The Seventh Child (60 page)

Instinctively I drew away a little.

“All of us from the Elephant Room are alone today, just as we were then. Maybe we’re afraid to get close to anyone. I think many adopted children have that fear.”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t an adopted child.

“I was married. Peter was married. Orla and Severin were married. We’ve had kids. Yet everything fell apart for us.”

“It isn’t because you’re adopted; it’s because you’re men,” I said, despite my lack of experience in such matters.

He smiled.

“All relationships fall apart,” I said.

“Not all.”

“All parents are selfish. They disappear in the end. Even though they ought to stay.”

“But at least I know where my real mother is, thanks to you,” he said.

I drew back further. I didn’t want him to hear my heart pounding.

“Maybe it’s true that Orla wasn’t adopted,” he said. “He did live alone with his mother.”

“There are so many stories,” I said.

“Stories?”

“Orla Berntsen is a strange man.” I stared toward the sound in order not to meet his gaze.

“It almost sounds as though you’re afraid of him, Marie.”

I was silent.

“Good God, don’t be afraid of a career official who is so dry that dust falls off him when he walks. A law careerist from Slotsholmen whose daily life is so dull and gray you could sew a mouse pelt out of it,” he said with a short laugh. “Orla Berntsen is only dangerous to those he perceives of as alien elements
…
and of course, in his case too, you might say he’s bringing a lot of baggage from home.” He laughed again.

But I could feel the unease creep into the long body next to mine, and his laughter reminded me of Magna’s when, as a child, I told her about the visions that haunted me in my dreams, and which not even the psychologists knew about.

For that reason, I understood without a doubt that Asger’s merriment was for my sake only. He wasn’t looking at the water or the sky anymore, but into his own soul, and I knew long before he did. Asger was just as scared as I was. Like me, he recognized that there was something unknown and inexplicable in the past we were about to unearth without grasping where it would lead.

And like me, he cursed the force that pulled us closer and closer to the ministry and the men who ruled it.

He bicycles from Slotsholmen to Grønnemose Allé, cutting through the wetlands from east to west.

By the big lawn he turns in between the trees and follows the creek where, one summer evening, the spirits flew through the treetops and marked the end of his childhood. It’s as though the Fool’s scream lingers in the air along with the laughter that belongs to the Devil himself. The wounded giant is splashing about in the middle of the creek—and the eye that has been torn from its socket lies close to the bank in a porridge of half-rotten dock lily pads and leaves. The giant spins around again and again, splashing and roaring toward the bank, as though a final death protest could heal his mortal wound. Blindly, he staggers toward the bank but falls over halfway up the slope. He stretches an arm up into the world he has left behind then grows quiet. The hole in his face stares into the sky, the other eye is closed tightly, and Orla feels the fear that has never left him. Again and again, he feels the hand rush forward at the Fool’s grinning face and the white dot that arches high into the twilight, but he has never caught a glimpse of the face behind the hand, neither in his dreams nor in the trancelike states he more and more frequently disappears into. The crucial moment is shrouded in darkness.

As he did back then, he disappears into the woods and finds the bridge over the creek and then bikes the last four hundred or so feet to Glee Court. Using the key he has carried since childhood, he lets himself into the house and at once smells the scent of his mother, as if she were awaiting his visit in the living room. Even though he regularly tidies up, he hasn’t felt the need to really clean the place since she died. Now there are cobwebs under the ceiling and along the walls, and festoons of fine, gray-white threads vibrate in the draft from the patio door, which has never closed properly. The dust in the windowsill is several millimeters thick, and there’s a thin film on the dining table where he hasn’t sat for years. He eats his meals standing in the kitchen and then sits in the sofa where he can study his mother in hiding (diagonally from the side), so she can’t see his gaze and can’t guess what he is thinking. Of course she can’t see him in the real world because she has been dead and buried for seven years, but nonetheless he still feels most comfortable in the corner behind her where he always sits. He lowers his head and tucks his limbs close to his body, disappearing the way his mother taught him so long ago.

“Are you hiding something from me like Carl Malle says?” he asks her. The sound of a voice, even his own, is comforting after the flight through the wetlands. He knows his question is in vain;
she’d
never wanted to discuss the past.

“I’ve promised to find out the truth,” he says, leaning in. He speaks a little louder and a little more defiantly.

But the shadow in the blue chair doesn’t react.

“I’ll search the house,” he announces. He has never spoken to her this angrily before. Then he stands and resolutely walks up the stairs to his room. He sits on his bed. The curtain is faded and stained with mold and age. Over his bed is the magazine photo of the boy throwing an orange beach ball into the air to his father; it’s frozen in the air between them, arrested in the moment, never changing. Orla the Happy leans back in bed under the picture and thinks of all the years when he longed for the father who never materialized. It wasn’t until the day he found the giant boulder in the wetlands that he understood what must have happened—and it was a solution that he, as an adult, admitted belonged in fairy tales.

“I don’t look like you,”
he’d
told his mother.
She’d
remained silent as though he hadn’t spoken at all.

Orla the Adult opens the door to her bedroom, and the smell of her skin and nightgown—which is still lying on a chair—nearly makes him regret his decision. He hasn’t been here since the night Lucilla found him and lifted him out of the darkness.

He stands in the room. He can hear the wind in the treetops above the roof, but as hard as he tries, he can no longer hear the sound of his mother’s breathing; it’s gone forever.

A little later he turns off the light and walks back downstairs to the living room. She is sitting there as though she never left—between the two blue armrests that enclose their world.

You’re persecuting me Orla, even after Death,
she says.

He stares at her from behind. “It’s
Carl
who asked me to look for evidence,” he says.

Her thumbs touch the armrests carefully.
Tell him I am no longer here.
Her hands are young again, as though they’ve never caressed or sinned, and nausea makes Orla breathe fast. Now her thumbs slide side to side, making small neat circles in the upholstery before they stop and transform; he falls to his knees as though he is going to pray right there on the floor in front of his mother, and at that moment the blue cocoon inside him must have burst because words gush up through his chest and exit his mouth with a sound he has never heard the likes of.

He asks the question that Carl Malle demanded of him only a few days ago:
Are you really my mother?

She turns to him on her blue throne.

Then he shouts to drown out her response and something warm slides over his tongue and down his chin as he lies there on his knees next to the blue chair. To his surprise he still hears a voice inside his head, and he thinks it sounds like Poul calling his name after the murder of the Fool in the wetlands. He looks up, but it isn’t him.

In his mother’s chair sits a boy, eleven or twelve years old, with his arms on the blue armrests, and there is a long red scratch from his wrists to his elbows.
He certainly knew how to make that cut, but they learn that from one another!
The guard at the asylum center had shaken his head, giving the chief of staff a cautionary look.
We can’t pity them, though, because then it’ll spread!
The exhausted boy had only been found alive because a psychologist from the Red Cross had chosen to visit the ward just as his life was ebbing out. (The remaining asylum seekers were terror-stricken, hunched over, with expressions that seemed to convey their approval for the boy’s means of escape, though none had yet worked up sufficient courage to make the same decision.) Orla had stared down at the bloody cuts in the boy’s arms as though
he’d
never seen that kind of thing before.
This is just their way of blaming us!
The guard had shrugged—but here, in Orla’s living room, the boy’s eyes are no longer brown like his parents’ but blue like Poul’s the day they killed the man in the wetlands, and it seemed absurd given the dark, almost black skin that Tamil children are born with. Orla is close to laughing out loud.
There—now he’ll sit still.
The guard had tied a couple of white plastic strips around the disfigured wrists, and they’d taken him to the airport and put him on a plane to Sri Lanka.
Now he can’t do any more harm to himself or anyone else!
The guard had clicked his tongue, and another voice had said:
We only do what we have to do!
It had been his voice. And normally that conclusion would have seemed fundamentally reassuring, but this time some invisible creature had stayed inside him to tear up everything and destroy him.

He jumps up with the reflex that is as old as humankind and flees into the basement. For many hours he lies huddled in the darkness, and it’s not until he dares turn on the ceiling light around midnight that he sees the heavy oak dresser where his mother kept her old scarves, nylon stockings, brooches, and earrings. He opens the top drawer, and, under two packets of stockings, he finds a small, rectangular case with a golden lock that he has no key for. He has never seen it before.

He carries it into the kitchen and finds a bread knife, which he uses to pick the lock. Under a pair of blue earrings and a collar with shiny blue gems is a photograph of a smiling man. The picture is no larger than a stamp.

Orla studies it through his thick glasses. He smells it, and it is his mother’s scent that lingers on the stiff paper. The man, who has curly hair, seems vaguely familiar, but he can’t remember where he’s seen him before. As far as he knows, no man ever visited his mother. He feels the familiar buzzing in his finger and behind his eyes as he slowly sinks to the center of Darkness, tucking his limbs in and disappearing from the visible world. It is crucial that no one touches him, that no one sees him.

Orla’s hands lie on the blue armrests. Soft and indistinct, without the least hint of the bones he’s become a master of pulling and cracking since childhood. His fingers glide silently back and forth over the upholstery, but something disturbs him and causes him to turn his head. There’s a dead bird on the patio. He can see its dark outline on the flagstone, and it looks as though it has been dead for some time. The beak is open and points straight at the sky. It must have flown into the window. He can imagine hearing its wings give a final flap against the glass…

There comes a knocking on the door, and the light returns just then.

It’s Severin hammering on the big window. Orla looks around, confused. The case is on the floor bottom-up in between broken chairs and torn pillows; farther into the room, the curtains have been pulled down and lamps knocked over, and his mother’s paintings of fjords, forests, and windmills have been yanked from their frames, slashed, and torn at the corners. It looks as though a raging wind has swept through.

Severin stands for a bit in the middle of the room, staring at the destruction. Orla can’t see the little photograph of the man anywhere. Severin opens and closes his mouth as though he’s the one who flew into the window and is now paralyzed on the flagstone.

“Christ
…
I must have been so angry.” Orla hears his own whispering voice, but he can’t believe he is saying something so stupid.

The lawyer stares at him in surprise and then starts to laugh. It reminds Orla of the young Severin at the Regensen dormitory long ago—and for several minutes the two men stand there, laughing hysterically, until there’s no more air in their lungs.

Later, Orla sits among the wet stains of blood and gall that he’s spewed during the night. The water collects it all into a thick stream that runs toward the patio door, and the two legal specialists sit next to one another between islands of blue upholstery that have been torn up with a bread knife. Severin holds his friend awkwardly.

He is the first to speak. “I’ve just told my parents I’m leaving the law profession. I no longer have the energy to make money out of other people’s misery, so I’ll be going away.” He laughs again. “If I could become a missionary, I’d be happy—because it’s true what they’ve always said. It’s in my nature. I’m so damn virtuous
…
but until I leave, I’ll be staying with them.”