Mendel's Dwarf Page 8

  Of course he is, all the time. He is hiding his devotion; but in its place, with an absurd flourish, like a conjuror in one of the booths in the Klosterplatz producing a rabbit from a hat, he presents a poor surrogate—the potted plant.

  The pink of her cheeks spreads. It is almost the color of the flowers on the little shrub. “For me?”

  “For you, Frau Rotwang. A fuchsia. I bred it myself. I have taken the liberty …”

  “The liberty, Pater Gregor?”

  “Of naming it Adelaide. The Adelaide fuchsia.”

  “Oh.” A small exhalation of breath. A shock. It is the first time that he has ever hinted at her Christian name, the first indication that he even knows it. The little flowers dance and bob like so many tiny ballerinas as he holds the plant out toward her.

  “You are not offended?”

  “No, no.” Pink, fuchsia pink, suffuses neck and face. “Honored. I am honored.” She takes the potted plant and admires it. “It is wonderful. Oh, wonderful.” Somehow she contrives to touch his arm while trying at the same time to hold the pot. The pot almost tumbles. She moves forward to save it. He grasps the pot, her wrist, her elbow, and for a moment they have stepped over the invisible barrier that convention draws between them. For a moment confusion threatens to wreak havoc amid the careful formalities of their acquaintance.

  “Oh, my goodness. I think I must sit.”

  He lowers her into a chair and places the potted plant on a side table. There is a blessed interruption as a maid comes in with a tray. Father Gregor feels hot beneath his soutane. The girl is detailed to take the plant to the conservatory, while Frau Rotwang regains composure behind the ornate coffeepot. The balance of things settles into its former equilibrium.

  “Now tell me about your children,” Frau Rotwang says, pouring. There is the faintest innuendo about her words. Frau Rotwang has no children. Neither, for quite other reasons, does Father Gregor. But both pretend. Father Gregor’s children are his plants, particularly his fuchsias, but also his peas, rows and rows of them in the convent garden, twining glaucous fingers around one another and around the pea-sticks, clinging like children to their mother’s apron.

  “You must come and visit them sometime. I could explain my ideas about them to you …”

  By way of contrast, Frau Rotwang’s children are her dogs, four of them that wriggle around the skirts of Mendel’s soutane, and beg for food, and a fifth that goes straight to his mistress and cringes at her feet. “What’s the matter with you?” Frau Rotwang asks of it as she lifts it into her arms. The dog laps wetly at her chin, tries to get at a crumb of poppyseed cake that adheres momentarily to the crimson Rotwang lower lip. “Naughty little boy. You are jealous, aren’t you?” She gazes over the animal’s narrow head at her guest. “Jealous of Pater Gregor.”

  The dogs are dachshunds, achondroplastic dwarfs. Father Gregor has already asked for their pedigrees …

  It was in London that I finally broke my enforced celibacy. In my case there is no conundrum, and no inclination to withstand the rigors of temptation; but up to then I had had no more than a long and intense affair with a variety of glossy magazine lovelies who lolled on chaise longues or sat, bold and brave, astride chairs and touched themselves with delicate talons almost as though unaware of someone looking. There were also tawdry videos and occasionally the live equivalent, a slot-machine booth for voyeurs where you could pay rather too much to keep a shutter from falling on the vision of strapped and hirsute flesh on the far side of the glass. But the real thing, that was what I desired.

  I did it in the only way within my powers; don’t imagine that it was easy. I took days, weeks, to reach a satisfactory conclusion. You have guessed, of course. Many evenings I drove—oh yes, I drive. I have built-up pedals and an extended gear lever and I park where the hell I please because I’ve got one of those window stickers. I haven’t got that kind of pride. My kind of pride is different and far more difficult to handle—many evenings I drove, cruised, in those areas where the assets of the city are displayed to the roving customer’s eye. I looked and wondered and let imagination and my fist play their paltry tricks, until one evening, charged up with the impoverished courage of whiskey, I pulled into the pavement alongside a shadowy and expectant figure and wound down the window.

  She stepped forward. “I got a place just round the corner, love,” she said; and then saw what she was taking on. “Oh, Christ. It’ll be extra for you. Sorry, dear, but that’s the way it is. Market forces. Extra for special treatment, extra for gross deformities.”

  “How much?”

  “It’d be best if we discuss it at my place. The narks are around and they’re being right buggers at the moment. Something about a cabinet minister being shortchanged the other night. D’you mind?” She climbed in beside me. She was lean and brassy, her makeup applied in dense layers of primary color, her legs sheathed in black net. “Bit parky at this time of night, innit? Just carry straight on and turn left at the pub. You should find an empty meter at this time.”

  Her room was over a Chinese restaurant. The Tu Can. “Only two can play,” she said, and shrieked with laughter. She greeted the owner by name as we went in, and muttered “Slit-eyed bastard” after him as I followed her up the stairs. You could smell the cooking and hear plates crashing around in the kitchens below.

  “My boo-dwar,” she announced, opening the first door.

  The room was all pink ruches and fluffy teddy bears and flowery perfume. There was a large mirror at the head of the bed, and another on the wall. A dressing table was flooded with a mess of makeup and tubs of cream and boxes of paper tissue. There was a tube of lubricating jelly, economy size, on the bedside table.

  “I don’t want the mirrors,” I told her.

  “No problem.” She drew discreet curtains, and the several images of diminutive me and angular, glittering her vanished. “D’you want to get straight down to it? It’ll be fifty quid for straight penetration, if that’s all right. Twenty quid for a hand-job. I try and avoid too much of the tricky stuff, know what I mean? Can get a bit dangerous at times. Done it before, have you? Well, there’s got to be a first time. Oh, and you’ll have to use a Johnnie, I’m afraid. I used to charge extra for doing it without, but I reckon these days it just isn’t worth it …” She unbuttoned her blouse, then hesitated and looked at me quizzically. “What you reckon? Everythin’ off, or do you fancy the underclothes?” She tossed her brassiere aside to display implausibly pneumatic breasts with carefully rouged nipples. “Like that okay? Come on, dearie, don’t be shy. Let me unbutton you.” There was a thoughtful pause as her fingers worked. “My, that’s not bad,” she said.

  “It’s the only part of me that’s unaffected,” I told her.

  “Let’s see what it can do, then.” She slid her knickers down—wide-mouthed, loudmouthed French knickers—and presented herself to my gaze. “What you think of that, then?” She was entirely hairless. A gleaming, nude mons veneris was creased delectably by the pout of naked labia. Of course, it may have been the result of an assiduous use of razor and depilatory cream but, truth to tell, it was probably because she was a victim (happy? resigned? indifferent?) of testicular feminization syndrome (X-linked recessive, mapping to the long arm, Xq11), which condition renders chromosomally normal males (2A + XY)—I quote the literature—“voluptuously female but devoid of axillary and pubic hair.”

  She was a monster, like me.

  I wondered, oh yes, in my desperate palpitating tumescence I wondered whether her mother had shown the developmental asymmetry of breasts, body hair, and vulva that carriers of the recessive condition sometimes manifest, the consequence of Lyonization (delicious, feline term), which turns off one of the X chromosomes at random in each body cell of every normal female, and so allows the feminization syndrome to show itself and not show itself, show itself and not, depending which X chromosome is active in which area. Now you see it, now you don’t. Genetic prestidigitation, chromosomal sleight of hand.


  “What you think of that, then?” she asked, and I demonstrated my feelings there and then, standing in front of her, while she tutted and commiserated and fumbled around with the Handi Wipes like a housewife with spilt milk. “Wait a few minutes and you can have another go, dear. Don’t worry about a thing. I often get ’em like that, you know. Quite a turn-on, eh?”

  She came from Wales. You could hear it in her voice, the faint ring of the valleys still there beneath the glottal stops of the London basin. “You’re all right in spite of everything,” she assured me as she squatted on the bidet in the corner of the room after it was all over. “Can’t be much fun for you, can it? Your parents the same, are they? What are they, circus or something?”

  “No, they’re not. They’re normal.”

  She nodded, toweling herself between the legs. “Must make it worse. My brother’s got a harelip. They say that’s the same. Genetic. Come on, get your things on. I’ve got to get back to my pitch. You’d better leave first, if you don’t mind. I don’t like to be seen going out with a client.” And then, smiling, she added, “You can come again if you like. If you know what I mean.”

  “I’d like to. If you don’t mind.” If you don’t mind. I hated myself for that.

  “ ’Course not. Here’s my card. You can ring in the morning and make an appointment if you like. I prefer doing it that way, in fact. There’s an answerphone if I’m not in. Leave your number and I’ll call you back.”

  EVE. FORBIDDEN FRUIT TASTES SWEETEST.

  That’s what the card said, above her number and beneath a crude line drawing of buttocks and garters. She was brisk and businesslike, selling wares like any other trader; not a tart with a heart, but an honest enough worker. I went to her four or five times and then had a blood test done, just in case. I was frightened, you see. Even with the condom I was frightened. I know how small viruses are.

  In 1856 the great work began: seminal, both literally and figuratively. With mathematical rigor unknown at that time outside physics, Gregor Mendel was about to demonstrate the behavior of the fundamental genetic material. He was about to elucidate the dance of genes. But what would you have seen? What does genius at work look like? A stout, obtuse figure in dusty black stumping purposefully up the hill from the monastery every morning on his way to school, and back in the afternoon when lessons are over, calling in for coffee at the Rotwang house near the Capuchin church twice a week. A round, peasant face peering at the world through gold-rimmed spectacles, smiling to himself as though at some secret joke, nodding amiably to passing acquaintances. He is part of the landscape: a mere cleric, a mere teacher leading a sequestered life that is punctuated by the ringing of bells, circumscribed by timetables and calendars, defined by routine. Genius is an elusive quality.

  “Good day, Father. How are you?”

  “Oh, mustn’t grumble, mustn’t grumble.”

  “And the plants?”

  “I find they grow on me.” A joke he has made a hundred times, apparently without being aware of repetition. He will talk for a minute or two about the weather (a particular interest), about bees, about his pupils, and you will be expected to laugh at jokes that you don’t always understand or, if you do, don’t find particularly funny. Then: “If you’ll excuse me, I really must be going. I have to see about my children.”

  Children. Sublimation, is that it? One clings to the idea eagerly. Doubtless the Blessed Sigmund Fraud (at that very moment going through his oral and anal phases in not-so-distant Freiburg, now Přibor) would have dismissed it thus. But what does the word explain? Objectively, it was certainly obsession. Mendel took two years merely to prepare the ground and a further eight years to carry out the work. Beginning with thirty-four different varieties of pea, he narrowed it down to twenty-two, and finally settled on seven strains with clearly contrasting characters: angular peas against round peas; yellow cotyledons1 against green cotyledons; white seed coat and flower against gray-brown seed coat with purple flower; smooth pod against constricted pod; green pod against yellow pod; axillary flowers against terminal flowers; tall stems against dwarf. And while the differing varieties hybridized in the garden behind the monastery, in his mind the logic of algebra hybridized with the facts of life.

  (A + a)(A + a) = AA + 2Aa + aa

  That is all it is, you see—the secrets of inheritance speared on the point of a simple binomial expansion. There is all the simplicity of genius. But what is the complexity beneath?

  Year One (1856)

  A total of 287 artificial crossings were carried out with seventy different plants from the selected pure varieties (A × a).

  Year Two (1857)

  Hybrids (Aa) from the first-year crossings were planted out and scored. Exact numbers unknown, but there were 511 hybrid plants counted for seed shape and color alone. These hybrids were left to self-pollinate (which is what they do naturally) and the peas collected, dried, and labeled for the next year.

  Year Three (1858)

  Four thousand six hundred twelve offspring from the previous year were planted out. They were counted and scored. In this generation the famous three-to-one ratios between dominant types (AA or Aa) and recessive types (aa) appeared. Individual dwarf plants were lifted and potted as soon as recognized, to ensure that they were not shaded by their tall neighbors. (He had a clear idea of the contrast between the inherited and the acquired, you see. He distinguished nature from nurture.) Again, self-pollination was allowed to take place in all plants. In this year Mendel also began to set up combinations of two or more characters together on the same plant—the bi- and trifactorial crosses.

  Year Four (1859)

  In this generation it was shown that all the recessive types from the previous year had produced nothing but recessive offspring, i.e., they were genetically pure. Of dominant types, some (one-third) were now shown to have been genetically pure, while the remainder (two-thirds) again produced dominant and recessive offspring in a three-to-one ratio, showing that they had been carrying the recessive character (i.e., were genetically impure hybrids). This was revealed by selecting one hundred of each of the 1858 dominant types and planting out ten seeds from each plant. This alone yields one thousand plants. In this year there are also the hybrids from the bifactorial and trifactorial crosses that were set up in 1858. Going through his paper, you lose count. From 1859 it becomes impossible to calculate with any accuracy the numbers of plants involved. Fisher2 suggests over five thousand plants for 1859, and over six thousand for 1860. The greenhouse was working full-time. Row upon row of peas grew in the garden strip behind the monastery. Obsession? Possession? The friar was at once their master and their slave. The work became the focus that drew to itself all the perspective lines of his world, the vanishing point of the whole of his existence. All else—personal inadequacy, nagging spiritual doubts, ailing mother, dead father—disappeared as surely as the demons of night disappear in the plain light of day. The good friar had slipped his moorings and was away on the high seas, leaving ordinary mortals far behind. Land was out of sight below the horizon.

  Year Five (1860)

  Some monofactorial lines are continued to show that half of the offspring of hybrids breed true, i.e., are genetically exactly as pure as the original stock lines that started the whole work. The second generation from the first bifactorial and trifactorial crossings are also planted out, producing plants with all possible combinations of characters, and showing that a pair of factors controlling one character is inherited entirely separately from a pair of factors controlling another character (what became the so-called “second law”). In that year he also back-crossed double hybrids (AaBb) with pure recessives from the stock lines (aabb), using both pollen and ovules from the hybrids. In 1861 these back-cross results were sown, and gave a 1:1:1:1 ratio of four different offspring. This was to test his hypothesis, by showing that the double hybrids did indeed produce pollen and ovules of types AB, Ab, aB, and ab in equal proportions, just as he had assumed. In the same year, w
ork was also begun on flowering time in peas, using an early-flowering and a late-flowering variety. Other pedigrees were continued from previous years, and experiments were set up using Phaseolus, the broad bean …

  And so it goes on. Obsession? Given a diverse twist or two by fate—a different interlacing of synapses at some part of the cerebrum, a different twist of the neck at the moment of birth—it might have become the fixation of a psychotic, the hoarder of pornography, the Peeping Tom—or nothing more than the tiresome craze of a stamp collector. Throughout each spring and summer from 1854 to 1871 (by then he had moved on to other species), the man spent hours and hours tending his plants, pollinating, scoring, labeling, harvesting, drying, putting seeds away for the next year, puzzling and pondering, counting and tallying, recording his results in leatherbound books, explaining to anyone who would listen what was going on, feeling his way into one of the greatest secrets of the natural world—that each inherited character is determined by individual, distinct particles carried by the egg and by the pollen. That, for each simple inherited character, every offspring gains one such particle from its father and one from its mother. That the particles remain distinct and identifiable even though contrasting ones might temporarily come together in an individual. That you can follow the movement of these particles down through the generations and that they are passed on to the offspring just as they were gained from the parents. That pure luck determines which of two differing characters is passed on—the choice is chance.

  Almost twenty years. Visitors were in the presence of a man inspired—a Beethoven or a Goethe—and all they saw was a dumpy, self-deprecating little friar with a sense of irony, a man who taught in the local high school and had a reputation for being reasonable and fair to his students, a man who smiled vaguely at the world through spectacles whose lenses were clouded with dust and, doubtless, pollen.