She gave a deep sigh and tried to compose her thoughts. Fraud and chaos. That was what she should be concentrating on.
When, at 5.30, the taxi stopped in front of the house, she walked over to the window, her heart beating loudly in her chest. The doctor got out and instinctively she stepped back so that he wouldn’t see her.
‘Your father is home,’ she said to the children. ‘You’d better tidy up. He’ll be up in a minute.’
But he did not come upstairs.
She waited five minutes. Ten minutes. She heard him down in the office. She fervently hoped that he wouldn’t discover she’d been snooping. She tried to remember if she had put everything back the way she’d found it.
Why wasn’t he coming upstairs to check if everything was all right?
She decided to go downstairs herself, with the boys, and then leave. She walked over to the window to shut it, but a sound from outside caught her attention. She looked up. The sky was quite blue, aside from a few high wisps of cloud, yet it sounded as if a thunderstorm were approaching from some distance. She opened the window a little wider and leaned out. The rumbling came from the other end of Napoleonstrasse and was getting louder. She had heard the sound before, but at first was unable to place it. It sounded like a large convoy of automobiles. But that wasn’t it.
Suddenly she knew what it was and grew pale as a sheet. When she turned round, she could tell from the way Michael, Gabriel and Raphael cocked their heads that they too had recognised the sound.
‘The car,’ said Gabriel. ‘That’s the car of that mister.’ His voice could barely be heard over the sound of the car, which was now very close.
Frau Maenhout didn’t say anything, but listened intently. She glanced at her watch. It was almost 5.45. Otto Reisiger was probably returning from the three borders, where he had kept the Boudewijn Tower open until five o’clock. He’s on his way to Albertstrasse, she thought; he won’t stop.
But he did stop. The deafening noise of the damaged exhaust continued for a few more seconds, then suddenly it went quiet. Frau Maenhout swallowed and looked out of the window. The watchman had parked his Simca in front of the house. He leaned across the passenger seat to pick something up, then got out and slammed the door shut. In his hand he held the little wooden sword, which, by the looks of it, he had repaired. Frau Maenhout, slapping her hands to her mouth, saw him ring the bell. He pushed open the gate, which wasn’t latched, and walked up the path.
She turned and looked at the children. ‘Have we said our prayers yet today?’ She just blurted it out. She didn’t know why. Well, she did, but she refused to acknowledge it. She was afraid.
She walked up to the three school desks where the three brothers sat. They had folded their hands together obediently. From downstairs in the hall came the sound of voices.
‘Our Father . . .’ she began.
‘The sign of the cross,’ Raphael interrupted her, ‘first we have to cross ourselves.’
‘You’re right,’ she said, and raised her right hand to her forehead.
‘In the name of the Father . . .’
Half-whispering, the boys said the prayer after her, the way she had taught them to. She closed her eyes and listened to the boys’ sing-song voices.
‘Our Father who art in heaven . . .’
She wouldn’t take it lying down. She was determined not to. She would defend herself. She would say that it was his fault. Wasn’t it?
‘Forgive us our trespasses . . .’
‘Thank you, Herr Reisiger!’ came the doctor’s voice. ‘Goodbye!’
The children calmly continued their prayer.
‘Lead us not into temptation . . .’
Downstairs the front door slammed shut.
‘. . . but deliver us from evil. Amen.’
Then she heard the doctor ascending the stairs. She hastily decided to go and meet him halfway. She didn’t want a scene in the children’s presence.
‘I’ll be back in a jiff!’ she told them. She walked to the door. The stress manifested itself in her hands, which she couldn’t keep still. Outside Herr Reisiger’s car started making its noise again. Not a loud grumbling or rumbling this time, but a high-pitched screech that lasted just a few seconds. She opened the door and stepped out onto the landing.
The doctor had just arrived at the top of the stairs. He was holding the wooden sword. She glanced at his face to weigh his mood, but his features, as usual, betrayed no expression.
‘Herr Reisiger,’ he began.
The deafening racket of the car outside suddenly returned. The doctor paused, then began again, ‘Herr Reisiger returned the sword. He told me—’
‘It’s all your fault,’ she broke in. She was wringing her hands together convulsively. She would remain on the attack.
‘What?’
He’s just pretending, she thought. He’s trying to play innocent.
‘It’s your fault that it has come to this,’ she said.
He bowed his head.
‘That isn’t true,’ he said. ‘It isn’t my fault.’
‘Excuse me?’ she said, startled and furious at the same time.
He started to shake his head but his eyes remained fixed on the floor. ‘I’ve done good. I have only done good. I didn’t want this to happen.’
He’s talking gibberish, she thought; it’s almost as if he’s drunk. He kept wobbling his head strangely from side to side. Outside the car began shrieking again, but the doctor’s voice carried over it.
‘He wanted it this way. He’s the one. I tried to stop him. I did try. But . . .’ He ran his hand over the sword’s wooden blade and took a step forward, but appeared to stagger.
‘I wanted to do good. I have always wanted to do good.’
Chaos and fraud. The words sprang to her mind again, and she said them out loud: ‘Chaos and fraud!’ She sidestepped to get away from him. ‘Chaos and fraud. That’s what they accused you of. You tricked everyone. Before. And now.’
Just then there was a loud bang outside. It made her jump, but the noise did not seem to register with the doctor.
‘You mustn’t say that!’
He had taken another step in her direction. She took another step backwards. Sensing she had found a sore spot, she went on: ‘You can’t take the truth. You haven’t the guts to face it. You overestimated yourself.’
‘You mustn’t say that,’ he repeated. He was shaking his head even more vehemently than before, like a child caught doing something he shouldn’t be doing, who refuses to own up to it. The doctor made a sudden lunge forward. Charlotte Maenhout was caught completely off guard and instinctively took another step back. Only then did she realise that she was standing right at the edge of the stairs. But it was already too late.
‘Doctor ? My car won’t start. Could you . . .’
The watchman, who had entered the doctor’s house, froze. ‘Oh my God!’ he cried.
Dr Hoppe was kneeling next to Frau Maenhout, who was sprawled at the foot of the stairs. He pressed his index and middle finger to her throat, waited a few seconds, then looked up.
‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ he said.
Otto Reisiger slowly crossed himself.
He hadn’t meant this to happen. Victor Hoppe hadn’t wanted this. He had simply wanted to give the sword back to her. That was all. But then she had said things. Alleged things. And something had got into him that was more powerful than he was. Evil had got into him. He knew it. And what was evil had to be vanquished. That he also knew.
II
In the scientific literature, Victor Hoppe’s career is usually summed up as follows:
The German embryologist Victor Hoppe received his doctorate from the University of Aachen in the sixties with an outstanding thesis on cell-cycle regulation. He spent several years in Bonn working as a fertility specialist, and in 1979 he astonished the scientific community by producing mouse offspring of single-gender parentage. He held a research chair at the University of Aac
hen and in December 1980 he astonished the scientific community again by cloning mice. He was the first scientist to successfully apply the cloning technique to a mammal. Three years later he was accused of fraud by his colleagues. It seemed that his experiments could not be replicated using his data, and Dr Hoppe refused to give a demonstration of his methods. In June 1984, after an investigation by an independent commission, he ended his research at the university and turned his back on academia. Some scientists later expressed some regret about the entire episode, suggesting that with the removal of Dr Hoppe a great talent had been lost, whereas others continued to maintain that his work was just amateur bungling.
That is how it is still characterised, even today. Except for the doctor’s nationality, everything else is true. But it’s only half the truth. Examine it under a microscope, and quite another story will emerge.
In London on Tuesday, 16 December 1980, at half past four in the afternoon, the editor-in-chief of the science journal Cell received a phone call from Dr Victor Hoppe. The name sounded familiar to the editor, but he couldn’t immediately place it. Speaking in English with a German accent, the doctor asked him when the deadline for the next issue of Cell was. Excitedly he added that he had some important news. His voice sounded muffled, as if he were holding a handkerchief over the mouthpiece.
The editor informed him that the deadline for the January issue had been a week earlier, and he was expecting the proofs on his desk any moment now. Articles for the February issue were still being considered.
Dr Hoppe did not want to wait that long. ‘It’s too important,’ he said.
Warily, the editor asked him what it was about. There was some hesitation on the other end of the line. Then he heard a very self-assured, ‘Cloning. I’ve cloned some mice.’
That made the editor sit up. If true, this was indeed important news. The announcement also jogged his memory, and he suddenly knew who Victor Hoppe was: the German biologist who had published a significant article in the journal Science some years before, on mouse-embryo engineering.
‘Well! That truly would be a first,’ said the editor.
‘I would like to publish a report on my experiments as soon as possible, you understand.’
‘I quite understand,’ the editor replied, suddenly most accommodating. ‘I may be able to arrange something for the current issue. Could you fax me the article today?’
‘No, not until tomorrow.’
‘That’s going to be tight. I’ll need it by twelve o’clock at the very latest. Is that possible?’
There was actually another day’s leeway, but the editor did not tell him that. The more time he gave the doctor, the greater the chance that other journals would find out about it and might try to get the scoop.
‘Twelve o’clock. I think I can do that.’
‘Excellent. How many mice have you cloned, if I may ask?’
‘Three. Three in all.’
‘That’s fantastic. I’m looking forward to reading your account.’
‘Just a few minor details and it’s finished. You can count on it.’
When Victor Hoppe, in Aachen, put down the receiver, he had not actually put down on paper very much of the article he was supposed to deliver the next day. He did have an outline in his head, and had jotted down the data every step of the way. He had also taken some photos, but that was all he had. He knew that it was his technique, in particular, that he had to emphasise. Most of his colleagues used viruses as vectors in cell hybridisation, whereby they forfeited the process most important to cloning. He, on the other hand, used a method developed in the seventies by Professor Derek Bromhall of England, which Dr Hoppe had then refined: using a microscopic dropper, or pipette, he would insert a foreign nucleus into the cell and, keeping the micropipette in situ would then suck out the cell’s original nucleus. That way the cell membrane needed to be pierced only once, making for swifter healing. The recently discovered agent cytochalasin B, with which he then treated the cell, worked to keep the cell supple, encouraging it to fuse with the new nucleus.
It was all very simple in theory, but in practice this method required a great deal of expertise and a thousand times more dexterity than you’d need to thread a needle. Many of his attempts failed, either because the cell membrane was too badly damaged, or because too much cytoplasm was sucked out together with the nucleus. The fusion of the nucleus and the new cell was also seldom straightforward, and the chance of a re-engineered cell developing into an actual embryo was completely down to luck. The data Dr Hoppe had recorded didn’t lie. Of the five hundred and forty-two selected white mouse cells, less than half survived the microsurgical intervention in which the nucleus was replaced with another harvested from a brown mouse. Of the remaining group, only forty-eight cells successfully fused with the new nucleus. These were cultured for four days, at which point it transpired that only sixteen of the cells had developed into tiny embryos and were therefore suitable for implanting into the uteri of some white mice. Despite the low numbers - less than three per cent of the cells had made it to the penultimate stage - it was a great achievement for Victor Hoppe, an achievement to which his colleagues had never even come close, because to date all their attempts had come to naught at the Petri-dish stage.
Then he’d had to wait three weeks until the embryos were fully gestational and could be born. He had used that period to start a new series of cells. To his dismay, of these not one survived the culture stage, which meant that he was forced to pin all his hopes on the implanted embryos. The young mice would be born hairless; the doctor would find out if his cloning experiment had been successful only three days later, when the pelts began to grow. The sixteen doctored cells would have to produce brown mice, while the fifteen control eggs that had been fertilised normally, which he had implanted into various uteri at the same time as the others, would be expected to produce mice with their mothers’ white pelt.
The mice were born on 13 December 1980, in a University of Aachen laboratory. As a precautionary measure, they were taken out by Caesarean section. The procedure was a simple one compared to the microsurgery required to substitute the nuclear material of the cells. Still, he had to concentrate with all his might, because he was so nervous that his hands were shaking.
The first of the five white mothers - in order to tell them apart he had marked them with ink, from one to five dots each - did not provide the hoped-for result; indeed, of the eight neonates, all of them stillborn, only three were physically recognisable as mice. Of the other five, two were as wrinkled as raisins and the next two looked more like some shrivelled three-month-old human embryo. The skin of the last deformed mouse was thinner than crêpe paper, so transparent that you could see all its innards. Dr Hoppe was disappointed, but after dunking his first mouse’s offspring in formaldehyde, he proceeded to cut open the second mother with fresh hope. In this case too, four of the five implanted embryos were stillborn; they had fused together in pairs. One of the pairs shared a spine, the other pair had just one set of hindquarters. But his attention was immediately drawn to the fifth specimen, which was twice as big as the others, and not just that, it was alive! But that was as far as it went. The little creature was scarcely moving - the only evidence of life was some twitching of the hind legs - so the doctor quickly grabbed a tiny pipette and began pumping air into its minuscule mouth.
‘Breathe! Breathe!’ he cried as if addressing something human.
‘Breathe! Breathe!’
Dr Karl Hoppe’s distorted voice rang through the house at 1 Napoleonstrasse in Wolfheim, where he had just helped to deliver his wife of a son. It was a Monday morning, 4 June 1945. The pains had started two days earlier, although the actual labour had lasted nine hours.
So it was a boy. In that case his name would be Victor. That was something they had decided on beforehand. However, the child’s sex wasn’t the first thing the father had looked for. His gaze had initially gone to his child’s face. Through the veil of slime and blood over
the mouth, nose and cheeks he had immediately seen that his fears had come true: the boy had the same harelip that he had inherited from his own father.
In the village, many people thought that, if a child was born with that particular deformity, it was because the mother had seen a dead hare when she was ten weeks pregnant. Even his own wife believed the old wives’ tale, although he had warned her that it was something that ran in the Hoppe family, as did red hair. She had nevertheless shunned the butcher’s shop for the entire length of her pregnancy, and whenever she was forced to walk past the shop window, with its display of meats, she had taken care to stare straight ahead.
It hadn’t helped. The child was born with a harelip. It was the first thing his wife had asked him. Not if it was a boy or a girl, but if it had . . . With a trembling hand she had pointed at her own mouth, which was slick with sweat. He had merely nodded and then announced that it was a boy, hoping that would take her mind off it. She had closed her eyes and sighed.
The boy’s breath was coming out ragged, and so an oxygen mask was immediately clapped onto his impaired mouth. Dr Hoppe began squeezing a black balloon at three-second intervals to pump air into his son’s lungs.
‘Breathe! Breathe!’ he cried.
If he stopped the artificial respiration, the child might die before it had properly lived. As he automatically went on squeezing the balloon, however, the doctor did ask himself whether it might not be best for the boy if he did not make it. He had assisted in the birth of several disfigured babies before this, children with impairments far more dire than a cleft palate; yet this question had never even occurred to him then. He had always made every effort to save the child’s life, as he had been trained to do, but now, in the case of his own son, his very first child, he was plagued with doubt. Memories of his own childhood suddenly gave him pause. Every squeeze of the balloon felt like a stab in his gut. When he abruptly stopped pumping, telling himself he was only checking to see if his son was able to breathe on his own, it felt as if a heavy load had been lifted from his shoulders.
The Angel Maker Page 13