Mendel's Dwarf Read online

  I’m not, of course. Mendel’s dwarfs were recessive. I am dominant. But at that time I didn’t know anything very much, except evasive glances and a brisk smile on my mother’s face and a cheerful but unconvincing assertion that what matters is what you are like inside. It’s easy to say that. All’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds. At home I had small chairs and a small bed and low bookshelves. The books were the normal size.

  “Mendel’s dwarf,” they cried after me in the playground. “Mendel, Mendel.” The name became a taunt, a chant of loathing. I retreated to the bike sheds, but they confronted me there, their knees hovering in my line of sight, their feet stamping at me as though I were something to be trodden into the dirt, a cockroach perhaps. “Mendel, Mendel, Mendel’s dwarf!” they called, and the feet came through the bike racks at me until a couple of older girls came in. “Leave off him,” they said carelessly. “What’s he done to you, poor sod?”

  “He’s Mendel’s dwarf.”

  “Oh, piss off.”

  The boys went, chastened by age and sex. The girls eyed me with distaste through the bike racks. One of them seemed about to say something. Then she shrugged as though the effort didn’t seem worthwhile. “Come on,” she said to the other. “Give us a fag.”

  I left them lighting up their Woodbines and scratching themselves.

  “It’s a problem you have to live with,” the headmaster advised me. I told him I’d not realized that before, and thanked him very much for sharing his insight with me. He answered that being insolent wouldn’t help. Or being arrogant. I asked him whether being submissive might. Or being recessive. He told me to get out of his study.

  A problem you have to live with. That’s a good one, isn’t it? It isn’t something I live with, as I might live with a birthmark or a stammer, or flat feet. It is not an addition, like a mole on my face, nor a subtraction, like premature baldness: it is me. There is no other.

  The curious thing is that I am doubly cursed. I am like I am, and yet I want to live. That’s another character, a more subtle one than dwarfism, but an animal character nevertheless, possessed by almost every human being. The Blessed Sigmund Fraud was wrong. There is no death wish, no Todeswunch. If there were, no animal species would survive, and certainly not our own damned one. But if there were a death wish, things would have been a lot easier for me: head in the oven, overdose of pills, fourth-floor window, the possibilities are endless. In the underground I’ve often stood on the edge of the platform as the train came in, and thought about it. But no, you’ve got to live with it. You aren’t actually given the choice. No one is. I use the second person to include the whole of the human race. No one is exempt. You are all victims of whatever selection of genes is doled out at that absurd and apparently insignificant moment when a wriggling sperm shoulders aside its rivals and penetrates an egg. “What have we got here?” Mother Nature wonders. “What combination have we thrown up this time?” It’s like checking over the results of some lottery, the numbers drawn every day, every minute of every day; and every time someone a winner and someone a loser. No need to say which I was.

  Two genealogies from dwarf studies, discovered in a book of medical genetics that I found one day in the public library. The diagrams have a pleasing sense of design about them, don’t they? There is a balance, a rhythm, a subtle asymmetry that halts the eye. The whole has something of the composition of a Mondrian painting, or perhaps a doodle by Miró:

  All four of the children of the two achondroplastic mothers were born by Caesarean section. If either of the two affected boys has children, the risk for each of these children being affected is a half.

  That was the kind of thing I used to do in my free time, run to the public library. It was a refuge, you see, a place of quiet, a place of sympathy. One of the assistant librarians in particular befriended me. She used to put aside books she thought I might like; she used to talk to me almost as though I were normal. She was not a bad-looking woman. Woman, girl, she was on the borderline between the two, one or two acne spots still lingering on her chin, a blush still coming readily to her cheeks whenever the chief librarian addressed her. Mousy, of course. I feel that all librarians ought to be mousy. It should be a necessary (but not sufficient) qualification for the job. Mousy? Agouti? What, I wonder, is its genetic control? Perhaps it is tightly linked to the gene for tidiness. She was about eighteen, this mousy librarian: eighteen, tidy, and frightened of the chief librarian (also mousy, but fortyish and balding), and her name was Miss Piercey.

  “It’s Benedict,” she used to say as I waddled in. Her tone was almost one of contentment, almost as though she were pleased to see me. “How are we today?”

  We.

  Usually she would be sitting on a stool behind the main desk. Often enough, just often enough for it to be a distinct possibility, not too often for it to be anything more than chance, her skirt would be drawn rather too high up her thighs for modesty. I used to gain an interesting perspective on her when she sat like that. It was the only occasion in the whole of my life when I have been at an advantage over normal people, eyeing Miss Piercey’s legs, longing to be able to pierce Miss Piercey. “Are we looking for anything in particular today?” she would ask. “Or are we just browsing?”

  We. For those moments we shared my paltry existence. “Browsing,” I would reply, my eyes browsing up and over the angle of her knees and into the shadows above. “Just browsing.” Sometimes things would become quite difficult. On occasion—when, for example, turning on her stool to deal with another reader, she had to uncross her legs—I would have to excuse myself hastily and rush not to the bookshelves but to the bathroom, there to find solace and comfort at my own hands.

  You are surprised? Oh yes, I’m quite normal that way. It’s only my bones that are deformed …

  Well, you might call it a bone, but it isn’t one. The os penis or baculum, a heterotopic bone found in many insectivores and rodents and in most primates, is absent in man. It isn’t a bone, and I am anything but dwarf in that respect. Because of my shortened arms I have to bend to reach it, but it’s quite normal when I get there. Seven inches erect. I measured it on one occasion when it was thinking of Miss Piercey.

  A test question: Who praised masturbation as the perfect sexual relationship, because it is the only one in which pleasure given is exactly equal to pleasure received? Answer: Jean Genet.

  Once I saw Miss Piercey’s underpants. I was standing chatting with her when an old lady called her to get a book down from a high shelf. “Won’t be a mo, dear,” Miss Piercey replied. “Just coming.” And, as she slid down from her stool, her skirt, snagging some splinter in the wood, rode upward over her thighs. “Whoops!” she cried, tugging the skirt down. “You keep you eyes to yourself, young man.”

  Miss Piercey hurried to the old lady’s aid; I hurried toward the bathroom. The incident was trivial and normality was soon reestablished (my desire spent into the lavatory bowl; the old lady equipped with book from upper shelf; Miss Piercey settled once more on her stool with her skirt pulled demurely down to her knees), but the memory lived on. White cotton with pink flowers, Miss Piercey’s knickers. They were etched into my mind. I saw the same design at the British Home Stores shortly afterwards, and I rushed in to spend my pocket money. “For my sister,” I explained. The assistant looked skeptical; yet surely, if it had been for any other purpose, I would have been rooting around among the black lace, the suspender belts and diaphanous French knickers, not the plain floral underpants. One must look at the matter realistically.

  Back in the safety of my bedroom, hugging the scrap of cotton to my face, I dreamt of Miss Piercey lying as white as a mouse beneath my gaze, wearing only those underpants. Sexual dimorphism is under the control of a pair of chromosomes, the X and the Y, but what is it that controls desire? That is a question that has defied the greatest geneticists of our time. There are those who claim that a rogue portion of the long arm of the X chromosome (section Xq28, to be exact1) may
be responsible for homosexual desires; but what was it that drove my body into paroxysms of lust for mouselike Miss Piercey?

  I haven’t mentioned her eyes, have I? I have mentioned, by implication, other parts of her anatomy, and, specifically, her hair; but I haven’t mentioned her eyes. They were of differing color. One was blue, the other green. How do you explain that by the mathematical dance of genes …?

  Miss J. Piercey. The name card on the librarians’ desk said so (I could catch a glimpse of it only if I stood far back). I didn’t even know her first name. J? I imagined “June”—June, moon, swoon; it would have been perfect. She was doing some kind of training in librarianship at the polytechnic, combined with work experience in the library. I was sixteen and was studying biology and chemistry and math, all those things that she had failed. The gulf between us was vast, being constructed of things material and things emotional, things structural and things spiritual. I suppose that had she known my feelings she’d have uttered a squeal of revulsion and accused me of being filthy-minded. But it was something approaching love.

  I did very well in biology, of course; particularly well in the questions on genetics. The words segregation, dominance, recessive, mutation flowed from my pen. My Punnet squares were punctilious. My ratios were rational.

  Mice of the strain known as waltzers suffer from a defect in the cerebellum that makes them move around in an uncoordinated way described as waltzing. When waltzers are crossed with normal mice all the offspring are normal …

  Aren’t they lucky?

  Humans of the type known as achondroplastic dwarfs suffer from a lack of cartilage cells, so that bones that depend on cartilage models for development cannot grow. When dwarfs of this type are crossed with normal humans fifty percent of the offspring are normal and fifty percent are dwarf.

  Aren’t they unlucky?

  Toss a coin. It is all a matter of probability and chance. Try it. Go on, take a coin out of your pocket or your purse. Toss it, call heads or tails, and there you are. Cursed or not?

  The biology laboratory at school possessed five microscopes. They were gleaming, ancient things with more than a hint of brass about them, but their optics were good. Only the seniors were allowed to use them, and then only under the supervision of the dull Mr. Perkins, but there are ways and means, always. I obtained a key to the room (the cleaning lady reported the loss, but everyone just assumed she had mislaid it) and stayed behind one afternoon. The impoverished school library was available for late study on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I spent some time reading there to establish an alibi before making my way along the corridor and up the back stairs to where the biology laboratory lay at the rear of the building, overlooking a car park and a supermarket warehouse. It was but the work of an instant to let myself in and lock the door behind me.

  The microscopes were in a locked cupboard, but I knew all about that. The key lived in Mr. Perkins’s desk. In a few moments (dangerous moments, for the cupboard was within view of the glass panel in the door) the best of the microscopes (Czech optics, I remember) was in my grasp. I set the thing up in a corner, away from the door. I got a box of slides and another of cover slips. I found a beaker and a teat pipette.

  I was—am—a born research worker. Single-minded, patient, prepared, determined; like Great-great-great-uncle Gregor himself. I had chosen the photograph, a particular favorite, with care. In a boudoir suffused with rose light, a honeyed girl, bedewed and as soft as angora, bent over and presented her backside to the camera and, by proxy, to my hungry eyes. She glanced behind, as though at her behind, while one hand reached back to part her buttocks and reveal the magic of golden pubescence and the mystery of moist, rubescent, pleated flesh. I told you I am a born researcher. No inhibition stands in my way. I propped the picture on a desk and fumbled with my clothing. In a few moments I felt the familiar spasm of delight and had a cupped palmful of nacreous liquid.

  A million million spermatozoa

  All of them alive:

  Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah

  Dare hope to survive.

  Author? Aldous Huxley: grandson of Thomas Huxley, the champion of Darwin against the clergy, and brother of Julian Huxley, Sir Julian Huxley, sometime professor of zoology at King’s College, London, sometime director-general of UNESCO, sometime leading eugenicist …

  I pipetted a drop of glutinous fluid onto a slide and lowered the cover slip with consummate care; then I arranged the light and slid the slide onto the stage. Low power … medium power. I peered, adjusted the diaphragm, turned the nosepiece to the big lens. It locked into place.

  One million million spermatozoa, all of them alive. Small exclamations of blind and culpable intent! Interrogation marks asking what absurd question? A thousand periods, each bearing its potent, muddled message … They shimmered and shook, nosing toward God knows what dimly perceived ovum, and I knew, oh, I knew that of every thousand that I saw within that brilliant circle of light, five hundred carried the command for height, for normality, for happiness and contentment; and five hundred bore the curse.

  But which?

  Was that an epiphany? Was that the moment when something, someone—the bleak and austere muse of science—spoke to me? Was my future research determined then, just as my future life had been determined seventeen years before, when a sperm such as one of these had nosed its way up my mother’s fallopian tube and encountered a wandering, wondering ovum with its delicate cumulus of follicular cells? Forget about copulation. The moment of true penetration is when the lucky sperm, the poor Noah, nudges against the ovum and explodes its capsule of digestive enzymes. The tail is shed and the head enters. For a moment two sets of chromosomes, one from the egg, one from the sperm, lie alongside each other in uneasy juxtaposition. And one of them carries my curse. The chromosomes, intricate spools of nucleic acid and protein, move together into a single, fateful conjunction; and Benedict Lambert has begun. Chromosomes that were once my mother’s and my father’s are now mine. I have begun. And I am cursed.

  And Gregor Mendel, was he cursed too? A moment of coupling in the massive bed in the peasant cottage at number 58, Heinzendorf, a village at the foot of the Sudety Mountains in Austrian Silesia, not far from the Polish border. It is October 22, 1821, more or less. There is a square tiled stove against one wall, around which the family sleeps during the deep winter nights; but now it is merely autumn, a chill autumn with the larch and the silver birch and the poplars turning to gold and rust, and Anton and Rosine use the great bed. The daughter Veronika sleeps on one side, while the parents couple quietly and methodically on the other side. They get warmth from each other’s body, and, for a convulsive moment, something else—a fleeting abstraction from the pains of peasant life. Then they lie quietly in each other’s arms while a shimmering galaxy of spermatozoa begins its blind and determined journey up Rosine’s genital tract.

  Did the particular sets of chromosomes that came together then bring with them Gregor Mendel’s particular future? Was that written in the genes? Can you possess genes for genius?

  1. Hamer et al., Science, 1993.

  Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, looked for evidence that intelligence runs in families—and found it, naturally enough, among his own august relatives. One wonders what he would have made of his exact contemporary, Gregor Mendel. One wonders what he would have made of the meanness of the world from which Mendel came, of the dull stupidity, of the grim labor in the fields, of the poverty and squalor. Mendel’s father was no more than a serf. He might have owned his small-holding, but he was still subject to the Robot. That was the world from which Mendel came.

  Robot is an emblematic word. Of course it was intended to be so from the moment that the playwright Karel Čapek took it from the lumber room of the Czech language and coined its modern sense.1 In Mendel’s day, Robot was man, not machine: three days’ forced labor out of every week of a peasant’s life. Following the revolution of 1848, in which the peasants were emancipated, the Robo
t was abolished; but not before it had destroyed Anton Mendel. That was the family endowment that Gregor stood to inherit.

  Galton, on the other hand, inherited a personal fortune and invented the science of eugenics in order to prove that the superior classes were, in fact, superior (in his particular case they were also sterile, but let that pass). In my thesaurus, “Galton’s law” comes immediately next to “Mendelian ratio.” There’s an irony.

  The village is still there, of course, tucked away among the hills of northern Moravia—the very navel of Europe, as far from Madrid as from Moscow, as far from the Baltic as from the Mediterranean. It’s a pretty enough place. A rural idyll, you might think. The fields and woods lie quietly beneath the fragile summer sky now just as they did in Mendel’s day. The same stream still runs beside the same road (merely tarmacked now) down toward the Odra valley. The same trees—alder and willow and aspen—grow along the streambank, while across the fields to the north rise the foothills of the same mountains, still black with spruce. You can almost imagine the family still there in the cottage, Rosine stout and jolly, Anton sallow and saturnine, the two daughters, Veronika and Theresia, and the son Johann. You might imagine all that, but you would be far from the truth.

  The fact is that although the geography may be the same and most of the buildings may be the same, the place itself has changed beyond reckoning. The name has changed, the language has changed, the people have changed, the whole world has changed. Nothing is the same. Heinzendorf is a vanished world—it is Hynčice now, a straggle of orchards and cottages and barns along a single street, merging into the neighboring village of Vražné that was once Grosspetersdorf. The mountains that rise to the north are part of the Sudety range.