‘What exactly do you want to know?’
The fact that he was so calm made her blood boil. ‘Their illness. What’s the matter with them?’
‘The telomeres were too short.’
‘In layman’s terms, Doctor, in layman’s terms!’
Then he told her all sorts of things, but the only part she really understood was that the boys were growing old too fast; that every year of their lives was more like ten to fifteen years. She had no idea what made her think of it, but a picture came into her head of an apple that’s been rotting in the fruit bowl for weeks. Maybe it was the smell that hung in the kitchen.
The doctor was adamant that the phenomenon could not be reversed.
‘Who says? The specialists?’ she asked.
‘Do you doubt me?’ He sounded as if he were insulted.
‘How dare you ask me that?’ she exclaimed indignantly. ‘After all you have done to me?’
No response. She wasn’t waiting for one, either.
‘I am staying,’ she said. ‘Do you hear? I’m staying! I’m not leaving them alone ever again!’ And as he still said nothing, she added, ‘And I don’t want you to come near them, do you hear? I won’t have it! You’ve done enough harm as it is!’
That she had said it, had had the guts to say it, felt like having a great weight lifted off her shoulders, even if she wasn’t sure how she would or should care for the boys. From his expression she could tell that the doctor was dumbfounded. So he had finally come to realise that she would not let herself be kicked around this time.
He asked himself why she was accusing him of doing harm. He had only tried to do good, hadn’t he? He had thought about it long and hard, certainly, but in the end he had done what was expected of him. He had stopped feeding the children, thereby placing their fate in God’s hands. For it was clear that God had been calling them from the very start, and he had not been able to delay it, no matter how hard he had tried over all these years. And since he had in the end surrendered the children to God, it was now up to God to decide when to take them. The fact that He was taking his time about it and had not taken all three at once - that was God’s own decision. So the evil - it was God’s doing. Surely there was nothing Victor could do about it? So why was the woman accusing him? Or could she be the one who was doing evil?
As soon as the doctor had left the kitchen, she began clearing away the tins. She stuffed them into rubbish bags and piled them up outside the front door. Then she hunted around for some fresh food, but all she could find was more tins, some stale bread and a couple of bottles of milk.
She heated some vegetable soup and took it up to the boys, who reacted with mild surprise when they saw her come in, as if they’d already forgotten that she had saved them from their horrible plight just an hour ago. They stared at her as she fed them, spoonful after spoonful, mouthful upon mouthful. The children had trouble swallowing, but they were apparently so hungry that they didn’t refuse a single bite.
‘Eat, eat, it’ll make you grow big and strong,’ she said.
When they had finished, she tucked the boys in for a nap, even though she still had so many questions. As soon as they were asleep she headed straight for the room she’d discovered in her quest for another bed for the children.
It was a classroom, with desks, a teacher’s lectern, a blackboard and a map of Europe on the wall. She gazed round in wonder, and began poking about apprehensively. In the top drawer of the teacher’s desk she found exercise books labelled with the boys’ names. She leafed through some of them. The handwriting was difficult to read, but what she could decipher astounded her. The boys, it seemed, already knew how to write and do sums. She saw words of two, three, or even more syllables. There were even some sentences running the width of the page, and not only in German but also in another language that was foreign to her. They also knew how to add and subtract.
She thought it rather odd, but also extraordinary. She did for a moment ask herself how she, who had not completed secondary school, could have produced such bright children. But soon enough that very fact - that she had managed to produce such bright children - made her feel very proud.
Nevertheless, it raised more questions. Who had been teaching her children? She didn’t for a moment imagine that it had been the doctor himself. And then, she thought, it didn’t make much sense at all that the children had been schooled. Why would the doctor have gone to the trouble of paying someone to teach them, if he didn’t care a fig about them?
She found the likely answer to her first question in a children’s Bible she found lying in the bottom drawer of the teacher’s desk. She hadn’t glanced at a Bible in years, but did remember a few stories that had been read to her at school, like the one about Noah’s Ark, or the story about Jesus and the publicans. She was quite religious, but only in fits and starts, when it suited her. When she’d been pregnant the first time, she had thanked God, but when she’d had her first miscarriage, she had cursed Him. In one and the same breath, as the aborted foetus had left her in a gush of stench and pain, she had called out to Him to help her.
It had been the same the second time. At first she had thanked Him for the divine miracle; then, when the children were born, the repudiation, because He had forsaken her. Later she had gone to church once or twice, to light candles, not for herself but for the children she had left behind. But it had been no use. What kind of God was He, if he allowed even little children to suffer so? That thought came to her as she leafed through the children’s Bible, her eyes skimming over the colour plates. Then she discovered the name - at the back of the Bible, in an elegant, flowing hand. She read the name aloud to herself a few times. Was she the one who had taught the boys? If so, then she would like to meet her. The sooner the better.
When the boys woke up, she asked them about it. Not straight away, because first they needed to be changed again.
‘Never you mind,’ she said, because she could tell that this time they were ashamed of what they hadn’t been able to control. Fresh sheets, clean clothes - all over again. But the smell wasn’t as bad this time.
‘Do you know who Charlotte Maenhout is?’
They both nodded.
‘Was she your teacher?’
Again, a nod.
‘Where is she? Where does she live?’
‘In . . . hev . . . ven,’ Gabriel said, laboriously.
The answer startled her.
‘You mean she’s dead?’
She had said it before realising how painful it might be for them to hear those words.
‘She . . . is . . . an . . . ang . . . el,’ Gabriel answered.
‘My-gal too! My-gal too! Look!’ Raphael suddenly piped up. The boy lifted his head and opened his eyes wide, as if he were seeing his dead brother. The next instant, something seemed to have got stuck in his throat. He started gasping for air, like a fish on dry land.
‘Raphael!’ she cried, panicked. She wanted to gather him in her arms, but didn’t dare. ‘Raphael! Raphael!’
Then she rushed from the room.
‘Doctor! Doctor!’ She ran down the stairs. ‘Doctor!’
The office door opened just as she reached the bottom of the stairs.
‘Raphael!’ she cried. ‘He can’t breathe! He’s dying!’
The doctor nodded.
‘You have to do something!’ she screamed. ‘Help him! Why won’t you help him!’
Again he nodded, and then stirred himself. But slowly. Very slowly. She stormed up the stairs again, hoping to get him moving. At the door to the room, she stopped. The doctor was coming up the stairs. One tread, then the next. Peering into the room, she saw that Raphael was flat on his back in the bed. As soon as the doctor had made it up the stairs, she stepped aside to let him pass.
He leaned down over Raphael and checked his pulse. Anxiously she clapped her hands to her mouth. Minutes seemed to pass before he let the arm drop. Then he turned to her: ‘It is not yet time. God wants to torment him a while longer.’
That night and all the next day she barely left Raphael and Gabriel’s side. She sat on a chair by the bed and kept watch. The boys slept almost the entire time, and they were very restless in their sleep. They kept moving their hands about, as if they were trying to climb onto something. They were also breathing heavily - so heavily that every time one of them stopped making any noise, she feared that he had stopped breathing altogether. Every so often she’d wipe the drool from their mouths and chins, or dab the sweat from their foreheads. Every so often she’d simply reach out and touch them.
During those hours of vigil she tried to read the Bible, but she couldn’t concentrate. She kept having to stop and gaze at Raphael and Gabriel, even though it just tore her up with grief.
The boys woke up a few times. Then she would change them and give them something to eat. A sip of milk, a mouthful of soup or a bite of bread that she’d soaked in the soup. But they took in very little. A crumb of bread, a teaspoon of milk or soup.
‘Come on, eat something, please eat,’ she said, but insisting did not help. Swallowing seemed to hurt them, as did sitting up. She even had the impression that opening their eyes was arduous.
Their deterioration was faster than she’d ever have expected.
A few days. A week, maybe.
She grew more and more desperate. She felt it as an ache in her belly. She had the constant urge, as she used to have, to punch herself in the stomach, as if that would make everything all right again. At a certain point she even wished that she could just pick up the boys as they lay there and stuff them back inside her stomach, so that she might give birth to them again, and so give them a fresh chance at life.
She was waiting for the right moment to tell them she was their mother. She felt she had to tell them. But every time the opportunity presented itself, she faltered. Maybe the boys wouldn’t want to know. Maybe they had a picture in their minds of what their mother was like and would be disappointed, just as she had walked around with a picture of what they were like, only to find out that they were quite different. Yet she wasn’t disappointed. So maybe they wouldn’t be either.
She told them late the next day, a Monday. She had not seen the doctor, as he’d stayed downstairs all day long, mostly in the office or in the room next to it. At five o’clock he’d had some visitors: a man and a woman. She had heard their voices, but hadn’t been able to follow the conversation.
When the couple left the house, the boys woke up. She gave them some water to drink and wiped their faces clean with a facecloth. Both were burning hot.
‘I have to tell you something.’
She had no idea if she had their attention. Their eyes were open, but they did not seem to be looking at anything.
‘I’m your mother.’ As she said it, she felt a wave of relief. As if she hadn’t really been their mother until that moment. She instinctively started stroking her stomach as she gazed at her offspring.
She had not expected much of a reaction from them. But something. Just a nod, or a faint smile. That was all she needed.
‘Your mother,’ she said again.
If only she knew that they had understood. That would have been enough.
Perhaps they didn’t believe her. Perhaps the doctor had told them they didn’t have a mother. As he had told her. Or perhaps they were simply incapable of taking anything in any longer. That would be even worse.
She felt as depressed now as she had been relieved just a moment ago. She wasn’t their mother. She had never been, because she had never been there for them. In that sense the doctor was right.
She looked at the children again. She wanted one more night alone with them. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask? Just one more night. And then she would go for help. She would give them up for good, and accept her penance.
7
They’d expected that the doctor would kick the woman out in two seconds flat. That he had even let her in had been quite a surprise.
‘We’ve got to warn him about her,’ said Maria Moresnet. She had forbidden her sons to play in the street as long as that woman was still around.
‘Oh, he’ll realise soon enough that there’s something not right with her,’ Rosette Bayer reassured her. ‘Let’s just wait and see.’
Two hours went by before they saw her again. She suddenly appeared in the doorway.
‘Over there. Look. There she is.’
She deposited some bags of rubbish outside the door and went back inside. Rosette and Maria were flabbergasted.
An hour later they decided to call the doctor. Maria dialled his number and he did pick up, which was fortunate, since several villagers had recently tried to reach him but with no luck.
She came straight to the point: ‘Doctor, you’d better watch out for that woman who’s in your house. She says things. She claims . . . all sorts of things. She bothered my boys.’
‘Is that so?’
‘She thought that my kids were your kids. She says she’s their mother. But it’s not true, is it?’
‘No, it isn’t true. She is not their mother.’
‘Just as I thought. But in that case you shouldn’t be letting her near them.’
‘She is with them, and she’s staying. That’s what she says.’
‘Watch out. She’ll do more harm than good.’
There was silence on the other end of the line.
‘I’ll try to remember that,’ the doctor finally said, and then he hung up.
For the next few hours the conversation in the Café Terminus revolved around the woman who had just appeared out of nowhere, as Maria put it. They soon decided that Dr Hoppe must know the woman, because he would not have let her see his children otherwise. But she wasn’t the mother, no matter what she said.
‘I bet she can’t have children of her own, and she’s talked herself into imagining all sorts of things,’ said Léon Huysmans, who’d once read that the desire for a baby can drive a childless woman insane.