The Seventh Child (48 page)

In the years that followed, she resumed sending unanswered letters to the far corners of the world, and he published ever thicker books recounting ever greater adventures from continents farther and farther from Denmark and the little cape where Josefine Ingemann was destined to live until her death. She dutifully bought all his books, but never saw him again.

In the summer of 1962, exactly four months after Susanne’s arrival, Josefine discovered that she was, miraculously, pregnant. She kept the news to herself for six days.

On the seventh day, she pulled Anton aside and relayed to him the astonishing fact. The miracle happened on the night they had made love after returning from Kongslund, she said. This, at least, was her carefully crafted story and, with a little hopeful stretch of imagination, the time frame was plausible.

A man like Anton wasn’t capable of imagining a deceit of that magnitude. So there he was, in the middle of the driveway in his fluttering red-checkered shirt, trying to find words to express his happiness. At that very instant Josefine spoke impulsively, without considering the consequences: “But how are we going to return Susanne?”

“What do you mean
…
return Susanne
?” Anton uttered, almost breathlessly.

Josefine’s blue-green eyes were the color of the lake during the winter months, and she spoke to him as though he were a child: “Anton. This is how it should have been—from the beginning, right? We should have had our own child. Now that I am pregnant with
our
child, there are other childless couples that can love Susanne. We don’t need
two
, do we?”

This kind of logic normally silenced Anton immediately, making him vacate his body, rising gracefully upward—especially when he was in the company of women—but not this time. And that alone should have served as a warning to Josefine.

For several seconds he swayed back and forth as he searched for words. “You’re saying that you want to hand her over
…
to someone else
…
to complete strang—” He couldn’t complete the word.

Josefine nodded, opening her mouth in a smile. “
We
were complete strangers to Susanne too, until we met her.”

Anton’s long arms dangled at his side, and he looked like the scarecrow in the vegetable garden, which his mother-in-law dressed in his old, faded flannel shirts winter after winter. He struggled to find the words before the wind carried him away.

“Listen,” Josefine said. Swaying gently from side to side, as if she were already rocking the newborn baby that was her own flesh and blood. “We’ll call Mother’s Aid Society in Copenhagen and explain the problem. They’ll find another family for Susanne—a family that can give her everything we no longer can.”

As an adult, Susanne Ingemann often speculated on this one crucial moment, when Anton stood before his wife, silently and suddenly understanding her intentions, when he left his body and rose to the skies, looking down upon what he had never thought possible. From one second to the next, his proud, unconditional love was transformed into black despair. In the old world, his tall, industrious body stood beside the tractor, blissfully unaware, waiting for the mother with the child—in the new world, he looked into Josefine’s blue-green eyes, and the image of her dissolved before him.

How can anyone prepare for such a catastrophe? Should he have swallowed his fear and anger? Anton was unable to answer such complicated questions, but his soul had already found the answers. I’m sure Josefine saw him disappear right then, and I think they both knew that Susanne was staying on the farm, but that they would never again live together as husband and wife.

Of course they didn’t separate—not physically—for as Susanne later told me, they had no place to go. It was just their souls that floated separately into the twilight, much like a couple of torn leaves.

Josefine turned and walked back to the house, stooped as though carrying the invisible child in her arms. Anton remained standing, like a tree trunk in the middle of the driveway, not moving until dusk began to settle.

The following winter Josefine gave birth to a girl, whom she named after a school friend who had married an American and left to explore the big wide world. The friend’s name was Amanda, and they changed it a little so that Susanne’s new sister was named Samanda, because already before her birth, Josefine had decided the two would have names that shared the same first letter. Perhaps she was trying to cover up the fact that the girls had very different origins—that Samanda was her own flesh and blood, while Susanne was a stranger, born to a woman Magna had described as a whore in Hamburg.

A fact that, with Samanda’s birth, became even more important to hide.

In those first years together, the girls appeared to be growing up in harmony, but in reality they were surrounded by the peculiar silence of the place. Most people carry their childhood impressions with them through life, wrapped up tightly and shoved into the lower levels of their consciousness, but once in a while the impressions fall from a shelf and land in the present with a bang; a hinge breaks, and odd sights and sentences pour out. Thus, it was only much later that Susanne remembered the tension she felt sitting in the kitchen with her mother, as though she was in the company of a stranger. She could smell the freshly baked bread, could hear Samanda’s babble, could see her mother pick her sister up, put her on the kitchen table, and gaze into her eyes as she stroked her hair—and in that moment she sensed the difference she had no way of understanding.

She felt her father’s love when he picked her up and brought her out to the fields, telling her about all the wonders that exist above and below ground, but she also detected pity in his voice—a pity Anton couldn’t hide because he didn’t realize it was there. When she was older, her parents could have told her why things had been this way, but in the white pastry-box house it had long since been decided that the truth would be kept hidden. Over the years, Josefine bonded more and more with Samanda, increasingly ignoring Susanne—consumed with her real daughter and her tall, narrow bookcases, where Ulrik’s thick tomes described the big wide world she would never see for herself: white mountaintops in Tibet, deep gorges in the Himalayas, narrow and rocky Inca trails in the Andes. Through Ulrik’s words, the conquistadors slipped unseen past Anton and the girls and into Josefine’s room. Susanne heard them whispering through mundane phone conversations about groceries, card-game nights, dentist appointments, and preparations for the Christmas bazaar—and she stood by herself, looking out over the fjord.

Josefine never tried to run away. Where would she go?
She’d
read about the liberation of younger women in Copenhagen—this was around 1970—but instinctively she understood there was no room for her there. They didn’t even know she existed. Instead she disappeared into herself, capsized, and sank to the bottom of the life
she’d
been dealt. Every night she sat on the bench in a sea of shadows, under the hazel branches where I lay hidden, facing south. She greeted her unseen visitors with a faint shake of the head, as though silently denying a message that only she heard. I saw her shoulders sink toward the ground where they would finally disappear. Her mouth hung half-open, protesting an immense, chronic hunger that no one could satisfy.

I’ve never seen so deep a longing. Not even in Magdalene, who was an expert on the subject. I recognized it strongly, perhaps because I myself was becoming a woman, and because I feared that Magna’s favorite message to the children at Kongslund had been a lie.
All the best homes are by the water
. It wasn’t true. I learned that at the cape.

The homes by the water are the ones no one escapes from.

“If she had only answered their call,” Susanne once said of her mother. But there was no real conviction in her voice.

If only her mother had followed their murmurs to the rainbow’s end, instead of letting the conquerors’ words become whispered messages about a world so far removed from the garden and the hazel bushes on the cape.

Seen from the outside, she was a happy mother with two beautiful daughters—daughters who were very different from one another and hardly ever played together. But that’s how it is with some siblings. No stranger would have ever dreamed that Josefine didn’t have the same maternal feelings for both of her children.

No one noticed the strain on Josefine’s face whenever she detected small signs of the stranger in Susanne. To most parents, innate differences between their children are inconsequential, because their love is so endless that it envelops idiosyncrasies and weaknesses and inexplicable variation. They don’t fear that their love is weighed, filling too much or too little, because it is everywhere. But it wasn’t like that for Josefine. When she sat with her daughters at bedtime, the subtle differentiation that shouldn’t have been there surfaced. In her voice there was an undertone so faint you wouldn’t think a human ear could hear it, but the illegitimate child did—and knew right away that she was a guest, a stranger. That a connection hadn’t been made.

Instinctively, Susanne drew closer to her stoic father, who didn’t seem to make the same differentiation, though he wasn’t able to express his feelings in words at all, neither love nor anger. With men like him, those kinds of sentiments had to find other outlets.

One day he sat on a tree stump in the woods holding a small frog toward his daughter. He closed his hands around it tenderly and said, “This is one of life’s biggest miracles
…
” And then he pinched the frog’s neck with two fingers until his nails turned white. “This is the portal between life and death
…
” It was dead before it hit the grass.

Back then Susanne hadn’t understood him, but she did understand the look in his eyes that made hers burn. Rubbing them, she felt the tears on her fingers.

Brutality takes many forms. In the fifth grade, Susanne began complaining of stomach pains. First there was a rumble in her gut, then a prickling, as though
she’d
swallowed a wasp. The principal and the homeroom teacher initially wrote it off as an upset tummy, but she displayed textbook ulcer symptoms and was finally put on a strict diet of oatmeal and crackers. People were compassionate toward her, and at appropriate intervals, she would remember to clench her teeth as though bravely enduring a particularly painful episode. Then she would sigh from deep within—but she never exaggerated her performance, because she already understood that genuine compassion makes people feel good, but it doesn’t tolerate total despair or hopelessness, let alone complicity.

For her twelfth birthday, Susanne was given a blue bike with shiny mudguards. Two weeks later, a teacher found it in the gravel under a lean-to, broken and battered. It appeared as though someone had, in a rage, flung it to the ground and stomped all over it. When the teacher showed Susanne the wreck, she simply stared silently at it. Then when the indignant principal and the janitor announced their plans to launch an investigation into the incident to find whoever was responsible for the vandalism, she still said nothing. Perhaps her silence made the two men uneasy, because they abandoned their interrogations of the students, and the investigation was dropped. No one mentioned the episode again, even the teachers fell silent about it, as though they realized there was something unmentionable behind the inexplicable occurrence.

Around this time, all energy seemed to leave Josefine’s body. Her eyes crept back into their sockets, and her whole person acquired a faintly shiny aura, as though she were gliding through a ghost world. The carpets crackled when she walked over them, and the heavy curtains fluttered in the living room whenever she walked past, even during the long periods when the windows were kept closed at her express order. Silence was everywhere, in every room she entered.

Just a few weeks after the bike incident, the vandalism began once more, violent and random. Again, Susanne was the only target: her clothes, her backpack, her pencil case—even her math books—were taken and later found in a bush or puddle, tattered and broken. The episodes occurred at least a couple of times a week, and no one managed to stop them, but strangely enough, the bizarre incidents only seemed to strengthen Susanne’s patient calm—she never cried and never blamed anyone—and for that very reason she was the object of growing admiration.

Shortly before the summer holidays, the vandalism ceased. It was as though the maliciousness had left the county, letting all aggressions seep into the ground from where they’d come. Nobody could explain why, but most people were relieved—a feeling that would later turn out to be entirely misguided.

That year, the harvest festival was held four short months after Susanne’s twelfth birthday. It was a relatively warm evening, and when Anton, in a rare tipsy state, fell into bed still wearing his clothes, Josefine crept through the rooms—the curtains fluttering—and sat on the floor with her back to her bookcase. She pulled one of Ulrik’s exotic books from the shelf and began reading. And that’s how Samanda found her at 5:15 a.m. Without turning, Josefine whispered to her daughter, “Look, it’s the man mommy used to know.” She pointed at the book cover and the little photograph of the author wearing a white safari shirt and wide-brimmed hat. He smiled under a neatly trimmed, blond mustache. His teeth were strong and white.