A little while later Rex put his theory to the test once more by asking Victor another question. He was so convinced that he had worked Victor out that he thought he already knew the answer.
What he asked was why Victor had chosen to clone himself. He was certain he would again say something about God creating man in his own image.
But this time Victor’s answer was quite different. The first thing he did was point at his mouth - at the scar over his upper lip, half-hidden by his moustache. ‘Because of this,’ he said. No obfuscating words. No rhetoric.
‘What do you mean?’ Rex asked, his voice wavering.
‘This will be the proof. Just like the colour of the fur in the case of the mice.’
Rex immediately saw what he meant. All of a sudden it was about science again. About the substantiation of it. The proof. What had happened to the word?
‘So you mean,’ he began, with some hesitation, ‘that if the baby, when it’s born, also has . . .’ - he pointed awkwardly at his own upper lip - ‘then that would be the physical proof that the baby is your clone.’
Victor nodded.
‘But it can also simply run in the family, be passed on from father to son, can’t it?’ Rex had no idea of how close his remark was to the truth. ‘It can be inherited. It’s a genetic defect, isn’t it?’
Victor nodded again, but was ready with his answer. ‘Every cleft palate is unique,’ he said in a professorial voice. ‘Its position, form, depth and width. Therefore if I can show that the child’s cleft is identical to mine . . .’
‘But how are you going to do that?’ Rex interrupted him. ‘Yours has been . . .’
He wasn’t able to come up with the right word, and therefore made another awkward gesture.
Victor pushed a cardboard file towards him. ‘With this,’ he said.
Rex opened the file and stared open-mouthed at the pictures, all in black and white, in stark focus, so that each photo mercilessly displayed what the scar had kept hidden all these years. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from it. From the missing tissue, and the skull showing beneath. And the longer he looked at the pictures, the more he felt something inside him was being ripped asunder - as if what he was looking at were contagious.
‘And the woman, Victor?’ he managed to say. ‘The woman. Does she know?’
Victor did not reply, and Rex understood.
Victor had not told her. He had tried to, but had not been able to do it. He had started to tell her, and at first it had gone well, the way he had planned it. He’d said that the baby would come from her own egg cells and that there would be no sperm involved. That much was true, and so he’d been able to say it without any qualms.
She had repeated his words to herself. Own egg cells. No sperm.
Her enthusiastic reaction made Victor realise at once that his words had given her cause to assume something he had never intended her to think.
She’d exclaimed, ‘So the child will look exactly like me!’
He was going to tell her that the child she would give birth to would not look like her - not remotely like her. He was going to add that he would make her a child that looked like her the next time.
He was going to tell her. But then she said it.
She said, ‘A child that looks exactly like me. Now that would be a gift from God.’
Her words had cut him to the quick.
At the secondary level of the Christian Brothers’ School Victor was given many nicknames that made fun of the way he looked. Even the teachers, both the monks and the laymen, would sometimes refer to him as ‘Red in Form 2B’, or ‘Harelip in Form 4A’. Victor heard it all, especially when the students yelled all sorts of nasty things behind his back, but he didn’t let it bother him. There was very little, in fact, that bothered him. Which was fortunate, for in those years there was no one to stand up for him the way Brother Rombout had stood up for him in primary school.
His indifferent demeanour led people to say that Victor had erected a wall to protect himself from whatever was thrown at him - sometimes literally, when they pelted him with wads of paper or balls, or figuratively, when the other kids jeered at him or called him names.
Since he never showed much reaction, the teasing didn’t go very far. At the beginning of each school year, when the presence of new boys in the class meant that his classmates had to prove themselves all over again, Victor was always seriously tormented, but after just a few weeks they would start leaving him alone again.
In the dormitory, too, he did not attract much attention, especially since he always had his nose in a book. Victor read and read, always and everywhere. He read textbooks, he read encyclopedias, he read journals, he read reference books.
The list of books he borrowed from the school library was impressively long, but also limited, for Victor was only interested in books that touched on the natural sciences. Not once did he ever take out a book on any other subject, or read something just for fun.
His extreme fixation estranged Victor even further from those around him. For when Victor did speak, it was always about the wonders of the human body or about the workings of the X-ray machine or about some new drug that had been developed to combat an exotic disease. And once you got him talking, he’d drone on and on with such pedantry that there were few who were able, or even wanted, to follow what he was saying. He wasn’t conscious of this himself because nothing ever seemed to get through to him. It was only when the teacher shouted at him to wrap up his monologue that he would stop.
It was also during Victor’s years at the secondary school that his supposed ‘sloppiness’ grew more pronounced. At least that was how the teachers interpreted his habit of handing in incomplete assignments. Some teachers called it laziness, and as a matter of fact they were the ones who came closest to the truth. For Victor simply didn’t bother to do many of his assignments, because he did not see the point of repeating the same thing over again once he knew how to do it, or of writing something down on paper when it was all already imprinted on his brain.
Owing to his purported sloppiness and the limited scope of his interests, Victor was only a middling student. He received high marks for physics, chemistry and biology; in Latin and languages he was about average, while in geography, history and maths he usually just skated by. He almost always failed religious studies, music and art, but never badly enough to keep him back a year. Skipping a form, as he had done in primary school, was out of the question in the light of his unimpressive grades. Victor therefore took six years to complete secondary school, like most of the other students, but since he had already been advanced for his age when he started, he was still, at sixteen, the youngest boy to graduate on 30 June 1961, and heading straight for university.
In those six years he had never had another outburst, or made a spectacle of himself. It has to be said that Victor had found peace in his own set of beliefs - peace in the sense that he was not troubled by any new insights. God did bad, evil things, and Jesus only did good.
Jesus had been punished for it, too, in the end. Victor had seen that with his own eyes. If you did good, you were punished for it. This had been confirmed on Calvary Hill, when Father Norbert had dragged him away from the cross and boxed his ears, like a thunderstorm breaking out overhead.
‘God will punish you for this, Victor Hoppe!’
The bad would always try to vanquish the good. Again and again and again.
Notwithstanding all that he was up against, Victor was determined to continue to do good. It was still his goal in life to become a doctor, and as long as he had that goal, and was working towards it, nothing could make him change his mind.
But he did have to remain on his guard against the bad. It was always lying in wait for you. He could tell that from looking at his father. As a doctor he did good, but as a father he did bad. And the bad was getting worse. Even though Victor was seldom home, his father always found some reason to get angry with him. Then he’d yell louder and louder, and sometimes it would come to blows.
‘What have I done to deserve this, for Christ’s sake!’ That was a frequent cry of his, and Victor knew that he was referring to the evil that had taken possession of him.
Even the people in the village said so. His father had not yet returned from making house calls one day, and there were people waiting for him at the gate. Victor was in his room and could hear their voices outside his window.
‘The doctor isn’t doing too well, is he?’
‘It’s going from bad to worse.’
That was what they’d said. And that had been enough for Victor.
Victor was fifteen when he found out that the mental institution where he had spent his early years was in the village of La Chapelle. He had never given the institution much thought while he was at school. It wasn’t as if he had forgotten it, but it had been a long time since anything had triggered the relevant cogs in his brain to set his memory in motion. Anything that used to do so no longer held that power. The weekly Mass and daily prayers just rolled off his back. He had permanently packed away the Bible he used to read so avidly, just as he would pack away his old textbooks at the end of the school year. At the secondary school he never again had a teacher like Brother Rombout, who with his gentle mien and mellifluent voice had kept alive the memory of Sister Marthe, and ever since he had moved to a new dormitory, even Father Norbert, whose stentorian tones sometimes reminded him of Sister Milgitha, had disappeared from his immediate radar.
All in all, besides finding some peace in his belief system, Victor actually found some peace of mind at the school. But then something happened to jog his memory, not suddenly, but bit by bit - as if someone had started plucking the strings inside his head, and the sequence of sounds turned into a recognisable melody.
It happened, as before, on the occasion of the annual class outing. The students in fifth-form Latin always took a trip to the three-border junction, and from there on up to Calvary Hill at La Chapelle. Victor had never been to the former but was all too familiar with the latter. Yet he did not raise his hand when the students were asked if any of them had already followed the Stations of the Cross. Nor was he looking forward to it much. He had no interest in seeing the three-border junction, and as for Christ’s Road to Calvary, he didn’t need to be confronted with that again.
This time the students went by coach. There were twenty-one of them, and none of the boys would sit next to Victor. He didn’t care. He didn’t even notice. There were boys seated in front and behind him, however, and one of them, Nico Franck, a gangly seventeen-year-old, tapped him on the shoulder just as the coach was leaving.
‘Victor, you know we’re going to be right by the mental institution. ’
The boy sitting next to Nico Franck, promptly added, ‘Yeah, and you’d better make sure the nuns don’t catch sight of you, or they’ll come and get you.’
‘And then they’ll put you back in with the idiots, where you belong,’ said Nico.
The laughter that followed did not bother Victor. What did bother him was the words: Institution. Nuns. Idiots. Three memory strings that were plucked.
Victor stared out of the window, but he barely noticed what he was looking at. He didn’t even notice that they drove right past his house.
‘That’s where Victor lives, during the holidays. His father is the local doctor,’ his Latin teacher, Brother Thomas, said.
‘I thought he lived in a mental institution!’ Nico Franck jeered, jumping up and tapping Victor on the top of his head.
‘Franck, sit down and behave!’ shouted Brother Thomas sternly.
The laughter continued a while longer.
Mental institution. That string being plucked again. The start of a melody.
When the coach reached the top of Mount Vaalserberg, everyone got out. Victor was the last one to exit the bus. As Herr Robert, the geography teacher, explained what they were here to see, Victor looked about. It was crowded. Dozens of tourists wandered around the summit, which was furnished with a kiosk and a few benches.
‘They’re going to build a new tower up here, one that’ll be even taller than the Juliana Tower,’ said the teacher. ‘The old tower is over there - in the Netherlands. Have any of you ever been to the Netherlands?’
Victor didn’t hear the question. He was thinking about the institution. About the nuns. About the idiots.
Imbeciles. Retards. The two words spontaneously popped into his head.
‘Victor, let’s go!’
The troop of students had already set off in the direction of the three-border junction. Victor trotted after them.
A cement column. That was all it was.
‘Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany,’ said Herr Robert as he paced around the column, sticking his arms out at right angles.
Victor did not get what the teacher was trying to show them. It was too abstract for him. Brother Rombout would have made it easier for him to visualise; he’d have taken a piece of chalk and drawn some lines on the ground, and then Victor would probably have been able to see it. His mind was elsewhere, anyhow. And it didn’t improve matters when something Brother Thomas said triggered something else inside Victor’s head.
‘This is the geographer’s golden calf,’ said the monk. He placed one hand on the stone and the other on his fellow teacher’s shoulder. ‘The physical representation of something that is in fact invisible. Just like God, in other words.’
Victor did not hear the irony in the monk’s voice. What he heard was ‘golden calf’. And ‘God’. Which suddenly made him recall another voice: ‘Moh-zzes, Victor. With a zzzzz. As in ro-ses.’
He felt a shudder running up his spine. From there on, nothing registered. He didn’t see the boys in his class pacing around the three borders, scissoring with their arms and legs. He did not hear the geography teacher asking him if he didn’t want to go ‘abroad’, like the other boys. Nor did he hear Brother Thomas say, ‘Victor is dreaming about travelling much further. He’s dreaming of the seven seas.’