The Seventh Child (51 page)

“Exactly.”

It looked as though the tall astronomer wanted to ask another question, but then he sank down on the last vacant chair, practically disappearing from the party, like a sunspot flickering on a wall.

“But how did you end up
here
?” It was Nils Jensen who asked the question, looking more and more confused.

“I met Carl Malle.” Susanne shrugged by way of an explanation. “He visited me at the teachers college and told me about Magna. They were old friends from the war. She offered me a job at Kongslund. I thought about it for a while, and then I decided to accept. I wanted to see the place that my parents had kept from me all those years
…
” She blushed, a rare sight. “So I came back, yes.”

“Yes,” said Taasing. “You’ve all been under surveillance by a very powerful guardian angel with dark curly hair.” If this was an attempt at lifting the mood, it failed.

“I haven’t seen Malle around, until now,” Peter said.

“Or maybe you just haven’t noticed.” Everyone looked at me. The words sprang to my lips before I could stop them. The others had no idea how well-informed I was. Just as Peter had failed to notice how quickly the episode with the dead principal had been hushed up when
he’d
avenged his friend’s humiliation. Or just as Orla had never realized how quickly and easily
he’d
been dispatched to the boarding school after the murder of the Fool in the wetlands. But I had. The police had shelved the case of the felled linden tree despite the stir caused by a single article in a morning newspaper—one that posited that the chopping down of the tree had been an attempt to destroy the despised principal.

“They didn’t want us to compare our pasts,” Asger said. “They kept watch over us, and it wasn’t with the intention that we were one day to meet.” He looked around at everyone seated at the table. “Neither Susanne, Marie, Peter, nor—” He paused, as though an unknown celestial body had plumped down among us.

“Nils,”
I said mercilessly.

It was one of my talents.

All but one instantly knew what I meant.

But they sat in their chairs like statues.

Nils was the first to react, and he stared at me. “What?” He breathed deeply. “Why am I here?” The words fell to the flagstones like a brood of chicks that had been kicked out of the nest too soon. You could barely hear them. He turned to Taasing then Peter, then Asger, and finally Susanne Ingemann. Fear was in his eyes. The black cameras hung from their leather straps, immobile, around his thin neck.

I didn’t dare look at Taasing, or Peter—and certainly not at Asger. They didn’t know what I knew about perdition. They only saw my intransigence, and the personal victim I had decided upon was Nils Jensen.

“I was here
…
?” In despair he fixed Susanne with his gaze. If everything was to remain as it were, she had to say no.

“Yes,” she said.

“But I have parents. This can’t be right.” He was as white as a sheet.

“Yes.”

“No. My parents would have told me.” Flatly, he refused to hear.

She didn’t respond.

For a long time, we sat in silence, the way people do when either death or grief has emerged between them and no one dares break the silence. Nils’s eyes were moist, and I saw a fury stir in him, its wildness growing as the ongoing silence confirmed that this was not a dream.

I saw it lift its head and break out of the Darkness they’d left him in.

He stood. “I have to go home now.”

No one stopped him. We heard him start his Mercedes and drive up to Strandvejen.

No one said a word.

“Would you have let him live in ignorance for the rest of his life?” I finally said. Instantly, I felt the same rage I’d directed at Dorah Laursen.

“Would it have mattered?” Taasing said. “You do whatever you want anyway.”

“Doesn’t the truth matter at all?”

Asger cleared his throat. “I have to admit that when my parents
…
when Ingolf and Kristine told me I was adopted, I would have rather not known.”

Susanne gave him a look that would have pleased him had he not been staring at the tablecloth as though heaven and earth had shifted places. I had admired Asger all the years I had followed him at a distance. His longing for the stars reminded me of my own longing whenever I gazed through the telescope at Hven.

“Of course you don’t know my story,” Asger said—almost formally—and everyone shook their heads, as if glad to have a reason to erase Nils from their minds.

“If Marie hadn’t helped me find my real mother, I would have—” He stopped.

I didn’t dare look at him.

“They hadn’t intended to tell me,” he said. “My parents
…
they didn’t tell me until circumstances forced them to.” He folded his hands, as though praying to the god with the best seat in the heavens, shoulder to shoulder with all the celestial bodies Asger admired. I knew every detail of his terrible story. I knew the prelude, the beginning, and the continuation—by heart. He didn’t know that.

But for the first time I spoke without a lisp. “You lived at Kongslund for exactly one year and nine weeks before you left.”

He looked up, surprised.

“They came in a blue Volkswagen, picked you up, and drove to Aarhus.”

Everyone was staring at me intensely now.

“You arrived at Atlasvej in the summer of 1962.”

Asger seemed as though
he’d
seen a ghost. And in a way he had. Only the ghost was of this world, one who carefully recorded observations made in secret and later memorized the recordings.

“You were adopted to a teacher couple in Højbjerg, and as a kid you were the direct cause of your best friend’s suicide.”

Now everyone was frozen in place. If the moon crashed onto the lawn, no one would notice. I lowered my head and went quiet.

Our little reunion had fallen apart in just a few minutes, and I wasn’t surprised. People who’ve lived in a closed room for as long as I have don’t expect things to work themselves out in a couple of hours, not even on a sunny patio with a view of the shimmering water.

Even if Magna had been right when she swore to me that nobody grew up in a better home than I, there would have been no other way to solve the mystery of Kongslund.

25

ASGER

1961–1972

If any of my old kinsmen in the Elephant Room had been selected for Fate’s small, teasing raps from above—and of course they had—
you’d
have to say that the whack that bowled over Asger for the second time in his life was so malicious that no earthly power could have planned it.

I still see him in my mind’s eye—at Kongslund, and in the room with a view of the sea where I found him much later, and at the sanatorium where he met Susanne. His misfortune was of the kind that the Master loves, because they really do seem like coincidences placed in random order.

It wasn’t until Asger, with a good deal of cynicism that I otherwise hadn’t associated with him, caused his friend’s death that I understood the other side of him. And how limitless his love of the stars and galaxies had always been.

He was wheeled away from his mother’s bed at Obstetric Ward B one early morning in 1961.

Three days later, a pair of strong arms lifted him from his bassinet, and Magna left the hospital with the little boy in her protective embrace.

No doubt he glanced over her shoulder as she carried him to the taxi, and I imagine how his round, inquisitive eyes gleamed, fascinated by space and all the blue that framed the planet they would soon be capable of seeing.

Asger couldn’t have been born at a more fortuitous time. Mighty telescopes explored ever more distant star clusters, and ingenious scientists were discovering the blinking quasars billions of light years away. By age five, Asger had found his life’s calling in an illustrated magazine teeming with stories of flying saucers and alien civilizations. When Asger was seven, two American scientists discovered the extraordinary traces of the universe’s beginning; they heard a faint crackle in a radio telescope in New Jersey. At first they thought the equipment was faulty and tried to wipe away the creation of the world from their equipment using soap and water. As we know they weren’t successful, for what they’d heard was the sound of the Big Bang—the very birth of the universe—and it was a true and wonderful story that once and for all directed Asger’s eyes upward—high above the physical tediousness of life on earth.

When he was six, he was so obsessed with the sky and all its luminous, blinking, flaming, and flying objects that night after night his parents found him wide awake, crouched in the windowsill of his little room, completely absorbed in the glimmering silver trail of the Milky Way. Again and again, Ingolf and Kristine awoke to discover their son studying the moon, bright eyed and focused.

Like so many practical women, his mother, Kristine, believed on the one hand that the night sky was entirely mapped out—and therefore unimportant—yet on the other, she sensed that it represented a mysterious abyss that no human being under normal circumstances could ever explore. An uncommonly witty higher power had even managed to organize things so that their house was located in a neighborhood where the streets were named after celestial bodies: Neptune, Atlas, and Jupiter. The symmetrical streets were on the northeast side of Observatory Hill, where the city’s famous observatory—with its two giant cupolas—had been built and named after Ole Rømer.

The two young teachers who were his parents worked at the local public school at Fredensvang, only a few minutes’ walk from the white one-story villa in Højbjerg they called home. In every way, they embodied dependable care—the vanguard of Denmark’s new middle class—and to complete the image, every night when they tucked their son in, they discussed countercultural ideas about freedom and uprising: the Vietnam War, nuclear test bombings, the Franco dictatorship, the Berlin Wall, and civil rights in America.

At some point, their stimulating conversations would be silenced by the one topic they could no longer ignore—and Ingolf would nervously pull at his pipe, while Kristine’s voice grew shrill: “I found him at the windowsill
again
!”

Her husband folded his legs and looked nervously toward Asger’s bedroom. They sat like this for a while. They were both painfully aware that the boy in the other room wasn’t theirs and therefore contained traces of people they’d never met.

“I wonder whether it’s
our
fault?” she whispered, casting a sidelong glance at the two cupolas visible from the window. She didn’t understand how something as vast as the universe had found a crack into her life. Finally she answered her own question: “It was
you
,” she said categorically one evening when her fears had come creeping back. “You were the one who told your friends he was born the same day they sent that
man
into space,” placing a particularly reproachful emphasis on the word
man
.

Ingolf trembled a little. She was right; he had bragged how the birth of their son had coincided with the first major triumph of space exploration. The very moment Asger’s small, long body was being washed and weighed and measured at the Rigshospital in Copenhagen, the world learned that the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had made it precisely three hundred kilometers into nothingness—in the spacecraft
Vostok
.

“One brave man went into space—and one brave little guy came down to earth,” Ingolf had playfully told everyone. But
he’d
only done it to give the impression that he and Kristine had attended the birth—and that Asger was their own child.

Was he supposed to regret that now?

On that April day it had taken Gagarin exactly 108 minutes to reach his distant target in space, only a few more minutes than Asger’s biological mother needed to deliver her perfect boy. Both fearless travelers, the man and the infant then received a healthy dose of liquid food; the infant fell asleep, while the space traveler wrote a couple of sentences about his weightless condition. What Ingolf omitted from the story was the terrible fact that, just as the man in the space capsule returned to his Russian embrace (this was in the middle of the Cold War), the woman rose from her bed and walked out the door to a waiting taxi, disappearing from her child’s life forever. That’s how Magna had described it. Asger’s mother had been a harlot,
she’d
said.

“But he had no idea what was going on,” Ingolf would say, irritated, whenever Kristine referred to the harmful effects of the Gagarin story on their little boy.

But Kristine would only look at him with empty eyes. “There’s more to this life than what meets the eye, Ingolf!” she would say and then burst into tears again.

Whatever the reason, the boy’s irresistible urge to study everything that moved in the sky grew: stars, comets, planets, galaxies, supernovas, jet planes, even gulls, song birds, ladybugs, wasps, bees, and butterflies. When he was seven, he had a larger head than other boys his age and wore glasses as thick as binocular lenses. He looked like a pensive professor of theoretical physics.

When he was eight, the two American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed in the Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong wandered about in the alien moon dust for two hours and fifteen minutes and then uttered the words that Asger had pinned to the wall above his bed: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The following day, Asger began limping on his right leg for the first time—and that was another peculiar coincidence: that his own steps in the months after the moon landing became smaller and smaller, until he could barely take a step. This strange defect continued for over a year, until one day he sat with his back to the sky and looked down. He took off his glasses, studied his right leg for a moment, closed his eyes, and cried. It was then that Ingolf and Kristine finally took him to the hospital. The doctors examined him for a long time, before finally agreeing that their young patient had contracted the rare and hard to pronounce Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease. The illness was named after the doctors
who’d
first described its disabling appearance in the human body: his right femoral head had collapsed due to insufficient calcium absorption—in the illustration it looked like a broken clay ball rattling in the hip socket. This breakdown of the machinery was due to a defect in the boy’s genes, the doctors said—in the very building block of the human organism, which at that time was the obsession of all scientists who weren’t studying space.

One week later, they drove Asger to a hospital at the cape near Kalundborg, where his sick leg was to be treated with traction so he could fight the disease with a hundred other children in the same condition. He was to remain in his hospital bed for a full year and a half—and just to be sure they did, all the children at the Coastal Sanatorium were cinched into their beds with three sturdy canvas straps on each side. The boy
who’d
always dreamed of flying into space was now tied to his earthly bed as tightly as possible. The irony was rich. But, I wasn’t surprised. I knew Fate could be banal when its mood was foul. I took three long trips to the Coastal Sanatorium while Asger was lying on his back there.

Nothing could surprise me anymore. At least, that’s what I thought in the beginning.

The first day at the hospital, Kristine broke down completely. She cried inconsolably—and Asger heard her all the way down the hall, until the heavy hospital gate slammed behind her. His father stood frozen and white in the doorframe and couldn’t manage a single word. For the first time, Asger really examined his parents, and he was shocked at what he saw. He was alone in the world. Any illusion about salvation was dwarfed by the scope of the catastrophe. He was like an astronaut
who’d
fallen out of his space shuttle into nothingness. Granted, he could see other points of lights in the dome of the sky, but he would never reach them in his lifetime. Back then Asger had no idea that he was already an experienced child in that regard—much more prepared for the darkness and loneliness than any of the other children in the big sanatorium.

On his first night he awoke screaming—it was as though the hospital room was filled with people he couldn’t see—and at one point he heard a voice that seemed familiar.

“Whose child is it?” it asked.

In Aarhus, Kristine awoke suddenly in her bed and shouted: “It’s mine!” And she wondered why she had answered a question she hadn’t been asked. She thought of Asger lying in the dark with his sick leg and the genetic defect that had betrayed them all. That’s what struck Kristine with more force than anything else—the little piece of information that the doctors had given her when the diagnosis was made: the defect was inherited on the maternal side; it was intrinsically connected to the female chromosome. The biological mother
who’d
abandoned her boy had left an illness inside him.

To the doctors, then,
she’d
had to confess that Asger wasn’t her biological son.

When they pressed her hoping to include this interesting aspect in their research, she gave them the name and address of the matron at Kongslund, but afterward she was left with a deep fear that the secret she had revealed might cause her to lose her son to an unknown adversary.

Ingolf stroked her hair and said, “No one can take him from us, Kristine, and nobody wants to, either
…
But we probably have to tell him the truth now that all the doctors know.”

She felt like a trapped animal.

In order not to lose him,
she’d
have to tell him the very thing that assured
she’d
lose him.

For the first Christmas at the hospital his parents gave him a small telescope with lenses so powerful that even at night he could study the sailors going up and down the ladders on the big oil tankers anchored in the fjord’s inlet.

In his room there were kids from all over the country—from the island of Møn, Copenhagen, Elsinore, and Vejle, indeed, even from Thorshavn on the Faroe Islands, from where two twins had arrived with the almost identically sounding names—Høgni and Regni. There was even a little boy from a small town in Greenland with a distant, alien name. Daniel never had a single visitor and after nine months forgot the faces of his mother, father, and sister. Month by month his brown skin grew paler, his face rigid, and his black eyes ever distant. No one knew what went on inside his head—he simply lay on top of his duvet, clutching a coarse-haired seal hide that
he’d
brought with him.