armrest of the pew as he growled something that might have been interpreted as an “amen.” Quite surprisingly, his hands were calm throughout the ceremony, as though filled with heavenly peace.

Little Orla had finally found a family.

The next day he lost it again—for a while at any rate—when he was driven by taxi to Kongslund. Here the strong governesses of Mother’s Aid Society would take care of him until his mother recovered (much to her father’s surprise, given all the support he felt she had gotten, she had become depressed) and could set up her new home. This account, which Orla later stitched together from his mother’s rare confidences and his annual visits with Magna, was made of something altogether different than the stories of the adopted children; that much he understood, even at an age when you’re supposed to be too young to understand. His mother had deliberately condemned him to the orphanage while she considered whether he was worth living for—and more than anything to protect herself.

Because of her indecisiveness, he had been at the infant room, in the dark, much too long and had himself become part of the endless span of time that filled Kongslund’s children with such terror. Even the psychologists at the institution didn’t understand it.

When he finally came home, Gurli showed him his room, put him to bed, and sat down in the blue wingback chair
she’d
inherited from her father who had died the year before. She would put her restless fingers on the armrest, and they would quiver every time she thought of the man
who’d
been her father, whom
she’d
buried with a feeling she was afraid to confide to anyone.

After a few nights, when she thought she could hear her son whimpering behind the wall, she gave him the photo of a smiling man throwing an orange beach ball into the air (she had cut it out of a magazine). The man stood in the sun laughing to the little boy on the beach, and the ball floated upward, almost infinitely, into the sky. She told her son that his father’s name was Pil, and therefore it had become Orla’s middle name.

Unfortunately, she told Orla, his father had gone abroad to find a place where the three of them could live together, and he hadn’t yet returned.

Over the following years Orla read about men like him in his collect
ion of
illustrated classics
:
The Deer Slayer, Ivanhoe,
and
Captain Grant
—who left behind their children as they struggled their way across glaciers and over mountain passes. And as time passed, he began to understand that happy endings were inevitable in such fairy tales only if you waited long enough. Granted, Fate had led his father away from him, but only for a while. One day he would return to Orla.