He had no great expectations and was most surprised when, as soon as the Bible was in his hands, Victor immediately began to read. Even though he wasn’t reading aloud, the doctor was sure that that was what he was doing. He could tell from the way Victor was moving his finger across the page below the words.
Verse 1. Verse 2. Verse 3. Verse 4. Verse 5.
‘Why don’t you read it out loud, Victor?’ he asked, wondering if he wasn’t expecting too much.
But Victor did read out loud. ‘And the evening and the morning were the first day.’
The doctor was amazed. You see, he thought, I always knew it.
‘Go on, go on, Victor.’
‘And God said: Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters . . .’
He was only half-listening, wondering what his wife would have thought of the scene.
He tried once more to concentrate on what Victor was saying.
‘And God said: Let the waters under the heaven be gab-dered together unto one—’
‘Gathered together,’ he corrected him automatically, but immediately regretted it, because with a shock he was again forced to recognise his father’s ways in his own behaviour. No, even worse, it was as if he were hearing his father’s voice.
‘You have to learn from your mistakes,’ his father used to tell him constantly, which meant that the only thing his father ever noticed was the mistakes. His father had never praised him for the things he’d done right, because that was what was ‘expected of him’. Those, too, were his father’s exact words.
‘Gaddered,’ said Victor.
‘Gathered, Victor, gath-ered,’ he said, even though he had meant to say it was just fine like that.
A few days after Johanna’s funeral, Karl Hoppe paid a visit to Father Kaisergruber. The doctor had come to settle up what he owed him for the funeral Mass, and he asked him point-blank just before he left, ‘Do you still believe that my son should be in an institution?’
‘I do think that would be for the best,’ was his honest answer.
‘But he is not retarded.’
That’s not the only reason, the priest thought.
‘I can prove he isn’t retarded,’ the doctor went on. ‘Victor can prove it.’
‘Well now, that’s something I’d like to see,’ responded the priest, although he didn’t really mean it.
‘Not yet. He’s still practising. Soon. You’ll be amazed.’
Even then Father Kaisergruber already suspected that Karl Hoppe was desperate. At the doctor’s house, a few weeks later, his guess was confirmed. He had tried to wriggle out of the doctor’s invitation but had not managed to do so.
The doctor first showed him into a little room where a number of jigsaw puzzles were displayed on the table and on the floor. ‘Victor completed them. All of them. And all by himself, without any help,’ he said proudly.
The priest nodded, wondering if that was the only thing he was required to come and see.
But then the doctor asked him to follow him into the living room, where Victor was seated at the head of the long dining table. The doctor invited the priest to take a seat at the table and he did as asked, although he did leave one empty chair between himself and the boy.
The last time he had seen the boy had been in the asylum, just days before Dr Hoppe had taken him home. Afterwards Sister Milgitha had told him that the doctor had made quite a scene, along with some disparaging remarks about the institution. In his role as shepherd of Wolfheim he had felt compelled to make excuses for the doctor. He’d said that the doctor’s wife was poorly; the doctor must be suffering from stress.
‘In that case he should go and see a doctor himself!’ Sister Milgitha had exclaimed indignantly.
The abbess had asked him if he didn’t agree it would best to give the doctor the cold shoulder for now. Not to punish him, she said, but merely to give him time to reconsider. Her question of course provided its own answer.
That had been four months ago and the priest had not seen Victor since then. But nothing about the boy’s appearance had changed. He saw that at once. His bearing. His appearance. His gaze. As if only the decor had changed and Victor was still sitting in the very same spot. A bulky tome lay open on the table in front of the boy; the priest presumed it was the Bible.
This was confirmed by Dr Hoppe, who had taken a seat across from him on the other side of the table. ‘Victor reads the Bible,’ he said.
The boy remained impassive, but his father seemed very nervous. He kept rubbing his hands, and when the priest looked at him, he would hastily look the other way.
‘Well! That’s excellent,’ said the priest. He glanced at Victor, whose eyes were indeed fixed on the Bible, but in such a way that it looked as if his father had made him sit like that and warned him not to move. How old might the boy be now, he wondered. Almost six?
‘But he can do other things as well,’ said the doctor, stressing the word ‘other’. Can’t you, Victor?’
Still no response from the boy. The priest did not know which of the two deserved more pity.
‘Father, give us a verse from Genesis.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just the two numbers. Chapter 12, verse 7, for instance.’
The priest shrugged. ‘Chapter 7, verse 6, perhaps.’
He had to think for a moment to remember what was in that verse, but before he had a chance to do so the doctor indicated with a nod of the head that it was Victor he should be addressing. He looked at the boy and repeated, ‘Chapter 7, verse 6.’
As he said it, it came back to him; And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.
The room was silent. The only sound was the ticking of the clock on the mantel. The priest let his gaze wander. Next to the clock was a statuette of Mary under a glass dome and above it, on the wall, the palm fronds from last year.
‘Victor, chapter 7, verse 6,’ he heard the doctor say.
Out of the corner of his eye the priest stole a glance at the boy.
The doctor urged his son again, insistently, ‘Victor, Father Kaisergruber has asked you to read something.’
I ought to put an end to this painful spectacle, thought the priest. ‘Why don’t you just let him read whatever he likes from the Bible,’ he proposed. ‘Surely that’s—’
‘No, no, he can do it! He’s done it hundreds of times. But he simply won’t! Chapter 7, verse 6, Victor!’
He misses his wife, thought the priest. She’d never have allowed it to come to this.
‘Doctor . . .’ he began.
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ the doctor broke in abruptly. ‘You think I’m making the whole thing up. You think Victor is retarded, don’t you!’
‘Doctor, there is nothing wrong with that. Your son is retarded. You don’t have to be—’
‘Show him, Victor! Show him he’s wrong!’
‘You don’t have to—’
‘Quiet!’
The priest was visibly shocked, which made the doctor realise he was making a scene.
‘Victor must speak,’ he said in a calmer voice. A voice that hid his anger, but not his despair.
But Victor would not speak, and the priest could tell from the doctor’s reddening face that he was making an effort to control himself. He considered suggesting that there might still be room for Victor at the institution at La Chapelle, even though he wasn’t at all sure that was the case; but he thought it wiser to keep his counsel.
He pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘I really do have to go now, Doctor. I’m so sorry.’
The doctor did not even get up to say goodbye. He only nodded, and went on nodding his head.
Father Kaisergruber wondered if he should say anything else. He looked at Victor one last time and thought, I’ve tried to save him, I can do no more than that.
‘Amen.’
That was what all the patients said when they got something from Father Kaisergruber. Marc François sometimes said, ‘Amen and out!’ but that was wrong. Sister Milgitha would punish him, later. But all the others always said, ‘Amen.’ They said it after they got the body of Christ from Father Kaisergruber. And if you didn’t get anything from him, you had to shut up. Sister Milgitha said so.
Doesn’t my father know that, then? Victor wondered. Didn’t Sister Milgitha ever tell him?
Karl Hoppe thought things had been proceeding quite well until then. From the moment he had given his son the Bible the boy seemed to have changed - as if opening the Bible caused Victor to open up as well.
Sometimes he thought that it had been the slap that had done it. That hitting him had released whatever had been stuck fast inside the boy. But he preferred to suppress that thought. No, it was the Bible. In giving him the Bible he had won his son’s trust.
It was not as if they’d been having any real conversations since then, Victor and he; no, it was more a matter of monosyllabic exchanges. He would ask something and Victor would answer ‘Yes,’ or ‘No,’ or ‘I don’t know.’ What the boy was really thinking was anyone’s guess. Even when he told him something important, Victor showed no reaction.
‘You know the lady who used to lie in the bed upstairs?’ he began one day.
Victor nodded.
‘That was your mother.’ Victor didn’t even look up. The doctor might as well have been talking about the weather. ‘She was ill,’ he added, nonetheless.
And that was all he ever told him about her. Nor did Victor ever ask for more. He was as frugal with his questions as he was with his answers.
Just once, Victor had asked him, ‘How do I get to become a doctor?’
‘By studying hard and reading a lot.’
‘Is that all?’
‘You also have to be good to people. And to do good.’
‘Be good. Do good,’ Victor had repeated after him.
It was a lame answer, but for Victor it was enough, apparently, because he had nodded and gone back to whatever he was doing. Which was reading, usually. And his reading material was almost exclusively the Bible.
Victor read, and his father corrected the mistakes he made. As soon as Victor could read flawlessly, he would show Father Kaisergruber: that was what the doctor had resolved soon after his wife’s funeral, and it was the reason he had taken the trouble to stir up the priest’s curiosity beforehand. He regarded it as a challenge.
When one day he noticed that Victor could not only read the Bible but also recite long passages by heart, he raised the bar even higher. Father Kaisergruber would be flabbergasted.
Victor didn’t seem to find it difficult. He probably regarded it as a game, although he never gave any indication that he might actually be enjoying it. He never gave any indication of anything, in fact. That had not changed. And to the doctor it was a constant irritant. However, showing off how intelligent Victor was should be enough to make the priest sit up.
But what should have been a triumph ended instead in a humiliating defeat. And after the priest had left, the doctor set about hammering the verse in question into Victor’s head, syllable by syllable - No. Ah. Was. Six. Hun. Dred. Years. Old. When. The. Flood. Of. Wa. Ters. Was. Up. On. The. Earth - and had Victor cried, had he dis-solved into a flood of tears, his father might possibly have come to his senses in time. But Victor bore every blow with passive resignation. Right until the very last syllable.
When Rex Cremer contacted Victor Hoppe in April 1979, many of Victor’s former professors were still teaching at the university. The dean, who had only held that post since 1975, had asked several of his colleagues beforehand to tell him about Victor Hoppe. Some professors, especially those who taught the purely theoretical subjects, such as the social sciences, policy or ethics, remembered seeing little of him in class - and when he had shown up, he had stood out largely on account of the way he looked - but said that in the exams he had consistently demonstrated a thorough knowledge of the subject. The professors who had supervised him in the lab, however, still had vivid memories of Victor Hoppe as a student. They all concurred that his physical appearance and his voice made him memorable, naturally; but it was chiefly his enthusiasm, or, as one professor described it, his obsessiveness, that truly made him stand out. He could spend hours at a time on a single experiment without ever showing any impatience or irritation, and his diligence often led to extraordinary results.
‘He was one of the most gifted students I have ever had,’ was the unanimous consensus. Some of the professors did add that this applied only to his intellectual gifts and not in any way to his social or communication skills.
‘A loner,’ one of the professors said. ‘I don’t think he had much contact with the other students.’
According to his former supervisor Dr Bergmann, who had since retired, Victor possessed a staggering store of theoretical knowledge, which enabled him to pursue ideas that were so revolutionary that they could never be realised in a practical setting, at least not in this century.
At a meeting convoked to decide on Victor Hoppe’s appointment, another professor, Dr Maserath, said, ‘He made me think, sometimes, of Jules Verne, who wrote about space rockets before the invention of the fuel engine.’
‘But there is a difference,’ Dr Genet, Victor’s erstwhile genetics professor, had astutely commented: ‘Jules Verne restricted himself to writing books and never tried to put his ideas into practice.’
He came back to that point later, when Rex Cremer told him that Victor wanted to try cloning mice.
‘See, that’s what I mean!’ exclaimed Dr Genet. ‘We’ve only just learned to stand and already he’s wanting to run!’
‘It is raising the bar rather high,’ said Dr Maserath, ‘but I don’t know if that’s such a bad thing.’
‘That’s exactly what he said to me on the phone,’ Cremer agreed: ‘that we scientists impose limits on ourselves; that many of us make that mistake.’