The Seventh Child (29 page)

Peter felt as though he might throw up, or as though he himself was drowning, belly down, in the Professor’s grotesque caricature.

“Let that story go, Peter. It doesn’t lead anywhere,” the Professor said as he stood up and left the room.

Maybe the Professor was right. He wasn’t being rational. How he longed on occasion for the years when his parents had kept him in the dark, so that he would be like all the other children, at least on the surface: a boy without the knowledge that threatened to destroy him.

In the weeks leading up to his thirteenth birthday,
he’d
recognized a strange atmosphere in the house in Rungsted, and he knew that something terrible was looming. But in reality,
he’d
sensed the threat since his earliest years. Little children have an intuition that adults don’t realize. They sense letdowns before they happen; they predict a departure well before a decision has been made, and they feel the longing even before the separation. Somewhere in his mind as a child was the memory of a world he understood existed even if he couldn’t see it;
he’d
often felt as though another child lived in the house—an invisible child—who followed him into the garden and sat next to him on the bench under the elm, mirroring his every move. But when he dared confess these feelings to his parents, they never said a word. Laust and Inge imagined that they’d shown him nothing but love from the very beginning. They weren’t aware of the undercurrent of grief they’d carried with them. To hide, grief will assume any mask: it wears anger and reproach, bitterness and indifference; and, in Inge’s case, contempt for families with biological children. Deep inside Inge, though, was a feeling
she’d
never admit to anyone: an aversion to the child she took care of, caressed, and put to bed each night. Magdalene understood that this was the anger of the unborn child toward the adopted child—the child that proved to Inge that
she’d
never be able to bear her own.

This anger can reside in the soul for years, and the living child faintly senses the presence of danger. Many adopted children unconsciously try to alleviate this threat by smiling and pleasing others, showing their gratefulness. Many are never told they are adopted, but deep down they know they don’t belong, and, without knowing why, they smile at the world around them.

“There’s something
we’d
like to tell you,” his mother had said.

He smiled.

There were thirteen birthday candles on the cake and thirteen Danish flags on the table. They’d given him an identical copy of a Tiger tank from the Second World War. When the batteries were installed, its canon tower turned 360 degrees.

His father stood behind her, with his curly brown hair and sunken cheeks. He had a way of walking through the house with a step that made the walls tremble, and Peter thought he resembled the German Panzer General depicted in the Commando story series set in North Africa. He rarely spoke to his son.

His paternal grandparents sat farther back in the shade, and in the glow of the thirteen candles his mother had pressed into the six-layer cake with custard and whipped cream and tiny pieces of licorice confectionary, he saw an expectant look in their eyes. He closed his eyes, and he could hear the buzz of the disaster as loud and clear as the Panzer driver on the Tiger tank in the desert sands at El Alamein.

“Peter, we know you don’t remember your early years,” his mother said.

He listened to the sound drawing closer.

“
We’d
like to tell you a little bit about that time. You were in an orphanage because
…
” Inge stopped. The deep buzzing rose and rose, and he glanced at his grandparents, who leaned across the table so as not to miss a single word: the critical words they’d helped formulate the evening before over a meal of baked eggplant on the patio.

“You see, we’re not
…
” Inge began again. She stopped again and drew a deep breath into her small chest.

In that moment the Tiger tank appeared over the sand dune and aimed its long black barrel directly at his chair.

“We are your real parents, but we didn’t give
birth
to you
…
”

He saw the message leave her mouth like a little smoke cloud, but he never managed to take cover.

“We didn’t give birth to you.” She took him by the hand, which lay completely still next to a speck of yellow custard.

Peter waited for the impact. For a moment he stared blindly at her, but nothing happened.

Didn’t give birth to you
.

Maybe that moment was the most decisive in his life, but the explosions were soundless. There was only a sign that someone must have nailed to the dark over his mother’s head and which for all eternity would broadcast the message:
Didn’t give birth to you
.

“But we love you.”

It was then that he ought to have seen through their perfectly executed maneuver and resisted their attempt to completely encircle him. It was in this moment of despair that he ought to have driven a wedge into the adults’ united front and mercilessly destroyed their flanks. He should have thrown himself onto the table among the silver decanter and porcelain cups and cried until his illegitimate heart burst. Instead, he sensed the existence of a being he hadn’t known was there—inside of him—a much older being that had mastered the cold and calculated deception, the pretense, the stuff of star material.

Calmly, he observed himself through the thin membrane that separates dream from reality, and he dispassionately witnessed his own reaction to the terrible news. He was aware of the moment of change and understood his universal duty to live up to everyone’s expectations. He heard his own voice answering with muted calm; it was the most remarkable sound
he’d
ever heard: “I kinda had a feeling. Don’t worry about it—it doesn’t matter. What’s important is that I’m with you.”

They ought to have wondered about his polite choice of words; they ought to have gotten up from their chairs and asked him to take it back. Those words ought to have terrified them, but instead his words were met with a sigh of relief, the exhalation of which extinguished three candles on his birthday cake and enshrouded the first thirty seconds of his new life in a soft, magical glow.

Tears flowed, tears of pure relief—even the commander in the cannon tower seemed (from a distance) moved. For the first time, Peter demonstrated in public his ability to sense what others felt and expected, and to react accordingly.

Without feeling anything at all.

This talent was the gift that his new life presented him, and from that day forward, it became his alter ego. In that moment, a star was born.

“This is the best day of my life,” his mother exclaimed, hugging her son so tightly he could feel her beating heart. “Apart from the day when we picked you up at the orphanage. Oh, it was it such a beautiful spot right by the water.”

He smiled. Somehow
he’d
known
she’d
say this.
All the best homes are by the water
.

Even his father pulled himself together and came to the table, squeezing Peter’s shoulders awkwardly, the way only fathers with military mindsets can. The rest of the day disappeared into the great pretense they had created together, and which he already knew would follow him to the end of his days.

When we picked you up
, the sign read.

Later, on the patio that warm summer evening, the adults toasted the family’s success, and the voices rose up through the night air to Peter, who lay on his bed, staring into the sky through the windows in the slanted roof. You couldn’t tell from his face whether he heard the happy voices below. You couldn’t even tell whether he was awake or merely sleeping on top of his duvet with his eyes open, as
he’d
learned to do in the Elephant Room and had done for so many nights that the alien creature inside had lost count.

But we love you
, the sign read.

The next day, he rode his bicycle over to see My, who had decided he no longer wanted to be called this nickname. He wanted to be called Knud. This was a year after Principal Nordal’s death.

Knud sat almost buried in his green beanbag chair, his head cocked, considering what Peter had just confided to him.

“That’s funny, because I’ve often wondered whether I was adopted, whether my mother really left for Spain like my father says. I’ve wondered whether she was my real mother
…
my dad too. I look nothing like him.”

Peter said nothing. Except in size, Knud and his father looked exactly alike: the same blond hair, the same freckles across the nose, and the same slightly stooped way of walking with their hands thrust deep into their pockets; though Hjalmar had shrunken significantly since the scandal at the private school, becoming a shadow of his former self.

“We’re probably both adopted,” Knud said in solidarity.

He still recalled the words his mother said when she woke him the next morning and told him the police had called. Early that morning, Knud had found his father on the living room floor under the Karl Marx poster, and
he’d
alerted a neighbor. But Hjalmar was dead, and Knud sat all alone at the police station. He had no other living relatives.

“It was heart failure,” Laust said.

Peter nodded. His own heart had nearly stopped. Of course it had been Knud’s real father. In that moment he felt a rage that frightened him so much that he nearly froze before his father in the hallway.

We love you
. The sentence continued to bump about in his head like a little ball bouncing from wall to wall, unable to settle.

“Do you want to come with me to the station?”

Peter didn’t respond.

“He can live with us, if he wishes. He’s all alone in the world.”

It was a moment that shouldn’t elicit envy. And yet there it was. Even at his young age, Peter knew he was at a vital turning point; he could run one way or the other, step backward or continue straight ahead as though he hadn’t heard a thing.

Peter said nothing.

Laust looked at his son for a long time, and then nodded, having understood the answer. “I’ve called in sick today. I’m going to drive up there now.” He rarely spoke more than a couple of sentences at a time.

Peter got dressed and left the house alone on his bike. When he couldn’t be seen from the windows any more, he turned and rode into the woods. He sat in the clearing on one of the tree stumps
he’d
felled that fall. He hadn’t thought about the episode for months—the humiliation of Knud’s father, the empty, dark schoolyard, or the snowstorm and the heavy chainsaw that hadn’t kicked to life until his third attempt.

He’d
never told Knud about what
he’d
done, and he would never tell anyone about what had passed between him and his father that morning. He barely understood it himself. The letdown was of such enormous proportions that there was no excuse.
He’d
have to bury that secret even deeper than the one about the linden tree. Knud had an uncle on the island of Ærø, and that’s where
he’d
be living now.

The night Knud left, Peter had dreamed of Principal Nordal. The old principal leaned over his bed, long branches sticking out of his empty shirt sleeves and his breath reeking of soil and rain and rotted leaves (death had not made it smell any better). The next morning, Peter hid his pajamas shirt in the back of his closet, so that his mother wouldn’t discover the stench.

He grew up during these days, once and for all, and took up the path that had led him to the sixth floor of the Cigar.

Standing by the panoramic window with his eyes closed, he saw his old friend in his mind: Knud Mylius Taasing, named for the men
who’d
challenged the polar night and lost their lives to it. For some strange reason, the two boys were thrust together again, more than thirty years later, to solve a mystery found in a child’s name, a name neither had heard of before.

Quietly, he reviewed the case yet again. The anonymous letters had been sent to him, to Orla Berntsen, and Asger Christoffersen—and presumably also to the last two boys who, according to the caption in the old magazine, had been in the infant room on Christmas in 1961. The writer had somehow tracked them down as adults and must believe that one of them was John Bjergstrand. The letter was a simple invitation to examine the past: the recipient who couldn’t locate his biological parents had to be the mysterious boy.

Peter was not a courageous man, and if it hadn’t been for Knud, he might not have gone any further. He opened his eyes and stared west. Magna was the key. Magna, who was so obviously terrified to speak to anyone these days. There must be witnesses from back then—nurses, childcare assistants, midwives, social workers—and Taasing would no doubt find them, one after the other. He had inherited his father’s stubbornness.

The thought of the brown villa gave him the shivers, as though an invisible battalion of demons from the past was approaching. Or maybe it was just the wind blowing in from the fjord, arousing his fear as it came around the corner of the Big Cigar. That night in the bushes, when
he’d
been sick without knowing why, he too had seen a figure between the trunks of the beech trees, a hunched figure that seemed to study him before disappearing.

The guardian angel of Kongslund
, a voice had whispered in his dreams. It was absurd.

He gazed toward the small Podunk towns
…
Of course he was damaged
…
He remembered all the nights he lay hiding his hands under the duvets so no one could see what
he’d
done that night at the private school. The smell of topsoil. The knowledge of the rot and Principal Nordal’s gnarled outline framed against the moon glow from the skylight.

The man
he’d
killed.

15

THE MYSTERY

May 12, 2008

Magna had always represented constancy, calm, and fortitude. All her friends in the Copenhagen chapter of Mother’s Aid Society would swear to that until their dying day.

When we expected company I stood, even as an adult, by her side and prepared the flowers that sat in buckets and pitchers of water throughout the house; I would hand her the long, slender green stems, which she resolutely arranged in a row on the kitchen counter, crushing them with a hammer before putting them in vases. Then I placed the vases in the annex, in the playroom, in the turret room, and in the infant room where, in her forty years as matron, there’d never been a single withered or wilted plant.

Anyone who knew my foster mother could swear to it: in her care, plants and people simply did not perish.

“Drawer babies.”

This statement was made authoritatively in a dry, old woman’s voice.

And why would the two listeners object? Neither of them knew what the term meant.

“Drawer babies we called them—indeed, we did.”

The two aging women sat slumped in their armchairs. Their small but strong bodies resting on seats with large-floral-print covers, colors so bright they almost blinded you. They had to be in their midseventies, and as witnesses of the heyday of Danish adoption, they had a marvelous story to tell.

“By the sixties, things had been put in order,” the older one said. “But in the fifties we got these drawer babies—when young women could go into the Rigshospital in the dead of night and put their unwanted newborns into this big piece of furniture we had there.”

“A dresser,” the younger one added. “With big, wide drawers.” She sounded oddly satisfied.

“Yes,” said the older one. “They were conceived, delivered, and deposited in a drawer. That is, until the system was abolished.”

It seemed completely absurd. But Knud Taasing and Nils Jensen had to trust them. They’d been social workers in Mother’s Aid Society during those decades, when the organization welcomed tens of thousands of ill-fated Danish mothers and their unwanted children, when legions of doctors and case workers followed an immense number of adoptions from beginning to end as conscientiously as possible.

In 1961, they had taken care of the young women who gave birth on Obstetric Ward B.

“Thousands were being put up for adoption. We found the best homes for them that we could.”

“And when that door closed, the biological mother could never find her child,” the older one said, as though delivering a death sentence—but again, in the same oddly contented tone.

“Back then there weren’t any birth control pills or IUDs, and if a young girl wanted a measurement for a diaphragm, she needed her parents’ permission. The mothers who chose to put their child up for adoption
…
I think it’s safe to say
…
never forgot, no matter how hard they might have tried.”

“Yes,” the other said, glancing first at Knud, then at Nils. “We gave them at least three months to reconsider before we started the adoption process, and even so over half of the women regretted their decision in the end. The others we noted in the diary, as it was then called, and later built paternity cases around in order to finance the orphanage.”

Suddenly they both laughed. “If we could find the
chap,
that is!”

“Many of the fathers disappeared then?” Knud asked.

“You can bet your bottom dollar they did, but we gathered information through other sources, and it was all recorded on a green form. And on that form we wrote everything—from the parents’ height and weight and eye color, to their criminal records and school references. And if they had a criminal record or other serious social problems, we tried to find a very tolerant adoptive family for the child.”

The logic in this seemed perfectly clear to the women.

Knud looked up from his notes. “Who picked up the child and brought it to Kongslund?”

“Oh, that would have been Ms. Ladegaard or Ms. Jensen. They would bring a carry-cot and take a cab back,” said the older of the ladies, whose prerogative it was to answer first.

“Do you remember anything about a boy named John Bjergstrand? I know it was a long time ago.”

Both social workers smiled tolerantly. “Of course not. We handled thousands of adoptions, thousands
…
But you could try the old church registries at the hospital.”

“I’ve already had a friend look into them. There’s nothing there. No one with that name.”

“Maybe your friend missed it, since you don’t have an exact date.”

“You don’t happen to have a newspaper from back then lying about?”

Another tolerant look. “If those papers still exist, they’d be put away in the Civil Registry—what is now known as the Family Council.”

“But what if the papers and church registries aren’t there? Is there any other way to find a child from back then?”

They lowered their heads in thought. “We did have these moral conduct forms,” the older one said, and the younger one nodded. “For that form, the adoptive parents needed two personal references to state that they were fit to adopt a child
…
and to raise it.” Suddenly they both laughed again, as if they simultaneously knew what was coming. “I remember this pastor—he grew so angry because he felt that he was by definition a good person, and that nobody but
God
could be his reference! Maybe you can find a copy of it somewhere.”

“Are there any other ways?” Knud was obviously clutching at any straw he could find.

“Well, later on
we’d
visit the new family to see how things were going, and we wrote a report about that. But by that point, of course, the child had a new name.”

“Do you know where the boy lived?” the younger one asked.

Knud shook his head.

“From time to time, we got Christmas cards from the happy families. We put them on the notice board in the adoption department. But they were removed a long time ago, naturally.”

“And besides, many people never told their children that they were adopted. Oh, they wanted to wait until the children were old enough and could understand it, they said. And then they waited forever. We used to say it was too late
…
even after three or four years, it’s too late. At that point the children have a sense in their hearts and minds that something isn’t right
…
They know instinctively that they don’t belong anywhere, and that they’ve been lied to. It’s incredibly dangerous. They need to be told with the mother’s milk, so to speak.” The two old ladies smiled; they uttered the last sentence nearly in unison.

“But many didn’t?” Nils interjected, speaking for the first time.

“Exactly,” the older one replied. “They were ashamed that they hadn’t been able to bring a child into this world themselves.”

“But then when everything worked out—with the application—we pulled out the green form and told the adoptive parents a little bit about the child’s biological parents. Only children with visible defects were difficult to place, so they were assigned to foster parents instead.”

“Like Magna’s foster daughter, Marie?”

The women froze, eyeing Knud disapprovingly—as though
he’d
suddenly encroached on forbidden territory.

“You knew Marie Ladegaard?” Knud stared intently at the two of them over the rim of his glasses.

“Of course.” It was the older woman again. Cautiously.

“How exactly did she come to Kongslund? I’ve heard she was a foundling?”

Again the two women seemed to silently communicate with one another. The mere mention of Marie Ladegaard’s name had charged the atmosphere in the room. Where before they had practically been tripping over one another to speak, now they seemed tentative, quiet.

“She was found on the doorstep—or so legend has it,” the younger woman finally said.

“Yes. She was a foundling. And tomorrow it will be forty-seven years,” the older woman said.

“It was on the Kongslund’s anniversary?” Knud asked.

“Yes, it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the orphanage’s founding, on May 13, 1961. We were there.” As if to acknowledge the memory, they nodded in tandem.

“The parents were never located?”

They said nothing.

Knud put his pen down on his pad. “You don’t want to talk about Marie Ladegaard, do you?”

For a long time they sat without moving, and then they both leaned gracefully forward. “No,” they said in one voice.

I knew that Knud Taasing would find people from that time—like the two social workers—but it didn’t really worry me.

They would tell Magna, and it would no doubt agitate her further as the anniversary approached.

In the days following Knud and Nils’s visit to Kongslund, I’d heard Susanne moving restlessly about in the hallways, but she never once came to my door. Perhaps the mystery and controversy swirling around us scared her more than she admitted. We felt the ministry’s shadow looming over Kongslund, and she had to know that it incited my anger. She ran the day-to-day matters from the ground floor, while I sat under the eaves in the King’s Room and emerged only when I was lonely. Days would pass without us seeing one another, and we never discussed the case.

Nowadays, Magdalene rarely visited anymore, and when she did it was mostly to tell me about the conquest
she’d
made on the Other Side, which she, like all other lovers, expected would last forever.
We’re sitting under the beech tree on a couch made of Italian walnut. His Majesty is telling me about the time he fought for the country at the Battle of Isted, where he lost an arm!
She whispered, and in her excitement she tilted nearly ninety degrees toward the floor. Instinctively, I reached for her. Even though my body was an asymmetrical abnormality, I understood the nature of symmetry and its hold on people. I understood the difference between the life path of the beautiful and that of the ugly.

When I sat with Susanne in the garden facing the sound, she was cloaked in a reddish glow, as though both the rising and setting sun were intent on courting her and inviting her behind the horizon, while I was ungainly and dark, twisted from birth, planted like a broken stick. I had lived in two unequal worlds for as long as I could remember: one harmonic and one grotesque, one for those left behind and one for those who had been taken away. In one I kept my eyes wide open, scrutinizing everything; while in the other, I kept them half-shut, tolerating no light. I made it a habit, when I heard one of the infrequent knocks on my door, to turn my shadow side away before opening it. I didn’t want to disappoint my guest, especially not the man Magdalene had promised me would show up.

When I was twelve or thirteen, I had found an old green dress in the attic—almost the same color as the one worn by the beautiful woman in the portrait—and when the orphanage was completely silent and asleep, I would hold it up to me and dance by myself in front of the mirror, ignoring both the mold stains and the tattered material. “
You’re ugly
,” the mirror mumbled, but I didn’t care because I imagined the dress had belonged to a princess, perhaps even Countess Danner herself.

During my childhood at Kongslund, the orphanage’s protector, Ole Almind-Enevold, was already a rising star in the party whose emphasis on inalienable social and democratic rights had become the natural center of the blossoming welfare state. Every time he visited Kongslund, Magdalene resolutely drove off in her wheelchair, disappearing in the direction of the white house on the slope, as though she feared or despised him, or perhaps both. To link up with a man like Ole was an instinctive act on my foster mother’s part—I understood that each time he returned—and I sensed, even at that age, that it was about the very survival of the orphanage.

He wasn’t as powerful then as he is now, but he was influential enough to sway the conservative neighbors of Kongslund, who didn’t care for the home. The young politician slowly changed the public’s opinion, and with the help of the
Søllerød Post
and the
Berlingske Evening Times
, he turned Magna’s deed into one of genuine Danish heroism, much like his own. He made the foundling a symbol of everything his party had fought for and dreamed about: the very struggle for the weakest members of society. And while it was a cleverly conceived campaign that made me famous across the country for many years to come, it probably condemned me to lifetime incarceration at Kongslund.