‘Just as you would expect in the case of a normal child,’ said the doctor, switching on the monitor, ‘it is likely to take after one parent more than the other. Or it may even end up looking like one of the grandparents.’
His answer still did not satisfy her. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was carrying something foreign in her belly.
She squeezed her girlfriend’s hand as the icy probe came pressing down on her stomach. There would not be much to see yet on the ultrasound, according to the doctor; but she was still hoping, somehow, that it would give her more certainty.
The doctor silently moved the probe across her stomach. The screen showed white, grey and black specks, with no discernible structure. It was like the faint beam of a flashlight flickering across the rough walls of a cave.
She turned her gaze from the screen to her naked stomach. It wasn’t any bigger. She hadn’t felt nauseous yet either. Maybe she wasn’t pregnant at all.
‘There it is,’ said the doctor.
‘I don’t see anything,’ she said.
‘This,’ he said, pointing with the tip of his finger. ‘This curved white line. That’s the spinal column.’
The line was even thinner than his finger. It was the only thing not moving on the screen, like an animal frozen in a hunter’s rifle sight.
‘Seven point eight millimetres,’ he said. ‘It’s 7.8 millimetres long. Now we’ll try to find the heartbeat.’
Keeping the probe in the same spot, he ran his other hand across the ultrasound’s keyboard. ‘There it is!’
She didn’t know where to look, or what she was supposed to see.
‘Where?’ said her friend, in a whisper, as if afraid that the sound of her voice would disturb it.
The doctor was pointing at the screen with the tip of a pen. It looked like a little light flickering on and off. A blinking black-and-white light.
‘It’s as if she’s winking at us,’ she heard her girlfriend say.
Suddenly she felt at peace. The realisation that there really was something alive inside her promptly changed her entire attitude. The questions she’d been asking herself no longer needed an answer. There was a baby growing inside her belly. That had always been her most fervent dream. And it might even turn out to be their joint biological offspring, which would be great, but suddenly didn’t seem so important any more.
Her girlfriend’s quiet sobs roused her from her musings. The sight of her teary eyes and her blissful smile made her suddenly aware of how selfish she’d been. She was shocked at herself, but did not let on, and took both her girlfriend’s hands in hers.
The doctor, twiddling the monitor’s knobs, was avoiding looking at them, as if he were afraid of being confronted with their feelings. The soft hissing sound they’d been hearing in the background was suddenly louder. Now a different sound was heard coming from the speaker: a dull, irregular tapping, like someone testing a microphone with their finger.
‘The heart,’ said the doctor. ‘Listen, you can hear the heartbeat.’ Indeed, the sound did seem to be more or less in sync with the blinking light on the screen, but it was fading in and out.
But there was more. Every so often, they could hear a second ruffle of beats, like an echo of the first heartbeat, but it couldn’t be, because the rhythm was different.
She looked at her girlfriend and tapped at her own earlobe, to draw her attention to the other sound. Her friend nodded. She had heard it too.
‘We can hear another heart,’ she said to the doctor. ‘Is that possible?’
He did not respond. He was peering at the screen and pressed the probe more firmly against her stomach. He was frowning.
Now the double beating could be heard even more clearly, but the blinking light had vanished. The doctor moved the probe hastily around the gel on her stomach. His head seemed to be following it, in nervous circles. She glanced at her girlfriend again, who said, more insistently this time, ‘Doctor, we can hear another heartbeat!’
He remained silent.
‘Doctor!’ she herself now cried.
Startled, he looked up.
‘Was there another heart?’ she asked.
The doctor shook his head. ‘Your own heart. It was your own heart.’ He said it in a neutral tone of voice, yet she still felt ridiculous. Apparently she’d been making a fuss over nothing.
The doctor put down the probe and began wiping the gel off her stomach.
‘I’m sorry,’ she stammered. ‘I thought . . .’
‘No matter,’ said the doctor.
It had been her own heartbeat. It hadn’t been a lie. But there was something else as well. Should he have told her? - that there was something strange going on? It would only make her fret, and that could lead to further complications.
There had been two foetal heartbeats - clearly audible. But he hadn’t been able to see the second one. Nor had he discovered another foetus. He had studied the photos carefully afterwards, and not a single scan revealed a second spinal column.
It could be that the second foetus was completely hidden by the first one. Possible. But most unusual.
If there were two foetuses, then the egg must have split again inside the womb, and each half had begun to develop separately. In that case, it would be twins. Identical twins.
The second ultrasound, two weeks later, provided the definitive answer. The pregnant woman seemed very calm - calmer, at any rate, than the first time, when she’d expected him to be able to tell her, at this early stage, what it would look like when it was born. The only way he might have been able to tell that the child took after at least one of them would have been if one of them was known to be the carrier of some genetic defect. But neither of them was aware of any such defect. Too bad, he even caught himself thinking; it would have given him some concrete measure of proof, for all the sceptics out there.
He had decided that if the second ultrasound showed two foetuses, he would tell the women. At eight weeks they ought to be clearly visible, even if they measured no more than two centimetres each. Their minuscule size notwithstanding, the foetuses would already show definite human characteristics. Head, arms and legs would be recognisable, and the face would already have two eyes, a mouth and two nostrils. It was most unlikely at this stage that the other foetus would still be invisible.
Proceeding with the second ultrasound, he tried sneaking up, as it were, on the uterus. Instead of zooming in on it directly, he took a detour around the liver, the stomach, the pancreas, the bladder and the appendix - coming at it in a pincer movement.
The women were watching the screen with bated breath. Every now and again they looked at him questioningly. He didn’t say a thing.
He soon found the first amniotic sack inside the uterus. A black spot, the size of an apple. There was no second amniotic sack, however. The foetus was lying at the bottom of the sack like a pebble.
He zoomed in on it. There were two foetuses, after all! He started counting: two heads, four arms, four legs. And two beating hearts. Right next to each other. And in between, like a curled forefinger: a single spine.
The blood drained from his face.
‘What’s the matter, Doctor?’ both women asked.
He could no longer pretend. But he still couldn’t bring himself to tell them the whole truth. ‘Twins. You’re going to have twins.’
One day Sister Marthe did not return to the convent at La Chapelle. This occurred after she had gone home to stay with her parents for the five-day holiday novices were allowed to take once a year. At first her parents had reacted with surprise when the abbess gave them the bad news. They told her that they had seen their daughter off in person when she’d boarded the bus back to La Chapelle. It wasn’t until Sister Milgitha told them they might have to report this to the police that her father confessed they had quarrelled over Lotte’s decision to leave the convent.
Sister Milgitha, in turn, was greatly astonished at this piece of news. She told the parents that she hadn’t had any inkling that Sister Marthe was making plans in that direction. According to the abbess, she had seemed quite content since becoming a novice almost a year ago. She’d comported herself as an able nun since then, and had she continued on the same path, she would soon have been ready to take her temporary vows. The abbess was confident that Sister Marthe would be back, and suggested that they refrain from informing anyone of her disappearance for the moment. Lotte’s parents were of the same mind, since if the news got out, it would only make people talk.
Sister Marthe did come back. But not until three months had gone by. After she’d been gone one week her parents did receive a letter. It said she was doing well. And that she needed some time, to think things over.
‘She is back, and she is sorry,’ read the telegram that Sister Milgitha sent to Lotte Guelen’s parents on 12 November 1949.
At first it was as if she’d just been gone on some errand. Her habit was immaculate, and her black cap fitted her head like a glove, or as a horseshoe fits a hoof. The gold cross on her chest had not lost any of its lustre.
In the bright light you could tell that she was more tanned than before - her face; the backs of her hands. Sister Milgitha noticed the colour of her arms and neck at once, but she didn’t mention it. She just asked if Sister Marthe was sorry, and she said that she was. Then the abbess said that she was welcome, and cited the parable of the Prodigal Son.
And that was where they had left it. At the time the abbess thought it was the best thing to do. She would cross-examine the girl some other time.
Victor noticed immediately that there was something different about the way she carried herself. She now went about slightly hunched over, and her back had a slight sway to it, which made her usually flat stomach stick out a bit. There was also something defiant about her demeanour. It was quite a change from the way she used to be before her disappearance. Before, she used to walk with drooping shoulders, her eyes downcast, and her pace had been so slow that it was almost as if there’d been someone clinging to her habit, holding her back. Anyway, Sister Marthe barely spoke to him any more, ever since the time Sister Milgitha had asked Victor to read something and he’d refused. He thought she was angry with him. He’d never seen her at night after that, and she had never come for the daytime Bible-reading sessions either. And then she was gone, just like that.
But now she was back. And that very first day, she whispered to him, ‘I’ve missed you.’
I’ve missed you too, he wanted to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come.
Later, when she had another opportunity to speak to him, she said, ‘I’ll be leaving again soon. For good this time.’
He did not know what to say. The news gave him a sinking feeling, a feeling he had never had before.
The sickly smell would come, and then it would go again. Victor had been aware of it since he was young. And when the smell was there, all the sisters smelled of it at the same time. Every time one of them leaned down over him, the smell was unmistakable. It rose from their clothes, from their hands. Their breath reeked of it. And it smelled the way the cold bacon fat tasted that he sometimes had on his bread.
The sisters seemed to be aware of it too, because while the smell was on them, they had even less patience than usual. Even Sister Marthe. Every time she’d smelled that way, she’d been more impatient with him during their reading sessions. Irritable. But whenever she caught herself, she’d apologise.
‘I’m sorry, Victor. It will pass.’
And it would also return, he knew.
But ever since Sister Marthe had come back, the smell was no longer on her. The other sisters had had it twice, but she hadn’t. When the other sisters had the smell, being washed and tucked in by Sister Marthe was like a breath of fresh air. But the fact that she did not reek of it was just something he’d noticed; he drew no further conclusions. Therefore the thing she confided to him one day came as a complete surprise.
She was drying him off with a towel in the bathroom.
‘They’ll start noticing fairly soon,’ she began. ‘You can already see it. And feel it.’ She took his hand in hers, and placed it on her stomach.
He could feel nothing but the soft fabric of her habit.
‘There’s a baby growing inside my belly,’ she whispered.
She moved his hand up and down, and he felt the roundness of her stomach; there really was something hidden underneath her habit.
‘As soon as Sister Milgitha finds out, I’ll have to leave,’ she went on. ‘First she’ll scold me until she’s blue in the face; but I don’t care, because once she’s finished yelling at me, she won’t have a choice. And my parents won’t be able to send me back ever again.’
She sank to her knees and took his hands in hers. She looked him straight in the eye, but he looked away. ‘If it’s a boy,’ she said, ‘I’ll call him Victor. Is that all right with you?’
It was all right with him.
As soon as Sister Milgitha began to suspect something, she started checking Sister Marthe’s underwear for bloodstains each washing day. She took out a calendar and calculated when it might have happened and how far along she might be. She began keeping a close eye on the novice, taking notice of how often Sister Marthe stroked a hand over her slightly swollen belly.
‘Do you have a stomach ache?’ she once asked her, waiting to see her reaction.
But Sister Marthe was not flustered. She shook her head innocently, then shot the abbess an indignant look, as if wondering what had given her that idea.
When five weeks had gone by and Sister Milgitha had not discovered any evidence of blood in her underwear, she decided to have Sister Marthe examined. Since she was not versed in that sort of thing herself, she approached Dr Hoppe one day when he came to visit his son. She occasionally consulted him on medical matters when her expertise or that of the other sisters wasn’t up to scratch, but this time she was vaguely embarrassed. She did not let on what she was really after, but simply asked him to give his medical opinion on a sister who had been complaining of a stomach ache for several weeks.