The Seventh Child (55 page)

Later that night I lie awake in the darkness listening to the sounds of children in the house, and I cannot help but think of the many children who’ve slept in these rooms for over seventy years. Sometimes I imagine that I remember all the faces that have turned toward mine, that I’m able to distinguish every single facial feature from a thousand others. But I know that only Magna possessed that skill.

In Gerda Jensen’s old apartment in the southern tower, Asger has settled in. Susanne is sleeping a little farther down the corridor on the second floor—and their presence stirs a faint feeling of triumph in me.

Ever since Magna put me in the King’s Room—an eternal reminder of the unfinished and imperfect in her otherwise symmetrical home—I have waited for this moment.

I think of those who now return, and a rare smile crosses my lips.

I wonder whether Asger possesses a heavenly innocence that so few adults retain. Certainly not Orla, or Susanne, or Nils, or Peter, not even Severin—who chose the path of Goodness, helping so many in distress—and certainly not I. We’ve never had such innocence.

But Asger?

“Is it possible to trust anyone at all?” I asked Susanne, as we made his bed in the tower room, when we were finally alone.

“I’ve never thought about that,” she said.

“But you used to know him
…
once?”

“When I was a child. But do you really know anyone when you’re a child?”

“Do you think he suspects us
…
or anyone in particular?”

Susanne stopped outside the King’s Room. “How did you find his parents back then?” she asked. She too had mastered the art of changing topics.

I withdrew into the doorframe until we could barely see one another in the darkness. Only the lamp from the stairwell gave off some light. We must have looked like two apparitions from a ghost story set in a larger house than this. It had been a long time since
she’d
followed me into the King’s Room.

“I thought the names of all the biological parents had been removed from the binder
…
from the records of the children in the Elephant Room,” she said.

I didn’t reply.

“But the papers still exist?”

I fled into my room and pushed the door closed. “I don’t remember anymore,” I said. My deceitful words lingered in the dark behind me like tiny, glowing orbs.

The words rolled like an echo down the hall and disappeared.

In that moment I knew of only one thing that had always been true at Kongslund. Always. I had always loved her. Susanne Ingemann possessed that rare quality that both men and women love. She was unobtainable.

26

THE BLIND GIRL

June 22, 2008

You can kill a person in many ways. And, of course, you can do it in ways that make it look like an accident, nearly undetectable. The small blows, the ones that can only be the work of a cruel fate, have always interested me. But to a boy like Asger, I think the hand that did the deed was merely a shadow in his soul. And that’s why he didn’t see it coming.

The prime minister’s eyes had acquired the sheen of surprise that people get when Death steps into their path—even though this encounter is the only sure thing in life.

All the signs of imminent departure were there. There could only be a few days left of his term, and Almind-Enevold no longer tried to hide that fact.

“Everything is ready—and everything will be the way you want it,” he said to his dying boss, rather formally.

He was talking about the arrival of Death as well as his own rise to the highest post in the land.

“Good.”

In the presence of Death, the prime minister had put his handkerchief away to deliver the final cough—without cover—right into its face. It was an impressive, unparalleled provocation that the minister of national affairs couldn’t help but admire, even though the sight of those blood-red threads of spittle running from the corners of his mouth was disconcerting on such a sunny Sunday morning, when the ministry was peaceful and nearly devoid of people.

He would have liked to push for a quick transition of power but didn’t want to risk challenging a man who so flagrantly defied his own fate for so long.

“Is the Tamil case
…
under control?” The use of the banned word alone was a testimony to how far on the edge of the abyss the boss was.

“Yes,” the minister replied, though it was the Kongslund Affair that worried him now.

Malle had visited Asger Christoffersen’s adoptive parents in Aarhus and had spent a long evening asking them about their son’s past and their contact with Magna. Had the matron ever given them information that suggested anything about the boy’s background or his biological parents? Had she given them any adoption papers that they could show him? Had anyone contacted them with a mysterious purpose?

They’d answered no to all of these questions.

As expected, Asger was a child without a past—or rather, the past seemed to have been carefully erased. Magna had advised them to raise the boy as their own. There was no reason for him to know that he was adopted,
she’d
said, when there was no way of discovering his past.

Malle told the minister and his chief of staff about his lack of results, while in the background the snake fountain spewed its yellow and green crystals so high in the air that even the Fly who brought them coffee was uncharacteristically distracted by it.

“What about the doctors from the Coastal Sanatorium
…
any clues there? They must have discovered all the biological data that’s scientifically possible to determine?” The minister’s questions were logical enough.

Malle waited until the Fly had buzzed away and then said, “There’s nothing. I’ve already been there. They never found his biological mother. But there was something else
…
” Malle shifted uneasily in his seat. “His father once told me that Asger disappeared from home for four days. He told them he was going to a festival on Zealand, but one of his friends later revealed, accidentally, that
he’d
never shown up. And shortly before that
he’d
talked to Marie.” Malle shook his head as if to emphasize an almost astounding revelation. “His father overheard their conversation
…
”

He paused dramatically and the minister leaned toward him.

“He thinks Asger visited his biological parents during those days—without telling anyone.”

The best orphanages are always by the water
, Magna would have said. And I think you could say the same about hospitals. The majority of them are in the interior or in the center of the biggest cities—but the Coastal Sanatorium was right on the water with an undisturbed view of the fjord.

In December 1972, Susanne had been gone from Asger’s life for three months, and in those days newspaper editors filled their pages with reports from the American bombing of Vietnam. The new prime minister at the time, who had once been a regular laborer but now had to bring Denmark into the European community, made regular, fervent speeches about peace and hope. As the world burned, Europe needed to form a tight bond. “Why do we have to be a part of that?” the nurses grumbled. They wore white caps as symbols of their altruistic work among forlorn children. Like other self-sacrificing people, they believed first and foremost in their will—and often feared the will of others.

A couple days before Christmas, Asger heard steps in the hallway and reluctantly turned his eyes from the sky and the fjord to the door. He had grown accustomed to the sounds of the sanatorium and could identify every single shoe by its thump on the floor. For months
he’d
listened for the sound that would bring Susanne back—but of course he never heard it—and he knew that it wasn’t her steps he was hearing, unless
she’d
become severely handicapped and had begun walking with a cane.

Tock-tock-tock.

He sat halfway up in bed and looked toward the door.

A little girl his own age entered his room—
tock-tock-tock
—and felt her way carefully with the cane until she found the chair next to Asger’s bed. It was quite a feat. For a moment she sat immovable, staring straight ahead. She had a soup-bowl haircut and rather exotic features. Her one shoulder slumped (maybe it was because of her grasp on the cane), and her face was a little out of focus, as though he saw her through two sets of misaligned lenses.

But Asger was so astonished by her blind march practically into his arms that he held his breath for five long seconds before he finally asked, “Who are you?”

Before the words had barely left his mouth, she answered—as though
she’d
known he would ask and had prepared a response, “I attend the School for the Blind here on the cape, and that’s where I live as well.” Her little mouth formed into a perfect flower, sucking the juice out of the words. She looked directly at him as though seeing him, but he knew that was impossible.

Most likely one of the nurses had taken pity on her and invited her in.

“Are you really blind?” he said.

She didn’t answer.

“What’s your name” he asked, staring curiously into her eyes.

“Inger,” she said. It sounded like
Ing-ger
because she lisped a little.

“Do you want to hear a story?” he asked.

Her left hand suddenly awoke and began groping for something to hold. Soon he felt five fingers around his lower arm, and she huddled like a little bird in Susanne’s chair.

He read aloud the first chapter of Carl Sagan’s book on the exploration of life in outer space. When he was done she stood, rapped a couple times with her cane, and left.

Some weeks later she returned, and Asger risked sharing even more advanced theories: “Scientists like Niels Bohr demonstrated how it isn’t possible to predict the way electrons move within the tiny atom. Each time you get close they invariably shrink back at random, and that means that nothing in the world will ever reveal its true self under observation.”

She sat listening, her little cane resting between her legs; she was wearing tights. It struck him that they were a good fit: the cane, the leg, the body—all as slender as a willow branch.

In January, he began rehabilitating his healthy leg, walking with crutches for an hour a day. Once in a while they went for a walk together, and afterward he read aloud to her while she listened, always in silence.

“Where is your real home?” he asked.

“By the water,” she said after a long pause.

“Is it nice there
…
by the water?”

“Yes,” she said. “All the best homes are by the water.”

He thought it a strange response, and the words startled him a bit. Even by a stretch, you couldn’t say that his home in Aarhus was by the water.

“I’ll be going home soon,” he said.

She didn’t respond.

Three days before he was discharged from the sanatorium he heard her
tock-tock-tock
a little earlier than normal. In the hand not holding the cane, she carried a small package, which she gave to him once she sat down.

He unwrapped it and stared at the contents for a long time. In a little white box lay a dried frog with protruding eyes; it was stuffed with wilted straw and leaves, and its neck seemed to have been broken. There was a brief pricking in his sick leg, and he felt goose bumps rise on his arms. But she couldn’t see them, thankfully.

“A frog
…
” he stammered. “Thank you!”

He considered how long it would take a blind girl to catch a frog and then how
she’d
killed it with a brutal clutch of its throat. An astonishing accomplishment. He looked at her thin brown fingers.

She didn’t speak or move.

“Have you ever heard of the Andromeda Galaxy?”

She appeared not to have heard his question.

But Asger kept talking, because he loved the Andromeda Galaxy, even the very sound of the name thrilled him. “Andromeda is the closest galaxy to the Milky Way, and at night you can see it quite clearly,” he said, impulsively taking her hand. Her skin felt as cold and dry as the frog’s, but he didn’t want to let go of her. “At night I see Andromeda in my telescope—it’s a fantastic sight.”

Her hand remained in his.

“There’s an observatory where I live, and I can show you if
you’d
like.”

She withdrew her hand, slowly, and straightened up. As before, her hand lay on the knob of the cane, and her knuckles shone white in the twilight. Then she stood and walked to the door.
She’d
never left him like that. Almost as though she were in a rush.

At the last moment, she turned and looked at him, and he waited for her good-bye; he understood that they wouldn’t see each other again. “I have seen Venus over Hven,” she said. And then she was gone.

Perhaps it was like the sun and the moon, he thought during the days that followed. He had loved Susanne’s warmth, but the moon crossed mercilessly in and out of the clouds, telling stories that were darker, older, and more mysterious than any other in the universe. While the other children slept, he cried for three nights in a row without knowing why. The creatures he attracted were even stranger and lonelier than he himself. It was one of Fate’s tricks. Often,
he’d
had the feeling he was living in an endless number of parallel universes, the way the eccentric physicist David Deutsch described it: with no singular, fixed reality. If he could only learn the art of stepping to the side and disappearing into a new universe, even the wickedest blow couldn’t affect him.

Of course, that was a dream as unattainable as the love
he’d
just encountered—and overlooked—the way people do.