The Seventh Child (23 page)

In the parking lot Peter was again overcome with a feeling of nausea, this time with such a force that he dove between two parked broadcasting vans, expecting to throw up.

For three hours he drove aimlessly through the small towns of Zealand he could see from his office window in the Big Cigar, gazing into the brightly lit windows, studying the shadows of the people who lived there.

Why he did it, he wasn’t sure.

Once again he called Søren Severin Nielsen—the lawyer might be able to help.
He’d
known the ministry’s chief of staff back in the day, and he himself had lived at Kongslund. Though he had picked a hopeless legal specialty, he was said to be a good attorney.

The phone rang, but there was still no answer.

12

SEVERIN

1976–1984

I’ve always considered it a coincidence that Orla and Severin met, even though they were placed in the same area where Carl Malle lived.

During the sixties and seventies, thousands of children grew up in the neighborhood west of the wetlands in this Copenhagen suburb, and the chance that the two boys would run into one another (and lift a corner of the veil covering the peculiar pattern they were both part of) was so miniscule that the invisible puppeteers of the Kongslund Affair probably didn’t think it possible.

Severin left Kongslund only a few days after Orla, and, as usual, all the governesses, caregivers, and assistants stood in the driveway and waved, wishing the little traveler a good life. But Severin’s home wasn’t the kind of home most adopted children grow up in—and in his case, death had, so to speak, traveled ahead of him.

Yet another elephant marched along
…
stepping across the fine web and was gone
…

And of course I followed.

Gray and massive, the boulder sat in the clearing like a squatting giant, its chin resting on its knees to study the lawns, the chestnut trees, and the seagulls flying over the rushes. It was here, by the huge boulder in the wetlands, right where Orla fought his last battle against the demons, that Severin—in hiding and from a distance with a big white bandage on his head—first spotted him. Almost seven years would pass from that first sighting until the boy from the yellow tenements made himself known.

In the days following the murder of the Fool in the wetlands, Malle had pulled the many strings he held at the time and found a boarding school on Zealand’s Odde, where the goofy, restless, and friendless boy could learn how to succeed in life.

When, almost three years later, Orla returned to the neighborhood to attend high school, the clownish mind—his only defense against boyhood loneliness—was gone, never to return as far as anyone knew. What replaced it, no one in the neighborhood could say—including Severin, who had seen him come back—because the new Orla hid behind vacant eyes that rarely met the gaze of others. He had an ability to practically disappear from his surroundings, so much so that no one even remembered
he’d
been present in the first place. He avoided people as demonstratively as
he’d
once sought them out. He kept his hair closely cropped, standing out from the crowd of long-haired, fatigue-clad hippie kids who rode mopeds, wore headbands, and shouted political slogans while demanding their parents be detained and reprogrammed for a just world.

He was alone.

Through some instinct of self-preservation, he graduated—and he even showed up for the official ceremony and subsequent celebration at the high school. It was on this night, donning his mortarboard, that Orla Pil Berntsen met Søren Severin Nielsen. Orla had just entered a pleasant hibernationlike state, an invisibility
he’d
mastered, when a voice suddenly spoke to him through the music and the clouds of smoke in the great ballroom. He was startled. Normally no one talked to him: Orla the asocial, the boy from the wetlands.

He raised his head and allowed his eyes to emerge from their usual hiding place, and, to his surprise, discovered a boy just across from him staring back. He had to either escape or disappear, or let the thin boy who also wore glasses—black, heavy, and wide-framed—look him over and ask the question that trembled on his thin lips: “Don’t you live in the red row houses?”

Orla decided to reply with a single nod. “How do you know?” He said, surprised to hear his own voice, as he hadn’t meant to speak.

“I’ve seen you there. And in the wetlands. My name is Severin. I live in the yellow tenements. Number sixty-one.”

Orla went quiet. The boys from the yellow tenements were as numerous as the workers in the gray factories out by the freeway, and that’s all he knew about them. An alien race. For ten years the children from the row houses had bombarded them with rocks without ever seeing their faces.

“We threw rocks at you too, without seeing you,” Severin said, in response to Orla’s silent thoughts.

Orla squinted. Had he spoken without knowing it?

“Once a rock hit my head, and I was taken to the hospital, sirens blaring,” Severin continued.

There was no anger or reproach in his voice, no shame or guilt. No tiny invisible toxic deposits between the words. It was remarkable, because the parents in the apartment buildings and row houses had raised their children to despise the community on the other side of the hedge with a force you wouldn’t expect to wane over time. Orla was about to sniffle, but no sound emerged. He just barely managed a reply in the three seconds it took for Fate to catch them and push them into the embrace of the God of Friendship and Camaraderie.

“I was the one throwing that rock,” Orla laughed. “You got a huge bandage on your head.”

His new friend laughed with him.

Orla wanted to say one more thing but didn’t have the guts. So he stayed quiet.

They walked home together that night after the party and went their separate ways near the hawthorn hedge shaking hands like real adults.

They were both serious people, and each chose to study law. They moved to Regensen—the big, old student dormitory across from Rundetaarn that had been built for the children from families of limited means who otherwise couldn’t afford to live in the city and study at the university. Here the high achievers, the winners, and the students with heavy brass prizes for diligence, along with GPAs higher than the Himalayas, resided. The two friends tested one another in inheritance law, tax law, and criminal law, as well as the names of the hottest girls in the dormitory. They joined a dormitory club, along with the impoverished son of a count from Allerød and a female theology student from Bronshøj who each afternoon walked through Jorck’s Passage to the pedestrian street to sing with the Salvation Army. For this reason, she was called the Salvation Girl by her numerous admirers (though no one knew whether they admired her most for her beauty, her mind, or her song).

There was one thing for certain: Severin’s room at the dormitory was as neat as Severin himself, simply furnished and plainly decorated except for a rather strange yellow-gray animal skin that hung over the bed, affixed to the wall with large nails.

“It ought to be on the floor,” Orla said to him one day. “In front of the fireplace.”

There was no fireplace in their dorm room, but that wasn’t really the problem with the suggestion.

“It’s not a bear,” Severin said with a sudden seriousness that seemed to verge on tears. “It’s my uncle’s dog. It was a golden retriever
…
I played with it as a child. When it died, Uncle Dan had the skin made and gave it to me for my confirmation.” He paused, his lips narrow and a little sulky. “Her name’s Mille.”

Orla stared at Mille—or rather at her pelt—and then at Severin.

Even though the two boys had both been at Kongslund (though they hadn’t learned that yet) and had been abandoned by their parents when they were very young, they had developed in significantly different ways. Orla had an unremitting terror that his mother would suddenly vanish into thin air and leave him all alone on the planet (at an abstract level, this fear had fascinated the bearded, pipe-smoking psychologists from Mother’s Aid Society). For Severin, neither the recognition nor the love of his adoptive father had eliminated his feeling of not belonging. Whether awake or asleep, the young man struggled with the repercussions of that pitch-dark room
he’d
been placed alone in right after birth. He both feared and longed for the closeness of other people. That he became an attorney for the weakest, the almost-lost lives, and that over the years he lost case after case and yet kept plodding away, is a fact both understandable and frightening.

In their final year of law school, the two young men got Almind-Enevold as their lecturer. This was in 1982, and the Almighty One had already served as the minister of justice in the previous administration and, for that reason alone, attracted a full house for his monthly lectures at the university. His name invariably inspired quite a few puns—a newspaper cartoonist had by then compared him to the last absolutist monarch
who’d
surrendered so much power and been such an ordinary man that everyone laughed—though no one dared share those with him. Especially not the remaining Socialists in the department who still defended spectacular armed revolts like those in the Basque region and in Belfast. And these aggressions resurfaced when the last desperate members of the Baader-Meinhof terror cell died in Stammheim Prison in West Germany and the leftists refused to believe the government’s claim that they’d killed themselves.

Their teacher, the former minister of justice, had burst into booming laughter: “I was a resistance fighter—a real resistance fighter,” he said. “And those pigs down there, they weren’t resistance fighters
…
They were nobodies. They took the easy way out, like hares—those cowards had no guts, they couldn’t handle it.”

His scorn paralyzed the most progressive in the auditorium; they sat petrified in the midst of waves of laughter. One student quit studying law in protest, but he was the only one to take this meaningless stance. The others instinctively realized that the planet had shifted, that the world was changing, and ten years later most of them were incredibly well-fed corporate lawyers, and Stammheim was merely a bad dream, a dark shaft in a youthful mind that had fortunately been covered.

In his third month as lecturer, Almind-Enevold asked the attendees to carefully consider and then list a maximum of seven general traits that they considered irreconcilable with a future career in the legal field.

The seven sins of the lawyer.

Orla’s best and only friend, Severin, with his idealistic and principled mind wrote:
Sloth
.

Then he considered a moment and wrote:
Lust for Power
.

Dishonesty
.

Greed
.

To be on the safe side,
he’d
shown his list to Orla, who had nodded encouragingly and let him carry on. After all, this was Severin’s nature.

Disloyalty
.

After that
he’d
sat quietly for a long time, contemplating his final two words, occasionally glancing at Orla, who sat utterly motionless—like a dead man—with his pen in his mouth and an absentminded expression etched on his face.

Arrogance
.

He stole a final glance at Orla, who had yet to write a single letter on the page, then completed his list with an obviously negative character trait that
he’d
nearly forgotten:
Insensitivity
.

Orla sat sucking on his pen right until Almind-Enevold cleared his throat and asked if everyone was done. With a quick movement of his strong wrist, Orla wrote a single word on his sheet.

When the former minister of justice later looked at the students’ lists, he smiled and nodded with satisfaction. His preferred student had written only one word:

Indecisiveness
.

Nothing else.

His old pal Carl Malle had been right—he hadn’t exaggerated. This was how this boy was put together, just as he had been at that age.

A month later, following a lecture, Ole Almind-Enevold invited his favorite student to dinner at the Ristorante Italiano on Fiolstræde. Orla ate a shrimp pizza while his teacher spooned through a bowl of tomato soup and peppered him with questions about his upbringing and his view of Denmark and the nation’s future.

When Orla got back to Regensen that evening, Severin rushed down the stairs from his room and met him in the courtyard where the giant linden tree stood.

Severin grabbed hold of Orla without knowing the world had changed. “What happened?” he almost shouted. “What did he want? Did he offer you a job?”

It was their senior year, and it was a reasonable question, but Orla did not feel like replying. “If he did, you can have it,” he said.

“If he
did
…
? You must know whether he—”

“He asked me a lot of questions,” Orla said abruptly.

Severin’s eyes were nearly leaping out of his head behind his eyeglasses. “What kind of questions?”

Orla made a deprecating gesture with his hand, the same that had so calmly written the one character trait that a career lawyer had to renounce:
Indecisiveness
. “They weren’t about law or even my studies.”

“But you were gone for two and a half hours!” Severin’s objection was logical.

Orla put down his bag on the cobblestones and sat on one of the white benches under the linden tree: “All right, then. He asked me whether I knew
you’d
been in the same orphanage as I when we were little.” He glanced up into the crown of the tree, letting each of his words fall like tiny bombs over Severin’s head.

“What?” Severin suddenly grew pale.