The Angel Maker

by Brijs, Stefan

  So she obediently did what was expected of her, reading aloud from the Bible for an hour without a break. Victor, hands folded on his tray, his head slightly bowed, sat across from her in a high chair without moving a muscle for the entire hour. She wasn’t sure if the Bible stories interested him, or if he understood much of the lofty language - ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Sister Milgitha had told her - but he did seem to be following attentively. So attentively, even, that when she asked him if he remembered where she had left off the last time, he promptly rattled off the last sentence word for word. Here was further proof of what an extraordinary memory he had. In her opinion, it was also a sign of intelligence, but the nuns she discussed it with said that the one had nothing to do with the other.

  ‘He is feeble-minded, Sister Marthe, remember,’ said Sister Noëlle.

  ‘Once feeble-minded, always feeble-minded,’ said Sister Charlotte.

  Sister Marthe refused to believe it, but to her chagrin she couldn’t come up with any further way of proving that Victor really was intelligent. Until, that is, the boy himself provided her with the proof one day.

  Several weeks had passed since the first reading session, and Sister Marthe had arrived at chapter 25 of the Book of Exodus. When she asked for the end of the previous chapter, Victor said, ‘An-fo-ty-days-an-fo-ty-ights-Mo-hes-wa-on-e-ount. ’

  ‘Moh-zzes, Victor,’ she said. ‘With a zzzzz. As in ro-ses.’

  She had been working on his pronunciation without the abbess’s knowledge. If he mangled a word, she’d often say it again slowly and ask him to repeat after her. He would try his utmost, but some sounds were simply beyond him. He was improving by leaps and bounds, however, although she wasn’t sure if she could offer that as proof of intelligence.

  ‘Mo-shes,’ Victor repeated.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said, even though it wasn’t a great improvement. She did not like to push him too much, as he might give up and refuse to continue.

  She opened the Bible to the page she had marked with a ribbon, the last page they’d read, and put it down on the table. Victor stretched out his hand across the table. He touched the gilt edge of the book with the tip of his finger.

  ‘You want to hear more, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Mo-shes,’ said Victor.

  He evidently hadn’t understood what she’d said. Every once in a while he would react quite differently from the way she’d have expected him to, and it sometimes made her feel, however briefly, that she should just stop wasting her energy.

  Reaching over, he planted his index finger on the open page. ‘Moshes, ’ he said again.

  ‘That’s right, Victor,’ she nodded, ‘that’s where we left off last time. At Moses on the mountain.’

  ‘Mo-o-shes! ’ he said insistently, moving his finger across the page to another spot, and stiffly keeping it there.

  It suddenly dawned on her: his finger was pointing at the name ‘Moses’! She glanced from the boy’s finger to his face. His eyes, too, were raptly focused on the word.

  ‘Moses,’ she said, trying to keep down the excitement in her voice. ‘It says Moses. You’re right. That’s very good, Victor. And does it say Moses anywhere else?’

  His finger moved to another spot. His hand was now more relaxed.

  ‘Mo-shes,’ she heard him say again. Again he pointed to the name Moses, which appeared twice more on that page.

  ‘Good, Victor, that’s excellent! And where else?’

  Again he moved his finger. Again he pointed at Moses.

  He can read, she thought. Thank God, he can read!

  She had been a bit premature in jumping to that conclusion, she realised when she tried pointing out some other words on the page. Victor didn’t get a single one. He had probably recognised the name Moses from the identical look of the characters, and the unmistakable capital M (which from where he was sitting actually looked like a W), but that was as far as it went. But still, at least he had worked out that every word she read corresponded with a set of characters on the page. That, in her eyes, was a remarkable achievement - he had only just turned three, after all - and to see if her guess was right, she decided to settle it beyond all doubt. Pointing to the word ‘the’ on the same page, she said it aloud at the same time. He then promptly pointed out every single ‘the’ on that page, and waited impatiently for her to teach him another word. That was when she decided. She would teach him to read, in order to convince the other nuns that he was not feeble-minded.

  On 14 February 1979 - the two women were just delighted with that date, convinced that it would bring them luck - Victor Hoppe implanted a three-day-old hybridised embryo into each of their wombs. He had removed the nuclei of two eggs culled from an anonymous donor and injected the nuclei from the women’s own eggs in their stead. Once the nuclei had fused, the cells had begun to divide, producing, three days later, an embryo sixteen cells strong. Even at that stage, it was still smaller than the head of a pin.

  Two days before the implantation procedure, he had received a letter from the editor of Science. It said, among other things: ‘We congratulate you on your groundbreaking research and the attendant results, which have astonished every one of us [. . .] Your findings could be the start of a new era [. . .] We would be most delighted to publish your work, were it not for a few points that still require some clarification. In the enclosed report you will find a number of questions and comments [. . .]’

  Perusing the enclosed report, he’d shaken his head. He found most of the comments irrelevant. He had been asked to provide further explication of procedures and methods that, to him, seemed self-evident. What irked him most was the question pertaining to references, which they clarified by writing, ‘[. . .] names of colleagues who have been witness to some or all of the experiments, or of (academic) institutions under whose supervision the research was carried out.’

  They don’t believe me, he’d thought to himself. He felt offended. And humiliated. Disappointed, he had filed away both the letter and the report. And it was on that very day that he succeeded in hybridising the two women’s eggs in a Petri dish.

  The report’s last question was, ‘Have you managed to replicate the experiment yet?’

  He had not. After the mice were born, he had concentrated solely on adapting his method to human eggs.

  The penultimate question asked, ‘Are the hybridised mice themselves fertile?’

  He couldn’t have answered that one even if he’d wanted to. All three mice had died quite suddenly - one after ten days, the other two within three weeks. He had dissected them, but found nothing out of the ordinary.

  As it turned out, one of the two women did become pregnant. The other embryo had probably failed to attach itself to the uterine wall. There was great rejoicing, however, and an even greater fear of a miscarriage. On his recommendation, the women decided to rent a flat in Bonn for the duration of the pregnancy, within walking distance of his practice. A first ultrasound would be done when the foetus was six weeks old. At that stage it should be possible to detect the beating heart and the spinal column.

  In the meantime he rewrote the article on his experiment with the mice for Science. The success of his experiment with human embryos impressed on him the need to get his first report out of the way before he could consider publishing his next.

  He didn’t include the fact that the mice had died. Not yet. First he wanted to have a chance to repeat the experiment with some fresh mice, so that he’d be able to answer in the affirmative the question of whether he had been able to replicate the experiment, as well as the one about the hybridised mice being fertile. But this time the experiment failed. He did succeed in starting several new embryos, but none of them developed to maturity in the womb of an adult mouse.

  He had no idea where exactly the experiment had gone wrong. Or perhaps he did, but would not acknowledge it.

  Luck. That was bottom line. His technique with the micropipette, in which the nucleus from a cell was removed
and replaced with another, demanded the utmost dexterity. The slightest wrong movement would damage the cell membrane or the nucleus. Another problem could arise if too much cytoplasm was sucked out. Was his technique at fault, then? Surely not, since his method is the one that has now been adopted by researchers the world over. However, the equipment they use is far more refined, eliminating the danger of an accidental jostle. So Victor Hoppe was ahead of his time. And since he did not have recourse to today’s more advanced equipment, a great deal of luck was needed to accomplish what he was attempting.

  But to Victor, luck was not the issue. He ascribed his failures to lack of concentration. He didn’t really see the point of experimenting on a new set of mice, now that he had achieved positive results with human cells. It was like being asked to go back to working on toys instead of getting on with the real thing.

  In the revised article he made no mention, therefore, of repeating the experiment, or of the question of the hybridised mice’s fertility. Nor did he name any references. But he did conscientiously answer all the other questions and comments, and wrote up his methods in greater detail. It was enough to convince the majority of the scientists on the Science editorial board. They argued that Dr Hoppe’s findings were so revolutionary that they simply had to be published, if only to open up the topic for discussion. Those opposed to publishing the article wished to forestall such a thing. They maintained that a single successful attempt wasn’t a reliable result, but an accident. In the end, however, they yielded to the majority opinion.

  Sister Marthe taught Victor to read during the winter of 1948. Since she did not want to be caught doing it, she taught him only when she was on night duty. Once everyone else was asleep, she got the boy out of bed and led him to the screened-off cubicle that overlooked the general ward. She had with her a number of letters and sounds that she’d written on separate cards beforehand. With these she taught him to spell out his first words. He turned out to be a voracious student, and each lesson again reinforced her hunch that he was intelligent. She had only to give him a couple of examples with a few letters and he would swiftly spell out the series of words she gave him. His progress was so rapid that she was forced to bring him a new letter or sound to work on almost every lesson.

  He was also starting, for the first time, to show some signs of having feelings. This was largely manifest in his eagerness to move the letter cards around the table. She was at times more astonished by his excitement, especially in light of all those years of passive behaviour, than by the spectacular strides he was making in learning to read. He wouldn’t stop, not even for a short break. She often ended up having to force him to stop by grabbing his wrist, and even then his eyes would continue scanning the letters in search of the next combination.

  She always ended the lesson after an hour to an hour and a half, because Victor had to get up for Mass the next morning with all the other patients. Clinging to her hand, he would reluctantly trundle back to his bed, where he would recite another litany for Egon Weiss as she waited beside the edge of his bed.

  ‘Sleep tight, Victor,’ she’d whisper when he had finished. ‘Tomorrow we’ll learn another letter.’

  ‘W-ich-un?’ he’d ask.

  ‘The “B”, as in “boy”,’ she would tell him. Or, ‘The “C”, as in “cat”.’

  Teaching Victor rekindled Sister Marthe’s desire to become a real teacher. The brief time she spent alone with the boy was so much more precious to her than any other hour of the day. Victor made her feel that she was doing something useful, and his rapid progress persuaded her that she was cut out for the job. If she could just show Sister Milgitha how good she was at teaching, then perhaps the abbess would finally see that she was capable of more than changing nappies or emptying bedpans. Perhaps the abbess would even consent to her pursuing her novitiate at another convent, where she might study for her teaching qualifications. If the abbess gave her consent, her parents would surely have no objections either.

  In order to convince the abbess, Sister Marthe had to finish coaching Victor, and so she began to step up the pace. She took over the night duty of some of the other sisters, and sometimes she made the boy practise non-stop until 3 a.m. She taught him to read not only new words but also simple verses, which she would print in her best handwriting. In the daytime she also managed to squeeze in some reading practice during the Bible sessions, making him search the Bible for recognisable words. Every once in a while he even managed to read a complete sentence.

  As the intensity of the lessons grew, so did her carelessness. One day she was abruptly spoken to by Sister Milgitha.

  ‘Sister Marthe, what have you been up to at night in the sisters’ quarters?’

  She felt her cheeks promptly turning red.

  ‘Excuse me?’ she asked, stalling. One of the patients must have seen her with Victor and informed the abbess; it was the only explanation.

  ‘I know that Victor comes and sits with you at night,’ the abbess said sternly. ‘Might I ask why?’

  She considered telling her the truth right then and there, but if she did, the abbess would in all probability want to test Victor immediately, and Marthe was sure he’d just clam up.

  ‘Victor suffers from dreadful nightmares,’ she said quickly.

  The abbess gave her a quizzical look.

  ‘If I don’t take him out of the ward,’ the novice added, ‘he’ll scream and wake everyone up.’

  ‘What kind of nightmares?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sister Milgitha. He won’t tell me.’

  She thought it sounded plausible. She started feeling a little calmer, especially when she saw the look of accusation vanish from the abbess’s eyes.

  ‘I was worried,’ said Sister Milgitha.

  ‘Oh, don’t be. Victor is—’

  ‘Not about Victor, Sister Marthe. About you.’

  That she had not expected. She gazed at the abbess, frowning.

  ‘You have been looking rather pale these days.’

  ‘I—’ she tried, but the abbess immediately interrupted her.

  ‘It might be best if you skipped night duty for a while. And reading two hours a day, I think, is also tiring you. Sister Noëlle will take over from you.’

  Excuses! She felt that she was being given excuses. The abbess simply wanted to separate the two of them, Victor and her. That was the reason!

  ‘I - I feel quite well, actually,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’

  ‘I think it would be for the best. That way you’ll be able to concentrate fully on your other tasks.’

  Sister Marthe felt cornered. And she knew that arguing wouldn’t help. There was nothing else for it. ‘Victor can read,’ she said sheepishly. She had always thought that one day she would say those words with well-deserved pride, but now it felt more like a confession of guilt.

  ‘Victor can what?’

  ‘He knows how to read. I’ve taught him to read, Sister Milgitha.’ Her voice sounded reedy.

  ‘Sister Marthe, do you realise what you are saying? The boy isn’t even four yet!’ The abbess paused. Then she added emphatically, ‘And he’s feeble-minded.’

  Sister Marthe shook her head. ‘He isn’t retarded. He really isn’t . . .’

  ‘That is not up to you to determine, Sister!’

  The abbess stuck her nose in the air and was already turning on her heels when Sister Marthe cried out, ‘Please, let Victor prove it to you!’

  The abbess did not respond, but she didn’t walk away either.

  ‘Won’t you let him prove it to you?’ said Sister Marthe, practically pleading this time.

  ‘Fine, let him prove it. Right now! Then we’ll know, one way or another, won’t we, Sister Marthe?’

  ‘Oh, not right now. Please . . .’

  It was even worse than she’d expected. Sister Milgitha didn’t give him a chance. Five nuns, including the abbess, came and stood around him in a circle, the way they did when they we
re about to wrestle a patient into a straitjacket. Of course he was scared.

  She was told to stand behind him, and was only able to catch a glimpse of his face when Sister Milgitha briefly stepped aside. The abbess pointed at her and said, ‘Victor, Sister Marthe claims that you can read. Won’t you show us?’

  From somewhere Sister Marthe summoned up the courage to interrupt the abbess. She took the sheet of paper out of her sleeve with the verses that he had read the night before - all the way through, and without a single mistake.

  ‘Sister Milgitha, this is—’

  The abbess made a broad dismissive gesture with one hand, and took the Bible from Sister Noëlle in the other. She opened the book to a random page and shoved it under Victor’s nose. ‘Read something to me,’ she said.

  Now’s your chance, Victor, Sister Marthe thought. She knew he could do it. Even if it was just one sentence.

  But Victor didn’t open his mouth.

  And the king said, Bring me a sword. And they brought a sword before the king. And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other. That was what it said. Black on white. His eyes had fallen on that passage, and it had flustered him so much that he had been unable to utter a word.

  ‘Will we be able to tell if the child is from both of us?’ one of the women asked.

  The doctor had just finished carefully spreading the clear gel over her stomach and was ready to perform the first ultrasound. He shook his head. ‘Not from the scan.’

  ‘I mean later, when it’s born.’

  ‘It will definitely be a girl,’ he replied. ‘It has to do with the chromosomes. Women have a sex chromosome of the double-X kind, which is why—’

  ‘But will we be able to tell any other way?’ she broke in.