The Seventh Child (11 page)

I remained silent, and it responded:
“You are!”

“Is the king my father?” I asked, stupidly.

The mirror and I also talked past one another.

Many nights I sat at my desk for hours staring toward Hven. Since the King’s Room projected over the ridge of the roof—indeed over the entire patio—I pretended it was the bridge of a ship that had rolled gently to port after an adventurous expedition. And in the dark I climbed onto my desk, took my position on the bridge, and steered the ship clear of the Swedish coast: my fingers were graceful, my face concentrated, my figure ramrod stiff in the captain’s uniform. Often I was so exhausted when morning came that I stayed in bed with bloodshot eyes and a chest so still that the orphanage’s doctor had to lean in to ensure that I was still breathing.

I flunked the first school readiness test, but I didn’t mind because I had no desire for any bookish knowledge that went beyond the walls of Kongslund. Magna’s right hand, Gerda Jensen, tutored me in the sunroom during the first years. My curiosity about the real world went no further than the Chinese stone pillars on Strandvejen that marked the steep driveway down to Kongslund. No further than that. Here in my home only two things had real value: the fulfillment of longing and the erasure of want. But I wouldn’t discover that until much later.

One of the last times I visited Magdalene, she said, “Even though you’re nobody’s child, you can have children of your own someday, Marie. It was the exact opposite for me.” The words bubbled up and down in a peculiar hiss, as though she were crying or laughing, or both. When everyone else gave up making sense of her speech, I understood every word. My eyes would find hers and read the message without any difficulty whatsoever (the way only children can). She had never been embraced, had never kissed a man’s lips.

“You’re right, Marie, I haven’t,” she said reading my mind, without ever looking up. “I would have liked to.”

“Do you want to be my mother?” I asked her.

She laughed, and the noise whistled through her nostrils. Her body twisted into an almost impossibly awkward position. I loved her. I rose from the sand and pushed her wheelchair up the slope, through the grove, and all the way to the king’s old lookout.

“Marie, don’t push me so fast,” she said, laughing again.

I think she would have preferred being spared from understanding all the physical signals one hopes the world will notice and reward with caresses. It’s the body and its longing that bends the mind and teaches the eye to calculate the distance to one’s desires so often out of reach. The words in her diaries were the lifeline that helped her pass her days.

“Maybe it was because I was so deteriorated to begin with, Marie!” She chuffed the last few words though her nose. “It could hardly get any worse!” The blue notebooks fell off her lap into the grass, and I picked them up as usual. She kept her fountain pen on a string around her neck.

“I want you to have my dairies when I pass away, because it won’t be long until you can read them yourself,” she said on one of the last days of her life. It was July 1969. She was working on her twelfth notebook.

“Maybe you’ll write yourself when you’re older,” she said, stroking my hair.

I said nothing.

“Write about what occupies your mind. Write about everything you wish to understand.”

And then she added, “Who wouldn’t like to die having lived a full life?” A week passed before she concluded the thought—much as how time passed when she wrote. “I will die without experiencing love, the love between a man and a woman, and that is the hardest thing.”

If God truly existed, he must have been present there, right at that moment. But of course I knew that neither God nor the Devil ever approached Kongslund, because they did everything in their power to avoid such irreparable creatures.

Only Fate could separate—and reunite—us.

I have Magdalene’s final diary.

It’s a sky-blue notebook that’s slightly curled along the edges, as though someone had splashed water on it and then left it on the radiator to dry. Perhaps
she’d
taken it to the beach once. I don’t remember.

On the second to last page, she wrote:
I have a recurring dream about my beloved Marie. In it she has traveled far from here and lives in a distant country on the other side of the globe; maybe it’s Africa, because in the dream I see the blue elephants she always told me about. They are alive, and they are marching with her in an endless row. It’s possible that her dreams will come true one day.

In her fine web of letters I can see everything; her deteriorating hand and her concentration. Some of the letters resemble long-dead spiders—half-erased, with hooked gray legs—and yet they are strangely beautiful.

On the very last page, she wrote:
When mankind takes its first step on the moon, I will know whether my telescope is worthy of a king. I will point it upward—toward the future—and see whether this message is true
…

The dots are hers. She would never write again.

She died on the morning of July 21. Something woke me very early that day. Maybe I had a premonition of the marvelous and dreadful things that had happened.

The night before, all the governesses had gathered around the small television in the living room and watched the Americans landing on the moon, and I was excited to see how my friend would react. Probably, she was already describing the landmark feat—imagine flying through space, high above the clouds
…
imagine that
…
what we’ve always dreamed of, Marie
…
just imagine it
…

I pushed open the door to her white villa.

Because she was not afraid of uninvited guests, she never locked it.

I stepped into the house and walked easily from room to room. To allow her movement throughout the house, the doorsills had been removed long before. There was a very narrow bed on which she slept, but she wasn’t in it.

A nurse from Gentofte County Hospital visited her once a week to change her sheets, I knew, and she would roll her around in her wheelchair. But the bed appeared not to have been touched in centuries. I knew something was wrong.

I also knew it was too late.

She was sitting outside, near the corner of the house, her back to her beloved Strandvejen. She was facing the sound. The prize telescope, rigged to a tripod attached to the wheelchair’s armrest, was directed at the sky, toward where the spacecraft was supposed to travel on its return to Earth. Her head had dropped onto her chest.

My foster mother and her assistants must have been quite shaken to find me there, me being so young, only eight, and it being so late, and long after they’d begun their search. Magdalene’s was the last place they’d thought to look.

I sat curled by the footrest of her wheelchair, where her slender feet had been for decades. Though she was dead, I’d put my head in her lap. I remember waking when Magna made a strange, frightened noise I’d never heard before.

I didn’t speak for the rest of July and most of August. This was the year that I became strange, that strangeness became a part of my soul.

Magna and I never talked about what had happened; she didn’t understand my grief. The soul is not, as many believe, a compact mass: a little ball of light between heart and liver. Nor is it, as the bold claim, a void that fills the living body and deftly floats away between the fingers of Death, ensuring eternal life for the spirit. No, the soul is a narrow ledge on which the faithful must balance in their search for consolation. If they make one misstep, they’ll never find their footing again, and if they search for Light further afield, all they will see is Darkness. That’s what I discovered that last summer with Magdalene. Like space, the soul is not an expression of eternal constancy but of constant change, and this motion has but one purpose: to continue forward, on the narrow ledge, in the absurd hope that you can escape the Darkness.

At night I hide her twelve notebooks inside a secret cubby in the teak bureau that the old sea captain Olbers, the man who bought the home from the royal family, brought home from one of his numerous expeditions to the Dark Continent (
he’d
been a ship’s boy on the frigate
Gefion
and later spent his entire life in the commercial fleet). In a drawer with a fake bottom are my own diaries, which I began to write the same year that Magdalene died. Contained in them you’ll find the beginning of the narrative she and I set into motion.

In another of the captain’s furnishings, this one a nearly seven-foot-tall cabinet, in a secret compartment behind elaborate carvings of lemon trees, you’ll also find a description of our first encounters following her magnificent funeral, the details of our concerns, the notes on our decisions—and, consequently, to my horror—what those decisions led to.

5

MAGNA

May 7, 2008

Of course Magna suspected that Magdalene never truly departed Kongslund, though death had removed her from the physical universe.

At some point, it became clear to me that my foster mother had found and read the twelve diaries hidden in the bureau. Naturally, we never talked about it.

Viewed from the outside, relations between the matron and her foster daughter seemed hunky dory, and in time I was considered her true daughter. To the outside world, Kongslund epitomized the genuine, unfailing kindheartedness that aided even the ostracized and the illegitimate. For here were the sniffling castoffs staring into emptiness, steeling themselves against the traumas that psychologists and professors would write books about for decades.

None of them actually understood the nature of our terror, Magdalene told me, rocking from side to side in her old chair. Abandonment has nothing to do with what you leave behind. Abandonment is where you go. You don’t find longing behind you: you find it in front of you.

The psychologists and the prim ladies from Mother’s Aid Society were all convinced that our defects could be repaired with fresh sea air and endless patience. Because that’s how it had always been done.

We remained silent, letting them keep their unshakeable conviction.

My foster mother had remained the undisputed mistress of Kongslund. Even long after her retirement, she continued to hold monthly meetings with her successor, Susanne Ingemann, to discuss the management of the orphanage.

She was the reason that Kongslund’s self-governance fund received a generous donation each year from the Ministry of National Affairs’ Office of Special Matters (there was no doubt that what was “special” about this office was the considerable sum distributed to Kongslund).

On a morning in May, Magna cancelled a meeting with Susanne for the first time, offering no explanation. Then she dialed another number. She could feel her otherwise steady fingers trembling slightly. She spoke for a few minutes and then waited.

There were wax stumps in each of the five silver candleholders in the window—one for each of the Five Dark Years. She had lit the candles a few evenings before, at the exact hour when, sixty-three years earlier, the voice from London had announced the end of the war: “We are getting reports
…
”

That Hitler, the son of a bitch, has been defeated.

She’d
noticed the uneasiness on the other end of the line, the pause, and the implicit question:
What the hell is going on there?

But she didn’t know anything.

I’m coming over.

She sat and waited. The source of the article in
Independent Weekend
was a mystery to her. How had the anonymous information come to light? She didn’t know what else the journalist might have discovered (he had called asking for an interview, but
she’d
declined, explaining that due to arthritis pain she was bedridden).

After
she’d
regained some of her composure, she reread the article. Then she stood and found her scrapbooks in the cabinet—three brown, three red, and three white. The brown ones contained photographs, the red ones postcards and letters, and the white ones yellowed newspaper articles collected during the seven decades since the orphanage’s founding in 1936. There had never been an article like this one.

She opened
Independent Weekend
and forced herself to examine the heading: “Famous Orphanage Accused of Hiding Thousands of Children.” All that was missing was an exclamation point.

To a large extent, the article was based on unsubstantiated accusations. Rumors. Anonymous voices. Unknown sources reported gossip that behind the scenes the orphanage had been a tool for the rich and powerful
who’d
had extramarital affairs. For decades, their unwanted, illegitimate children had been gathered up discreetly and effectively from hospitals and given new identities, after which no mortal power could ever locate their mothers or fathers.

With a look of disgust, she studied the headline as though it were made of crushed insects, before turning to page six, where she found a longer article and two photos, one archive photo of her and another, larger one of the orphanage. “In the Service of Forgotten Children.”
By Knud Taasing
.
Photos: Nils V. Jensen
.

After
she’d
read the article three times, she knew the introduction by heart: “On Tuesday, May 13, a celebration will honor a very special woman and the thousands of children who called her ‘mother’ until they found their own way and their own families.”

Magna sighed, puckering her lips as though she were going to spit one of the dead insects onto the carpet. For the occasion, she was dressed in dark blue and wore the earrings that she usually reserved for visits to the theater and funerals (the latter outnumbering the former these days).

“Now approaching ninety, Ms. Ladegaard has been known simply as Magna among the thousands of children she ‘fostered’ at the home on Strandvejen. She became matron at Kongslund in 1948, and she is still connected to the orphanage, which is located in a great patrician villa near Øresund. From the beginning, Kongslund was famous for offering shelter to the weakest of the weak—the children whose parents wanted nothing to do with them.”

She closed her eyes and felt anger stirring.
The weakest of the weak.
She would never refer to her children that way.

Magna hated seeing her name in print. She was baptized Martha Magnolia Louise Ladegaard—an impressive series of names
she’d
never quite lived down, and which perhaps, in the end, had driven her away from home at a young age. The first middle name, Magnolia, came as a whim to the pastor
who’d
held her over the baptismal font, the man who also happened to be her father. Though her mother had leaped from her seat in surprise, the God-inspired name could not be changed. That day the church had been festooned with delicate, dried flowers—in addition to magnolia, there were freesia, poppy, harebell, meadow anemone, and prairie clover. It could have been much worse, Magna’s mother used to tell her daughter reassuringly. Every time the other kids in the village school teased Martha Magnolia about her flowery middle name, her mother repeated these comforting words: “Well, would you rather have been named Anemone? Or Harebell!”

At age sixteen, she was a tall, rather sturdily built girl with wavy brown hair and a deep, melodic voice. One spring day she traveled to Copenhagen to become a nurse’s aide. It was during those weeks that Mother’s Aid Society purchased Kongslund and transformed the beautiful villa into an infant orphanage, furnishing the high-ceilinged rooms with the practical sense of strong women. Magna often thought the old king—
who’d
been so brutally cut off from his biological mother, the promiscuous princess Charlotte Frederikke—would have been delighted by the turn in the home’s fortunes. As punishment for her unfaithfulness, his mother had been deprived access to her son. (There was no doubt that a motherless childhood had made him so strange that anger and longing had rendered him infertile. After that the lineage died out.
Suitable retribution
, Magna thought,
for a family who denied a boy his mother
.

The newly furnished orphanage opened on May 13, 1936. That was also Save the Children Day in Copenhagen, and the women of the city used the occasion to call attention to the children’s charity. Some 1,600 women with 1,600 flag-decorated prams and 1,629 children—including two pairs of triplets and twenty-five pairs of twins—marched in the bright sunlight from Rosenborg Castle to Tivoli.

Young Martha Magnolia had never seen anything like it. What she witnessed was nothing less than Danish women marching into the future, mothers asserting their worth, defending newborns, striving for basic care—and expressing their right to speak collectively as women.

When the procession ended, a speaker from Mother’s Aid Society described the new orphanage that had been inaugurated that very day in Skodsborg—and the young nurse’s aide knew instantly which path her life ought to follow.

The orphanage on Skodsborg Hill grew year after year. Tricycles, shovels, buckets, and soapbox cars appeared on the lawn facing the sea, and young women in white caps with bundled babies in their arms could be seen coming and going from the great house. On Sundays childless couples visited, nervously shuffling their feet and clutching their approval letters from the adoption agency. They would take home the child who radiated the fragility and need for love that they themselves were searching for.

When the matron took ill in 1947, she immediately appointed Magna as acting director. A year later Magna became the institution’s second matron.

“Being a single mother without a husband was considered shameful in all levels of society,” the article stated. “Perhaps it was an even greater scandal for families higher up the social ladder. Several sources confirm
Independent Weekend
’s assertion that potentially controversial adoption cases were handled with unusual discretion by the respected orphanage.”

Magna lowered the newspaper for a moment before forcing herself to continue reading.

“They could have been politicians, public officials, or actors who hadn’t wanted to risk their reputations and careers because of some extramarital affair, our sources tell us. They could show up at Skodsborg Strandvej, and be confident that the matron now celebrating her anniversary would solve their problems to their full satisfaction.
Independent Weekend
has come into the possession of a confidential document from one of the biggest adoption years (1961), a document suggesting that one such boy’s case was to be handled outside the usual protocol. The boy’s name was John Bjergstrand.”

Magna stared at the white scrapbooks in front of her. There had never been an article critical of Kongslund. This newspaper seemed to suggest that the service offered might have also had a commercial purpose. The journalist continued in the same vein—one that Magna assumed helped sell newspapers.

“Perhaps a current high-ranking official or politician in all secrecy put his unwanted child up for adoption to avoid a scandal. That’s what the story suggests. Does the now grown man know his own storm-tossed narrative? And what goes through the mind of a father who, out of regard for his own career, gives up his own child? This man may be a public figure who fears disclosure and therefore keeps quiet. Due to health concerns the main figure in the anniversary celebration, a woman who served as matron from 1948 to 1989, declined to be interviewed for this article. Many questions thus remain.”

The newspaper had dedicated a lot of space to the article, which appeared under the headline “In the Service of Forgotten Children.” It had even shoved the story of an eleven-year-old Tamil boy facing deportation to the back of section one.

One particular detail worried the retired matron more than any other: A small sign that the journalist knew much more than what was actually printed in the article’s five long columns. A knowledge she couldn’t think of a reasonable explanation for, and which therefore frightened her. She needed to share the potential consequences with a person she would normally never invite inside her home.

Once again she studied the names above the article: Knud Taasing and Nils V. Jensen. It was bizarre. She folded the newspaper and lit one of her thick cheroots. Possibly, it was a coincidence—but if it was, it seemed almost supernatural. For two days
she’d
felt nauseated; she knew it must be fear. This wasn’t like her.

Although
she’d
been anticipating the doorbell’s chime, she flinched when she heard it.

“Hello!” he said in a lightly ironic tone, giving her a peck on the cheek. Just like in the old days.

He brought his own copy. With a red pen
he’d
drawn a circle around the front-page story.