From down below, Felix Glück saw Frau Maenhout finally picking up the boy in her arms. She made an attempt to put the hat back on his head, but he slapped her hand away, yelling, ‘No, no, I’m not a musketeer any more!’ With his other hand, he pulled the mask off his face.
As if they’d been given a sign, his brothers both decided to follow his example. With a swift flourish they tipped the hats from their heads and ripped off their masks.
The mechanic caught himself staring, open-mouthed.
‘They had the bodies of toddlers, but the faces of old men,’ he later told his clients in the garage. ‘They were sick. Very sick. That was as clear as day.’
When Frau Maenhout reached the bottom, Glück tried to see if the boy in her arms looked the same as the other two, but he kept his face buried in the woman’s ample bosom.
‘Look what I’ve found!’ came the watchman’s voice. He was standing at the gate, red-faced, waving a sword that was broken in two pieces. He laid the fragments of wood across each other and said, smiling, ‘A couple of nails and some wood glue will soon fix that! Then you can play with it again!’
But the boys acted as if they hadn’t heard him.
Reisiger shrugged his shoulders, tucked the smashed sword under his arm and locked the gate. ‘Shall I take you back to the doctor’s house, Frau Maenhout?’ he asked.
She had been staring blankly into the distance, and it took her a while to turn her gaze towards him. She shook her head. ‘No, no, it’s not necessary, really.’
‘But I insist, Frau Maenhout,’ the watchman pressed her. ‘The doctor would never forgive me if I left you here. And the boys would probably much rather go home by car than on foot - am I right?’
Again there was no response. Felix Glück stared at the boys. Little Martians, he thought - they look just like little Martians, only they aren’t green. He heard the woman take some deep breaths. Then she assented.
Reisiger nodded. ‘That’s a wise decision, Frau Maenhout.’ He walked to his car, opened the hatch and dropped the broken sword into the boot.
Meanwhile Glück the mechanic had gone to open the rear door. ‘Please, why don’t you take a seat in the back with the children, madam? That would be best, I think.’
She stepped past him and looked him briefly in the eye. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thanks very much.’
Her eyes were soft. Suddenly she seemed much nicer than before.
The woman scooted into the back seat with the boys, and the watchman got in too. The car listed a bit to the side he was on.
‘Herr Glück, thanks and see you around!’ he cried, sticking his hand out the window.
‘See you around!’ said Glück, but his voice was lost in the car’s deafening roar.
Five minutes later a group of people on the pavement in front of the Café Terminus watched as the car drove into the village.
‘There’s my husband,’ exclaimed Frau Reisiger, waving at him.
From a distance he stuck his arm out the window and gave the thumbs-up.
‘My God, all’s well then,’ she said, relieved.
The car rolled slowly past the onlookers. Otto Reisiger gestured that he would drop his passengers off at the doctor’s house. But the villagers only had eyes for whoever was in the backseat.
Someone said, ‘I told you so,’ and that set the tone as the rest of the chorus joined in.
11
She had made a complete hash of it. That was the conclusion Frau Maenhout reached in Otto Reisiger’s car. Not only had she got herself into a fine pickle, she had also disappointed the boys terribly. They didn’t say a word, not even once they were home again. They were shattered, and she immediately put them to bed. Then she sat down at the kitchen table, and gave in to the emotions she had kept bottled up all this time. She could barely think straight. The one thing racing through her head was the question: how she could have been so stupid?
It was an hour before she was able to calm herself down, and the first thing she then asked herself was what to do next. She had boxed herself into a corner. How could she possibly accuse Dr Hoppe of neglect or abuse when she had shown such a lack of responsibility? The doctor would seize the opportunity to heap all the blame on her. It was more urgent than ever, therefore, to find some evidence that would prove the doctor’s malevolent intent. Only then would she be able to take the next step.
So she began to search for evidence. She might have all day to do so, but then again, she might not. She had no idea where to look or what, exactly, she was looking for.
She began in the office. She had expected everything to be under lock and key, but that wasn’t the case. When she opened one of the drawers, the patient files fanned out like an accordion. She limited herself to flipping through the Hs, however - she didn’t want to be accused of anything more was than strictly necessary. If her search didn’t turn up anything in the end, she would go through the rest of the files. Alas, the letter ‘H’ did not give her anything to go on.
In the other drawers she found nothing but medical implements - scissors, needles, bandages, cotton wool, rubber gloves. Gloves! It suddenly occurred to her that she had been leaving her fingerprints all over the place. It made her feel even more like an intruder. But she was doing it for a reason! - a triple reason, asleep upstairs. That gave her the courage to pursue her search. And that was how she came to discover something after all.
There was a pile of photo albums in one of the cabinets. Maybe she would find photos that would shed some light on the doctor’s past? Photographs of the doctor as a child or teenager, photos of his mother, or his father, who had also been a GP; perhaps even a picture of his wife, the mother of Michael, Gabriel and Raphael! Who was she? What was she like? Charlotte had often wondered about her, especially since the boys were bound to start asking about her some day. Yet she knew very little. In all the years that she had been working there the doctor had only mentioned her once. Charlotte had questioned the doctor and he had replied that he knew very little about the boys’ mother. That was all, but it had made Frau Maenhout wonder, naturally. Perhaps, she had thought to herself, perhaps Michael, Gabriel and Raphael’s mother wasn’t dead. Perhaps she and the doctor had never been married; perhaps the boys were the product of some sort of fling. At the time she had discussed the possibility with Hannah Kuijk, who had gone one further. ‘Or a rape!’ Hannah had suggested. Some hanky-panky between the doctor and one of his patients, perhaps. That would also explain, Hannah said, why he had been willing to trade a city like Bonn for a village like Wolfheim. The woman had lodged a complaint against him; his name had been dragged through the mud. And she’d probably not wanted to keep the babies, because they were so - ‘Forgive me for saying it,’ Hannah had said - ugly. So to the doctor the boys were a reminder of his disgrace, and that was the reason why he could not love them the way a father should.
Frau Maenhout couldn’t help remembering that conversation as she stood at the consultation-room cabinet leafing through the photo albums, quite unprepared for what she was looking at. She had truly imagined something different.
It took her a while to understand. She had taken down the first album. It was marked ‘V1’ in the upper right-hand corner. She had no idea what that might mean. It was full of Polaroid pictures, probably taken by the doctor himself. Underneath each photo, in the white margin, was a caption written in felt-tip pen - another ‘V1’, followed by the date and the year; in this case 1984. The photos themselves were peculiar: just a hand, a leg, a foot, an ear or a navel. Opening the book at random, she saw that it was like that throughout. Then she went back to the beginning. The first page.
She recognised the baby immediately. In the first photo he was lying on his back, naked, on a bed or sofa, she couldn’t tell which. She didn’t know which of the three it was, there was no name, but there was a date: ‘29/09/1984’. The children’s birthday. What struck her next was the cleft palate. Not the scar, because that didn’t exist yet. This was something else
. A wound. A gaping hole.
That it was definitely a gaping hole was confirmed on the next page. It gave her quite a turn. The doctor had photographed the cleft palate the same way that he had photographed the hands and feet and other body parts - close up.
She gasped, and snapped the album shut, but the picture stayed branded in her mind.
Then she took out the next album. ‘V2’ she read on the cover. Opening it at random, she realised at once that all the pictures were identical to the ones in the first album. Yet still she proceeded to take the third album down from the shelf, if only to find what she had expected on the cover: ‘V3’. And that album, too, was the same: hands, feet, legs. But also the torso, the back of the head, the shoulders, the eyes . . . everything.
Everything.
She had to sit down on a chair by the desk. She felt dizzy.
A little later she started counting the albums from where she was sitting. She counted twelve. A simple sum. One album a year for each child.
It wasn’t enough. What did it prove? Nothing. She came to that conclusion over the course of the morning. After her discovery she stopped searching and went up to the boys’ bedroom. They were still asleep. She didn’t stay upstairs long, as she couldn’t think in their presence. Gazing at them, she kept seeing those pictures flash before her eyes.
Downstairs she walked towards the phone to call Hannah. But she kept procrastinating. She felt she had to make sense of it herself, first. But in the end she did dial the number.
No one picked up.
She made herself a cup of soup to force herself to think of something else. She did the washing-up. The ironing. Every so often she felt as if she couldn’t breathe. What could she do? What should she do? She was distraught.
In the end she returned to the office. There had to be more. This time her gaze was immediately drawn to the door leading to the laboratory. That was where he always kept his children in isolation when they were sick. That door wasn’t locked either, which was a bit of a let-down, because it meant there was less chance he was keeping something hidden in there.
She had not been in the laboratory very often. He cleaned this room himself, and the few times she had been inside she had seen that he did an extremely thorough job. No dust, no mess, no clutter.
It struck her again how clean the room was. No dust, no mess, no clutter. Yet it was different this time. All the glasses, all the jars, all the dishes - every piece of equipment, including the microscopes and monitors - looked pristine, as if they’d never been used. Each time she had peeked in here before, there had always been something bubbling or steaming somewhere; the tables or cabinets had held all kinds of Petri dishes or liquid-filled test tubes. But not this time. It was as if the room had recently been refurbished and was awaiting a new occupant. That was her first impression. But soon she arrived at a different conclusion: he’s covering up his tracks. He’s cleared everything away, thrown it out, destroyed the evidence.
She was too late. That, sadly, was the conclusion she had to draw.
She decided to look through the patient records once more, but first she returned to the cabinet with the photo albums. Overcoming her repugnance, she began leafing through all twelve albums, beginning to end, though in a cursory way. And even though she knew what she would see there, she kept having to swallow. She had hoped she might find a photo or a note stuck between the pages, something that would help her, but there was nothing. As she turned the last page, she had the sense that she was also closing the final chapter in the boys’ lives.
At that point she gave up. She didn’t have the strength or the courage to probe any further. She wanted to spend the time that remained with Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. Once the doctor was home again, she’d see what would happen. She’d just wait and see.
As she was returning the last album to the cabinet, her gaze landed on a pile of magazines lying on another shelf. They were all English-language journals with titles such as Nature, Cell, Differentiation. She picked up a few and flapped them around to see if anything fell out. But this final effort - she knew it was hopeless - also produced nothing. Until she started putting the magazines back on the shelf. As she was doing so, the portrait of a man caught her eye. It was on the cover of one of the issues of Differentiation. She recognised him immediately, from the red hair and the moustache camouflaging his scar. He didn’t have a beard yet. Under the photo was a caption and one word immediately caught her attention: ‘experimental’. She looked up the article. He had written it himself. It said ‘Dr Victor Hoppe’ above the title: ‘Experimental Genetics of the Mammalian Embryo’.
‘Mammalian,’ she said out loud; it made her think of the French word mammalien. From a mammal, then. ‘Genetic experiments with mammalian embryos’. She shuddered involuntarily and glanced at the date on the cover. The issue was dated March 1982.
With growing astonishment she began to look through the other journals. Each had some mention of the doctor’s name, and sometimes his photo. It was always the same photo: a simple passport picture. Some of the articles were written by the doctor himself, but most, it turned out, were about him. He was described as a ‘famous embryologist’ at the University of Aachen, where he had apparently done some remarkable experiments in the early eighties. The authors were all in awe of the doctor; many of them even applauded him. But then, suddenly, the tone of the articles began to change, as evidenced by the words that were used: ‘investigation’, ‘falsification’, ‘fraud’, ‘chaos’. Those words shocked her. Especially the last two.
Finally, in the magazine at the very bottom of the pile, an issue of Nature, she found one last article about him. It was short, but the title alone spoke volumes: ‘University of Aachen: Victor Hoppe resigns’.
She felt another shudder running up her spine, and when she looked at the date of the journal, she gasped: 3 July 1984. Three months before the doctor had returned to Wolfheim.
On an impulse, she tore out the article.
Fraud and chaos. Chaos and fraud. She repeated the words to herself because she was trying to make some sense of them. The word ‘fraud’, in particular, set her thinking; indeed, it even gave her comfort. After all, it meant that the doctor had already deceived people in some fashion or other; that he had convinced people of things that were untrue. That was something she could use.
Suddenly some other words came back to her. How had he put it again? It was when she’d brought up the subject of the incision on Gabriel’s back. She had said, ‘I don’t believe you,’ or, ‘I don’t believe you any more.’
Have you, too, lost faith in me?
You, too. So she wasn’t the only one.
She had a lead. That was all it was. But it was more than she had expected. She could look into this further. She would get someone to translate the article for her, contact the University of Aachen. But she wouldn’t rush it. She mustn’t make any mistakes. That night, when she got home, she would make a start. And then she’d have all of Sunday. She wouldn’t have to defend her actions until Monday morning, when, she supposed, the first patients would inform the doctor about what had happened at the three borders. But by that time she hoped to have made some headway. And even if she hadn’t, there was still time. All in all, she no longer cared if the doctor fired her.
Dr Hoppe came home that Saturday at half past five. Frau Maenhout was in the classroom with Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. After the boys had woken up at around two o’clock and had had something to eat, she’d taken them upstairs, but there hadn’t been a lesson. The boys were distracted, and she too had been unable to concentrate. She had read to them, however. The story she picked from the children’s Bible was that of David and Goliath. About how a simple shepherd slew a giant.
‘If you aren’t big and strong, you have to be cunning,’ she told them when she came to the end of the story. Then she told them to make a drawing of it.
‘Just how big was the giant exactly?’ Gabriel wanted to know.
�
�Three metres tall. Even taller than this.’ She stretched her arm up in the air, as high as she could reach.
‘He won’t fit on my page.’
‘You have to draw it to scale. You have to make everything smaller than it is in the real world.’
That was a difficult concept for them to understand. They didn’t know how to turn something that was life-sized and real in their heads into something reduced and two-dimensional. For some reason she couldn’t make them see it; they could only envisage what was real.
She drew a picture of David and next to him a giant four times his size.
‘But that isn’t a giant. He’s much too small!’ Gabriel yelled.
‘All right, but just go ahead and copy it.’
She realised that she was a bit short on patience that afternoon. She was nervous, of course. She kept glancing at her watch. She bit her nails. She opened the window a crack and held her breath every time a car drove past.
At around five o’clock she couldn’t keep it inside her any longer. She made the triplets pay attention, and started asking them questions. She wanted to prepare them. She didn’t say, ‘In case someone asks you . . .’ She simply posed the question: ‘What do you think of your father?’
‘He’s bad.’
‘Why?’
‘He does bad things.’
‘What kind of things?’
‘With needles. He sticks needles into us. Long needles . . .’
‘Is that all?’
After thinking it over for a while, they couldn’t come up with anything else. Which made her realise that there had been nothing else. Of whatever she thought the doctor guilty, very little could be proven. What it boiled down to in the end was that he had acted irresponsibly towards his children. Inhumanely, even. But he had never blown up at them. He had never hit them. All that he had done, in fact, was subject them to medical examinations, even if excessively so. He had kept them indoors. But was that a crime?
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