The Seventh Child (20 page)

“Did you receive a letter?”

The question was unexpected. Knud was a good journalist, and the pause revealed the truth before Peter had time to deny it. “Yes,” he said. Few reporters in the country were at his level. Maybe only a handful.

“Same wording?”

“Yes.”

“If you want my help after all these years, you have to be
honest
,” Knud said, emphasizing the last word.

Peter sensed his former friend’s detachment. It had formed after they parted, like a thin shield against what had happened to him at school—which, in the end, had cost Knud’s father his life.

“Would it be possible to find some of the former top leaders of Mother’s Aid Society?”

“Maybe,” Peter replied without any conviction.

“
Maybe.
What about the old director? What was her name?”

“Mrs. Krantz. She’s senile now.”

“I’ve tried to get ahold of Magna Ladegaard. She’s somehow involved. But she’s terrified. She doesn’t want to say anything at all.”

“So you believe the story—that the rich were assisted in ridding themselves of the unwanted results of their extramarital affairs? The children of famous men?”

The journalist ignored the question, asking instead, “Who was in the infant room with you? Susanne Ingemann won’t tell me. But you visited the orphanage after you
…
” He suddenly stopped.

Peter considered the question for a moment. “I’m pretty sure about three of them,” he finally said. “The first is Orla Berntsen, whom we already know, and the second is an attorney you might know—an immigration attorney by the name of Søren Severin Nielsen. It’s really quite an amazing coincidence. In one newspaper profile, Søren Severin once revealed that he lived with Orla Berntsen at the Regensen dormitory when he was a young student. Given that they’re on opposite sides of the big refugee cases, that’s quite striking. Probably no one knows that they also spent time together as infants in an orphanage. They must have had a falling out somewhere along the way.”

Knud said nothing, and Peter understood the silence. Friends let each other down.

“And then there’s Marie Ladegaard, the girl who was adopted by the matron herself. I believe there was also a guy named Asger, whom Marie once told me about. He was placed with a family in Aarhus on Jutland. I haven’t talked to her in many years.”

So they all seemed to be afflicted with some kind of fear
…

“I haven’t been able to reach Marie at all. When are you planning to broadcast?”

“Right before the anniversary.”

“So, we know about you, Orla, the attorney, Marie, and maybe a boy by the name of Asger. But that leaves two, right?” He was insistent. “Who the hell are the last two
…
a girl and a boy.”

“I don’t know.”

“The boy is the interesting one in this case. If anyone can get it out of Magna or Marie, it would be you. I think there’s a great story here. I can feel it.” He paused.

Peter could hear his former friend’s enthusiasm roaring like an ineluctable wave. Maybe
he’d
been just as certain when
he’d
made the mistake of his life.

“Listen. I really need this scoop
…
a genuinely true and revealing story. My dying paper needs it, and it’s letting me pursue it as long as it reeks of conspiracy with a pinch of class struggle.” Knud coughed. “They’d hate to miss out on the scandal that would emerge if a scaly creature from the past were to suddenly expose a beloved institution that protected scores of respectable citizens who impregnated poor girls who, in turn, put their vulnerable offspring up for adoption. And then in exchange for these protections the institution was protected and rewarded by a powerful government ministry. Christ. And with the party, the self-proclaimed party of solidarity, as the villain.”

Peter said nothing. Knud had always been more direct. The working-class kid and the chief medical doctor’s son; that’s how it had started.

He read the article once more after hanging up, highlighting the most important information with double underscores. Then he decided to make the inevitable phone call. He had the minister’s direct number.

“Almind-Enevold,” the man said when Peter picked up the phone. Nothing else. The call came through just half an hour later. Peter immediately recognized the characteristically soft, almost feminine voice.

He’d
met the party’s undisputed ideological hard-liner on numerous occasions;
he’d
interviewed him more than twenty times during his career as an anchor and host at Channel DK. “I’d like to talk to you about Kongslund, the orphanage in Skodsborg that you’ve supported since the 1960s,” he said, getting straight to the point. “This time around, I think an informal talk will be fine, but perhaps later we can do it on camera.”

There was a marked pause on the other end, quite uncharacteristic of the powerful man. “Kongslund
…
why?” The minister’s voice filtered through some static on the line. Peter shifted the phone in his hands.

“We’re developing a profile for the former matron’s anniversary,” he said. “I’d call it a piece of Danish history.”

“I thought Channel DK went after juicier stories.”

“We read the articles in
Independent Weekend
.”

“Sensationalism, Trøst, in a sensationalist tabloid. It shouldn’t have been printed.”

Peter narrowed his eyes, searching for just the right words. “The report mentions an anonymous letter,” he finally said.

“Listen, Trøst. I’d like to talk about the orphanage and about the at-risk children whom the Ministry of National Affairs has a clear interest in protecting, but—”

It sounded like the beginning of a campaign speech, and Peter interrupted him. “In our portrait, there will be room to talk about the past too.”

“Not if you’re basing it on the
Independent Weekend
article.”

“Can we meet and talk about this, before we record?”

Once again there was a long, uncharacteristic pause. For nearly five seconds he could hear the minister breathing as he considered the proposition. “Listen, Trøst. I’m going to a meeting with my constituency in Vejle tonight. I’ll stop by on the way, off the record, around five.” He hung up without saying good-bye.

Peter took the elevator to Eden and stood staring to the east, into the mist, until he found the blue shadow he guessed was Øresund, and beyond that, Sweden. A tall, beautiful man on top of the Cigar, a privileged man who could reach the most remote parts of the country with whatever message his superiors wanted to convey. But they would hardly care to disseminate a story that the Ministry of National Affairs opposed. For many years, the Professor had made sure to give exclusive attention to the ministry’s stream of releases: new immigration and refugee laws, instructions, and regulations; new rules for the issuing of visas, family reunification, and citizenship; observance of national holidays; and promotion of important debates concerning the country’s ailing cultural heritage, education, and—of course—foreigners.

But the Kongslund Affair wasn’t about foreigners, unless you classified the tens of thousands of adopted children as foreigners of that era, and Peter had never thought of himself that way. On the contrary, like the other Kongslund children
who’d
been adopted, he had gotten a new home, a second chance. They had all been helped. He studied the blue shadow in the horizon, and thought that it, in all its remoteness, symbolized the past
he’d
never been interested in. The child
he’d
once been had been left, unconditionally, in the care of the people
who’d
accepted him; he had traveled from an unknown past and was unaware of even his own place of birth.

Some adopted children, he knew, traced their roots when they were older. But he had never felt the urge to do that. Because it would be an act for which he couldn’t foresee a conclusion. It would mean losing control, and you didn’t do that in his world if you could help it.

He was nevertheless intrigued by how the anonymous letter had spooked the ministry to this extent. And the letter had caused something to stir inside of him too.

Maybe it was spite.

He saw the dead principal in front of him, and he closed his eyes. As always. How much did the anonymous letter writer know about his past?

10

PETER

1961–1973

I think the children in the Elephant Room knew the date of their departure long before they were carried into the arms of strangers. We said our good-byes silently, the way children do, and the message was passed unencumbered from bed to bed.

For some reason I always fell asleep before Magna’s song stopped, and I would dream that I was the one being escorted to one of the waiting cars in the driveway, prodded along by Magna’s endless chain of verses.

Peter was the next one to go. One morning his bed by the window was empty. In my dreams I saw him walking across the fine web that the governesses had spun for him, and he never stumbled or hesitated in the least.

At the end of the summer of 1972, I observed Orla intensely for several months, and I was no longer so sure I wanted to leave Kongslund for a family of my own.

I was frightened by his strange life in the row house, among children who scorned him, who treated him like some bothersome element in their midst—and around whom he nonetheless circled with ever-growing rage.

After my excursions, Magdalene often came for a night visit (she spent more and more of my daylight hours with her soul mate, the People’s King). On those evenings we would study my notes together and add comments before I hid them away, and it was she who suggested I take a look at another child from the Elephant Room.

Naturally, our eyes were drawn to Peter—Peter the Happy. In the Christmas photo from 1961, he is lying on the rug under the branch from which the drum ornament dangles, and he is smiling directly into the camera. No wonder the chatty governesses thought he looked like the young film star Poul Richardt. Magna’s most trusted assistant, Gerda Jensen, later told me how much they adored him.

I took the Strandvej bus through Skodsborg, Vedbæk, and Christiansgave and got off by Rungsted Harbor, which at that time consisted only of a pair of wooden piers and some small boats, as well as a little beach where the hippies sometimes sat in their thick Icelandic sweaters in the sun, smoking hash and drinking their homebrew. From there I walked the last stretch to the address I’d found in Magna’s secret books. It was a big white villa set within a lush and well-kept garden; there was a small, white bench under a tall elm, and Peter sat inside a ray of sunlight that had miraculously slipped through the foliage. Lying in some bushes, I watched the birds leap from the shadows and flock around him as if he were simply a mirage they didn’t need to take notice of. Through the telescope I studied his face. He didn’t notice. He never saw me.

For weeks, I hid behind the hedges and bushes that surrounded the magnificent garden that had become his, and in contrast to Orla’s world it was like gazing at Paradise itself. Everything was in bloom. If you were inclined to envy, it would sprout and grow and wind its way in and out of your heart, but only at a distance and only until the moment when you looked into the gray-blue eyes that millions of Danes would later see every single night. In his early childhood he possessed a truly mindboggling lack of self-assertiveness and an indifference to his own appearance that sharply contrasted with who he later became. Though he was the center of attention from his first day of school, he wasn’t spoiled by his popularity; it didn’t cause him to brag or boss others around, nor did it make him overlook the weakest in his cohort. On the contrary.

The private school he attended was a low, streamlined preserve for the children of the wealthy. It was adjacent to a small forest where, during recess, older students could go for strolls. A long gravel road led from Strandvejen to a wrought-iron gate that was opened in the morning and closed at night. The principal’s dogs—a couple of ferocious but scrawny dobermans that were chained behind a wire fence in a corner of the playground during the day—guarded the gate at night. If anyone came near the gate in the dark, you could hear the dogs barking, like a raging echo through the woods, and the more forbidding sound of hollow thudding when they rammed their lean bodies against the hated barrier. If the two beasts had been even a hair’s breadth thinner, they would have squeezed through the bars, and no doubt this was the terrifying image that kept burglars and potential pyromaniacs—indeed, any strangers—off the property.

The ruler of the private school was a man with the most ruthless disposition, feared by his 225 students for his quiet sarcasm and his sudden and explosive displays of wrath. To parents, he was always smiling, always at the ready with a well-chosen compliment about their diligent daughter or bright son—compliments that made the students’ descriptions of his roaring, rabid alter ego seem like poor excuses back in their nice homes on Strandvejen. Teary accusations of his sadism frequently resulted in an extra box on the ear and another grounding, and it was especially those parents whose offspring Nordal had complimented for their unstinting honesty who put the most zeal into their punishments.

Peter noted that these were the children Principal Nordal liked the least.

Early in the morning when his dogs were chained up, he sauntered down the path from his private residence with his gaze expectantly fastened on the driveway. In the middle of the courtyard he would pause for a moment under the giant linden tree, the pride of the school, and listen to the roar of the wind in its magnificent crown. Of course, he should have heard its premonition of his imminent death. But he didn’t. He had helped nurture the tree, and it had grown so tall that it had become a landmark for the entire area.

That the children continued to be tardy, in spite of the dobermans behind the fence, is a testament to humankind’s inherent desire for freedom. With the timidity of rebellion shining in their eyes, these offenders sidled through the big gate and were met with his furious shouts. When he bent over them his breath smelled like sulfur, lightning, and hydrogen chloride, and over time the students feared this nauseating stench more than his most sarcastic digs: “Did his Lordship have trouble getting his fat belly out from under the silk duvet?”
he’d
scream as he brutally grabbed an ear and yanked. “I’ll teach you how to get a move on, you little twit,”
he’d
add, throwing the student down on the gravel. “Goddamnit! I’ll teach you!” While the offender lay on his knees in his own vomit, the rector’s words would disappear in a foamy lather of cursing.

Parents in the suburban hinterlands of Hørsholm-Usserød rarely considered enrolling their children in the private school; and if they did, Principal Nordal would quickly put an end to it. He would not allow the sons and daughters of secretaries and sanitation workers at
his
school, and no proletarians would tarnish its distinguished reputation with common names like
Olsen
and
Jensen
and
Hansen
and—God forbid—
Pedersen
. A simple workman’s name.

Only one person in the entire county prevailed—even threatening to contact the newspaper in Usserød, during a time when it was practically Socialist—until the principal, thin and pale from anger, was forced to give in. The first representative of the world outside the tony towns of Vedbæk, Christiansgave, and Rungsted—where boys wore English blazers and became little patriarchs by the age of eight—entered class with his head bowed against his chest as if in shame. He didn’t look like any person—child or adult—that Peter had ever encountered. Ms. Iversen introduced the thin boy with longish hair, wearing a faded T-shirt. He stood by the blackboard, his shoulders slumped, resembling a miniature version of the teenagers the police had just beaten with batons in Copenhagen during the demonstrations against the World Bank and the Vietnam War. She pointed at a chair along the windows, and the boy sank into it, disappearing in an aura of aloofness that seemed to protect him from all the hostile gazes.

He would have been destroyed in any other class; his name alone would have ensured that. He pronounced it in a nearly inaudible whisper: Knud Mylius Taasing. And while his surname came from the Danish island that had been the home of his family for generations, his first and middle names were a result of his father’s enthusiastic adoration of the Greenland explorers Knud Rasmussen and Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen.

The latter, Ms. Iversen explained enthusiastically, had been a Danish hero, perhaps the greatest ever. He disappeared into the polar night in March 1907 near the seventy-ninth parallel north; his body was never found. In a loud voice she read from the last journal entry that her hero had made immediately before the expedition fell into the darkness, which made the explorer’s namesake redden like the final, desperate light in the polar night: “I turned thirty-five recently. In fifteen years, all my male vigor will be gone.”

Ms. Iversen’s hero worship incited hatred for the famous name among the other boys, and they resolutely changed the new boy’s name to
My
—after the large steam locomotives that pulled enormous carriages out of Copenhagen Central Station and across the country. They made faces and hissed from the sides of their mouths, as if they were letting steam out of overheated boilers, and My collapsed powerlessly between them. His father worked at the garment factory in Usserød, and if rumors were true, his hippie mother had died in Spain as the result of an overdose of pills and hashish.

Nevertheless, one day Peter invited My to his beautiful Rungsted garden, and they sat together on the bench under the elm, where his new friend suddenly asked a question that Peter, to his own surprise, somehow knew he would ask:

“How big was that tree when you were little?”

“Bigger than me at any rate,” Peter said with the superb logic that has enabled man to land on the moon and humankind to answer some of life’s most complicated questions.

My considered the terse response, but said nothing.

“No,” Peter said, before his friend could even voice the next question.

My nodded. He had been wondering whether the tree was ever going to be chopped down.

In the beginning My was a sulky, rather awkward child: a small, narrow-shouldered boy with thin, nervous fingers and dirty nails. Where Peter’s father was chief medical doctor with specialties in neurology and heart disease, Knud’s father would trundle off to work at 6:00 a.m., return by 4:00 p.m., remove his clothes, shower, and put on a T-shirt emblazoned with a black-and-white illustration of Vladimir Lenin. Then he would sit on the stoop of the apartment buildings on Usserød Kongevej with his newspaper, the Communist Party organ
The People
.

If Peter’s father was taciturn, Knud’s father, Hjalmar, was silent as the grave. In order to learn about My’s family, Peter studied the few details available in the apartment: the portraits of Lenin and Marx over the dining table; the photo of the smiling, departed mother. According to My’s whispered account, she wasn’t dead at all but had found true revolutionary freedom in a hippie commune that followed a Buddhist way of life in a province in southern Spain; there she meditated in the lotus position within the blue shadow of the mountains. All the while, her likeness gazed wistfully at her son from gilded frames on the television, the stove, the bedside table—even damply smiling down from the shampoo shelf in the shower.

It was a mystery to Peter that this admirer of Lenin, a longtime member of the Communist Party and union representative at the garment factory, had been so adamant about enrolling his only son in the most private of private schools in all of North Zealand’s bourgeois idyll—perhaps the most capitalist of all capitalist schools in Denmark.

One day he asked Hjalmar if
he’d
ever met Principal Nordal. At first My’s father didn’t react, but simply sat still for a long time. Then he slowly lowered his big head with its bushy brows and opened
The People
.

As if reading it in his paper, he said, “Principal Nordal isn’t important.”

This assessment would turn out to be a fatal mistake. Knud Mylius Taasing’s growing popularity, combined with his unjustified presence at the school, set off Principal Nordal—also known as the Doberman—and sealed his own fate and that of Knud’s father. Nordal hated this man who attended political meetings, printed blood-red posters, and incited rebellion against factory owners and their unabashed profits—especially since one such manufacturer was on his board and was one of the county’s most solidly conservative eminences. The persecution began in the spring of 1973, and when the opportunity fell in Nordal’s lap it seemed a peculiar coincidence (only much later was the story pieced together from the fragments, the way I did, like when you rebuild an airplane that has been blown into a thousand pieces).

Encouraged by My’s success, one of Hjalmar’s colleagues successfully enrolled his own son at the exclusive school, but this boy didn’t have My’s charm and brute strength—nor did he become a friend of Peter’s—and the skinny boy was overwhelmed with bullying from day one. On the third day he stood in the schoolyard crying, and the mock sobbing of the older students provoked squeals of laughter that made the dobermans bay more loudly behind the wire fence by the principal’s office. Knud had learned three virtues from his taciturn father: protect the weak (the foundation of all human community), solidarity (the pillar of change), and pride (the pillar of personal integrity). So Knud,
who’d
once attended the public school in Usserød and whose mother was a revolutionary in Andalusia in the fourth incarnation, pulled the boy over to a bench and put an arm around his shoulder. During recess they walked into the woods together, their heads held high, as if preparing for a new and united resistance movement.