The Seventh Child (61 page)

“But what about Hasse
…
?” The question leaves Orla’s lips before he can stop it. Hasse has always lived there, before, during, and after Severin’s arrival. They both know that.

Severin doesn’t seem to mind. “I told them I’d be staying in his room—so they had to clear out his stuff. It’s hardly an unreasonable demand after forty-seven years.” For a moment he looks as though he might start laughing again.

In his mind’s eye Orla sees the bloodstained shopping bag with the groceries spilled out on Gladsaxe Road. Hasse’s last purchases.

“And after that I told them about Kjeld, because I didn’t think anything needed to be kept secret anymore. I told them it wasn’t until Kjeld died that Hasse disappeared from my life. Presumably because he was scared of me even in death. Though they’d rather not, they remembered the day Kjeld rode the horse in the wetlands.”

Orla observed the man
who’d
been his opponent in the refugee and immigration courts for two decades. To his own surprise, he put an arm around Severin’s shoulder. If the Fly had seen her boss at that moment, her black cupola eyes would have sprung from their sockets and rolled onto the floor. Orla Berntsen had no feelings; the entire nation knew that.

“Finally my mother said that I sounded a little tired, but that no one was going to use Hasse’s room anyway, so I could certainly have it—and set it up the way I wanted. But what, she asked, was so wrong about commemorating him? Of course Hasse had been dead for many years, but they still loved him and they always had—and with or without the room,
he’d
be with them. I shouldn’t blame myself for anything when it came to Kjeld, my mother said;
he’d
simply fallen from a horse because he didn’t know how to ride, and that could happen to anybody. My father agreed.
He’d
simply fallen—stupid little Kjeld. And in that way everything was smoothed over. The way it always has been.”

Yes, that’s what mothers are like
, Orla wanted to say. But in truth he didn’t know how mothers were. His mother had never said anything to him of any significance. All her communications had focused on the practicalities of everyday life.

Or maybe
he’d
forgotten.

Severin turned his head. “That’s what mothers are like,” he said. The God of Friendship whirled into the room and, once again, made them laugh. Their faces were so close together that one might for a second mistake them for lovers.

The chief of staff at the Ministry of National Affairs sat on a floor in Søborg with his old adversary and laughed like a lunatic. So peculiar are humans, created out of a strange and fragile material that at a distance seems impenetrable, but suddenly a hand swoops in from above and sweeps it all to the ground—their guard, their common sense, their delusions.
Crack
, it’s gone—and the wise ones laugh.

Søren Severin Nielsen sat in the midst of the smashed chair with its blue upholstery in tatters. “I asked Erling and Britt if they even knew who I was—and you know what they said
…
no
…
they didn’t even have a piece of paper with my name on it
…
or the name of my biological mother. The matron had said it didn’t matter. So even if someday I really wanted to know
…
no one would be able to help me. That’s how things stand. We don’t know who we are—and that’s probably how we prefer it.”

“I know who I am,” Orla said. “I’m not adopted.”

Severin ignored him as though he hadn’t spoken and said, “You mean the best and plan everything accordingly, but then you forget to do the right thing when it really counts. That’s how we’ve been as parents too. You’re divorced. I’m divorced. Peter is divorced. Asger is divorced
…
”

“I’m not divorced,” Orla said with a resolve in his voice that he couldn’t quite explain.

“And everything that we ought to have learned from our own upbringing—things that we’ve had more opportunity to learn than most—we didn’t. Not at all.” He sniffled. “Britt and Erling adopted me, but they only did so because Hasse died
…
In reality, I was Hasse, newly repaired.”

Orla let go of his friend’s shoulder. Orla had never been so close to someone crying. His mother had never shed a single tear even though
she’d
had more reason than most, and Lucilla had always taken care of their daughters’ tears.

Severin shook his head and rose from the ruins. He wasn’t wearing any shoes, and his socks had holes in them, Orla noticed.

“Let’s get going,” Severin muttered through his tears.

They left Orla’s home and drove to Bispebjerg Cemetery, where Orla had arranged to meet Peter Trøst and a camera crew.

The three boys from the Elephant Room stood together under the poplars. It was late, and it had started to rain again. My letter about the past had finally gathered the Fates.

Peter recorded the segment on Orla’s story, his mother’s gravestone forming a foggy rectangle in the film’s background.

“There are no homes other than this,” Inge Troest Jochumsen said with a resolve that characterized the doctor’s wife who had once dreamed of becoming a doctor herself.

The huge elm was silhouetted against the sky, and the last rays of sunlight colored the clouds over the sound in a perfect rose-pink. The three of them sat under the electric heaters on the patio, and Peter hadn’t broached the subject until dessert was served and everything had gone quiet in the spacious Rungsted garden.

Laust moved his legs nervously under the elegant oak table that had been built for a much larger family. It was the same table where thirty-four years ago Peter’s grandparents and parents had decided to reveal the truth about Peter’s origins. Afterward the family had celebrated their beloved boy’s thirteenth birthday, satisfied in the belief that everything once hidden had now been revealed in the most perfect way.

Peter recalled the disastrous event in details that never lost their lucidity: The Tiger tank that had appeared over the sand dune without warning. His father sitting in the turret hatch behind the armor, with the fear-inspiring invincibility that surrounds both fathers and tank commandants. His mother uttering the words everyone had been waiting for with just the right measure of joy in her voice that the family deemed appropriate. “We are your real parents, but we didn’t give
birth
to you
…
”

“Who did give birth to me then?” he now asked in the Rungsted garden, thirty-four years later.

She looked as though
he’d
just kicked her in the face. Behind her bloomed cypress, Japanese cherry, black poplars, willows, hawthorn, mountain ash, and elderberry trees. Everything was the way it had always been.

He’d
just filmed Orla in front of his mother’s grave, giving the statement that would end his career and trigger a crisis in the administration. The gravestone read
Gurli
in swirly, gold lettering. Outside the frame, Severin had sat like a little boy with his legs folded under an especially large poplar, smiling and nodding as though it were all just a big joke. Both the tape and the camera now lay in a bag in his parent’s garage, next to the chainsaw that had once felled the linden tree, changing Peter’s life forever. In the morning, he would edit it and make it the most sensational segment in the history of Channel DK.

“But they never told us about your parents,” Laust said cautiously. “Magna said it was best to just forget about it.”

The threads had been tied up remarkably well.

“But what little they said gave us the impression that she was a
…
loose woman.” Laust smiled apologetically and then blushed.

And they hadn’t wanted to know any more
. For crying out loud.

“We didn’t think it mattered,” Laust said.

His mother, dressed all in black, sat hunched like one of the fisherman’s wives Peter had photographed on the Portuguese coast on his first InterRail trip at the age of nineteen. Frozen in time and by the wind from the sea.

“I think someone
killed
Magna because of that information,” he said.

The old woman who was his mother lifted her head with a jerk. And as was his habit, Laust climbed onto the armored skirt of his tank and opened the hatch. “Why in the world would anyone do that?” he said from his perch high above. They’d returned to El Alamein, as though time had stood still since his thirteenth birthday. Whenever the enemy approached, Laust Troest Jochumsen would crawl into his steel armored tank and become unassailable once again.

“Because she hid it,” Peter said. “And because she wouldn’t tell it to the person who killed her.”

“But they’re not even sure it was murder.”

“We’re all under suspicion. Especially those of us who’ve killed before.”

The hatch was just above his father’s head. “I don’t understand what you’re saying
…
killed before?”

“Yes, people like us.”

“Nonsense
…
” Laust crept into the black hole and prepared to close the hatch.

“Yes, Dad. I killed Principal Nordal.”

His father froze midmovement and, in a brief, flickering second, forgot both his armor and his escape route.

“I got our chainsaw and felled his damn linden tree—and that killed him. I felt gleeful afterward, for months, even years, because it was exactly what I had hoped for!”

“But we were at his funeral
…
” Laust’s absurd objection faded into silence.

To his left Inge sat speechless, her mouth agape.

“He ruined Knud’s father’s life,” Peter said. “He killed that man, even if he himself died first.”

“But how on earth was that any of your business?” The argument sounded like a polite interjection in a televised debate.

“No,” Peter replied. “It’s never anyone’s business, is it?”

There was fear in Laust’s eyes.

At long last Inge reacted. “We don’t believe a word of that.” She put a gentle hand on her son’s arm. “You’ve always had a vivid imagination, Peter.”

A mother does not need an entire armored division to eschew the truth about her child.

“I can tell you in detail what happened,” he said.

“Of course you can.” Her eyes gleamed, as though they were parrying a mild taunt.

“It’s been so many years ago that no one remembers anything anyway,” Laust said. “What’s fiction, what’s real
…
?” He nodded eagerly to himself, and the polite justification kept him standing in the light a little longer.

“I know what’s real
…
I listened in on you in the living room and on the patio
…
I heard everything you said about me
…
and I remember
all
of it
…
” His voice was trembling.

The hatch slammed shut. Inge was alone with her adopted son. She let go of his arm.

“Do you remember the tape recorder that you gave me for my birthday, Mom? The old B&O recorder
…
there was a cord that ran from a microphone in the living room through the ceiling and into my room. I could wiretap you for eight hours on four tracks, so thirty-two tracks on each of the four large reels
…
I had hundreds of hours of recordings of you
…
I heard everything you said when you thought you were alone.”

The desert heat roiled around them, and everything was deathly quiet.

“You always talked about me
…
and about yourselves as parents. How good you were. How well you handled it—when you told me that I was adopted. How mature I had been in my reaction to being told. Grandpa said, ‘That maturity can take him far—maybe even to a Nobel Prize in medicine.’ Do you remember that?”

Silence descended on the patio, and the sun’s rays finally disappeared. Peter was drunk by now and cornered his parents (the goal of which wasn’t even clear to him). He had nothing else to say.

His mother stood. She gathered the empty glasses on the elegant silver tray that they’d used for fifty years.

“Why did you never have a career?” he asked.

She didn’t respond.

“Why did you just putter about in the yard, planting cypresses and flowers and writing letters—that you signed as a doctor even though you weren’t?”

She edged past him with the tray, and the glasses rattled; he felt like shoving it but didn’t.

“Why did you let me sit in that yard, surrounded by all your bushes and trees saying nothing for all those years?”

She’d
made it to the patio door.

“What were you waiting for?”

The door slid closed behind her.

He got up and went upstairs to his room. The bed was, as always, freshly made, and his mother had put a selection of newspapers and magazines on the bedside table. The B&O recorder sat on a platform in a corner, and the two large eighteen-inch reels reflected faintly in the darkness, as if they needed only a simple command to start turning again.