The Angel Maker

by Brijs, Stefan

  ‘He has to look after his children.’

  ‘They must be going downhill fast. That’s why you never see them outside any more.’

  ‘How awful: first his wife, and now . . .’

  From all quarters came offers of help, both from the ladies, who offered to take care of the housekeeping, and from the men, who wanted to mow his lawn. Dr Hoppe thanked them all but turned them down. The only offer he did take up came from Martha Bollen, who told him he could order his groceries over the phone and have them delivered to his house.

  ‘He wants to spend as much time as possible with the children, naturally. It goes without saying,’ said Martha, who delivered the groceries herself and always threw in some treats for the kids.

  Once, when making a delivery, she just couldn’t keep it in any longer. ‘Doctor, is it true—?’ She deliberately broke off in mid-sentence because she assumed he would know what she was talking about.

  ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘You know, about the children?’ she tried.

  She could tell from his expression that he was startled. Yet he still pretended that he had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘What about the children?’

  With the utmost reluctance, she uttered the name of the illness that had taken her own husband’s life ten years before.

  The doctor frowned and shook his head. ‘Cancer? No, not as far as I know.’

  His response sounded forced, so she did not pursue it. It was quite obvious to her that he did not want to talk about it.

  ‘He isn’t ready to face up to reality yet,’ she explained afterwards, in her shop. ‘He has to learn to cope with it first. When my husband fell ill, it took me three months before I could bring myself to tell my customers.’

  For two weeks the sad news about the doctor’s sons was practically the only topic of conversation in the village. Then suddenly, literally in the blink of an eye, it was eclipsed by another tragedy that caused even greater consternation.

  ‘Here, see this X, halfway down Napoleonstrasse, a stone’s throw from the doctor’s house,’ Jacques Meekers would explain years later at the Café Terminus. ‘That’s where the second accident happened. Not even two weeks after Charlotte Maenhout died! The victim was Gunther Weber - you know, the deaf kid. It was 11 November 1988: Armistice Day. So it was a public holiday.’

  Gunther Weber and five other boys had been playing a game of football on the village green. It was a peaceful autumn day, and since early morning cars and coaches chock-full of Belgian tourists had been snaking through the village on their way to the three-border junction. A traffic jam had soon clogged the narrow underpass leading to the Route des Trois Bornes. By lunch time the traffic jam stretched all the way past Dr Hoppe’s house. With so many people stuck inside their cars, and therefore so many eyes on them, the boys were encouraged, as usual, to show off. Fritz ‘Lanky’ Meekers, thirteen years old by then and just shy of two metres, had never given up the hope that one day a football coach would jump out of his car and offer him a contract to play for a top club, a dream shared by the other boys as well, though it was, as a rule, crushed by Meekers.

  ‘You, Gunther, you - picked for a top club? You can’t even hear the referee’s whistle!’ It was a remark he would regret for the rest of his life, since it was the constant teasing that goaded Gunther Weber into being even more of a show-off than the others, because he wanted to be considered as good as the rest of them.

  Gunther was goalie as usual, because from between the goalposts he had a view of the entire field. Julius Rosenboom had just kicked the ball wide of the goal and Gunther had gone to retrieve it. As he picked up the ball, he felt all eyes in the traffic jam upon him, and it made him puff up with pride. Pushing out his chest, his nose in the air and the ball under his arm, he marched back to the goal. He placed the ball on the ground, repositioned it a few times with a great deal of fuss, turned the ball over one more time and nodded theatrically when he was satisfied that it was just the way he wanted it.

  ‘Gunther, don’t be such a show-off!’ yelled Lanky Meekers. ‘OK, we’ve all seen you!’

  It may have been those very words that encouraged Gunther to stretch out his one-man show even longer. He tapped one of his ears, pretending he hadn’t understood. Then, raising his hand to his eyes, he peered in the direction where he was intending to kick the ball. He stretched his arm high up in the air and waved it back and forth.

  ‘Gwo-back, gwo-back,’ he shouted at his mates. ‘I’m-gwonnah-kick-de-bwall-erry-fah! ’

  And as the other boys started walking backwards, Gunther also took several giant paces back, to give himself a running start. Look there - what’s that boy doing? he could sense the people behind him wondering, and he imagined them nudging each other. He took yet another couple of steps backward, rolling his shoulders demonstratively. He’s going in for the kick. That boy’s going to kick that ball clear up into the sky! Just look at how far back he’s going!

  He was some twenty feet from the ball when he saw his mates starting to wave and shout at him. But he was too far away to read their lips. Keeping his eyes on the ball, he took another step back and then pitched forward slowly, like a runner waiting for the starting shot. In his mind he could hear the shouts of encouragement behind him: Gunther! Gunther!

  Oh, he was going to give that ball such a kick! Just one more step back and then . . .

  Gunther Weber landed under the 12.59 p.m. bus that had come swerving into the bus stop on the green. The boy was killed instantly, it was determined by a physician in one of the stationary cars who had immediately rushed to his side. That news was his parents’ only consolation, although it did not bring them much comfort. They had lost their only child.

  Victor Hoppe, standing at a first-storey window, watched people rushing to the scene. It was as if they were all pouncing on some quarry sprawled in the middle of the street, except that they all hung back a bit, leaving an empty circle around it. Peering through the glass, Victor could just make out their stricken faces, discreetly averted, yet sneaking covert glances at what was lying there. A man, shouting, was elbowing his way through the crowd, which fell back to make way for him. The man had to be a doctor, Victor guessed, and the quarry was the victim of an accident. Then he made the connection between the sounds he had just heard and the bus drawn up close to the victim.

  He recognised the gestures the doctor was making. A life had been taken. That was easy, taking a life. There wasn’t anything to it. It was much easier than creating a life. Taking a life was easy, even if you hadn’t meant to. That was something he’d learned just the other day.

  Victor Hoppe looked on, fascinated, his hands behind his back.

  The doctor’s announcement caused a stir amongst the crowd. Heads were shaken or bowed; people buried their faces in their hands. A small group of boys stood huddled together, sobbing.

  One boy detached himself from the group and walked away. Victor Hoppe saw that it was Fritz Meekers. The kid was screaming and yelling, and was running towards the village green, where two stacks of coats had been piled on the ground about three metres apart. The goal. And a ball lay on the ground beside the goal. Fritz was racing towards the ball. He seemed to be skating across the tarmac; it almost looked as if he were floating, as if his screams were making him levitate above the ground. Using all the pent-up force of his run, he gave the ball a vehement kick. A long-drawn-out wail followed the ball as it soared into the sky. Fritz didn’t watch where it went. His long legs buckling under him, he sank to his knees and his shoulders began to shake. People began walking over to him.

  Victor turned away to stare at the victim again, who, he was certain, must be one of the kids from the village.

  Someone came over with a blanket. The physician flung it over the victim so that the body was no longer visible. Death has to be erased as quickly as possible, thought Victor. Erased, like a mistake on a blackboard.

  He saw that peop
le were already starting to leave. The show was over. They returned to their cars or their coach and went back to being ordinary tourists again, on their way to the three-border junction. It was not a real place, Victor knew: only an arbitrary figment of the human imagination. Not real, yet it did exist. They all wanted to see it with their own eyes, even though there wasn’t really anything to see. And even though there wasn’t anything there, it did give them something to believe in. The three-border junction was like God. People were attracted to it, but at the same time they were being deceived.

  Suddenly people were getting out of their vehicles again. Something new had caught their attention. Victor blinked. The little group of people still hovering around the victim broke apart, this time to make way for a woman who had come running over. It was Vera Weber. Now he knew who the victim was. The doctor had stood up, and was trying to restrain the woman. Shaking his head, he grabbed her by the shoulders, but she shook him off.

  Victor gazed at Vera Weber in astonishment. The woman was yelling. The woman was screaming. Victor lifted his hand to the window to open it, resting his finger on the latch. A gentle breeze carried the eerie sounds inside. He had heard those sounds before. Long ago. They were sounds of grief. Of despair. And of madness. The sounds touched off something inside his head and he shuddered.

  The woman knelt by the blanket and pulled it off. Her voice had stopped. In the breathless silence, she cradled the boy’s head in her arms, lifting it onto her lap. She stroked his hair. She was talking to him. Didn’t she know he was dead?

  God giveth and God taketh away, Victor. Remember that.

  The woman understood. Suddenly she did understand, because she stopped talking to the boy. Lifting her head, she gazed up at the sky, stretched her arms into the air and clutched at something that wasn’t there. And as she tried to grab the something that wasn’t there, she started screaming again.

  Victor closed the window, shutting out the noise. What he’d been hearing was strange to him, but the sound itself wasn’t strange. It was only strange to someone who wasn’t familiar with it. Because he didn’t know. He didn’t know that a mother could be so grief-stricken about her child.

  Gunther’s parents were startled when Dr Hoppe paid them a visit. Their son was lying in an open coffin at home, for people to come and pay their last respects. The doctor was one of the first to drop by.

  ‘My condolences,’ he said. ‘I know how you must feel.’

  His visit and his words moved them. Lothar and Vera Weber thought that he showed great courage in coming to express his sympathy when he was going through such a hard time himself, and would shortly be losing not one child but three. That was why they did not have the heart to ask him if he would like to go and say goodbye to their son in person. They thought it would bring up too many emotions for him. But then he himself asked to see the boy.

  ‘Would you like me to come with you?’ Lothar suggested.

  But that wasn’t necessary. Dr Hoppe went in by himself, disappearing behind the heavy dark drapes that screened off the coffin. The doctor did not stay long, but the parents quite understood. They offered him coffee, but he politely declined.

  ‘If ever I can be of assistance,’ he said finally, ‘please do not hesitate to contact me. You need not abide by God’s will.’

  Then he left, leaving Gunther’s parents somewhat bewildered.

  He had used the scalpel to make a quick incision in the scrotum, about two centimetres long. The scrotum was shrivelled, stiffened, as when a boy is dunked in icy water, an instinctive somatic reaction to protect the testicles. It worked to keep the temperature constant a little longer, which meant that some of the tissue might possibly still be viable. It was a gamble, but a reasonable one. And if not, at least he’d have some sperm to work with.

  The two testicles were the size and shape of dried white beans that had been soaked in water too long. Working quickly, he snipped them free of the sperm duct and then slipped them into a jar filled with cotton wool. The jar disappeared into the breast pocket of his coat.

  He zipped up the boy’s trousers again without making a sound.

  Now he’d have to be quick.

  We must abide by God’s will.

  That was what was written at the top of the mourning card Victor had found in his letter box that morning, before setting out to see the Webers.

  He had taken it as a fresh challenge. As if someone had thrown down the gauntlet again.

  It made everything that had gone before seem quite irrelevant.

  3

  Seeing them for the first time was a tremendous shock. The boys looked old, terribly old, largely on account of their skin, which seemed to be made of dried-out leather. They were emaciated, truly skin over bone. Rex took it all in at a single glance; he tried to look away, but he found his eyes were drawn back irresistibly. And it wasn’t as a scientist that he was staring at them, but as a voyeur.

  Victor, for his part, was every inch the scientist when it came to the children. He talked about them as if they were research specimens, even when they were standing right in front of him. It was dreadful, and Rex felt very uneasy the whole time. The doctor lined up the three boys in a row and then pointed out the details of their physical similarity: the shape of the outer ear, the position of the milk teeth, the pattern of veins on the skull and the misshapen nose and upper lip.

  Next he showed Rex the variations, but stressed that these had arisen at a much later date. There were wrinkles and grooves in the parched skin that were not exactly alike, and there were brown spots on the back of their gnarled hands that differed in size and shape. Victor didn’t explain this, but Rex assumed they must be age spots.

  He noticed, moreover, that one of the boys had more of these liver spots than the other two, which made him wonder if the ageing process might be more rapid in this boy’s case. The same boy also had a scar on the back of his head, which according to the doctor was the result of a fall, and another on his back, the result of a surgical procedure on one of his kidneys - an experiment that had not proved conclusive, Victor admitted.

  But prior to that, before the ageing process had really set in, he repeated emphatically, you couldn’t tell them apart at all. Indeed they were so alike that he’d had to tag them. The way we do with mice, he added without even a grain of irony in his voice, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Lifting up the boys’ shirts, he showed Rex the dots tattooed on their backs: one dot for Michael, the firstborn, two dots for Gabriel and three dots for Raphael.

  ‘Otherwise known as Victor One, Victor Two and Victor Three,’ he added.

  Cremer’s eyes were drawn to the boys’ chests. Even from far away he was able to count the ribs; the thin skin was stretched over them like a garment draped over a coat rack. Later he found out that the boys weighed just thirteen kilos each. Thirteen kilos for a height of 1.05 metres; but even that dimension was rapidly dwindling, for the children’s spines were becoming more and more crooked.

  V1, V2 or V3. That was how the Polaroids in the photograph albums were labelled. Rex was shown these when he and the doctor returned to the consultation room. Twelve albums filled with photos. Beneath each photo a date, and, again, V1, V2 or V3.

  Three children’s lives, meticulously recorded. No, that was wrong: it wasn’t about the children’s lives, because the photographs bore no resemblance to family snapshots. These were pieces of a jigsaw - a jigsaw showing parts of the children’s bodies, to demonstrate the similarities between the three boys at every stage of their life. But as he leafed through the endless series of pictures, what struck Rex was mainly the boys’ senescence, rather than their resemblance, as if the albums spanned not four, but eighty, years.

  Actually, he wished he could leave, but Victor just went on talking and explaining non-stop, repeating himself more than once. He told his story soberly and without a trace of emotion, and Rex listened to him with astonishment. Victor told him about the boys’ intelligence, about their
talent for languages, and their memory. In all those things, said Victor, he recognised himself. He had made sure their talents were encouraged, so that they too would later be able to use their knowledge and insight in the service of humanity. That was how he’d phrased it: ‘in the service of humanity’. And, moreover, he had said ‘they too’.

  Rex shuddered, but held his tongue, because the doctor wasn’t finished. He had started telling him what the next steps would be. In order to solve the telomere problem, he was considering using nerve cells as the donor material instead of skin cells. Nerve cells split far fewer times than other cells; this should automatically solve the telomere problem. Bone cells would do as well, since those grew more slowly than other cells. The same held true for the sex organs, because their cells only began to divide at a later stage, at puberty, meaning the cells were younger, and their telomeres longer. The simplicity and logic of his reasoning again reminded Rex why he had given Victor carte blanche in the past. He was, and remained, far ahead of his time.

  Rex felt himself getting sucked in again, slowly but surely. Victor’s nasal drone seemed to be having the effect of making him even more receptive to what Victor had to say. I must get out of here. The thought suddenly popped into his head. I’ve got to get out of here, before I become even more involved.

  He stood up promptly and said, ‘I can’t stay any longer; I have to get back.’

  He knew it sounded like a fib. It was obvious he was looking for a way to escape.

  But Victor did not try to detain him; on the contrary, he stood up and walked him to the door. Rex was outside before he knew it, but once the gate had shut behind him and he was sitting in his car, he didn’t drive off immediately. Something was stopping him. Not what Victor had told him, but what the children had said: a few words that had upset him more than all of Victor’s assertions combined.