The Angel Maker (3 page)

The doctor, swaying a little on his feet, stood silently beside the cot. Except for the hum of the old ceiling fan, there was an awkward pause, and Werner felt all eyes on him.

‘Hey, Werner, give the doctor his drink,’ cried René Moresnet. The bartender held out a glass of water. Everyone watched as Werner handed the glass over to the doctor, who accepted it with a polite nod.

‘Thank you very much,’ he said, stepping aside to free up a space right next to the cot. ‘Please, be my guest, Herr Bayer.’

Werner took a hesitant step forward. ‘They’re so quiet,’ he remarked. ‘Are they asleep?’

‘Oh, no, they’re awake,’ replied the doctor with a cursory glance into the cot.

‘Ohhh.’ Cautiously Werner leaned forward; he thought he could make out the tops of the babies’ heads. ‘Girls?’ he asked.

‘No, three boys.’

‘Three boys,’ Werner echoed, swallowing audibly. He inched past the doctor to the side of the cot. ‘What are their names?’

‘Michael, Gabriel and Raphael.’

A buzz went round the café and Freddy Machon exclaimed in alarm, much louder than he’d intended, ‘The angels of vengeance!’

It was clear that Dr Hoppe didn’t know where to look. In order to cover his embarrassment, he took a sip of water.

Jacob Weinstein, who had not caught Machon’s exclamation, chimed in: ‘Just like the archangels, right, Doctor? God’s messengers,’ stated the sexton emphatically, as if to show off his biblical knowledge.

The doctor nodded, but remained mute.

Werner was still dithering next to the cot. ‘How old are they now, Doctor?’

‘Nearly nine months.’

Werner tried to recall what his own son had looked like at that age - how big had the boy been; and had he had any teeth?

His hands behind his back, his eyes squeezed shut, Werner leaned in slowly, screwing up his face as if he were biting into something sour. René Moresnet watched from behind the bar as Werner opened first one eye, then the other. Twice his eyes scanned the cot, from side to side and back again.

Then his face lit up. ‘It’s incredible! They look so much alike, all three of them!’ he exclaimed, with a sigh of relief.

Dr Hoppe nodded. ‘Quite. And nobody thought I could do it.’

Some of the patrons laughed, but the doctor’s face remained serious, so that several people began to wonder whether it really was meant as a joke.

Werner took no notice; he was waving the bystanders over. ‘Come on, you’ve got to see this!’

René Moresnet emerged from behind his bar, pushing Wilfred Nüssbaum ahead of him. It wasn’t until the two men had leaned over the cot and reacted with an enthusiasm equal to Werner’s that the other villagers felt it safe to approach. There was some pushing and jostling, and as the cries of Oooh! and Aaaah! proliferated, everyone tried to catch a glimpse of the three infants.

The first thing that everyone noticed was the way in which the doctor had had to arrange the babies in the cot, because they no longer quite fitted. Two of them were lying head-up: one had his left ear pressed against the side of the cot, the other his right. The third boy lay with his head at the foot of the cot, his feet sandwiched between his brothers’ heads.

‘Like sardines in a tin,’ whispered Freddy Machon.

There was no blanket, but to ward off the cold their father had dressed the babies in mouse-grey woollen jumpsuits that covered them from neck to toe. All three jumpsuits had a sailboat on the left breast pocket, but most of the villagers did not notice this until they had closely examined the three little faces, none of which betrayed any sign of the wide-open gash Lanky Meekers had described. As it turned out, each infant did have a stitched upper lip, leaving a diagonal scar that extended, as in the doctor’s own case, halfway up the wide, flattened nose. Their bulging heads - ‘I thought for a moment they were wearing helmets,’ René Moresnet remarked later - sprouted stringy ginger hair that was still too sparse to mask the entire skull. They had also inherited their father’s grey-blue eyes, and his pale complexion. The skin on their high foreheads and cheeks was flaky, as it was on the backs of their hands.

‘Their skin is too dry. He ought to use Zwitsal soap on them,’ whispered Maria Moresnet, mother of a pair of illegitimate eighteen-month-old twins.

In any case, everyone agreed that the three brothers looked uncannily alike, and were nothing like the monsters most people had been imagining. The boys certainly weren’t cute, and if you had said that they were ugly, nobody would have been likely to contradict you. However, for most people, especially the young mothers, the sight of the boys didn’t evoke disgust, only pity - although no one was actually tempted to touch them, pat their ginger hair or say their names out loud, as if the people were all afraid that doing so would summon the children’s celestial namesakes. The villagers shuffled round and round the cot, their heads bobbing above the three little boys like so many balloons. Anyone expecting the babies to react with alarm, now that they suddenly found themselves the centre of attention after so many months of confinement, would have been sadly mistaken. They simply didn’t react at all. The spectators decided the babies must be overwhelmed by all the new things to see, because even pulling a funny face at them, or crooning ga-ga-ga or boolle-boolle-boolle did not make them as much as blink.

‘They seem drugged,’ whispered René Moresnet.

When just about everyone had had their turn at the cot, Lanky Meekers and his father came to have a gander.

Meekers promptly gave Lanky a poke in the ribs. ‘Eighteen centimetres? Idiot!’ his father hissed at Lanky, causing quite a bit of hilarity among the bystanders. Quickly, to change the subject, he turned to the doctor. ‘Can they talk yet?’

From behind the bar Maria Moresnet said scornfully, ‘At nine months? Surely not!’

But Dr Hoppe nodded and said dryly, ‘Indeed they can, ever since they were six months old.’

Meekers looked up triumphantly. ‘See? I was right!’

‘Really? That soon, Doctor?’ asked Maria incredulously.

The doctor nodded again. ‘In French and German,’ he added.

Now Maria began to laugh, ‘Oh, you’re joking.’

But the doctor wasn’t joking. He even seemed to be slightly offended. ‘I have to go,’ he said abruptly, walking over to the cot and yanking up the hood.

‘Wouldn’t you like another drink, Doctor?’ René Moresnet suggested. The doctor shook his head, stretching the cover over the cot.

‘Doctor?’ The question came from somewhere at the front of the bar - a voice that had not been heard from before. Whoever it was cleared his throat and cried again, louder this time, ‘Doctor, would you mind if I had a look at your sons too?’

The doctor was startled. He turned his head to see where the voice was coming from. A man with a wrinkled face, squinting out of one eye, stuck his gnarled hand up from his seat at a table by the window.

‘My name is Josef Zimmermann, Doctor.’

There was some tittering. With his good eye Zimmerman glared around the café. ‘Could you bring them over here for a minute?’ he said, turning to the doctor. ‘I’m not too steady on my feet, you see.’ With a nod of the head he indicated the walking stick that was hooked over the arm of his chair.

‘If you like, Herr Zimmermann,’ said the doctor.

The café had gone quiet again, and the patrons held their breath as they watched Dr Hoppe pick up the cot and swing it down off the table. He crossed over to where Zimmermann was sitting and, crouching down, placed the cot on the floor right next to the old codger’s scrawny legs.

‘Thank you,’ said Zimmermann, staring at the bowed back in front of him.

The doctor let the cot’s hood down once more, then stood up. The old man was scrutinising him intently with his one functioning eye, the inky pupil of which filled almost the entire cornea. The other eye was just a horizontal split ringed with yellowish crusts.

‘I knew your father and mother,’ said Zimmermann.

The doctor cringed as if he’d been stung, but rose to his full height, trying to look nonchalant.

‘Your father, now there was a good doctor,’ the old man went on. ‘They don’t make them like that any more.’

It was a mean thing to say, but Dr Hoppe did not react. He simply stared at the cot and didn’t say another word. Josef Zimmermann gave an audible sigh and slowly bent forward over the head of the cot.

‘Well, well, so there they are. They look just like you.’ He paused for a second, then said, ‘Where is their mother, if I may ask?’

Behind him, some of the villagers exchanged looks of surprise. Everyone had been wondering the same thing for months, but nobody had had the guts to come right out with it and ask the doctor.

Dr Hoppe did not seem fazed, as if he had been expecting the question. He took a deep breath and then replied, ‘They don’t have a mother. Never had one.’

Josef Zimmermann looked baffled, but then he shook himself and said, ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, I didn’t know . . .’

All of a sudden the babies made their presence known. All three simultaneously opened their mouths and began to cry, and their voices were so exactly alike that it almost seemed as if the wailing were emerging from a single throat. Their shrieks set the bystanders’ eardrums ringing. Even hard-of-hearing Weinstein covered his ears. The doctor reacted nervously to the screams, but did not make any attempt to hush his offspring. He pulled the hood of the cot back up and snapped the plastic rain shield into place. Then he picked up the cot and manoeuvred it between the tables and chairs towards the door, which he struggled in vain to open. Werner Bayer rushed forward and flung the door open wide, nodding his head nervously. He stared after the doctor as he crossed the street, then shut the door, turned round and glared angrily at Josef Zimmerman.

‘Was that really necessary?’ he cried. ‘Was it? He saved my son’s life, for God’s sake!’

3

Any villagers who had still been hesitant about going to Dr Hoppe’s surgery in the days following the incident with George Bayer changed their minds after Father Kaisergruber went to see him about his gastritis. In fact, the pastor’s chronic complaint wasn’t the real reason for his visit; it was curiosity. His conscience, too, played a part in his decision. Certain things had happened in the past, and he wondered what, if anything, the doctor still remembered.

‘You look very much like your father.’

That was how he began the conversation, upon being received by the doctor in a rather cool and businesslike manner in the former consultation room. It was still stacked with boxes, and otherwise furnished with an old desk and two chairs.

Victor Hoppe responded to his remark with a curt nod, then asked him to describe his symptoms precisely.

The priest tried again a little later: ‘Your mother was a good and devout Christian.’ She was, at any rate, he would have liked to add.

Again, just a nod of the head. But this time the priest noticed a slight hesitancy. At least that was something.

The doctor asked him to take off his cassock. He complied, although it felt as if he were taking off a piece of armour that protected him from evil. As he was being examined, therefore, he kept conspicuously fingering the little silver cross that hung from a chain around his neck, in the hope that that would make the doctor think twice.

Then he mentioned casually, ‘The holiday of St Rita is coming up next week. The entire village always goes on pilgrimage, to Calvary Hill at La Chapelle. The convent of the Clare Sisters.’

The doctor palpated his stomach, prodding hard where it hurt the most. The priest cried out in pain and only just managed to swallow an oath.

‘That’s the spot,’ Dr Hoppe said, nodding, ‘right where the oesophagus joins the stomach.’ The doctor had managed to dodge the subject, but Father Kaisergruber knew that his own remark had touched a sore spot as tender as the one the doctor’s probing thumb had just found.

The doctor gave him a home-made elixir for his ailment, and when the priest asked what he owed him, Victor Hoppe just shook his head and said, ‘It is my duty to do good. It would not be right to take money for it.’

The priest was astonished. He wondered if the doctor was being ironic. He responded perfunctorily that that was very noble of him, and departed somewhat befuddled, the acid burning in his stomach.

At home he took a spoonful of the elixir, though less than the prescribed amount - what if it was poison? he asked himself fearfully - and very soon the burning sensation in his stomach began to abate. Two days later it was almost entirely gone and after another two days he felt great, as if his stomach upset had never existed. That in itself was such a relief that at the next Mass he read from chapter 6 of the Gospel according to St Luke, even though a different text was specified by the liturgical calendar. ‘Judge not,’ he preached that Sunday, ‘and ye shall not be judged. Condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned. Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.’ And the entire congregation had witnessed how, for the first time in many weeks, the priest did not grimace in pain on swallowing the cheap sacramental wine.

A bunion, a dry cough, chilblains, a boil, a grazed knee: ever since Father Kaisergruber’s recovery, even the most negligible complaint was excuse enough for the burghers of Wolfheim to ring the surgery bell. But villagers with incurable ailments - a chronic hernia or, in the case of Gunther Weber, congenital deafness - also went to Dr Hoppe, hoping, of course, that he would bring about another miracle.

Although Irma Nüssbaum had claimed the contrary, it turned out that the doctor was not quite ready for so many patients to come knocking at his door. As the priest had already discovered, he did not yet have a proper examination room, and the former waiting room had not been refurbished either, so that patients occasionally had to wait in the little hallway by the draughty front door.