The Hormone Factory: A Novel

by Saskia Goldschmidt

  “But, Mr. Motke,” said Silberstein, “don’t you understand how serious this is; don’t you see how easy you have it, compared with us? To you it’s just about employment opportunities and corporate profit margins. To us and our wives and children back in Germany, it’s a matter of life or death.”

  There were nods of agreement all around.

  Rivka had been following the discussion intently, and now she put in her two cents. “Motke,” she said, “a German firm or a Jewish firm, surely those are two very different things? Surely the world can be made to understand that taking on asylum seekers means taking a stand against that despicable regime? Surely if Farmacom and the De Paauw Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Company are seen to be helping the victims of Hitler’s tyranny, it will generate goodwill for the firm around the globe, and open up new markets abroad?”

  The buzz that greeted my wife’s comments made clear that she had a receptive audience. I suddenly saw red. My own wife trying to teach me a lesson, here at this gathering; how dare she?

  “Talk is cheap,” I retorted haughtily. “What do you know about running a business, Rivka? My responsibilities are far greater than any of you can possibly comprehend.” I stood up. “Come, Rivka,” I snapped at her. “I have to be at work again in the morning, unlike some of the people here. Have a pleasant evening.”

  Rivka hoisted herself from her chair with visible reluctance and a pointed shrug, went up to the Dauphine to kiss her goodbye, and gave the company around the table a smile and a little wave. Rafaël followed me into the hall to see us out.

  “It’s a shame,” he said, helping me into my coat, “that it had to come to this. I wanted this evening to end on a festive note. I do very much appreciate, Motke, that you have made Farmacom possible. And I am over the moon about our latest achievement. But surely you see that we are now at a point where commercial considerations ought no longer to be the key motivation. This is about life and death, as Silberstein said, and we all know that evil doesn’t need much incentive. If humankind just stands by and does nothing, it’s enough to let atrocity prevail.”

  “Ah, but nice guys finish last,” I responded, and stomped outside without waiting for Rivka, who, when she finally came out, got into the passenger seat next to Frank. In a silence more deafening than any provoked by our sporadic fights over twelve years of marriage, we drove home to our mansion in the sticks.

  21 …

  The thirties were bleak years in many respects.

  The months following the party fiasco saw me working even longer days at the office than before, up to my neck in negotiations, contract signings, and expansion plans, or else away on increasingly frequent business trips that took me, and sometimes Aaron, to England, America, South America, and China—territories where it was necessary to nail down new and existing business contacts and get subsidiaries off the ground. My intensive workload was occasionally lightened by a fling with a factory cutie or a diverting seduction in the lobby of some foreign hotel.

  Rivka was kept busy looking after our four girls. She was a cheerful and enthusiastic mother, and I admired her for not taking out on the children the coldness that had arisen between the two of us. She also continued running her enrichment programs for the factory girls. Since our visit to the Levines, she had thrown herself into volunteer activities, assisting refugees who had managed to reach our country despite the strict border controls and the country’s fractious mood. Whenever we happened to run into each other at home, she’d insist on telling me their tragic stories in a reproachful tone of voice, as if I, and not the Satan across the border, were the one who’d been mistreating all those poor schmoes.

  • • •

  The discovery of the male hormone did not bring us the success we were expecting from the get-go. It was a big headache at first, because a major German company had registered some premature patents that could conceivably block us from putting Levine’s invention into production. Moreover, the fact that the discovery had been the brainchild of a Jew goaded the German government into doing everything in its power to claim it as an Aryan achievement. That nest of crooks was in the habit of appropriating Jewish discoveries and chalking them up to the master race.

  To lay claim to a scientific breakthrough is an extremely complex matter. I was well aware of how difficult it was to obtain a patent for our kind of discovery. If you were an inventor, it wasn’t all that hard to win the right to stop others from commercially exploiting your invention for a certain length of time; an inventor comes up with something from scratch, something that’s never existed before. A scientific researcher, on the other hand—for example, one who isolates a new substance from existing matter, such as animal organs—was often informed by the patent office that his product did not meet the criteria of an original invention, and thus did not qualify for a patent. It always took great amounts of red tape to protect our discoveries, but it was critical to do so in order to recoup our costly investment.

  These efforts were further complicated by the fact that we had to divest ourselves of our German division. As it turned out, the most convenient way was to sell the business to one of our major German customers—none other than the sharks who’d beaten us in snagging the patents for the hormone. The most Byzantine negotiations of my business life resulted in the end in an agreement by which our subsidiary was sold for a pittance. However, thanks to some crafty moves on my part—a huge consolation—we did manage, in the face of fierce opposition from our Aryan rivals, to set up a corporation in the United States, thus creating a huge new market for our products. And in 1937 we finally obtained the necessary patents for the substance Levine and his team had discovered, and which he now endowed with a new name: testosterone.

  Aside from having to cope with all these vicissitudes, I was getting increasingly concerned about Aaron, who seemed to be growing more depressed by the day. He would often show up late for work, or not show up at all. Once, hearing his sluggish, shuffling tread on the stairs leading to our office floor, I confronted him and chewed him out right in the administrative office hallway. I let him have it within everybody’s hearing, scolding him for playing hooky, something an executive in his position could not afford to do. Staring at me with his dull, droopy eyes, as if my tirade registered no more with him than the sound of the bellows from the glassworks, he shambled right past me into his office, not even bothering to stand still and hear me out.

  He neglected his work, made errors in drawing up foreign contracts, disregarded proper dismissal procedures, failed to follow up on decisions made at board meetings; everything he was supposed to be responsible for was getting bungled. Although he had never been much of a cheerleader for our company, he had previously always done what was expected of him, joylessly and perfunctorily, the way he did everything in his life. But since he had started dropping the ball, I could no longer count on him; I felt things were spiraling out of control, that his unreliability was imperiling the firm. This could not go on. I decided one afternoon that something had to be done.

  I marched into his office without knocking and found him sitting at his desk, staring out the window overlooking the busy courtyard. At the sound of the door opening he listlessly turned his head in my direction, then looked away again when he saw who it was. I perched on his desk and gazed down on his pale, stooped form. It was hard to think that he really was my twin. Tangled, unkempt hair; dazed, absent eyes; pasty skin; flushed cheeks that signaled copious alcohol consumption; hunched shoulders; and that flabby, sagging torso—sitting there like Job on the dunghill. Christ, he looked terrible.

  This was my brother, my unfortunate twin, the one who shared my entire history, who was so much a part of me that it was like having a third hand, or another foot. My twin sibling had always been there and would always be; life without him was unthinkable. But if that was so, why did we have so few things in common, aside from those nine months in the womb and a childhood dominated by two unloving parents? I suddenly remembered something�
�an article I’d once read that I’d dismissed as pure nonsense before consigning it to some subterranean repository of useless information. It was a report about the Yoruba people of western Africa. They believed that twins possessed one soul between them. An utterly galling thought, but suddenly I couldn’t get it out of my head. Aaron and I had been accidentally conceived from two separate eggs at the same exact time. Aaron had been the first to squeeze through the birth canal, paving the way, and all I’d had to do was slide out after him. My brother and I were as different as day is different from night. But—to share one soul, what a horrifying thought! It meant we belonged together like two sides of a coin, like a photographic negative and positive. It would explain why I had turned out the way I had: enterprising, quick on my feet, and purposeful. Aaron, meanwhile, was my inner voice, my silent conscience, my better self. And so he could just sit there brooding and suffering, knowing I would do what had to be done, for myself, but also for him. Two bodies, one soul.

  I shook my head to get rid of that crazy, troubling thought. Of course we weren’t one. He was my lost-soul twin, a man totally cut off from the real world, and so beset by loneliness and inertia that he just couldn’t seem to snap out of it. I needed to step in and make him get ahold of himself so that he’d be able to resume his part, however minimal, in the gigantic task facing us.

  “Aaron,” I said, “you’ve been dropping the ball on everything; we can’t count on you anymore. What’s the matter with you, for chrissakes?”

  Aaron went on staring out the window, gave a slight shrug, and said nothing.

  “Aaron,” I said, now raising my voice, “if something’s wrong, buck up, man, pull yourself together. We need you.”

  Slowly he turned his head toward me, with a listless “You need me?” He went on with a sneer. “Yes, I’m handy to have around, aren’t I, as your flunky? All those nasty but necessary little jobs that have to get done. A contract here, a dismissal notice there, but does it make a damn bit of difference? A bungler, a dolt, a dope, that’s what I am. No one needs me. Not here at the factory, and even less out there in the world at large. Nobody even notices I’m here. If I had to be born, why did it have to be in this godforsaken dump, why was I born with you as my twin, why into this wretched firm, and, worst of all, why at this abominable time in history?”

  He picked up the pencil stub lying on the desk and started gnawing on it.

  “Jesus, Aaron,” I said, getting up to pace about the room, “you really are depressed. That’s the kind of thinking that will drive you mad. Sure, times are bad, but we are fortunate enough to be largely in control of our own lives. Make something of it! Just remember what a lucky dog you are. Count your blessings, give yourself a good kick in the backside, go take a trip. It’s a big world out there, with lots of sales territories left to conquer. Get yourself a beautiful woman—there are plenty of them out there, you know—and try to get the most out of all life has to offer!”

  He didn’t respond.

  “You’ve said it yourself,” I went on; “you need to find yourself a girl, get yourself a nice piece of ass. A man who doesn’t do it on a regular basis will forget how.”

  “I may not ‘do it’ enough, but you ‘do it’ far too much.” He looked straight at me for the first time. “Just for a moment back then, I thought you had taken to heart what I’d said to you. For a few days I clung to the illusion that my words might have brought out some decency in you, that I had at the very least saved some girls from your dirty shenanigans. But no, you’re still the perv you always were and always will be.”

  He stared at the floor.

  “I did take your words to heart, Aaron,” I said. “You did have a point. I wish I was better at controlling myself, that I wasn’t subject to these urges that seem to overtake me like a raging fever. I did try, but I simply couldn’t do it. I go nuts if I can’t let off steam every once in a while. And trust me, those girls, they’re asking for it. You act as if I’m some kind of rapist creep, but I’m not. Sure, I like the thrill of the hunt, to feel in my guts that I have the power to seduce some broad. Knowing I can have whichever girl I want, knowing she’ll spread her legs for me, that she wants to offer herself, that’s what gives me the energy to do what I do, by which I mean my business exploits, not the ladies. No, it isn’t the girls I’m worried about; I’m worried about you.”

  Aaron stared somberly into space, gave a deep sigh, and muttered under his breath, “Me, I don’t have any desire for a woman, the way you describe it. I don’t even have any idea what that feels like.” Tapping his pencil on the armrest of his chair, he took a deep breath and went on in a louder voice. “There, now you know how it is with me. Now you can despise me even more than you did before.” He leaned his head against the window pane with a look of total defeat.

  Those last words struck a chord; suddenly it was clear to me why my brother had been floundering all his life. I remembered what Levine had said at dinner about unsexed men whose genitals appeared to be in working order. Aaron’s listlessness, his lack of aggressiveness, the disinterest in women; I had always misread it. My brother had been contending since boyhood with a secret he’d had to keep from everyone, in order to escape my father’s derision and my scorn. How ironic! My brother, one of the directors of Farmacom, an enterprise that for more than ten years had been on the hunt for various “soul hormones,” suffered from an insufficiency of the very thing Rafaël had so recently discovered! Aaron had been going through life with a colossal testosterone deficiency.

  22 …

  I realized I was the wrong person to tell my brother of this diagnosis; it required someone who could first confirm medically whether Aaron was lacking in the sex hormone department and, if so, persuade him to accept treatment. Regular injections with Levine’s new potion might boost his testosterone and, indeed, might even transform him into a bold, sexually active, happy man. Wouldn’t that be great! If he got cured, we might wind up sharing responsibility for the firm on a more equal basis. I’d have a real partner at last, a true comrade.

  Not wanting to waste any more time, I approached Rafaël. The clinical trials for the male hormone were in full swing. Rafaël had asked us to stockpile every last damn bull testicle the Netherlands had to offer, for use in preparations of various strengths and combinations. He was also trying to collect as much male urine as possible, following the example of the German scientist who, when the testosterone race had still been in full swing, had got his hands on an enormous supply of the most aggressive male pee in the Reich: the urine of young SS soldiers in a military barracks in Berlin.

  Without revealing that it was Aaron, I mentioned to Rafaël that I had met a man who bore the hallmarks of a castrato, as described during the party at his house, and asked him to recommend a physician who might treat the unhappy soul with the new miracle cure. He gave me the name of a doctor in Nijmegen who had enthusiastically embraced the clinical trials. Without mentioning the therapy I had in mind, I managed to persuade Aaron to go see this doctor.

  My dispirited twin took the train to Nijmegen. I had confided to the good doctor in a phone conversation that my brother was, in all likelihood, suffering from an insufficiency of the manly hormone. Aaron returned from his visit without breathing a word about what he and the doc had discussed, and I couldn’t tell if he had started the treatment or not. I kept a close eye on him the next few weeks, curious to see if I could detect any change in his energy or mood. The fact that he was making the trip to Nijmegen several times a week gave me hope; it could well mean he was receiving a course of injections. He seemed to trust the doctor; however, my patience was being sorely tried, since in the first few weeks I detected no difference in him. His somber mood and inertia did not lessen; ever since our last conversation, he’d clammed up again like a bivalve determined to shut out every last drop of seawater, and I was starting to have doubts both about my diagnosis and about Levine’s wonder drug. If he was indeed being treated with the soul hormone, was the prof�
��s potion really all it was cracked up to be? Or was Aaron being given too insignificant a dose? The trials were still in an early stage, and there was quite a bit of uncertainty as to the proper dosage, the ratios required for optimal results in humans as opposed to roosters.

  Blame it on Levine’s excessive caution regarding the dosage, his reluctance to take any risks as long as the therapy’s clinical effect on humans wasn’t yet known. My impatience with the glacial pace of his methods had already led to several altercations over the past few years, since I felt that he showed too little concern for the financial aspects of the business. After all, we’d poured a small fortune into every discovery and every new drug. Of course I could see it was necessary to test their effectiveness on humans, and that each new preparation had to be produced in sufficient quantities to provide insight into its basic workings and side effects. But Levine tended to be excessively prudent and scared to death of harming his reputation. I thought it only fair, considering the enormous financial investment we had made, that he stick out his neck a little and speed things up just a tad. But the dosage instructions he gave the doctors were always so conservative that it took ages to come up with any conclusive results, let alone a viable drug that we could sell. Speed and impatience, as I’ve said before, are my middle names. There’s anger in there too, since Rafaël’s chickenhearted methods showed that he cared more for his precious good name than for our firm’s sound financial footing.

  After several weeks with no obvious results, I decided to pay a call to Aaron’s doctor myself in order to get some answers. He received me courteously and respectfully, as most of Levine’s contacts did, since they felt honored to belong to his circle of trusted associates and knew that the preparations they were being given to try out were manufactured by my company. Participating in the trials was a way to make a name for themselves as physicians on the cutting edge, more able than their less fortunate colleagues.