That was why, starting that very first night, Sister Marthe began repeating the litanies after Victor. She spoke in a whisper so that her voice would not be heard in the hall. And if she heard a sound anywhere in the building, she would stop and go back to reading aloud from the Bible, as she was supposed to do.
The next afternoon she read aloud to him from the Bible for two hours in Sister Noëlle’s stead. When she had finished, she whispered in his ear that she was looking forward to practising with him again later that night. She received no reaction.
The second night went off just like the first night.
‘Irit-uf-is-dom-an-un-ner-an-ing,’ said Victor.
‘Spirit of wisdom and understanding,’ Sister Marthe recited.
‘Irit-uf-oun-sel-an-orri-tude,’ said Victor.
‘Spirit of counsel and fortitude,’ Sister Marthe repeated.
At the end of the night, stroking his red hair again, she asked him, ‘Are you praying for Egon?’
He nodded, but showed no further emotion.
‘That’s good. It will surely help him to find peace,’ she said.
He did not respond. But a little later, as she walked away, she felt his eyes on her. She glanced over her shoulder and saw him look quickly the other way.
‘You have to eat something,’ said Sister Marthe. She held a bar of chocolate under his nose.
He brusquely twisted his head away.
It was the fourth night that she had sat with him. The previous night had been quite extraordinary. Victor had been playing a game with her. At least, that was what it seemed like. He kept breaking off in the middle of a litany, leaving her to continue it. A few verses later he would join in again. They had repeated this a few times. But when she made a mistake he had shaken his head and corrected her. That was when she realised that he was testing her. She, a twenty-year-old woman, was the pupil of a child of three.
They had kept the game up for two hours, with three short breaks, during which Victor would involuntarily drop off to sleep. He hadn’t eaten in a week and hunger was taking its toll. The abbess had said that she would give him an injection of undiluted glucose if he continued to refuse to eat. This wasn’t without its risks, Sister Noëlle blabbed, but she hadn’t explained what kind of danger the injection entailed. Sister Marthe had therefore decided that she had to convince Victor to eat.
‘You have to,’ she tried again.
Victor kept his lips clamped shut.
‘If you don’t eat, Sister Milgitha will hurt you again.’
No reaction whatsoever, as if she were talking to a wall.
‘If you don’t eat, you will die.’
Even those words did not elicit any emotion on his pallid little face.
‘Once you’re dead, you won’t be able to pray for Egon any more.’
A frown passed over Victor’s face - just fleetingly, but it was enough.
‘Nobody else will pray for Egon. The sisters won’t do it.’
Now Victor began to pluck nervously at the bed sheet that came halfway up his chest.
‘Nor will the other patients,’ she went on. ‘Nobody. Not Marc François. Not Angelo Venturini. Not Nico Baumgarten. Nobody.’
She saw his pupils swivel in her direction.
‘No, not even I, Victor. Because if you die, I’ll be praying for you.’
Logically, it didn’t really make sense, but Sister Marthe had instinctively invoked the only reasoning young Victor Hoppe was able to understand.
If . . . then. One thing led to another, in his mind. A chain reaction.
If . . . then. That was the way his brain worked.
Sister Marthe broke off a piece of chocolate and held it to Victor’s mouth. The boy parted his lips and allowed her to place the chocolate on his tongue.
‘Maybe you should sit up a bit,’ she said, ‘or you might choke.’
He lifted his head and looked round in a daze, as if he had only just realised that he was no longer on the main ward. It did her good to see Victor starting to suck on the chocolate. Without a word he accepted another piece and stuck it into his mouth. Then another one, and another. He began wolfing down the chocolate greedily, as if he’d suddenly realised how ravenous he was.
‘Now you’ll probably want a little water as well,’ she said as the boy started on the last piece.
He nodded and said something she did not understand.
‘What did you say?’ she asked. It was the first time he had actually used his voice to communicate.
‘Yeah-sis-ter,’ she heard again. And then, ‘P-ease.’
She was stunned. None of the sisters had ever taught him to say those words. They had never taught him anything, in fact, except how to walk. Yet all the time he had been mute he must have been watching and listening, filing it all away somewhere in his head; filing it away for a day when he might have a need for it; or the desire to use it.
‘Then I’ll just go and get you a glass of water. I’ll be back in a moment.’
She walked to the bathroom. She wished she could go straight to Sister Milgitha to tell her the news. ‘Victor’s eating!’ she wanted to say. And, ‘Victor can talk!’
But the abbess was to be woken only in cases of dire emergency. And Sister Marthe didn’t think this was an emergency. It certainly wasn’t. This was good news. Not only for Victor, but also for her. She had proved herself as a novice. She, Sister Marthe, Lotte Guelen in another life, had succeeded in persuading Victor to eat again, something none of the other nuns had been able to do.
When she returned with the glass of water she found Victor lying down again, reciting yet another litany.
‘Victor,’ she said quietly, ‘Victor, I’ve got some water for you.’
The boy went on praying as if he hadn’t heard. She started to feel uneasy. Had she dreamed the whole thing? She glanced at the crumpled chocolate-bar wrapper on the bedside table, and frowned.
‘Victor? Didn’t you want some water?’
She listened to his voice. He was saying the litany of Divine Providence. He was almost finished with it.
She decided to join in for the last few lines. ‘... no matter how little we may deserve this grace, grant us, we beseech Thee, the mercy to submit to all the decrees of Your Providence over the course of our lives, so that we may come into the possession of the heavenly goods. Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.’
She had just finished crossing herself when Victor sat up again. Not looking at her, he reached out to take the glass from her hand. ‘Ac-k-you,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome,’ she replied, and let out a sigh of relief.
‘Shall we pray some more for Egon?’ she asked next.
Victor nodded. She noticed that he continued to avoid all eye contact. She might finally have got through to him, but he was still keeping his distance.
They recited the litany of St Joseph together, and then Sister Marthe suggested that Victor just close his eyes for a bit. It was 4 a.m. She saw that he was hesitant.
‘I think Egon would want it,’ she said. ‘In fact I’m sure of it.’ That seemed to reassure the boy. He closed his eyes, and she began to sing to him softly.
‘The little flowers dropped off to sleep.
Their fragrance had worn them out.
They nodded their little heads at me
As if to say good-night.’
She paused, then said, ‘That’s a Dutch song, Victor; my grandmother used to sing it to me all the time.’
But Victor, it turned out, was already sound asleep.
The next morning Sister Milgitha witnessed Victor eating his bread. Hunched over, his head lowered, he sat cross-legged on his mattress and, holding the bread up to his mouth, nibbled at it with tiny bites. His eyeballs kept swivelling from side to side, as if he were afraid someone would come and take his food away from him.
Sister Marthe was standing next to the abbess. Her eyes were shining. She’d got up that morning at the same time as the other nuns, even though it was her prerogative to sleep in, and had immediately gone to tell the abbess the great news. The abbess had been incredulous and announced she wanted to see it for herself. Just as St Thomas would not believe that Jesus Christ was risen until he had touched Christ’s wounds with his own finger, Sister Marthe thought to herself.
For a minute she was worried that Victor wouldn’t want to eat in Sister Milgitha’s presence, but when she handed him a piece of bread, he took it from her.
‘Here you are,’ she said.
‘An-k-you,’ was his reply.
She felt as if she’d won a glorious victory.
‘Reading to him has helped. The evil has been driven out,’ Sister Milgitha said. ‘I knew it would work. The sisters have done good work.’
Sister Marthe couldn’t believe her ears. She blinked, and when she saw the abbess looking at her, she didn’t know how to hide her disappointment.
‘You too, Sister Marthe,’ the abbess said dryly.
She felt Sister Milgitha’s hand lightly touch her shoulder.
That was all.
Sister Milgitha had decided that Victor would continue to be read to for two hours a day, just in case the devil tried to return. That task was given to Sister Marthe, not because she had forged a relationship with the young patient, but because - so said the abbess - she’d be able to study her Bible texts at the same time that way.
Sister Marthe didn’t really care what reason was given. She was just glad to be allowed to spend two hours a day alone with Victor. At ten in the morning and three in the afternoon she would fetch the boy from the main ward and together they would retreat to a little room at the far end of the convent, where the sound of the other patients would not disturb them. Sister Milgitha often happened to pass that way, and would peek in through the door’s stained-glass window. Occasionally she would come in and, nodding to Sister Marthe to continue her reading, would stand motionless in a corner of the room, listening. Then she’d walk out again without a word.
‘She’s keeping an eye on me,’ Sister Marthe said to Victor, not just to reassure him, but also because she was certain that was the case.
So she obediently did what was expected of her, reading aloud from the Bible for an hour without a break. Victor, hands folded on his tray, his head slightly bowed, sat across from her in a high chair without moving a muscle for the entire hour. She wasn’t sure if the Bible stories interested him, or if he understood much of the lofty language - ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Sister Milgitha had told her - but he did seem to be following attentively. So attentively, even, that when she asked him if he remembered where she had left off the last time, he promptly rattled off the last sentence word for word. Here was further proof of what an extraordinary memory he had. In her opinion, it was also a sign of intelligence, but the nuns she discussed it with said that the one had nothing to do with the other.
‘He is feeble-minded, Sister Marthe, remember,’ said Sister Noëlle.
‘Once feeble-minded, always feeble-minded,’ said Sister Charlotte.
Sister Marthe refused to believe it, but to her chagrin she couldn’t come up with any further way of proving that Victor really was intelligent. Until, that is, the boy himself provided her with the proof one day.
Several weeks had passed since the first reading session, and Sister Marthe had arrived at chapter 25 of the Book of Exodus. When she asked for the end of the previous chapter, Victor said, ‘An-fo-ty-days-an-fo-ty-ights-Mo-hes-wa-on-e-ount. ’
‘Moh-zzes, Victor,’ she said. ‘With a zzzzz. As in ro-ses.’
She had been working on his pronunciation without the abbess’s knowledge. If he mangled a word, she’d often say it again slowly and ask him to repeat after her. He would try his utmost, but some sounds were simply beyond him. He was improving by leaps and bounds, however, although she wasn’t sure if she could offer that as proof of intelligence.
‘Mo-shes,’ Victor repeated.
‘That’s better,’ she said, even though it wasn’t a great improvement. She did not like to push him too much, as he might give up and refuse to continue.
She opened the Bible to the page she had marked with a ribbon, the last page they’d read, and put it down on the table. Victor stretched out his hand across the table. He touched the gilt edge of the book with the tip of his finger.
‘You want to hear more, don’t you?’ she said.
‘Mo-shes,’ said Victor.
He evidently hadn’t understood what she’d said. Every once in a while he would react quite differently from the way she’d have expected him to, and it sometimes made her feel, however briefly, that she should just stop wasting her energy.
Reaching over, he planted his index finger on the open page. ‘Moshes, ’ he said again.
‘That’s right, Victor,’ she nodded, ‘that’s where we left off last time. At Moses on the mountain.’
‘Mo-o-shes! ’ he said insistently, moving his finger across the page to another spot, and stiffly keeping it there.
It suddenly dawned on her: his finger was pointing at the name ‘Moses’! She glanced from the boy’s finger to his face. His eyes, too, were raptly focused on the word.
‘Moses,’ she said, trying to keep down the excitement in her voice. ‘It says Moses. You’re right. That’s very good, Victor. And does it say Moses anywhere else?’
His finger moved to another spot. His hand was now more relaxed.
‘Mo-shes,’ she heard him say again. Again he pointed to the name Moses, which appeared twice more on that page.
‘Good, Victor, that’s excellent! And where else?’
Again he moved his finger. Again he pointed at Moses.
He can read, she thought. Thank God, he can read!
She had been a bit premature in jumping to that conclusion, she realised when she tried pointing out some other words on the page. Victor didn’t get a single one. He had probably recognised the name Moses from the identical look of the characters, and the unmistakable capital M (which from where he was sitting actually looked like a W), but that was as far as it went. But still, at least he had worked out that every word she read corresponded with a set of characters on the page. That, in her eyes, was a remarkable achievement - he had only just turned three, after all - and to see if her guess was right, she decided to settle it beyond all doubt. Pointing to the word ‘the’ on the same page, she said it aloud at the same time. He then promptly pointed out every single ‘the’ on that page, and waited impatiently for her to teach him another word. That was when she decided. She would teach him to read, in order to convince the other nuns that he was not feeble-minded.