The Seventh Child (84 page)

In the beginning of 1973, there came a breakthrough in Magna’s surveillance of me:
Yesterday, when Marie sat as usual in her chair on the pier, studying Hven in the telescope that had long since lost its lenses, a thought occurred to me that really ought to have come a long time ago. I hurried into her room, and my hunch proved right: in a drawer with a fake bottom in the captain’s old bureau, I found the blue notebooks that Gerda had given her.

That afternoon Magna opened my notebooks one by one, studying all the secret thoughts and observations I’d entered onto the pages—and it infuriated me. But at the same time, I noted to my satisfaction how deeply she regretted doing it.

Today I wish I had never read those notebooks, but what has been done cannot be undone,
she wrote. There were things she didn’t understand and which she questioned:
Is it normal for an eleven-year-old to write in such a way that it resembles the diaries of a dead woman? Not just as though she knew the dead woman, but as though she
is
that woman? Could that be considered a natural element of a child’s fantasy life? I hardly dare write this, not even in this book that no one will ever see. And I certainly don’t dare ask the psychologists at Mother’s Aid Society
.

She skipped a line and then wrote:
I am more distraught than ever.

My anger grew to a point where I was about to suffocate. I felt tears, which always gave me away, running down my left cheek. Magna had crossed all boundaries. She didn’t just read my notebooks,
she’d
copied them too, and she had considered showing them to Kongslund’s bearded gang of pipe-smoking oracles to ask their advice. She had come dangerously close to revealing my and Magdalene’s innermost thoughts to everyone in the world.
She’d
read about our first meeting—when the water flowed and nearly drowned us both. She had had access to my most intimate memories, and all
she’d
thought to do was to pass them on to the men who would destroy the children they didn’t understand.

It was Gerda
who’d
pleaded for her to let it go.

Gerda is afraid of the risk involved. That in the end, they’ll take Marie from me. Maybe it is normal to live in that kind of fantasy world, but if it isn’t, then I risk losing my daughter, Gerda says. Of course that would be a catastrophe to all of us, because if she really is as sick as I fear, no one can help her better than I.

The logic was as sound as Gerda herself, but how typical of my foster mother to make up an illness for another person that she could then work on for another couple of decades in the service of Goodness—but in this case, of course, I was relieved at her decision. Nevertheless she continues:
I’ve talked to Gerda about the problem again, and for once she is as much at a loss as I am, as though she is confronted with something she had never before experienced. I’d never thought I’d see Gerda like this. Inger Marie has always made up a lot of stories, so maybe that is the explanation for Magdalene’s diary. Even when she was little she told the naive governesses that Kongslund was full of famous people’s children, suggesting that Kongslund had a hidden purpose as the protector of the wealthy. I suppose it comes from seeing all the wealthy families taking their kids out for walks on Strandvejen. As Gerda says, maybe she combined it with the funny nicknames we derived from famous people and gave to the children while they were at Kongslund. At the time, we just let her make up things. It seemed innocent, after all. We didn’t think anyone could take such tall tales seriously. Maybe that was a mistake.

Again, it’s typical of my foster mother to blur the reality that no one is supposed to see. I myself am living proof of that. I was—or rather am—actually the daughter of a famous man, however much I’d like to be blissfully ignorant of that fact.

In the months that followed, Magna continued her investigation of what she now referred to as Inger Marie’s secret life. In addition to the twelve notebooks that contained Magdalene’s journals, she found some of my old diary entries—the ones about my conversations with Magdalene in the years after her death. Magna read those, too, one day while Gerda was tutoring me in the sunroom.

My fear is now entirely indescribable. She writes that the old woman died peacefully in her sleep on her patio the very night the Americans landed on the moon, and that she therefore died happy. Perhaps, she has simply repressed how it really happened. Yet, there is something about her distortion of reality that I find disturbing. I don’t know what to make of her account, but I don’t dare ask anyone for advice. Not even Gerda.

In the years that follow she often visits my room when I am out, the Protocol reveals, but she never finds my oldest and most secret hiding place—in the compartment of the old cabinet, behind the lemon-tree carvings—where I keep my accounts of Orla, Peter, and the others. She never finds my descriptions of my cohorts from the Elephant Room—the ones who left me one by one but have now returned.

At one point it appears as though she relaxes, assured that I must have stopped writing and fantasizing, as she calls it, and it seems to lessen her jealousy of my friend.

I think Magdalene is finally a completed chapter,
she writes in the beginning of 1974
.

That’s how naive the repair woman of the world’s lost souls was.

At that time, Gerda is still tutoring me. Once in a while, she’s assisted by a teacher from Søllerød School (who herself has adopted a child from Kongslund), and on weekends I help take care of the older children in the Giraffe Room and the Hedgehog Room. Everything seems almost normal.

Magna’s worries now focus on more practical matters, and when I become a teenager and later approach twenty, she writes in the Protocol:
I think we’ve succeeded at Kongslund in doing the work we were put on earth to do. But, of course, I am still worried that she has no other interests than drawing moons and planets, which she copies from her astronomy books—and then studying Hven through the broken telescope she loves so much. It is clear to me that she is going to spend the rest of her life here at Kongslund. And that is the only comfort I have to offer her.

From her notes in the Protocol, I can tell that it’s important for her to keep me at Kongslund and to prevent any plans for my adoption by repeatedly underscoring to Mother’s Aid Society that I was too fragile and different to be around other people.

She’s not going anywhere.

In order to prevent her colossal deceit from being revealed, she had—I realize—let me live in the awareness that I’d never go anywhere.

During the following years, it appears that Magna thought my flaws disappeared one by one—until the day she viewed me in an almost magical light: as a beautiful, shapely woman who looks more and more like her
mother
. Of course that’s a distortion of her immense, unfulfilled maternal love, but it causes her to keep me away from other people—as energetically as possible. She writes how she fears that Almind-Enevold, on one of his visits to Kongslund, will discover my likeness to his young lover from Visitation Room 4—but of course he doesn’t. I’m dark as a stick and have been planted crookedly in the ground; nothing but a mother’s imagination could change that.

Only once in the Protocol do I find any indications of enchantment in regards to what has happened, the fate she has given me. This at the very end:
In this book, which was swept in on the ocean waves, I have described everything as it really happened. Not out of consideration for those involved or anyone else, because Gerda has promised to burn the Protocol in the event of my death, but because I myself have to try to understand what happened. It pains me that I have to keep such a big secret from my little girl, and that I have to keep it all her life, but there is no other way. My only fear is that she will one day ask Gerda the wrong question: Who is my mother? Because Gerda has never been able to lie. Thankfully, Marie doesn’t even know that this question could be answered, and therefore she has no reason to think to ask it.

With their silence they’d locked all the doors to the world around me. I sat in Darkness and tried to comprehend the vastness of their deceit.

I felt my tears drop onto the old paper in Magna’s log. I wanted to close the book, but I couldn’t move my hands or my crooked shoulders. I remembered all too clearly my visit with Gerda the day I’d asked about the mysterious John Bjergstrand, and how before fainting
she’d
whispered, “Marie
…
there is no John Bjergstrand!”

I’d thought she lied for the first time in her life, and I’d despised her for it. But I was wrong, because her response was entirely truthful. Five small words, like wreckage in the sand.

I am nearing the end of the Protocol; there aren’t many pages left. Even though the anger hasn’t completely left me, my breathing has grown somewhat calmer.

Then things take a bad turn again, because Magna mentions something that disturbs her. Now her worries are focused on the rococo mirror hanging on the wall over my bed. According to her notes, Magna first became aware of my special relationship with the mirror when I was a teenager and had found an old dress in a wooden chest in the attic.
It was green like beech leaves
, she writes,
but worn with age
. I put it on anyway, the way children will do, and one day when Magda entered my room unannounced, I was standing in front of the mirror turning around and around, my arms raised above my head.

A grotesque sight,
she wrote.

And because she only saw me dancing, she didn’t hear me ask the mirror the question the only logical reinterpretation I knew of the fairy-tale question, Who is the fairest of them all?
Who is the ugliest of them all?

So she didn’t hear the answer either. Because she saw me in such a romanticized light—the way mothers do—the experience made her even more desperate:
I don’t know what to do, and no one can help me. Inger Marie tells me she’s incredibly ugly. She still thinks she’s the little black-haired girl with a deformed back and funny feet that walks about Kongslund toting a rusty old Japanese pull-along elephant. I’ve tried to tell her how much she has changed. I’ve tried to tell her how beautiful she has become, but I don’t think she wants to hear of it. The mirror has been her most cherished possession over the years, even after it fell and fractured so badly that no one could see her reflection in it anymore. I don’t understand what she sees. And when she turns to face me, I’m nearly in tears.

I was tempted, once again, to turn to the old mirror right behind me, but I didn’t. I was sure it would immediately take advantage of my weakness and jump at the chance of getting out of its Darkness—once again. I didn’t dare risk that.

In a month, I will retire
, Magna wrote.
I bought a condo in Skodsborg. But Inger Marie will stay at Kongslund. This is her decision. I understand it and accept it. This is where she belongs.

I am reassured by the fact that Susanne Ingemann will replace me. Susanne loves her as much as I think it is possible for anyone besides me to love Marie.

There are only a few, dramatic entries left in Magna’s Protocol, namely those that reveal the truth about the Kongslund Affair.

No doubt they will topple the Almighty One—I’m sure of that—and that’s why I intend to reveal the Protocol in the only way I can imagine. But the very last notes could also be used against people, especially me, the child she raised as her own. And there’s nothing to be done about that.

For forty years, Magna and Gerda were certain that no one could uncover their secret about my real identity, and then things went wrong. Not because of sloppiness or carelessness, but because Fate allowed a Danish tourist to rise from a bench in Adelaide and leave behind a newspaper that had traveled halfway around the globe. That’s all it took.

By accident, Eva Bjergstrand noticed it on the bench in front of the Australian hotel where the Danes always stayed.
Independent Weekend
: what an odd name, she no doubt, thought. On impulse she picked it up, perhaps because it was published April 8, 2001, Palm Sunday, and therefore reminded her of Easter celebrations from her childhood.

She’d
been born on Good Friday—April 7, 1944.

Inside its pages, she noticed the wedding in Holmen’s Church, which even occurred on her birthday. There’s no doubt that with these few, casual details, Fate deliberately drew her further into the game that no one understood at the time. The man who had been the cause of all her misery smiled at her from one of the photos taken outside the church—and everything that she had sought to forget returned, as though it had never been gone.

Five days later—on Good Friday, April 13, 2001—she writes two letters: one to Magna and one to the child she has never seen.

She mails them on April 17, 2001. This is the first business day after Easter, and they are addressed to Martha Ladegaard at Infant Orphanage Kongslund.