The Seventh Child (21 page)

When they came back, the rich boys lingered around them insecurely, and perhaps at this moment the Doberman sensed the presence of a mightier opponent than the usual parade of tardy rich kids: the very risk that one could become two, and two could become many, and that many would become even more, which is to say that the Pedersens of this world would once and for all knock down the gates to the promised land and flood the domain of the wealthy.

And so he developed an idea to swallow up Knud Taasing’s father and solve the problem once and for all. Early the next morning he set his plan in motion. He called five of the older seventh-grade students into his office and kept his door shut for almost an hour; after this meeting, the principal was more pale than usual, his eyes burning. He sent for Knud. During recess, the seventh-grade boys gathered in a circle in the schoolyard and whispered to one another, but Knud didn’t return. Instead his father, in work clothes and clogs, picked him up, and together they walked with bowed heads down to his moped, then away through the woods.

He didn’t return to school for another week, and when he did, his aura of remoteness was even more powerful, protecting him from the gazes of the other kids for the rest of his school days. A rumor circulated in and out of classrooms and was confirmed by Nordal’s bloodshot eyes. In the following weeks, the Doberman treated the students with an abnormal mildness. Even sinners who were five, six, or seven minutes late received only a muted reprimand from his tight-lipped mouth—which issued just a puff of sulfur now—before being sent to their classrooms. Even the dogs were quiet.

Despite the power of his silence, how Knud Mylius Taasing got through the darkest chapter of his young life, stretching over several months, no one knows. A rumor had started—via the seventh-grade boys whom the principal had met with that day—that My and the new boy had walked into the woods locked in an embrace, and that something had occurred between them among the thick trunks. My had forced the smaller boy to do things of a nature that could only be suggested, and this suggestion—which in a way was worse than an admission—sufficed for the principal and the school.

A few nights later, Peter had a nauseating dream: he stood like a shadow in the principal’s office waiting for something to happen. My’s father arrived with the smell of sweat and cigar smoke that he hadn’t had time to wash off clinging to him, the image of his revolutionary hero on his T-shirt. “You have to understand that there’s nothing
we’d
rather do than avoid a scandal and the possible involvement of the police,” the Doberman told the laborer, and you could see the antagonism and skepticism and contempt seep—like sand from a torn bag—from men like Nordal for men like Hjalmar.

In that moment, Peter understood that My was innocent. In his eyes there was no trace of shame.

A couple weeks later, Peter’s family threw a harvest celebration in their garden. The house was filled with the most distinguished families from Strandvejen, and after the dinner, the garment manufacturer and his close friend, the mayor, settled in a corner of the living room. Peter heard them laughing. Then a word caught his attention:
Communist
. Then another:
scandal
.

Peter edged closer.

“In the end, they always stick in the pipe,” the manufacturer said. More laughter.

“Yes. That’s one procedure he’ll never forget,” the mayor agreed, his fat hand raising a glass of cognac.

“So elegantly handled by Principal Nordal,” the mayor said admiringly.

The manufacturer studied the glow of his long cigar. He nodded. “Yes, they were both put in their place, the bastard and his little bastard.”

A week later, the story was confirmed to Peter: My’s father had just announced that he wouldn’t be seeking reelection as the factory’s union representative. The party had tried to change his mind, wrote the Usserød newspaper, but he hadn’t offered any other explanation than that he wanted to be replaced.

Peter immediately realized the devilish ultimatum that Principal Nordal had presented to My’s father that day at the school: Hjalmar could stand his ground and let down his son, or he could abandon his cause and save his son.
To justify keeping the police out of this, we have to act with discretion, and act responsibly. Of course, how can you continue your political involvement or continue as union representative when at any minute you might be leading a strike and be fired, perhaps even end up drawing the attention of the police? You’re a single parent, and this boy needs you, not least after what has happened.

Peter could hear, even smell the words as clearly as if Principal Nordal was standing right in front of him. They haunted him when he lay sleepless, listening to the wind blowing through the elm. Whether it was the rustling of the leaves or the nightly visits from Nordal’s foul-smelling, triumphant spirit that gave him the idea, no one will ever know.

But early one morning he rose, found a notepad, and started making the preparations that would continue through the fall, as Denmark suffered an oil crisis and the entire nation changed character by welcoming a new right-wing party protesting something the population was barely able to understand.

The chainsaw had been resting, unused, in the garage for years. Peter put it in a big black bag and rode his bicycle deep into Rungsted Woods, where for three weeks he prepared for the execution of his plan:
how to use the throttle, rev it up, how to hold it, apply pressure, and hold the blade steady
. More attentive parents would have noticed the callouses, which had formed over the blisters on his hands, but not Laust and Inge; they read the newspaper and wrote letters, and therefore they sat with their heads bowed much of the time.

Three days before Christmas, the scandal struck the private school like a natural disaster.

That winter morning, the principal was, as usual, headed for the gate to relieve his dobermans of their restless night duty, but for once the air was not torn by their heavy, furious bodies flying at the gate. One lay dead and the other was dying in a corner of the schoolyard, foaming around his pointy lower jaw. And Principal Nordal heard a moaning that might have originated more from inside his head than from the dark, snow-covered schoolyard. The pride of the school, the mighty linden tree, had been chopped down at its base, as if by a giant invisible hand. It had fallen sideways across the water pump, and its longest branches had crushed several sheds and shattered the windows in the south wing of the school. Now the police and firemen who had been called by the shocked man were walking among glass shards, bricks, and branches, as the principal himself stood powerless behind them with clenched fists, trying to comprehend the disaster.

They found only a single piece of evidence, down near the base of the tree: a pair of expensive buffalo skin gloves that were immediately traced to a seventh-grade boy, who without much ado was taken away by two officers. Since no one believed the boy could have done it alone, his four closest friends were brought in as well and driven to the police station. The poisoned dogs were placed on a plastic tarp and taken to the same destination. The principal didn’t even look in their direction as they were taken away. For hours he stood motionless, staring at the felled linden tree, and he was still standing there when the last car left the yard. Something alien and powerful had entered the school; perhaps he suspected then what it was. Perhaps he understood that
he’d
inadvertently challenged a mind much more powerful than his own—one that was more hateful than even he deemed possible.

This was the last time that teachers and students saw the principal.

On Christmas day he suffered a stroke; he died in Usserød hospital at exactly eight in the morning on New Year’s Day, without ever having regained consciousness.

One tabloid got wind of the story, and a sharp reporter had no difficulty connecting his sudden death with the brutal felling of the school’s pride a few days earlier. In large type on its front page, the paper wrote: “Vandalism Kills Principal.”

The murder of the tree had become the murder of the man; a man who, with the same narrow, aggressive appearance as when he was alive, followed his dogs to the grave.

The police interrogated the boys for days. And for weeks the county was embroiled in gossip and rumors, but since the detained perpetrators didn’t confess, they couldn’t be punished. And since no murder weapon matching the information provided by the arborists was ever discovered, the death of the man and the felling of the tree could not be connected. The principal was buried, and the vandalism was allowed to sink into the place where it served everyone best: oblivion.

The seventh-grade boys were released and returned to suffer punishments that were heard throughout the neighborhood for weeks. They were the very same boys
who’d
harassed Knud and
who’d
connived with the principal to create that devastating scandal.

They returned to school with red cheeks and bloodshot eyes.

The suspected ringleader never discovered how his gloves had disappeared from a shelf in the hallway and, much to his terror, turned up by the felled linden.

Despite persistent efforts, the teachers and students at the school never solved the case, never found the real killer of the tree and the dogs and the man.

11

THE MINISTER OF NATIONAL AFFAIRS

May 9, 2008

Once, when I was around twelve or thirteen years old, I asked Magna if she was really sure that the spider’s fine web could bear all the feet that marched across it, year after year.

She looked at me impatiently and replied, “Marie, that web can hold all the children in the whole wide world.”

Maybe my concern was caused by my deformed limbs, which were slowly getting accustomed to their imprisonment during those very years, or perhaps I already sensed that no one would ever come for me—and that even if such a miracle occurred, my ugliness would trigger the fatal misstep that would cause the threads to rupture, sending my foster mother’s herd plummeting into the abyss.

As usual, Magna responded to my fear with booming laughter—the way she always laughed at nonsense—and I closed my eyes and prayed that the Master above wouldn’t hear it.

Peter put the letter and the crocheted socks back into the drawer.
He’d
discussed the first part of his life with very few people. And thus, his decision to open the door to the past went unnoticed, just like the time he practiced in the woods with the chainsaw.

For thirty years, Peter Trøst had lived in the moment. In his world, the present took the shape of a tunnel stretching from the TV studios in the Cigar to living rooms across the country, where no one, as the Professor put it, wanted his or her evening relaxation ruined by disturbing images that hit too close to home. Television was a way to observe the world
as though
it were close to you without it actually being so, and Kongslund was the most cherished national jewel in this the age of globalization.

In the basement Concept Room, where the young lions snarled and growled out new, folksy ideas for viewers, the Professor had begun the day by shouting: “Nobody has any use for yesterday! Nobody wants to dwell on worries
…
People want to remember, but they don’t want to remember problems!”

The young lions gathered around the table nodded until their manes quivered, because, here in television’s palace, the Professor’s words were law. He was the ruler of heaven, the father of the hardworking ants, and this was the breeding ground of signals.

As a lecturer of Scandinavian Literature at Copenhagen University, he had made his television debut in a debate with a nervous sociologist on the growing influence of the medium on the human soul. That night he uttered the maxim that would alter his rather bland life as an academic-fact retainer: “Television is the world’s eighth wonder because it soothes and heals the problems that each and every one of us secretly fears: loneliness, isolation, violence, war—even famine and natural disasters. Television is the only real revolution of our time!”

A few years later, Channel DK made national identity its brand and named the popular professor as its chairman of the board. After that, he said everything that had once been considered inappropriate for television. Unabashedly, he praised the rich and powerful, and he distanced himself from bleeding-heart humanists and their provincial mentality. “We Danes should be allowed to reject everything that is alien to us: customs, foreigners—Poles, Romanians, Slavs, Tamils, Uzbeks, and Turks. What’s coming next?” It was hardly surprising that
he’d
formed a close bond with the party, and that viewership increased exponentially.

Peter stood before the panoramic window in his oval office studying the stretch of woods near Hejede Overdrev and Gyldeløveshøj. He had visited Kongslund shortly after his parents had revealed their secret to him. They had seemed so relieved, as if they’d killed someone and had now finally found their peace with God. Or perhaps their absolution had come from the old matron, who met them in the driveway and gave Peter a hug, lifting him into her arms as though he still belonged there. He was only thirteen years old at the time.

He had met Magna’s foster daughter on the next visit, and they’d sat in her strange bedroom on the first floor, which reminded him of a ship’s bridge (she had even attached a kind of telescope to the armrest of an old wheelchair). They’d tried to remember one another from their first year together, but of course they couldn’t. At some point, however, she had told him about Asger, who had been adopted during the same period and had begun searching for his biological parents. Even though Asger had moved to Aarhus and lived a life far removed from Kongslund, Marie was somehow able to describe the neighborhood as though
she’d
been there, had seen him with her own eyes.

From behind his big executive desk, Peter shook his head at the memory, and then began calling the public schools in Aarhus, one by one, asking for a teacher couple with a son named Asger. On his fifth attempt he found them.

“Yes,” the principal said, the couple had been employed at Rosenvang School there in Viby for over fifty years, but they had recently retired. Their son was now the director of the Ole Rømer Observatory in Højbjerg, and the students at Rosenvang visited the observatory several times a year to study galactic clouds like Andromeda, the Virgo Cluster, and the Large Magellanic Cloud.

“From a very early age, he stared
up
most of the time,” the principal said. “That’s the way he is. Like Hawking, he dreams of finding the theory of everything.” Then the principal abruptly changed topics. “I hope he’s not about to be publically humiliated for something. He has never been extreme politically or—”

The principal stopped short, as if he suddenly considered an even worse possibility.

Before hanging up the phone, Peter reassured him that he was not planning on humiliating him in any way. He found the astronomer’s number, lifted the receiver, and then hesitated. From the panoramic window he studied the dark blotches that dotted the hilly North Zealand landscape every mile or so—Skalstrup, Brordrup, and Gøderup—the peculiar names of small towns in a world he practically never visited. He had no idea what people did in places like that.

Then he punched in the number. There was a click at the other end.

You’ve reached Asger Dan Christoffersen. I’m at the observatory but will be back soon. Please leave a message, and I’ll call you back.

The voice was deeper than Peter had expected, about as far from the constellations as you could get. He left a short message without specifying what he was calling about. Then he stood, removed his jacket and shirt, and slipped on a fresh set he had hanging in his office. Lately
he’d
begun feeling dirty in his clothes after two or three hours, and it was especially bad during these months when the coolness of winter had been replaced by the warmth of spring. It felt as though someone had placed a hot hand on his skin, and he had never really liked being touched. By the end of the day, he was often in his third or fourth suit, and
he’d
become wary of those colleagues who wore the same shirt and tie all day.

He grabbed the telephone again and this time called Søren Severin Nielsen. Severin’s name frequently appeared in the newspapers, Peter knew, and almost always in connection to hopeless asylum applications or distressed refugees’ failed appeals for humanitarian stays. Apparently his office was unstaffed, because no one answered the phone—no secretary, no paralegal, just a raw, rugged man’s voice practically whispering:
Søren Severin Nielsen is in court. Please leave a message.

Peter hesitated for a second. He remembered the man from his public appearance in several major cases: thin and ruddy, he looked as though he drowned his many defeats before the Refugee Board and the National Ministry in too many after-work pints. Peter hung up.

For a moment he considered calling Magna, but he faltered without knowing why. Something
she’d
told him came back to him: “Remember one thing, Peter, illegitimate children come to us like Moses in his basket, and the best orphanages are therefore always by the water!”

It was a strange observation, even in a country surrounded by water.

He stood and looked at the sky over Assendløse and Bregnetved—another pair of oddly named Zealand towns whose residents
he’d
only caught glimpses of whenever he cruised about in his car postponing his arrival at Østerbro. All those towns with curious names from days gone by. Since the day the letter had arrived, Peter didn’t quite recognize himself anymore. The past seemed to be seeping to the surface.

His mother had said, “You were the most beautiful child Kongslund had ever housed. They all wanted to take you home!”
And he had understood the curse. The trajectory of many lives is determined by the physical body that God in his irreproachable teamwork with the Devil bequeaths at birth. There are people who are so hideous that they never overcome the setbacks they suffer as children, and there are children who are so beautiful that they never stop craving the attention that has been lavished upon them; this is a tendency that is even stronger among adopted children, he knew. Deep down, Peter carried the knowledge of his own excellence, instilled in him by his adoptive parents, and if he ever tried to evade it—seriously and genuinely tried to evade it—Fate would, with a tired look on its face, lean over the edge of heaven, from where it keeps an eye on both the living and the dead, and slice the nerve that kept all his insecurity and vanity in scant but vital balance.

All stars fear this sudden fall, and with the Kongslund Affair as an open abyss before him, Peter Trøst was on the verge of panic.

His cell phone rang.

The minister was on his way up in the elevator.

He stood and placed two wineglasses on the oval rosewood conference table, and then opened the door.

Ole Almind-Enevold was smaller than he seemed on TV and, close up, so manicured you might suspect him of being gay. But the hounds in the press had never found any signs of that, quite the contrary. He lived alone with his wife, Lykke, and they had no children. From time to time he was involved with other women, but his wife had no idea.

The minister was accompanied by four guards, probably to illustrate the stories that his press chief regularly told the media about threats and harassment from fundamentalist Muslim groups. The guards, however, stayed outside the office.

Unbidden, the Almighty One sat in the largest and most comfortable armchair in the room holding a glass of red wine in one hand and a thin cheroot in the other. A light smoke ring spiraled toward the ceiling, and the powerful man nodded to the middle-aged journalist.

“There was a time when you didn’t mix news and entertainment,” he said, as though he were talking to the smoke and not to the man.

Peter struck a relaxed tone. “We have to keep up with the times. And keep up our ratings,” he added with a smile. “Just as the administration needs to keep an eye on its own numbers.”

For a moment the minister didn’t comprehend.

“The polls,” Peter said.

The Almighty One expelled a short laugh that sounded like a handful of glass shards falling onto a tile floor. All reporters knew the man had a reputation for being callous—both in his private and professional life—and his coldness had sometimes surprised his opponents. He was a personal friend of the Professor, whom he had known since they occupied the Department of Law back in the years of student protests. Before times had changed.

Peter put his glass on the table. “I know you have a special relationship with the orphanage in Skodsborg. In four days the matron will be celebrating her sixtieth anniversary.”

“The
former
matron, yes, that’s true.” The Almighty One spoke in his usual soft voice.

“Yes. The
real
matron, you might say
…
the one you always supported as the leader of the orphanage you helped bring fame.”

The minister didn’t react. He had two small rows of teeth and colorless lips, and his high, shiny forehead looked like an impregnable stone wall.

“Was it your idea to throw the anniversary party on May 13?”

“I helped make the arrangements, yes.”