The Hormone Factory: A Novel

by Saskia Goldschmidt

  14 …

  “Religion is the opium of the people.” That’s the only thing that troublemaker Marx ever said with which I am one hundred percent in agreement. Religion is the anesthetic of mankind, the ultimate excuse to remain ignorant.

  Three things in life have motivated me and given me the energy to accomplish what I have: one, run a successful business; two, seduce the women who appeal to me; and three, explore and unravel nature’s mysteries. For years I thought it was just a matter of time before all the riddles were solved. Silly of me, of course; it shows how naïve I was back then, for neither Mizie nor I will live to see the day, not even if Death continues to get a kick out of making me lie here in my human cage, endlessly drawing out my torment. Neither my legal offspring nor my bastards scattered around the globe—not even their children or their children’s children—none of them will be around for that glorious day. No, the human race will have gone to the dogs, dragging Mother Earth with it, long before the last mysteries are revealed.

  If there ever was a God, he must have been a schlemiel, just a lousy endocrinologist who never figured out how to fix the flaws in our DNA. I’m telling you, if this schlepper had worked in our lab, I’d never have renewed his contract, I’d have thrown him out on his ass myself, because this so-called God is just a failed biochemist with damn little creativity and even less brains who gives up too easily and has never managed to eliminate all the mistakes in the human formula. He’s had millions of years to fine-tune and experiment, and yet his alleged creation, man, is and remains a god-awful mess.

  Levine and his team also needed time, of course, to locate, map, and purify the insulin, the estrogen, the testosterone, and all the other secretions. But they got it done within a couple of years, which was fortunate, since it would have been prohibitively expensive otherwise. God is a total failure from a business point of view as well—a rank amateur who has been allowed to go on tinkering for far too long without doing a proper cost-benefit analysis and without being accountable to anyone. If there is a heaven, they forgot to set up a proper finance department up there—big mistake. It astonishes me that in today’s world, where reason and commerce are so highly prized, billions of people still can’t seem to recognize how bankrupt that global enterprise Heaven & Co. really is.

  • • •

  I was the infidel in our family. Aaron had always left open the possibility that there might be something more after death. As certain as I was that I was right, both in business and in my private life, that’s how uncertain he was. Aaron was a bit of a ditherer. He often said he hated certainty, because it only obscured a fear of life’s unpredictability, to which I’d respond that his waffling only masked a fear of making decisions.

  He was extremely skeptical of my marriage vows to Rivka. Seated in the front row in the town hall, chewing on his pencil, he grinned when I promised to be true to my wife until death did us part. When his turn came to congratulate us, he wished Rivka good luck and whispered in my ear, “If you remain true to Rivka, as you just promised, I’ll eat a kilo of raw pancreas. I’m giving you a year.”

  Perhaps he was simply jealous of my captivating little wife, or of the fact that she was carrying my child. Although I never caught him showing the least bit of envy; he never appeared to have the hots for her, which worried me. I wondered if he might be a faggot, one of those nancy-boys, or even a pederast—a rather mortifying thought.

  How had Aaron and I, with nearly identical genes, having shared the same womb for nine months, grown into such dissimilar people? It was as if our respective character traits had been concocted from two radically different formulae, so that on a cellular level there wasn’t a smidgen of genetic compatibility between us. In some primitive societies a multiple birth is regarded as an abomination, the work of evil spirits, or even proof of spousal infidelity. I can’t imagine my mother being guilty of the latter; I’ve never known a colder, less passionate woman. But in indigenous societies it’s not uncommon for the weaker of the twins to be killed. In that sense, I suppose the law of nature did win out in the end. I was incontestably the stronger one. Aaron’s number came up the year he turned forty-eight. My brother keeps popping up in my thoughts now that I’m shackled here to my prison bed; I no longer seem to have any control over it.

  I never contributed to his happiness; I did contribute to his downfall. But in the end, you have to make your own way in life. And if you don’t, you run the risk of falling into the trap that someone else, or history, has laid for you.

  • • •

  Those were hectic times. My dream of conquering the world pharmaceutical market demanded an all-out effort and considerable manpower. Opening up export markets for the insulin, as well as any future products, was essential to Farmacom’s growth. Our sales territory had expanded exponentially when we acquired a German subsidiary; within a few years its sales were four times those of the parent company.

  With our insulin on its way to conquering the world and the money pouring in, Levine was already on to the next big thing. Hormone research, he explained to me, depended on being able to come up with a reproducible test result. American scientists had discovered a method of determining when female mice came into heat. The mouse’s vagina gets swollen and moist when the female is ready to mate, as in all other mammals. In a neutered mouse, of course, this reaction will not occur. But the Americans had found out that just one milligram of the substance they had isolated, a certain secretion of the ovaries, was enough to make ten thousand neutered female mice hot to trot.

  Levine and his team pounced on this discovery and, thanks to some fanatical researching, and with the help of thousands of live rats, mice, and rabbits, the placentas of innumerable cows, sows, and mares, and a handful of human placentas thrown in for good measure, they became the first in the world to standardize the invisible ovarian ingredient and make it ready for mass production.

  Ah, the rutting hormone, that wonderful secretion that makes the female behave in ways men find so delightful! It is that elixir, hidden inside the female organs, that prompts her to open up, that makes her spread her legs, that makes her nipples swell, that makes her pussy wet, that breaks down her resistance. A single milligram is enough for ten thousand mice! Can you blame me, a full-blooded male, for having visions of paradise when I realized the possibilities of the stuff?

  The raw material required for this estrus preparation turned out to be most readily available in the urine of pregnant mares. We collected thousands of liters of the stuff, a massive undertaking that had to be repeated every winter.

  The farmers we approached were suspicious at first. Four and a half cents for a liter of horse piss? Jaspers, who managed our raw materials department, gave me the gist of the first few conversations he’d had with the farmers. After optimistically setting off on his bike, he’d covered miles and miles of dirt road, only to get the same reaction wherever he went: “They stare at you, their jaws slowly dropping; at first they frown and then they begin to snicker. ‘Has that meatpackin’ Jew gone right off his rocker? That’s a good ’un … four and a half cents fer a liter of horse piss, that’s more’n we get fer a friggin’ liter of milk. So what you gonna do with it, the piss? Turn it into champagne? No need fer food coloring, anyhow.’ ” Uproarious laughter, and a jerk of the head suggesting Jaspers get the hell out of there if he didn’t want a kick in the backside.

  The request for horse piss must have stirred up some vague, atavistic trepidation in the farmers’ hearts. Their poverty was great; the depression had affected them as it had everyone else, on top of which a long-standing milk price war had further nibbled away at their already paltry earnings, and so some extra income from collecting what to them was a worthless waste product should have been more than welcome. But they could not fathom why we were so interested in the urine, and it made them wary. After all, make a pact with the devil and you can never go back. The request that sounded so meshuggah to them must have awoken some seed hidden deep within, a f
ear planted there by their forefathers’ dark whispers about the Jewish race and its occult practices. To a simple farmer, there couldn’t have been all that much difference between horse piss and the blood of Christian children.

  Thanks to the intervention of the local veterinarian, we did in the end manage to overcome their misgivings, and for many years they kept their pregnant mares isolated for a number of gestational weeks, collecting the urine via a special drain into barrels provided by us. The vats were collected at specific sites, then conveyed to the factory in an old jalopy. Sometimes, when the sandy paths got flooded, we’d have to get a day laborer in thigh-high waders to walk ahead of the vehicle to make sure it didn’t hit a sinkhole and disappear in the muck with its precious cargo.

  It was quite a smelly job, boiling and then filtering twelve thousand liters of horse pee; you had to pour in gallons of alcohol from wicker-wrapped carboys until you wound up with a semisolid mass that might in the end yield just a handful of pure, very fine crystals, which, after being sterilized, could produce amazing, though variable, results.

  The farmers’ mistrust was rekindled ten years later, when the country was mobilizing for war. Sinister rumors about the purported practices of the Chosen People began to circulate once more, and the farmers started passing up their four and a half cents a liter on account of the whispers—doubtlessly started by the brownshirts, who’d started crawling out of the woodwork and throwing their weight around in public ever more brazenly—that we were using the stuff to make poison gas. Now that was what you’d call chutzpah, in light of the genocide to come.

  15 …

  Even in the wild years of the stock market crash and the economic recession that followed, we managed to keep our heads above water. By the time the crisis broke, I was fortunately no longer an inexperienced young whippersnapper but had grown into a tough businessman unafraid of making the hard decisions. During those stormy years, when I’d finessed the handing off of the oil, fats, and soap production to one of our rivals, we also made the decision to diversify by going into canned goods, thus creating a new sales avenue for ourselves. Thanks to such measures, we managed to keep both our well-regarded meatpacking business and the fledgling Farmacom afloat.

  Our insulin exports had steadily increased before the market collapse, thanks in no small part to Aaron’s efforts; that can’t be denied. He had actually succeeded in getting a foothold in Argentina. He had gone there to make a deal with a firm that had thousands of kilos of pancreas to sell us. The “sweetbreads,” as we called the gland, had to be deep-frozen for the trip to the Netherlands. We were forced to start importing the stuff because of the growing demand for insulin; the amount produced at our own plant was no longer anywhere near adequate. Then, having made the Argentinians curious as to what on earth we needed their waste product for, Aaron, capitalizing on that interest, created a demand for our insulin in that country.

  Furthermore, I didn’t shrink from taking draconian measures when necessary. So for several years in a row I would fire a large segment of our workforce just before Christmas, only to rehire them in the new year. It wasn’t very nice for them, but had I not done so, I wouldn’t have been able to offer them any work that year.

  • • •

  After many successful experiments on animals, in which sterilized young mice and rabbits went into heat after being given the new substance, and those squirmy little creatures showed themselves ready and willing to procreate, the moment was at hand when the white powder was ready to be tested on humans.

  “A critical juncture!” Levine announced, explaining to me that the compound, sterilized and packaged in a special “clean room,” would first be administered to women with menstrual problems. The first vials would go out to a select group of clinicians, with instructions to administer it in minute doses. These trials called for the utmost prudence, since one couldn’t be certain that a real, live woman would react the same way as a mouse or a rabbit.

  The physician was asked to carefully record how many units the patient was given, what changes occurred in the woman’s body, and to note any side effects, since it was difficult to ascertain these in lab mammals. Through this process Levine and his team would gradually achieve a better understanding of how the preparation worked.

  Levine’s extreme caution in these clinical trials severely tried my patience, never one of my strongest qualities. Of course innocent people ought not to be frivolously exposed to unacceptable risk, but still, it was the De Paauw Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Co. that was bankrolling all this research, a huge investment that had to be recouped as rapidly as possible. Levine always put his rigid dedication to science and his moral principles ahead of everything else; commercial considerations often came last as far as he was concerned.

  I was exceptionally interested in the testing of our rutting hormone. Providing the world with life-giving drugs would put us on at least an equal footing with God. Would it really be possible to resuscitate a barren womb, to repair a set of faulty ovaries, and to eventually help an infertile woman conceive? And—holy cow!—would we someday have a way to prevent a pregnancy? After all, our own Ruth wasn’t the only kid to come into this world unplanned. How many people are there who started off in life as an accident, the result of a moment of lust or lack of self-control, the living result of an expert seduction or a brutal rape? Hasn’t mankind attempted since time immemorial to find a way to forestall pregnancy? All over the world women have tried every method under the sun to prevent conception—stuffing their nether parts with leaves, fruits, or even crocodile dung, for instance, in hopes of being spared yet another mouth to suckle, feed, and protect.

  • • •

  Levine one day asked me to join him at his favorite Amsterdam establishment, the restaurant with the German name, to give me an update on his research on hormones, which he had started calling “soul glands.” The more that was known about these compounds, the clearer it became that they not only were responsible for the organ’s own function, but had a marked influence on the overall workings of the human body as well.

  “I’d like to name the rutting compound ‘Genesis’—as in ‘creation,’ ” he clarified.

  I stared at him, appalled. “Genesis? What in hell has got into you? A direct reference to God—it’s unthinkable!” I could just see the frown on the pasty visage of the pastor, who had already been around several times asking anxious questions about the drugs we were developing, and had implied that with our most recent discoveries we might be stepping on God’s toes, contravening the meekness that behooved mankind.

  “Exactly,” Levine chuckled. “We are unlocking the secrets of creation. The name Genesis shows that we are taking over God’s racket …” He took a sip of his cognac, observing me through half-closed eyes.

  “Rafaël,” I said, “you may enjoy your little joke, but I’m the one who has to get the stuff sold. A product invoking the work of God doesn’t stand a chance of succeeding on a global scale. I’m having enough trouble as it is trying to allay the clergy’s mistrust, and it’s essential that we avoid drawing their attention to our work. So no, Genesis doesn’t exactly strike me as the ideal name for it.”

  Levine chortled. “Too bad; I just thought I’d give it a try.” He promised to find another name. We were calling it Preparation 288 for now, since in Rafaël’s lab both the experiments and the test subjects had numbers assigned to them. Then he told me there were indications that the new drug might cure women’s menstrual pains, help young mothers with lactating problems, and ease or even overcome the menopausal complaints of older women. And it probably had even more benefits that had yet to be discovered.

  • • •

  On the same occasion he told me of the latest breakthrough, from Germany. There a scientist had established that the pituitary gland, that little appendage of the brain no larger than a chickpea and until now thought to have no particular function, exerted considerable influence on our rutting hormone. Small pieces of the front
al lobe of a cow’s pituitary gland had been implanted into immature female mice. A hundred hours later, all the mice were in heat.

  “This might just be the Master Gland,” said Levine, pronouncing the last two words as if he were talking about Alfred Nobel himself. “That ugly little appendage could very well be the pilot in the hormonal world’s cockpit. Pivotal, this! We must get to work on it immediately. It’s a fantastic discovery, quite definitely up our alley; we haven’t a day to lose, and I’ll need more manpower.”

  This was par for the course. The De Paauw Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Co.’s contribution to Levine’s laboratory, as stipulated in the original contract, turned out to be just an initial down payment on a never-ending stream of orders and requests for more money to fund further research and augment the team of scientists. One chemist for each new drug was Levine’s motto. He seemed to think of our firm as some fat milk-cow, his own personal gravy train.

  Both in Amsterdam and at our factory, dozens of experiments were being conducted at once; one group worked out of the university lab, while a scant fifteen men in white coats with notched collars on the top floor of the De Paauw Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Co. were trying to figure out the exact composition of the secretions capable of producing such amazing results.

  In her office next door to our improvised lab, my perky and able Agnes was busy all day dispatching letters and telegrams to every corner of the world and forwarding lab results to Amsterdam. But she had to spend even more of her energies on a constant flood of demands and admonitions reaching us from Amsterdam by mail, telephone, and telegram needing immediate attention. There was no end to the shopping lists: rat cages, incubation boxes, aluminum containers, pressing bags, stone pots, meat presses, hundreds of live rabbits, mice, and rats, tons of yeast, dried blood, pigs’ bristles and pork liver, chicken genitals, adrenal glands, horse ovaries, bovine follicular fluid and pituitary glands, powdered thyroid and placenta, bone marrow, mucous membranes, deep-frozen bovine pancreas—every other minute, it seemed, a new demand would come in for something the university lab needed straightway. All this took up a disproportionate amount of our employees’ time. It wasn’t just the effort required to track down the materials; every order tended to come with its own set of problems, since finding the best ways to conserve or convey the stuff was still a question of trial and error.