Mendel's Dwarf (29 page)

In 1924 the U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Act, designed to limit immigration from eastern and southern Europe on eugenic grounds. By 1935 twenty-nine states had sterilization laws on their statute books. In 1933 the Sterilization Law had been passed in Germany and a system of Genetic Health Courts (
Erbgesundheitsgerichte
) had been set up. The science spawned its own vocabulary. There were
Erbämter
(genetic officers) who sifted through
Erbkartei
(genetic files) in
Erbklinik
(genetic clinics) for traces of
Erbkrankheit
(genetic disease). None of this had anything to do with being Jewish—in Germany just as in the United States it was the feebleminded, the schizophrenic, the epileptics, the alcoholics, and those with serious bodily malformations who went under the surgeon’s knife. The curious thing is this: abortion wasn’t much advocated in either country. It was practiced only under certain, limited circumstances. Even by the eugenicists it was, you see, considered immoral.

Jean went back to her aunt after that. She’d resigned from the Institute and claimed she was doing some kind of temporary job
at the local library, helping with the cataloging or something. She had slipped from my grasp.

But had she ever been within it? I doubted it then, and I doubt it now. A fragile specimen, a moth settling for a moment, flexing its wings gently and capriciously, then fluttering stiffly away. I pursue my metaphors with all the enthusiasm of a collector: a noctuid moth, gray and mottled—a miller. But I couldn’t have trapped her in my short and clumsy fingers.

Some days later, Hugo Miller called on me. I was at the flat, putting the final touches to my latest paper, working through a summary of the linkage analysis, watching the figures glistening on the computer screen and seeing there the culmination of a life’s work—is that putting it a bit strongly? I don’t think so—when the phone rang. “Can I come and see you, Ben? I know you don’t want to see me and all that, but I need to. Really. Would you mind?”

“Who’s that?” Of course I knew who it was. I wondered how he’d got my number.

“It’s Hugo. Jean’s husband. Would you mind?”

Would I? I anticipated his arrival with detached curiosity, his actual presence with indifference. He settled into one of the armchairs—“nice little place you’ve got here, convenient”—and it was clear from the way he spoke that he had no idea what had happened between us, in this very place, in the room next door with the light turned out so that she shouldn’t see. Presumably it was something he would not have believed even if he had been told it outright. I have the perfect alibi, don’t I?

“I want her back,” he said.

“Well, I haven’t got her.”

He seemed amused at the idea. He chuckled a bit and showed his teeth to me as though I might be an orthodontist. “I know you’ve been a good friend to her. I know you’ve been on her side in all this—no, I don’t blame you, not at all, Ben. Don’t blame you for one minute. You’ve done things according to your lights and I know I was a bit of a bastard … but I want her back.”

There was something about him, a certain drabness, a tawdriness that suggested someone on the way down. He needed a shave, and with Hugo Miller it just didn’t look like designer stubble, it looked like rusty iron filings smeared across his chin. “I’m having trouble at work, you know. It’s the situation …” He waved a hand vaguely, as though to illustrate ineffable problems. “You see, it all comes down to the fact that we can’t have babies, that’s what it is. I went to some kind of counselor, can you imagine? She wanted Jean to come too, and she did …”

“Who did what?”

“Jean came.”

“Jean went with you to a marriage guidance counselor? She never told me.” A slip, that. He gave me a sharp look, a glimmer of his old self staring out through those tired and defeated eyes.

“Why should she? Anyway, she did. This counselor woman asked lots of questions and we had to fill out questionnaires—separately. They made us agree that we’d tell the whole truth and they put us in separate rooms so we couldn’t discuss things, I guess. It was like one of those television game shows. You know the one? The one about how good a partner you are. Myself, I can’t imagine how anyone could go on one of those things and have all your secrets broadcast to the whole bloody country. Anyway, we filled in these forms and afterwards we discussed what we had written, and it was quite a shock, I can tell you.”

“Shock?”

He was silent, staring morosely at the beer I’d given him. I clambered up onto the other chair and sat opposite him and waited.

“Total honesty, that’s what the woman said.”

“And were you?”

“It wasn’t me, it was her.”

“She wasn’t honest?”

“Too honest, if anything.”

“How can you be more honest than total?”

He ignored that particular issue. “There was this question about …” He paused, as though trying to work out a difficult move in some board game or other. His tongue slid across his lips. His mind skipped erratically. “I’m sorry about that scene at the Institute that day, Ben,” he said. “I don’t know what got into me. I’m … sometimes I don’t know myself, really.”

“The shock,” I reminded him.

He laughed humorlessly. “Yes, the shock. One of the questions in this bloody quiz was ‘Have you had any affairs?’ Outside the marriage, it meant. Not before.”

“And?”

“She had. She said that she had.” He looked at me with appealing eyes, hoping to be told it was all nonsense. “You know her, Ben. Has she been having an affair with someone? Eh? You must know. Didn’t she stay with you for a while after we had our bust-up? I heard that from someone, don’t know who. You must know if she had another man.”

“No,” I said.

“You mean she didn’t, or you don’t know? Christ alive, it’s bloody serious, this. I never thought she had it in her. She said she’d had another man, and …”

“And?”

“And she’d got pregnant.”

Oh, the astringent kiss of irony. I watched him sitting there in my armchair, where Jean had crossed her languid legs, and I toyed with all the possibilities. Of course I did. Revenge, revelation, confession, all those things crossed my mind. And questions of loyalty. And questions of that most unfashionable of emotions, love.

“Pregnant,” he repeated. “She said she’d even had an abortion.” And Hugo Miller began to weep, there in my diminutive sitting room, crouched in my armchair like a child, weeping like an adolescent. “I’d do anything to get her back, Ben, anything at all.”

1
. Renamed “Eugenics Society” in 1926.

2
. Placard at an exhibition of the American Eugenics Society, quoted in Kevles,
In the Name of Eugenics
, 1985.

A
bitter February evening in the city, gaslit and muffled by snow. Footsteps sounding along Johannesgasse; huddled figures stamping their feet on the pavement outside the doorway of the Modern School; clouds of breath rising up through the cones of light as greetings are called. A carriage disgorges someone who has come from out of town. Someone else hopes that the janitor has remembered to leave the heating on. In the entrance hall there is a doffing of coats and hats. At a desk the secretary of the society, von Niessl, ticks names off a list and directs members toward the assembly hall.

Forty-five people in the audience. On the podium a table draped with a heavy, tasseled cloth. A white linen sheet is hung on one wall, and in the middle of the room stands a large, gleaming magic lantern with cooling vents in its side and a brass chimney to disperse the fumes from the lamp. One of the committee members fiddles with this gadgetry. “Lantern slides,” people whisper excitedly while von Niessl calls the meeting to order:

“Gentlemen”—he hesitates and nods at two of the audience—“
ladies
and gentlemen, this is a moment we have long been waiting for.” Von Niessl beams down on the man seated beside him. The members of the society nod and smile. Stout, balding,
broad-faced Father Gregor acknowledges the recognition with a nervous gesture of both hands, as though warding off applause. “Who here does not know of Pater Gregor’s countless offspring?” von Niessl asks. The members chuckle knowingly. “Who has not had cause to visit the gardens of the Königinkloster and see them for himself?” Catching Frau Rotwang’s eye, von Niessl adds gallantly, “Or
her
self.” And Frau Rotwang blushes prettily while Father Gregor coughs. “Who does not know that this illustrious society is honored by the membership of a man who has carried out hybridizations of great importance for the future of agriculture and natural history? So now, after many years, we have the privilege to hear of this work from the man himself.”

Mendel clears his throat again as he rises to his feet. There is scattered applause, but he waves it to silence. His manner is apologetic, self-deprecating. “I’m not used to my pupils applauding my lessons, or my congregations applauding my homilies,” he says, and the audience laughs. Frau Rotwang’s eyes shine with admiration. “Furthermore, the distinguished members of the society do not yet know what I have in store for them. Maybe by the end of my talk they will not wish to applaud.”

More laughter. Shaking of heads this time, assertions that everyone will find it all
most
instructive. The laughter subsides and people settle themselves, men rubbing their hands and stroking their whiskers and looking altogether serious, Professor Makowsky opening a notebook and holding his pen poised over the page.

Mendel glances at his own closely written notes. “I have entitled my address ‘Experiments in Plant Hybridization, with Particular Reference to
Pisum sativum
, the Garden Pea.’ Although I deal with the pea, I would like to preface my work with the remark that this work was inspired by artificial fertilizations undertaken in ornamental plants carried out in order to produce new color varieties, particularly members of the genus
Fuchsia …
”

Von Niessl nods and writes. Frau Rotwang smiles happily. The lecture is under way, one of the most momentous scientific events of the nineteenth or indeed any century.

And what did he talk of?

He talked of numbers and ratios, of chance and probability, of characters—
Merkmale
—and segregation. He showed that for a given inherited character—“let us consider, for example, the characters of tall and dwarf in these plants”—each offspring receives two constant characters, the dominating one
A
from the tall parent and the recessive one
a
from the dwarf parent. If each parent is a hybrid
Aa
, then each is capable of contributing either
A
or
a
to its offspring. When these factors come together in the offspring, “it is entirely a matter of chance which of the two kinds of pollen combines with each single germinal cell. However, according to the laws of probability, in an average of many cases it will always happen that every pollen from
A
and
a
will unite equally often with every germinal cell for A and
a
. If you will bear with me”—smiling around the audience—“I can best show this with a diagram.”

There is a disturbance while the lamp is lit and the gaslights turned down in the room. People mutter in the shadows. A diagram appears suddenly on the linen sheet, vast, blurred, and upside-down. Muttered apologies come from the figure at the magic lantern while things are put to rights, while the slide is inverted and brought into sharp focus. For the first time the arcane laws of genetics are presented to the world. Mendel’s own diminutive figure is silhouetted against the picture as though dwarfed by his discovery. “In fertilization, you may see that one of the two pollen cells
A
will meet with a germinal cell
A
, the other with a germinal cell
a;
and equally, one pollen cell
a
will become associated with a germinal cell
A
, the other with
a
.