But his first words had given the women hope, and they had latched on to that hope. At that point he had felt he couldn’t disappoint them, which had made him say even more things that had stunned them.
Then he had examined the women. One of them had suggested that perhaps they could both become pregnant at the same time. She may have meant it as a joke, but the doctor had not taken it as such. Indeed it had set him thinking, and it occurred to him what a unique chance these women were offering.
When he had said that he would begin the next day, he knew it was too soon. He had to practise first. With other animal cells - mouse cells; or rabbit cells. But he hadn’t told them that. If he had asked them to come back in six months, they might have changed their minds.
They returned the next day at the appointed time and he performed the procedure. But unknown to them, he used unfertilised eggs. At least that way he’d gained another month.
The women were both a week late. In those seven days they had become convinced they were pregnant. This they had told him with great excitement. And then the embryos must have somehow been rejected by their bodies without them noticing it. The doctor did not deny their theory, even though he knew there had never been an actual embryo. Then he proceeded to implant another set of unfertilised eggs into both women, since he was still experimenting.
This was how far he had got by this point: he had managed to grow mouse embryos from two female eggs, but none of the embryos had developed into live mice. As for human cells, he had progressed no further than the nuclear-fusion stage. However, even this was an exceptional result.
Then he had shut himself in his laboratory for days at a time. He was working on several experiments at once, starting a new one before the previous one was finished. He jotted down the data only sporadically - too sporadically, in fact, even for him. I’ll get to it later, he kept thinking; his mind was already on to the next step. His thoughts were like domino pieces: as soon as one toppled over, all the others followed automatically.
On 15 January 1979 the women once again came to his office. He had wanted to postpone their meeting since he needed another month. But they had insisted, and he’d given in because he didn’t want them to go elsewhere.
‘Is it going to work this time, Doctor?’
‘Time will tell.’ He had been expecting the question, and had prepared an answer.
‘And if it doesn’t . . . ?’
He’d been hoping they would ask that. ‘Then I’d like to try one more time. If you’ll agree, of course.’
The women looked at each other. One said, ‘So you think it won’t work this time either?’
Her remark was a reproach, but his response was the same nonetheless. ‘Time will tell.’
‘We have been discussing it . . .’ the woman continued after a short pause. ‘Maybe we should stop. We are—’
‘You don’t have to pay me,’ he said quickly.
‘It’s not about the money. We no longer trust that it’s possible.’ Her words made it sound as if she were breaking up with someone.
Her friend concurred. ‘People have told us that what we want is impossible.’
‘Who are these “people”?’ he shouted, louder than he’d meant to. It made the women jump. For a moment he feared they were slipping through his fingers like sand, but then it occurred to him that they wouldn’t have come back if they had given up hope completely. He just needed to convince them. So he took them to see his laboratory.
‘Sometimes what may seem impossible is merely very difficult,’ he told them.
The three mice he showed them were five days old, the size of an infant’s little finger. Their skin was covered in fine hairs, brown in the case of two of the mice and white in the case of the other. They were tucked in a box of shredded paper, being suckled by a black mouse.
‘That isn’t the biological mother. She merely carried them to term.’ He picked two adult mice, one white and one brown, out of another cage. ‘These are the mothers. The babies are their offspring. No male mouse was involved.’
The women looked on open-mouthed.
He did not try to deceive them this time. He told them that he needed to carry out a few last experiments on human eggs but was certain that it would work after that. He spent an hour and a half lecturing them on how and why it would work this time, and they never interrupted him once. So in the end he managed to convince them to wait another month before the next attempt.
That very day he wrote down everything he had told them. Now that the women had seen the mice, he anticipated that the news would spread quickly, so he would have to make his methods public, before other scientists cried foul and accused him of spreading lies. He’d have preferred to wait until the women had actually given birth, but he no longer had that option.
The article practically wrote itself. He only had to consult his scarce notes a couple of times. He sent it the very next day to Science, the journal that years ago had published some extracts of his thesis. He had taken Polaroid pictures of the mouse young and their female progenitors, and also included microscope slides or sketches of each stage of the division process. Then he shut himself in his lab once more.
Lotte Guelen had entered the convent of the Clare Sisters at La Chapelle a year after the end of the Second World War. Her father, Klaas, was from Vaals in the Netherlands, and in 1928 he had moved to Liège in Belgium to work in the coal mines. He had met a nurse at the hospital a year later, Marie Wojczek, the eldest daughter of strict Catholic immigrants from Poland. Marie was nineteen years old. They’d married after they’d known each other only six months. That was in March of 1930. Marie was three months pregnant with Lotte. She had hidden the slight bulge of her belly under her wedding dress by means of a corset. No one had noticed a thing - not until six months later, that is, when anyone who bothered to do the maths came away frowning. But that was as far as it went. Even her parents never mentioned it. It may have been precisely for that reason that Klaas and Marie never stopped feeling guilty about it.
Sixteen years and three daughters later, their guilt was assuaged by sending Lotte to the convent at La Chapelle. Lotte did not put up any resistance. She wanted to become a teacher and thought that the postulancy would be her first step towards that goal. Her parents, however, had failed to tell her that there was no school attached to the convent of La Chapelle. She found out soon enough, when the nuns put her to work in the asylum. As a postulant, she had to change the cotton nappies of patients who were incontinent, and empty and rinse out the chamber pots of the rest. Her tasks also included changing soiled bed linen and cleaning festering wounds. During the year of her postulancy she was not allowed to speak to the patients.
That probationary year was extended to almost twenty-one months, at which point her parents insisted that Sister Milgitha allow Lotte to become a novice; on her visits home their daughter had twice told them that she refused to return to the convent.
The habit Lotte was given to wear as a novice finally made her feel worthy, even though she had to sweat through the leaden heat of the summer of 1948. Her tasks remained the same, because she was still the youngest nun in the order. Her name did change, however. From then on she was known as Sister Marthe, a convent name the abbess had picked for her. St Martha was the sister of Mary Magdalene, and had always faithfully taken care of the household chores while her sister went to listen to Jesus. According to Sister Milgitha, the convent name was a reward for Lotte’s hard work.
For herself, the greatest reward was that she was now allowed to talk to the patients. She was informed of this the day after Egon Weiss was silenced for good. Undoubtedly the two were connected, since permission to talk to the patients involved being discreet and not passing on what the patients said. Or what they blathered: that was the word Sister Milgitha had used. Which led Sister Milgitha to dismiss everything the patients said as nonsense. What Marc François had blathered, for instance. The imbecile had waved Sister Marthe over a few days after it happened and whispered in her ear that Egon had been murdered. He illustrated his words by slashing his forefinger across his throat. She then asked him who had done it. Tucking the same forefinger behind his ear, he had pointed furtively at Angelo Venturini. When she reported this to the abbess, Sister Milgitha took her to have a look at Egon’s corpse. The abbess pointed out the unblemished throat of the deceased.
‘You see, Sister Marthe,’ she said, ‘it’s all nonsense, the patients’ blather. That’s why it’s dangerous to pass this sort of thing on.’
Sister Marthe understood, perfectly.
Since Egon’s death, his howling at night had been replaced by Victor’s sing-song voice. As soon as the overhead light went out, the boy would start on a string of litanies and not stop until daybreak. His voice had no intonation or feeling. It was nothing more than an incessant mumbling and so did not disturb the other patients. On the contrary, the monotone sound seemed to calm them down and lull them to sleep.
Victor slept during the day, or perhaps he was just pretending. Whatever the case, it was as if he’d erected a wall around himself. Neither the voices of the nuns, nor the din the patients made, seemed to reach him. The sisters soon gave up trying to have any interaction with him; the patients, on the other hand, persisted, in some cases only because they’d forgotten they had already tried before. Jean Surmont sat down on the rails at the foot of Victor’s bed and crowed like a rooster; Nico Baumgarten stood next to the bed imitating the sound of a trumpet; and Marc François, sneaking up to Victor, proceeded to empty a round of imaginary machine-gun bullets into him.
Since Egon’s death Victor had refused to eat; he would only drink. His plate would be left on the table by his bed, and if he hadn’t touched it by the time the other patients were done with their meal, it was simply cleared away. Sister Milgitha said that he would eat when he was hungry, but when the boy still had not eaten anything after three days, even she began to worry.
‘He is mourning for Egon,’ said Sister Marie-Gabrielle.
‘He’s much too young,’ said Sister Milgitha. ‘It’s just a prank. We’ll teach him not to try that sort of thing with us.’
That afternoon, with the assistance of three other nuns, she stuffed his mouth with food, pinching his nose shut until he swallowed it. She forced his entire meal down his throat that way.
Less than a minute after he’d gulped down the last mouthful, Victor threw it up again - all over Sister Milgitha’s habit.
Marc François, across the room, howled with laughter. To restore her own dignity, the abbess gave Victor such a box on the ears that it made everyone gulp.
Victor didn’t cringe or move a muscle. Even though they could all clearly see Sister Milgitha’s handprint reddening on his cheek, the boy remained completely impassive.
‘There truly is evil inside that boy,’ the abbess declared, and she decided to post a sister by his bed, to read to him from the Bible, day and night. That way, she hoped, the devil inside Victor would never get any sleep, so that in the end, desperate for peace and quiet, it would leave the boy’s body.
Victor’s bed was moved to a separate room, and the sisters took turns reading to him, in two-hour shifts by day and four-hour shifts at night.
Sister Marthe was assigned to read to him for a portion of the night; she didn’t mind this too much, because it meant she was allowed to sleep in the next morning, and skip matins.
The first night, she watched Victor as he lay in bed, eyes closed. She stared at the scar over his mouth, which ruined the symmetry of his face, and at his flattened nose, seriously disfigured by the deformity. The scar pushed the wings of his nose upward, causing the right nostril to gape open much wider than the left.
‘That’s how you can tell he’s retarded,’ Sister Noëlle had explained.
She also stared at his hair, at how red it was; but she didn’t find anything devilish about it, as the other nuns so loudly maintained. She even leaned forward and cautiously touched it. Nothing happened. Her hand had not been singed. She wasn’t struck by lightning. Nothing.
Yet perhaps something did happen . . . because when she placed her hand on his forehead, the boy stopped talking for an instant. Then the unstoppable stream of words started up again. Her own voice was supposed to drown his out as she read to him, but she couldn’t do it. His voice hypnotised her.
The boy spoke poorly. The sounds found their way out through his nose, lending his voice a wooden, mechanical tone. But since it was litanies he was reciting, it was possible for a careful listener to translate the noises into actual words.
There had been some debate among the sisters as to the boy’s intelligence. Some maintained that anyone who knew such lengthy verses by heart could not be retarded. Others said that even a parrot could be taught to recite them. Sister Milgitha had intervened, saying that the noises the boy was producing weren’t real litanies, but the ravings of the devil within. With that, the abbess had put an end to the discussion.
But Sister Marthe definitely recognised the prayer of St Joseph, and also that of the Holy Ghost. Never stumbling or stopping, Victor would rattle off the entire sequence, sometimes in French and at other times in German; he even did a better job of it than she ever had. She’d been having a hard time mastering the litanies, and every time she had to recite them for Sister Milgitha she would falter halfway through, or skip a few lines. It was her inability to perform this task adequately that had given Sister Milgitha the excuse to postpone her noviceship. True, she had in the end been promoted, but the abbess had warned her that she would not be allowed to take her vows if she did not know her litanies by then.