The Hormone Factory: A Novel

by Saskia Goldschmidt

  Running a business venture is playing with fire. If you’re scared of getting burned, you’ll never make it big. In my business life I ran one risk after another, all the livelong day. So why, of all things, give up those private moments of relaxation and bliss with my cuties? No, I had tried, and I couldn’t. The price was still much too high.

  19 …

  One day in the summer of 1935, I received an urgent request to come to Rafaël’s lab. When I got there he showed me a robust, proudly crowing cock that was restlessly pacing the confines of its small cage, waving its glossy tail and shaking the splendid bright-red comb that crowned its head. The rooster’s comb is the testament of male performance, the showcase of male virility. Like a man’s business suit, the cockscomb shows the little woman that if she takes her chances with him, she won’t be sorry. She can tell from the flamboyance of the headgear that its wearer is a superlative choice, guaranteed to deliver the finest offspring. Here, in Rafaël’s cage, was an extraordinarily fine specimen, crowing at the top of its lungs.

  “Good-looking bird,” I commented, looking at Rafaël quizzically. I live in the countryside, where roosters are a dime a dozen; I didn’t need to waste precious time traveling to a lab in Amsterdam to admire one.

  “Good-looking bird?” Rafaël scoffed. “An exceptional bird, this is. The finest cock I’ve ever seen in my life. This bird is our prize achievement. And do you want to know why?”

  It had to be something to do with the search for the male hormone. But exactly what, I couldn’t say. This was typical of Rafaël, to rub my reliance on him in my face. Was he doing it on purpose, did he get a kick out of revealing my ignorance? Or was I just being oversensitive?

  “This, my dear Motke,” Rafaël went on, taking no notice of my annoyance, “this superb specimen, that given the chance will go for its rival’s jugular, that makes every hen that comes near go weak in the knees, this animal was, not so long ago, a capon, parted from its balls right here in the lab. And, as you may know, a capon’s flag droops at half mast, the comb vanishes, the cock becomes a lame duck, stops crowing, and turns into an emasculated wimp.”

  I looked at him, incredulous. Was this it? Had they actually managed to isolate the male hormone?

  “We’ve done it, Motke.” The words were uttered with such force that Rafaël might well have swallowed a dose of testosterone himself. “We have worked out the composition of the stuff. Behold this brilliant creature, risen like the phoenix from its miserable capon ashes; here is the apotheosis of our first wholly independent scientific discovery. For two weeks we’ve been injecting it with the bovine testicle extract, and behold, the neutered bird is transformed into this splendid, aggressive, crowing cock, sporting the world’s most spectacular comb. The article has already been sent off for publication. The world will very shortly hear about it. We won!”

  We fell into each other’s arms, Rafaël enfolding me in his imposing girth. I had never been so warmly embraced by another man. My father wasn’t one for physical contact; he found it disgusting. When we were little, Aaron sometimes tried snuggling close to me, especially when he was scared or had been chewed out by my father, but I would invariably push him away. I hated the idea that my father might see us, and that the sharp gibes normally reserved for Aaron would also be directed at me.

  Now I felt Rafaël’s heart beating against my chest, and, strange to say, I was flooded with a profound sense of peace. All the usual stress seemed to fade away, taking with it the burden of the heavy responsibilities that normally weighed me down. The economic crisis that was still raging, capable of sinking the entire global economy, the shouts of the bully across the border threatening to bring our whole world to an end, our firm getting panned for charging market prices for our medical products, the Church’s mistrust of our latest discoveries, which the papists claimed were blasphemous evils—all of it seemed to melt away like snow in the sun. Just for a moment, as I leaned against Rafaël’s chest, he became the father I never had. A powerful man, a winner, but one who didn’t need to prove his manhood by keeping others at a distance. No, he was the father with an unstinting heart. With that hug, Rafaël, the incomparable colossus from Amsterdam, the Prussian soldier, the Jewish Maecenas, allowed me, Motke, to share in his triumph. In that remarkable moment I felt a sense of connection stronger than I have ever had with a woman. Never would I feel closer to anyone in my life. A moment of total bliss, born from our combined near-superhuman effort, the absurd pressure we’d been under, and our daring, groundbreaking alliance that was about to bring us worldwide fame.

  We had done it! We were the first in the world to isolate the male hormone!

  20 …

  One evening not long after that memorable day, Rivka and I set out for Amsterdam to celebrate with Rafaël, his Dauphine, his colleagues, and a few other friends the testosterone discovery as well as the publication of the related article in a scientific journal. Aaron stayed home. He seemed to be growing more morose by the day. My brother’s lethargy sometimes worried me, but on this particular occasion I didn’t care. I did not insist when he told me he’d rather stay home in his cold, lonely house, with its ingrained smell of cigarette smoke and stale whiskey.

  The mood in Rafaël’s crowded house was exuberant, the dinner abundant, the consumption of alcohol prodigious. A grand opportunity to let our hair down, at a time when, aside from this triumph, there wasn’t much to celebrate.

  One guest after another made a heartfelt toast; there were many predictions of a trip to Stockholm, since everyone there believed the Nobel Prize was in the bag. Rafaël reported on the League of Nations conference in London, where his discovery had received attention from the Health Committee. Salomons, my father-in-law, raised his glass to the late Dr. Brown-Séquard, the eccentric and much-maligned scientist who, in 1889, at the age of seventy-two, had injected himself with blood taken from guinea pig testicles, suspecting it contained a substance capable of reversing the aging process, whereupon he said he felt thirty years younger. After some weeks of treating himself with the guinea pig blood, the old codger, who literally had one foot in the grave, was apparently able to run up and down stairs like a youngster, to put in long days at work, and, to his inexpressible delight, to get his rocks off again. His shrunken pecker seemed to have regained its ability to get up and go. The fellow had been drunk with joy. Even though the scientific community wrote him off as a charlatan and the articles he published were derided, especially on account of the sex, he did get the popular press interested, resulting in a veritable stampede to his Paris institute by graybeards eager to be injected with the elixir purported to restore their youthful vitality.

  “To Brown-Séquard,” said Salomons, rising from his chair, “who was not deterred by the narrow-mindedness of the Philistines, and paved the way to the male hormone’s discovery, even if he couldn’t explain how it worked!”

  The male hormone is capable of many things. But in my present state, a second youth, a miraculous resurrection from my metal cage, is no longer in the cards. Older than all those eager French geezers hoping for a new lease on life, and also wiser in the wake of a whole century of scientific progress, I know that for me there’s no turning back the clock.

  At Levine’s party the possibilities of the new discovery were extensively debated. Wild fantasies about cures for all kinds of unlikely diseases flew back and forth across the table. It was pure speculation, of course; so far the stuff had only been tested on the caponized cocks and castrated mice, all turned into potent fertility machines after they were given the miracle drug.

  It didn’t take long for the conversation to turn to the eunuchs of the past—the poor sods who were mutilated in ancient Egypt, Greece, and many Islamic countries, in order to guard the sultans’ harems. Castration was considered an effective precaution against any fornication between sentries and concubines.

  “Incidentally,” Rafaël snickered, “whether the sultans were correct in their assumption is questionable. There
are known cases of eunuchs—a minority, to be sure—who remained capable of having erections, even orgasms. So they may have been having a wild old time in those harems, especially since the ladies didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant. This was possibly the seraglio’s best-kept secret.”

  The Dauphine, our walking music encyclopedia, mentioned that in seventeenth-century Italy, boys were castrated at the age of eight or so, usually in the hope that the castrato’s voice would bring the mutilated child’s family untold wealth, although in reality that seldom happened. If the boys did manage to survive the horrific surgery, performed without anesthesia, all most of them had to look forward to was a life of hardship. Easy to spot by virtue of their luxuriant locks crowning an otherwise hairless, excessively long-limbed body that gave them a tottering, unsteady gait, sooner or later they all wound up obese. Most of the castrati lived out their lives shunned by society.

  “In 1904,” said the Dauphine, looking pointedly around the table, for she did so like to show off her exhaustive musical training, “I attended a performance by the castrato Alessandro Moreschi in Rome’s Sistine Chapel. He was not, sad to say, a particularly great singer; his ‘Ave Maria’ was a startling feat rather than a truly moving interpretation. I think the man—perhaps that’s not the right word for it; what do you call such a creature?—well, anyway, I think he owed his fame largely to the fact that he was one of the last of his kind, because castration has quite fallen out of fashion.”

  Her voice held a note of regret. The company peppered her with questions: What did he look like, how big was his rib cage, did his face have feminine features, and how would she describe his voice?

  “It’s almost a pity,” mused Samuel Klein, a pharmacologist who had been a major player in the breakthrough we were toasting, a little peanut of a fellow whose appearance belied a quick, sharp wit, “that those Italian castrati are no longer around. We could have been of considerable help to them, and we’d have had a whole bunch of clinical test subjects thrown into the bargain.”

  “We do still have access to some neutered men,” Rafaël reassured him. “There are plenty of accidental castrations, as well as cases where the testicles are amputated for medical reasons. And then of course there are the virtual eunuchs, men who, even if the gonads are intact, don’t have the normal sexual drive. That affliction is caused by a deficiency of the same testes hormone; we know that now. So we’ll have more than enough customers for our clinical trials!”

  We all drank to that.

  Silberstein, a chemist whom I had turned down for a permanent position in our firm and who had fled Nazi Germany a year earlier, told us how in his fatherland homosexuals were being pressured to get castrated to cure their “disease,” which ran afoul of the Aryan ideal of manhood. Would Farmacom someday be able to help these unfortunate creatures by giving them back their sexual apparatus? The conversation now took a different turn, from discussing hormones to bemoaning the barbaric practices that were becoming increasingly common across the border.

  After dinner the party moved into the living room, where we were offered coffee, cognac, and Rafaël’s Cuban cigars; for the ladies there were filter cigarettes in the sterling silver case on the coffee table.

  The company included a number of recent refugees from the Third Reich. Most had fled to our country alone, hoping to build a life for themselves here before sending for their families. They were all extremely worried and distressed by the reports reaching them of what life was like for the ones they’d left behind; the situation was getting more desperate by the day. To make matters worse, there was no guarantee that the reluctant Dutch government would grant them and their threatened family members permission to remain in the Netherlands.

  • • •

  Setting up a German subsidiary ten years earlier had been an excellent move. Germany was a big country, and it had become our main export market. But the current dictatorship and growing reign of terror over there made me less and less inclined to invest another cent in Farmacom Deutschland and someday run the risk of having it confiscated by that piece of shit and his followers, the ones who had declared outright war on our people. Besides, a worldwide boycott of German goods had already put the kibosh on our export operation. I thought the boycott was a rather surprising knee-jerk reaction, by the way, probably owing more to political expedience than to sympathy for the victims. After all, the Chosen People haven’t ever been all that popular anywhere in the world. It’s no wonder that one of the Jews’ favorite jokes is the one in which Isaac sighs, Isn’t two thousand years of being the Chosen People enough, Lord? Couldn’t you give some other race that honor for a change?

  Because we had a branch in Germany, and also because we had given all those German-Jewish refugees jobs in our Farmacom operation, there was a growing perception that our company had links to the Third Reich. There is as little room for nuance in business as in politics. The refugees were mainly friends or colleagues of Rafaël’s; people who turned to him or his Dauphine for financial help, employment, or introductions that might lead to a coveted residence permit—and they never seemed to come away empty-handed. Rafaël simply assumed that I was just as anxious as he was to offer help to these erudite men, reduced by dire circumstance to penniless beggars. Our waterlogged country, which had always had a reputation for hospitality and tolerance, and once upon a time had been a haven of refuge for my own forefathers, was in these crisis years turning into an increasingly inward-looking, provincial place, afraid of both a flood from the west and a deluge of refugees from the east. A fearful nation, it allowed itself to be intimidated by the thug across the border, and was therefore not keen on letting in more of the persecuted outcasts. Besides, the brownshirts in our own midst were growing more vociferous, spewing their hateful invective all over the place, and our own citizens were starting to hear them out with increasing enthusiasm. In uncertain times folks tend to be drawn to ruffians who, by shouting simplistic slogans and wild accusations and by dragging up ancient prejudices, manage to heap the blame for all their problems on some innocent scapegoat. A fearful populace wants to see blood, and the demagogues provide plenty of ammunition, first in word and then in deed, as they set upon the black sheep in an orgy of bloodletting.

  My position as CEO of a fast-growing company was rather precarious. I was responsible for keeping my workforce employed, and for that I needed the goodwill of the world at large. And it really stuck in my craw to find the notion taking hold that our company, Farmacom, born and nurtured on good Dutch soil, was actually a German concern, or at least intimately linked to Germany. I had to use every means at my disposal to dispel that idea. For that reason I sold the German subsidiary, and I put new policies in place to stop doing business with our eastern neighbor and not to employ any more foreigners, especially German nationals. Besides, it showed we supported our government’s efforts to bring down the high unemployment rate.

  Rafaël and I disagreed on this issue, although he himself had taken Dutch citizenship some years earlier, just before that dirty bastard seized absolute power. Prompted by his desire to distance himself as much as possible from the abhorrent goings-on in the Third Reich and to show his loyalty to his new homeland, he may also have been motivated to some extent by a desire to please me, knowing how patriotic I was.

  However, Rafaël’s sense of loyalty to the asylum seekers streaming in from his former fatherland kept growing stronger. He tried to find a job for every poor, persecuted Yid who came knocking on his door with some sob story, and kept importuning us to take on more German Jews. As if our firm wasn’t practically a Jewish ghetto already.

  The more dire the situation inside Germany, the more Rafaël’s once-shrewd business sense abandoned him, as his indignation about what was being done to his people intensified. He did everything in his power to sever all links with Germany. As a member of the faculty, he put considerable effort into getting the university to boycott an important Munich conference. The way he saw it, participa
ting in that conference was sleeping with the enemy.

  Of course I shared his anger at what was happening, but I was finding it increasingly difficult to accede to his over-the-top demands, motivated as he was by the urge to be the savior of anyone who needed his help. I had to do what was best for both Farmacom and the De Paauw Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Co. Never bite off more than you can chew. A firm that allows itself to be governed by emotions is doomed to fail.

  And so that evening in Rafaël’s living room, I found myself in a rather difficult spot. The emotional, tipsy exiles were growing more and more belligerent: Why wasn’t I offering more of them jobs? I was the only one at the party in a position to do so, and they sensed my reluctance, although I tried to be as noncommittal as I could.

  “If we Jews fail to do everything we possibly can to rescue our brothers from Hitler’s clutches, and to help them where we can, how can we expect the rest of the world to do so?” said the Dauphine tartly, topping off the brandy snifters.

  “But we are already doing all we possibly can,” I replied defensively, sensing the eyes of the entire company glaring at me. “We are in the process of divesting ourselves of our German subsidiary; we have offered lots of people positions in the company; we have donated generously to the refugee organizations; but I do have to remember that my first responsibility is to the firm. If Farmacom should come to be viewed around the world as a German concern, it’s curtains for our business, and that means the bread line for all our workers, Jew and non-Jew alike. We’re in a difficult quandary and have to be extremely careful how we handle it.”