The Seventh Child (88 page)

40

THE KING’S ROOM

April 30, 2010

When I lean forward, I see directly into Kongslund’s garden, and if I stand on my toes and open the window, I still see the white-clad authoritative governesses who ruled the orphanage for a generation, almost as though they are still sitting on the patio.

It is as Magdalene always said,
When Fate knits its careful patterns, it doesn’t do so with grand ceremony but as simply and unassumingly as if playing a child’s game. And that’s why we never discover what’s going on until it is too late.

Even the smartest minds believe that their lives follow a chronological but ultimately accidental course, and we regard even the largest and most precise obstacles as coincidences. This is a delusion that is shared by the believers as well, even though outwardly they claim to follow a course plotted by God. Because no God could have deliberately arranged for this much chaos.

The story doesn’t have a happy ending, the way Magna would have preferred.

I have laid the Kongslund Protocol and my own diaries on the beach near Kongslund, where I know the person I have selected will find them. In the exact spot where Magdalene sat the first time we met.

The papers are under a pink blanket in the carry-cot the foundling arrived in. I think this is the right way to do it, and one thing is for certain: this time no one escapes, and certainly not Ole Almind-Enevold.

It will be up to others to determine whether those involved in the Kongslund Affair will be doled out their share of the blame, or whether it will have to fall on the individuals who started it all: Ole and Carl, Magna, and maybe Gerda, who painted the blue elephants in their apparent innocence, then concocted a deceit that fooled us all. And, of course, the child that couldn’t let go of finding a way to a world outside Kongslund’s walls. Down and down and down to the point where I killed my own mother, just as she had killed hers.

In my dreams, the sky over Hven is still full of blue elephants that swarm with clouds and sunspots the way they always did. They march from south to north upward and onward—toward the stars where UFO-Ejnar has finally found his place and is engrossed in a profound conversation with the silver-nosed king of astronomy on the very character of the firmament.

I imagine Magdalene and her chosen one watching them from their heavenly abode.

Here at the end of the story, I’m at my desk alone, as always, and I remember the words that were read at the anniversary that was to be my foster mother’s last: “Every time a human being sits alone in the dark crying for another human being, the miracle comes
…
” It’s hardly a masterful use of language, but once in a while I think it’s true.

I’m sitting in Magdalene’s old chair with the telescope in my lap, staring into the old magic mirror, but of course I no longer get an answer—no more mocking challenges, or hints at my ugliness.

Is it really broken?

I can’t believe it. My right side is quite normal, as it always was, while the left side hangs as it always has; I cannot be imagining it.

I turn my attention a little to the side, and suddenly it’s as though I see the lake where Samanda died. And I spot her mother in the shade under the hazel branches.

Right beside her, in the Søborg living room, Orla’s mother sits in the blue chair, from which she studies her son without a word; and in Rungsted, Peter darts through the bright green garden that was his mother’s paradise.

I even see Hasse’s bloodied shopping bag. I reach for my telescope. But it isn’t there. Or maybe my fingers can’t locate it. I grope to find it, but it really isn’t there. I lean toward the old mirror, but there is no movement, not anymore. Then I hear my own voice calling for Magdalene, but there is no response. It’s as though she were never here—with me, in the King’s Room.

Who is the fairest of them all?
I jump, startled.

It’s the ancient question we have always asked, but it sounds oddly distorted.

At that moment I sense who is speaking to me as well as why I no longer hear anyone respond. I understand Susanne’s teasing words about occurrences that are more fantastic and incomprehensible than a human mind can grasp…

Until you understand that, you understand nothing.

I know that Magna was right when she held me in her arms—on the patio in front of the Elephant Room so long ago—and taught me what I would always remember.

All the best homes are by the water.

She forgot to add one detail, something that no child can grasp, so no adult would reveal. The worst thing a child can discover: there are houses where, in the end, you’re left all alone.

Epilogue

MARIE’S SONG

Her home lies where it always has, near the sound, with a view of the Swedish coast and Hven.

That is, of course, how Marie found me, even though we never met face to face, and even though I never got to know her.

Like the main character of this book, I spent the first part of my life at Infant Orphanage Kongslund, and like so many others I often returned there as an adult, driven by an urge I’ve never been able to understand. Nor have I wanted to.

Each spring (the time of year when I was cleared for adoption), I would ride the bus up Strandvejen, pass Bellevue and Fortunen, and disembark right before Skodsborg Hill, where I would scale a small fence and find a narrow path that only I and a few others knew about (this was where the king and his beloved had walked during the months precipitating the abolishment of absolute monarchy in Denmark). Then I would trudge over the slope, past the abandoned white villa where the Fairy Tale Poet had once visited the king’s architect, and head down to the beach, where I would walk north a little way—perhaps just a few hundred feet—the way Marie had done the night Eva Bjergstrand’s soul flew up to God.

Finally, I would stand as Marie had once stood even longer ago, on the old pier below Kongslund, right where the People’s King’s ship,
The
Falcon
, had once berthed.

Often I would stand there for quite some time, motionless—for an hour or two—looking toward the old house, and once in a while an assistant or childcare worker would come down to the beach inquiring about my business.

I always said the same thing, which was the truth: I once lived here.

I found the carry-cot in the sand, precisely where
she’d
said.

Under the pink blanket were the book, the Protocol, and the notes Marie had left behind; among them were the careful entries by a person
she’d
loved and whom
she’d
given the biblical name Magdalene.

In Magdalene’s books I looked up the famous date, May 13, 1961, and I shook out the one piece of paper that Marie had jammed between the pages. It fell onto the sand.

The old song.

A moment later it was carried out to the sound like a beech leaf in the sunset, but I’d read what I needed to read
…

Seven elephants go a marching now.

Inger Marie Ladegaard from Kongslund had reached the final verse.

About the Author

© Kissen Møller Hansen, 2011

Copenhagen native Erik Valeur has been an award-winning journalist for Denmark’s most influential media outlets for the past twenty-five years. Like many of the characters in this, his first novel, he too was orphaned as a child, and the plight of adopted children has been of perennial interest to him.
The Seventh Child
was released in Denmark in 2011 and has since been published in twelve other countries. This international bestseller has garnered numerous awards across Europe, including the prestigious Glass Key award given by the members of the Crime Writers of Scandinavia, as it makes its debut in the United States.

About the Translator

© Eric Druxman

K. E. Semmel is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in
Ontario Review
, the
Washington Post
, the
Writer’s Chronicle
,
Redivider
,
Hayden’s Ferry Review
,
World Literature Today
,
Best European Fiction 2011
, and elsewhere. His translations include Norwegian crime novelist Karin Fossum’s
The Caller
; Danish novelist Jussi Adler-Olsen’s
The Absent One
, selected by
Publishers Weekly
as a
PW
Pick; and Danish novelist Simon Fruelund’s
Civil Twilight
and
Milk & Other Stories
. He has received translation grants from the Danish Arts Council.