Farewell to Freedom (38 page)

She quietly walked over and sat down next to him. She started out not saying anything, just sitting in the silent church listening to his breathing, as he tried to get himself under control. She knew he could tell she was there, but he hadn't looked up.

Five, maybe ten minutes passed before he wiped his face and straightened up. He didn't turn to face her, but looked like he was about to say something, and she hurriedly beat him to it.

“I really owe you an apology,” she began and was met by his confused stare, as he turned to her.

She heard him swallow and she cringed a little when she saw that his face was filled with despair and something she interpreted as fear, but which could also have been anger.

“What on earth for?” he asked hoarsely and cleared his throat, trying to ward off whatever crying was left in his body.

She said that she'd called Elsa Lynge and explained how she'd doubted him when she couldn't get things to add up. Without looking at him, she admitted that she'd passed the information on to Louise and asked her to check whether he and his wife had brought Jonas home with them when they came back from Bosnia.

She looked down at the wide grooves between the stones in the church floor.

“Please forgive me for being so nosy. I was confused and thought you were keeping something to yourself, something that might give the rest of us some kind of explanation for what happened here,” she said, nodding in the direction of where she'd found the stillborn baby. “But obviously you weren't, it was just me.…”

When she tried to recall the sound later, she had a hard time saying whether it was a dull laugh or a dry sob that spontaneously emerged from Henrik's chest. But the expression in his eyes was unmistakable as he slowly turned and looked her in the eye.

Camilla collapsed onto the pew when she realized she was sitting next to a man who'd lost everything.

He reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze, and she saw that he was trying to pull it together so that he would be able to say something.

“You're certainly entitled to try to find out what happened,” he began. “I would never hold that against you, especially not since you and Markus were so involved, and I'm so sorry that I've only just now really put together how the events all fit together.”

He pulled his hand back and rubbed his forehead hard, as if he were trying to gather up his strength to keep going. Then he took a deep breath and leaned back in the pew. Camilla could almost see his thoughts slipping back through time.

“Alice and I started dating when we were eighteen. We were married two years later, and we started trying to have a baby from day one. I had just started my theology program and she was going to nursing school. We dreamed of having a big family and a parsonage in Jutland.”

The little laugh Henrik emitted now was unmistakable, but it was for the memories and seemed far removed from the present moment.

“Five years later we were still dreaming. There was no sign of any kind of expansion to our family, and we started to concede that the doctors were right when they blamed it on the blood disease Alice had been treated for since she was very little. So we decided we would adopt our children instead and went to visit an adoption agency. We started the process of getting pre-approved as potential adoptive parents. But we didn't even make it through the first phase because of Alice's disease, and that was even though her doctor at National Hospital wrote to the agency that it was extremely likely she would live with the disease until she died of old age. But back then, people didn't take any chances. Since then, they've eased up on the requirements some. Nowadays single people can be approved, so maybe they would also accept that a father could handle a child on his own in the unfortunate event that his wife up and died on him.”

He cleared his throat and took another deep breath, while Camilla sat very still so as not to interrupt.

“For a while, right after they rejected us, Alice really took it hard. It was the first time her illness had significantly impacted her life. Up to that point it really hadn't limited what she could do, it had only lurked in the wings like a dark shadow she was forced to live with. Now it was preventing her from becoming a mother, and for a long time we were really depressed about it—Alice most of all. But one night after dinner, she asked if I wanted to see if we could get permission to work in a refugee camp. She had made up her mind that she really wanted to go and do something to help people who had lost everything. That was right after the Dayton Agreement was signed in Paris, the peace agreement that was supposed to put an end to the war. But far from that, it went on day after day.”

He stopped for a moment and looked at Camilla, as though he was looking right through her. Then he slumped a little and sighed heavily.

“Obviously it was escapist of us, a way of getting away from the life we'd fantasized about but would never have. But I guess we were also hoping that by going someplace where people had suffered real loss, it would help us see that the loss we were suffering really wasn't so bad in comparison.”

Camilla nodded, shifting slightly on the hard bench, and feeling like she understood.

“As I told you before, it was a wonderful and at the same time a painful time. Never have I seen people in such torment, and never have I seen people fight so hard for their right to live, even though everything around should have broken them down. Obviously there were many people who couldn't handle it, and some of them went over to the darkest sides of the human mind, where evil takes over and overshadows everything else.”

“A year—almost a year and a half,” he corrected himself, doing the math quickly, “went by with the camp as our world, and we no longer dreamed of the life we had hoped to have. We lived in the barracks with the youngest of the children, the ones whose parents had been killed in the war or who had been forced to abandon them for other reasons. So our desire to be around little kids was fulfilled. Every once in a while, a stranger would come and knock on our door with a baby in their arms who had been left alone in one of the surrounding villages. When they brought us little ones like that, it was always done in the cover of darkness, and it was never something anyone discussed. We took them in without asking too many questions. Srebrenica was predominantly a Muslim area, but the villages around it were mixed, and no one wanted to have anything to do with a Muslim baby in a Serbian area. A baby like that had no chance of survival if it wasn't brought to us.”

“But how could anyone tell the baby was Muslim?” Camilla couldn't help but ask.

For a second the pastor seemed to snap out of it, but he flew back in time again before he answered.

“The same man came to us many times with toddlers or infants who he'd saved from Serbian areas, and eventually we got to know him and he became our friend. Bosko was a Serb; he moved around in the villages and told us about the Muslim families who had been victims of the ethnic cleansing his fellow countrymen had been subjected to. After the peace agreement, many of the Muslim families came back to reclaim their houses and possessions. But they didn't get anything back. Instead they were gunned down and left lying in the streets.”

Henrik sighed, and Camilla saw that he had to pull himself together before he could continue.

“One night he brought a bottle of slivovitz plum brandy with him, and I guess all three of us had had a little too much by the time we started talking about the little kids who were sleeping in the big room next to ours. Some were just infants, others toddlers, but none of the ones living in our barracks were older than three.

“We told him why we were working in the camp, about Alice's disease, and about our dream of becoming parents and how the adoption agency had rejected us. At some point in the conversation, he leaned in over the table a little and asked if we hadn't considered taking one or more of the children—who didn't have any future in Bosnia anyway—back to Denmark with us and giving them a proper life far from the aftermath of the war.

“You could give them a life of love and security and a good education
, he said, and reminded us that there was nothing for them where they were now. No one wanted them, and they were going to grow up and live their lives in an orphanage if they ever made it out of the camp.

“That's not a real life. If you really want to help these children, then help make sure they get out of here and help them find a good home with parents like you, who dream of having a child but aren't able to themselves
. That's how he said it.

“And at that point it sounded totally right. We saw the little children every day. We sat with them, fed them, and comforted them, but everyone knew that one day they would be on their own. It was unbearable, and the only way you could deal with that was to try not to think about it. Luckily it also happened fairly regularly that a mother or father would come to the camp looking for their child, and sometimes they found each other. But the very littlest ones … no one ever came looking for them. They were there because their parents were no longer alive.”

He swallowed once before continuing.

“The next night, he brought Jonas. We guessed he must be about a year old, based on the number of teeth he had, but he was small for his age, and he was totally silent. He just lay there in a big blanket and watched us with his brown eyes. And he had a big bandage around his right foot.”

“Bosko told us that he was the son of a young married couple from outside of Srebrenica, who had found their home burned to the ground with everything they owned inside it. All they had left was the garage, and when the man went to pull the car out, they were attacked and shot at close range. The mother was holding Jonas in her arms when she was shot, and the bullet had sliced his pinky toe right off.”

Henrik emitted a grunt, which was a mixture of laughter and a statement of fact, before he proceeded.

“I knew it was already too late when he set the boy in Alice's lap. Still, I tried to explain that we couldn't just take the child home to Denmark with us illegally. At that point, my wife was ready to stay in Bosnia if it meant she could keep him.”

Henrik ruffled his hair so it was sticking up in the air, while he tried to report the agreement they entered into that night, the first time they met their son.

“Back then, you could pay to get any kind of paperwork or document made. We never heard about that side of things here in Denmark. There was a big problem with driver's licenses being issued to people from the former Yugoslavia even though they'd never had even one hour's driving lessons. When they came to Denmark, they would just send a picture and some number of German Deutschmarks home to a contact person, and one month later they received their Yugoslavian driver's license with whatever issue date they wanted, and they could just walk in to the department of motor vehicles and swap it for a Danish one. Easy-peasy. The same for birth certificates. We paid Bosko ten thousand marks to get a certificate that said Alice gave birth to Jonas on June fourteenth the previous year at a hospital in Sarajevo.”

The tears overwhelmed him before he managed to choke them back, and he sat for a moment with his eyes closed until he was in control of them again. Then he slowly shook his head.

“It's not so much that we paid and broke the rules. I could certainly live with that. The only thing in the world we wanted was to have the little baby, and the alternatives for him weren't even worth thinking about. But I can't forgive myself for not realizing that it wouldn't end there. I was so naïve in my joy at our wish for a child finally becoming a reality. And I believed Bosko was helping us for the sake of the child. I try to justify that with the fact that we were just so over-the-moon with our own happiness that when we made the agreement with him, we also agreed that we would help other orphaned children find new homes in Denmark with infertile couples.”

He took deep breaths.

“A couple of months earlier, I had received a message that I could start my post as pastor of Stenhøj Church in September of that same year. By that point, I had almost forgotten that I'd applied for it, but that fit just fine with the agreement we made with Bosko. There was no exchange of money, aside from what we paid him for the forged birth certificate, and I suppose that was also one of the reasons we still believed that he was doing it for humanitarian reasons, that he wanted to help the children have better lives. If we'd known he was planning to do it to make money—a lot of money—we wouldn't have agreed to it.

“According to the agreement, we were not supposed to be involved in bringing the children illegally into Denmark or finding families who wanted them. Our only obligation was to be a way station, when they arrived in the country, and it always transpired like that. They would be left in the church early in the morning. We didn't know who brought them, and didn't want to know either. Later that same day, the new family would come pick up the baby. They handled the paperwork themselves; we weren't involved with that. It seemed so innocent to see the same joy in other childless couples that we had experienced ourselves.