Her words had cut him to the quick.
At the secondary level of the Christian Brothers’ School Victor was given many nicknames that made fun of the way he looked. Even the teachers, both the monks and the laymen, would sometimes refer to him as ‘Red in Form 2B’, or ‘Harelip in Form 4A’. Victor heard it all, especially when the students yelled all sorts of nasty things behind his back, but he didn’t let it bother him. There was very little, in fact, that bothered him. Which was fortunate, for in those years there was no one to stand up for him the way Brother Rombout had stood up for him in primary school.
His indifferent demeanour led people to say that Victor had erected a wall to protect himself from whatever was thrown at him - sometimes literally, when they pelted him with wads of paper or balls, or figuratively, when the other kids jeered at him or called him names.
Since he never showed much reaction, the teasing didn’t go very far. At the beginning of each school year, when the presence of new boys in the class meant that his classmates had to prove themselves all over again, Victor was always seriously tormented, but after just a few weeks they would start leaving him alone again.
In the dormitory, too, he did not attract much attention, especially since he always had his nose in a book. Victor read and read, always and everywhere. He read textbooks, he read encyclopedias, he read journals, he read reference books.
The list of books he borrowed from the school library was impressively long, but also limited, for Victor was only interested in books that touched on the natural sciences. Not once did he ever take out a book on any other subject, or read something just for fun.
His extreme fixation estranged Victor even further from those around him. For when Victor did speak, it was always about the wonders of the human body or about the workings of the X-ray machine or about some new drug that had been developed to combat an exotic disease. And once you got him talking, he’d drone on and on with such pedantry that there were few who were able, or even wanted, to follow what he was saying. He wasn’t conscious of this himself because nothing ever seemed to get through to him. It was only when the teacher shouted at him to wrap up his monologue that he would stop.
It was also during Victor’s years at the secondary school that his supposed ‘sloppiness’ grew more pronounced. At least that was how the teachers interpreted his habit of handing in incomplete assignments. Some teachers called it laziness, and as a matter of fact they were the ones who came closest to the truth. For Victor simply didn’t bother to do many of his assignments, because he did not see the point of repeating the same thing over again once he knew how to do it, or of writing something down on paper when it was all already imprinted on his brain.
Owing to his purported sloppiness and the limited scope of his interests, Victor was only a middling student. He received high marks for physics, chemistry and biology; in Latin and languages he was about average, while in geography, history and maths he usually just skated by. He almost always failed religious studies, music and art, but never badly enough to keep him back a year. Skipping a form, as he had done in primary school, was out of the question in the light of his unimpressive grades. Victor therefore took six years to complete secondary school, like most of the other students, but since he had already been advanced for his age when he started, he was still, at sixteen, the youngest boy to graduate on 30 June 1961, and heading straight for university.
In those six years he had never had another outburst, or made a spectacle of himself. It has to be said that Victor had found peace in his own set of beliefs - peace in the sense that he was not troubled by any new insights. God did bad, evil things, and Jesus only did good.
Jesus had been punished for it, too, in the end. Victor had seen that with his own eyes. If you did good, you were punished for it. This had been confirmed on Calvary Hill, when Father Norbert had dragged him away from the cross and boxed his ears, like a thunderstorm breaking out overhead.
‘God will punish you for this, Victor Hoppe!’
The bad would always try to vanquish the good. Again and again and again.
Notwithstanding all that he was up against, Victor was determined to continue to do good. It was still his goal in life to become a doctor, and as long as he had that goal, and was working towards it, nothing could make him change his mind.
But he did have to remain on his guard against the bad. It was always lying in wait for you. He could tell that from looking at his father. As a doctor he did good, but as a father he did bad. And the bad was getting worse. Even though Victor was seldom home, his father always found some reason to get angry with him. Then he’d yell louder and louder, and sometimes it would come to blows.
‘What have I done to deserve this, for Christ’s sake!’ That was a frequent cry of his, and Victor knew that he was referring to the evil that had taken possession of him.
Even the people in the village said so. His father had not yet returned from making house calls one day, and there were people waiting for him at the gate. Victor was in his room and could hear their voices outside his window.
‘The doctor isn’t doing too well, is he?’
‘It’s going from bad to worse.’
That was what they’d said. And that had been enough for Victor.
Victor was fifteen when he found out that the mental institution where he had spent his early years was in the village of La Chapelle. He had never given the institution much thought while he was at school. It wasn’t as if he had forgotten it, but it had been a long time since anything had triggered the relevant cogs in his brain to set his memory in motion. Anything that used to do so no longer held that power. The weekly Mass and daily prayers just rolled off his back. He had permanently packed away the Bible he used to read so avidly, just as he would pack away his old textbooks at the end of the school year. At the secondary school he never again had a teacher like Brother Rombout, who with his gentle mien and mellifluent voice had kept alive the memory of Sister Marthe, and ever since he had moved to a new dormitory, even Father Norbert, whose stentorian tones sometimes reminded him of Sister Milgitha, had disappeared from his immediate radar.
All in all, besides finding some peace in his belief system, Victor actually found some peace of mind at the school. But then something happened to jog his memory, not suddenly, but bit by bit - as if someone had started plucking the strings inside his head, and the sequence of sounds turned into a recognisable melody.
It happened, as before, on the occasion of the annual class outing. The students in fifth-form Latin always took a trip to the three-border junction, and from there on up to Calvary Hill at La Chapelle. Victor had never been to the former but was all too familiar with the latter. Yet he did not raise his hand when the students were asked if any of them had already followed the Stations of the Cross. Nor was he looking forward to it much. He had no interest in seeing the three-border junction, and as for Christ’s Road to Calvary, he didn’t need to be confronted with that again.
This time the students went by coach. There were twenty-one of them, and none of the boys would sit next to Victor. He didn’t care. He didn’t even notice. There were boys seated in front and behind him, however, and one of them, Nico Franck, a gangly seventeen-year-old, tapped him on the shoulder just as the coach was leaving.
‘Victor, you know we’re going to be right by the mental institution. ’
The boy sitting next to Nico Franck, promptly added, ‘Yeah, and you’d better make sure the nuns don’t catch sight of you, or they’ll come and get you.’
‘And then they’ll put you back in with the idiots, where you belong,’ said Nico.
The laughter that followed did not bother Victor. What did bother him was the words: Institution. Nuns. Idiots. Three memory strings that were plucked.
Victor stared out of the window, but he barely noticed what he was looking at. He didn’t even notice that they drove right past his house.
‘That’s where Victor lives, during the holidays. His father is the loc
al doctor,’ his Latin teacher, Brother Thomas, said.
‘I thought he lived in a mental institution!’ Nico Franck jeered, jumping up and tapping Victor on the top of his head.
‘Franck, sit down and behave!’ shouted Brother Thomas sternly.
The laughter continued a while longer.
Mental institution. That string being plucked again. The start of a melody.
When the coach reached the top of Mount Vaalserberg, everyone got out. Victor was the last one to exit the bus. As Herr Robert, the geography teacher, explained what they were here to see, Victor looked about. It was crowded. Dozens of tourists wandered around the summit, which was furnished with a kiosk and a few benches.
‘They’re going to build a new tower up here, one that’ll be even taller than the Juliana Tower,’ said the teacher. ‘The old tower is over there - in the Netherlands. Have any of you ever been to the Netherlands?’
Victor didn’t hear the question. He was thinking about the institution. About the nuns. About the idiots.
Imbeciles. Retards. The two words spontaneously popped into his head.
‘Victor, let’s go!’
The troop of students had already set off in the direction of the three-border junction. Victor trotted after them.
A cement column. That was all it was.
‘Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany,’ said Herr Robert as he paced around the column, sticking his arms out at right angles.
Victor did not get what the teacher was trying to show them. It was too abstract for him. Brother Rombout would have made it easier for him to visualise; he’d have taken a piece of chalk and drawn some lines on the ground, and then Victor would probably have been able to see it. His mind was elsewhere, anyhow. And it didn’t improve matters when something Brother Thomas said triggered something else inside Victor’s head.
‘This is the geographer’s golden calf,’ said the monk. He placed one hand on the stone and the other on his fellow teacher’s shoulder. ‘The physical representation of something that is in fact invisible. Just like God, in other words.’
Victor did not hear the irony in the monk’s voice. What he heard was ‘golden calf’. And ‘God’. Which suddenly made him recall another voice: ‘Moh-zzes, Victor. With a zzzzz. As in ro-ses.’
He felt a shudder running up his spine. From there on, nothing registered. He didn’t see the boys in his class pacing around the three borders, scissoring with their arms and legs. He did not hear the geography teacher asking him if he didn’t want to go ‘abroad’, like the other boys. Nor did he hear Brother Thomas say, ‘Victor is dreaming about travelling much further. He’s dreaming of the seven seas.’
After the class had wandered over to the highest point in the Netherlands, where, according to Brother Thomas, the three border posts represented people’s desperation for something to hitch themselves to in life, they climbed back into the coach.
‘Now we’ll be driving to La Chapelle,’ said Herr Robert. ‘To Calvary Hill. Brother Thomas will give us its history.’
‘At the end of the eighteenth century’, began the monk, ‘a boy named Peter Arnold lived here. He suffered from epilepsy and one day he bought a figurine of Mary in the market and hung it from an old oak tree . . .’
‘Victor, are you paying attention?’ Herr Robert, who had taken a seat beside him, nudged the boy.
‘Hung it from an old oak tree,’ Victor answered mechanically.
The geography teacher nodded and went back to listening.
‘. . . was cured of his epilepsy. That is why the Clare Sisters had a chapel built right beside that oak tree. A few years later another miracle occurred. Frederik Pelzer, a boy about your age, was abruptly cured of his insanity after his parents went to the chapel to pray for him. The nuns then decided to build a convent and a mental institution next to the chapel, to save even more unfortunates.’
Unfortunates. Most of the words had gone right over Victor’s head, but that word snagged him like a fish hook. He hadn’t heard it since he had left the institution.
Let us pray for the unfortunates. That was the way Sister Milgitha would begin the prayer when they were brought to the chapel. The unfortunates - that was them, the patients.
The cogs in his brain began to turn, in the cadence of a litany.
Marc François.
Fabian Nadler.
Jean Surmont.
Every name called up a face.
Nico Baumgarten.
Angelo Venturini.
Egon Weiss.
He saw Angelo Venturini placing the pillow over Egon Weiss’s face.
Let us pray for Egon Weiss, who has exchanged the temporal for the eternal.
So that his soul may find peace.
Are you praying for Egon? That’s good. Then he’s sure to find peace.
God giveth and God taketh away, Victor.
He saw Sister Marthe turn her back and walk away. She walked as if she were bearing a heavy cross.
Victor was found in the convent’s churchyard. He was on his knees before a headstone, hands folded.
It was at the Sixth Station of the Cross that it had dawned on Herr Robert that Victor was no longer with the other students. Nobody knew how long he’d been gone. Nobody had missed him.
Brother Thomas and Sister Milgitha were the ones who found him. The convent’s abbess clapped her hands to her mouth when she caught sight of the boy.
‘Do you know him?’ the monk asked her.
But she shook her head.
‘No, I don’t know him,’ was her reply. ‘I’ve never seen him before. He must have been lost.’
Then Brother Thomas took the boy by the arm and led him away. Victor meekly went with him.
He hadn’t been lost. The place where they found him was simply as far as he’d got.
Dr Karl Hoppe was reading the newspaper after breakfast when his son came into the kitchen. The boy poured himself a cup of milk and stood hovering by the sink.
‘When did you take me out of the institution at La Chapelle?’
It was a double whammy: the very fact that Victor had suddenly asked him a question, and then of course the question itself.
‘What did you say?’ the doctor asked, outwardly unruffled. He turned a page of the newspaper and hoped Victor would not have the guts to ask the question again.
But he did.
‘Institution?’ the doctor heard himself say. ‘What gave you that idea? You’ve never been in an institution.’ He did not look up as he said it.
‘But wasn’t I . . .’ began Victor. ‘The sisters . . .’
‘No, Victor, you were not!’ said the doctor, raising his voice. Slapping his paper down on the table, he jerked up his head. ‘If I say you weren’t, then you weren’t! I’m the one who should know!’
His son dawdled a bit longer, evidently mulling it over, and then turned on his heel. As he did so he let go of his cup of milk. He didn’t hurl it down on the floor; no, he simply turned round, let the cup fall from his hand and walked away.
Karl Hoppe sat there for a moment, frozen, as if nailed to his chair. Then he jumped up and ran after his son.
When Victor returned to his boarding school a few days later, he found, unpacking his suitcase, a file with his name on it. In the upper right-hand corner was printed ‘Sanatorium of the Convent of St Clare’, followed by an address in La Chapelle. The file didn’t contain any letters, just an index card with some dates on it and a couple of black-and-white photographs.
Victor stared at the photos dispassionately, as if seeing them through the eyes of a doctor who has already seen this many times before.
Then he studied the card. Each date was followed by one or more words. ‘Feeble-minded,’ it said in a couple of them. ‘Can speak. Unintelligibly, alas,’ he read. Then he read the last line. ‘Discharged,’ it said, preceded by a date: 23 January 1950.
Seeing that date did shake him, however.
Rex Cremer immediately sensed something was afoot. Pri
or to the meeting his colleagues on the faculty had started avoiding him, and whenever he tried to engage anyone in conversation, the answer was curt or unresponsive. They’d have to change their tune soon enough, he thought to himself.
When the vice chancellor had called the meeting to order, Rex took the floor and passed around the photos of the six-day-old embryos. He felt slightly uncomfortable claiming they were mouse embryos, and his discomfort grew when nobody said a word. He noticed some of the faculty looking at the vice chancellor, who cleared his throat and said, ‘We cannot take anything for granted any more. We understand that you want to support Dr Hoppe, but there is too much at stake to let matters simply take their course.’
‘But . . . the photographs speak for themselves, surely?’ said Rex, hearing Victor’s voice in his own.
‘This isn’t about the photographs,’ said the vice chancellor, ‘Not in the first instance.’
Rex swallowed. He wondered if the vice chancellor knew he was lying about the photos. The thought made him shudder. It was just beginning to dawn on him that he had made a terrible mistake. The events of the past few days had disconcerted him. He had started doing things he’d never have done before; things that would never even have occurred to him.
The vice chancellor took advantage of Cremer’ s silence. ‘There is going to be an inquiry. We have set up an international scientific commission, which is to investigate whether Dr Hoppe has . . .’ - the vice chancellor hesitated briefly - ‘whether Dr Hoppe has been making things up.’
Making things up. It was one of the worst things a scientist could be accused of. And the very fact that an investigative commission had been set up without Rex’s knowledge meant that they were having doubts about him too. That set his mind reeling. Could it be that it was all indeed a sham and that he hadn’t been able to see it because he did not think Victor capable of such a thing? Could it be that Victor had taken advantage of his belief in him? Rex tried to sort it out in his head, but the vice chancellor was still droning on, as if reading a declaration.
The Angel Maker Page 26