The Seventh Child (49 page)

“Mom?” Samanda said.

Josefine looked into the man’s blue eyes.

“Mom?”

Josefine remembered how
he’d
put a finger on his lips and kissed her good-bye, the taxi door half-open, before he disappeared into the world.

“Mom,” Samanda said. “Tell me the story!”

So Josefine closed her hands around the book and read aloud from the chapter about the Spanish Armada, which brought back shiploads of “living gold” that the conquistadors had found in the Canary Islands—the small golden birds that sang more beautifully than any prince or king in Europe had ever heard in their deep, dark woods.

“Let’s buy one of those!” Samanda shouted joyfully. No one could know then that this innocent desire was simply a continuation of what Fate had planned years ago—and would bring about her own demise.

By the time Josefine and her daughter left for Copenhagen on Monday morning, they had decided on getting two birds. As they stood in the pet shop, the number doubled to four and even the largest cage was too small, so Josefine burrowed holes into a big cardboard box from the store before hurrying home. At the behest of his enthusiastic wife and youngest daughter, Anton built a giant aviary in less than a day, using heavy wire—the kind found on mink farms—stretched across a floor of birch tree planks and stained Masonite. Following Josefine’s direction, he placed the aviary right inside the kitchen by the south-facing window. Within a month, the four new lodgers were given two new friends; and soon the beautifully carved oak, birch, elm, and ash sticks in the cage held eight vigorous, loudly chirping bright-yellow canaries with their eager beaks turned straight up to the sky. They chirped so loudly that Susanne felt like covering her ears, but she didn’t dare to, because she sensed her mother’s peculiar excitement about her new allies. Before the end of the year, eight had become twelve, because that was the very number Josefine had always dreamed of—and she named each bird after a Greek god or philosopher
she’d
discovered in Ulrik’s book about Olympus, written the year she gave birth to Samanda. Hera, Aphrodite, Amphitrite, Aeolus, Athena, Hermes, Dionysius, Prometheus, Poseidon, Zeus, Socrates, Plato: the ten females were gods or goddesses, the two males were philosophers.

Josefine spent hours in front of the aviary, sitting on a stool and staring through the screen until her eyes went red from concentration—as though she were waiting for an event she couldn’t yet see. One morning she went to Kalundborg; late that afternoon she returned, set her shopping bag on the sofa, and pulled out a little wooden cage covered with a green blanket. The cage stood next to her bed all night, and in the morning the house awoke to a whistling, warbling singing. Susanne heard her mother laugh exuberantly. “That one will be my most beautiful darling,” she said.

She called the fateful, thirteenth bird Aphrodite—her favorite name—renaming the first Aphrodite Aristotheles; granted, it was neither a god’s name nor a philosopher’s, but one she invented, and in her exalted mood she had no time to worry about that.

The new Aphrodite had been born with a unique color mutation: a white chest with only a few narrow stripes of yellow. For two days the bird sat in the aviary, glancing nervously at her twelve companions. On the third day there came a strange coughing sound from the floor of the giant cage, and the remaining twelve birds cocked their heads and stopped chirping. Josefine screamed. Aphrodite, with her fine golden markings, sat hunched over, the center of the other birds’ undivided attention, breathing heavily as if the beautifully arched chest might at any moment burst. Another two days passed. The forlorn Aphrodite lost all of her splendor and many of her feathers, looking more and more like the aging Socrates than the exquisite goddess of love: straggly, bloated, and nearly bald.

The following morning she laid her egg. A big, greenish thing with brown spots. Josefine for once held Anton’s hand tightly as she watched the shell first appear; it seemed an impossible size—bigger than the cherry plums they picked at the cape each summer—and Josefine let out a despairing whimper, as if she were the one giving birth. Then the arched shell protruded further, and the bird’s eyes opened wide as its chest heaved in terrible angst. Josefine moaned at the sight. The rest of the egg followed, and Susanne, who had been standing behind her mother, hurried to the bathroom and vomited—spitting and rattling and practically drowning out the grotesque birth. The remaining birds sat petrified, and Samanda wailed.

They watched in horror as Josefine’s favorite collapsed next to the large, formidable egg. Her chest rose and sank—and she tried to climb atop the egg to brood, but kept slipping over the side. No one intervened, and Susanne found herself completely devoid of compassion—both for Aphrodite and for Josefine. Finally, Anton reached into the cage and removed the egg. He studied it carefully. It looked cracked, dead. “She’s broody,” he said. “She’ll keep laying eggs until we have her put down.”

Josefine looked at him, her eyes wet. She stood and took the egg from him. She placed it in a blue Tupperware container, which she carefully carried into her room. The next day she absurdly patched up the shell with a bandage and candle wax, but it looked every bit as lifeless as before.

Two days later the egg remained in its shell of candle wax. Josefine replaced the bandage every morning, and the shell assumed a brownish color as though a still-living creature was pushing against the inside of the shell with all its might.

On the sixth day Josefine gave up. The following morning, Anton took the feeble Aphrodite and the cracked egg and went into the forest. Susanne hesitated in the kitchen doorway, recalling the frog her father had killed before her.

“Come with me!” he said, and she ran after him.

Father and daughter stomped through the thicket until they came to a suitable spot behind a juniper, its bare branches poking out in every direction. Here they laid Aphrodite on the ground, and the bird sat shaking in the little wooden cage it had arrived in, as though it understood what was about to occur. Susanne studied her father’s strong hands, and, to her surprise, she felt goose bumps spread across her entire body, down to her very fingertips, like thousands of little needles pricking her skin.

Anton squatted with the terrified bird in his hand, and he looked at Susanne for a long time. Slowly he held the bird out to her, and she accepted it and did exactly what
he’d
shown her with the frog. A moment later, Aphrodite lay in her box, her elegant neck snapped and her head dangling at an impossible angle. The beak that should have sung so beautifully was half-open, and the bird’s eyes had already glazed over. They dug a hole in the forest and put the box in it. They covered it and patted the ground firmly, erasing all traces of the grave so no one would ever find it again. At last Anton crushed the egg with his boot, until there wasn’t a chip of shell left. He kicked it into the dirt, the last few pieces blowing away in the wind.

It was a dreadful winter. Josefine had taken the death of her beloved golden bird as an unusually bad omen, refusing to enter the surface of ordinary life. She floated about the rooms like a faintly gleaming ghost, her mouth a thin white line under black eyes that focused on nothing earthly. Never had the house at Våghøj been so filled with a heavy, invisible mass; it tore at the curtains and the walls and tried to suck them into its vacuum. Even Josefine’s friends stayed away, and the quiet chirping of the remaining birds could barely be heard through the vast silence.

Then Fate sneaked unseen though the rooms one night when they were all asleep—completing the catastrophe, which Susanne had known would happen ever since Aphrodite’s arrival and subsequent death. (I was the first person she told the story to, and it is the most bizarre story I’ve ever heard.)

Early one morning all sounds were suddenly gone; the little raps against the sticks, the familiar tinkle and rustle from the kitchen—silent now. And the door to the aviary was open. So too was the front door. The birds had flown off, each and every one. With a noise that didn’t seem to belong in this world, a woman’s voice broke the silence that had lasted for nearly two months since Aphrodite’s death. It was a Sunday morning, and the scream spread across the hills, causing people several miles away to glance into the sky, puzzled. What living creature could make such a sound?

When Anton arrived from the fields, Josefine was sitting by the kitchen table, rocking her pale but still beautiful face between her two fists. Her mouth was half-open and a strange wail emerged from her throat. Then there was the patter of quick-moving feet across the floor. Anton turned and blocked the doorway, holding his daughters at bay. “No, no, no!” he shouted loudly, and the tone in his voice made the two girls back off, frightened.

Any reasonable person would have understood that somebody had let the birds out on purpose. A cage door might have come open by accident, but a front door does not unlock itself—only a pair of purposeful hands could do that, and they would have had to do so quietly when everyone was asleep.

Maybe a vagrant, Anton suggested.

But Josefine stared into the void and did not respond.

Then he too fell silent. Only a fool would run off with twelve canaries and leave the silverware.

A couple of months later, Samanda and Susanne finished the tenth and eleventh grades of high school. The first shock seemed to have blown over, and everyone must have assumed that the bad luck that had plagued Hill Farm had finally ended—at least for that year. Susanne considered the door that had been opened while everyone slept, and the sun that had risen over the fjord, shining like the conquistador’s gold and tempting the little birds toward it. She thought of the frog and of Aphrodite, lifeless, in the cold soil.

In the months that followed, Josefine’s skin became dry as parchment. It practically crackled under the gray light that enveloped her. Her walk grew hesitant; her joints seemed stiff and tense, as though struggling to turn on their hinges when the brain ordered them to do so. Twice, Susanne had seen her stand in the middle of the room for nearly half an hour as if
she’d
forgotten where she was or how to move her limbs. They didn’t buy any more birds; the aviary stood empty and only rattled faintly whenever Susanne or her father walked past. They ate dinner in silence. She hated the empty wire cage because it reminded her of a giant mausoleum. She couldn’t understand how its bars remained so shiny, without a trace of rust. It was as though Josefine’s dust cloth continued to polish it when no one was looking.

One night at dinner, Susanne took a deep breath and said, “I’m going to move away when I start twelfth grade.”

Josefine looked up for the first time in a long while. Very slowly Anton guided a forkful of goulash into his mouth. Almost as though he hadn’t heard her. Maybe
he’d
already floated up under the ceiling in order to withdraw from the scene.

Samanda sat strangely frozen.

“I can rent an apartment in town,” she said. She meant Kalundborg.

Josefine didn’t move.

Susanne stared at her. “If I have to stay in this house, I’ll drop out and get a job as a cashier.” She wasn’t sure why she said this.

Anton stared at his plate. Josefine’s mouth was half-open. Samanda remained frozen, pale, without the smile Susanne had expected.

“There’s something sick in this house,” she said.

At that moment, Josefine’s chest expanded to the breaking point, and her body filled with energy, as if all the accumulated pressure that had for months caused her skin to shine and her limbs to tremble were suddenly released.

Samanda reached for her, but it was too late.

“
You
…
!” Josefine pointed directly at Susanne. “You’ve never belonged here!”

Out of the corner of her eye, Susanne saw Samanda’s wide eyes, and in the background she heard a faint rattle in the aviary, as though all its contents had been shaken loose and were bumping against the cage. Or perhaps the birds had miraculously returned and taken their seats for the final showdown.

“Don’t you
…
bother to come back, ever! Don’t ever set foot here again!”

Anton awoke at these words and tried to reach out for his wife’s raised arm, but all the pent-up air was forced from her hunched body and swept him aside like a tumbleweed in the wind.

The blast of anger struck Susanne, practically lifting her from her chair. “You know what you are
…
Do you even know what you are
…?
Do you know where you come from
…?
You were born to a whore in Hamburg
…
!” Josefine stretched the last vowel out, before it was torn apart by a moan emanating from deep within her belly. Susanne jumped up from the table and ran out of the kitchen with Anton in pursuit. She made it to her bicycle, which was still scratched up, and was gone before he could catch her. That’s how abruptly her life at the pastry-box house at Våghøj came to an end.

Just as abruptly as it had begun.

She had arrived at Hill Farm in the vanilla-custard Volvo sixteen years earlier, a stranger. And she had remained a stranger. The orphanage suitcase with the little blue elephants on it still sat in her closet, a memory of the short period when she had been Anton and Josefine’s dream come true: the girl from Kongslund with the golden halo.