Mendel's Dwarf (10 page)

Finally I opened the last box of all. Inside it, on the top of a pile of papers, discolored and crisp with age, was a pamphlet of a dozen pages. It might have been a theater program, but it wasn’t. Across the cover was written

GOTTLIEB WEISS’S
ANATOMICAL CURIOSITIES

“Oh dear,” Beatrice said as I showed it to her. Gottlieb and Heinrich Weiss, it transpired, had once run a freak show.

At that moment Mother came in with the tea. “Didn’t you know?” she asked carelessly when she saw what Beatrice had found. “I thought Harry would have mentioned it. He was always going on about the past, the old bore.”

Her offhanded manner did not deceive me. Gottlieb Weiss had run a circus of the deformed and the dispossessed, and with strange, Teutonic tact, Uncle Harry had kept the whole episode secret from me. I turned the pages. They were all there in the program, all illustrated and described in precise detail—the conjoined twins, “straight from Siam”; the bearded lady; the human gorilla; the giant; the family of midgets; the wart man, whose face (a blurred photograph bore witness) was peppered with a thousand papillae; the man-mountain (forty-three stone); the three-legged boy. There was even the cat-child, “half human, half feline, with the plaintive cry of a kitten,” although that particular act did not survive Manchester. It was expunged from the show and the parents were duly paid off, the fact recorded along
with everything else in the leatherbound tome that I found in the bottom of the box. The records were precise. So too was the timetable, from London to Nottingham, to Manchester, to Liverpool, to Birmingham, and back to London for a grand display at the Hammersmith Palladium. Everything relating to the show was preserved there among Uncle Harry’s things: copies of contracts
(… that the aforementioned Joseph, having the appearance of a chimpanzee, shall agree to display himself, naked but for a covering for the loins, for a fee of …)
, copies of flyers, a folder of press cuttings (“A remarkable if somewhat gruesome experience,” in the view of the
Liverpool Daily Post
), even a photograph (sepia, blurred) of the entrance to the show itself, with the name displayed in a curve of lights above the ticket booth:

And in the foreground the owner and son, Gottlieb, now with a large beard, and his son Heinrich sporting a fine, curly mustache.

The last tour was dated 1914. Perhaps the war and the changing of names put an end to it; whatever the reason, Gottlieb had metamorphosed into Godley by the time the next enterprise surfaced among Uncle Harry’s papers:

D
OCTOR
G
ODLEY
W
ISE

Confidant of the Crowned Heads of Europe
Adviser to Princes and Presidents
Analyst of the Viennese School
Descendant of the Founder of Genetics

Lectures at the Masonic Hall, Pimlico.
13th May 1922

Admission free to all men and women of Intelligence & Culture

About what did Great-grandfather Godley lecture? I opened a pamphlet and discovered that he lectured about the “Science of Human Genetics, founded on the new Mendelian Principles, being a Full Exposition of the Danger faced by the British Race through a Deterioration of its Genetic Stock.”

Former freak-show manager Godley Wise had become a eugenicist. There was a list of initial subscribers to his society. Did they, I wonder, ever see a satisfactory intellectual return on their investment? They included Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. G. B. Shaw, Mr. H. Belloc. Strange bedfellows, indeed.

Great-great-great-uncle Gregor was sent to the University of Vienna in October 1851, to prepare for another attempt at the teaching examination. Nowadays Vienna is the overblown capital of a small, smug province, but then it was Imperial Vienna, the Vienna of the Habsburgs: Vienna, Wien, Viden, Bécs, a crucible, a melting pot of nations, a fusion of genes—German, Slav, Magyar, Gypsy, Jew, half a million souls, all the nations of
Mitteleuropa
bubbling, arguing, creating, protesting, seething together. The revolution of 1848 was a recent memory. The city was a place of intellectual turmoil and vitality, with the rationalists and democrats in conflict with the church and state. Sigmund Freud was on the way. So too was Vienna’s guilty secret, Adolf Hitler. It was to this city that the callow young priest from Heinzendorf set off on the night train from Brünn on October 27, 1851. He carried with him a letter from Abbot Napp to the minister Andreas von Baumgartner. What else did he bring from provincial Brünn to cosmopolitan Vienna? A fine-honed and perceptive mind? An incisive brilliance? An inspired imagination? Genius?

He never even took a degree. He attended Doppler’s lectures on experimental physics, and Franz Unger’s on botany, as well as
a course in higher mathematical physics given by von Ettinghausen; but he never took a degree. Thus is genius educated. But the influence of Unger—an avowed and controversial evolutionist who earned the enmity of the Church—was decisive, as was the mathematics learned at the feet of the physicists. For a while the young friar acted as a demonstrator in Doppler’s Physical Institute. He also joined the Zoological and Botanical Society of Vienna. He listened and he thought. He acquired ideas, but little in the way of self-confidence; he acquired intellectual ambition, but little self-assurance.

In 1853 he returned to Brünn, and in the spring of the next year he began work as an unqualified substitute teacher at the Brünn Modern School. He was thirty-one years old, the product of an approximate and inconsistent education; yet somewhere within him an ember glowed. He began to breed plants, fuchsias and others, in the back garden of the monastery.

And peas …

Pisum sativum
, the garden pea, is a member of the Papilionaceae family, a workaday group with blossoms that dance like butterflies among the foliage. These papilionaceous flowers possess five petals: the large, vivid, and vivacious standard; the two wings; and two others that form the keel or
carina
, a sweet, sleek, and secretive sheath. Within, moist and fragile, lie the reproductive organs. No chance choice. You select your material with care. Being food plants, they come in a number of distinct varieties, and others have already crossed them artificially with success.
²
The keel ensures self-pollination under normal conditions, so different strains are certain to be pure, and the flowers are large and therefore easily manipulated. Mendel watched and examined and thought. He had the mind of a chessplayer (he
was
a chessplayer) and he watched nature’s moves patiently.

Is it possible to draw him out of the past, out of the shadows
of the few photographs that remain, out of the vague stories of Uncle Harry, out of fusty recollection and textbook repetition? Can the man live in any sense? “Watch,” he said.

Bratranek watched. Scrawny and self-satisfied, Bratranek smiled at the sight of the younger man down on his knees among the vegetables.

“You must get down to see properly,” Mendel muttered. “It’s no use just standing around like a damned priest. Kneel before Mother Nature.”

Complaining, Bratranek hitched up his skirts and knelt, while Mendel rooted among the chaos of stems and tendrils for a suitable flower to show. His fingers were grimy. Just like a peasant’s. Blood will out. “These here are the dwarfs. Obviously. Obviously they’re the dwarfs. Now what we do is …” He bit his lower lip and frowned with concentration, pulling open one of the immature flowers, peering at it through his gold-rimmed glasses, muttering almost as though addressing the plants themselves rather than the thin priest at his side. “There’s my little child. Remove the stamens”—scissors snipped—“and there we are. Gone. When she is ripe, that flower will become the female parent. Bag.” He snapped his fingers behind him. Bratranek handed over one of the paper bags that he had been given to carry. Mendel slipped it over the selected flower. “Now you may watch the transfer of pollen. The useful thing is that you get flowers at all stages of maturity. Fruit down at the bottom, mature flowers halfway up, unopened buds at the top. Couldn’t be better.”

The friar clambered to his feet and led the way over to the line of tall plants, huffing and puffing and stumbling over the uneven soil of the bed, muttering as he went. “What did Bacon say? ‘Nature reveals her secrets when put to the torture,’ was that it? But it is not torture. It is a caress.” He grinned at Bratranek, a camel-hair paintbrush in his hand. “Nature reveals her secrets when she is
stroked
,” he said. He opened a mature flower
and dabbed at it and held up the brush to show a tiny speck of golden pollen on the tip. “There. This”—returning to the dwarfs, kneeling down among the ragged stems once more—“goes here.” Another bagged flower was unveiled for a moment to reveal the sequestered flower. The paintbrush slipped in among the delicate petals like a tongue. Mendel scribbled something on the paper bag and put it back in place. “Female pure tall, crossed with male pure dwarf.”

Bratranek look pained. “This is disgusting.”

“It may be disgusting, but it’s natural. Wasn’t your Goethe an admirer of nature?”

“The higher flights of the human spirit, not mere sex. Anyway, what is natural about this … 
manipulation?
” Bratranek pronounced the word with distaste, as though the modifier
genital
were implied.

“What on earth do you imagine plant breeders
do
, man? Cast spells?”

“And once you’ve performed this … unnatural act?”

“I will harvest the hybrid peas and plant them out. They will all be tall. The tall dominates the dwarf, you understand?”

“If you know the result already, what’s the point?”

“But when they self-pollinate and we get the hybrid generation,
³
then we shall see. I have a theory, you see? The dwarfs that have vanished in the first generation will reappear in the second, one dwarf for every three tall plants on average. It is all a question of probability. Just like the lottery. I used to play the lottery in Vienna, What is the chance of a winning ticket, eh? Pretty small. Here the probability of getting a dwarf factor or a tall factor from a hybrid parent is one-half. One-half multiplied by one-half gives one-quarter. The probability of being dwarf is one-quarter. It is no more than a matter of logic.”

Bratranek seemed unimpressed. “Mathematics in botany? What on earth is it all about? And
when
do you expect all this?”

“The first pods in a week’s time … and the hybrids planted out next year. Then I get the first hybrid generation the year after that. Oh, believe me, I would like some way of creating two crops per year, but …” Mendel shrugged. “That’s not the way with the pea.”

A bell rang from beyond the monastery building.
“Naturae enim non imperatur, nisi parendo,”
said Bratranek.

Mendel gathered up his things and followed his companion across the court. “ ‘Truly nature may not be commanded, except by obeying her.’ Have I got it right?”

“More or less. Also Bacon; but Francis, not Roger.”

“But the thing I don’t yet understand … one of the things, anyway … is where all these different varieties
come
from. Nobody thinks about this. They are just ordinary seeds available from any supplier in the town. They breed true, so they are stable; but do they
arise
in some manner? Sports, they call them. How do they arise? This surely has some bearing on the question of speciation. How do they arise?”

Bratranek shrugged. “I really don’t see that it matters much. Would all this apply to animals? That’s the main point. Man, even. Would it apply to man? I mean, in man you have
gradations
of height, don’t you?” Bratranek opened the door into the building.