Three nights later, on 16 December 1980, Victor discovered that three of the eleven remaining young - two more had inexplicably died a day after their birth - were beginning to grow hair of a tawny hue, whereas on the other eight white bristles were clearly showing up against the pink skin. All the stress that had been building in him over the past seventy-two hours suddenly melted away. It was replaced with a sort of daze, and it was in this zombie-like state that he stared at the three brown mice for a full half-hour as they sucked their fill at their mothers’ teats. Every now and again, he’d stroke the back of one with the tip of his finger.
Johanna had expected her son’s harelip to look quite different. The worst she’d expected was a surface wound just a couple of centimetres long, which would be gone with a few stitches. She had only ever seen her husband’s scar and had never tried to imagine how he might have looked before it was stitched up. So when he deposited the child in her arms, she was so taken aback that she promptly pushed it away.
‘Get it away from me!’ she cried, raising her arms in a gesture of revulsion, so that the baby rolled down her chest and landed face down on her naked belly.
Karl, hesitating, didn’t know what to do. He had never yet experienced a situation like this in all his professional life. Every woman he had ever delivered of a baby had always wanted to hug the child to her chest immediately, even if there was something wrong with it. Some wouldn’t even let you prise the child away from them.
‘Get it away from me, Karl!’
Johanna thought she could feel the child’s mouth stuck to her skin like a suction cup, and when her husband finally picked it up and took it from her, the sensation wouldn’t go away, so she peered anxiously at her stomach to see if the child was really gone. A little trail of blood from the umbilical cord was left on the spot where it had been lying. But she thought it was blood from her son’s split upper lip, and so she started screaming in horror.
Just a few days after his birth, Victor Hoppe was admitted to the Clare Sisters’ convent of La Chapelle, a few kilometres from Wolfheim. The child had been bitten by the devil - according to his religious mother, at least. For hadn’t she avoided all contact with hares, both dead and alive, and not only at the beginning of her pregnancy but for the entire nine months? And yet the boy’s face had still been besmirched. So there must have been other forces at work.
Father Kaisergruber, who had come to christen the child, confirmed her suspicions. ‘Mon Dieu!’ the curate had cried when he first set eyes on the child, and instinctively made the sign of the cross.
This had not escaped Johanna’s notice. ‘It’s the devil’s work, isn’t it?’ she asked him. She was hoping for an affirmative answer, so that she could then consider herself blameless; and affirmation was what she got. It wasn’t more than a nod, but it was good enough for her. In the short interval between her question and his response, the priest had glanced out of the corner of his eye at the doctor, who was standing in a corner of the darkened room with his hand over his own deformed mouth.
It’s all his fault. He has passed on the evil. He should never have been allowed to bring any children into this world. That was what Father Kaisergruber was thinking, but he did not say it out loud; he still had respect for the doctor, even so. That was why he had just nodded. Upon which the mother let out a deep sigh.
The convent of the Clare Sisters at La Chapelle had always been an institution for mentally and physically disabled children, but during the war Sister Milgitha, the abbess, had decided to open the convent doors to well-to-do burghers from France and Belgium who had had to flee their homes. When the war ended, the convent was compelled to open as an asylum once again. Victor Hoppe was its first new patient, and since his physical impairment didn’t amount to a real disability, the sisters noted in his patient file that he showed some signs of retardation. No other particulars were recorded. The file was signed underneath by both parents.
Sister Milgitha had based the steep monthly fee for Victor’s care and upbringing on the doctor’s conjectured income, and increased it again when she saw the baby. She told the parents that the supplement was to cover extras, such as special dummies and disinfectants. She told one of the other nuns, however, that the reason she had asked for more money was that she was convinced that Dr Hoppe and his wife would pay any price to be rid of the child. She had also gathered as much from Father Kaisergruber.
It was he who had suggested to the parents that they might want to entrust the child to the care of the Clare Sisters for the time being. Sister Milgitha had just a week earlier summoned him to tell him that she was reopening the institution. She had asked him to try to find her some ‘unfortunates’ - those were her actual words. Naturally he would be rewarded for his efforts. Wasn’t he waiting to be promoted from curate to pastor?
The curate had never expected to find his first ‘unfortunate’ so soon.
‘The evil must be driven out,’ he told the doctor and his wife after the christening. He had surreptitiously pinched the baby’s bottom during the proceedings, so that it had started screeching like a banshee when the holy water was poured over its head. The mother had clapped her hands over her eyes; the father had looked the other way. Then the curate had done it again, twice more.
Pinch. Dunk.
Pinch. Dunk.
He had finished all of the holy water and little Victor was shrieking bloody murder.
‘The evil can only be driven out with the help of God,’ he’d said, stressing his words one by one. He had put the howling child back into the cradle without bothering to dry its head. The sparse red hair clung to the little skull and the swaddling cloth was soaked through.
Gazing into the mother’s eyes, the curate had casually mentioned: ‘The sisters at La Chapelle have reopened the mental institution.’
He didn’t look at the doctor, deliberately. He had no idea what he would think of the idea. As for the mother, he was almost certain that she did not want this child. She had refused to hold it during the christening ceremony and one could scarcely help noticing that she did her best not to look at it at all.
The mother turned to her husband. The curate, discreetly averting his gaze, inclined his head towards the cradle, where Victor was still bawling at the top of his lungs. With a theatrical flourish, he brought a hand up to his forehead, peered down at the baby from beneath that hand and shook his head gently to show how concerned he was. He waited with bated breath for a response, but it did not come.
‘I could,’ he therefore began, turning back towards Johanna, ‘. . . make an appointment for you, if you wish, to see Sister Milgitha. ’
‘We’ll think about—’ the doctor said, but his wife broke in abruptly.
‘I want it gone, Karl!’ she said vehemently.
‘Johanna, we have to—’
‘He has the devil in him!’ the mother cried out, practically hysterical. ‘Surely you can see that for yourself!’ She whipped her head back around towards the curate.
From her look, he understood that he was being asked to intervene. ‘Doctor,’ he said calmly, ‘I do think it would be best, for the child.’
Something in the doctor’s expression suddenly changed. First came a startled look of surprise and then, for just a split second, his eyes went glassy, as if trying to remember something.
The curate deduced that his words had touched a nerve, and so he deliberately went for the doctor’s sore spot a second time. ‘You have to think of the boy’s future,’ he said, holding the father’s gaze.
Slowly Dr Hoppe turned to stare at the cradle. The howls came in waves, with brief lulls as the baby gasped for air with a nasty squeaking sound.
‘Think of the boy, Doctor.’
The curate watched the father take a deep breath, and then heard him say, ‘All right then, why don’t you make the appointment. Today, if at all possible.’
Then the doctor scurried out of the room.
From the years 1945 to 1948 the convent of La Chapelle was home to seventeen nuns, and in that period the asylum had an average of twelve patients. Victor Hoppe was the youngest patient there, Egon Weiss the oldest. Egon was twenty-seven when he was admitted a month after Victor, and according to the accepted diagnostic definitions of the time, he was an idiot - the severest form of retardation. He spent most of his stay in the asylum shackled to his bed, where he kept up a stream of animal noises day in, day out. He had the devil in him, no question about it.
Egon Weiss’s preferred mode of communication was to howl like a wolf, or growl like a mad dog, and it drove the nuns and the other patients crazy. Victor, however, was fascinated by it. The shrill sounds Egon made were a welcome change from the rather monotonous hymns and prayers the patients were subjected to, which the sisters considered more beneficial than any medicine.
Most of the patients idled away the days doing nothing. In the morning some would move from their bed to a chair, others would stand up and remain on their feet until it was time for bed again. Once a day all the patients had to go to chapel. If they could not walk by themselves, they were rolled there in wheelchairs; Victor was carried. The hymns were in Latin, the prayers in both French and German, in the hope that the patients would at least understand something. One nun sat at the front leading the prayers and hymns, the other sisters were spread out among the patients, most of whom sat compliantly through every service. A few even muttered along with the Our Fathers or Hail Marys.
Only Egon Weiss went on wailing, and was often taken back to the main hall before the end of the service. Barbiturates were of little help in his case, for even in his sleep he went on making a racket as if there were a pack of dogs on his heels. The only thing that made him shut up was when he was dunked into an ice-cold bath, then a scalding hot one, and then back into the freezing cold again. Then he’d be quiet for almost an hour, the time it took him to dry off.
Victor didn’t talk for the first three years. In the first year of his life it was assumed that he couldn’t make any sounds on account of his deformity, but once his cleft palate was surgically repaired and he still wouldn’t say a word, the nuns surmised that he wasn’t intelligent enough to learn to speak. A few additional tests, during which he showed no reaction, substantiated this assessment.
His father had at first still harboured the hope that the problem would resolve itself. When that turned out not to be the case, it did somewhat ease his conscience, since it had now been positively established that his son was at the asylum because he was feeble-minded. The thought that it was the cleft palate that had been the deciding factor had caused him many a sleepless night. He used to visit the mental institution on a weekly basis over the first year, and every time he saw that sorry group of idiots and imbeciles, he had the feeling his son did not belong there. But fortunately now it turned out that the boy was mentally disabled as well.
His mother never went to see him, not even once. She never even asked her husband how he was. He therefore kept quiet about the child, except on that one day.
‘He’s been diagnosed as retarded,’ he said. ‘The tests have officially confirmed it.’
Johanna blinked. That was her only reaction to his announcement.
‘He can stay there’, Karl went on, ‘as long as we like.’
His wife gazed at him expectantly.
‘I told them that we would be most grateful if the sisters could go on taking care of him. That’s best, for the boy. Sister Milgitha thinks the same thing.’
His wife nodded. That was all. Until he turned and was about to walk out of the room.
‘Why is this happening to us, Karl?’ she said, her voice tinged with despair.
This time it was he who fell silent. He didn’t have an answer. Except perhaps that they should never have considered having children. But they had never discussed it. And now it was too late.
Louise Brown was born on 25 July 1978, in England. She was the product of the successful collaboration of the zoologist Robert Edwards of Manchester and the gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe of Oldham. Edwards had started experimenting with in vitro fertilisation in the 1960s; in the seventies, Steptoe had discovered a method of extracting egg cells through the vaginal canal and then reimplanting them via the same route. In the autumn of 1977 Louise Brown was conceived when an egg cell from her mother was artificially combined in a Petri dish with a sperm cell from the father, and the resulting embryo returned to the mother’s womb. The news of Louise Brown’s birth, which was announced in the summer of 1978, caused a worldwide sensation; it was received everywhere with feelings of both revulsion and admiration. For Victor Hoppe, who had been working for years towards the same goal, the birth of the first test-tube baby meant a shattering end to his own research.
Victor had started experimenting with amphibian and mouse eggs whilst doing his doctoral research at the University of Aachen, and it was in 1970, when he was an associate at a fertility clinic in Bonn, that he had first attempted to fertilise a human egg outside the womb. He had obtained the human eggs from the hospital in Bonn, harvested from ovaries that had been taken out for gynaecological reasons. The sperm he used were his own. After five years of experimenting, he had finally stumbled upon the right combination of method and medium to promote the fusion of the egg and sperm in a Petri dish. He then left the fertilised egg in another culture to develop into an embryo, as he had done with the mouse eggs. It had taken him another year before he had quite mastered that procedure, but all in all it was a relatively speedy result.
In the spring of 1977, on the strength of these results, he persuaded several couples to take part in an experiment taking his research one step further. He found couples in which the woman was unable to produce mature eggs as a result of some ovarian abnormality. Dr Hoppe told them that it was possible to have a donor egg fertilised with the husband’s sperm, and then, after three days, when it had split and multiplied into sixteen cells, to have it implanted via an abdominal incision into the wife’s uterine wall. Over the following year and a half he performed this procedure nine times, on four different women. Their bodies invariably rejected the foetuses within three weeks. The last time this happened was two days after the birth of Louise Brown. When the news broke, Dr Hoppe took the reams of data he had gathered over the years, and filed it all away for good.