The Seventh Child (2 page)

PART I

THE BEGINNING

1

THE FOUNDLING

May 1961

When I lean forward, I can see directly into the orphanage’s garden, and if I stand on my toes and open the window a little, I can catch a glimpse, as if in a dream, of the white-clothed, authoritative governesses who for a generation ruled over Kongslund and all the creatures brought there. They would be sitting on the patio with a view of Øresund, and even today, so many years later, I can still smell the aroma of newly ironed linens and freshly baked bread that seemed to emanate from them, scents that easily drifted all the way up under the roof, making me dizzy and forcing me to lean my crooked shoulder against the wall so as not to fall to my knees.

Ms. Ladegaard would be sitting right there, and over there Ms. Nielsen and Ms. Jensen, and a bit farther down, all the way by the water’s edge, I am standing with my little blue Japanese pull-along elephant on its rusted chain, looking at the distant outlines of the island of Hven, where several centuries ago the scientist and pioneer Tycho Brahe built Stjerneborg. Of course, back then, I knew nothing of the scientific significance of that island. At that age and with a pull-along elephant as my only companion, that blue stripe of land symbolized, from as early as I can recall, the secret target of my persistent escape fantasies.

During those years, Kongslund received a never-ending stream of children who had been born out of wedlock and were therefore given up for adoption. They were welcomed into the high-ceilinged rooms by the strong and straight-backed governesses who made only one promise: to find them a new home and a new family as quickly as possible.

I was moved out of the Elephant Room in my second year at Kongslund, and when Ms. Ladegaard became my foster mother, she put me gently but firmly in the room she considered the most beautiful. “Have a look around, Marie,” she said. “Because this room was designed and decorated by a king of the people.”

Obediently, I twirled on my heels—three full turns—and then I was once again by myself. I sat down by the window, my gaze returning to Øresund and the distant island. At least once a day, I would curl my fingers together and put them to my eyes so that it looked exactly as though I were staring toward the object of my dreams through a long and tremendously sturdy pair of binoculars.

The scream seemed to ricochet from wall to wall as it made its relentless way through the long corridors of the Rigshospital, and it carried with it so much rage against darkness and perdition that no one within earshot would ever forget it. After what seemed like an eternity, it slowly faded, leaving only a low murmur in the minds of those
who’d
heard it.

The strange thing was that the scream arrived many hours after the actual delivery—at the very moment of birth, the young mother had maintained a surprising and entirely unnatural silence. The little baby entered this world under such peculiar circumstances that each of the individuals present on the obstetrics ward would remember the details of that night—and what had happened immediately before—nearly half a century later.

Several people remembered both the prelude and the young woman’s mysterious disappearance three days later; one even remembered the delivery itself. But their recollections could be confirmed by only a few handwritten notes that had collected dust for decades, and that did not answer two central questions: Who was she and where did she come from?

No one had the slightest idea where
she’d
gone following the birth. And no one had any information about the child, not even its gender, since it had been removed from the delivery room according to the hospital’s custom during those decades, when thousands of illegitimate children were born in Denmark.

The three people who could shed light on the mystery of that night in 1961 have all passed away: the supervising midwife who delivered the baby; the nurse who watched over the infant during its first hours; and the chief medical doctor who had ordered everyone to refrain from discussing the events. Many years later, a midwife—then a student—who had been on the floor that night told a reporter that the child was retrieved on the third day, as the doctor had predicted, and that in all probability its first home was the famous Infant Orphanage Kongslund.

The midwife, now retired, was only too happy to tell the story to her attentive audience, for she had always felt sorry for the young women who, during the postwar decades, passed in a continuous stream through the Rigshospital, delivering girls and boys who were then given up for adoption.

The first oddity occurred when the chief medical doctor called during the nightly marine weather broadcast, barely an hour before the young woman’s arrival.

It was a brief and somewhat formal conversation, which the young midwifery student overheard as she sat across from the on-call nurse, drinking tea. Later she could recall in detail how the chief medical doctor had emphasized how very special this arrival was—
a special delivery
, he had remarked drily (and perhaps with a trace of disapproval).

“She will be brought to Obstetric Ward B by car. She will give birth
alone
. There will be no next of kin present,”
he’d
said. “If she wishes to see the child when she is on the ward, don’t let her
.
No matter what, the child will be put up for adoption.”

He had underscored the irreversibility of the decision, and that wasn’t typical, either. From time to time, the young women regretted the most difficult decision of their lives, and they were allowed to stop the adoption process. But that wasn’t going to happen in this case.

“In three days the woman will be picked up, at the same time of day. The matron of Kongslund, Ms. Ladegaard, will pick up the child.”

The latter was standard procedure. But the short notice and the chief medical doctor’s involvement were not.

The next peculiar deviation from routine was the woman’s arrival. She was brought to the hospital by private car, which at the time was entirely uncommon.

At least three of those present would later recall that the car was dark and rather large, and that it turned into the hospital’s entrance on Juliane Maries Road. The engine was still running when the chauffeur, dressed in black, climbed out and helped the young woman from the backseat.

Two midwifery students who had observed the scene from behind semi-closed blinds joked with one another: “Here comes Cruella de Vil,” the older one said.

The new arrival was indeed wearing a long, dark coat and a black wide-brimmed hat. But that was the extent of the comparison. The woman on the hospital doorstep was quite young, with short blond hair and dark, narrow eyes, as though she hadn’t slept in a very long time. She was approximately the same age as the youngest midwifery student.

Normally, a woman in labor would bring a note from Mother’s Aid Society, the national organization that assists women, containing the necessary information. Mother’s Aid Society would have already prepared and sent a report to the hospital’s social worker. And the social worker would have marked the file with a capital
A
to inform everyone involved that the mother wished to put the child up for adoption.

The delivery would then be handled according to the custom of the time—discreetly, in awkward silence, and with a generous dose of laughing gas. And in the very moment of birth, the medical professionals would do something that would puzzle subsequent generations of more liberated women, because it seemed like an invocation of a very special curse: they would place a white cloth over the laboring woman’s face to prevent her from catching the tiniest glimpse of her child. This had become standard practice, a way of easing the separation with the baby, who, until that moment, had been part of the woman’s body. The mother would not see the umbilical cord cut, would not see the child’s hands searching for its mother; instead, the midwife would wheel the infant out of the delivery room to a waiting bassinet.

Later that evening, when the older of the two midwifery students hesitantly asked for the girl’s medical record, the head nurse, blushing, admitted that no record existed.

The younger student, Carla, curiously eyeing the soon-to-be mother, held out her hand. “What’s your name?” she asked.

But the girl did not respond. She merely put her coat on a chair and supported herself against it. A persistent whir rose from her chest, as though she were restraining a cough or suppressing a shudder in her slender shoulders.

More than twenty-five years later, the two students remembered this very detail. They ascribed that sound to anxiety, but the retired midwife later realized it might have been something else entirely.

As though the girl knew it was better to get it over with as quickly as possible—that there was no way around her shame—powerful contractions seized her half an hour later. In a sense, putting a child up for adoption was a more heretical act than an illegal abortion, because it condemned the child to begin life in utter loneliness. All these years later, the now aging midwife still recalled the silence that surrounded the fallen young women.

Carla had returned to the delivery room with a little metal canister containing sterile cotton tampons, and when there was a pause in the contractions, she had approached the laboring woman’s bed, trying to make contact with her for the second time. “You are doing very well,” she said.

Carla wanted to show compassion, to ask about the contractions, maybe even hold the girl’s hand—after all, they were almost the same age. During her first few months at the hospital, she had made a concerted effort to provide the suffering girls more than the professional assistance she was taught. “Carla is very attentive to the patients,” the head midwife had remarked. But before Carla reached her, the girl suddenly turned and opened her eyes, staring at Carla with a look she would never forget.

The girl’s irises had been green and blurry, first shiny with pain and fear, then suddenly clear and cold, glaring up as if from a shaft inside the earth. A moment later they lit up in rage, the likes of which Carla had never seen and the reason she still remembered the girl and this delivery a lifetime later.

From this moment on, the labor progressed quickly, and that too was rather bizarre. After only an hour, the girl’s face was as white as the sheet under her sweaty body, and yet she didn’t cry. She closed and opened her eyes again and again. Her body seemed to grow stiff, as though the blood had ceased to flow; sweat seeped from her pores, and the crinkled bedsheets became soaked. And yet she made no sound. When the contractions rolled over her, her lean white shoulders trembled. Carla remembered the heat and dampness in the room, the blond hair sticking to the pillow, the smell of shame invariably surrounding the women whose file bore the capital
A
.

Only much later, when she became a mother herself and she had a long life to gaze back on, did Carla realize that her compassion was part of this shame. The realization shocked her, but she shared it with no one until, in retirement, she recalled the mysterious birth. She considered compassion the highest virtue, but that night on Obstetric Ward B, it had had a twin sister whose face was invisible to Carla. The suffering woman, however, had recognized it immediately: condemnation.

The chief medical doctor arrived a few minutes before the delivery and asked Carla to leave the room. But she knew what was about to happen. To complete the curse—that’s how she thought of it years later—the girl would give birth behind the white cloth and (according to the midwife) without uttering a single scream, and in the minutes that followed, the child would be taken away, the whole matter concluded.

The young woman was wheeled to the postnatal ward, where the newborn would be sent as far from the mother as possible so she could not hear it cry. (The nurses knew the abandoned children woke more frequently and therefore cried more than the babies whose mothers slept close by, and nobody wanted a desperate mother to start looking for her little one.)

On the third day—a few hours before she was scheduled to leave—the young woman raised her head from the pillow and asked for the head midwife. She wanted to revoke her decision to put the child up for adoption. She wanted to see her child.

The head midwife contacted a nurse who called the head nurse, who in turn got hold of a doctor, who then alerted the chief medical doctor, who restated his command: under no circumstance was the girl to see the child.

In this particular birth, there would be no exceptions.

About an hour passed before the order circled back to the head midwife. She went straight to the young girl’s bed and, in a soft voice, rejected her request. No doubt, she thought, the decision was in the child’s best interest. “I’m afraid it’s too late. The child is already gone,” she said.

You could hear the young woman’s scream in the delivery rooms on the opposite side of the building; it embodied a mixture of grief, fear, and unrestrained fury, and it slammed against the walls like a torrent of water in a sealed tunnel.