But he did not tell her that he had brought Victor home. He didn’t lie about it; he simply didn’t volunteer the information, afraid that, if she knew, his wife would curse him for all eternity. And that was the reason, the only reason, that it suited him if Victor’s voice was never heard.
He had had a hopeful sign one day. He had left Victor in his wife’s former sewing room while he saw patients. He’d parked him in front of the half-finished jigsaw puzzle she had begun a few days before taking to her bed for good.
‘Why don’t you finish this puzzle?’ he had said to Victor, showing him what to do by fitting a couple of jigsaw pieces together.
He didn’t expect much, because it was a two-thousand-piece puzzle, a picture of the Tower of Babel. But it was the only thing he currently had in the house to stimulate his son’s mind, and at La Chapelle he had occasionally seen the patients working on puzzles. According to Sister Milgitha, it could be quite therapeutic in imparting some structure to their addled brains. When Johanna had suddenly come home with this puzzle some six months earlier, it had surprised him. Was she reverting to a second childhood, or was it her way of trying to revive the lost child inside her? One of his colleagues had suggested that it was Johanna’s way of filling up some emptiness, piece by piece. It still didn’t seem very likely to him, but he did come to regard the puzzles as good therapy, because they had a calming effect on his wife. Perhaps too calming, as it later turned out.
When the surgery hour was over, he returned to the sewing room and stood watching his son from the doorway. He saw how the boy was intently sorting through the loose pieces, choosing one and then slotting it confidently into place without trying it out first to see if it fitted. Walking up to the table, he saw to his amazement that Victor had already finished more than three-quarters of the puzzle.
So he isn’t retarded after all, he told himself excitedly.
But he was forced to revise his opinion a little while later. He had been observing his son doggedly at work on the puzzle for about fifteen minutes. Doggedly - that was what struck him the most. There was something mechanical about Victor’s actions. The boy’s eyes skimmed the pieces; he pounced on one, then popped it into place. And again. The same way of searching, the same way of choosing, the same way of slotting it into place. And then again. Searching, choosing, slotting into place. And again. But Victor’s face remained impassive and blank the entire time.
Compulsive behaviour. That was the thought that popped into Dr Hoppe’s mind, and his fears were confirmed when he snatched a puzzle piece out of Victor’s hand. Victor didn’t even attempt to resist. There was no sign of annoyance. No puzzlement or anger.
Come on, say something! Show some reaction, for God’s sake! he wanted to yell at the boy, but he kept a lid on his anger. Shaking his head, he stared at his son, who seemed to have frozen in mid-action, his hand hovering in the air, his thumb and forefinger pinched together as if still clutching the puzzle piece. He waited in that rigid attitude until his father finally gave the piece back to him. The boy slotted it into the exact spot where it was supposed to go, then doggedly moved on to the next piece.
Compulsive. The word stuck in the doctor’s mind, and continued to haunt him. He couldn’t help thinking of the place from which he had rescued Victor.
It had come to his attention that, ever since he’d brought his son home, people had begun to shun his house. Father Kaisergruber was the first one he noticed keeping his distance, for in the past the priest used to stop by practically every week to read to Johanna from the Bible. The doctor had taken over this task, but only because he thought that was what his wife would have wanted. Personally, he would never have started on the Bible readings in the first place, because he was far less religious than his wife. Less fanatical, he sometimes thought to himself, although he never actually said so aloud.
It was beginning to dawn on him that his patients had also started staying away. The waiting room often used to be quite crowded, but since Victor’s return this was no longer the case. Week by week, the number of patients dwindled, until one day not a single person showed up.
He was reminded of his first months in Wolfheim, some ten years ago. A recently qualified physician, he and his wife had arrived from the nearby village of Plombières, which was already served by two GPs. And even though Wolfheim had had to make do without a doctor for years, to begin with the villagers would have nothing to do with his practice. There was great distrust of outsiders, and it had taken months before he and his wife were accepted by the community. It never occurred to him that his physical appearance might have had something do with the initial scarcity of patients, but he did realise that the villagers’ change of heart had had more to do with Johanna’s piety and her selfless devotion to the Church than his own medical skills.
He didn’t know how to turn the tide this time, without his wife’s help. Actually, he did know - it was quite simple, really - but he was absolutely determined not to send Victor back to the asylum. He would just have to make it clear to the villagers, as well as to Father Kaisergruber, that there was nothing evil or stupid about Victor; that the harm and the stupidity lay largely in the superstitions they clung to. In his role as physician he had often had to contend with these, but this time it would be quite a different sort of struggle - a more difficult struggle. He was convinced of it.
In spite of his father’s best efforts, Victor was often led to think of the institution. For there were so many things in his new house to remind him of the place: the cross hanging on the wall in every room, the font of holy water in the front hall, the statuette of St Mary and dried palm fronds on the mantel, and the framed prints everywhere cautioning God is watching you and Here people never swear. The smells coming from the surgery and waiting room also brought back memories. One time it might be the smell of ether or disinfectant; another, the odour of sweat and unwashed bodies.
But what transported him back to the convent more than anything else was the words he heard every night when he was in bed. In the room next door, his father was reading from the Bible. The words were difficult to make out, but since he knew them anyway, it wasn’t hard to follow. It often made him think of Sister Marthe.
There was a patient in the room next to his. That was what his father had told him. His father had also said he wasn’t allowed in there - that it was forbidden. But he didn’t understand. The only rooms that were forbidden were the sisters’ rooms. That was what he’d been taught. Patients were not allowed in the nuns’ rooms, but patients were allowed to visit each other. That had always been allowed.
And so he’d crept into the patient’s room anyway. Once. And another time. And then many times. But only when he heard his father sleeping. His father made this grunting sound when he slept, the same kind of sound the other patients used to make.
The first time he’d gone to see this patient he had noticed, from a distance, that her hands were folded in prayer and there was a rosary looped around her hands: he recognised it; it was the same kind of rosary all the sisters had. So maybe the patient was a sister after all, and that was why he wasn’t supposed to go into her room.
He crept a little closer and in the light from the candle that was always lit he stared at her face. The face looked like a sister’s face, but without the cap and veil. So then she must be a patient after all - a quiet patient. Not at all like Egon Weiss; more like Dieter Lebert. That one was always flat on his back, with only his chest moving, up and down. Up and down. Lebert is a vegetable, Marc François had once told him, but Victor didn’t believe him.
On his visits to the patient next door he would go and sit by the bed and watch the chest going up and down. Sometimes he’d read the Bible that was on the bedside table. He usually stayed there for as long as he heard the sound of his father sleeping. When the grunting stopped, he’d sneak back to his own room.
But then, suddenly, the patient was dead. He could tell immediately, because the chest stopped going up and down. He could tell by the smell, too. He knew that smell. It smelled as if someone had pooped in their pants. And another smell, too, that he couldn’t place.
When someone died, you had to pray. That was what you were supposed to do. Pray for the soul of the deceased to find peace, the sisters used to say. And so he folded his hands together and began reciting the litany of the Holy Ghost. Out loud. Because the sisters always had to be able to hear the patients praying.
Karl Hoppe’s first thought was that he was dreaming. Then he thought someone had broken into his house. But as soon as he realised that it was a child’s voice, he remembered Victor, and leaped out of bed.
He raced to his son’s room, but slowed down when he reached the door, so that he wouldn’t alarm the boy.
‘Spirit of mercy and compassion. Spirit, who in our weakness giveth us succour and affirmest that we are God’s children . . .’
He wasn’t listening to what was being said, but to the way it was being said. He heard nasal sounds. He also noted that the ‘p’ and the ‘b’ were barely pronounced. A speech impediment. It had to be Victor’s voice; it could not be otherwise. He could speak! The joy of that realisation, however, was promptly checked by the realisation that the voice was coming not from Victor’s bedroom but from Johanna’s.
‘. . . Who leads us on the right path. Highest spirit, who enlivenst and fortifiest . . .’
A shudder ran up his spine. He reached the bedroom in two strides and there he saw his son sitting at his wife’s bedside. Victor’s ginger hair glinted in the candlelight as he sat with his head bowed and his hands folded, droning his monotone utterances over Johanna.
She mustn’t find out, Karl Hoppe thought, darting forward in a panic. Grabbing his son just above the elbow, he dragged him roughly off the chair. The boy let out a scream, and in the space of that scream the doctor glanced at his wife. And in that split second he knew, from the colour of her face and the way her mouth hung open, that she was dead. He let go of his son, pressed his index and middle finger to his wife’s carotid artery, felt that her body had gone cold and her heart had stopped and, although he knew it was pointless, started calling out her name over and over again.
Then he looked at his son, who had been silent for three months and who had just been talking. Then he glanced at his wife, who was dead. Talking, dying - all of a sudden he was convinced there must be some connection there, between his son’s talking and his wife’s dying - that the one thing had led to the other. And even though he had never really believed the story about his son having the devil in him, in that instant, with the candlelight casting long shadows on the walls, he did believe it. And that recognition, that painful recognition, made something inside him snap. It was as if a handle had been twisted, causing all the fury and all the grief and all the disappointment that had been locked away for years to come pelting out, not via his mouth, in the form of curses, nor via his eyes, in the form of tears, but through his right hand, which suddenly shot forward and, with a loud smack, collided with his son’s cheek.
Karl Hoppe had always told himself that he would never do what he had just done. Ever since his teenage years, when it had first occurred to him that he might one day have children of his own, he had decided never to do to his own children what his father had done to him. But the slap he had given Victor made him recognise with some consternation the trait he had always deplored in his father: a violent nature.
The impulse had simply been too strong to resist. If anyone had the devil in him, it was he, Karl Hoppe, when he slapped Victor. He really regretted doing it, but he couldn’t take it back. So then what was the point of being sorry? When his own father had shown remorse while he was still smarting from the sting of his blows, he had never set much store by it. For he had known that no matter how sorry his father was right then, he would surely give him another beating some day.
No, he would rather think of a way to make up for it. What would it take for Victor to forgive him? How would he ever be able to win his trust now?
The new jigsaw puzzles seemed like a good place to start. In between receiving condolence calls - the villagers seemed to have been reminded all of a sudden that he lived there - the doctor paid a visit to the toy shop on Galmeistrasse, and bought the three puzzles they had in stock. He’d been afraid Victor might refuse anything he offered now, but the boy tore open the packages without hesitation, and immediately began working on one of the puzzles in the sewing room, isolated from the stream of visitors.
By the end of the day he had completed all three. The doctor had actually been hoping that those three puzzles would keep his son occupied right up to the funeral. But after finishing a puzzle Victor refused to break it up and start over again.
Karl Hoppe therefore had to make a decision. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘I think it’s what she would have wanted.’
By ‘she’ he meant his wife, but as he handed the Bible over to Victor, he was also thinking of Sister Marthe. She had told him, during their brief conversation in the convent, that Victor enjoyed reading from the Bible. But he had wanted his son to forget his years in the asylum as quickly as possible, and so he had deliberately kept the book from him. The fact that his son had prayed for Johanna - a realisation that occurred to him only some time later - made him reconsider that decision. Perhaps this was the way to win his trust. He was doing it not just for Victor, but also for his wife, because he was certain that she would have wanted it, as he had already said to Victor. And finally - although he would not admit this to himself - he was doing it for his own sake; for his own peace of mind. It afforded him some measure of relief, like finally being in a position to pay off old debts.