‘Women really can’t help it,’ said Maria. ‘It’s because of their . . . what’s it called . . . ?’
‘Hormones. Their hormones,’ said Léon Huysmans.
‘That’s what I meant. In her case they’ve run amuck, probably. She even told us there was no man involved. Totally off her rocker. And yet - just think, wouldn’t that be something? If women no longer needed a man, to have children? Then we’d be free to do as we pleased.’
‘You wouldn’t get through a single day without a man, Maria!’ Jacques Meekers shouted at her.
‘Oh yes I would, Jacques, easily!’
‘I think it’s going to be possible, in the future,’ said Léon Huysmans. ‘Women will be able to have children without a man. They’re already close to that in America.’
‘In America they can do anything,’ said René Moresnet.
‘Ah, so the women over there get preggers by immaculate conception! ’ cried Meekers, snorting with laughter.
‘Meekers, behave yourself!’ responded Maria, but she too couldn’t help laughing.
The sound of the door opening and closing made everyone look up. Lothar Weber had risen to his feet and left without a word. Looking out of the window, René Moresnet saw him cross the street with his head down.
‘We shouldn’t have been talking that way,’ said the café’ owner. ‘How would you like it if you suddenly had to go through life childless, and all anyone around you ever talked about was having kids and more kids?’
‘I thought he was doing better,’ said Jacques Meekers. ‘He’d started smiling again, once in a while.’
‘These things keep festering, Jacques. Take his wife, for instance.’
Meekers nodded, but said nothing. Vera Weber had been visiting the doctor almost every week over the past few months. Everyone knew she was suffering from depression, but no one dared say so. The closest they came to it was to say she had fallen into a funk.
Lothar Weber hadn’t liked the whole idea from the very start.
‘You can be present during the procedure,’ Dr Hoppe had said, ‘but we won’t be needing your sperm.’
Not only didn’t he like it, he didn’t get it either. How could the doctor arrange for him to have a son, if his input wasn’t necessary? At the next appointment he had asked about it again, just to make sure, but his mind had not been put at ease.
‘It’s simply a question of technique. Even your wife’s eggs are not really necessary, in principle. It can just as easily be done with donor egg cells. But we’ll try with your wife’s eggs to start with.’
‘But how, Doctor? How?’
‘The hormones she is receiving now will cause the egg cells to ripen . . .’
‘I mean, how are you going to make a baby? Out of what? Not out of clay?’
‘Out of genetic material. DNA.’
‘DNA?’
‘Deoxyribonucleic acid.’
Lothar had nodded, even though he didn’t get it at all. His wife had kicked him in the shins - twice. She was absolutely set on going ahead. It was the hormones that did it, Lothar thought, because in the beginning it was she who had been most hesitant. But once the doctor had given her the first injection, she’d quickly come round. It was true that she had turned quite moody, biting Lothar’s head off over the slightest little thing, but that too was probably just the hormones.
The hormones were also responsible for her hefty weight gain: fourteen kilos in four months. She almost looked pregnant. She’d said it herself one day, and as she said it, he’d caught a glint in her eye.
He, on the other hand, still wasn’t sure - until that afternoon in the Terminus. What Léon Huysmans said had startled him. He had rushed out of the café to go home and tell his wife.
‘In America they’ve been doing it for a while.’
‘What?’
‘What the doctor’s doing. Without a man, or anything.’
‘You haven’t told anyone, have you?’ she replied in dismay. She didn’t want anyone to know that she was in treatment.
‘No, no, they were the ones who started talking about it. Because there was a woman at the doctor’s who—’
‘Who said she was the mother of his children. I heard. Helga Barnard rang me. Is she still there? At the doctor’s?’
‘Yes, she’s still there.’
‘I hope she’s gone by tomorrow.’
‘She probably will be.’
The problem wasn’t anything he had done. That Victor was sure of. He was being thwarted. God was just not going to give in without a fight. At least it did confirm that he, Victor Hoppe, was on the right track, because God would never have put up such a fight otherwise. It had all started with the questionable viability of Gunther Weber’s cells. He had taken it as an omen. But then he had come to see it as an extra challenge, and since he did manage in the end to overcome that snag, he decided that that had been the worst of it. That was why he felt able to promise the parents they would have a baby in a year’s time, identical in every way to Gunther, only without his hearing disability.
He’d been a bit overconfident, although he didn’t see it that way. Or did not want to see it. Or could not see it. In any case, by Monday, 15 May 1989, one week before the four months were over, he still had not succeeded in deciphering the DNA code, and so had not been able to identify the gene with the deafness mutation.
He could have farmed out that step - to Rex Cremer, for instance, who had better equipment in Cologne, and more experience with the new technique - but Victor wanted to do everything himself. And he might have done it, too, if he had given himself more time. For once, he had raised the bar too high.
The thought that he too might have his limitations, that he too might possibly fail some time, or run out of luck once in a while - none of that ever occurred to him. No, in his eyes, it was obstruction, pure and simple. God would not relinquish the code of life to him without a struggle. It was something Victor understood all too well. After all, he would never have dreamed of giving everything he knew away either.
But since God was putting up such resistance, he was forced into a decision in the end. For there was only a week to go before he would have to implant an embryo of at least five days’ gestation into the mother’s womb, which left him only two days to decipher the code and find the error. That was too little time.
For that reason, he decided to stop trying to find it. He wasn’t admitting defeat - no, he was merely regrouping. As if God had tried to smite him, but had just managed to nick him a little with his sword. Nothing life-threatening. A stab in the arm. Or a cut in his side. Not a defeat but an injury. That was how he saw it. And since it was merely an injury, he could still strike back. He wouldn’t win this time, perhaps, but he could at least take a swing at God. If he resurrected Gunther Weber, giving back the life that God had taken from the boy, then God and he would be quits. And the boy would have to have a full life, naturally. He’d be deaf, but he would not grow old before his time. Not this one! He’d have the one mutation, but not the other. That was what it came down to: deafness, but normal telomeres. The first was unavoidable; the second wasn’t. That was the challenge. But it wasn’t hard. For he practically had it in the bag.
Lothar accompanied his wife to Dr Hoppe’s on 15 May. It was Whit Monday, but he had learned that the menstrual cycle did not take Sundays or holidays into account. Lothar would rather have stayed at home - seeing that he didn’t have a role in this anyway - but his wife had insisted, because she was scared, she told him. The doctor was going to poke all sorts of things up inside her, and she wanted her husband to be nearby in case something went wrong.
‘As long as I don’t have to watch,’ he’d said, under his breath.
Their appointment at the doctor’s was for five o’clock. The date and time had been decided on weeks ago. After the first month, during which Vera had had to keep track of her menstrual cycle on a calendar, the doctor had mapped out a strict timetable. If it all went according to plan, their next appointment would be five or six days from now. That was when the doctor would put one, perhaps two embryos back into her uterus. Male embryos. They would look like Gunther. In the beginning that had been their fervent hope, but now that the momentous day was almost at hand, it no longer seemed to matter as much. As long as the child was healthy - that, after all, was the most important thing.
One time, Vera had mentioned this to the doctor. She had only wanted to make things easier for him. ‘It doesn’t have to be a boy. He doesn’t have to look like Gunther.’
‘It has to be. It will be,’ the doctor had answered flatly.
After that, she’d kept quiet. Not only was she afraid of appearing ungrateful or of lacking faith in him; in saying aloud the name of her dead son, she had also suddenly seen him before her. Suddenly she missed him terribly, and the longing to hold him was so overpowering that she instantly regretted having told the doctor that the baby needn’t look like Gunther.
Still, what she wanted more than anything was a healthy baby. No defects; no disabilities; and so no hearing impediment either.
Lothar and Vera arrived at the doctor’s house at five o’clock sharp. Lothar felt a bit awkward, as if he, not his wife, were about to undergo the procedure. Now that the moment was at hand, he asked himself if they shouldn’t have tried the natural way first after all. Come to think of it, the subject had never even come up between them in the past four months. Nor had he made any overtures to her in bed. Perhaps that was another reason he was feeling slightly ill at ease: it troubled him to think the doctor would be fiddling with his wife - with him sitting right there - whereas he had not touched her in ages.
In the examination room Dr Hoppe had already set out everything needed for the procedure. Lothar sat down next to the desk, his back half-turned to the examination table on which his wife would be lying. He’d taken in the stirrups at a glance, and that was enough for him.
‘Just relax, Frau Weber,’ he heard Dr Hoppe say to her.
The doctor had just finished recapitulating what he was about to do, but Lothar was barely listening. As long as it’s over soon, he thought.
In the village, people assumed that his wife was in therapy with the doctor, being treated for depression. He had never contradicted them, because he knew Vera wouldn’t want that. She would rather they thought that than learn the real truth. He felt the same way. They were both still grief-stricken, but now that they had something to hold on to, something to look forward to, their grief had become more bearable. The emptiness was a little less empty. Something like that.
Behind his back he heard the sound of metal instruments being dropped into a metal dish, but there were other noises too. There was someone walking around in the house. Could it be the doctor’s boys? Or was it that woman? No one had seen her leave.
‘You ought to ask him about her,’ Vera had said on the way there, ‘in a roundabout way.’
Should he ask the doctor about the woman now? He glanced at his wife. The top half of her body was shielded from the lower half by a dark-green sheet. Her eyes were closed, and her breathing was calm. The doctor had given her a mild sedative. She would scarcely feel a thing, he had said. Her profile reminded Lothar of his son’s. They both had the same snub nose and high forehead. He used to be glad that Gunther had not inherited his big broad nose. Thinking of his son made him shiver. He took a deep breath. Somewhere in the house he heard someone banging around. The doctor’s sons? He wondered how they were doing. They had cancer - that was the rumour. But the doctor had never confirmed it. What was worse? To lose a child after a long-drawn-out illness, or to lose a child in an accident? He wished he could have had a chance to tell Gunther some things. Still, it was bound to be just as terrible for the doctor. Children weren’t supposed to die, neither in an accident, nor because of illness.
‘Why couldn’t God have taken me instead? I’ve had my best years. He still had his whole life ahead of him,’ his wife had sighed more than once in those first days after Gunther had died. In the doctor’s case, of course, God had taken the mother’s life first. But even that hadn’t been enough of a sacrifice, apparently. So now God wanted the children as well.
You need not abide by God’s will. Lothar could still hear Dr Hoppe saying those words. But now even he, the doctor, would have to abide. Or were the boys not as poorly as everyone seemed to think? It was true that no one had seen them since Charlotte Maenhout’s accident, but was that enough reason to write them off for as good as dead?
‘Seven, Frau Weber,’ he heard the doctor announce. ‘I have been able to harvest seven mature eggs. That is an excellent outcome.’
Lothar heard his wife sigh. She turned her face towards him. Her eyes were wet, but there was a smile on her lips. Like the sun coming out after the rain.
‘You can get dressed,’ said the doctor, starting to remove the green screen. ‘It’s all done.’
Lothar felt this might be the right moment to ask the doctor about his boys. All the tension had dissipated and they were all feeling palpably relieved. The doctor might even tell them about the woman who’d arrived on his doorstep yesterday. Lothar cleared his throat. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his wife sitting up. The doctor was taking off his gloves.
‘How are the boys, Doctor? Gabriel and . . .’ He couldn’t immediately think of the other names, but the doctor spoke before they came back to him.
‘Their fate is now in God’s hands. God will decide what’s to become of them.’
Zapped by a thunderbolt - that’s how Lothar felt.
‘I - I didn’t know . . . It must be . . .’ He looked at his wife helplessly. Her face had gone pale and there were tears welling up in her eyes.
Lothar averted his gaze. The doctor had his back to him. It was natural that he wouldn’t want to show his feelings in their presence. Lothar wondered if he should tell him he was sorry, but he knew that if he did, he too would burst into tears.