The Seventh Child (30 page)

During my teenage years, I took comfort in Magdalene’s twelve diaries. One section in particular I returned to time and time again. According to the date,
she’d
begun the entry in February 1966, starting with a reflection that was so mysterious that I was never quite able to interpret its real meaning:
Yet another has been abducted. It happened only twenty-five days after they found the girl. The national news just put out a search for him. It’s a little boy. Is that the explanation I’ve been looking for? Was that how Marie got here?

Because I didn’t understand it, it annoyed me to no end. I sat on my bed and imagined Magdalene bent over the paper, her head fallen onto her chest as she concentrated on each letter.
Who were the two abducted children?

Five years after my arrival at Kongslund, Magdalene had, for some reason, connected the abduction of a boy from a Copenhagen street with my arrival. And it had clearly disturbed her:
I often wonder about Marie’s arrival at Kongslund that morning, when I saw the woman on the slope. Why do it this way when any child can be put up for adoption anonymously? I thought about this again when I learned of the kidnapped boy. Strangely enough, I am just as disturbed to hear about children who disappear without a reason as I am to hear about children who turn up without one.

That’s what she wrote—incomplete and entirely inexplicable—and she didn’t let me read it until after her death. When I asked for an explanation, I was met with silence.

Orla Berntsen was standing by the window when Carl Malle came in and closed the door behind him. Down in the courtyard, the snake in the fountain rose in a giant arch, spewing water so high up into the air that it crossed a ray of sun before atomizing in a blaze of purple and green. People from the ministry hardly ever sat in the courtyard, despite the eight small benches that had been carefully placed there.

“The world does not encroach on your domain,” Malle observed with a hint of mockery.

Orla’s protector from Søborg had aged; his face had grown more furrowed and his curly hair had nearly turned gray, but his charisma was undiminished. Orla knew the man would not be contradicted, nor would he change his plans for reasons other than those he himself knew and accepted. And naturally he needed a plan. That’s what he was paid for.

“How’s it going with the Tamil boy?” Malle asked.

“You mean the boy in the detention center in Asylum Center North, the one the papers are writing about?”

“Yes, the eleven-year-old you put in prison?” Malle smiled contemptuously.

“It’s what people want. People don’t want illegal refugees in Denmark, regardless of how old they are.”

“People! You were an eleven-year-old boy once, Orla—and illegal too, you might say. Certainly unwanted.”

Orla narrowed his eyes. He couldn’t tell Malle that the heavy-handed treatment of the little Tamil boy was in part an attempt to distract the media from the Kongslund Affair. He felt the familiar trembling in his hands and fingertips; he hadn’t quite gotten used to Malle’s presence over the last few days—or how he went systematically from office to office, questioning everyone, from the youngest, jittery officials to Bog Man and the Witch Doctor.

Every night, Malle had hour-long conversations with the minister behind closed soundproof doors, which only heightened the unease in the hallways and cubbyholes of the ministry. Orla was one of the few who knew how close the minister and the security advisor were. Until the first time
he’d
seen them together,
he’d
had no idea that there was a connection between the two men, who had by turns assumed the position as the patron of the otherwise insignificant Berntsen family of Søborg.

When he first made the connection, the two men had been standing together in the room at the ministry that was called the Palace. This was an early morning in the late winter of 2001, and they appeared to be in the middle of a strategy session in connection to the election that everyone expected the party to lose. Of course, that wasn’t what happened. The election strategists, led by the Almighty One, managed to seize victory that year by announcing the establishment of an entirely new ministry. The two men were going over a ten-point campaign concerning Muslim dominance in the larger Danish cities—a campaign that was to be executed in collaboration with the newly established Channel DK.

That morning Orla had managed to draw away so quietly that only Malle saw him. Retreating quickly to his office, Orla reclined on the couch and closed his eyes as he tried to discern the implausible connection between the two men. The former assistant chief of police had come to his office a short while later, readily answering the questions the soon-to-be chief of staff had yet to formulate.

“How do we know each other, Ole and I? Oh, since the Resistance. How do you think the little gnome survived the terrors of the war?” Malle said and then laughed out loud.

“But how did you come to live in the same neighborhood as me?” Orla’s voice trembled almost uncontrollably.

Malle laughed again, nonchalantly perching on the edge of Orla’s desk. “Denmark is a small country, Orla, a very small country. If I remember correctly, Magna recommended a quiet neighborhood to your mother, out of concern for you, and I suppose she named one she knew about—since I lived there. We also knew each other during the Resistance. But no one said anything to me about it. You know Magna. She doesn’t ask for permission—and certainly not from a
man
!”

He laughed a third time.

It sounded plausible at the time, and Orla had had so much on his mind during those months. His mother—still living in the row house in Søborg—was terminally ill. The tumor in her stomach continued to grow, as though her accumulated grief suddenly wanted out, no matter the cost. When she would call him, the silence on the line sometimes lasted minutes, and afterward his mouth was often so dry that he couldn’t speak to anyone—not even the Fly, who scuttled about in his periphery for upwards of half an hour at a time.

Finally he decided to move back to Søborg to care for his mother.
She’d
sit wrapped in blankets in the faded blue wingback chair, staring into the abyss. Her hands were white with red and purple blotches; her fingers quivered, but they no longer had the energy to travel across the worn cloth. He had sensed his mother’s disapproval when he first decided to move in with a woman. Though she hadn’t said a word, the image of her on her blue throne with her lips pursed tightly was seared in his mind. Perhaps that’s why Orla hadn’t wanted to marry Lucilla as long as his mother was still alive—nor had he taken any steps to bring the two women together. Lucilla, who was born in Cuba and had grown up in the old working-class neighborhood near Havana’s harbor, had instinctively understood the danger; she kept silent and allowed Orla to stay with his mother those months.

Every night he helped Gurli to bed and went to his own room, under the photograph of the man and the boy and the orange beach ball that hung immovably between them.
He’d
often awake with his right hand clutching at the sheets like the talons of a large bird;
he’d
then stretch his fingers, listening to the reassuring cracks that drove away the powerful visions from his dreams.

One afternoon a message awaited him as he came out of a meeting: Mrs. Berntsen had called. It was March 23, 2001, and she didn’t pick up when he returned the call.

He left the ministry immediately, hailing a taxi outside the stock exchange, and rushed to Søborg.

He found her on the patio in the sun, lying on her stomach, as though she were sleeping. If the neighbors had risen even halfway from their lawn chairs and glanced over the hedge in the mild spring sun, they would have seen her, but for years they’d seen no signs of life on her side of the hedge, and now they would not see death there, either. It was completely quiet on Glee Court that day; for once, the man with the grand piano had skipped his afternoon sonata.

Orla carried his mother into the living room and put her on the couch, facing south—the direction she preferred. Something stirred inside him, and he gripped his stomach. He retraced his steps to the patio where
he’d
found her. A blackbird sat on the garden gate, its eyes set on him. And he was reminded of the Fool on the night he died in the wetlands, the eye staring at him from the water lily as though it would pull him down into the depths. He thought of the blue eddies with the red threads where Death had coughed.

He went back inside and sat in his mother’s armchair with its worn armrests. He couldn’t recall having sat there before.

The Fly and Lucilla made the funeral arrangements. Orla sat in the first row of pews in an almost empty church and then walked through the cemetery in the rain with the drops running down his umbrella, his nose completely congested from a despair that made him blush from rage. Instinctively, Lucilla understood that there was no way she could help Orla Pil Berntsen, and so she said nothing.

He wandered about his mother’s house for days. He went upstairs to stare at the white walls. He sat on the bed and stared at the photo of the boy throwing the orange beach ball into the air, and at the man who raised his arms toward the sky in a never-ending attempt to catch it, the freckles on his nose alighting and flying away, like celestial bodies in the expanding universe. He sneezed and closed his eyes.

A week after the funeral his world remained filled with all the flickering visions
she’d
left behind. He slept in his mother’s bed on the first floor, while Lucilla took care of their daughter in Gentofte.

The next morning he went to Bispebjerg Cemetery and squatted by the little mound of her grave. Seeds fell from the poplar trees. Later that night, Lucilla—
who’d
grown up in a world much more mysterious than the Danish one she existed in now—had found him lying behind a little hedge near the gravesite. She rescued him with a single sentence. “I’m pregnant,” she said. That night they slept together in his mother’s bed, and time ran backward until it could go no further. Lucilla screamed in the dark as though
she’d
seen a ghost. She sat bolt upright in bed staring into Gurli’s oval mirror, with its smooth, polished rosewood frame, as though she were looking straight into the Land of the Dead. Orla immediately snapped on the light, but his mother was gone forever. Lucilla pulled him out of the dark and covered his body with her own, sealing the deal that her guardian angel had made with his years ago, when the ships had blown their horns in Havana Harbor and two strangers kissed.

The next morning, he was sitting in the blue armchair when she awoke. Again she instinctively knew how great the danger and how short the road to perdition.

She proposed to him the next day.

They married on April 7, only two weeks after the funeral; the national minister-to-be, Ole Almind-Enevold, was their best man. One newspaper reporter had caught wind of the event and snapped a single, incisive picture of the newlyweds leaving the church, and what a neat story it told: the minister in charge of immigration and deportation walking one step behind his trusted chief of staff and his dark-skinned, exotic bride.

The photo was printed on page nine of one national paper the following day, Palm Sunday; but apart from this single leak, the party succeeded in putting a lid on an episode that might’ve created confusion among the electorate.

It is the twisted irony of Fate that this very image would later become so destructive—in a very different way—triggering the Kongslund Affair and causing the deaths of so many people.

He left the row house untouched, and that’s how it remained when Lucilla gave birth to their little late-comer, and ever since, with only a monthly visit from a cleaning company.

But the last couple of weeks, time moved backward again, almost as though the years had decided to hold on to him, refusing to allow him to let go of the row house or remain with his family.

Orla returns to Glee Court every afternoon and sits in the blue armchair that stands in the same place, his hands clutching the soft fabric. He closes his eyes, and far away the pianist begins his Brahms sonata. In strong measures he hears the words he shared with Severin:
Sloth. Lust for power. Dishonesty. Greed. Disloyalty. Arrogance. Insensitivity.

Indecisiveness.

He hears his own voice like a whisper in the room.

“Nobody has any use for indecisiveness!” Carl Malle has broken into his stream of thoughts.

His soul flies back to the ministry, landing in the swivel chair before Malle realizes that it has traveled seven years back in time.

“If you hear from your old friends, especially Severin, I need to know!”

Orla Berntsen opened his eyes and looked up. Malle had no doubt kept abreast of his whereabouts and knew
he’d
moved back to the house in Søborg and asked for a divorce. It was his job to know these things.

Only a month after the wedding, Orla had visited Magna and asked her the questions that Malle had answered so plausibly: “How did I wind up living in the same neighborhood as Carl Malle?”