Mendel's Dwarf Read online

  This is the Sudetenland.

  At the crossroads in the center of this idyllic village is a curious building. It looks like a hybrid between a bus shelter and a chapel. Raised above the roof of the hut is a black stone plaque inscribed in gothic lettering:

  It is not difficult to imagine a detachment of soldiers in feldgrau halting at that crossroads and looking up at that plaque. It would be a fine autumnal day of 1938. They would have a halftrack perhaps; maybe a motorcycle and sidecar. They would look up at the inscription with the satisfaction of the liberator, while villagers—women in floral aprons with flour on their arms, and men in overalls and muddied boots—would come out of the houses and barns to welcome them.

  “Hier wurde Mendel geboren,” the villagers would explain.

  “Mendel? Ein Jude?”

  “Nein, nein.” Laughter. “Prälat Mendel. Entdecker der Genetik.”

  A grinning, embarrassed relative would be produced as evidence. Conscious of race and blood, of the purity of their genes and the inferior nature of the Slavs, the soldiers would be delighted to learn that they had fetched up in Mendel’s home village. It would appear to them an omen. There would be laughter. Perhaps there would even be a photograph taken with a sharp, neat, futuristic Leica to send back to the family in Rostock.

  Oświecim/Auschwitz is a two-hour drive away, just over the Polish border.

  The Mendel house itself still stands, a stout cottage set back from the road up an overgrown path, surrounded by cherry and apple trees. There is a metal sign painted in the crude lettering of the onetime People’s Republic—Památka G. Mendela, the G. Mendel Memorial—and you get the key from the woman who runs the village shop. She is Czech, of course. She understands little German.

  There are just two rooms open to the public, both whitewashed, both tainted with damp. On the walls are the usual photographs—Gartner, Nägeli, Darwin, the Augustinian friars—and the usual facsimiles of Mendel’s papers. There are diagrams of some of the pea crossings and a quotation from T. H. Morgan, and a stylized and inaccurate model of part of a DNA molecule. There is little else. Only in the inner room is there something that Mendel himself might have recognized: a tiled stove standing in one corner as mute witness to the long, hard winters.

  In the visitors’ book someone has put the epithet SudetenDeutscher beneath his name.

  What was it like, that distant, Sudeten German life one hundred and fifty years ago? Frugal, fearful of God, attentive to duty, I suppose. The future would have been no more than a continuation of the past, not subject to change. You accepted your lot, and visited the family graves regularly just to see what acceptance meant. You prayed and you worked. You didn’t question.

  Johann Mendel escaped through the only door that stood half-open—education. In 1834, encouraged by the local schoolmaster, he sat the entrance examination to the Imperial Royal Gymnasium at Troppau (Opava) and won a place.

  Imagine his mother’s pride when she heard the news: picture her in the kitchen, wiping her ruddy hands on a cloth and turning to embrace her young son in a powerful, maternal clasp. She had plans, we imagine: her uncle had once been a teacher, and she had similar plans for her son. And picture old Anton, swallowing bitterness and envy while slapping his son on the shoulder. “In my day you didn’t get opportunities like this, my boy. In my day you had to work to better yourself …”

  “But the lad has worked. He’s worked with his brain.” The reproach would have been there just below the surface, the hint that Johann was destined for better things, the suggestion that by using your brains you could escape the clutches of serfdom and the Robot; and the implication that by marrying Anton Mendel, Rosine Schwirtlich had somehow stepped down a rung.

  Johann was admitted to the grammar school on half-commons—the equivalent, I suppose, of free dinners. He worked hard and did well at his studies—prima classis cum eminentia—but escape wasn’t that easy, for in the winter of 1838 his father was badly injured while logging in the forests above Ostrau—while working under the Robot. A trunk broke loose and rolled onto him, and they brought him home on a cart with his chest half crushed.

  Heinzendorf must have been rife with speculation. What would Johann Mendel do? The father survived more or less, but manual work was beyond him. What was the son, the only son, going to do? Grim and implacable, the Robot stood waiting in the shadows to claim Johann Mendel for his own.

  Can there be a gene for stubbornness? Johann was a stubborn man, sure enough. He was stubborn in his work with the garden pea (eight years, eight generations, more than thirty thousand plants); he was stubborn in his battle with the taxman when he was abbot of the monastery; and he was stubborn then, when he was a mere boy of sixteen and his father was a near invalid and the farm was going to wrack and ruin. It isn’t hard to imagine the rural drama that reigned in that cottage in the village of Heinzendorf when he came home. It isn’t difficult to picture the internecine quarrel that threatened to split the family apart—the jealousies, the accusations, the false appeals to duty and the dishonest appeals to affection, the whole caustic solution of a family dispute.

  “The boy must be allowed to continue his studies,” Rosine would insist.

  And old Anton, sitting in a chair by the stove, would cough and hack and bring up mucus and blood like evidence. “I’ve worked myself to the bone for this place. And I get it thrown back at me without so much as a thank-you.”

  “It’s not like that, Father,” the son would try to explain, with little success.

  “Oh, it’s exactly like that. Farm work’s beneath you, that’s the trouble. You think it’s beneath you. You think that you can become grand just by reading a few books …” Old Anton, hacking and spitting and pointing his finger at his son, with the daughters hovering in the background, pleading for him to stop. “You’ll do yourself an injury, Father.”

  “You keep out of it. This isn’t the business of women.”

  But it was. It was precisely the business of the women, for it was the daughters who held the key—the elder Veronika with her shining new husband and the young Theresia, Uncle Harry’s grandmother, then a mere child of eleven. I imagine they plotted the whole thing together with their mother and presented it as a fait accompli to the father. Veronika’s husband, Alois Sturm, had some money put away. He could buy the farm and so keep it in the family. The sale would raise enough money for Anton and Rosine to retire—he wasn’t in any fit state to carry on, was he?—and there would be something left over to support Johann at the university. And Theresia—stout, sensible Theresia—would surrender her own share of the inheritance, her dowry in fact, to help her beloved brother with his studies.

  So he stayed at his studies, living from hand to mouth, doing some private teaching, scratching out a living, battling with poverty and guilt.

  The church of Vražné/Hynčice lies up the hill on the far side of the stream, half-hidden among the lanes and gardens, couched among silver birch. There is a memorial from the First World War with a Mendel (Ferdinand) listed among the dead. The interior of the church is as plain as a Protestant chapel. Here the Mendel family would have walked each Sunday, stumping along the lane in their clumsy Sunday best, stolid in their Germanicism. Little more than serfs, on Sunday they would have looked like free men and women. They would have sung “Ein feste Burg” and “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser” along with all the other good folk of the villages.

  A middle-aged couple were cleaning around the altar when I peered in through the open doorway. They stopped and stared at me in surprise. They seemed startled, as though I were a confirmation of what they had always feared, a manifestation of folktale and legend, a dwarf from the Sudety Mountains, where, no doubt, dwarfs had mined for gold from time immemorial. “Dobry den” I greeted them.

  The woman recovered her composure and returned my greeting. “Trpaslík,” the man muttered. The other words I didn’t understand, but I knew that one well enough. I know that word in every language. Dwarf. We stare
d at each other for a moment, as though across a barbed-wire fence, before I turned and left them to their work.

  Farther up the hill I found the cemetery. The center of the field was taken up with the modern graves, the Czech ones, the Markovas and the Chudys, black and gleaming in the sunshine. Prominent at the front was a memorial to Russian soldiers, still gleaming, still with a lamp burning, still with fresh flowers:

  NA VECNOU PAMET

  SOVETSKYM HRDINUM

  In eternal memory of the Soviet Heroes, something like that.

  I love the ironies of history. This has the taste of one of the sourest, most acerbic of them. Here in Moravia, precisely in this village where the founder of genetics was born and where the Nazis came in pursuit of racial purity and Lebensraum, the Soviets came as liberators. They brought freedom from the tyranny of genetics and replaced it with the tyranny of social theory. Mankind is good at tyrannies.

  Among the nettles over to one side I found the German headstones. A few faded ones were still standing:

  FRANZ MENDEL

  1878–1930

  FRANZ MENDEL

  1906–1940

  OBERTRUPPFÜHRER IM RAD

  There was a calvary buried beneath dog rose and brambles. The thorns tore at my hands as I reached up and pulled the branches aside to discover:

  THE RESTING PLACE OF

  ALOIS STURM

  DIED 1892, AGED 42

  AND

  ROSINA STURM

  DIED 1927, AGED 72

  This was Gregor Mendel’s nephew, the son of his elder sister, Veronika. Mendel himself married them in 1873, on his last visit to Heinzendorf. But where were the others? Where was Veronika, or Alois’s father? Where was Theresia? And where were Anton Mendel and Rosine Schwirtlich?

  There is an evolution in the life of a cemetery, as in life itself. There are lines of development, changes with time, adaptations, extinctions. Most of the Mendel tombstones, most of the Sturms, all of the Schwirtlichs, are extinct—dinosaurs and dodos in the exiguous world of Hynčice necrology. Perhaps their fossils lie there in the rubble of broken stones cast aside into the hedge.

  Nothing but moss-grown fragments shall remain of the epoch in which the genius appeared.

  Gregor Mendel himself wrote those words. Perceptive? Prophetic? He wrote them before he ever became a friar, when he was still young Johann and still living in Heinzendorf. The line is part of a poem, a paean to the art of printing, probably a task set by some forgotten and forgettable teacher, preserved among childhood memorabilia by his second sister, Theresia. Date unknown. Shall we say, 1838—ten years before the revolution throughout the Empire that led to the emancipation of the peasants; sixty years before Heinrich Weiss left Vienna with his father Gottlieb; one hundred years before the Munich betrayal?

  Yes, his laurels shall never fade,

  Though time shall suck down by its vortex

  Whole generations into the abyss …

  Abyss. I suppose that’s good enough. I stood among the debris of the graveyard of Hynčice and strained to catch a glimpse of Mendel and his family across the abyss. But the Mendels and the Sturms and the Schindlers and the Weisses had vanished, along with all else that was German, in 1945. Heinzendorf to Hynčice. In that year Edvard Beneš returned from exile in London and the brief, fragile democratic government of Czechoslovakia was installed in the wake of the Red Army. In that year the expulsion of the Germans began. Odsun, the transfer, the Czechs called it. Nowadays it’d be known as ethnic cleansing. While the Red Army looked on and the western Allies kept quiet (it had all been agreed to at the Potsdam Conference), three million Germans were driven out of the Czech lands to fare as best they could in Germany and Austria; and the Sudeten problem vanished. Heinzendorf and Mendel lie somewhere on the far side of that event.

  I stood beside Alois and Rosina Sturm and thought of ancestry and descent. And of Jean.

  1. In the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), 1920.

  Education is an escape. I took it, Mendel took it. Indebted and beholden, he moved on from the grammar school to the university at Olmütz, giving private lessons to earn his keep. He tried to pay his little sister back, and at the same time he tried to become what he was not: one of the educated middle class. It was not easy. A peasant’s son had little chance in those days, and it is hardly a surprise to find that in 1843 he approached the Augustinian Friars at Saint Thomas in Brünn. The Church has always dealt kindly with those of its children who have brains and are willing to pay the price, which is to vow that you will not pass any genes that you may possess, for intelligence or anything else, on to the next generation. It is the very antithesis of eugenics.

  He took the name Gregor at his induction. Brother Gregor Mendel. In his first year at Theological College in Brünn he studied ecclesiastical history, ecclesiastical archaeology, and Hebrew; in his second year canon law, scriptural exegesis, and Greek; in his third year, dogmatics and moral theology; in the fourth year, pastoral divinity, catechetics, and the methodology of primary-school education. In his reports he is described as prima classis cum eminentia once more, and applauded for his diligence and good behavior, but that hardly makes him one of the geniuses of the nineteenth century. During his last year, with unseemly haste (there is a shortage of priests), he is ordained subdeacon, deacon, and finally priest, all within the space of a fortnight. The ordination to the priesthood took place on his birthday.

  LETTER FROM ABBOT CYRILL NAPP

  TO PRIOR BAPTIST VORTHEY:

  It has come to my knowledge that Father Gregor is attending lectures without wearing a college cap. Father Gregor, although he is now a priest, is still only a student … I must ask the Very Reverend Prior to inform him that when he attends lectures he must wear a college cap just like the other students.

  A little glimmer of pride? Perhaps. But we look in vain for anything else. There is not a trace, not a glimmer, of anything that might be genius. The problem is, we can’t come to terms with genius. We don’t know where it lies. Is it in the heart or is it in the head? Is it mechanistic or mystical, fortuitous or inevitable? Is it in the genes or in the upbringing? If it’s the one, then it is nothing more than pure mechanics; if it’s the other, then it is nothing more than pure chance. Either way, no merit attaches. The apple falling on Newton’s head may be a fiction, but it is emblematic—the fact that the image exists, I mean; not the fact that it isn’t a fact, that the image is no more than a myth. It is the myth that interests me. We don’t understand the man, so we create an event, a moment, something we can grasp. But a million other windfalls have dropped at a million other feet and all to no effect, so what are we left with by way of explanation?

  I have two photographs of him. I copied them from a book in the Institute library, and had them developed and printed by one of the technicians in the electron microscope department—a group picture of the whole community and a studio portrait of the man alone. You look for clues, don’t you? You try to read behind a face. Father Gregor possesses a high forehead, a strong jaw, and a determined mouth; but the expression is that of a gentle man and a dreamer. He gazes out of the portrait with visionary eyes. He seems to be staring into the unknown, into the dim world of discovery, into the future.

  Visionary eyes? Be suspicious of everything I have just written. He was merely shortsighted. Physiognomy is a pseudoscience, and crime has been committed in the name of phrenology. You can tell nothing from a man’s appearance, nothing except the depths of your own prejudice. And anyway, according to his biographer, that photograph has been doctored, touched up, smoothed out, and generally made what it is not.

  And yet …

  In the group photograph there is something to grasp at, some kind of movement, some hint of the mood of a distant day. The picture seems to cast a shadow forward into the bright light of the twentieth century, a shadow from the occasion when the photographer came, with his panoply of tent and chemicals and glass plates, his self-importance and impatience, to pre
serve the images of the Augustinian community of Altbrünn for posterity.

  “Please, gentlemen, please be still!” The anguish of an artist not being taken seriously. “Fathers, please!”

  You can almost hear the chatter and the laughter, the protests of Father Thomas, the ironical amusement of Father Baptista, and the insistence of Father Anselm that this new manifestation of scientific progress be taken seriously. Anselm poses with his left finger resting against chin, and gazes into the lens of the camera as though to make clear that he understands the importance of this experiment. Father Pavel has brought a book along and appears to be writing in it—choirmaster and organist, perhaps he is working on an arrangement for mass on the next major feast day. Prälat Cyrill, the abbot, has a Bible on his lap. He looks faintly impatient with all the goings-on.

  And Father Gregor? Father Gregor holds a fuchsia flower. He holds it up almost for the camera to see, and he squints at it pointedly, with a quizzical expression, as though asking it a question and getting no answer …

  This is a photograph taken when photography was in its infancy. The arrival of a photographer from the new town would have been an event, heralded with much excitement, much anticipation. You did not pose casually as the photographer vanished beneath the black hood. You thought about what you were doing. And Father Gregor holds a fuchsia flower and asks it a question …

  Do photographs tell anything?

  They took the official photograph of the Institute the other day, out on the lawn at the back of the main building. Jean wasn’t there, of course. I stayed away as well.

  Do photographs tell anything? Does appearance tell anything?

  Father Gregor has a high forehead, a strong jaw, and a determined mouth. But he failed the examination for his teacher’s certificate twice because of nerves, and thereafter was never able to work as anything but a substitute teacher. I have a massive forehead and blunt, puglike features. My nose is stove in at the bridge, my mouth and jaw protrude. My limbs are squat and bowed, my fingers are mere squabs. I am one meter, twenty-seven centimeters tall.