Mendel's Dwarf (2 page)

“Mendel spent eight years on his experiments with garden peas alone. By the end he had bred a grand total of about thirty-three thousand plants. He developed a rigorous, mathematical interpretation of his results, in the course of which, by implication, he predicted the haploid nature of gametes and the diploid nature of body cells, as well as the need for a reduction division in the production of gametes; and no one saw the significance. He was as great an experimenter as Louis Pasteur, an exact contemporary,
and no one recognized the fact. He had a more acute, more focused mind than Charles Darwin, another exact contemporary, and no one listened. He was one of those men whose vision goes beyond what we can perceive with our eyes and touch with our hands, and no one shared his insight. The word
insight
is exact. Mendel had the same perception of nature as Pasteur, who could conceive of a virus without ever being able to see it, or Mendeleyev, who could conceive of elements that had not yet been discovered, or Thomson who could imagine particles yet smaller than the atom. Like them, Mendel looked through the surface of things deep into the fabric of nature, and he saw the atoms of inheritance as clearly as any Dalton or Rutherford saw the atoms of matter; and no one took any notice. He was a true visionary, where a man like Darwin was a mere workaday naturalist putting common sense observations into a hotchpotch, tautological theory that lacked rigor and precision, and bore, deep within itself, a fatal flaw. And no one took any notice. Mendel handed us our origins and our fate for the examining, and no one took any notice …”

They applauded after the address, great tides of applause sweeping through the lecture theater; but you will forgive me if I say that I’m used to that. Inured to it, in fact. They would applaud anything that I did, you see—it’s a way of assuaging that insidious sensation of guilt that they all feel.

Guilt? How can that be? It is no one’s
fault
, is it? No one is to
blame
that I possess this stunted, contorted body, this hideous prison of flesh and flab and gristle. You can blame only the malign hand of chance …

Theirs is the guilt of the survivor.

The chairman rose to his feet, beaming like a circus ringmaster, and called them to silence. “I am sure all of us appreciate
Ben’s coming here and sharing his insights with us.” He smiled down at me. People craned to see. “I hope he won’t mind my saying that he is not only a great Mendelian but …” Did he really look to me for agreement? I fear that he did. “… also a very
brave
man. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Doctor Ben Lambert!”

A crescendo of applause, like the roar of rain on a tin roof. Photo flashes flickered like lightning in the storm. The ocean of people swayed and roared. They even lined up to shake my hand, as pilgrims might queue to kiss a statue of a martyr. Perhaps they were hoping that by such contact they might acquire something of my grace, that courage of which the chairman had spoken. The secretary of the association, Gravenstein by name, leaned over to endorse the chairman’s praise. She was large
⁶
and quivering, a mountain of concerned flesh shrouded in paisley cotton. “Gee, Ben, that’s wonderful. So brave, so brave …”

Brave. That was the word of the moment. But I’d told Jean often enough. In order to be brave, you’ve got to have a choice.

There was an organized dinner in the restaurant of the hotel that evening, a ghastly affair with Moravian folk dancers and gypsy violins. A journalist from a local newspaper asked me questions—“What is the general thrust of your researches?” “Is it true that you express your ancestry in the pursuit of your inquiries?”—while Gravenstein and the chairman cosseted and protected me like a child. I was rescued by a call over the public address system: “Phone call for Doctor Lambert. There is a phone call for Doctor Lambert.”

I escaped into the lobby. The hotel had been built before the
curtain came down on the Czech People’s Republic, and the lobby was as brash and shoddy as a station concourse. You expected to see train departure times on the bulletin board. It was almost a surprise to find instead the forthcoming events of the Mendel Symposium: a seminar at the university molecular biology department, a lecture on “The New Eugenics” by Doctor Benedict Lambert, a visit to the monastery library. Bookings were open for a trip to the Mendel birthplace, near Olomouc. Doctor Daniel Hartl of the George Washington University School of Medicine would be wandering “What Did Gregor Mendel Think He Discovered?”

I reached up to tap on the reception desk. “There’s a call for me. Telephone.”

The receptionist peered over the edge. She had a widow’s peak and attached earlobes.
⁷
You notice such things. Your mind grows attuned to them. Brown eyes. Brown hair. Phenotypically normal. I saw the familiar expressions cross her face at the sight of me: surprise, revulsion, concern, one blending clumsily with the other and all pinned together with disbelief. “There is a call for a Doctor Lambert,” she said.

“I am Doctor Lambert.”

“You are Doctor Lambert?”

“I am Doctor Lambert.”

Disbelief almost won. She almost denied the fact. Then she shrugged and pointed to a row of booths beyond the fountain—“You take it over there”—and went back to filing her nails.

The telephone booth was stuffy and tobacco-stained, with a worse, nameless smell lurking in the corners. I had to stand on tiptoe to lift the receiver down. “Hello?”

A fragile voice, attenuated by distance, by the electrical connections, by anxiety, whispered in my ear. “Is that you, Ben?”

“Jean. Where are you?”

“At the hospital.”

“The baby …?”

“They wanted me in early. My age or something. Everyone’s being so nice …”

“Is it okay?”

“They say it’s fine.”

“How did you get my number?”

A murmur and a twittering somewhere on the line. “I rang the Institute. Aren’t you going to wish me luck?”

I told her that she didn’t need it. I told her that luck didn’t come into it. But I wished it just the same. Then I returned to the dinner, to the loud and various sounds of Gravenstein, to the fussing of the chairman and the cavorting of the folk dancers and the mindless questions of the reporter.

1
. autosomal dominant

2
. autosomal dominant

3
. autosomal recessive, probably controlled by genes at two different loci

4
. polygenic control

5
. sex-limited autosomal dominant

6
. Obesity (OBS gene), probably a dominant located on the long arm of chromosome 7 (Friedman et al.,
Genomics
11, 1991).

7
. Both possible autosomal dominants.

N
ext morning I detached myself from the congress. I left the hotel and I walked alone down Husova, the wide boulevard that cuts between the center of the city and the wooded Špilberk Hill. People stared at me. At the end I turned at the junction with Pekařská, where the trams queue up against the traffic lights, and people stared. I went on down the hill, down to Altbrünn, Stare Brno, Old Brno (old in little more than name), past rotting, grimy buildings dating from the last century; and the good people of the town stared. You get used to it. It isn’t the straightforward, what-have-we-got-here? kind of stare. They know in an instant what they have got here. It is, perhaps, a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I sort of stare, a sly and sideways stare, the face ostensibly and deliberately pointed tangential to the line of vision. One woman crossed herself. Another, as I paused to glance into some tawdry shop window, discreetly touched me. They do that, you know. It brings good luck.

And what was I looking for? Good luck as well? I was thinking of Jean, of course. I was thinking of Jean and I was thinking of luck, which is merely chance masquerading under an alias—the tyranny of chance.

At the bottom of the hill I reached Mendlovo námĕstí. The
smell of roasting hops from a nearby brewery was heavy on the air. Trams rumbled along the street, surging in and out of the square like air filling and emptying the lungs of the city. Passengers waited in dull lines. I crossed the road at the traffic lights (drivers stared) and approached the monastery. The buildings were red-roofed and white-walled, amiable and placid against the dark brick buttresses and gothic pinnacles of the church: the rational growing out of the irrational, if you like. You look for signs like that, don’t you?—the artifacts of Man imbued with something of the spirit in which they were created. Just as you look at Man himself and wonder about the forces that created him.

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.