The Seventh Child (59 page)

Peter Trøst had no idea.

Today they’d concluded the morning meeting in the Concept Room by singing
On your way! Be brave and true!
, the standard funeral hymn, and the five hotheaded lions had mumbled their verses over their enormous coke bottles without protest, the way no one opposed even the most bizarre ideas now. The Professor had presented the frame concept for a new program that would advocate for the disenfranchisement of all unproductive members of society—the unemployed, welfare recipients. “But isn’t the right to vote the very pillar of democracy?” the youngest of them had objected in a moment of boldness. “Isn’t it more undemocratic to repress the debate and keep up the taboo?” the Professor had hissed. And the young lion was quieted.

“There’ll be no denial of the Tamil story, Trøst,” the Professor said. “And Orla Berntsen is finished.”

“I see.” Peter turned and left.

A couple minutes later, Channel DK’s chairman of the board stood by himself at the south-facing window gazing out at the Zealand landscape. He didn’t see what Peter had glimpsed there. He couldn’t find it. All he saw were a cluster of homes set against a dull backdrop—and his own close reflection in the glass.

Finally he shook his head in resignation, and the ice-blue luminance of his forehead seemed to fill the entire room.

Asger Christoffersen spent his fourth night in Gerda Jensen’s old room on the second floor. The room was sparsely furnished, because Gerda had taken almost all her furniture with her when she retired. All that was left were a couple of chairs, a small sofa, and a bed. And, at first, Asger had felt nervous in the nearly vacant room. Maybe he felt the mighty ceiling, with its substantial beams, pressing hard against his forehead with all its symmetrical might—or maybe the house made him claustrophobic, the way astronomers often feel when they can’t see the night sky and its hundred million galaxies.

I said good-night to Susanne in the room that had been Magna’s for sixty years.

Magna’s old rosewood sleeper sofa was newly made, as though
she’d
used it as recently as the previous night and still lay in it, staring at me. Many nights, as a child, I’d stood at this very door for just a few moments longer, eyeing with fascination Magna’s thick, green leather-bound book and all its precious secrets that
she’d
cast onto her duvet. But throughout my foster mother’s lifetime—and now after her death—
she’d
kept the Kongslund Protocol out of my reach. I had never imagined that there’d be any other motive for the break-ins than this very book. And to my mind, there was no doubt about the reason the burglars had given up and left the orphanage, their business unfinished. Magna had been too clever and too patient. They’d never even been close to what they were looking for.

That night, as I thought about the child we couldn’t find, I sat in the window in the King’s Room and stared at the calm waters of the sound.

Marie, there is no John Bjergstrand
, Gerda had said. But
she’d
lied. Of that I was certain.

With the moon casting its silver arrows over Hven, I felt a sudden urge to cry, but just as I rose to go to bed, a knock came at the door.

Of all the people in the world, Asger was the only one I would have let in, and the one I least expected to find when I opened the door.

For a long time he stood silently just inside the room staring at the empty wheelchair next to the bureau. Cautiously, he sat in my Chippendale chair, his legs folding around the elegant piece of furniture.

I remained standing. Even then, I was only slightly taller than he, and he met my gaze over his aquiline nose. “You shouldn’t have sent those letters,” he said.

“You’re right,” I admitted.

“You started something that should have been left to Fate.”

Now Asger, too, was talking about Fate. It’d taken him a long time to discover that there’s a force stronger than both God and science.

“Yes,” I said obediently. The last time I’d been this close to him was during the weeks at the Coastal Sanatorium, when his parents had let him down and
he’d
seen me—and yet not seen me—because
he’d
fallen in love with Susanne.
He’d
thought I was a blind girl, but
he’d
been the blind one. That was a truth he had yet to discover.

“We have to look forward,” he said.
He’d
almost said
up
.

“Why did you become an astronomer?” I’ve always had the ability to ask questions that were light years away from the topic.

But apparently it didn’t bother him. He had the same ability. “You have a telescope yourself,” he said, pointing at the king’s telescope that was aimed at the sky. “And I can see you’re studying Stephen Hawking’s interpretation of the event horizon of black holes.”
He’d
turned his attention to the few books in my bookcase. “Perhaps you support the
Theory of Everything
?” He wasn’t being ironic.

I would have liked to respond, but the words were stuck in my throat.

I stood and blocked his view of my bookcase. On the shelf right above my astronomy books and the ones on Tycho Brahe were a couple of Agatha Christie’s most famous crime novels in their English editions—
Evil Under the Sun
and
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd—
which had always fascinated me. I didn’t want him to see them.

“Wouldn’t it be fascinating if Bohr and Einstein could be looped together in the end
…
their theories, I mean?”

He’d
posed the question as though I possessed some special knowledge of these dead scientists.

“ ‘God does not play dice,’ Einstein said, as you know—he believed in a rational, predetermined fate for all living creatures. But that was an incredible paradox—because if everything is predetermined, what do we need a god for
…
? God would be bored to death.”

I searched for a smile on his face, but there wasn’t one.

“According to Bohr’s model of quantum mechanics, all future events are unpredictable—and we don’t even know where the dice are. Humankind has no access to a rational world in which everything can be planned and steered, even though we think we do. Bohr opened our door to freedom. He gave us the opportunity to choose, and not only that
…
he gave us the opportunity to make any number of choices—which would forever separate us from machines, computers, and robots. This is the most important realization in the history of humankind.”

Asger confided this precious piece of information in such a firm tone of voice that his glasses nearly fogged up. I sat in the wheelchair without speaking, but he didn’t notice. “If Einstein’s worldview is correct, free will would be an illusion since everything would be predetermined, and the fate of all human beings would derive from a particular order of events, which in the end would be set and unchangeable
…
” He spoke like a textbook, and I didn’t normally care to speak about Fate with anyone except myself. “But if
Bohr’s
worldview is correct, then there’s a force that no human being can explain and that is beyond human reach—forever.”

“Amen,” I said, trying to bring God back into the picture and Asger back down to earth. Had Asger come to lecture me on eternity?

He stood—abruptly—and pulled the antique chair closer to me; his eyes were lit with a clarity that made me close mine; no man had come this close to me since the psychologist with the unlit pipe,
who’d
ultimately made a startled beeline from my room. However, I could still detect the smell of wool and scented soap that I’ve always connected with men of great knowledge—because that’s how all of Kongslund’s army of scribes and psychologists smelled.

“Hence, the unpredictability of the world isn’t just an illusion in a machine we don’t understand,” Asger said. I considered the choice I’d made on his behalf when I gave him the address of the couple in Brorfelde, and suddenly I was ashamed. He had, with no inkling of the truth, followed the path I’d laid out for him—from one observatory to the next, and finally all the way back to Kongslund, where I’d waited for him. Here, at the end of the journey, he still sincerely believed that his path was merely the result of a quantum-mechanic coincidence that no one could have predicted.

“But we’ll never comprehend the system,” I said, as if to punish him for my own shady dealings.

He sat for a moment with his head bowed and then once again changed the topic. “Imagine if you were the last human being who could appreciate a beautiful painting or a beautiful story while everyone else merely saw doodles on a canvas or page, having no concept of what they meant. That’s what’s always been my greatest fear—that our wealth will suffocate us some day
…
that we’ll only elect the politicians that promise us more and more wealth, until finally we’ll forget the grand scheme we’re a part of.”

Suddenly Asger sounded immensely sad—but also a little grandiose, I thought. He must have sensed it because he said nothing more.

The next day we went for a walk in the garden. We ambled up the slope under the twelve beeches and sat on the very bench where the People’s King had rested.

I pointed through the green foliage to the white villa whose southern-
facing wall seemed to float toward us in a sea of trees. “That’s where my friend lived when I was a child,” I said, and felt a longing that I hadn’t in years. “Her name was Magdalene.”

“Magdalene.” He repeated the name in the same dreamy tone he would have said Andromeda or the Virgo Cluster. And that pleased me.

“Yes,” I said. “She had cerebral palsy and was confined to her wheelchair. Yet she taught herself how to write. She wrote twelve diaries writing
one
line a day.”

He studied the sails out on the sound.

“In her diary she describes how Kongslund was built. She knew the story from her father’s father. The first owner was a sea captain and his wife. The Olberses. They were childless,” I said.

Asger looked searchingly toward Hven just as Magdalene and I had in clear weather.

“They spread joy and happiness wherever they went. Magdalene described them as the most lovable couple on Strandvejen.”

He didn’t reply. Maybe
he’d
forgotten I was there.

“The Olberses continued to develop new ways of improving the growth of their plants. Magdalene met them for the first time down on the beach where they were harvesting seaweed, which they used as a fertilizer.” I laughed and put a hand on his arm for a second, as I repeated the words Magdalene had written in her first journal (I knew them by heart). “
One morning I saw the marine captain on the slope eagerly digging holes.
‘You’re busy, Mr. Olbers?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m planting verbena; this is the Queen Victoria breed.’ ‘But tell me, what’re those peculiar chunks there?’ ‘It’s butter,’ he said. ‘Butter?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The soil here is so poor I give every plant a little chunk of butter down by the root.
’ ”

I laughed again. But Asger still hadn’t taken his eyes off the sky over Hven.

“I think Magdalene loved them so much precisely because they were childless but never showed any grief or regret over their fate.”

To my best friend there’d never been any hope of reproducing. Even if her shrunken body had been able to produce a strong, viable child, no suitor would have ever taken the turn into her driveway to meet her. I fell silent. It was as though Asger didn’t want to recognize Magdalene’s existence.

Suddenly he put his long arm around my deformed shoulder, which sank so low to the ground that we almost lost our balance and toppled down the slope like the People’s King that memorable March day in 1847. “Magdalene isn’t here anymore,” he said.

I grew so shy that I felt like one of the hedgehogs curled up in the thicket in the woods. “That’s why
we’re
sitting here,” he said. “We’re both looking for things that aren’t here anymore—or things that are too far away for anyone to remember. You remind me of someone I once met.”