Then the doctor had told her the boys’ names, showing her the little coloured band each wore around the wrist. Indeed, it was quite impossible to distinguish one from another with the naked eye. At the same time, she had seen how much they resembled their father: hair, skin, eyes and, alas, cleft palate, on the same side, too - the right.
In the short time that she was with them, she had noticed something else: they would not look at her. In that way too they resembled their father. It had struck her during her physical examination that he tried to avoid any and all eye contact. The way he accomplished this was by looking down at the floor a lot, whereas his three sons had been chiefly absorbed by their own hands, which were in constant motion, as if palpating some invisible object.
‘Frau Maenhout is going to look after you, starting tomorrow,’ she’d heard the doctor say, to her considerable surprise.
She had wanted to object, but then all three boys had lifted their heads and looked up at her for an instant with their disproportionately large eyes. She had made her decision right then and there. ‘What time do you want me tomorrow?’ she had asked.
‘Eight thirty,’ he’d answered.
Then she had left, and it wasn’t until she was outside that she’d realised she hadn’t even said goodbye to the boys.
‘Are you ready?’ asked the doctor as he opened the door to the kitchen.
She wasn’t sure, for she had no idea what the doctor expected of her. They had not yet discussed it. They hadn’t talked about the children at all, and even the subject of money had not come up. Rarely had Frau Maenhout been so impulsive.
‘I think so,’ she said, and again she was surprised at her own reply.
The little boys were in their rocking chairs, just as they had been the day before. Again they were concentrating on their hands, which they couldn’t seem to keep still. There was even a kind of rhythm to their movements, which gave them a rather robot-like air.
Maybe they’re bored, Frau Maenhout thought, because she had noticed that there were no toys or stuffed animals around. ‘Hello, boys,’ she said.
There was no reaction.
‘They’re a bit shy,’ said the doctor.
She walked over to them and scrutinised them carefully. They were too thin, she decided, and with such delicate, almost transparent skin, they seemed rather fragile - as if they were made of glass.
‘Please feel free to pick one of them up, if you want.’
She nodded and pussyfooted towards them. She didn’t know which one to choose. None of them seemed eager to be picked up: they didn’t raise their arms in the air or anything like that. Kneeling down in front of the middle chair, she unbuckled the strap. For a moment she held her breath, having to conquer her trepidation. It was the same kind of fear she had felt in class about ten years earlier, the first time she’d had to take Julie Carpentier’s badly charred hand in hers in order to show her how to move it across the page. Just as she had then, she now counted to three under her breath, then swooped down and lifted the boy up from his chair. He weighed very little and showed barely any reaction upon finding himself in her arms.
‘That’s Raphael,’ said the doctor, pointing at the blue bracelet.
‘Raphael,’ she repeated.
She thought it was a lovely name, but in combination with the other two names, it was a rather odd choice, to name the three kids after the three archangels, and Frau Maenhout wondered who had decided on this. The father or the mother? Or someone else?
‘They are so quiet, such good boys,’ she remarked. But as soon as she said it, she was struck with the alarming thought that there might be something wrong with the children. They might be retarded or something.
‘They still have to get used to you,’ said Dr Hoppe. ‘They have a hard time adapting to new situations, I’ve noticed.’
His reply did nothing to ease her fears. As if he had read her mind, the doctor added, ‘But they can talk. Sometimes they’ll suddenly say a word they’ve overheard. Either from me, or from the radio. And it might be in French, or in German. They are extremely intelligent.’
‘That is quite remarkable, yes.’
She didn’t know whether to believe him or not. In her profession she had had occasion to speak to parents who perceived abilities in their children that did not actually exist. Every woman thinks her child is special, she used to remind herself every time it happened.
‘I wish to stimulate their language skills,’ the doctor continued. ‘I’ve been alternating between German and French with them, but if you speak only French to them from now on, and I restrict myself to German, it should help them to distinguish the two languages from each other more quickly, don’t you think?’
She had to agree, nor did she find it an unusual request. In this region, at the crossroads of three cultures and three languages, most of the children were raised multilingual. Nearly everybody spoke German, and usually also knew some French or Dutch. Some children learned all three languages at once, depending on which school they attended or who their playmates were.
It had been the same for her. She had been born in Gemmenich and her parents had raised her to speak German. She had picked up French in the street, and later, in secondary school, she had been taught Dutch. Suddenly she understood the reason for the doctor’s interest in her language abilities the day before, especially when he mentioned the Dutch lullaby again.
‘The one about the flowers,’ he said, ‘could you sing it to them from time to time?’
‘As you wish,’ she said, even though she thought it rather a strange request.
The doctor looked at his watch. ‘Come, I’ll give you a quick tour of the house. The first patients will be arriving any minute now.’ He turned on his heels and disappeared through the door leading to the corridor, leaving her standing there somewhat befuddled.
Shaking her head, she carefully put Raphael back down in his little chair. ‘I’ll be right back,’ she said to the boys in French, wondering what on earth she had let herself in for.
In the hall the doctor was waiting by a door opposite the examination room. ‘The children and I have been sleeping downstairs for the time being,’ he said, and stepped into the room.
She hesitated, hanging back in the doorway. The room was immaculate. At the far end, centred on the wall, was a single bed, its bedspread stretched taut, without a single crease. There weren’t any books or clothes on the two chairs stationed on either side of the bed, nor were there any children’s toys or paraphernalia on the floor. Three metal cots on wheels were lined up side by side against another wall. These too were neatly made; there wasn’t a crease in the spotless white sheets or pillowcases. At the foot of each bed hung a little nameplate. Michael slept in the bed on the right, to his left was Raphael and next to that, Gabriel. The walls appeared to have been freshly wallpapered, but aside from that they were quite bare. There were none of the pictures one would have expected to see: a portrait of the doctor’s wife, perhaps, a wedding picture of his parents, or at the very least a photo of the children. The entire room radiated anonymity. It was an impersonal space; the spotless white of the bedspread and the sheets made it feel like a hospital ward more than anything else.
‘The bathroom is upstairs,’ said the doctor, ‘but since it’s difficult to carry the children up the stairs every time, I’ve been washing them in a tub in the kitchen.’
‘Just as in our own day.’ Frau Maenhout smiled.
The doctor remained impervious. No sense of humour, she thought.
‘Frau Maenhout . . .’ There was a pregnant pause, which made her look up. ‘There is something else. There’s something wrong with their health,’ he stated flatly.
Although she had been wondering about the children’s health, the news still came as a shock. She wondered why the doctor had waited so long to tell her.
‘It’s nothing too serious,’ he said, ‘and I’m dealing with it, but I thought you ought to know. It means they do have to be kept indoors for the time being.’
‘You might have told me before . . .’ she began, but was interrupted by the sound of the doorbell.
‘Ah, there’s my first patient,’ said the doctor in a rush. ‘I must get started. And so must you.’ He turned and, brushing past her, hurried out of the room. It was almost as if he were running away, and she stood there perplexed. ‘Are you coming, Frau Maenhout?’ she heard him say.
I’m not doing this, she thought, I mustn’t. Flustered, she stepped out of the room. ‘Doctor,’ she said, ‘I—’
‘Hello, Frau Maenhout.’
It was Irma Nüssbaum at the end of the hall, nodding at her. Charlotte Maenhout had seen her watching from the house across the street just a short while ago.
‘Will you be looking after the doctor’s children then, Frau Maenhout? ’ asked Irma.
There was a note of spitefulness in the way she had pronounced her name. The doctor had stopped and posted himself in between the two ladies, like the referee in a duel.
‘Yes, Frau Nüssbaum,’ Charlotte Maenhout replied without moving a muscle. ‘I was asked to, and said I would.’ Turning on her heel, she walked towards the kitchen.
In those first few weeks the children did not strike Charlotte Maenhout as being particularly intelligent; on the contrary, they continued to be quite unresponsive and had not spoken a word. She was growing increasingly convinced that all three were mentally disabled and surmised that that was what the doctor had meant when he’d said there was something wrong with them.
Slowly but surely, however, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael began to warm to her. Indeed, it was as if she’d had to earn their trust. She had done nothing special to earn that trust, other than being consistently kind and patient with them, which was the hardest part, really. There were times when she had felt like shaking them one by one, hoping to wring even a smidgen of emotion from them. Luckily she’d been able to control herself, however, for one fine day, when Napoleonstrasse was, as so often, chock-a-block with cars and coaches on their way to the three-border junction, there was a sudden breakthrough. She had picked up Michael in her arms so that he could look out the window, when suddenly the boy cried, ‘Au-o!’ and a second later one of the other two behind her cried, ‘A-ee!’ Later the doctor said his son had probably meant ‘taxi’, because it was in a taxi that they had travelled from Bonn to Wolfheim all those months ago. Charlotte Maenhout was flabbergasted.
After that, things progressed rapidly. Either their vocabulary was already extensive to start with, or it was growing by leaps and bounds, because over the next few days the three boys kept uttering new words, repeating what one of the others had said or adding to it. Sometimes it almost seemed as if the children were making a game of it. She’d be preparing some fruit for them to eat and the boys would start naming fruits one by one, in French, because they had cottoned on to the fact that this was the language she spoke. All three were quite hard to understand, of course, not only because they were so young but also because, like their father, they had trouble with certain sounds on account of their cleft palates. But she understood what the boys were saying, and that was all that mattered - at first, anyway.
Shortly after this the children gave her another demonstration of their talents. As the doctor had requested, she sang them the Dutch lullaby about the little sandman every night before they went to sleep, and one evening, about fifteen minutes before their usual bedtime, Gabriel suddenly said, in Dutch, ‘Tired.’ She didn’t understand at first what he meant, but when Raphael promptly chimed in with, ‘Sleep,’ in Dutch as well, and then Michael piped up and said, ‘Night-night,’ she knew that the triplets had spontaneously applied the Dutch words they had learned from the lullaby to their bedtime ritual.
When a few days later she told her friend and former colleague Hannah Kuijk about it, Hannah said, ‘That’s because they don’t have a mother. It means they’re not bound to any mother tongue.’
Charlotte Maenhout thought it a rather far-fetched explanation. Next her friend suggested that the boys’ brains might be linked via some invisible neurological network into a single overarching super-brain. Frau Maenhout had heard of a similar idea before, and also that multiple siblings were sometimes able to read each others’ minds or feel one another’s emotions, even when miles apart. Still, she preferred to stick to the simple explanation that they had inherited their father’s intelligence, as well as his passivity - unfortunately, because notwithstanding their verbal abilities the triplets were still frustratingly taciturn when it came to expressing or showing emotion.
For the four hours that Frau Maenhout watched the children - from half past eight in the morning until half past ten, and from six until eight in the evening - she kept them busy with an energy and enthusiasm that she had not thought herself still capable of. She made silly faces and rolled her eyes, erected precarious towers with building blocks and cardboard boxes, set the boys on her lap one behind the other and bounced them up and down, drove toy cars down imaginary lanes and little wooden trains through dark tunnels, and told them fables and fairy tales, taking on the role of the witch, the fairy or the queen. Yet notwithstanding all her exertions she never managed to get any of the three boys to chortle or laugh, except once; but then they hardly ever cried either.
‘Oh, it will come, Charlotte,’ was Hannah Kuijk’s opinion. ‘Those children are probably dealing with some kind of trauma. They didn’t receive any love for the first months of their lives. They didn’t get it from their mother, since she was dead, nor from their dad, because he’s such a cold man. The very fact that he wants them to call him “Father” and not “Dad” or “Dada” proves that he wants to keep them at arm’s length. I wouldn’t put it past him to insist, later on, that his children address him as “Sir”.’
‘But he’s constantly taking pictures of them,’ Frau Maenhout objected. ‘Surely that must mean he’s fond of them?’