The Seventh Child (24 page)

“He said you were in an orphanage called Kongslund—in Skodsborg—in the early sixties, like me. Is that true?”

Severin’s arms fell to his sides. It was a cool fall day, and the breeze made a single leaf dance about his feet before it settled, absurdly, on his shoe.

With an inexplicable intensity, Orla said, “You never told me you’re adopted—but you are?”

“Yes.”

“You could have told me.” The anger. The former justice minister’s revelation at the restaurant had shocked him, and it was in that second—sitting across from Almind-Enevold—that decisiveness had actually struck him.

“Yes.” Severin’s answer hung in the air.

“But you didn’t tell me.”

“My mother told me before I started school,” said Severin, as though that explained his silence many years later. He stopped and shook his left foot, but the leaf stayed put. He stomped the cobblestones.

“Did they pick you up at Kongslund?”

“Yes. But how did he know about you?”

“I told him about it myself
…
that my mother had placed me in Skodsborg the first year after my birth. Then he laughed and said he already knew. And then he told me about you.”

“But
…
how?” Severin’s eyes were glossy. And he fell silent. The leaf was gone.

“He said
he’d
known the matron at Kongslund for decades. When he was young he helped out in Mother’s Aid Society. They handled the adoptions in the 1960s. The man has a photographic memory
…
He says he remembers every single name he saw there. We were there during the same period.”

“That sounds
…
” Severin stalled again, studying the tips of his shoes.

“Like a coincidence
…
that might not have been,” Orla said. His anger had returned.

“But what was he doing for Mother’s Aid Society?”

“He was an attorney. He worked in the social services, with the weakest members of society. He’s known the governesses at Kongslund for many years. He worked with them in the Resistance.”

That night they sat under Mille’s flattened, outstretched skin, and for the first time, Severin talked about his parents. His adoptive father was a glazier by the name of Erling, and his mother was a Swede named Britt. Before Severin was born, they’d had a little son named Hasse
who’d
died when he was only six years old.

“He walked onto Gladsaxe Road and was run over by a twenty-ton semi that had swung onto Laugaards Boulevard.” Severin looked as though he were about to cry.

The semi had hit the boy
who’d
stopped in the middle of the road (everyone in Severin’s family had a tendency to get lost in their own thoughts), and it had run him over with all four sets of its right-side wheels. The shopping bag Hasse had been carrying lay on the road, all the goods intact. Even a large jar of pickled beets had made it through. Now this bloodstained shopping bag lay in a locked drawer in Britt’s bedroom; her husband had never been able to open the drawer and remove the brutal keepsake. Hasse had been their only chance—Britt had suffered from preeclampsia and had almost died delivering the little boy. Since she was sterile, she was unable to remake Hasse, and she withdrew into a cocoon of shock and despair. She just sat quietly by the window facing the playground between the yellow tenement houses, dreaming so intensely of her childhood landscape, the edge of a Swedish forest where foal grazed, that all eyes were drawn to her.

These were the foal the Master of all of life’s coincidences had selected as his toys while he constructed the disaster that would later afflict Severin.

For months Britt sat staring, smiling bitterly at God and repeating—slowly again and again—that it wasn’t His fault. But of course it was. And then Erling knew what he had to do. They had been approved for adoption relatively quickly, which at that time was about three years, and it was in this way that Severin entered this ghost family—where another boy’s spirit continued to wander, lost in thought in the middle of the road, holding a bloodstained shopping bag.

Orla was shocked to hear his friend’s story. “
You’d
think adults would be more
…
adult,” he stammered. But Severin just laughed, spilling red wine on his shirt. Again, Orla felt the anger that Almind-Enevold’s revelation had triggered.

Erling had picked up little Severin—who at Kongslund was referred to as Buster after a popular actor in
Circus Buster
—and driven him home in his company truck. He had four thick window panes on the truck bed that were to be delivered to a wholesaler in Hellerup. While Severin slept on the back seat, he installed the four panes in the posh villa and drank a beer with the wholesaler. In a field behind the house, four gray horses were galloping around, and this was no doubt how Severin’s adoptive father first got the idea for the most important barter of his life.

I think it was his generous mind that decided the matter. In his spare time, he was a bit of a performer:
he’d
once exchanged two skylight windows for a unicycle that he could ride for a good fifty feet while juggling two blue polka-dotted balls. Despite Severin’s arrival, Britt continued to sit by the window, depressed, and there seemed to be nothing that could free her. One day, when Severin was seven years old, his father returned from boozing—a little later than normally—with a real live horse. He wandered down Maglegaards Boulevard and around the corner, pulling a large gray gelding that startled at the cluster of children. Britt stared down at him from the open kitchen window. For once she wasn’t the one drawing the attention of the neighbors.

“Look what I got for you,” he shouted to her, and the stench of Bavarian beer could have paralyzed anyone close by.

There came no response from the kitchen window.

“No worries, Britt,” he continued reassuringly. “I didn’t buy it
…
I bartered with the wholesaler.”

“And what did you have to give him?” Britt asked, her Swedish vowels trembling as she instinctively clutched Severin, because she couldn’t imagine which of their meager possessions could have been offered in exchange for a horse.

“I gave him the truck! What else?” Erling roared in drunken overeagerness, laughing so hard the echo bounced back and forth several times between the apartment buildings. “It wasn’t worth anything anyway!”

“You idiot!” For the first time since Hasse’s death, Britt raised her voice. “How are you going to run your business now?”

Erling froze—but only for a second—as if, in his rush to acquire the horse,
he’d
forgotten how fragile and heavy solid glass windows are, how unfit for travel by horse. But that’s how Severin’s father was: impulsive and brave, especially when beer was involved; never aggressive but soft and tender, reasonable, magnanimous, generous, compassionate, and practical—and above all, spontaneous when it came to people who made good offers.

The moment
he’d
met the wholesaler and seen the four beautiful gray horses,
he’d
thought only of Britt,
who’d
always dreamed of her Swedish home, telling him of the little foals on the field—foals that Hasse would have ridden if he hadn’t stopped on the road, hesitating with a jar of beets in his shopping bag. With a lump in his throat—made worse by the beer—he remembered how
she’d
bought a poster of Pippi Longstocking sitting on a horse’s back and hung it over little Hasse’s bed, crying as she did so. This had been a year after his death.

“But where are we going to put it?” Britt asked anxiously through the kitchen window. She stood in a floral dress with short sleeves, and her long, curly hair fluttered in the breeze like a Hollywood film star’s.

“In the basement,” Severin’s father whispered at the window, though loud enough that everyone heard. “At night, it’ll stay in our storage space. There’s plenty of room, and we’ll put down grass and peat and warm blankets. Don’t you think I’ve thought it through?”

Britt considered this for a moment and then nodded at her husband. “You have to promise to walk it in the wetlands everyday—otherwise it’ll perish from claustrophobia.”

Erling smiled. The Swedish lilt in her voice made it clear that the echo from the deep woods had done its job.

Instinctively, Orla gazed up at the walls in Severin’s dorm room—but there was nothing resembling a horse head or a hood or a tuft of a mane, so perhaps the animal had survived its strange encounter with the generous family. But, of course, complaints started to pour in, and the janitor, Mr. Johansen, showed up with his half-grown son Kjeld by his side, reciting the many anonymous tips from upset neighbors: complaints about horse droppings and the smell in the basement, stories of children frightened when the nag loped around the playground, and finally, a reminder that it was generally not allowed to keep a horse in an apartment building. This was a few weeks before Kjeld’s final ride, which brought the police into it, convincing Erling that
he’d
lost the battle. After quite a few beers, he persuaded the wholesaler to trade back. A truck for the horse.

Orla sat baffled, listening to the thin boy with the big head. He had a hard time connecting his good manners with the absurd acts of his adoptive father.

“But we aren’t really related, you know.” Severin read his mind again. “Strictly speaking, we were born into very different families and were just brought together
…
by Hasse.”

Orla struggled to comprehend that something so interesting and peculiar had happened on the other side of the hawthorn—in the world
he’d
only ever known when a scream rose into the red sky at night, the result of his rock finding its target.

“I have a scar right here—where you hit me,” Severin said, putting a slender index finger on a small depression above his left eye.

Then he lifted his glass and studied his reflection in it. “Come to think of it, it’s strange that they wanted me. With this grimace I was born with.”

“Grimace?”

“Yes. I’ve never been able to smile, really.” Severin took a drink of his wine and looked at Orla. “Look for yourself.” He smiled sadly. “You see?”

“See what?”

“That my face is made this way. That I can’t actually smile.”

Orla sat quietly as the God of Friendship and Camaraderie suddenly put a cold finger between the boy’s shoulder blades, causing him to tilt his torso forward and stiffen into a nearly impossible position.

“It doesn’t matter now. I smile when I want to, even if nobody can tell.” He smiled and looked directly into Orla’s eyes. Then he lowered his voice. “I had no idea they weren’t my real parents for the first six years of my life. When I learned the truth, I was sitting on a small stool in the hallway outside my parents’ kitchen, and my mother was putting Carmen curlers in her hair. Suddenly she said, ‘By the way, we’re not your real parents, Severin. They disappeared right after you were born and then we became your parents.’ I remember thinking that
she’d
done a good job of it”—he looked at himself again in his glass—“in just a few clearly worded sentences.”

Orla felt the anger rise up in him again.

“I asked a few questions about minor details,” Severin continued, “but I didn’t really take it that hard. When my dad got home, I ran to him shouting, ‘You aren’t even my real dad!’ And I’ll never forget that because he started crying and said, ‘Yes, Severin, I am your father.’ But then I said, ‘Mom told me I have another father.’ And then he cried even more.”

After drinking most of the bottle of red wine, Severin’s eyes shone. “They lost their real child, and then they got me. They’d had a son, but I was a stranger. It was terribly confusing. My dad put me on his lap and said, ‘No, I am not your biological father, but I am still your father, and I love you more than anything in the world. I want you to know that you’ll never want for anything.’ But already that first night I wondered what my real parents looked like—something had changed, but I wasn’t sure what. In reality
…
” Severin sniffled and then paused. Reality would have to wait.

Orla studied him through squinting eyes.

Severin took another gulp of wine.

Again, Orla felt flushed with an anger that he knew would destroy their friendship. “They didn’t look like you
…
Britt and Erling?”

“Not at all.”

“Neither physically nor psychologically?”

“No. They’re tall and big boned. And I’m like this.”

Orla thought of his father, whom he couldn’t really think about because, like Severin’s smile, he existed only in an invisible world.

“Our names are ugly, don’t you think? Severin and Orla. They always teased me at the Kennedy public school in Høje Gladsaxe. ‘Severin, Severin, you smell like gasoline,’ all the boys shouted.” He laughed, drooling a little.

Orla nodded. He knew only too well the bullies in Denmark’s first concrete ghetto that, curiously enough, had been named after the assassinated American president.

Severin continued, “It was all in Hasse’s spirit—finding an orphaned child. They wanted to honor his memory with a good deed.” A single red drop resembling blood sat in the corner of his mouth. “I went to a salon with my mother, I remember, and the hairdresser said, ‘You have your mother’s hair, little buddy.’ My mother’s fingers grew ice cold, and she said, ‘That is not the case.’ ”

Severin tried to force his red lips into a smile. “The entire family went along with the charade—all of it—for the sake of Hasse’s memory.” He stood and walked around the table unsteadily, toward Mille, whose skin hung at eye level. He raised his hand and touched the pelt’s small gray nails with his thumb and index fingers. “They only got me
…
”—he cupped his hand around a paw, and the nails stuck out between his fingers—“
…
they only got me to keep the memory of my damn brother alive. Forever. It’s a paradox, isn’t it? Like in a courtroom? You have to speak the truth, yet you turn your back on the audience. We’re completely insensitive, aren’t we? That’s our curse. It’s not because we’re adopted, but because we were there—at Kongslund.”