‘You’re wrong,’ she repeated; ‘the cross is a symbol of Jesus’ suffering.’
‘See? That’s what I mean. Surely we don’t need to be confronted with his suffering all the time?’
‘Yes we do. So that we’ll never forget that He gave His life for us.’
It was as if someone had grabbed the doctor by the hair and yanked his head up. Something in what she’d said must have hit home.
‘In sacrificing His life,’ she continued, ‘He relieved man of his sins. And by ascending to heaven He demonstrated that He is beyond both life and death. And that He will be there for ever, for everyone. That is why we commemorate His death. That is why we are obliged to honour the cross.’ Then she added emphatically, echoing what the doctor had once said to her, ‘We. Everyone. Humankind.’
Her explanation was slightly simplistic, as if she were indeed addressing a little boy, but the doctor’s reaction was childish too. He shook his head and then stomped off, leaving her standing there, speechless.
Charlotte Maenhout did not hang the cross back up. She didn’t want to provoke the doctor, so she concentrated on the lessons instead. In fact, she’d much rather have seen the boys playing games or having fun with building blocks all day, as they were supposed to do at their age, but as they were so eager to learn, practically begging her to teach them more, she continued to do so, and with the utmost dedication, even though she realised that she was thereby furthering their father’s ambition to turn them into some kind of prodigy.
Classroom time was largely taken up with reading and arithmetic, both oral and written, although it was clearly too soon for the latter - physically the triplets were still toddlers, and their motor skills were not sufficiently developed. She had not yet added religious instruction to the curriculum. The things the doctor had said to her over the past few days had made her hesitate. Anyway, the boys had more than enough to do with reading, sums and oral exercises - they couldn’t seem to get enough. Still, there was one subject that captured their interest over anything else. The mere sound of it set their minds racing: world geography. At the beginning of the week she would let one of them point to a country on the map, and would then tell them a few facts about it, such as the names of the major cities and rivers. They would roll the names around their tongues as if they were sweets, committing them to memory. The rest of the week she would devote an hour every day to telling them about that country, showing them pictures or drawings of buildings like the Dom in Cologne or Paris’s Notre-Dame, and the boys would stare at the pictures for a long time, fascinated.
She was, of course, only sharpening their longing to see more of the wide world in this way; but she was determined to take them outside, beyond the gate, beyond the village. Even though their father had yet to give his permission for such a venture, she still had hope. After all, the doctor frequently asked her about the progress his sons were making. With justifiable pride she would tell him about the new words the boys had learned, and then she would get them to read from one of the books she borrowed from the Hergenrath lending library every Saturday. The doctor expressed his satisfaction in his typical manner - that is to say, without much enthusiasm; but the fact that he did, at her urging, spend half an hour or so helping the children with their reading each day was a sign that she had his full support.
His reaction to the news that his sons had begun to do sums wasn’t quite what she’d expected. ‘Show me,’ he’d said.
The boys had gone to the classroom to fetch the wooden blocks they used for counting, and he’d given them a few simple sums to do. As if performing some magic trick, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael pushed the blocks around, arranging them in different configurations, speedily arriving at the correct answer every time. It was the doctor’s own idea to continue this little ritual each day after she went home, which came as a pleasant surprise to Charlotte. It seemed that he was finally trying to get closer to his children, as if he had finally acknowledged them.
‘Some men don’t know what to do with little kids,’ opined Hannah Kuijk, with whom she was still in the habit of discussing such developments. ‘They don’t have the patience. To them children are little robots that produce nothing but noise and shit. It isn’t until their children are a bit older and wiser - and so, in their eyes, more human - that they finally learn how to relate to them.’
Alas, Hannah’s predictions were not borne out by what came to pass, and Dr Hoppe’s involvement lasted only a short while. He kept it up for two to three months, working with his sons on a daily basis; but after that he began to skip a day here and there. The increasingly frequent excuse was that he was too busy. The boys would confirm this: their father had been poring over books with difficult words or long columns of numbers, or he had spent the entire time working in the lab, leaving them to do their homework at the desk in his office.
Over the next few weeks he even stopped apologising for his neglect, and Frau Maenhout had to find out from the children whether or not he’d had any time to read or do sums with them.
She was sorry that the doctor’s interest in his sons’ progress was abating; still, it did give her the freedom to do whatever she thought fit in the classroom. So one fine morning she opened a children’s Bible and proceeded to tell Michael, Gabriel and Raphael the story of Creation, just as she had always done with her pupils at the start of the school year. She did not tell them about Jesus yet - not out of spite, but simply because she was following the order of the Bible. So the following day she continued with the story of Adam and Eve, and the next she told them about the Fall. Then came Cain and Abel, the Flood and the Tower of Babel. She read to the boys from the children’s Bible for at most fifteen minutes a day, and sometimes even less than that, because if she heard Dr Hoppe’s footsteps on the stairs, she’d clap the book shut and hastily put it away, even if Moses was on the verge of cleaving the Red Sea in two or Abraham was raising the knife in the air to kill his only son Isaac.
The boys listened just as breathlessly to the Bible stories as they had to the fairy tales she used to tell them, and couldn’t stop talking about them afterwards. But Charlotte told them expressly that they must not talk about the stories to their father.
‘A secret. We have a secret,’ they cried, and Frau Maenhout realised that it was only a matter of time before they would shoot their mouths off. She’d have to see how she would talk herself out of that one.
The doctor’s interest continued to flag, however, and in the end he no longer bothered to find out, either from his sons or from her, what went on in the classroom. When he did raise the subject with her, it was obviously more out of politeness than from any genuine concern. She was increasingly getting the sense that he was leaving it all up to her, not because he thought she was so good but, possibly, because he was hoping to distract her so that she wouldn’t notice what he was up to. For, after leaving his sons alone for a while, he had now gone back to putting them through all sorts of medical tests. Some new equipment had arrived, including an ultrasound and an X-ray machine, and more than ever he seemed to be treating his sons like guinea pigs. This in turn put a damper on his relationship with the children.
For this, Hannah Kuijk came up with yet another explanation. This time she was sure she knew what ailed the doctor: fear of commitment. ‘Since losing his wife, he has grown fearful of putting his heart on the line again. He doesn’t want to experience the same hurt all over again, if something should happen to one of his sons.’
It was a remark that kept preying on Frau Maenhout’s mind.
It started when Raphael lost a tooth one day. There was nothing unusual about that, except that it was a little early for his age. He had been eating a sandwich and bit down on something hard. It turned out to be one of his milk teeth. Charlotte gave him a little glass jar in which to save the tooth, and later on he proudly showed the relic to his father.
The doctor reacted by collapsing into a chair and staring blankly into space for several minutes.
That was the turning point. Until then the triplets’ condition had been fairly stable and it had seemed as if everything was truly under control. From that moment on, the triplets’ health took a turn for the worse. Their joints ached. Their skin began to peel and brown spots appeared on the backs of their hands. They coughed a lot, and had frequent bouts of diarrhoea. And they were tired, even more than usual. Their minds were still as lively as ever. But how long would that last?
He doesn’t want to experience the same hurt all over again, if something should happen to one of his sons. She couldn’t get Hannah’s words out of her mind. Was that why the doctor had stopped showing an interest in what the children were learning? - because there was no point to it?
For weeks she walked around, agonising over the possibilities. In the end she finally found the courage to speak to him.
She decided to come straight to the point. ‘How old will they be, Doctor?’
She had given Michael, Gabriel and Raphael a project that would keep them occupied for a few minutes in the classroom. Surgery hours were over and the office door was ajar. The doctor was sitting at his desk, hunched over a pile of papers. He invited her to take a seat across from his desk, but she remained standing.
Her question took him by surprise. ‘Who? The boys?’
She nodded.
‘Why, they’ll be four in a few weeks. But surely you know that?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘Then what do you mean?’
There was nothing guarded in his voice, which made her doubt herself for a split second.
‘How long do they have left?’ she asked. From his expression and the way he shifted in his seat, she could tell she’d been right to trust her intuition; yet he tried to keep up the pretence. ‘How long do they have?’
Now she had to stand her ground or he’d simply fob her off with some evasive comment or other. She had no proof, only a premonition, but she mustn’t let it show. ‘They’re aging very rapidly,’ she said.
He did not reply.
‘Much too rapidly,’ she went on. ‘It isn’t normal. It’s as if . . .’ She had to search for the right words. ‘It’s as if every month they’re another year older.’
‘But I thought I’d explained it to you . . .’
‘I don’t need explanations!’ she burst out suddenly. ‘That’s no help at all! And I don’t want to hear that everything’s going to be all right either. Because it isn’t! Quite the contrary, it keeps getting worse. Surely you can see that for yourself!’
She was startled by her passionate outburst, but it did seem to have made an impact. Leaning back in his chair, the doctor raised his hand to his beard, inhaled deeply a few times and then exhaled through flared nostrils. His hand sank from his chin along his throat down to his chest.
‘How long do they have left?’ she asked again. She lowered her voice because she realised the children could have heard her.
The doctor leaned forward and folded his hands on the desk top. He must have had to break this kind of news before, to patients with some incurable illness.
‘The way it looks now, which doesn’t really mean much, because it could—’
‘How long?’
‘One, possibly two years.’
‘One . . . two years?’
He nodded, no more.
‘So they’ll be lucky to reach the age of six,’ she said, more to herself than to the doctor, as she collapsed into a chair. Conflicting feelings beset her: on the one hand there was the relief of knowing the truth at last; on the other, that truth made her break into a cold sweat. But now that she’d got him to talk, she had to go on.
‘How long have you known?’
‘Since shortly after their birth.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because it’s going to be all right. The latest tests—’
‘All your tests are useless! The only thing you’ve achieved with those tests has been to make your sons afraid of you!’ She couldn’t stop herself, but she saw no reason to rein herself in now. Her fury served as a release for the grief she did not want to show him.
‘I am trying to save them,’ said the doctor calmly. ‘That is my goal. I want to cure them. Surely that’s good.’
‘They should go to hospital,’ she said, after taking a few deep breaths - in, out.
‘I know what is right,’ she heard him say firmly. ‘They are not going to any hospital.’
‘You could get a second opinion,’ she tried, pleading.
‘They’re all bunglers!’
That made her jump. It was the first time she’d ever heard him raise his voice. His exclamation was accompanied by a sudden movement of the arms and hands, as if he’d had an electric shock. All of a sudden she was afraid of him. That too was new. She had never felt comfortable around him, but she had never been scared of him before. Slowly she stood up.
He heard her push back her chair and said, without looking up, almost as if he were talking to himself, ‘Time. I need time. That’s all.’
She really wanted to leave without saying another word, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking one last thing, even though she knew it was naive of her. ‘What are their chances, percentage-wise?’
‘I don’t deal in probabilities. My starting point is the assumption that it will be all right. As it has always been.’
She went back to the classroom in a daze. There, she just about managed to keep herself together, even though every time she looked at one of the boys, she imagined she could see death in his eyes.
When she got home, she collapsed. She would have liked to ring Hannah for support and advice, but in the end she didn’t. She wanted to keep the news to herself for now. Once she’d told someone else, it would all become so final, and then all hope of recovery would be lost. She vowed to herself that she would tell someone the moment she felt she could no longer bear it alone. And she also swore that in the meantime she would do everything in her power to make life as pleasant as possible for the children. Their fourth birthday was coming up in two weeks. And after that? After that, she had no idea.