The Hidden Child

Chapter 53

Elsy picked up the drawing that Erica had made and carefully placed it inside the chest. Tore had taken the girls out in the boat, and she had the house to herself for a few hours. On occasions like this, she often came up to the attic to sit for a while and think about the way things once were.

Her life had turned out so differently than she had imagined. She took out the blue diaries and absently stroked the cover of the one on top. How young she had been. How naïve. How much pain she might have spared herself if she had known back then what she knew now. That a person could not afford to love too much. The price was always too high, and that was why she was still paying for the one time, so long ago, when she had loved too much. But she had kept her promise to herself never to love like that again.

Of course she had sometimes felt tempted to give in, to let something into her heart. Especially when she looked at her two daughters, their faces turned towards her with such longing in their eyes. She saw in them a hunger for something that was expected of her, but she was incapable of giving it to them. Particularly Erica. She needed it more than Anna. Sometimes Elsy would notice Erica just sitting and looking at her with an expression that displayed all the unrequited longing that could possibly be found in a little girl’s face. And part of Elsy wanted to break her promise and go over to put her arms around her daughter, to feel her own heart beating in time with Erica’s. But something always stopped her. At the last moment, before she could get up, before she could hug her daughter, she always had a sensation of his tiny, warm body in her arms. His brand-new eyes looking up at her, so like Hans, so like herself. A love child that she thought they would raise together. Instead, she had given birth to him alone, in a room filled with strangers. She had felt him slide out of her body and then out of her arms when he was carried away to another mother – someone about whom she knew nothing.

Elsy put her hand inside the chest and took out the baby’s shirt. The stains of her blood had faded over the years and now looked more like rust. She held the shirt up to her nose, sniffing at it to see if it still held any trace of that sweet, warm scent that he’d had when she held him in her arms. But there was nothing. The shirt had only a stuffy, musty odour. All those years in the chest had wiped away any scent of the boy, and she could no longer smell it.

Sometimes she had thought about trying to track him down. Maybe just to make sure that he was all right. But the idea had never gone any further. It was the same with the idea that she might throw her arms around her daughters, and in that way free herself from the promise that kept her heart closed.

She picked up the medal which lay at the bottom of the chest and weighed it in her hand. She had found it when she searched Hans’s room, before she left to give birth to his child. That was when she still had hope that she might find among his possessions some explanation for why he had deserted her and the child. But the only thing she found, aside from a few items of clothing, was the medal. She didn’t know what it meant, didn’t know where he had found it or what role it had played in his life. But she sensed that it was important, and so she had kept it. Carefully she wrapped the medal in the baby’s shirt and put the small parcel back in the chest. Then she put in the diaries and the drawing that Erica had made for her in the morning. Because this was the only thing Elsy was capable of giving to her girls. A moment of love when she was alone with her memories. That was the only time she could allow herself to think of them not only with her mind but with her heart. As soon as they looked at her with their hungry eyes, her heart would close up in fear.

Because people who refused to love had nothing to lose.