‘Raphael!’ she cried, panicked. She wanted to gather him in her arms, but didn’t dare. ‘Raphael! Raphael!’
Then she rushed from the room.
‘Doctor! Doctor!’ She ran down the stairs. ‘Doctor!’
The office door opened just as she reached the bottom of the stairs.
‘Raphael!’ she cried. ‘He can’t breathe! He’s dying!’
The doctor nodded.
‘You have to do something!’ she screamed. ‘Help him! Why won’t you help him!’
Again he nodded, and then stirred himself. But slowly. Very slowly. She stormed up the stairs again, hoping to get him moving. At the door to the room, she stopped. The doctor was coming up the stairs. One tread, then the next. Peering into the room, she saw that Raphael was flat on his back in the bed. As soon as the doctor had made it up the stairs, she stepped aside to let him pass.
He leaned down over Raphael and checked his pulse. Anxiously she clapped her hands to her mouth. Minutes seemed to pass before he let the arm drop. Then he turned to her: ‘It is not yet time. God wants to torment him a while longer.’
That night and all the next day she barely left Raphael and Gabriel’s side. She sat on a chair by the bed and kept watch. The boys slept almost the entire time, and they were very restless in their sleep. They kept moving their hands about, as if they were trying to climb onto something. They were also breathing heavily - so heavily that every time one of them stopped making any noise, she feared that he had stopped breathing altogether. Every so often she’d wipe the drool from their mouths and chins, or dab the sweat from their foreheads. Every so often she’d simply reach out and touch them.
During those hours of vigil she tried to read the Bible, but she couldn’t concentrate. She kept having to stop and gaze at Raphael and Gabriel, even though it just tore her up with grief.
The boys woke up a few times. Then she would change them and give them something to eat. A sip of milk, a mouthful of soup or a bite of bread that she’d soaked in the soup. But they took in very little. A crumb of bread, a teaspoon of milk or soup.
‘Come on, eat something, please eat,’ she said, but insisting did not help. Swallowing seemed to hurt them, as did sitting up. She even had the impression that opening their eyes was arduous.
Their deterioration was faster than she’d ever have expected.
A few days. A week, maybe.
She grew more and more desperate. She felt it as an ache in her belly. She had the constant urge, as she used to have, to punch herself in the stomach, as if that would make everything all right again. At a certain point she even wished that she could just pick up the boys as they lay there and stuff them back inside her stomach, so that she might give birth to them again, and so give them a fresh chance at life.
She was waiting for the right moment to tell them she was their mother. She felt she had to tell them. But every time the opportunity presented itself, she faltered. Maybe the boys wouldn’t want to know. Maybe they had a picture in their minds of what their mother was like and would be disappointed, just as she had walked around with a picture of what they were like, only to find out that they were quite different. Yet she wasn’t disappointed. So maybe they wouldn’t be either.
She told them late the next day, a Monday. She had not seen the doctor, as he’d stayed downstairs all day long, mostly in the office or in the room next to it. At five o’clock he’d had some visitors: a man and a woman. She had heard their voices, but hadn’t been able to follow the conversation.
When the couple left the house, the boys woke up. She gave them some water to drink and wiped their faces clean with a facecloth. Both were burning hot.
‘I have to tell you something.’
She had no idea if she had their attention. Their eyes were open, but they did not seem to be looking at anything.
‘I’m your mother.’ As she said it, she felt a wave of relief. As if she hadn’t really been their mother until that moment. She instinctively started stroking her stomach as she gazed at her offspring.
She had not expected much of a reaction from them. But something. Just a nod, or a faint smile. That was all she needed.
‘Your mother,’ she said again.
If only she knew that they had understood. That would have been enough.
Perhaps they didn’t believe her. Perhaps the doctor had told them they didn’t have a mother. As he had told her. Or perhaps they were simply incapable of taking anything in any longer. That would be even worse.
She felt as depressed now as she had been relieved just a moment ago. She wasn’t their mother. She had never been, because she had never been there for them. In that sense the doctor was right.
She looked at the children again. She wanted one more night alone with them. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask? Just one more night. And then she would go for help. She would give them up for good, and accept her penance.
7
They’d expected that the doctor would kick the woman out in two seconds flat. That he had even let her in had been quite a surprise.
‘We’ve got to warn him about her,’ said Maria Moresnet. She had forbidden her sons to play in the street as long as that woman was still around.
‘Oh, he’ll realise soon enough that there’s something not right with her,’ Rosette Bayer reassured her. ‘Let’s just wait and see.’
Two hours went by before they saw her again. She suddenly appeared in the doorway.
‘Over there. Look. There she is.’
She deposited some bags of rubbish outside the door and went back inside. Rosette and Maria were flabbergasted.
An hour later they decided to call the doctor. Maria dialled his number and he did pick up, which was fortunate, since several villagers had recently tried to reach him but with no luck.
She came straight to the point: ‘Doctor, you’d better watch out for that woman who’s in your house. She says things. She claims . . . all sorts of things. She bothered my boys.’
‘Is that so?’
‘She thought that my kids were your kids. She says she’s their mother. But it’s not true, is it?’
‘No, it isn’t true. She is not their mother.’
‘Just as I thought. But in that case you shouldn’t be letting her near them.’
‘She is with them, and she’s staying. That’s what she says.’
‘Watch out. She’ll do more harm than good.’
There was silence on the other end of the line.
‘I’ll try to remember that,’ the doctor finally said, and then he hung up.
For the next few hours the conversation in the Café Terminus revolved around the woman who had just appeared out of nowhere, as Maria put it. They soon decided that Dr Hoppe must know the woman, because he would not have let her see his children otherwise. But she wasn’t the mother, no matter what she said.
‘I bet she can’t have children of her own, and she’s talked herself into imagining all sorts of things,’ said Léon Huysmans, who’d once read that the desire for a baby can drive a childless woman insane.
‘Women really can’t help it,’ said Maria. ‘It’s because of their . . . what’s it called . . . ?’
‘Hormones. Their hormones,’ said Léon Huysmans.
‘That’s what I meant. In her case they’ve run amuck, probably. She even told us there was no man involved. Totally off her rocker. And yet - just think, wouldn’t that be something? If women no longer needed a man, to have children? Then we’d be free to do as we pleased.’
‘You wouldn’t get through a single day without a man, Maria!’ Jacques Meekers shouted at her.
‘Oh yes I would, Jacques, easily!’
‘I think it’s going to be possible, in the future,’ said Léon Huysmans. ‘Women will be able to have children without a man. They’re already close to that in America.’
‘In America they can do anything,’ said René Moresnet.
‘Ah, so the women over there get preggers by immacula
te conception! ’ cried Meekers, snorting with laughter.
‘Meekers, behave yourself!’ responded Maria, but she too couldn’t help laughing.
The sound of the door opening and closing made everyone look up. Lothar Weber had risen to his feet and left without a word. Looking out of the window, René Moresnet saw him cross the street with his head down.
‘We shouldn’t have been talking that way,’ said the café’ owner. ‘How would you like it if you suddenly had to go through life childless, and all anyone around you ever talked about was having kids and more kids?’
‘I thought he was doing better,’ said Jacques Meekers. ‘He’d started smiling again, once in a while.’
‘These things keep festering, Jacques. Take his wife, for instance.’
Meekers nodded, but said nothing. Vera Weber had been visiting the doctor almost every week over the past few months. Everyone knew she was suffering from depression, but no one dared say so. The closest they came to it was to say she had fallen into a funk.
Lothar Weber hadn’t liked the whole idea from the very start.
‘You can be present during the procedure,’ Dr Hoppe had said, ‘but we won’t be needing your sperm.’
Not only didn’t he like it, he didn’t get it either. How could the doctor arrange for him to have a son, if his input wasn’t necessary? At the next appointment he had asked about it again, just to make sure, but his mind had not been put at ease.
‘It’s simply a question of technique. Even your wife’s eggs are not really necessary, in principle. It can just as easily be done with donor egg cells. But we’ll try with your wife’s eggs to start with.’
‘But how, Doctor? How?’
‘The hormones she is receiving now will cause the egg cells to ripen . . .’
‘I mean, how are you going to make a baby? Out of what? Not out of clay?’
‘Out of genetic material. DNA.’
‘DNA?’
‘Deoxyribonucleic acid.’
Lothar had nodded, even though he didn’t get it at all. His wife had kicked him in the shins - twice. She was absolutely set on going ahead. It was the hormones that did it, Lothar thought, because in the beginning it was she who had been most hesitant. But once the doctor had given her the first injection, she’d quickly come round. It was true that she had turned quite moody, biting Lothar’s head off over the slightest little thing, but that too was probably just the hormones.
The hormones were also responsible for her hefty weight gain: fourteen kilos in four months. She almost looked pregnant. She’d said it herself one day, and as she said it, he’d caught a glint in her eye.
He, on the other hand, still wasn’t sure - until that afternoon in the Terminus. What Léon Huysmans said had startled him. He had rushed out of the café to go home and tell his wife.
‘In America they’ve been doing it for a while.’
‘What?’
‘What the doctor’s doing. Without a man, or anything.’
‘You haven’t told anyone, have you?’ she replied in dismay. She didn’t want anyone to know that she was in treatment.
‘No, no, they were the ones who started talking about it. Because there was a woman at the doctor’s who—’
‘Who said she was the mother of his children. I heard. Helga Barnard rang me. Is she still there? At the doctor’s?’
‘Yes, she’s still there.’
‘I hope she’s gone by tomorrow.’
‘She probably will be.’
The problem wasn’t anything he had done. That Victor was sure of. He was being thwarted. God was just not going to give in without a fight. At least it did confirm that he, Victor Hoppe, was on the right track, because God would never have put up such a fight otherwise. It had all started with the questionable viability of Gunther Weber’s cells. He had taken it as an omen. But then he had come to see it as an extra challenge, and since he did manage in the end to overcome that snag, he decided that that had been the worst of it. That was why he felt able to promise the parents they would have a baby in a year’s time, identical in every way to Gunther, only without his hearing disability.
He’d been a bit overconfident, although he didn’t see it that way. Or did not want to see it. Or could not see it. In any case, by Monday, 15 May 1989, one week before the four months were over, he still had not succeeded in deciphering the DNA code, and so had not been able to identify the gene with the deafness mutation.
He could have farmed out that step - to Rex Cremer, for instance, who had better equipment in Cologne, and more experience with the new technique - but Victor wanted to do everything himself. And he might have done it, too, if he had given himself more time. For once, he had raised the bar too high.
The thought that he too might have his limitations, that he too might possibly fail some time, or run out of luck once in a while - none of that ever occurred to him. No, in his eyes, it was obstruction, pure and simple. God would not relinquish the code of life to him without a struggle. It was something Victor understood all too well. After all, he would never have dreamed of giving everything he knew away either.
But since God was putting up such resistance, he was forced into a decision in the end. For there was only a week to go before he would have to implant an embryo of at least five days’ gestation into the mother’s womb, which left him only two days to decipher the code and find the error. That was too little time.
For that reason, he decided to stop trying to find it. He wasn’t admitting defeat - no, he was merely regrouping. As if God had tried to smite him, but had just managed to nick him a little with his sword. Nothing life-threatening. A stab in the arm. Or a cut in his side. Not a defeat but an injury. That was how he saw it. And since it was merely an injury, he could still strike back. He wouldn’t win this time, perhaps, but he could at least take a swing at God. If he resurrected Gunther Weber, giving back the life that God had taken from the boy, then God and he would be quits. And the boy would have to have a full life, naturally. He’d be deaf, but he would not grow old before his time. Not this one! He’d have the one mutation, but not the other. That was what it came down to: deafness, but normal telomeres. The first was unavoidable; the second wasn’t. That was the challenge. But it wasn’t hard. For he practically had it in the bag.
Lothar accompanied his wife to Dr Hoppe’s on 15 May. It was Whit Monday, but he had learned that the menstrual cycle did not take Sundays or holidays into account. Lothar would rather have stayed at home - seeing that he didn’t have a role in this anyway - but his wife had insisted, because she was scared, she told him. The doctor was going to poke all sorts of things up inside her, and she wanted her husband to be nearby in case something went wrong.
‘As long as I don’t have to watch,’ he’d said, under his breath.
Their appointment at the doctor’s was for five o’clock. The date and time had been decided on weeks ago. After the first month, during which Vera had had to keep track of her menstrual cycle on a calendar, the doctor had mapped out a strict timetable. If it all went according to plan, their next appointment would be five or six days from now. That was when the doctor would put one, perhaps two embryos back into her uterus. Male embryos. They would look like Gunther. In the beginning that had been their fervent hope, but now that the momentous day was almost at hand, it no longer seemed to matter as much. As long as the child was healthy - that, after all, was the most important thing.
One time, Vera had mentioned this to the doctor. She had only wanted to make things easier for him. ‘It doesn’t have to be a boy. He doesn’t have to look like Gunther.’
‘It has to be. It will be,’ the doctor had answered flatly.
After that, she’d kept quiet. Not only was she afraid of appearing ungrateful or of lacking faith in him; in saying aloud the name of her dead son, she had also suddenly seen him before her. Suddenly she missed him terribly, and the longing to hold him was so overpowering that she instantly regretted having told the doctor th
at the baby needn’t look like Gunther.
Still, what she wanted more than anything was a healthy baby. No defects; no disabilities; and so no hearing impediment either.
Lothar and Vera arrived at the doctor’s house at five o’clock sharp. Lothar felt a bit awkward, as if he, not his wife, were about to undergo the procedure. Now that the moment was at hand, he asked himself if they shouldn’t have tried the natural way first after all. Come to think of it, the subject had never even come up between them in the past four months. Nor had he made any overtures to her in bed. Perhaps that was another reason he was feeling slightly ill at ease: it troubled him to think the doctor would be fiddling with his wife - with him sitting right there - whereas he had not touched her in ages.
In the examination room Dr Hoppe had already set out everything needed for the procedure. Lothar sat down next to the desk, his back half-turned to the examination table on which his wife would be lying. He’d taken in the stirrups at a glance, and that was enough for him.
‘Just relax, Frau Weber,’ he heard Dr Hoppe say to her.
The doctor had just finished recapitulating what he was about to do, but Lothar was barely listening. As long as it’s over soon, he thought.
In the village, people assumed that his wife was in therapy with the doctor, being treated for depression. He had never contradicted them, because he knew Vera wouldn’t want that. She would rather they thought that than learn the real truth. He felt the same way. They were both still grief-stricken, but now that they had something to hold on to, something to look forward to, their grief had become more bearable. The emptiness was a little less empty. Something like that.
Behind his back he heard the sound of metal instruments being dropped into a metal dish, but there were other noises too. There was someone walking around in the house. Could it be the doctor’s boys? Or was it that woman? No one had seen her leave.
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