Communication entails more than just language skills, Frau Maenhout thought to herself, but she didn’t say it aloud.
Finally he too had a stipulation. It came as a total surprise. ‘Could you please tell them about Jesus Christ?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘About Jesus. In the New Testament.’
‘Tell them about Jesus,’ she repeated, frowning.
‘About Jesus, not about God,’ he emphasised. ‘Only Jesus.’
‘Just about Jesus?’
‘Yes, the New Testament, not the Old Testament.’
She couldn’t believe her ears. In the first place she would never have taken the doctor for a religious sort, and in the second, she had to ask herself how she could possibly tell the boys about Jesus without mentioning God. She asked the doctor once more, just to be sure: ‘So I’m to tell them about Jesus, but not about God?’
‘That’s right.’
‘But it can’t be done. It’s impossible.’
‘Nothing is impossible, Frau Maenhout. Difficult perhaps, but impossible, never.’
She decided not to pursue the matter. She was happy enough to have permission to give Michael, Gabriel and Raphael some religious instruction, even if it did come with restrictions.
She had one more thing to add, however: ‘I didn’t know you were religious, Doctor. You never go to church.’
The doctor answered, ‘The church is the house of God. There’s nothing for me there.’
‘Then there’s nothing for God here either,’ she said - she meant it as a joke.
But the doctor remained grave. ‘God is everywhere,’ he said. ‘In heaven. On earth and in all things.’
It was the catechism - the answer to the question ‘Where is God?’ She too had had to learn the catechism by heart as a child, and she had also never forgotten it.
‘Where did you go to school?’ she asked, because she was curious, but also because she wanted to change the subject. She didn’t feel like discussing religion with him. There was little enough in the way of normal conversation anyway.
He pondered an instant before answering her. ‘In Eupen.’
‘At the Christian Brothers’ School?’
He nodded.
‘As a boarder?’
Again he nodded.
She knew the school, or at least its reputation. The students received a strict Catholic upbringing, and in the doctor’s case it had clearly left its mark. She was curious to know what his experience of the school had been like.
‘What did you think of—’ she began, but he interrupted her.
‘I have a great deal of work to do, Frau Maenhout. Another time.’
Just for a minute she had thought she might forge a crack in the wall he had built up around himself, but once again she’d been wrong.
‘Another time,’ she repeated.
Florent Keuning needed just three days to transform one of the first-floor rooms of the doctor’s house into a functional classroom. He painted the ceiling and walls, scoured and polished the old floorboards, scrubbed the windows’ rusty hinges and hung up the blackboard Dr Hoppe had ordered together with three wooden school desks and a teacher’s lectern. To his chagrin, in all this time he had not seen the children, and had just about given up hope when on the last day they suddenly appeared in the classroom, no doubt lured there by his voice when he’d deliberately called out, ‘Right, I’m done! The doctor’s sons will be so happy!’
The boys made straight for the three desks, not even glancing in his direction. Each sat down at his desk although, being so small and slight, they could all easily have fitted at one. Their feet did not reach the ground, so that their short little legs dangled under the bench. They trailed their fingers across the wood as the handyman stared wide-eyed at the three bald heads. The blue blood vessels beneath the frail skin reminded him of the jagged veins running through certain types of marble.
The boys now turned their attention from the desk tops to the little hooks provided for hanging their schoolbags, then to the shelves underneath, where they would stow their books and notebooks, then to the grooves running along the backs of the desk tops.
‘That’s for your pencils and pens,’ said Florent. At the sound of his voice, the three boys glanced up briefly. The handyman was shocked at what he saw. Only the scars on their upper lips and the flattened noses still conformed to the image he had carried around with him since the last time he’d done work for the doctor. Of course the children were two years older now, but even in that space of time there was no way they should have changed this much. They seemed to have grown much, much older, and that impression was caused not just by their baldness, but also by the big dark bags under their eyes, which made their faces look drawn, as well as the fact that they didn’t have any eyebrows. It was as if all three were wearing masks, with just two round holes cut out for the eyes. This added to the impression that their heads did not really belong to their bodies. In spite of these changes, however, the three boys were still identical, and the handyman, even with his keen eye, so expert at telling if something was crooked or straight, was unable to detect the slightest difference. Since all three of them were gazing at him as if they hadn’t understood what he’d said, he stepped forward, took the pencil from behind his right ear, and placed it in the groove in the middle desk.
‘See, that’s what I mean,’ he said.
The boy sitting at the desk frowned. ‘Well of course we know that,’ he said, annoyed. ‘D’you think we’re stupid?’
Florent was startled again, this time by the voice, which sounded like the doctor’s, except that it was much higher, and therefore had the unpleasant screech of someone scratching his nails down a blackboard.
‘We already know how to read and write,’ said one of the other two. He slipped off his bench and walked to the blackboard.
‘There’s some chalk in the tray,’ said the handyman awkwardly.
The boy picked out a piece of blue chalk from the tray and, standing on tiptoe, began to write. A swollen vein ran right around the back of his skull from one ear to the other, like a cord for spectacles. The other boys also darted up to the blackboard to stand next to their brother, chalk in hand. They had the same large vein wrapped around the back of their heads. Florent noticed that all three were left-handed and were still wearing the coloured wristbands.
‘Are you three upstairs?’ Charlotte Maenhout’s voice rang out suddenly.
There was no reaction from the toddlers.
‘Yes they’re up here,’ called Florent.
‘Just as I thought.’ He heard her footsteps reverberating on the stairs. A moment later her large frame appeared in the doorway. She was carrying a cardboard box under one arm and a roll of paper under the other.
‘Hello, Florent,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you’re still here. Could you help me to hang up this picture?’ She gestured with her head at the roll under her right arm.
The handyman nodded and hastened to the door. He look the paper from her, pointed his thumb at the three boys standing at the blackboard and whispered, ‘They already know how to read and write.’
‘They can count, as well,’ she said briskly. ‘So you’d better watch out when you make out your bill.’
He looked at her in dismay.
‘It’s a joke,’ she said, tapping him playfully on the shoulder.
‘What’s it say?’ cried one of the boys. He had turned around and was pointing his piece of chalk at the roll. His eyes bulged so dangerously they looked as if they might pop out of their sockets at any moment. The handyman looked the other way so that he wouldn’t be seen to be staring.
‘The map of Europe,’ said Frau Maenhout.
‘The map of Europe?’ asked Florent.
‘It was the only poster they were willing to part with at the school,’ she confided to him. Then, turning to the children, she announced in a loud voice, ‘And it’s a good thing too, because the boys want to be world travellers - isn’t that right?’
‘Yeah, we’re going ever so far away,’ said Gabriel.
‘Well then, I’d better hang this map up right away, so you can get started,’ said the handyman, looking for a spot on the wall. ‘Where do you want it, Frau Maenhout? By the window?’
‘Yes, that’s fine,’ she said.
‘Are you going to be teaching them?’
‘The doctor wants me to. They’d only be wasting their time at nursery school.’
‘He’s right about that. If they’re really so bright, it’d probably be counter-productive. Over here?’ He pointed his drill at a spot on the wall. Frau Maenhout nodded.
He glanced at the doctor’s sons. The sound of the electric drill didn’t seem to bother them. He felt two conflicting emotions. On the one hand he was unsettled by the boys’ physical appearance, but on the other he was glad to have seen them. Later, at the Café Terminus, the other patrons would hang on his every word. Still, he wished he had something more to tell them.
‘Frau Maenhout,’ he said softly, then went on in a whisper, ‘is there something wrong with them? I mean, they look so . . . uh . . . different.’
Taking a deep breath, Frau Maenhout nodded coolly. ‘The doctor says it has something to do with their chromosomes.’
‘Chromosomes?’
‘I don’t quite get it either, but it’s to do with their genes. Every human cell has a number of chromosomes - twenty-three, to be exact - and every time a cell splits, the chromosomes split as well - that’s the way information is transmitted to the next cell.’
‘You’ve already lost me, Frau Maenhout,’ he whispered. ‘But can’t the doctor do something about it?’
‘He’s working on it, he says. It’s going to be all right in the end.’
‘Oh, that’s good,’ he said, with genuine relief.
He hung the map up on the hook, and was about to ask another question when Frau Maenhout called out to the little ones, ‘Look here, it’s the map of Europe!’
All three looked round and gazed at the map, which showed the countries of Europe in different colours, and the larger cities as red dots.
‘This is where we are,’ she said, tapping a finger at the spot where the borders of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands converged.
‘The three borders!’ cried Florent enthusiastically, as if giving an answer to a difficult question. He glanced at his watch. The Terminus was about to open. ‘I have to go, Frau Maenhout. I have to stop by Martha’s shop before it closes. She has a job for me as well.’
‘Oh, can’t you please wait a moment? I’ve got another thing I’d like you to hang up.’ She walked over to the teacher’s desk, where she had deposited the cardboard box. She took off the lid, rummaged around in it and took out a cross.
‘What’s that?’ asked one of the boys.
‘This is Jesus,’ she said.
‘The son of a carpenter,’ Florent added with a wink, waving his hammer.
‘Why’s he hanging on a cross?’ asked the boy.
‘I’ll tell you another time,’ said Frau Maenhout. ‘Herr Florent is in a hurry.’ She turned round and pointed to a spot over the door. ‘Over there perhaps,’ she said.
Florent nodded, moved his stepladder over to the door and began hammering a nail into the wall. ‘Will you be teaching them religion as well?’ he asked, over his shoulder.
‘The doctor has asked me to.’
‘Is that so? I didn’t know the doctor was a religious man.’ Another piece of news to tell the others. Everyone at the Terminus would be amazed.
‘Oh, he is, Florent. Just because someone doesn’t go to church, it doesn’t mean he isn’t devout.’
‘He doesn’t have the time to go to church, of course.’
‘That’s right, Florent.’
She handed him the cross, and he hooked it on the nail.
‘There, that’ll hold for the next thousand years,’ he said, smiling, as he climbed down the ladder. He picked up his tool chest, and, sticking his other arm through the stepladder’s treads, slung it over his shoulder. ‘If you have any other job for me to do, Frau Maenhout, you just let me know.’
Nodding, he took his leave, sneaking one last look at the boys. Derelict. That was the word that suddenly came into his head. They looked derelict. Like an abandoned house that’s gone to ruin after being battered for years by rain and wind.
The next day Frau Maenhout found the cross lying in the top drawer of her desk. Her eyes went automatically to the spot above the door, where even the nail it had hung from had disappeared. She had a hunch, which was confirmed at the end of the day, when she mentioned the incident to Dr Hoppe.
‘Yes, I did that,’ was his reply.
She immediately regretted having been so discreet with Florent Keuning the day before. When he’d started asking nosy questions, she had been tempted to tell him other, less flattering, things about the doctor. But she knew that the ‘truth’ as she saw it might very well be construed as slander, and that whatever she said would eventually reach the doctor’s ears.
‘Why did you take down the cross? I thought you wanted me to tell your children about Jesus.’
‘About what he did. You have to tell them about his deeds. All the good things he did. Not about his death.’
‘Death is a part of life,’ she replied. ‘Surely you know that?’
‘True, true. But even if that’s so, we don’t have to be confronted with it all the time?’
‘It’s just symbolic.’ Her voice had gone up a register.
‘He was betrayed by God,’ the doctor said abruptly. He hadn’t even heard her remark. He hadn’t even looked up.
‘Excuse me?’
‘God did nothing to save Him when He was on the cross. His own son. Is that really the image we want to preserve? Must we really be reminded of it?’
She remembered the discussion they’d had a few days earlier, when he had requested that she teach the boys about Jesus but not about God. So was that the reason? Because God had done nothing to save Jesus from the cross?
‘You are wrong.’ She said it adamantly, and was surprised at herself. It was the first time she had dared to contradict the doctor point-blank. She knew why she had suddenly found the guts to do so, as well: because she felt as if she were dealing with one of her pupils; a little boy, to whom she was supposed to teach certain things.