The Seventh Child (81 page)

“People like us, we’ll always have that feeling inside of us,” he said when he visited me for the last time (though he himself was unaware that it would be our final meeting). Like always, he smelled of soap and wool, the way wise men do. “We lay in the darkness without knowing who we were, or where we were going, but we were together, Marie. Even though it shouldn’t be possible for children that young, we understood each other. Even though we didn’t have a language yet, we spoke, and that’s the miracle: we proved that
no
human being is ever completely alone.”

He stood in the doorway before taking his leave, as though struck by a premonition about the final good-bye, and said, “To people like us, any human being we meet is one of the blue elephants, and for that reason we can’t hate anyone, can’t judge anyone, can’t reject anyone. Because once they lay there too—right next to us—speaking to us in the darkness. Nobody can ever change that feeling.”

When he was halfway out the door, he stopped again, and said his very last words: “Marie, the only problem in the world, between left and right and light and darkness and intelligent and stupid and parents and children, is that we all forget the capacity for empathy that we are born with.” He took a step backward into the darkness, but I still heard his voice: “The Elephant Room proves that human beings do not from the beginning contain that judgment”—for a second he sounded as though he were going to cry—“and it proves that Niels Bohr was right: electrons never rest in the same condition if you don’t want them to. It’s not possible—
nothing
is predetermined.”

That was his last farewell, and I might have been naive enough to believe him if it hadn’t been for the book I’d just wrested from Gerda and my foster mother’s arms.

It was no longer some starry-eyed orphanage protocol full of old women’s tales about long-forgotten adopted children and their adoptive parents: it was a weapon, an especially brutal weapon, because it contained the description of a reality that had been hidden for so long.

It told the story of a fairy-tale-like deceit. Of the father of our nation’s real sin, of the cynical plans of three individuals—Carl, Ole, and Magna—for the fates of seven children: Peter, Asger, Severin, Susanne, Orla, Nils, and myself.

It told the story of a murderer.

And it would take down everyone
who’d
been involved along the way.

39

NEMESIS

September 12, 2009

There are headstones carved like an open book of fairy tales where the dead person’s name is chiseled in golden brass on the left page. I would have preferred that Magdalene had been buried under such a stone rather than lie in an unmarked grave under the twelve beeches up there on the slope; after all, the Great Poet had been a guest in the white villa shortly before she was born—and she could have had a spot next to him, I was sure.

If I had proposed that kind of arrangement to my foster mother, she would have laughed at me with that deep rumble that was meant to reassure the children under her care. She would have put her hand on my left shoulder and said, “Marie, in truth there is no God or Devil. There is only this reality. We live and we die—and in between, we have to do things as best we can.”

Needless to say, it had never been like that in my world
.

The old leather-bound book literally drifted in from the ocean. Had there been rushes between Skodsborg and Bellevue (as there had been on the stretch of the Nile where Moses had arrived), Magna would have definitely found it there.

It was in the water and quite dissolved, with no name on the cover or any other indication of
who’d
lost it or where it had come from.

These were her notes on the first page.

It’s three-fingers thick and contains at least 4,000 or 5,000 pages,
she wrote
. My first thought was that it was a ship’s log, and that for some reason it had fallen into the water. Nothing had ever been written on its pages, or maybe the saltwater had erased the ink—but I don’t think so.

My practical foster mother brought the book to Copenhagen to a retired bookbinder, whose adopted child had once been in her care, and he restored the beautiful keepsake for her, affixing new pages and engraving her full name on the cover in gold lettering that had barely faded over the years: Martha Magnolia Louise Ladegaard. Here she acknowledged her full identity, and that suggested to me the book’s importance to her.

Already as a child, I imagined that my foster mother was writing in the log from a sunken submarine or some beached vessel from one of the great wars, or maybe from a Spanish frigate that had long since sunk to the bottom of the ocean. But Magna wasn’t inclined to such far-fetched thoughts. She was just satisfied that the book had come to Kongslund—since in the future it was to contain the most important details about the home whose location near the water had always been crucial to her. And it had been her intent that it would follow her into the grave.

This book is never to be read by anyone, not even after my death,
she wrote in the Protocol’s introduction.

I ignored that.

The thoughts that Magna at first confided in her new keepsake were not particularly spectacular. They revolved around the children who spent the first part of their lives in her care, and she described the everyday routines—an afternoon by the beach or an outing to the Deer Garden—and more serious problems such as the adoption of an especially damaged or ailing child.

As the notes progressed, her descriptions increasingly centered on the weakest and most poorly adapted, the fragile ones: their flaws, defects, and the slow progress that was owed to her careful repair work (although she herself never used that expression), and which made up the content of her life.

It seemed to me that the Protocol contained a life’s quest for the answers to the misfortunes that are ceaselessly passed from one generation to the next—as though a higher power wanted humankind to never learn from its mistakes and therefore never correct the previous generation’s blunders.

The specially chosen children, the ones in the most need, were the ones she let stay the longest in the Elephant Room, where they received the special protection and care of herself and Gerda Jensen. She described her selection criteria, what kind of negligence they had suffered, and which correctives she intended to hammer in to help them transform into a more usable shape.

One little boy’s parents were both alcoholics, and one little girl (who never spoke a word) had been pried with forceps before the authorities delivered her in a hospital (her mother died). A third child had become so emaciated that no one thought it would live—and like this, onward they marched: the stooped, miserable beings across the pages of the Protocol just like the elephants in Magna’s song—in apparently endless rows.

But then things changed. From the spring of 1961 to the summer of 1962, she deviated from the pattern: she let the Elephant Room serve as the setting for the lives of seven children—of which only one could be said to really need her ingenuity and special care, namely me, the little foundling.

None of the other six are described in the pages of the old log as being especially damaged or as having a particular need for protection and care. Nothing like that is ever mentioned, and that would probably strike readers as peculiar.

What was her motive for letting us remain together for so long in the most important room in the house? I leaned over the book, crookedly. I would finally know the answer.

In the Protocol, Magna’s careful notes transformed into some of the most shocking I have ever read. Her notes revolved almost exclusively around me—and they told me a story I’d never imagined possible.

Page by page, I realized what had made Gerda Jensen so terrified of handing over the book to me.

The fear had nothing to do with protecting the children described within, nor about Magna’s activities. To the contrary.

It was all about me.

She knew this book would destroy the child they loved.

What worries me most are her fantasies. More and more frequently, I catch myself fearing what is going on inside her. Some of what I see and sense is so peculiar and different that I cannot find the words to describe it: The wheelchair. The telescope. The mirror. Not to mention the palsied woman she has begun to dream of night and day. God knows that I’ve come close to taking that chair from her at least a hundred times and driving it to the landfill in Klampenborg, but I fear her wrath, and something tells me to heed this fear
.

So wrote Magna, who otherwise feared no one.

And I should have stopped reading—right there at the beginning of her narration—but of course that was impossible.

I am the daughter of a pastor, and from time to time I get the sense that Evil has come to reside at Kongslund in a creature I don’t know
, my foster mother wrote in an even more mystifying note on one of the following pages. I didn’t understand the connection, even though her tone left a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. For a woman like Magna, who never had any time for artificial drama, these kinds of incantations were shocking.

In the following pages she writes of Eva Bjergstrand—and the child—and everything that should have never happened but did. And she does it in a way that shows that she slowly realized what
she’d
initiated—with the help of her faithful assistant, Gerda Jensen.

Her first encounter with the newborn child is described in the Protocol as a revelation:
Never during all my years at Kongslund have I seen a creature so fragile as Eva’s child. And I have, after all, seen quite a bit.

This is in the beginning of May 1961, three days after the arrival of the mysterious woman to Obstetric Ward B, where her baby was delivered and since disappeared.

The crucial event is not the birth itself, because it was, as Magna elaborates, planned to the last detail by powerful men and therefore followed to the letter. The determining event that changed everything about the fastidious plans was Magna Louise Ladegaard’s own encounter with the child that was to be offered up for adoption—as had been arranged with the very young mother.

When Ole Almind-Enevold and Carl Malle had first told her the incredible story about the prison affair, Magna had refused to help them. Kongslund did not want to get involved in such a deceitful and dangerous game.

But when the two men outlined the plan that would cover up the affair and spare the mother—and enable Ole to adopt his own child—
she’d
finally agreed. For the sake of the child, of course. Even if the last part of the plan was to be kept secret from the unhappy woman.

Eva Bjergstrand had agreed to her own pardon in return for the child, the two men told Magna—and they didn’t dwell on this. The justification for her pardon would be her age and that she was a new mother.

From their time in the Resistance, Ole and Carl had close contacts at the Ministry of Justice. Party members registered the contours of a scandal that had to be avoided at all costs, and they were more than happy to turn a blind eye. Well-placed officials pulled the right strings and cashed in some favors. The girl would begin a new life in Australia, and that was the best scenario she could hope for. In any case, as a felon and a single woman,
she’d
never gain custody of the child anyway. No matter what, the child would be put up for adoption.

In that situation it was better for the child to live with its biological father than to end up with complete strangers, Ole and Carl argued. Of course they had not told Eva the last part of the plan—that Ole would adopt the child—because, they said, it might trigger an even more profound longing in the mother. (It was like putting a white-cloth diaper over the young mother’s eyes, I thought to myself upon reading it.)

Magna, having finally talked to Eva herself, agreed to the plan. For the child’s sake.

But then the unpredictable happened—as it does so often when bold people proceed without heeding the old Master up in his heavenly bed. It’s a strange truth that even the mightiest constructions are blown away by what appear to be simply mere coincidences.

In this case, it was Magna’s encounter with Eva’s child.

Kongslund’s great matron regretted her participation in the plan the minute she leaned over the crib at Rigshospital. During those minutes in the obstetric ward, there had been no doubt in her mind: never before had she seen such a lonely and damaged child as this—never. And
she’d
seen it all.

In Kongslund’s Protocol, she described it like this:

While the child’s mother slept, I spoke to the head nurse to make sure she was not more exhausted than normal. Then I let them show me the way to the child, which lay by itself, and it was like a revelation. Although I have never believed in God or any higher power, I can’t describe it any other way. Not even I, who have seen so many abandoned fates, could help being affected by the sight: a little girl with black hair, her back and one shoulder deformed, her feet at an odd angle as though a giant hand had grabbed them and turned them round and round. It was a heartbreaking sight, and I knew instantly that this creature couldn’t be protected by anyone but me and Gerda. Under no circumstances could I leave this child to a man like Ole Almind-Enevold and his wife, Lykke, whom I was sure had no interest in adopting to begin with.

I believe I read this section three times before I understood what the words meant.

The shock came like a kind of slow-motion replay. It rolled in, as though from the earth’s core, and burst the very foundation of Kongslund, up through the infant room ceiling to strike me in my chair by the desk. I slid sideways onto the floor and lost consciousness.

I awoke in a pool of water—just like that time long ago when I’d let myself be carried away in Magdalene’s arms, when I thought I was drowning—and the water was everywhere around me.
A little girl.
Maybe I’d always known…

With trembling fingers and sapped of all energy, I undressed, crawled onto my bed, and lay on top of my duvet. Apparently no one had heard me fall, because no one came to my rescue. The fatal Protocol lay open on the desk under the window.

During the hours that followed, darkness fell, and I began to slowly understand everything: the child that Magna had described as so immensely damaged that it would take years—maybe a whole lifetime—to repair, could only be one person
…
and I understood it with all of the horror that a human soul can harbor
…