The Seventh Child (68 page)

He stalled, leaving us to draw our own conclusions about Magna’s possible dark deeds, even darker than
we’d
ever imagined. Orla Berntsen put one hand over the other, as though he were trying to keep his fingers nailed to the table as he concentrated on Taasing’s information.

“There’s no reason to think that my mother isn’t my real mother,” he said. His voice sounded like a child’s, defiant and sad at the same time, and I could see both of his hands trembling, while one thumb was bent backward at an almost impossible angle.

“You don’t know a damn thing, not about your own mother either,” Taasing said brutally, and the old aggression against his former adversary flared up. Orla grew considerably paler at the remark. His left hand was half-hidden under a blue cloth napkin with Kongslund’s monogram, but I could tell, even in the dark, how his fingers grew stiff and heavy in anger.

Søren Severin Nielsen,
who’d
been a buffer between scores of asylum seekers and the Danish immigration authorities, rose to defend the man
who’d
laid the foundation for most of his numerous defeats. It was a strange and extraordinary gesture, born from both pride and humility. I’m sure none of the aging, pipe-smoking psychologists from my childhood would have been able to explain it.

But Severin didn’t manage to speak before Orla spoke for himself. “Single mothers in difficult circumstances often placed their children at Kongslund for a while.” His tone was surprisingly calm, and you could almost hear his mother’s endlessly repeated explanation in his words.

“Yes
…
maybe,” Taasing said. “My apologies. I’m sorry for my outburst, Berntsen. It’s just that we can’t be sure about anything at all.”

“I
am
sure.” Orla Berntsen leaned back, pulling his napkin onto his lap. You could hear his joints cracking.

If the others heard, they pretended not to have.

“In any case,” Taasing continued, “the minister’s reaction to Marie’s letters showed that he was somehow involved—as confirmed by Eva’s letter. The other day I took the trouble to go to Copenhagen University to search for information about that time period, and listen to this: Ole Almind-Enevold was in law school, as we know, but there was remarkably little about that period in the archives. Nonetheless, I found a small note from the juridical faculty, dated in 1959, about a collaboration between Copenhagen University and Criminal Services that was supervised by a young student. He was only in his midtwenties. He wanted to write a thesis about the problems associated with incarcerated women and their right to motherhood. It must have been a rather strange topic at the time—well before women’s issues were on the agenda. It’s a testament to the tenacity and good connections of the Almighty One that it was even approved. According to a note that I didn’t find under Ole’s name but in a yearbook composed by the faculty’s director, the young Enevold developed the bold hypothesis that extended periods in prison damaged women more than men. Though back then, of course, women generally weren’t given sentences as long as men for committing the same crime. In short, Enevold believed that this deeper damage was due to the fact that incarceration prevented women from realizing the instinct of their sex: motherhood. The incarceration of women was completely destructive, he thought, and for that reason truly anti-society and gender discriminatory. Remember that he was already then a member of the big social party, and apparently he saw a link between his somewhat manic theory—which was no doubt rooted in his own childless marriage—and a politically compelling topic that would make him interesting to half the electorate, namely women.”

For a long time there was silence around the table. No doubt, we were all contemplating the powerful man who, from his earliest days in politics, had mastered the modern amalgam of cynicism and social engagement, where the ideals also served his own career.

After about a minute, Taasing resumed, “In other words, I think I know what happened. Ole Almind-Enevold had always been childless; it’s often mentioned in newspaper profiles of him, and it’s clear this wasn’t what he wanted. On the contrary. He is protector of the nation’s most famous orphanage, and yes, it is evident that his commitment is due to his wife’s infertility. So, there he is in 1960, young and successful, a rising star in both politics and legal scholarship, married to a beautiful and admired woman; but
…
she can’t give him the one thing he wants more than anything else: a child, a son, specifically. The young, frustrated student then becomes obsessed with motherhood and designs his legal thesis in that spirit; and in prison he meets Eva, the guilty young woman who at that time was practically a child, and a virgin, and therefore somewhat innocent in his eyes, and so we have to assume
…
”

Taasing paused dramatically, and then said, “She was only seventeen when she conceived their child.”

I could tell that Taasing’s story had everyone in the sunroom spellbound—even Orla Berntsen, who was now leaning back in his chair, his hands folded behind his neck. He had known the accused man for decades. He wasn’t sniffling anymore.

“He impregnates her, and that is both a catastrophe and a blessing for him. Of course he wants the child
…
I think that’s his first thought. Remember that he has dreamed of a child for several years—just like today, he is the chairman of Children’s Right to Life after all. The
accident
is, in a strange way, his big chance. Now he can have the child he has dreamed of, through a discreet and hidden passageway—if only Magna will help him. That of course is absolutely crucial. And that’s why Eva ends up on Obstetric Ward B at the Rigshospital, where late one night she gives birth. The only witnesses are all dead today. The midwifery student I talked to wasn’t in the delivery room itself, and she knows almost nothing. The baby disappears from Eva’s life in the arms of Magna—we know that much from the midwifery student—and then Enevold arranges for the girl’s clemency by funding her relocation to the most distant place on earth: Australia. As in the gruesome fairy tale, she is sentenced to one hundred years of exile.”

Taasing paused for a moment.

And despite his sense of melodrama, no one even blinked.

Everyone believed his story.

“And the boy
…
?” In the end, Orla Berntsen couldn’t help but put the difficult but crucial question to his former adversary.

“Indeed
…
what can we make of it? What do
you
think? I know what I think.”

Everyone leaned toward the journalist, utterly confident in him despite his rather ruinous professional history.

“I think,” said Taasing, “that Enevold got in his car, drove to Kongslund, and sought to adopt his son. He wanted the boy. Eva was gone. The door was open.”

Something resembling a collective sigh rose in the warm summer breeze and was carried across the sound.

It was followed by Severin’s dry, lawyerly voice: “But there’s one problem. He doesn’t have
any
children—today.”

“No. Because something must have gone wrong,” Taasing said.

“So, let’s see. Magna helps him in the beginning and the child disappears discreetly from Rigshospital to Kongslund without anyone having done anything illegal,” Peter Trøst spoke up, putting his hands on Eva’s final letter as though it were a sacred object that needed to be protected. “The only unusual thing is that the mother isn’t some young, relatively innocent girl—but something quite different. Isn’t that what you’re saying? She’s a murderer. But Enevold’s helpers pull some strings and they make a deal. They take the child from her and send her as far away as possible. But why the hell don’t they finish it, so Enevold can adopt his son?”

“Because either we’re wrong—he didn’t actually want the boy—or, and this is the explanation that gets my vote, his
wife
didn’t want the child,” Taasing replies. “She didn’t want to adopt. It takes
two,
after all. And then perhaps we can speculate on what happened
…
Because in that case Magna would have been terrified that even the least evidence of her illegal and scandalous actions might at some point leak out. For that reason, she cuts Enevold off from the child and erases all evidence of the boy, hiding him effectively among the other children at Kongslund. And then finally an unknown family—somewhere in Denmark—adopts him.”

Taasing glanced at the three men one by one. “Søborg
…
Rungsted
…
or maybe Aarhus
…
who knows?”

“And then she forgets about the form that Marie found in the archives of Mother’s Aid Society?” Severin added.

“Yes. It’s her only mistake. Everyone commits one, after all. But aside from that, Enevold is now prevented from revealing anything or finding his son, and that interpretation of events matches what we saw at the anniversary. His peculiar and sentimental speech about
longing
.” Taasing nodded almost formally at Severin. “He referred to Magna as the mistress of longing, and right before he raised a toast to her, he said something like,
Magna, I have a longing that only you know the origins of
…
which only you can alleviate
. Everyone believed it was a declaration of love—that they’d been lovers when they were young—but perhaps we were wrong. Maybe what he expressed was genuine anger.”

Severin cleared his throat the way he presumably did in the Immigration Court. “But, who visited Magna after the anniversary party
…
the day she died? Was that
Enevold
?” He sounded slightly mocking, as though such accusations against the nation’s second-in-command were entirely far-fetched.

“Maybe. Or maybe someone else.” Taasing shook his head, changing the topic. “I’d hoped to limit our search by asking you to come back with the names of your biological mothers. I’d hoped that some of your adoptive parents had kept the information they were given during the adoption process. But now I think that Magna destroyed all of it. She knew that Enevold would try to track down the seven children from the infant room. Seven children who couldn’t be tracked—not one of them—was foolproof camouflage. Of course, we can still hope that Susanne or Asger learns something, or Nils—” Abruptly he turned to me. “Because he is
your
bet, isn’t he?”

“I only know that—” I began, but Taasing cut me off.

“Tell us what Gerda told you
…
about Nils,” he said.

My shoulders sank even lower than ever, if that was possible. But I had to continue the story I’d started so long ago. “I went to see Gerda in 2001,” I said without looking at any of them. “This was after I got the letter from Eva.” I was astounded that I spoke so clearly. “She told me there was a boy in the Elephant Room whom the nurses referred to as Little John.” I smiled, and that must have seemed entirely misplaced to them. “Because he was just a little shrimp. That was the only child I couldn’t track down during those years when I
…
” My voice slipped far down my throat, and I stopped, only a hair’s breadth away from revealing my childhood obsession: the tracking and spying of the only roommates I’ve ever had. I considered the carefully kept records of their comings and goings, which were hidden in the secret compartment of the cabinet—the descriptions of their adoptive parents, their friends, their new lives, and clippings of all kinds chronicling their adult achievements: Asger as the new director of the Ole Rømer Observatory, Peter as the star of a new TV station, Orla as the feared chief of staff at the Ministry of National Affairs, Nils as a war photographer, and Susanne as Magna’s illustrious successor.

I blushed for the second time.

“During those years when
what
…
?” Peter Trøst asked. A logical question. He had a curious but surprisingly kind look in his eyes. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

“When I wanted to find John Bjergstrand,” I said vaguely. My explanation almost sounded like a lisp, but strangely enough, that seemed to reassure them. My oddness satisfied their curiosity.

“I put a lot of pressure on Gerda,” I said. “She’s a woman who has a hard time lying—and that day, she finally told me that the boy they’d named Little John
,
after the character in
Robin Hood
, had been adopted by a night watchman and his family. They lived in a tenement in Nørrebro, in Copenhagen. It was very unusual. Normally that kind of family would
never
be approved by Mother’s Aid Society. They would have ranked as too poor, their living conditions too squalid: the kind of life considered too risky for a child.” I raised my voice to underscore my final, crucial point: “John’s new father was a man by the name of Anker Jensen.”

Taasing leaned over, clumsily knocking over a cup. But he didn’t pay any attention to that.

All he needed were three words: “Nils Jensen’s father.” And he whispered the name so everyone could hear it. “The night watchman in Nørrebro.”

“Yes,” I confirmed.