Victor gazed at Vera Weber in astonishment. The woman was yelling. The woman was screaming. Victor lifted his hand to the window to open it, resting his finger on the latch. A gentle breeze carried the eerie sounds inside. He had heard those sounds before. Long ago. They were sounds of grief. Of despair. And of madness. The sounds touched off something inside his head and he shuddered.
The woman knelt by the blanket and pulled it off. Her voice had stopped. In the breathless silence, she cradled the boy’s head in her arms, lifting it onto her lap. She stroked his hair. She was talking to him. Didn’t she know he was dead?
God giveth and God taketh away, Victor. Remember that.
The woman understood. Suddenly she did understand, because she stopped talking to the boy. Lifting her head, she gazed up at the sky, stretched her arms into the air and clutched at something that wasn’t there. And as she tried to grab the something that wasn’t there, she started screaming again.
Victor closed the window, shutting out the noise. What he’d been hearing was strange to him, but the sound itself wasn’t strange. It was only strange to someone who wasn’t familiar with it. Because he didn’t know. He didn’t know that a mother could be so grief-stricken about her child.
Gunther’s parents were startled when Dr Hoppe paid them a visit. Their son was lying in an open coffin at home, for people to come and pay their last respects. The doctor was one of the first to drop by.
‘My condolences,’ he said. ‘I know how you must feel.’
His visit and his words moved them. Lothar and Vera Weber thought that he showed great courage in coming to express his sympathy when he was going through such a hard time himself, and would shortly be losing not one child but three. That was why they did not have the heart to ask him if he would like to go and say goodbye to their son in person. They thought it would bring up too many emotions for him. But then he himself asked to see the boy.
‘Would you like me to come with you?’ Lothar suggested.
But that wasn’t necessary. Dr Hoppe went in by himself, disappearing behind the heavy dark drapes that screened off the coffin. The doctor did not stay long, but the parents quite understood. They offered him coffee, but he politely declined.
‘If ever I can be of assistance,’ he said finally, ‘please do not hesitate to contact me. You need not abide by God’s will.’
Then he left, leaving Gunther’s parents somewhat bewildered.
He had used the scalpel to make a quick incision in the scrotum, about two centimetres long. The scrotum was shrivelled, stiffened, as when a boy is dunked in icy water, an instinctive somatic reaction to protect the testicles. It worked to keep the temperature constant a little longer, which meant that some of the tissue might possibly still be viable. It was a gamble, but a reasonable one. And if not, at least he’d have some sperm to work with.
The two testicles were the size and shape of dried white beans that had been soaked in water too long. Working quickly, he snipped them free of the sperm duct and then slipped them into a jar filled with cotton wool. The jar disappeared into the breast pocket of his coat.
He zipped up the boy’s trousers again without making a sound.
Now he’d have to be quick.
We must abide by God’s will.
That was what was written at the top of the mourning card Victor had found in his letter box that morning, before setting out to see the Webers.
He had taken it as a fresh challenge. As if someone had thrown down the gauntlet again.
It made everything that had gone before seem quite irrelevant.
3
Seeing them for the first time was a tremendous shock. The boys looked old, terribly old, largely on account of their skin, which seemed to be made of dried-out leather. They were emaciated, truly skin over bone. Rex took it all in at a single glance; he tried to look away, but he found his eyes were drawn back irresistibly. And it wasn’t as a scientist that he was staring at them, but as a voyeur.
Victor, for his part, was every inch the scientist when it came to the children. He talked about them as if they were research specimens, even when they were standing right in front of him. It was dreadful, and Rex felt very uneasy the whole time. The doctor lined up the three boys in a row and then pointed out the details of their physical similarity: the shape of the outer ear, the position of the milk teeth, the pattern of veins on the skull and the misshapen nose and upper lip.
Next he showed Rex the variations, but stressed that these had arisen at a much later date. There were wrinkles and grooves in the parched skin that were not exactly alike, and there were brown spots on the back of their gnarled hands that differed in size and shape. Victor didn’t explain this, but Rex assumed they must be age spots.
He noticed, moreover, that one of the boys had more of these liver spots than the other two, which made him wonder if the ageing process might be more rapid in this boy’s case. The same boy also had a scar on the back of his head, which according to the doctor was the result of a fall, and another on his back, the result of a surgical procedure on one of his kidneys - an experiment that had not proved conclusive, Victor admitted.
But prior to that, before the ageing process had really set in, he repeated emphatically, you couldn’t tell them apart at all. Indeed they were so alike that he’d had to tag them. The way we do with mice, he added without even a grain of irony in his voice, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Lifting up the boys’ shirts, he showed Rex the dots tattooed on their backs: one dot for Michael, the firstborn, two dots for Gabriel and three dots for Raphael.
‘Otherwise known as Victor One, Victor Two and Victor Three,’ he added.
Cremer’s eyes were drawn to the boys’ chests. Even from far away he was able to count the ribs; the thin skin was stretched over them like a garment draped over a coat rack. Later he found out that the boys weighed just thirteen kilos each. Thirteen kilos for a height of 1.05 metres; but even that dimension was rapidly dwindling, for the children’s spines were becoming more and more crooked.
V1, V2 or V3. That was how the Polaroids in the photograph albums were labelled. Rex was shown these when he and the doctor returned to the consultation room. Twelve albums filled with photos. Beneath each photo a date, and, again, V1, V2 or V3.
Three children’s lives, meticulously recorded. No, that was wrong: it wasn’t about the children’s lives, because the photographs bore no resemblance to family snapshots. These were pieces of a jigsaw - a jigsaw showing parts of the children’s bodies, to demonstrate the similarities between the three boys at every stage of their life. But as he leafed through the endless series of pictures, what struck Rex was mainly the boys’ senescence, rather than their resemblance, as if the albums spanned not four, but eighty, years.
Actually, he wished he could leave, but Victor just went on talking and explaining non-stop, repeating himself more than once. He told his story soberly and without a trace of emotion, and Rex listened to him with astonishment. Victor told him about the boys’ intelligence, about their talent for languages, and their memory. In all those things, said Victor, he recognised himself. He had made sure their talents were encouraged, so that they too would later be able to use their knowledge and insight in the service of humanity. That was how he’d phrased it: ‘in the service of humanity’. And, moreover, he had said ‘they too’.
Rex shuddered, but held his tongue, because the doctor wasn’t finished. He had started telling him what the next steps would be. In order to solve the telomere problem, he was considering using nerve cells as the donor material instead of skin cells. Nerve cells split far fewer times than other cells; this should automatically solve the telomere problem. Bone cells would do as well, since those grew more slowly than other cells. The same held true for the sex organs, because their cells only began to divide at a later stage, at puberty, meaning the cells were younger, and their telomeres longer. The simplicity and logic of his reasoning again reminded Rex why he had given Victor carte blanche in the past. He was, and remained, far ahead of his time.
Rex felt himself getting sucked in again, slowly but surely. Victor’s nasal drone seemed to be having the effect of making him even more receptive to what Victor had to say. I must get out of here. The thought suddenly popped into his head. I’ve got to get out of here, before I become even more involved.
He stood up promptly and said, ‘I can’t stay any longer; I have to get back.’
He knew it sounded like a fib. It was obvious he was looking for a way to escape.
But Victor did not try to detain him; on the contrary, he stood up and walked him to the door. Rex was outside before he knew it, but once the gate had shut behind him and he was sitting in his car, he didn’t drive off immediately. Something was stopping him. Not what Victor had told him, but what the children had said: a few words that had upset him more than all of Victor’s assertions combined.
‘Dyou-know-whey-frow-mai-wood-is?’
One of the boys had spoken up. Rex had been about to leave the classroom after Victor had suggested they continue their discussion in the office. The three boys, who had patiently submitted to the doctor’s humiliating prodding and probing, stayed behind. Were left behind. Victor had left the room without another glance, not even a word. Cremer was hanging back for one last look at the boys, as if to convince himself that what he was seeing was real. Then one of the boys said something, but Rex was so taken by surprise at first that he didn’t quite catch what he had said.
‘Dyou-know-whey-frow-mai-wood-is?’ The boy’s voice was as nasal as Victor’s but his articulation was better.
‘What did you say?’
‘Dyou-know-whey-frow-mai-wood-is?’ the boy said again, staring straight ahead as if he were speaking to someone else.
Did he know where Frau Maiwood was. He didn’t know any Frau Maiwood.
‘No, I don’t know,’ he had replied.
‘Shees-wiv-God-in-eav-ven,’ he heard, but this time it wasn’t the first boy who spoke up. One of the others had answered, although the voice was identical.
Rex did not understand what they meant. It wasn’t until the third boy spoke that it became clear to him.
‘Shees-dead-fad-der-did-it.’
This all took place within the space of a few seconds, but at the time it seemed much longer, and he was surprised that Victor hadn’t rushed back to tell the children to shut up. When the doctor did come back, he didn’t even act surprised or angry. He simply ignored the children, and again asked Rex to follow him to the office.
As Victor went on jabbering, the boys’ words went round and round inside Rex’s head.
Shees-dead-fad-der-did-it.
It wasn’t until he was sitting in his car that the significance of the words really hit him. He felt so nauseated that he had to get out again. Leaning against the open door, he gasped for air. A woman walked up to him and asked him what was the matter, and then she began talking about the children. ‘They aren’t doing well, are they?’ she said. He couldn’t deny it; perhaps he didn’t want to deny it. He asked her if she knew who Frau Maiwood was, and what had happened to her. Frau Maenhout, she said, Frau Maenhout, the doctor’s housekeeper. She fell down the stairs. An accident.
That did reassure him somewhat. Yet the boys’ words stayed with him all the way back to Cologne. He tried to recall everything that had happened, from start to finish, and the more he tried to piece it all together in his head, the more far-fetched it all seemed. As if he’d been watching a film. Characters on a screen. In the end he wondered if he might not just have imagined the whole thing.
4
Lothar Weber had phoned Dr Hoppe behind his wife’s back. She wasn’t in agreement with him.
‘Why? I’m not sick,’ she had answered when he had suggested going to see the doctor.
But she was sick - sick with grief. Lothar saw it day after day. It was the little things he noticed. The way she dragged herself out of bed and trailed around, the way she ate her food more slowly than usual, the laundry and ironing piling up, his shoes never getting polished, the drawn-out silences.
Lothar was suffering too, as never before, but he was still able to concentrate on his work at the foundry. Vera was at home by herself all day long.
He had been hoping that the pain would level off at a certain point, but it seemed to him that her sorrow was growing more intense, week by week. When one morning she decided not to get out of bed at all, he rang the doctor. It was the run-up to Christmas, and he thought that the holidays would only make her grief even worse. He had heard from someone at work that there were pills to make life a little easier to bear, and he wanted to ask the doctor if his wife might have some. He hadn’t mentioned it over the phone, because he thought it wouldn’t be proper; he’d just asked the doctor to stop by the house.
‘It’s Vera,’ he said. ‘She’s ill.’
The doctor promised to stop by that very day. That had given Lothar hope, because Dr Hoppe seldom made house calls these days.
If ever I can be of assistance, please do not hesitate to contact me. He had not forgotten that, and the doctor was evidently true to his word.
He arrived at 3.30. Vera was still in bed. She hadn’t eaten a thing all day. Nor had she spoken. When Dr Hoppe appeared in her bedroom, she sat up a bit, tugged at her nightie and glared at her husband. He made a helpless gesture, but was secretly relieved at her reaction; apparently her inertia had not quite gained the upper hand.
‘Are you in pain?’ the doctor asked.
Vera shook her head. Lothar saw that she was about to burst into tears. He also felt a lump in his throat.
‘Are you sad?’ the doctor asked next.
Vera promptly began to sob, so intensely that her shoulders heaved. ‘I miss him so!’ she cried. ‘And it isn’t getting any better! It won’t go away! Gunther, my poor, poor Gunther!’ She bowed her head and buried her face in her hands.