Danish Folk Tale

One chilly, damp morning in Copenhagen in 1912, a tall, slender woman named Agnes Johansen met her best friend, Amalie Sorensen, for lunch at their favorite café.
+++++Agnes had strolled from the apartment in sturdy shoes, a midnight-blue dress, and her faded black wool cape, greeting neighbors and shopkeepers. She pushed a pram carrying her son, Peter Emil, who was six months old. The child was buried under layers of warm flannel, with only his pink nose protruding like a button.
+++++Arriving at the café’s big wooden door at the same moment, Agnes and Amalie shared effusive hugs, even though they had visited each other just three days prior. They parked their strollers in front of the café, alongside a row of slumbering babies lined up  in their prams like little multicolored buses. Peter was nestled in his blankets, eyes closed, snoring gently, oblivious to the bustling surroundings. Amalie’s baby, eight-month old Jorgen, was asleep, too, a soft lock of golden hair tickling his smooth forehead.
+++++Agnes and Amalie enjoyed a delicious lunch of herring, roasted vegetables, fresh bread, and strong coffee, with sweet pastries for dessert. Throughout the meal, they gossiped about friends and wondered out loud why the handsome new pastor had come from Odense without a wife.
+++++During their meal the sun had peeked through the clouds, and so the women decided to walk to Tivoli. They exited the café and retrieved their lethargic babies from the queue of buggies. Peter began to fuss, while Jorgen sat up and looked around with bright blue eyes. Both boys soon quieted, lulled by the motion of the prams, as their mothers turned toward the gardens.
+++++It was suddenly a beautiful fall day, with a hint of saltwater moistening the crisp air billowing along the streets. Agnes could almost taste the sea on her tongue. It reminded her of the holiday she and Christen had taken before she was pregnant with Peter. Her husband had kissed her in public then, right on the beach, and she was embarrassed and delighted.
+++++“Oh, look!” exclaimed Amalie, pointing to a shop across the street.
+++++Agnes stopped. The window was full of colorful baby clothes, as gleefully welcoming as a candy shop.
+++++“How sweet!” she remarked. “Let’s go look.”
+++++Amalie replied, “Oh yes, let’s!”
+++++Agnes and Amalie crossed the street and parked their buggies outside the shop, next to a cluster of similarly occupied vehicles. Peter and Jorgen made silly faces at the other children as their mothers entered the store.
+++++The women browsed for several minutes, fondling the soft woven fabrics and silver buttons on the tiny little suits and jumpers. Neither had enough money to buy anything, but it was very fun to look. They emerged empty-handed, collected their offspring, and again set off toward the gardens. Jorgen was wide-awake, while Peter had burrowed under the blanket and appeared to be asleep.
+++++A few moments later, Amalie shrieked. “Agnes! Where is Peter?”
+++++Agnes noticed that her baby’s flannel blankets had blown to the edge of the carriage. She screamed when she saw what was inside.
+++++There, huddled in the buggy where her son’s little body should have been, was a complete stranger. This unwanted guest was not her dark-haired, pink-nosed angel, but rather a bald, chubby boy with an angry, red face.
+++++Agnes fainted, Jorgen began to bawl, and Amalie yelled frantically for help. Perhaps this was a different pram, she wondered hopefully? But no, this was Agnes’ dark green carriage, and the child inside was definitely not her friend’s son.
+++++The police arrived almost immediately and a three-month investigation ensued. Agnes and Amalie were briefly suspects, but many people had seen them in the clothing store. And Agnes was so clearly, heart-wrenchingly stricken with grief, nobody believed she had traded her baby for the unsavory little creature left in her pram.
+++++The police ultimately determined it had been a random kidnapping, a child in exchange for a child. Peter was surely gone for good, replaced with this much less desirable boy. And somewhere there hid a guilty mother. Everyone hoped she was sane and would love Peter as her own. Nobody wanted to believe the person who had taken Peter Emil would harm him.
+++++Poor Agnes. She was so different after losing her child. She became sad, dreary, and humorless, a fragile shadow of the lively, strong woman who had set out for the café that fateful morning to meet her best friend. And poor Christen, too, he grieved hard for his lost son and soon found himself married to a woman he loved deeply but no longer recognized.
+++++But Agnes and Christen, fiercely Lutheran and family-oriented, raised the tomato-faced imposter as their own child, for what choice did they have? The boy did not have a mother, certainly not one who wanted him, and Agnes no longer had a son. And they were kind people who felt the boy should not be committed to an orphanage.
+++++Agnes and Christen renamed the child Soren, after Agnes’ friend Amalie. And they tried to love him, they surely did. They even took him to America to start a fresh life in a city in Wisconsin on a huge lake that grew icy cold in the winter. There, they had three more children—Anders, Greta, and Carl—but none could replace their lost son Peter. Their children knew they were loved, of course, because they were well taken care of. But all four Johansen children, especially Soren, felt their parents were distant and cold, a bit too old country.
+++++For all of her life, Agnes mourned the loss of her flesh and blood baby, her grief a persistent, crippling ache in her bones and organs. Not even her beautiful grandchildren, three of whom became doctors, could heal her damaged heart.
+++++Agnes Johansen died in 1983 at Lutheran Hospital, three years after Christen’s painful death from pancreatic cancer. Her final words, uttered on a quiet, ragged exhalation, were “my boy.”
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Monica J. Casper reads, writes, and teaches for a living. Director of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies at ASU’s New College, she has written numerous books and articles on gender, health, bodies, and reproductive politics. She is currently researching the biopolitics of infant mortality and maternal-child health and also co-edits the NYU Press book series Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century. A prolific writer, Casper’s essays have appeared in such diverse outlets as Trivia, Florida Review, The Feminist Wire, Canyon Voices, American Sexuality Magazine, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Conscience. She lives in Phoenix with her partner and daughters. For more information, see www.monicajcasper.com.