The Angel Maker (29 page)

But had somebody - a father or a mother, for instance - given Victor more individual attention, he might gradually have been taught or have discovered for himself that every human being is made up of an entire palette of feelings. In that case he might have started to blossom himself, in the widest sense of that word; because, when all was said and done, Victor never got beyond the bud stage. But at boarding school his conviction that there were only good people and bad people was reinforced over and over again. Certainly his lack of intimacy with others played a role in this, but the monks contributed as well. They were masters at hiding their true feelings from one another as well as from the students; indeed, they were expected to do so. Even Brother Rombout. His goodness was certainly apparent, but that was all that he would reveal. What went on inside him, what brooded and seethed there, what he might be feeling or longing for - none of that was made public. So how could Victor be expected to discover that there was more to life than just good or bad?

The more experience Victor had under his belt, the more he came to associate the good or the bad in a person with either that person’ s voice or the kind of physical contact he had with them. For he couldn’t tell anything from reading someone’s face.

First, the voice. The volume and the vibration. A loud volume usually came with a heavy vibration. That was bad.

Brother Rombout always spoke in a soft voice, and when he sang, he sang in a mellifluous voice, not like the dull drone of many of the other monks’ voices. Listening to Brother Rombout was a pleasure.

Brother Lucas, the third- and fourth-year teacher, and Brother Thomas, the first-year teacher, had voices that sounded like the lowest notes of the chapel organ. But they could do what the organ couldn’t do: they could let out all the stops and still make the sounds vibrate. Their voices were never actually directed at Victor, but he could hear them through the classroom walls. They sounded like a thundercloud passing overhead, and Victor pictured God hurling bolts of lightning at the students, because when the brothers raised their voices, they usually did so in the name of God.

‘The wrath of the Lord shall smite you.’

‘Fear the Day of Judgement, for God will know how to find you then.’

‘God’s vengeance will be implacable.’

Father Norbert, who usually supervised evening study, likewise had a voice with the bad sound in it. Victor had once experienced it himself. He didn’t know why, but Father Norbert had shouted at him. He was always shouting at the other boys, in fact, but never at him. ‘Look at Victor - he should be your example.’ He often shouted that at the other boys. But this time, this one time, he had shouted at Victor.

‘Look at me, Victor Hoppe! Look at me when I’m talking to you!’

But he couldn’t. He didn’t look up at Father Norbert. He wanted to, but he just couldn’t do it. It was as if his head had been nailed fast to his neck. Then he’d felt a box on the ear.

‘God will punish you for this, Victor Hoppe!’

The physical contact: touch. That too was either bad or good. Hitting someone was bad. Besides the floggings, Father Norbert was also bad when he pinched a student’s ear between his thumb and forefinger and twisted it until the boy had tears in his eyes. Victor had often seen him do that. And whacking someone’s fingers with a wooden ruler was bad too. Brother Lucas and Brother Thomas did that. The students in their classes would show off the black-and-blue marks across their fingers.

In Brother Rombout’s touch Victor recognised goodness. That sort of touch was gentle. A hand on his shoulder. A pat on the head. The way the brother leaned over him and guided his hand to help him write. That was all good.

And what about God? The image Victor came to have of Him was largely formed by the pronouncements of Brother Thomas, Brother Lucas and Father Norbert. Since they were always presenting God as threatening, as the one who excoriates and punishes, all-powerful, omnipotent and all-knowing, Victor, who was himself powerless and could barely tell the difference between abstract and real, concluded that God had to be the source of all evil.

And that image of God, that terrifying image, was underscored for him by what he read in the Bible, the Bible that Brother Rombout allowed him to read in peace, never realising what exactly Victor was getting out of it. What he got out of it was: God unleashed wars, God destroyed cities, God sent down plagues, God punished, God killed.

God giveth and God taketh away, Victor. Remember that.

God gave, it was true, but for all that God gave, he took away just as much, and more.

 

Jesus was good, however.

The New Testament came as a revelation to Victor when he was in the fifth- to sixth-year learning group. He had read that part of the Bible before, but now he came to it with the insight he’d gained from more than two years in boarding school.

Victor read about how Jesus fed the hungry; how Jesus calmed the storms; how Jesus healed the sick; how Jesus raised the dead.

Victor discovered that Jesus did not raise his voice, nor hit people, nor punish people.

Therefore, Jesus was good.

It was not only a revelation to Victor; it was also a comfort. Jesus was the Son of God, after all. The Father did bad things; the Son did good things. It was a familiar scenario, and it comforted him. It was no exaggeration to say that he saw a friend in Jesus. Jesus was also more real to him than God - more physical; more human. In that respect it was easier for Victor to imagine what He was like.

Besides being a friend, he soon came to see Jesus as a fellow sufferer - not little by little but quite abruptly, when he came to the end of the Gospel according to St Matthew. ‘Eli, Eli, lamma sabaktáni: that is, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? ” ’ That sentence struck him like a bolt of lightning. God had deserted his own Son. He had abandoned Him to his fate. This was only too familiar to Victor. Hadn’t his own father likewise abandoned him?

Did Victor imagine himself to be Jesus? Certainly not, because, first, he possessed no imagination. Secondly, he did realise that Jesus and he were two separate beings. It would be more accurate to say that Victor thought that he was like Jesus. They shared the same fate and therefore they were both good. Jesus had done more good than Victor, to be sure, but Victor still had plenty of time to catch up. If he became a doctor, then at least he’d be able to heal the sick. That’s the way he thought. If . . . then.

There was one thing he just couldn’t understand: how had his own father ever become a doctor? Doctors were supposed to do good, weren’t they?

 

Over time, Karl Hoppe’s medical practice began to thrive once more. The doctor had seen the error of his ways - in the opinion of the villagers, anyway; though they did ask themselves what on earth his son was doing at that school. But at least Victor was now safely in God’s hands again. Which was how Father Kaisergruber put it.

The doctor himself, however, was not doing so well, his patients noticed. It was difficult to draw him into conversation. He seldom laughed any more. He was losing weight. He did continue to practise medicine, and to do his job well, which was the most important thing, wasn’t it?

 

He doesn’t even look me in the eye - that’s how far it’s gone; that’s how far I’ve allowed it to go. That was how Karl Hoppe put it to himself whenever his son was home for a few days, after months away at school.

It also struck him that Victor’s intelligence seemed to be progressing in leaps and bounds. His homework, in grammar as well as arithmetic, was increasingly difficult. And Brother Rombout confirmed this. He said that Victor was his best student, head and shoulders ahead of the other boys.

The doctor always had to swallow when he heard that. He never let on that Victor had once been declared feeble-minded.

He wanted to know if his son was as silent in the classroom as he was at home.

‘Yes,’ the brother affirmed, ‘Victor is rather introverted. A lot goes in, but not much comes out.’ Then he added: ‘He doesn’t have any friends.’

There’s another thing Victor and I won’t ever be, thought the doctor: friends.

Later he again made a mental list of all the things his son might hold against him. There were times when he was ready to discuss these things with Victor. He wanted Victor to know what his mother had been like and why the two of them had decided to send him to the institution. He also considered giving Victor the patient file the sisters had kept on him - he had never been able to bring himself to throw it out, perhaps because he wasn’t quite ready to pretend that that chapter in Victor’s life had never really happened. He also intended to explain to Victor some day why he had hit him. What he wanted to say was that something had just come over him, something more powerful than he was. Finally, he would like to ask Victor to forgive him.

But every time he made up his mind to talk to him, he would decide at the last minute that it was better for Victor to forget rather than forgive. The blows he had dealt him would probably be the hardest thing for his son to forget, but the years the boy had spent in the mental institution were bound to fade from his memory in good time. He had been so young, after all. And who remembers what happened before their fifth birthday anyway?

 

The seventeenth of December 1980, early morning.

‘Done it.’

‘Victor?’

‘Yes, it’s Victor.’

‘Victor, it’s four-fifteen in the morning!’

‘Done it,’ he said again.

‘What have you done?’ asked Rex Cremer, annoyed.

‘The mice. The clones.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I’ve cloned the mice.’

The dean was dumbstruck. Victor’s flat tone of voice, as if he were simply reporting something routine, was completely at odds with the bombshell he’d just delivered.

‘Victor, are you serious?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many are there?’

‘Three.’

‘Where are you? Are you at the university?’

‘I’m here, yes.’

‘I’m on my way.’

On the way to the university Rex Cremer tried to work it out in his head. Fifteen months had gone by since he had recruited Victor and in that time Victor had not produced anything remarkable. The other biologists had urged Rex to put an end to the experiment, but he had stood his ground and backed Dr Hoppe. His stance was informed not so much by hope as by the fact that he was not yet ready to admit that he’d been wrong about Victor. When he had been woken by the phone call that morning, he had just come back from a week’s holiday. He had spoken with Victor just before he left. If what Victor had told him on the phone was true, then at the time they’d spoken the embryos had already been implanted, the birth of the mice imminent. Yet Victor hadn’t breathed a word - as if he had been reluctant to say anything until he possessed some concrete proof.

When the dean arrived on campus, he went straight to the lab, where he found Victor hunched over a microscope.

‘So where are they, Victor?’

Without raising his head Victor pointed at a table in a corner of the lab. It held a Plexiglas cage half-filled with shredded paper. Rex leaned down and counted seven young mice and one grown white mouse. He immediately saw that the half-naked mice were several days old; he had assumed that they’d just been born. So Victor had kept quiet about this even longer than he’d thought.

‘How old are they?’ he asked.

Victor wagged four fingers above his head.

‘In that case why did you wait to call me until now?’

‘Because I couldn’t be sure until I could tell what colour they were,’ Victor replied, sliding another Petri dish under the microscope. ‘I had to wait until the hair started growing in.’

The dean leaned down closely over the cage, and now he noticed the barely detectable colour difference.

‘White and brown mice?’

‘The ones with the brown coats are the clones,’ Victor informed him. ‘The white ones are normal mice. The clones are from the eggs of a black mouse; the eggs’ nuclei were replaced with nuclei from five-day-old embryos from a brown mother. And the surrogate birth mother was a white mouse.’

It took some time for his words to sink in. Rex tried repeating to himself what Victor had said. So Victor had removed the nuclei of the eggs of a black mouse and substituted donor nuclei from developing embryos that he had taken from a brown mouse. The three brown mice in the glass cage, therefore, had to be clones of mouse embryos; they weren’t the product of normal cell division. Victor had therefore succeeded, for the first time in the history of science, in cloning a mammal. Rex was flabbergasted.

‘By Jove, you did it!’ he cried.

But Victor did not respond. He was adjusting the microscope with his left hand while jotting something down on a sheet of paper with his right.

The dean turned back to the mice. ‘Victor, this is a world first,’ he said emphatically. ‘Do you realise?’

‘The world will know about it soon enough,’ Victor replied flatly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve already written the report and sent it off, to the editor of Cell.’

‘But you can’t! You mustn’t. I mean . . . You should have presented it to us first, or to me, at the very least. That’s not the way we do things here. Certainly not in this case.’

‘It had to be done quickly,’ Victor replied.

Rex took a deep breath, his eyes fixed on his colleague’s back.

‘And why Cell?’ he asked. ‘You gave your last article to Science. It has greater impact, surely?’

‘They ask too many questions.’

‘But they have to! That is why they—’

‘There are times when one should simply accept the facts.’

‘Victor, you are extremely accomplished, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to account for what you do.’