The Seventh Child (71 page)

“
You
let the birds out?” At that moment, Anton seemed as helpless as the day his wife had told him she was pregnant, and that they should return Susanne. But instead of exiting his body, until the person talking had disappeared along with the dreadful message, he clutched his wife’s wrists.
“You let the birds out?”

“Yes,” Susanne said. “When her favorite, Aphrodite, died, she took an awful revenge on the rest of us—and punished herself as well. Any first-year psychology student could deduce that.”

Josefine stared at the tablecloth where her plate had been.

“I think Samanda discovered that it was you who released the birds
…
she sensed it. And then she got really scared. I think she also discovered your other secret, Mom, the one I’ve always known.”

“Secret?” Anton said.

“That Samanda’s not
your
child—she’s only Mom’s. Isn’t that true, Mom?”

A moment of absolute silence followed, and you could hear the wind in the oak trees. Then Josefine screamed, wresting free of Anton’s grip; the sudden movement knocked all the glasses over.

Anton didn’t react at this horrible moment. Maybe
he’d
already left his wife and daughter and was floating in the air above the yard, calmly observing the scene below. Or maybe he simply couldn’t find his words before his wife spoke.

“Yes,” Josefine said, and her voice was more powerful that it had been for years. “Yes
…
Samanda discovered who let the birds out. And then I told her everything. How her father and sister had taken pleasure in Aphrodite’s illness, how they’d taken her into the woods to break her neck and throw her in a hole where nobody would ever find her again. And then I had to calm her down, by telling her she wasn’t really related to either of you.”

“So you told Samanda why you loved her—and not me?”

Josefine bowed her head at this statement—delivered in such a calm and matter-of-fact way. “I would have gone with him,” she replied, her voice surprisingly loud and clear.

“You would have gone with him, but you didn’t.”

“I told Samanda all of it
…
that she probably wasn’t even
…
that she wasn’t who she thought she was. And that I would have gone with her real father if
…
if we
…
”

“If
you’d
had any courage,” Susanne said.

Josefine began to cry.

Anton sat unmoving, his face expressionless.

Susanne stood. “What a life. First you conceive Samanda dishonestly, your secret love child, then I frighten her out of her wits with my vandalism and stories about sailing out on the lake, and then you tell her she isn’t even the daughter of the man she loves and believes to be her father, but the bastard child of a charlatan and a globetrotter who has long since abandoned you. You didn’t even dare follow him to the garden gate
…
”

Josefine whimpered again.

“And this man, her father, didn’t even know what was going on?” Anton said. Miraculously,
he’d
remained grounded here with us, and now faced his wife with a coldness I didn’t know he had within him.

“I would have gone with him,” Josefine whispered.

Susanne took one step closer and lowered herself to her seated mother. “Did you get pregnant on purpose, Mom?”

Before anyone could answer, Anton stood. “I can’t stay here.” These words came slowly, as if he hesitated on each syllable, yet it was clear to anyone who might have been listening that he meant them. Never again would he sit across from his wife, in silence or otherwise.

Josefine never answered her final question, Susanne later told me. She remained seated at the table where, like always, she gazed at the horizon. From what I heard, I don’t think she saw her daughter or husband leave; and anyway, I don’t think it meant anything to her, deep down. She sat just as she had the first time I’d laid eyes on her: sunken in a sea of shadows on the bench under the hazel branches, facing south, listening to a message only she could hear, and which she acknowledged with a peculiar nodding of her head.

And that’s how she remained as the sun set over the cape that had once been cursed by a king.

30

BREAKDOWN

June 29, 2008

Somehow I’d always thought that Susanne would be the first of us to break under the pressure, after which
she’d
reveal all of her secrets.

I should have known that her past had long since hardened her for far greater burdens than the ones we now faced. What I should have realized was that the breakdown would come from a very different place—and much too quickly for anyone to react.

Everyone in the room was smiling, and most of the smiles were bigger than ever, even if they should have turned to grimaces—or worse.

More than a thousand people—board members, managers, technicians, reporters, and celebrities—stood shoulder to shoulder in Channel DK’s enormous ballroom on the lowest level of the Big Cigar. The space was so tightly packed there was barely room to raise a glass in response to the many toasts being offered. Everyone was in especially high spirits, and more than a few celebrants had spilled champagne on their neighbors, but that hadn’t dampened the mood. The Professor started off the festivities by reading a telegram that
he’d
received directly from the Ministry of State just a few minutes earlier.

“I wish all the best for Channel DK in the years ahead,” the dying but indomitable prime minister had written from his sick bed. The words were a little pedestrian perhaps, lacking conviction, but that hadn’t affected the atmosphere.

The Professor had insisted on celebrating the successful
Roadshow
, which he contended had united Danes around the station’s new visionary concepts; now everyone could see with their own eyes how well the station was doing.

Peter Trøst Jørgensen had receded to the far back of the ballroom, trying to block out the euphoric cheers being given for the man on the podium. He nodded politely to those who flocked around him offering their congratulations; in one cluster of celebrity guests stood his former wife—his second—who after only three months of marriage had formed the group “Famous Men’s Wives.” He didn’t know if she was still a member or even if it still existed.

Peter surveyed his boss on the podium; there was no doubt the Professor was in high spirits tonight, just as there was no doubt he was planning to sack him on account of the Kongslund Affair scandal. Of course,
he’d
wait a few months, until the successful conclusion of
Roadshow
, whose main star was Peter, but there was no doubt that he would do it. He would start by gradually removing him from the screen and from his executive functions and press contacts, and then he would launch a new star with much fanfare to replace him. Before the audience could even think to object, let alone protest the change, Peter would be gone and soon forgotten. That’s how the world was designed—on both sides of the screen.

Despite what the Professor and the other members of the board wanted everyone to think, Channel DK was on the verge of bankruptcy—yet here they were, in the ballroom, drinking champagne and cheering—and in a short while they’d be dancing and singing until midnight to the station’s own big band, as though all was well.

The Professor stepped onto the podium—grasping his beloved pipe in his right hand—and gave the most peculiar speech in the station’s history: “
Doubt
,” he said. “Doubt kills people and television stations. It’s the only significant crack in the armor of evolution. The damage that most people suffer, through the process we refer to as childhood, is from a lack of self-esteem. It’s by far the most dangerous epidemic among us.” People were already beginning to wonder what he was talking about. The pipe stuck out from under his beard, bobbing up and down as he spoke. “We’ve given the most important years of our lives to random and often unpredictable people: our parents—who are victims of an uncontrollable inferno of emotional outbursts and traumas precipitated from their own childhoods—and that’s why we grow up to become crippled, ill-adapted, half-complete individuals haunted by doubt.”

At the end of this monologue, he coughed, and the sound system crackled. Trøst wondered whether the Professor was drunk. This was far from his usual diatribe.

God knows he had every reason to get wasted.

He spat a glob of pipe juice onto the marble floor—
he’d
never done that before—and this act, so out of character in its disregard for appearances, made the entire crowd shift uneasily on their feet.

“That’s why we who control the media images and who select the information must master an ability no one needs to be ashamed of”—the Professor put his hand to his narrow, striped tie, which ended halfway down his belly—“namely, the ability to love ourselves. It’s the only kind of love that truly matters. The elimination of all doubt.”

Scattered applause, clearly a beat off, met these words. To Peter, the chairman sounded as though
he’d
eaten a handful of psilocybin mushrooms.

Then the Professor began to shout: “If that love wilts, well, then we’re back with the parents who gave us all the fucking psychoses to begin with!”

The audience stared at him, dumbstruck.

Without noticing it, the Professor placed one newly polished shoe in the glob of his pipe spit. By now, several of the distinguished guests had already left the room.

“That’s all there is to it!” the Professor boomed.

He staggered off the podium, and to everyone’s relief, exited the ballroom. A few minutes later, a couple of Trøst’s executive colleagues started whooping—and soon the exuberant crowd members were once again smiling and enjoying themselves, the strange speech nearly forgotten.

The following morning, when the employees of Channel DK arrived at work, hungover and sluggish, they learned of the sudden illness of the TV star.

Early that morning, Peter Trøst had called for help from his ninth-floor executive suite. He couldn’t stand up; his legs had gone numb.

The Cigar’s own physical therapists had called in a team of orthopedic specialists from Rigshospital, but no one could explain the bizarre phenomenon. Finally, the senior doctor on the team posited that it could be a mysterious virus and transferred Trøst to a special unit for unknown and potentially fatal infections.

For the sake of appearances, the Professor, who had only barely recovered from his drunken stupor (the strange speech was nearly forgotten), took the Cigar’s limousine to the hospital on Belgdamsvej. It would be exceptionally convenient if he could rid himself of the celebrated reporter for something as dire, and understandable, as a health emergency, poor fellow.

“Trøst, what the hell did you step on?” he ebulliently cried, mostly for the benefit of the attending nurses, as he entered the star’s hospital room.

It was meant as a cheerful greeting between men, but the supine patient didn’t respond. For lack of any better ideas, the doctors had given him a shot of morphine, and he had slipped into a deep darkness several hours before.

Once again I dreamed of Nils Jensen, and I knew in my dreams that he still hadn’t worked up the courage to ask his parents the terrifying question—even though it was crucial to solving the Kongslund Affair. I envisioned him at the Assistens Cemetery, where
he’d
played as a child. This was where, using his little Kodak Instamatic,
he’d
developed his skill—evident even in his first black-and-white photographs of birds and squirrels between flowers and gravestones—of how to combine light and dark.

Nils Jensen could find the Great Poet’s grave with his eyes closed—and without stumbling once.
He’d
sat silently in the living room with his parents much of the afternoon, trying to formulate the question he knew he must ask—although he feared the answer more than the Darkness his father had described so often when he was little.

The purgatory that no soul escapes.

The poet’s grave was the place
he’d
always gone with his father, on the rare occasions when the man ventured out in the daylight. There they’d sit and his father would tell him stories so fantastic that Nils Jensen knew them by heart to this day.
Our life on earth is the seed of eternity / Our body dies but the soul cannot perish!
the gravestone read—written for posterity in the poet’s own words—and Nils hoped with all his might that it was true. He had a crucial question to ask the man whose earthly life had long since ended.

In my dream, he sat for a few minutes studying the grave as he tried to sort the words marching around in his head. He was searching for a suitable opener that wouldn’t offend the old man with the fantastic stories. As an adult, the stories Nils remembered best were the ones about lonely children like
Thumbelina
,
The Ugly Duckling
, and
The Boy Who Trod on the Loaf
. It was the last one that compelled him to seek out the Great Poet today. As he saw it, the answer to his question would help him decide what to do with Marie’s revelation.

As he had as a child, he closed his eyes and imagined the Great Poet slowly rising from the grave. He envisioned a skinny, black-clad man, as you see in old photographs, bowing politely and greeting Nils kindly.
What a lovely surprise that is bestowed upon me to see you again. To what do I owe this honor?

“I want you to tell me a story. A very special story.” That’s what
he’d
always said to his father when they came here. It was a ritual all three of them knew.

You mean—a real story—one of those that begin with ‘once upon a time,’ which has become my finest trademark?

“Tell me the story that I loved the best, old poet
…
the one about the boy who trod on the loaf.”

The one about the
boy
who trod on a loaf
…
?
There was a puzzled tone in the poet’s vibrant voice.

“Yes, that one
…
! Why did you write that story
…
? That’s what I’d like to know.”

Listen, my little friend, you need to understand that I can’t just explain everything. And the fairy tale you mention isn’t about a boy like you, you know, but about a
girl
who came to such grief. That’s the whole point.

A small squirrel darted across the path.

I trust you’ve heard of the girl who trod on the loaf so as not to soil her shoes, and what terrible things befell her. It has been written and it has been published.
The poet’s voice rose up, flowing like wind rustling in the poplars, and then fell to a whisper just as the little squirrel ran across a thick trunk. He began recounting the shortest version Nils had ever heard:
She was a poor child, proud and arrogant. Lacking character, as they say. As a very young child she liked catching flies, pulling their wings off, and turning them into reptiles. She grabbed a cockchafer and a dung beetle and pinned them down, then put a green leaf or a small piece of paper at their feet, and the poor creatures held on, turned and bent it to try to get off the needle. “Now the cockchafer is reading!” said little Inge. “Look how it turns the leaf!” As she grew older she got worse rather than better, but pretty she was, and that was her misfortune
…

Nils interrupted, even though he could tell how delighted the old poet was to tell the story again after such a long time: “Listen, old poet—I don’t need to hear the story again, because I know it by heart. After all, it was my father’s favorite fairy tale. And it wasn’t a girl who trod on the loaf but a boy, and I know that because my father told me. The boy was condemned to eternal life down in the Darkness deep underground—alone. Just tell me the ending, because that’s the part I don’t understand. Tell me about how the boy ascends from Darkness—how he finally becomes a little bird that flies high up in the sky.”

A little bird zigzagged up to the world of humans
…
the poet began spontaneously, his voice light and flowing, his hat bobbing cheerfully as he spoke such wonderful words—but Nils interrupted once again.

“Yeah, yeah, but tell me what it all means.”