The Angel Maker

by Brijs, Stefan

  Victor shrugged his shoulders non-committally. It wasn’t clear if he just wasn’t in a mood to answer, or if the shrug was meant to be the response. He didn’t ask Rex anything in turn, so again it was up to Rex to say something.

  ‘And what are you up to now? It’s been so long . . .’ He kept the question deliberately neutral. He remembered how evasive his former colleague could be.

  ‘I’m a GP,’ Victor had said.

  ‘A GP,’ Rex echoed, rather startled. To cover his surprise, he quickly added, ‘Where?’

  ‘In Wolfheim.’

  ‘Wolfheim?’

  Victor nodded. That was all. He didn’t bother to explain where that might be. It wasn’t that he was being mysterious or reticent - no, it was more a matter of indifference, as if he and the man facing him had no history together. But his attitude changed when Rex told him that he too had left the University of Aachen. That did seem to surprise Victor. He looked up, very briefly, as if he were about to say something. But there was still nothing forthcoming until Rex let slip a remark that he knew would not leave the doctor cold.

  ‘I had lost their trust.’

  However, his confession had a somewhat different effect from what he’d intended, because Victor, not bothering to lower his voice, said, ‘As I lost yours.’

  Rex looked round, embarrassed. Best just to ignore that, he thought to himself; it would only lead to a pointless argument.

  ‘How did it all come out, in the end?’ he asked. He was expecting an evasive answer, and would have been satisfied with that. It would have put his mind at ease. Yet the answer only raised more questions.

  ‘It isn’t finished yet.’

  He felt a shudder of apprehension. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m starting over again.’

  That answer was more reassuring. So the previous experiment had failed. And evidently it hadn’t been a complete fabrication either. It had, simply and logically, ended in failure. Thank God.

  And yet he asked one more question. He wanted to have it from the doctor’s own mouth that the experiment had failed. Victor waited, staring at the ground - and then Rex asked the question.

  Originally, they had made a date for the day after the technology fair, but Victor had cancelled that morning because something had happened. He had sounded confused; from what Rex was able to gather, something had happened to his housekeeper - an accident or something. Could he possibly come a few days later? Rex had agreed, even though it meant he’d have to curb his impatience a while longer.

  What did he know, as of now? That three boys had been born four years ago, and that the fourth embryo had failed to thrive and died. He also knew that all three were clones of the doctor, and that they looked exactly alike, down to the most minute detail. Finally, he knew that the boys were still alive.

  All of this he had found out from talking to Victor that morning at the fair. And he, Rex Cremer, had listened open-mouthed.

  ‘May I see them?’ he had blurted out.

  He would be allowed to see them.

  He’d had one more question. And the reply to that, too, had startled him. No, had shocked him. He had asked the names of Victor’s children.

  Rex Cremer parked his car in front of the villa. He saw the sign on the gate, with Victor’s name and the hours of surgery. As he got out he heard the village clock strike two. He was right on time. Across the street a woman was sweeping the pavement. He nodded at her amicably, but she barely acknowledged him. Victor came out of the house, greeted him with a nod of the head and unlatched the gate.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said. He was already halfway up the garden path.

  Rex felt as if he was just another patient coming for a check-up, a feeling that was reinforced when he saw that he was being shown into the examination room. Victor sat down behind his desk and invited Rex to take a seat across from him. Rex immediately noticed the framed photograph on the corner of the desk that was half-turned towards him, almost as if it were on purpose.

  ‘Is that them?’ he asked.

  Victor nodded.

  ‘May I?’ He stuck out his hand.

  Victor nodded again and said, ‘It’s an old photo.’

  Rex picked up the frame and noticed that his hand was shaking. He was still somehow hoping that the whole thing had only been a figment of Victor’s imagination, and even though just a glance at the photo clearly showed the uncanny resemblance between the three boys, he was still not completely convinced they were indeed clones. They could be a set of identical triplets, and had simply inherited Victor’s characteristics: the red hair and . . .

  Every cleft palate is unique.

  He could still hear him saying it, although it had been several years ago. He stared at the mouths of the three children in the picture, but the print was not clear enough to make out fine details. Besides - this was something he was able to see - the upper lips had been repaired. But the doctor would certainly have saved photographs of the children prior to surgery, even though that kind of proof was no longer necessary. A British scientist had recently found a way to dissect and read the genetic code unique to every human being. A DNA test would determine unequivocally if the children were indeed identical copies of Victor Hoppe.

  ‘They must have changed quite a bit,’ Rex began, as neutrally as he could. ‘How old are they in this picture? About one?’

  ‘Just a year old,’ the doctor replied. ‘They have changed - you are right.’

  ‘I can’t wait to see them.’

  He was eager to see the children straight away, but when Victor began speaking again, he realised that his patience would be put to the test.

  ‘I have tried to slow it down.’ It didn’t sound like a justification. Victor was simply giving Rex a piece of information.

  ‘What have you tried to slow down?’

  ‘It’s been too rapid.’

  ‘What . . . I don’t follow.’

  ‘The telomeres on some of the chromosomes are much shorter than normal.’

  Rex looked at him nonplussed, but the doctor took his look to mean something else.

  ‘You do know what telomeres are, don’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course I know what telomeres are. I just don’t know what it has to do with all this.’

  But as he said it, it did begin to dawn on him. Telomeres were long chains of building blocks at the end of every chromosome in the nucleus. These telomeres were somehow responsible for providing the energy required for cell division. With every division, a number of these telomeres disappeared for good, because the cell could not manufacture replacements. The more frequently a cell split, the fewer chromosome telomeres were left; in short, the older the person, the shorter the telomere chain.

  ‘Soon after the boys were born,’ Victor explained, ‘I discovered that the telomeres of the fourth and ninth chromosome were much shorter than those on the other chromosomes.’

  Rex didn’t really want to hear the rest. The more he found out, the more involved he would be. But he already had a strong suspicion that he knew what the doctor was trying to tell him. One of the questions biologists frequently asked themselves, a riddle that hadn’t yet been solved, was what the actual age of the clone would be. Since the cell providing the donor nucleus had come from an adult, the clone’s cells would, by definition, be much older than the cells arising from normal insemination. Was that it? Had something gone wrong on that front?

  He felt his anxiety rise. ‘Does that mean—’ he began.

  ‘I have tried to slow it down,’ the doctor interrupted, raising his voice slightly. There was despair in that voice. It was the first time Rex had noticed anything like that in Victor. Or . . . perhaps not: it had happened once before, when Victor had begged him on the phone for his help because it turned out that as many as four cloned embryos had implanted themselves.

  ‘But I’m not giving up,’ he heard Victor declare stubbornly, all trace of despair gone. Then he fell silent again.

  ‘
Dr Hoppe, you mentioned the telomeres of the fourth and ninth chromosomes,’ he began. ‘You said they were much shorter. How much shorter?’

  Victor stared at the photograph Rex was still holding.

  ‘Less than half,’ he said mechanically.

  ‘Less than half. That is . . . Were there any consequences, for the children?’

  ‘They are ageing very rapidly.’

  Rex’s worst suspicion had been confirmed, although he wasn’t sure what this meant on a practical level.

  ‘Was it obvious?’ he asked. ‘I mean, could you tell just by looking at them?’

  He hoped that the doctor would now suggest that they go and see the children, but Victor just nodded, staring at the photo.

  ‘There didn’t seem to be anything wrong at that stage,’ he said. ‘But then . . .’ He was quiet again.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘They suddenly went bald. That was the start of it.’

  Rex looked at the picture. The boys’ red hair was already thinning at that stage, so it wasn’t hard to imagine the hair completely gone.

  ‘Was there nothing you could do?’ he asked.

  ‘I tried.’

  ‘And what about now?’

  ‘The telomeres of the fourth and ninth chromosomes are all used up.’

  That made Rex sit up, startled.

  The doctor confirmed his fears: ‘Since then the cells have stopped dividing, and the cells that are left are slowly dying.’

  ‘Which means that the ageing process has become irreversible?’

  Victor nodded. ‘But all’s not lost,’ he said, finally. He straightened himself, his hands on the armrests of his chair, as if he were about to stand up.

  ‘Not lost?’ asked Rex, surprised.

  ‘It was a mutation. Simple as that. Now that I know about it, I can look out for it the next time, in the embryo-selection process.’

  Rex didn’t know where to look.

  ‘It is our task, after all,’ Victor went on stolidly. ‘It is up to us to correct the mistakes which He in his haste has wrought.’

  Rex’s eyes were almost popping out of his head by now.

  ‘A mutation is nothing more nor less than an error in the genes,’ Victor went on in a monotone. ‘Just as this was an error in the genes.’ Raising his hand to his upper lip, he ran his finger over the scar.

  Rex did his best not to stare.

  ‘And by correcting those congenital errors, we correct ourselves,’ said Victor firmly. ‘That is the only way to beat God at his own game.’

  This startling pronouncement transported Rex back in time, back to the day when he had written to congratulate Victor Hoppe on his article, before they had even met.

  You have certainly beaten God at his own game.

  And as he thought about it, it dawned on him that it was he, Rex Cremer, who had set the whole thing in motion with that one ostensibly innocent phrase.

  ‘Shall we?’ Victor had pushed back his chair and was getting to his feet. ‘You wanted to see the children, didn’t you? Come with me. They are upstairs.’ Not waiting for an answer, he walked to the door.

  Rex stayed in his seat a few seconds longer, completely flummoxed. When he stood up, he felt dizzy. He blinked his eyes a few times and took a deep breath.

  ‘Dr Cremer?’ he heard from the corridor.

  ‘Coming,’ he replied. As he followed Victor up the stairs, he tried to focus his mind on what he was about to be shown, but the words he had just heard kept spinning round in his head.

  It is up to us to correct the mistakes which He in his haste has wrought.

  This isn’t possible, he thought. He’s just provoking me. Victor Hoppe is trying to get my goat. He is pulling my leg. Next he’ll probably tell me that he made the whole thing up; that he just wanted to see how I’d react. That’s the reason he asked me to come. So that he could make fun of me. Because people used to make fun of him.

  As Victor opened the door, Rex was still hoping that the whole thing was an elaborate sham. Even when Victor stepped into the room and Rex heard him say, ‘Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, there is someone—’

  The voice broke off in mid-sentence. Rex, hearing it from the stairs, cleared the last three treads in one stride. Two more steps and he was standing in the doorway, peering inside.

  He didn’t immediately realise that it was a classroom. His glance was first drawn to the blackboard, where Victor was heading with long, rapid strides. Storming up to the board, he snatched the eraser and began wiping the surface clean. Rex just caught a glimpse of a drawing the full height of the blackboard. It was a drawing of a person - a man or a woman. With one swipe the doctor had already erased the face. What was left was the hair, pinned up in a bun. So then it was a woman. The bun was white, and was surrounded by a yellow radiance. That was next to go - the knot and the yellow glow around it, which Rex suspected was supposed to represent a halo, because the woman had also been endowed with a pair of wings. White wings, depicted as large oval shapes on either side of the torso.

  It was a child’s drawing, with simple lines, but that made it instantly recognisable. It was erased in a trice.

  The doctor then turned his attention to the remaining half of the blackboard, which was covered in scribbles. The single phrase Rex managed to decipher before it was obscured by the doctor’s hand told him what the rest of the text had said: . . . who art in heaven . . .

  Victor put down the eraser and turned round. He rubbed his hands together, and dust flew into the air. Then he wiped his face. His fingers left white tracks in his red beard.

  For a split second Rex had forgotten what he’d come for, but Victor’s glance reminded him.

  There were three of them. Three, but it might as well have been two, or four. It wouldn’t have made the slightest difference, for he saw it immediately. He saw that it wasn’t a sham. Victor Hoppe had made nothing up.

  2

  When, in the autumn of 1988, the walnut tree in the doctor’s garden was cut down, there were few villagers who really believed that the event would bring bad luck to Wolfheim, as Josef Zimmerman had predicted. Not one year later, however, even the greatest sceptic was forced to admit that the old man had been right. Jacques Meekers had come up with his own theory by then: that the calamity had been spreading through the village the way the roots of a tree spread under the earth. If anyone happened to express doubts about his theory, he would unfold a topographic map of Wolfheim and its surroundings, and spread it out on the counter of the Café Terminus. He had marked every spot where the calamity had surfaced with an X. Each cross was given a number, and was connected with a jagged line to the mark where the walnut tree had once stood. In the map’s margins, Meers had jotted down the details of the accidents relating to each X, including victim and date. He had strengthened his case by including even run-of-the-mill mishaps that had had negligible consequences, and was able to refute the objection that there was no way the tree’s roots could have spread all the way to La Chapelle by showing that the distance between La Chapelle and the tree’s core was less than five hundred metres as the crow flies.

  The onslaught of the calamities, everyone agreed, had started with Charlotte Maenhout’s accident on 29 October 1988. Her funeral had lured many folks to the church, most of them probably hoping that Dr Hoppe and his three offspring would attend the service. The doctor had not made an appearance, however, either at the Mass or at the graveside. Jacob Weinstein reported afterwards that the doctor had rung shortly before the funeral to excuse himself: the children were very sick. Sick with grief, of course, he’d supposed, but when some days later the details of Charlotte’s will became known, he was forced to revise his assumption, as were many of the other villagers.

  Father Kaisergruber personally heard the news from Notary Legrand of Gemmenich. The notary told him that Charlotte Maenhout had left all her money - he didn’t say how much, but it was a hefty sum - to a children’s cancer foundation. That piece of news needn’t necessari
ly have raised any red flags, but Notary Legrand added that Frau Maenhout had had her will changed just two months prior to her death. Before that, the doctor’s children had been named as her beneficiaries. They were to have received the money on their eighteenth birthday.

  But there was more. Irma Nüssbaum had seen a big box being delivered to the doctor’s house, marked with a large radioactive warning, and the next day he’d had a visitor from Germany who had told Irma that the children were not doing so well.

  ‘He was in there for over an hour,’ Irma said, ‘and when he came back out he looked as if he’d seen a ghost. He got into his car, but then got straight out of it again. I went over to him and asked him what was the matter - was it the children? He gave me this guilty look, and that told me enough. They aren’t doing too well, are they? I asked. I saw him hesitate, but then he shook his head. No, he said, not really. In a tone as if someone - well, you know. Then he asked if I knew a certain Frau Maanwoud. Frau Maenhout, you mean, I said; she was the doctor’s housekeeper. He wanted to know what had happened to her and I told him that she had fallen down the stairs at the doctor’s house the week before. She had died instantly. I asked him why he wanted to know. Oh, no reason, he said, no reason; he’d just heard something about it. He was definitely distraught, because he got back into his car without saying another word.’

  The doctor’s absence at the funeral, the news of Charlotte’s Maenhout’s inheritance, Irma Nüssbaum’s story - all led to the same conclusion.

  ‘The doctor’s sons are dying.’

  ‘So it must be - you know . . .’

  ‘It’s probably leukaemia,’ said Léon Huysmans. ‘It’s fairly common in young kids. And fatal.’

  ‘You could see it coming.’

  The villagers grew even more convinced of their theory over the following weeks, when they saw that Dr Hoppe’s surgery was shut more often than not. No one answered the telephone, and the gate remained locked, so that several of his patients were forced to find another doctor. There was some grumbling, but for the most part people were understanding.