The Angel Maker Page 8

  He pondered an instant before answering her. ‘In Eupen.’

  ‘At the Christian Brothers’ School?’

  He nodded.

  ‘As a boarder?’

  Again he nodded.

  She knew the school, or at least its reputation. The students received a strict Catholic upbringing, and in the doctor’s case it had clearly left its mark. She was curious to know what his experience of the school had been like.

  ‘What did you think of—’ she began, but he interrupted her.

  ‘I have a great deal of work to do, Frau Maenhout. Another time.’

  Just for a minute she had thought she might forge a crack in the wall he had built up around himself, but once again she’d been wrong.

  ‘Another time,’ she repeated.

  Florent Keuning needed just three days to transform one of the first-floor rooms of the doctor’s house into a functional classroom. He painted the ceiling and walls, scoured and polished the old floorboards, scrubbed the windows’ rusty hinges and hung up the blackboard Dr Hoppe had ordered together with three wooden school desks and a teacher’s lectern. To his chagrin, in all this time he had not seen the children, and had just about given up hope when on the last day they suddenly appeared in the classroom, no doubt lured there by his voice when he’d deliberately called out, ‘Right, I’m done! The doctor’s sons will be so happy!’

  The boys made straight for the three desks, not even glancing in his direction. Each sat down at his desk although, being so small and slight, they could all easily have fitted at one. Their feet did not reach the ground, so that their short little legs dangled under the bench. They trailed their fingers across the wood as the handyman stared wide-eyed at the three bald heads. The blue blood vessels beneath the frail skin reminded him of the jagged veins running through certain types of marble.

  The boys now turned their attention from the desk tops to the little hooks provided for hanging their schoolbags, then to the shelves underneath, where they would stow their books and notebooks, then to the grooves running along the backs of the desk tops.

  ‘That’s for your pencils and pens,’ said Florent. At the sound of his voice, the three boys glanced up briefly. The handyman was shocked at what he saw. Only the scars on their upper lips and the flattened noses still conformed to the image he had carried around with him since the last time he’d done work for the doctor. Of course the children were two years older now, but even in that space of time there was no way they should have changed this much. They seemed to have grown much, much older, and that impression was caused not just by their baldness, but also by the big dark bags under their eyes, which made their faces look drawn, as well as the fact that they didn’t have any eyebrows. It was as if all three were wearing masks, with just two round holes cut out for the eyes. This added to the impression that their heads did not really belong to their bodies. In spite of these changes, however, the three boys were still identical, and the handyman, even with his keen eye, so expert at telling if something was crooked or straight, was unable to detect the slightest difference. Since all three of them were gazing at him as if they hadn’t understood what he’d said, he stepped forward, took the pencil from behind his right ear, and placed it in the groove in the middle desk.

  ‘See, that’s what I mean,’ he said.

  The boy sitting at the desk frowned. ‘Well of course we know that,’ he said, annoyed. ‘D’you think we’re stupid?’

  Florent was startled again, this time by the voice, which sounded like the doctor’s, except that it was much higher, and therefore had the unpleasant screech of someone scratching his nails down a blackboard.

  ‘We already know how to read and write,’ said one of the other two. He slipped off his bench and walked to the blackboard.

  ‘There’s some chalk in the tray,’ said the handyman awkwardly.

  The boy picked out a piece of blue chalk from the tray and, standing on tiptoe, began to write. A swollen vein ran right around the back of his skull from one ear to the other, like a cord for spectacles. The other boys also darted up to the blackboard to stand next to their brother, chalk in hand. They had the same large vein wrapped around the back of their heads. Florent noticed that all three were left-handed and were still wearing the coloured wristbands.

  ‘Are you three upstairs?’ Charlotte Maenhout’s voice rang out suddenly.

  There was no reaction from the toddlers.

  ‘Yes they’re up here,’ called Florent.

  ‘Just as I thought.’ He heard her footsteps reverberating on the stairs. A moment later her large frame appeared in the doorway. She was carrying a cardboard box under one arm and a roll of paper under the other.

  ‘Hello, Florent,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you’re still here. Could you help me to hang up this picture?’ She gestured with her head at the roll under her right arm.

  The handyman nodded and hastened to the door. He look the paper from her, pointed his thumb at the three boys standing at the blackboard and whispered, ‘They already know how to read and write.’

  ‘They can count, as well,’ she said briskly. ‘So you’d better watch out when you make out your bill.’

  He looked at her in dismay.

  ‘It’s a joke,’ she said, tapping him playfully on the shoulder.

  ‘What’s it say?’ cried one of the boys. He had turned around and was pointing his piece of chalk at the roll. His eyes bulged so dangerously they looked as if they might pop out of their sockets at any moment. The handyman looked the other way so that he wouldn’t be seen to be staring.

  ‘The map of Europe,’ said Frau Maenhout.

  ‘The map of Europe?’ asked Florent.

  ‘It was the only poster they were willing to part with at the school,’ she confided to him. Then, turning to the children, she announced in a loud voice, ‘And it’s a good thing too, because the boys want to be world travellers - isn’t that right?’

  ‘Yeah, we’re going ever so far away,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Well then, I’d better hang this map up right away, so you can get started,’ said the handyman, looking for a spot on the wall. ‘Where do you want it, Frau Maenhout? By the window?’

  ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ she said.

  ‘Are you going to be teaching them?’

  ‘The doctor wants me to. They’d only be wasting their time at nursery school.’

  ‘He’s right about that. If they’re really so bright, it’d probably be counter-productive. Over here?’ He pointed his drill at a spot on the wall. Frau Maenhout nodded.

  He glanced at the doctor’s sons. The sound of the electric drill didn’t seem to bother them. He felt two conflicting emotions. On the one hand he was unsettled by the boys’ physical appearance, but on the other he was glad to have seen them. Later, at the Café Terminus, the other patrons would hang on his every word. Still, he wished he had something more to tell them.

  ‘Frau Maenhout,’ he said softly, then went on in a whisper, ‘is there something wrong with them? I mean, they look so . . . uh . . . different.’

  Taking a deep breath, Frau Maenhout nodded coolly. ‘The doctor says it has something to do with their chromosomes.’

  ‘Chromosomes?’

  ‘I don’t quite get it either, but it’s to do with their genes. Every human cell has a number of chromosomes - twenty-three, to be exact - and every time a cell splits, the chromosomes split as well - that’s the way information is transmitted to the next cell.’

  ‘You’ve already lost me, Frau Maenhout,’ he whispered. ‘But can’t the doctor do something about it?’

  ‘He’s working on it, he says. It’s going to be all right in the end.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good,’ he said, with genuine relief.

  He hung the map up on the hook, and was about to ask another question when Frau Maenhout called out to the little ones, ‘Look here, it’s the map of Europe!’

  All three looked round and gazed at the map, which showed the countries of
Europe in different colours, and the larger cities as red dots.

  ‘This is where we are,’ she said, tapping a finger at the spot where the borders of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands converged.

  ‘The three borders!’ cried Florent enthusiastically, as if giving an answer to a difficult question. He glanced at his watch. The Terminus was about to open. ‘I have to go, Frau Maenhout. I have to stop by Martha’s shop before it closes. She has a job for me as well.’

  ‘Oh, can’t you please wait a moment? I’ve got another thing I’d like you to hang up.’ She walked over to the teacher’s desk, where she had deposited the cardboard box. She took off the lid, rummaged around in it and took out a cross.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked one of the boys.

  ‘This is Jesus,’ she said.

  ‘The son of a carpenter,’ Florent added with a wink, waving his hammer.

  ‘Why’s he hanging on a cross?’ asked the boy.

  ‘I’ll tell you another time,’ said Frau Maenhout. ‘Herr Florent is in a hurry.’ She turned round and pointed to a spot over the door. ‘Over there perhaps,’ she said.

  Florent nodded, moved his stepladder over to the door and began hammering a nail into the wall. ‘Will you be teaching them religion as well?’ he asked, over his shoulder.

  ‘The doctor has asked me to.’

  ‘Is that so? I didn’t know the doctor was a religious man.’ Another piece of news to tell the others. Everyone at the Terminus would be amazed.

  ‘Oh, he is, Florent. Just because someone doesn’t go to church, it doesn’t mean he isn’t devout.’

  ‘He doesn’t have the time to go to church, of course.’

  ‘That’s right, Florent.’

  She handed him the cross, and he hooked it on the nail.

  ‘There, that’ll hold for the next thousand years,’ he said, smiling, as he climbed down the ladder. He picked up his tool chest, and, sticking his other arm through the stepladder’s treads, slung it over his shoulder. ‘If you have any other job for me to do, Frau Maenhout, you just let me know.’

  Nodding, he took his leave, sneaking one last look at the boys. Derelict. That was the word that suddenly came into his head. They looked derelict. Like an abandoned house that’s gone to ruin after being battered for years by rain and wind.

  The next day Frau Maenhout found the cross lying in the top drawer of her desk. Her eyes went automatically to the spot above the door, where even the nail it had hung from had disappeared. She had a hunch, which was confirmed at the end of the day, when she mentioned the incident to Dr Hoppe.

  ‘Yes, I did that,’ was his reply.

  She immediately regretted having been so discreet with Florent Keuning the day before. When he’d started asking nosy questions, she had been tempted to tell him other, less flattering, things about the doctor. But she knew that the ‘truth’ as she saw it might very well be construed as slander, and that whatever she said would eventually reach the doctor’s ears.

  ‘Why did you take down the cross? I thought you wanted me to tell your children about Jesus.’

  ‘About what he did. You have to tell them about his deeds. All the good things he did. Not about his death.’

  ‘Death is a part of life,’ she replied. ‘Surely you know that?’

  ‘True, true. But even if that’s so, we don’t have to be confronted with it all the time?’

  ‘It’s just symbolic.’ Her voice had gone up a register.

  ‘He was betrayed by God,’ the doctor said abruptly. He hadn’t even heard her remark. He hadn’t even looked up.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘God did nothing to save Him when He was on the cross. His own son. Is that really the image we want to preserve? Must we really be reminded of it?’

  She remembered the discussion they’d had a few days earlier, when he had requested that she teach the boys about Jesus but not about God. So was that the reason? Because God had done nothing to save Jesus from the cross?

  ‘You are wrong.’ She said it adamantly, and was surprised at herself. It was the first time she had dared to contradict the doctor point-blank. She knew why she had suddenly found the guts to do so, as well: because she felt as if she were dealing with one of her pupils; a little boy, to whom she was supposed to teach certain things.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ she repeated; ‘the cross is a symbol of Jesus’ suffering.’

  ‘See? That’s what I mean. Surely we don’t need to be confronted with his suffering all the time?’

  ‘Yes we do. So that we’ll never forget that He gave His life for us.’

  It was as if someone had grabbed the doctor by the hair and yanked his head up. Something in what she’d said must have hit home.

  ‘In sacrificing His life,’ she continued, ‘He relieved man of his sins. And by ascending to heaven He demonstrated that He is beyond both life and death. And that He will be there for ever, for everyone. That is why we commemorate His death. That is why we are obliged to honour the cross.’ Then she added emphatically, echoing what the doctor had once said to her, ‘We. Everyone. Humankind.’

  Her explanation was slightly simplistic, as if she were indeed addressing a little boy, but the doctor’s reaction was childish too. He shook his head and then stomped off, leaving her standing there, speechless.

  Charlotte Maenhout did not hang the cross back up. She didn’t want to provoke the doctor, so she concentrated on the lessons instead. In fact, she’d much rather have seen the boys playing games or having fun with building blocks all day, as they were supposed to do at their age, but as they were so eager to learn, practically begging her to teach them more, she continued to do so, and with the utmost dedication, even though she realised that she was thereby furthering their father’s ambition to turn them into some kind of prodigy.

  Classroom time was largely taken up with reading and arithmetic, both oral and written, although it was clearly too soon for the latter - physically the triplets were still toddlers, and their motor skills were not sufficiently developed. She had not yet added religious instruction to the curriculum. The things the doctor had said to her over the past few days had made her hesitate. Anyway, the boys had more than enough to do with reading, sums and oral exercises - they couldn’t seem to get enough. Still, there was one subject that captured their interest over anything else. The mere sound of it set their minds racing: world geography. At the beginning of the week she would let one of them point to a country on the map, and would then tell them a few facts about it, such as the names of the major cities and rivers. They would roll the names around their tongues as if they were sweets, committing them to memory. The rest of the week she would devote an hour every day to telling them about that country, showing them pictures or drawings of buildings like the Dom in Cologne or Paris’s Notre-Dame, and the boys would stare at the pictures for a long time, fascinated.

  She was, of course, only sharpening their longing to see more of the wide world in this way; but she was determined to take them outside, beyond the gate, beyond the village. Even though their father had yet to give his permission for such a venture, she still had hope. After all, the doctor frequently asked her about the progress his sons were making. With justifiable pride she would tell him about the new words the boys had learned, and then she would get them to read from one of the books she borrowed from the Hergenrath lending library every Saturday. The doctor expressed his satisfaction in his typical manner - that is to say, without much enthusiasm; but the fact that he did, at her urging, spend half an hour or so helping the children with their reading each day was a sign that she had his full support.

  His reaction to the news that his sons had begun to do sums wasn’t quite what she’d expected. ‘Show me,’ he’d said.

  The boys had gone to the classroom to fetch the wooden blocks they used for counting, and he’d given them a few simple sums to do. As if performing some magic trick, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael pushed the blocks around, arranging them in different
configurations, speedily arriving at the correct answer every time. It was the doctor’s own idea to continue this little ritual each day after she went home, which came as a pleasant surprise to Charlotte. It seemed that he was finally trying to get closer to his children, as if he had finally acknowledged them.

  ‘Some men don’t know what to do with little kids,’ opined Hannah Kuijk, with whom she was still in the habit of discussing such developments. ‘They don’t have the patience. To them children are little robots that produce nothing but noise and shit. It isn’t until their children are a bit older and wiser - and so, in their eyes, more human - that they finally learn how to relate to them.’

  Alas, Hannah’s predictions were not borne out by what came to pass, and Dr Hoppe’s involvement lasted only a short while. He kept it up for two to three months, working with his sons on a daily basis; but after that he began to skip a day here and there. The increasingly frequent excuse was that he was too busy. The boys would confirm this: their father had been poring over books with difficult words or long columns of numbers, or he had spent the entire time working in the lab, leaving them to do their homework at the desk in his office.

  Over the next few weeks he even stopped apologising for his neglect, and Frau Maenhout had to find out from the children whether or not he’d had any time to read or do sums with them.

  She was sorry that the doctor’s interest in his sons’ progress was abating; still, it did give her the freedom to do whatever she thought fit in the classroom. So one fine morning she opened a children’s Bible and proceeded to tell Michael, Gabriel and Raphael the story of Creation, just as she had always done with her pupils at the start of the school year. She did not tell them about Jesus yet - not out of spite, but simply because she was following the order of the Bible. So the following day she continued with the story of Adam and Eve, and the next she told them about the Fall. Then came Cain and Abel, the Flood and the Tower of Babel. She read to the boys from the children’s Bible for at most fifteen minutes a day, and sometimes even less than that, because if she heard Dr Hoppe’s footsteps on the stairs, she’d clap the book shut and hastily put it away, even if Moses was on the verge of cleaving the Red Sea in two or Abraham was raising the knife in the air to kill his only son Isaac.