The Seventh Child (83 page)

It was during the days between Christmas and New Year’s that Ole Almind-Enevold told Magna about his wife’s decision.

My foster mother’s shock is evident from the Protocol:
As I always feared deep down, Lykke has declined, and that puts us in a terrible pinch. Ole is begging me to see his son, but I refuse, as always. Now it’s clear how wise it was of us to never show him the real child. The boy named “John Bjergstrand” must be hidden from everyone, forever.

She put the name in quotation marks, of course. Because no John Bjergstrand ever existed, not then, and not now.

During those days, the most difficult and dangerous of their lives, the two women had a boy child at Kongslund who—if they were to expose their own forged papers—was the son of a murderer. Of course Ole already knew that, and after the adoption, he would have tossed away the certificate and, through his contacts in the state administration, gotten a new one—with a new name. But an entirely new and responsible adoptive family would no doubt require more information and would attempt to dig into the child’s background. That couldn’t happen. Magna and Gerda could never risk that.

A night watchman’s family has applied to adopt, even though we have told them their social rank does not qualify them for approval,
Magna wrote under the heading March 1962 (though she rarely dated her entries).

Gerda thinks this is our big chance.

A few weeks later, she described the solution Gerda came up with:
Everything has gone as she predicted. The family has agreed to go about things quietly, both for their own sake and the sake of their son. When the man asked me for the child’s papers and birth certificate, I wanted to deny him access, but Gerda convinced me otherwise. I told him to burn the certificate as soon as they’re sure there’s nothing wrong with the boy, and he promised to do that. But Gerda says he will no doubt keep the birth certificate because that’s how people of his kind are. It could be to our advantage, she says. If someday anyone is clever enough to track down Eva’s child, this is where they’ll wind up—and the birth certificate will, as it was originally intended, identify the boy as Eva’s, thus keeping her real child hidden.

A final, deeply buried assurance.

Gerda’s cunning and her ability to predict even the most bizarre patterns filled me with both consternation and admiration. How could a woman
who’d
never been able to lie make such deceitful plans?

One page later in the book, Magna writes:
They’ve said they’ll call the boy Nils, and that they’ll forget everything about his background. Gerda is satisfied. “John Bjergstrand” has finally disappeared once and for all, as though he never existed.

And then she added:
And, of course, he never did.

Already in January of 1962, the young lawyer Ole Almind-Enevold began to investigate the five boys from the Elephant Room in order to identify his son. He must have been desperate as a consequence of Magna’s stubborn rejections.

I can imagine the considerations he and Carl Malle made, which were confirmed by later events—and by Almind-Enevold’s admission in the ministry when he was finally presented to his son, Nils Jensen.

Convinced Magna would never put Eva’s vulnerable child with a working-class family in the slums, the two old comrades must have instantly ruled out Nils. They completely missed the significance of this cover-up.

They were also inclined to rule out Peter because his adoptive parents came from the other end of the social spectrum and, as a distinguished and intellectual family, would no doubt be dismissed as victims of such duplicity.

They ruled out Asger because they didn’t think that Magna, with her heavy burden of responsibility for this adoption, would send Eva’s son to a family that lived as far away as Aarhus, since the distance would leave her very little control.

That’s why they focused on the two boys in Søborg: Severin and Orla—and especially Orla,
who’d
ended up with a single parent in Glee Court. With their illicit scheming and tactical planning, they concluded that it might have been an ingenious move on Magna’s part—to construct the story of a single, biological mother—to divert their attention. Orla was often at the orphanage, and, besides, the stocky boy looked like the successful politician.

Toward the end of 1962, Almind-Enevold therefore promised his friend, Malle, his full support for the duration of his career if, in return, he would do him the favor of moving into one of the newly built brownstones in Søborg where the two boys lived.

In that way the two men were able to discreetly follow the comings and goings of the boys.

Time passed, and they got no closer to answering the riddle, and no one discovered the injustice inflicted upon Eva and her child. When they obtained, a few years later, blood samples of all five boys and the results proved inconclusive, Malle advised against further testing—no doubt because he feared that Almind-Enevold’s son was not one of the five, which would mean Malle would lose his hold on him completely. I couldn’t help but smile at the real reason for the failure
…
that the two men never thought to test a girl.

The three conspirators—Magna, Ole, and Carl—are locked into an uneasy alliance. If one falls, they all fall.

Eva remains in Australia and thus fulfills her part of the pact. She changes her name and finds a job as a secretary at an oil company but never marries.

I’m guessing that her longing—and her profound self-reproach—was a major obstacle.

During the following years, according to Magna’s narration, Ole’s career falters. The prime minister who assumes office in the fall of 1962 passes him over for a ministerial appointment, because there are still rumors in the party about a scandal having something to do with his time in Prison Services and, perhaps a young, incarcerated woman.

No politician wants to dig any deeper.

In the meantime the country’s best doctors fix, to the best of their ability, my deformed body, and I slowly straighten out and have a life of my own, albeit a hidden one, at Kongslund.

I’ve named her Inger Marie, because they are two beautiful old Danish names derived from the words for Beauty and She Who Comes from the Sea—and what could be a better fit?
Magna writes in the spring of 1963.
She is still going through some procedures, but the doctors have succeeded in straightening her feet a bit, so she is now able to walk, almost like the other children. I take great joy in that development. Two years after we discovered the foundling, several magazines once again wrote about the fairy-tale-like story, and once again reporters complained how no one had been able to find the child’s father and mother. The police continue to receive calls about the case whenever it’s discussed publicly, but most calls are from disturbed people who are invariably attracted to such stories.

A couple of years later she writes:
At my request, Mother’s Aid Society has now recognized that our little Inger Marie will be very difficult, if not impossible, to place with an adoptive family. She still looks very odd, and she is still so fragile that she isn’t able to live in a normal family. Mrs. Krantz is sympathetic to my suggestion that Mother’s Aid Society grant me official status as Inger Marie’s foster mother.

There is no mistaking her joy at becoming a
real
mother in these pages:
Marie loves to wear dresses in light colors. She often picks yellow ones, like the color of the freesia that are in full bloom in the beds outside the Elephant Room’s window. Her favorite thing is to walk with me in the garden and pick newly blossoming freesia for special occasions at Kongslund or for when we receive visits from distinguished people who have learned of our work—sometimes from as far away as Japan.

I furrow my brow, because I don’t remember it like that. To the contrary, I have a clear image of an energetic, determined woman who picked the flowers by herself, in solitary majesty, and who then stood beside the kitchen counter, a huge presence, crushing the stems until they were flat—as though they were small people who needed to be shaped into a viable form.

In one passage, Magna observes, almost with a sense of relief:
After all, it is fortunate that Marie was so deformed at birth. She resembles neither parent.

A few years later, she confides in the Protocol the role Gerda had taken in my upbringing:
We’ve decided to homeschool little Inger Marie, because the psychologists believe that she is still too weak to be sent to school with the other children. It is important that she has calm surroundings. I’ve decided to give her the King’s Room. I’ve told her about the room’s history and its place in the exact center of Kongslund, right between north and south. The other day, Gerda read aloud to her from an old article in the
Søllerød Post
, which told the history of the area. Inger Marie was most interested in the story about the little invalid girl who grew up in the white villa on the slope behind Kongslund. The newspaper printed some of the girl’s journal entries about sea captain Olbers, the first owner of Kongslund. Inger Marie loves the journals, even though she has never met the author.

The last remark surprises me. Magdalene had been with me again and again, up on the slope and down on the beach—especially when she sat on the pier in her old wheelchair studying the sound through the king’s telescope.

Magna must have seen that.

Gerda tells me that it was no doubt Magdalene’s story that caused Marie to write at such an early age, and to everyone’s surprise. Gerda gave her a stack of sky-blue notebooks, which she writes in and guards as though they were her most prized possession. So far no one has been allowed to look at what she has written, but I’m very excited to, of course. She will probably show me some day.

This is the last passage in which Magna’s descriptions of my life and actions are narrated in a light, cheerful tone.

The transformation is abrupt. Page by page the mood seems to darken, and it becomes more and more evident that Magna is worried about her foster daughter, and that her concern increases as the months go by. It culminates the morning they find my friend dead.

The old invalid died last night. They found her at the foot of the slope next to the wheelchair she used whenever she risked going out. She was brash enough to leave the house while it was still dark, the police believe, because it was the night after the American moon landing. An old telescope lay crushed at her feet. The police think she wanted to study the moon but had flipped over in her chair.

I feel a growing rage at reading Magna’s description. At this point in the Protocol she was talking about something very crucial in my life, and I no longer wanted her presence. I didn’t want her to come any closer.

I should never have brought Marie along to the old woman’s funeral. It’s as though since the woman’s death Marie has become obsessed with her. In the shed, she’s found the wheelchair the governesses used to spin her around in when her feet were in bandages. And the other day she found an old telescope that someone had thrown on the beach. She has affixed the telescope to the armrest of the wheelchair. Some days she carries the chair down to the beach and sits there for hours studying Hven through the old rusty instrument, which you probably can’t even see through. I’m not sure what she is looking for, but I know from the librarian that she checked out three books about the astronomer Tycho Brahe. Maybe it’s the moon landing that has inspired her. Gerda tells me not to worry so much, but I am not so sure. Gerda always believes the best in people.

Month by month she turns it over in her mind—this growing problem she has understanding her daughter, and my interest in the place I would never escape from.

Now Gerda worries too. And for good reason. Yesterday Marie told her that her telescope belonged to a king, the monarch who built Kongslund, and that it has been passed down to her by the invalid woman. Where do kids get such crazy ideas? Gerda has tried to make her put the wheelchair back in the shed, because she doesn’t need it at all. But Marie maintains that it belonged to the old lady in the neighboring villa—and it is this persistent delusion that worries us the most.

Again I felt my anger stirring as I read this, because Magna had followed my relationship with Magdalene much more carefully, and in much more detail, than I’d ever imagined. I didn’t understand why she had never shared her observations with the child she claimed to love—not a word—so I could have reassured her and corrected all these misunderstandings.

Maybe some of what happened later could have been avoided, I thought. But my foster mother chose to remain silent, leaving her descriptions in her beloved Protocol to stand as distant whispers for posterity, even on pages she didn’t intend for anyone to see. Least of all me.

During those years—when I was ten or eleven—she kept a close eye on me, and her concern sent her looking for the journals, which Gerda had given me to write in, when I wasn’t in my room. She wanted to know what I was inventing, as she put it, but she didn’t find them the first time around because I’d hidden them as well as I possibly could. It was during this period that I made my secret trips to see the children I was shadowing, while she was at meetings or at conferences in the name of Goodness of Heart—and Gerda chose, for reasons I don’t understand, to cover for me.