The Seventh Child (44 page)

I returned to Copenhagen determined to do one thing: go through every extant archive that contained the name Bjergstrand
,
as well as the few painstakingly gathered pieces of information I kept stored in my mind. It would be a long investigation, and I would have to tell Susanne Ingemann about my plans—and therefore also tell her about the letter from Eva Bjergstrand.

That didn’t worry me much.
She’d
be discreet. After all, I had much more in common with her than with any other person—far more than anyone outside Kongslund could know.

She was the one who suggested that I expand the search to include the archives of Mother’s Aid Society, which at some point had been moved to the Civil Law Directorate, where they’d been put in boxes and stashed in an attic and presumably were still—unless someone had discarded them, of course. As it turned out, her position as director of Kongslund gained me rather easy access to these archives.

The boxes had not been tossed, and they were piled in enormous stacks under the sloped attic ceiling, representing a seemingly impossible undertaking. Had Magdalene not taught me everything there was to know about patience and persistence—and had my years at Kongslund not taught me to hone these qualities—I would have given up once I discovered that the first three or four contained nothing more than endless case files, a complex, incomprehensible collection of documents, which I, in my quest for the needle in the haystack, nevertheless leafed through page by page, line by line.

Day after day I climbed up to my treasure troves in the attic, opening and closing case files and records from the fifties and sixties, the great adoption years in Denmark. Most astonishing were the comprehensive psychological assessments of the so-called damaged children and their often equally damaged parents, which filled folder after folder. What a display of broken goods and vain repairs, what a ragtag army of ailing, limping, wrecked lives ceaselessly wandering from one defeat to the next until—right at the very edge of the abyss—they met a woman who smelled sweetly of cheroot and freshly plucked freesia and who compensated them for their failed efforts, oblivion, forgiveness: a whole new existence.

My foster mother had really believed that the sons and daughters of the debased could find a new life with the pure and unblemished, and
she’d
tried to replicate the processes in her shop where God and the Devil, working in tandem, loftily constructed human lives in the hopes of stopping Fate in its tracks. In the vast history of the Great Repair, Magna was the most stubborn mechanic that had ever lived—that was abundantly clear to me.

As the days passed, the air in the loft grew drier—almost as though I’d drained it of its last ounce of moisture with my concentrated anger. I was close to giving up when my quest finally delivered something of interest.

It was at the end of the sixth day when I found it. I had opened one of the very last boxes marked only with the words, “Mother’s Aid Society,” removing the piece of black plastic that had been placed on top of the contents. In a folder titled “Cases in Progress—1961,” I found a divider labeled “Unfinished Cases.”
Behind the divider were twelve forms that included names of children who had apparently never entered into the regular adoption procedure.

One of the forms contained the name I’d been looking so long for: Bjergstrand.

It was handwritten, and the letters were as legible as if they’d just been scratched in the paper, and in the space before it was a single boy’s name: John
.

John Bjergstrand.

My hand shook a little.

In the upper right corner of the form, the year 1961 was scrawled in very small letters—and a bit farther down the page was a number of columns to enter name, birth date, place of birth, and residence. Only two of the boxes had been filled out before the case was for some reason shelved and disappeared into the voluminous archives of Mother’s Aid Society.

I read it again and again. Puzzled. Following the name, three other words had been added in the same hand:
the Infant Room
.

It would have made sense to take the form to Magna, but of course I couldn’t do that. She wouldn’t have wanted me snooping around in all this. Instead, the next morning, I wandered up Strandvejen to see Gerda Jensen, who lived in one of the expensive new apartments in Skodsborg with a view of the sound. I had no idea how she was able to afford to retire in such luxurious surroundings—but presumably all the assistants lived on next to nothing during the years they served Mother’s Aid Society and had therefore saved up small fortunes.

“Gerda, you have to tell me about the last child from the Elephant Room,” I said without preamble, setting the famous photograph of the seven babies on the table before her.

The other clues—the form, the socks, and the letter from Australia—I kept to myself for now.

She didn’t even blink.
She’d
always been formidable and unflaggingly loyal to only one person in this world, Magna Louise Ladegaard. But
she’d
always had a soft spot for me (I was after all Magna’s only relative, albeit an artificial one)—and this was my chance.

“Why dwell on the past?” asked the thin woman
who’d
once painted blue elephants on the infant room walls. “The past means nothing now.”

We sat on the sofa. “To me it does,” I replied. I have a knack with old people, the way all adopted children do for some reason. “Where is the seventh child?” I pointed at the picture. “Who is he?”

Gerda stared ahead as though she didn’t want to acknowledge my question. Then she sipped carefully from her delicate, light-blue Royal Porcelain teacup. Her lips were puckered. This was the woman who had once made an entire Gestapo battalion retreat.

“What nickname did the governesses give him?” It was the only logical question to ask.

She hesitated, before suddenly putting her cup down and taking my hand. “Marie, it doesn’t matter.”

In spite of these words, I felt that she was revealing something. Gerda suffered from a rare affliction: she couldn’t lie. In her youth
she’d
tried a couple of times, Magna once told me, but after a few words, the blood would drain from her lips, her pupils would dilate to double their normal size, and her fine voice would stall, dissolving in the middle of the lie. In short order she would hyperventilate, sway, and—unless anyone intervened—faint on the spot. It was, Magna thought, both a beautiful and disturbing phenomenon. She herself had never had any trouble voicing a lie (white, gray, or black) if it served a good cause.

That morning my knowledge of Gerda’s weakness was my strongest weapon: if Gerda was to avoid a lie,
she’d
have to keep quiet from the beginning, pinch shut her already narrow lips, and stare at a point far beyond any earthly deceitfulness.

She turned her long, almost triangular face toward me, and her unpainted lips formed a single word: “John.”

Just that name, with no emphasis.

“John?” I said. My heart beat hard in my chest. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. The governesses called him Little John, because he was no bigger than”—suddenly she smiled—“no bigger than the tobacco you used to be able to buy
…
tobacco for a schilling.”

“Little John,” I repeated. “His name was
John
then?”

“He was
called
John.”

“But—” I stopped, and asked another question instead. “Did we arrive at the same time?”

“It’s been a long time, Marie.”

“But where did he come from? Who were his parents?”

“His name was John. He was adopted.”

I could tell that Gerda was clinging to the only detail she was willing to give. She was eighty now, and hard concentration wore her out. But I was sure she knew more, that she was only evading my questions out of loyalty to Magna.

“Is it the same John who’s listed in this form?” I pushed the paper toward her.

She froze. For a moment, her slender fingers rested on the paper like spider legs, then she said, “I don’t know, Marie. It was a long time ago.”

“Who
was
he, Gerda?”

She slumped in the sofa like a balloon losing air. Then she sat up and began breathing quickly. The blood drained from her face, making it appear paler than
you’d
think possible. “I
…
don’t
…
know
…
where
…
he came
…
from,” she whispered. “He
…
was
…
adopted
…
by
…
”

I grabbed her arm, the one that had held me as a baby and painted the blue elephant over my bed. I needed her to finish the sentence before she fainted.

But it was too late. Gerda’s body spun halfway around then slipped sideways off the sofa.

Quickly I reached for her, breaking her fall. She hung limply in my arms, which despite the deformations were strong. She moved her lips in an effort to talk. She couldn’t lie.

“Yes?” I almost shouted.

“By
…
a
…
night watchman and his family in Nørrebro.”

“What was the family’s name?”

But Gerda had gone as rigid as a stick, and in a moment
she’d
be gone.

“What was their name?” I repeated. It could kill her.

“His name
…
was
…
Anker
…
Jensen,” she whispered.

“Was he John Bjergstrand’s father?” I said, trying with all my might to pull Gerda back into a normal sitting position.

She showed the whites of her eyes. It was a terrifying sight. “It
…
doesn’t
…
matter
…
” A little spit had gathered at the corner of her mouth. I recalled how
she’d
saved Kongslund and hundreds of Jews during the Second World War by keeping silent. But if the German commander had asked the right question and demanded an answer, she would have told them everything.

“Yes, it does—to
me
it does!” I screamed, but I’d nearly given up.

Then she raised her voice as though
she’d
made a decision that could never be undone. “Marie
…
there is no John Bjergstrand!”

I let her go. She sank to the floor.

This woman’s dedication to Magna was so complete that in this sensitive matter she chose to disregard everything she believed in. She who never lied had lied to me.

I exhaled and said for the last time, “It does matter, Gerda
…
”

But she was no longer listening.

I left her living room, and I wouldn’t see her again until the day we buried Magna, our guiding star.

Of all the mistakes I made, this was the biggest. Not heeding Gerda Jensen’s last warning.

After my visit to Gerda’s, I realized I couldn’t get any further.

As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t see a connection between Eva Bjergstrand’s baby and the son Dorah received several years later.

When I told Susanne what Gerda had said, she stared at me, astounded. Then we read the letter from Australia once more. Carefully and slowly.

“It is strange, Marie
…
Eva doesn’t even know it’s a boy.”

“That was the whole idea back then. They weren’t allowed to know anything about their own flesh and blood,” I replied, sounding as though I was defending the notion.

Other people—besides Magna and Gerda—must’ve known about it, we decided. To some degree, the doctors and everyone at Kongslund must have been informed, but it would be hard to locate them. Even if we were able to, they would have had good reasons not to tell us anything if something covert had been going on.

“But Magna could have at least told her the child’s gender,” Susanne said with a peculiar bitterness in her voice.

“But Magna was the one who had to make sure the child disappeared. And then Eva.”

“The night watchman’s family that Gerda mentioned must be the one that adopted John.”

“It’s just strange that they didn’t change the name. That Magna
…
it doesn’t make sense.”

Susanne understood my nagging doubts—and my fear. Neither of us wished to go to Magna. If we contacted the night watchman’s family, the adoptive parents would almost certainly be ignorant of the boy’s past. And we had no way of proving that the child they’d adopted really was the boy that the convicted murderer Eva Bjergstrand had given birth to and had baptized at the Rigshospital in 1961. If we suggested this was the case, without having even the slightest documentation, we might do serious and needless harm to the family. If I gave him the letter that Eva Bjergstrand had written to her child, it could be a fatal mistake.

In the end, we didn’t know whether we were pursuing a false lead or not. Magna would certainly have protected her herd with all the means she had at her disposal, and perhaps Gerda had mastered lying after all—when it really mattered.

The only logical move was to take another stab at finding Eva Bjergstrand. Maybe there was a way to identify the child that only she knew about? There must be some trace of her arrival in Australia; after all, we knew that she had arrived within a specific six- to nine-month period.