The Angel Maker Page 9

  The boys listened just as breathlessly to the Bible stories as they had to the fairy tales she used to tell them, and couldn’t stop talking about them afterwards. But Charlotte told them expressly that they must not talk about the stories to their father.

  ‘A secret. We have a secret,’ they cried, and Frau Maenhout realised that it was only a matter of time before they would shoot their mouths off. She’d have to see how she would talk herself out of that one.

  The doctor’s interest continued to flag, however, and in the end he no longer bothered to find out, either from his sons or from her, what went on in the classroom. When he did raise the subject with her, it was obviously more out of politeness than from any genuine concern. She was increasingly getting the sense that he was leaving it all up to her, not because he thought she was so good but, possibly, because he was hoping to distract her so that she wouldn’t notice what he was up to. For, after leaving his sons alone for a while, he had now gone back to putting them through all sorts of medical tests. Some new equipment had arrived, including an ultrasound and an X-ray machine, and more than ever he seemed to be treating his sons like guinea pigs. This in turn put a damper on his relationship with the children.

  For this, Hannah Kuijk came up with yet another explanation. This time she was sure she knew what ailed the doctor: fear of commitment. ‘Since losing his wife, he has grown fearful of putting his heart on the line again. He doesn’t want to experience the same hurt all over again, if something should happen to one of his sons.’

  It was a remark that kept preying on Frau Maenhout’s mind.

  It started when Raphael lost a tooth one day. There was nothing unusual about that, except that it was a little early for his age. He had been eating a sandwich and bit down on something hard. It turned out to be one of his milk teeth. Charlotte gave him a little glass jar in which to save the tooth, and later on he proudly showed the relic to his father.

  The doctor reacted by collapsing into a chair and staring blankly into space for several minutes.

  That was the turning point. Until then the triplets’ condition had been fairly stable and it had seemed as if everything was truly under control. From that moment on, the triplets’ health took a turn for the worse. Their joints ached. Their skin began to peel and brown spots appeared on the backs of their hands. They coughed a lot, and had frequent bouts of diarrhoea. And they were tired, even more than usual. Their minds were still as lively as ever. But how long would that last?

  He doesn’t want to experience the same hurt all over again, if something should happen to one of his sons. She couldn’t get Hannah’s words out of her mind. Was that why the doctor had stopped showing an interest in what the children were learning? - because there was no point to it?

  For weeks she walked around, agonising over the possibilities. In the end she finally found the courage to speak to him.

  She decided to come straight to the point. ‘How old will they be, Doctor?’

  She had given Michael, Gabriel and Raphael a project that would keep them occupied for a few minutes in the classroom. Surgery hours were over and the office door was ajar. The doctor was sitting at his desk, hunched over a pile of papers. He invited her to take a seat across from his desk, but she remained standing.

  Her question took him by surprise. ‘Who? The boys?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Why, they’ll be four in a few weeks. But surely you know that?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Then what do you mean?’

  There was nothing guarded in his voice, which made her doubt herself for a split second.

  ‘How long do they have left?’ she asked. From his expression and the way he shifted in his seat, she could tell she’d been right to trust her intuition; yet he tried to keep up the pretence. ‘How long do they have?’

  Now she had to stand her ground or he’d simply fob her off with some evasive comment or other. She had no proof, only a premonition, but she mustn’t let it show. ‘They’re aging very rapidly,’ she said.

  He did not reply.

  ‘Much too rapidly,’ she went on. ‘It isn’t normal. It’s as if . . .’ She had to search for the right words. ‘It’s as if every month they’re another year older.’

  ‘But I thought I’d explained it to you . . .’

  ‘I don’t need explanations!’ she burst out suddenly. ‘That’s no help at all! And I don’t want to hear that everything’s going to be all right either. Because it isn’t! Quite the contrary, it keeps getting worse. Surely you can see that for yourself!’

  She was startled by her passionate outburst, but it did seem to have made an impact. Leaning back in his chair, the doctor raised his hand to his beard, inhaled deeply a few times and then exhaled through flared nostrils. His hand sank from his chin along his throat down to his chest.

  ‘How long do they have left?’ she asked again. She lowered her voice because she realised the children could have heard her.

  The doctor leaned forward and folded his hands on the desk top. He must have had to break this kind of news before, to patients with some incurable illness.

  ‘The way it looks now, which doesn’t really mean much, because it could—’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘One, possibly two years.’

  ‘One . . . two years?’

  He nodded, no more.

  ‘So they’ll be lucky to reach the age of six,’ she said, more to herself than to the doctor, as she collapsed into a chair. Conflicting feelings beset her: on the one hand there was the relief of knowing the truth at last; on the other, that truth made her break into a cold sweat. But now that she’d got him to talk, she had to go on.

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘Since shortly after their birth.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because it’s going to be all right. The latest tests—’

  ‘All your tests are useless! The only thing you’ve achieved with those tests has been to make your sons afraid of you!’ She couldn’t stop herself, but she saw no reason to rein herself in now. Her fury served as a release for the grief she did not want to show him.

  ‘I am trying to save them,’ said the doctor calmly. ‘That is my goal. I want to cure them. Surely that’s good.’

  ‘They should go to hospital,’ she said, after taking a few deep breaths - in, out.

  ‘I know what is right,’ she heard him say firmly. ‘They are not going to any hospital.’

  ‘You could get a second opinion,’ she tried, pleading.

  ‘They’re all bunglers!’

  That made her jump. It was the first time she’d ever heard him raise his voice. His exclamation was accompanied by a sudden movement of the arms and hands, as if he’d had an electric shock. All of a sudden she was afraid of him. That too was new. She had never felt comfortable around him, but she had never been scared of him before. Slowly she stood up.

  He heard her push back her chair and said, without looking up, almost as if he were talking to himself, ‘Time. I need time. That’s all.’

  She really wanted to leave without saying another word, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking one last thing, even though she knew it was naive of her. ‘What are their chances, percentage-wise?’

  ‘I don’t deal in probabilities. My starting point is the assumption that it will be all right. As it has always been.’

  She went back to the classroom in a daze. There, she just about managed to keep herself together, even though every time she looked at one of the boys, she imagined she could see death in his eyes.

  When she got home, she collapsed. She would have liked to ring Hannah for support and advice, but in the end she didn’t. She wanted to keep the news to herself for now. Once she’d told someone else, it would all become so final, and then all hope of recovery would be lost. She vowed to herself that she would tell someone the moment she felt she could no longer bear it alone. And she also swore that in th
e meantime she would do everything in her power to make life as pleasant as possible for the children. Their fourth birthday was coming up in two weeks. And after that? After that, she had no idea.

  9

  Most of the villagers who had young children were understanding of the extreme measures the doctor took the morning after the birthday party. Some of the older ones brought up the death of Dr Hoppe’s father, albeit in the most veiled terms, and suggested that the sad lot of the doctor’s own sons provided the doctor with enough justification for his actions. Others weren’t so sure, but the one thing they did all agree on was that the doctor’s decision would only bring even more calamity upon the village. As for the events that had led to that decision, there had been several witnesses, and their testimonies were patched together to form a story.

  Boris Croiset, who came by car on account of his sprained ankle, had been the first to arrive at the birthday party that day - 29 September 1988. He was one of five lucky children who had found an invitation from the brothers Hoppe in their postboxes a few days earlier. Six-year-old Olaf Zweste, of Kirchstrasse, and his neighbour Reinhart Schoonbrodt, the same age, were also invited, as were the five-year-old twin brothers Michel and Marcel Moresnet, who had proudly shown off their invitation to the patrons of the Café Terminus. Judging from the messy penmanship, in big block letters, everyone could tell that it had been written by one of the birthday boys himself.

  That day, Frau Maenhout had led Boris into the kitchen, where the doctor’s three sons, wearing gold paper crowns on their heads, were sitting reading. They had been told to close their books and put them away, and had done so with obvious reluctance.

  ‘They were awfully big books,’ Boris reported later, indicating with his thumb and index finger a girth of about five centimetres. Since he had only just started to learn to read, he was unable to provide titles, but had recognised the picture of a balloon on one of the covers.

  Reinhart and Olaf had arrived together and had shaken hands with the birthday boys. Reinhart had noticed that all three had brown spots on the backs of their hands.

  ‘Freckles, just like the doctor’s,’ his mother supposed.

  They had given rather limp handshakes, too.

  Those seeking further information about the triplets’ appearance only heard what they already knew.

  ‘They were short, and skinny. You could have knocked them over with a feather.’

  ‘Their faces were very white, like clowns’ faces.’

  ‘Their eyes looked like frogs’ eyes.’

  ‘Their mouths were all crooked.’

  By the time Michel and Marcel had arrived, Dr Hoppe had joined them too. It was the first time the children had ever seen him without his doctor’s coat; around his neck, instead of the stethoscope, hung the Polaroid camera, for which Frau Maenhout had purchased several new film cartridges just the day before.

  Next, the birthday boys had opened their presents, while their father had snapped pictures of them. Boris had given them a game of snakes and ladders, Olaf a set of dominoes and from Michel and Marcel they had received some colouring books; these the brothers had put aside indifferently. Reinhart, whose father was a lorry driver, had brought each birthday boy a matrushka, one of those wooden dolls with another little doll inside, which in turn hides another and another.

  ‘Papa brought them back from Russia,’ he had told them when they started opening his presents. The threesome had suddenly perked up.

  ‘From Moscow?’ one of them asked. ‘Or from Leningrad?’

  ‘No, Russia,’ Reinhart said.

  After presents it was time for cake, one that Frau Maenhout had baked herself. She came in with it singing ‘Happy Birthday’, and all the children sang along. The cake had twelve candles.

  ‘Four for each birthday boy,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to blow them out all in one go, boys.’

  Michael, Gabriel and Raphael stood up and linked hands. The other children counted to three, and then the birthday boys tried to blow them out all in one go. More than half the candles remained lit.

  ‘Is that the best you can do?’ Michel Moresnet yelled, then blew out the remaining candles with one great puff.

  ‘He just wanted to help,’ Maria claimed in defence of her son later when she heard that the doctor’s children had burst into tears.

  The guests were then shown the classroom on the first floor. Frau Maenhout carried Boris up the stairs, on account of his ankle. After the children had been allowed to test out the desks, they split up into little groups. Gabriel and Raphael took Reinhart over to the map of Europe to show him where Russia lay. Then they asked him what other countries his father had been to, and told him that they came from Germany.

  Michael showed Olaf and Boris their exercise books, every page filled with sums, and reacted with surprise when Boris told him he only knew how to count to ten. Boris slunk off and joined Michel and Marcel; Frau Maenhout had given them some chalk to draw on the blackboard.

  Then Frau Maenhout had left to answer the telephone. At first she’d hesitated, listening to see if the doctor would answer it downstairs; then she’d gone to the top of the stairs and yelled down, ‘Doctor!’ but apparently he had heard neither the telephone nor her shout. So in the end she’d run down the stairs and answered the phone in the living room.

  Nobody has ever come forward to admit they were the one who called the doctor’s house and spoke to Charlotte Maenhout that day. The name of Irma Nüssbaum did come up, because she often rang Dr Hoppe for a telephone consultation, but she adamantly denied that it had been her. And Freddy Machon had seen Maria Moresnet making a phone call that afternoon from the Café Terminus, but Michel and Marcel’s mum swore that she’d been on the phone to the brewery, and later proved it by producing the delivery slip with the date and time of her order.

  It was only natural that nobody would admit to having made that phone call, because it was while Frau Maenhout was downstairs answering the phone that the drama took place on the first floor - a drama Michel and Marcel blamed squarely on the doctor’s sons.

  ‘Marcel saw there were nuts outside the window,’ Michel told his mother afterwards. ‘The whole tree was full of them. There were millions!’

  The old walnut tree that grew right next to the house did bear an extraordinary crop that year. The branches groaned under the weight of the clusters of nuts inside their husks, some of them almost the size of an apple. The tree had not been pruned for years, and the loftiest branches had grown up past the roof. In the days before the birthday party, the first nuts had started falling onto the roof and from inside the house the noise sometimes sounded like gunfire, according to some of the patients.

  ‘The three boys came and stood next to us,’ Michel went on, ‘and one of them said—’

  ‘Gabriel - it was Gabriel!’ Marcel piped up.

  ‘Gabriel said he was going to pick us a nut.’

  ‘We told him he mustn’t . . .’

  ‘. . . but then the other one grabbed a chair and put it under the window.’

  ‘Gabriel climbed up on it and opened the window.’

  ‘He reached out and . . .’

  ‘. . . then the chair slipped under him and he . . .’

  The doctor had been in the laboratory, and just before the crash he had seen a gold paper crown wafting down past his window. Then there was the loud crack of branches snapping, and in a flash he saw a body come tumbling down, followed by a dull thud. The doctor rushed outside, and Frau Maenhout must have heard it too, for she came racing out to the garden in a panic.

  Irma Nüssbaum had stepped out of her house at practically the same moment - exacerbating the suspicion that it was she who had made the call - and understood from Frau Maenhout’s reaction that something had happened.

  ‘You could hear the branches snapping from right inside my house,’ Irma asserted defensively, but no one really believed that the sound could have travelled as far as that.

  In any event, she was abl
e to testify truthfully that she had seen the doctor’s two other sons peering anxiously out of the first-floor window.

  ‘Inside!’ their father had yelled. ‘Get back inside!’

  Irma had also heard Frau Maenhout’s voice. First a shriek, and then: ‘I’m calling the ambulance!’

  ‘No, no ambulance!’ she’d clearly and distinctly heard Dr Hoppe shout, and he’d had to repeat it twice, because Charlotte kept on insisting. Irma thought it was a shame that Charlotte seemed to have so little confidence in the doctor’s abilities. Then the doctor must have picked the boy up in his arms, because she heard him say, ‘Frau Maenhout, please hold the door open!’

  At that moment Michel and Marcel had appeared at the window upstairs. ‘He was trying to pick a nut, Herr Doktor! He just wanted to pick a nut!’

  The doctor had ignored them, and the door had slammed shut behind him. A little while later Frau Maenhout had rung all the parents and asked them to come and pick up their children.

  All day long, many of the villagers just happened to pass by the house at 1 Napoleonstrasse, and all gazed up at the big branch of the walnut tree that had snapped and was dangling down the trunk like a paralysed arm.

  ‘I always said that tree was dangerous,’ Irma repeated over and over again.

  The next morning the sound of a chainsaw was heard in the doctor’s garden, fifteen minutes after Florent Keuning had arrived.

  ‘He asked me to,’ the latter claimed afterwards. ‘I couldn’t really refuse, could I?’

  Even from far away you could see every leaf of that walnut tree quivering, and the longer the sound of the chainsaw was heard, the more nuts fell onto the slate roof of the doctor’s house.

  ‘It’s bad luck to cut down a walnut tree! Bad luck!’ cried Josef Zimmerman, peering out of the Terminus window and seeing the broad crown suddenly disappear from the sky above the doctor’s house.