Mendel's Dwarf Read online

  I walked around the long south wall of the convent, toward the gate. Above everything—lift your eyes for a moment above the pavements, above the red roofs, above the clock tower of the library and the spire of the church, above the grimy flats, above that whole quarter of the city—stood the Spielberg Fortress, where the Austrian Emperors used to keep their political prisoners. It is interesting to reflect that while the secrets of genetics were being revealed for the first time down there in the back garden of the monastery, the secrets of democracy and subversion were being revealed for the thousandth time in the dungeons on the hill above: nature, both human and plant, under torture. Did he know about it? Of course he did. And what did he think about it, eh? In 1858 the Habsburgs abandoned the Spielberg as a political prison, but you can’t take the stain away from a place like that. Within a century the Gestapo was putting it back to use.

  I looked in through the garden gate. Klášter, cloister. White buildings bordered the expanse of grass and lent the place something of the atmosphere of a university college—the fellows’ garden, perhaps. One almost expected figures in gowns.

  I am as suspicious as anyone of appeals to the emotions, but I am honest. I admit I felt a curious excitement as I stood there, a sense that everything had somehow focused down to this: this space, these solemn buildings with their red roofs and dormer windows, this quiet place beneath a summer sky with a woman wandering along the path with her dog (dachshund), and a gardener weeding, and two men strolling toward the archway on the far side, and a sign saying MENDELIANUM. Oh yes, I felt something as I stood looking across the lawns: something stirring in the bowels as well as in the brain, something that evades the grasp of words. The beds beneath the windows were where he first grew his plants. That long rectangle of gravel running across the grass was where his greenhouse had stood, where he’d puttered among the peas, muttering to himself, counting and numbering, dabbing with his camel-hair brush, planting seeds, counting again, always counting … This acre of space was where it all started, where the stubborn friar lit a fuse that burned unnoticed for thirty-five years until they discovered his work in 1900 and the bomb finally exploded. The explosion is going on still. It engulfed me from the moment of my conception. Perhaps it will engulf us all eventually.

  In the shrubbery at the far side of the garden there was a statue. At a distance it looked like an angel holding out its arms over souls in purgatory. Close to, it was no angel, of course, but an anemic, conventional figure in priestly robes stretching out its hands over a stand of carved garden peas:

  P. GREGOR MENDEL

  1822–1884

  At the foot of the statue, someone had planted a row of garden peas, and on the plinth of the statue itself lay a small bunch of wildflowers. It was almost as though he had become the subject of some secret cult since his death, as though pious geneticists crept along in the night and surreptitiously left offerings to their saint.

  “Where did I come from?” I once asked my mother. I was no more than four at the time, but even at that age I recognized the pain in her expression while she tried to answer—a blend of helplessness and guilt—and I never asked again. I wonder now when they first told her about me, how they broke the news. An obstetrician can recognize it immediately, of course. The diagnosis is straightforward. But to a doting mother lying in bed in the aftermath of birth, one crumpled newborn child is much like another—the bones have not yet developed and the malign hand of the mutation has had little time to work its distortions. I wonder how they told her. I wonder when …

  My father never looked straight at me, can you imagine that? Never, throughout the whole of my life, can I remember his looking directly at me. Always his glance was aslant, tangential, as though that way he might not notice.

  I know the way your mind is working. You are trying to picture them, trying to give them shape and substance. You are trying to see if they are normal.

  They are normal.

  I don’t even look like them. Oh sure, I share certain features with them—the dark hair, the brown eyes, my father’s cleft chin, that kind of thing—but there is no structural resemblance, no facial resemblance. I don’t look like my father or my mother or my sister. I don’t have my mother’s nose or my father’s jawline or my grandfather’s cast of brow. I am on my own. “You’re special,” my mother would insist as she dragged me off to one or another of those specialists—pediatricians, orthopedists, neurologists, orthodontists—who could never do anything at all. “You’re special, that’s why you have all these people looking after you.”

  For a while I was fooled by her assertions. I even used to imagine that I had been planted on my parents by extraterrestrial beings, a Midwich Cuckoo; but soon enough I learned the truth: I am exactly what I seem—an aberration, a mutant, the product of pure, malign chance.

  I offer you this image: a desert in the early morning, stretching away toward the sunrise, stretching away toward the perfect hairline of the horizon. In the middle distance over to the left there is an outcrop of rock; in the foreground there is a cluster of military vehicles and a group of soldiers. The men are nervous. They talk in muted voices. There is the sensation that something is about to happen, something momentous, an execution perhaps. The men scratch and kick at the stones on the ground and glance often at their watches, as though time might suddenly have sped up and caught them unawares.

  Despite all this anticipation, the disembodied voice that crackles out into the still, chill morning air from one of the vehicles startles them. “Five minutes,” it announces. “All personnel are to put on eye protection. Repeat, all personnel are …”

  There is a little flurry of activity as the men take goggles from their knapsacks and pull them on. Someone cracks a joke about looking like fucking frogs, but no one laughs. When all is ready, they turn and stare out across the desert as though searching for something through the thick, tinted lenses.

  A siren begins to wail. That is the only desert sound as the minutes tick away: the wailing of a siren just like those that used to wail across the city during the blitz, Rachel wailing for her children and would not be comforted. Then the siren stops and the men wait and the morning breeze soughs across the land, a soft and mournful sound.

  “One minute to go.”

  And the minute passes like a century.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  There is no muttering now. The men stand still, their figures etched against the pale peach of dawn.

  “Five, four, three, two, one …”

  And dawn breaks suddenly, with a flash, in silence. Like aboriginals, the men stand there watching a new sun rising, bringing in the new age.

  Was it then? The men wore welders’ goggles against the glare, but at exactly the same instant that the flash of silent light reached them, so too did the other rays, the gamma rays; and while the light was filtered by the dark glass of the goggles, the gamma rays, subtle and unseen, wafted freely through cloth and flesh and bone. In the course of their passage, did they touch with malign and featherlike hands the dividing cells buried deep within my father’s testes? Was that the moment when I was conceived?

  We have a photograph of him from those days in Australia. It shows him in the uniform of the Royal Engineers. Sergeant Eric Lambert. He has a bright and hopeful smile, largely stemming from the fact that he had managed to avoid service in Malaya. They sent him to Australia instead, on weapons research; and when he came back he fathered me.

  Was that how I came to be?

  Who knows? Who will ever know? Certainly it was a single mutation somewhere along the line, for I am, in good Mendelian fashion, a simple dominant. I might have fifty percent of my genes in common with each of my parents, but I don’t share that particular one with either of them. I couldn’t have come from them without a mutation …

  Unless my mother had sexual congress with a dwarf …

  All things must be considered.

  There is something more in the bizarre genetic equation tha
t adds up to Benedict Lambert. There is Uncle Harry—Great-uncle Harry Wise.

  Rawboned and dark-eyed, Uncle Harry sits firmly in my childhood memory in a shabby wing-back chair in the front room of his bungalow on the south coast, with his neck in a brace and his mottled hands clutching the arms of his chair as though thereby clinging to life itself. Uncle Harry was the only person who appeared indifferent to my condition, the only person who never looked at me with affected cheerfulness, the only person who never made ill-disguised asides to my mother about how brave the little chap was. Maybe it was simply that in the clouded world of old age he didn’t realize.

  “Kom here and see, boy,” he used to call, and his finger would beckon me onto his knee (the faint smell of damp and mold) to look at family photographs. One in particular showed—shows still, for I have it on my desk in the laboratory—a group of three adults posing beside a plaster column amid a small jungle of artificial plants. They are staring fixedly at the camera as though at the firing squad of history—a squat man in a black soutane; a younger man beside him wearing a frock coat and a rather foppish cravat; and a young woman seated between them. On the woman’s knee is a little child.

  “My poor Mutti,” Uncle Harry would say in sorrowful tones. “With me in her arms.” The child—four, five—has no expression, no real existence, barely even the distinguishing feature of a specific sex. A blot, a thing decked out in frills and sporting some kind of ridiculous bonnet, it is merely there on its mother’s lap like a family heirloom. Long ago, longer ago than it was possible for a child to understand, Harry Wise had been born Heinrich Weiss in Vienna; this photograph was the only relic he possessed of those dead days.

  “And that man is your grandfather, boy,” Uncle Harry would continue.

  “Great-grandfather,” my mother would correct him.

  “Urgrossvater Gottlieb,” Harry would admit solemnly, as though the discovery of a further intervening generation had somehow depressed him. “With”—his bony finger would prod at the figure in the soutane, as though trying to prod it into life—“Uncle Hans. That is how he was known to the family. Uncle Hans. He was a famous man, boy, a famous man.”

  The picture is, in a sense, pivotal. It marks the last moments of the Austrian existence of the family Weiss. A few years later and the mother, that fragile, hopeful thing with the child on her lap, will have been abandoned, dead or alive—family history is uncertain on the point—in distant Vienna, and Gottlieb Weiss will have brought his only son to England. Once in England, Gottlieb found himself a second wife—English, Anglican, etiolated, stern—and, when name-changing became expedient in 1914, a second name: Godley Wise. He might have toyed with the etymologically accurate Theophilus White, but apparently that striking combination did not quite suit one who was a freethinker and agnostic, and a wayward disciple of Freud. So Gottlieb Weiss became Godley Wise—Doctor Godley Wise—and young Heinrich became Harry. Later a daughter was born, a half-sister to Harry but nothing like him, so my mother claims. Miscegenation had diluted that Austrian blood beyond recognition. Quite English, my grandmother was.

  I will run time backwards, the generations backwards, back toward that portrait taken in some Viennese photographic studio, and beyond that into the realms of myth and legend: Gottlieb Weiss, a man who changed names as you might change your coat, was born Gottlieb Schindler, the grandson of one Anton Mendel of Heinzendorf, in Silensia. Anton Mendel was the father of Gregor Mendel. Gregor Mendel is the priest in the family photograph. Thus Benedict Lambert and Gregor Mendel are related. That is what Uncle Harry used to tell me in his thick and monotonous accent. By some quirk of history, caprice of fate, whim of genetics and inheritance, Gregor Mendel and I are related. We have genes in common: to be precise, three percent. I am Gregor Mendel’s great-great-great-nephew.

  At the age of eleven I sat an entrance exam for the local grammar school. My exam was called the eleven-plus, and was designed with good Mendelian principles in mind. Sir Cyril Burt of Oxford, Liverpool, Cambridge, and, finally, London universities was the principal advocate of the test, and I have a great deal to thank him for. Sir Cyril was a disciple of Galton. It was he whose work on twin and familial studies claimed to prove what Galton had only surmised, that intelligence is largely inherited, and that if you can measure a child’s intelligence, then you can measure its suitability for a decent education: the successful child goes to the grammar school; the failure goes to the secondary modern.

  I recall one of the questions, just one: If it takes three minutes to boil an egg, how long does it take to boil one hundred eggs?

  The answer, gentle reader, is three minutes. Anything else is wrong. At the time, sitting in an anonymous classroom of the local grammar school, stared at by the dozen or so children who, like me, were sitting the exam, I wanted to write, It all depends … But I was too intelligent to do anything stupid like that. Three minutes.

  “At least he’s got something going for him, poor little chap,” one of my mother’s friends said. I overheard them talking shortly after news of my success had come through. “At least he’s got a brain in his head. Where did he get that from, I wonder? Was it his father? I expect it was. Although you can’t tell, can you?” My mother was at the sewing machine, frowning with concentration as she made some kind of shirt that would fit me, accommodate my all-but-normal trunk and my shrunken arms. Whenever she was at home, whenever she wasn’t cooking or doing the dishes, she seemed to be sewing clothes for me. It is impossible to buy clothes, you see. The industry doesn’t take into account people of my proportions.

  At least he’s got a brain in his head. Even then I wasn’t so sure that was much of a consolation. But I passed the examination and was admitted to the grammar school.

  At my grammar school, biology was taught in a classroom like all the others. There was a blackboard and a raised podium at one end, and rows of sloping desks facing it in dutiful attention. Mendel himself would have recognized the kind of place. Elsewhere in the school there were proper laboratories for physics and chemistry, but biology was an afterthought, consigned to a room that was fit for dictation, for sitting and listening and taking notes. There was an atmosphere of lassitude about the place, a sensation that nothing much would ever happen there. A poster on the wall showed the internal organs of the human body in lurid and unlikely color. It was a prudish, sexless picture, and someone had tried to scribble in genitals where none had previously existed. The attempt had been rubbed out, but the crude lines were still risible like the scars from some dreadful operation. Below the poster was a bench with a row of dusty test tubes containing Tradescantia cuttings, the debris of some halfhearted demonstration that had been set up weeks before and then forgotten. There were microscopes, but they were locked away in some cupboard and marked for senior pupils only.

  I clambered with difficulty onto a chair. The class watched and whispered. The biology teacher, a Mr. Perkins, coughed impatiently as though it were my fault that I was late, my fault that I was an object of curiosity, that I was what I was and am. “Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk,” he informed us once quiet had fallen. He paid scant attention to matters of fact. “The monastery was miles away from anywhere. No one knew about him and his work, and he knew nothing about what was going on in the scientific world of his time, but despite all these disadvantages, he started the whole science of genetics. There’s a lesson for you. You don’t need expensive laboratories and all the equipment. You just need determination and concentration. Stop talking, Dawkins. You never stop talking, boy, and you never have anything worth saying. You will find a photograph of Mendel on page one hundred and forty-five of your textbook. Look at it carefully and reflect on the fact that it is the likeness of a man with more brains in his little finger than you have in the whole of your cranium. But photographs won’t help you pass your exams, will they, Jones? Not if you don’t pay attention and don’t learn anything and spend all your time fiddling.”

  I turned the pages. From page 145 a fa
ce looked out of the nineteenth century into the twentieth with a faint and enigmatic smile, as though he knew what was in store. I held my secret to my chest, like a cardplayer with a magnificent hand.

  “Below the picture you may see one of his crosses,” Mr. Perkins said. “Study it with care, Jones.”

  “This is the most famous of his experiments. Mendel took two strains of garden pea—”

  “Please, sir, how do you strain a pea, sir?”

  “Shut up, boy.”

  “Dawkins strains while having a pee. Is that anything to do with it, sir?”

  “Detention, boy! You are in detention. One of the strains was tall and the other was dwarf …”

  “Is a dwarf like Lambert, sir?”

  The racket of laughter stopped. Mr. Perkins reddened. “That’s enough of that, boy.”

  “But is it, sir?”

  “Enough, I said. Now I want to explain what Mendel discovered. You will open your notebooks and take down this dictation …”

  And then I played my hand. “Please sir, he’s my uncle. I mean great-uncle. Great-great-great-uncle. That’s what Uncle Harry told me.”

  There was a terrible silence. Someone giggled. “Don’t be foolish, child,” Mr. Perkins said.

  “He is, sir.”

  The giggling spread, grew, metamorphosed into laughter.

  “But he is, sir. Uncle Hans. Great-great-great-uncle Hans Gregor.”

  The laughter rocked and swayed around the room, around the small focus of my body and around the wreckage of my absurd boast. Great-great-great-uncle. “Great-great-great,” they called. “Great-great-great! Great-great-great!”

  “Shut up! There will be silence!”

  The laughter died away to mere contempt. “You will open your notebooks,” Mr. Perkins repeated in menacing tones, “and take down this dictation …”

  After the lesson they confronted me in the playground and taunted me with Uncle Gregor. “He’s one of them,” they shouted. “He’s one of Mendel’s dwarfs!”