The Hormone Factory: A Novel

by Saskia Goldschmidt

  I stood up to show that, as far as I was concerned, the interview was over. The preacher remained slumped in his chair, defeated. I strode up to where he sat, slipped my hand under his arm, and pulled him to his feet. Then I led him to the door. As I showed him out, I said quietly, “Go see the mayor, surely he’ll be able to help you hush up those nasty rumors. I wish you the best of luck, reverend Father.”

  Ignoring my outstretched hand, he turned away brusquely. I quickly shut the door behind him.

  29 …

  The padre’s visit had dispelled both my somber mood and my exhaustion. I asked Agnes for Rosie’s address and hurried over to her parental home, a ramshackle hut near the tracks. The doorframe was askew and a mezuzah dangled from a loose nail, not to mention the peeling paint on the windowsill; the wood was in an advanced state of decay. The window was so filthy you couldn’t see through it, and it was cracked right up the middle. I knocked. A strident voice yelled something unintelligible, and a few moments later the door was yanked open. A frazzled-looking woman appeared, worn down by poverty like so many of the womenfolk in our dreary town. Her thin frame brought to mind Rosie’s sinewy slenderness, except that, in the mother’s case, all the softness and freshness was missing. She was holding a baby in her large, splayed hands, and I could make out several other children in the dark room.

  Seeing me startled her; she took a step back and peered at me suspiciously.

  “Good morning,” I began, “are you Mrs. Groen? Rosie’s mother?”

  She nodded with obvious reluctance. “My name is De Paauw, I’m the brother of …” I said, rather uncomfortably; “could I have a word with you?”

  Grudgingly she moved aside to let me through, and pointed to a chair drawn up to the table in the center of the stuffy room. The children stopped their game and stared at me shyly and wide-eyed as I stepped inside, taking off my hat and unbuttoning my overcoat before sitting down.

  “Bram,” the mother barked sharply, upon which the oldest boy, a child of around ten, looked up at her questioningly, “take Berel and the little ones out to the shed.”

  The children scrambled obediently to their feet; the boy took the baby from her and they all disappeared through the back door.

  “Is Rosie home?” I asked.

  The woman shook her head.

  “Do you have any idea where she is?” I inquired carefully.

  She shrugged.

  “I want to apologize to you, in the name of my brother, for what he did to her. I take it you know what happened?”

  The woman laughed scathingly.

  “There ain’t a dog in this town don’t know what happened. News like that spreads faster ’n fire. Folks lap it up, as long as it’s not their own kids.” She glared at him. “We thought it best for Rosie to go work for you, and not Van der Vlis or Bartelsma. Goyim don’t respect the likes of us, and I’d hoped it would be different over at your place.”

  “I am terribly sorry about what happened, and I want you to know I’ll do everything I can to make amends. How is she?”

  Again she gave a sullen shrug.

  “I would like to speak to her, to apologize to her on my brother’s behalf, and to see what we can do for her.”

  My words had quite a different effect from the one I’d expected.

  “You know what you can do, Mr. De Paauw?” she said, standing up and placing her hands on her hips. “You can just stay the hell away, as far away from us as possible. We’ve got enough troubles without you coming here bothering us with your smut and filth. Isn’t all the money we make for you, us and our children, enough? Can’t you just be happy being filthy rich? Why do you have to go and drag our kids—the only thing in life we got more of than you—through your scuzzy slime? You’ve got daughters yourself, don’tcha?”

  She strode to the door and yanked it open. “Now get out,” she growled. “You’ve taken my darling, my eldest girl, from me, you and your brother. She was such a happy little thing, the apple of my old man’s eye. Now he’s kicked her out of the house. Doesn’t want people talking. See, that’s men for you! And don’t ever come back here again. Leave us the hell alone.”

  Getting to my feet, I pulled my wallet out of my pocket and left a hundred guilders on the table. The woman looked at the money greedily, having probably never laid eyes on such a huge sum. She marched over to the table, snatched up the hundred-guilder bill, and whipped it away into her apron pocket.

  “Blood money,” she muttered. “You think you can just fix anything, don’tcha, with money. If I didn’t have my young ’uns, I’d have you watch me tear it to pieces. But I can’t afford to do that. Just don’t think this makes up for what you’ve done to us.”

  She stepped aside, and I made my escape. The rickety door was slammed shut behind me.

  • • •

  Back in the office, Agnes handed me the morning editions of De Telegraaf and Volk en Vaderland, two newspapers that relished any excuse to show the Jewish people in a bad light, turning every smoldering ember into a huge conflagration. Aaron’s transgression was front-page news. His “Jew behavior” was described in gory detail. None of it could be verified, of course, simply because no one had witnessed what had really gone on in that room. Rosie was the only one who could have shed light on it, but the papers reported that she could not be found, and reinforced the speculation that she had died of her injuries. The interior pages too featured prominent articles describing our firm’s activities. A photograph of the factory gate and of Bertha, the prime witness, ran alongside. The fat bitch reported with relish that not only Aaron but I in particular, as well as the rest of the Jew directors (including that professor from Amsterdam), were all guilty of sexually abusing the factory workers. Interestingly enough, she did not confess to being one of the supposedly injured parties—I guessed because she wasn’t sure if such an admission would mark her as a victim or as something worse, and she didn’t want to go through the rest of her life branded as the company whore. In the article she claimed she had always resisted my indecent advances, implying that her refusal had led to her dismissal.

  What a God-given gift I had handed to our homegrown brownshirts! Inspired by the propaganda of their political brethren across the border, our own extremists were likewise engaged in proving that the Jewish people did not deserve to be called human—a crucial first step in the establishment of a fascist utopia in which there was to be no place for us. After all, getting rid of an inferior species is much easier than going after your own sort. By allowing myself the occasional little indulgence, I had played straight into the scumbag’s hands. Crushed, I sat at my desk, cursing the proclivities that had brought me into this fix. In all my fooling around I had never foreseen this scenario. Call me naïve, in view of the tide of hatred that had been sweeping across Europe for some years. What could I do to quell this storm?

  As I sat there stewing about what to do, Rafaël called. I’d quite forgotten about him in all the commotion. The daily telephone and telegram traffic between Amsterdam and our factory meant that his lab was already abuzz with yesterday’s event. Rafaël grimly insisted on an explanation. When I gave him the story about the dangerous cocktail of drugs, he sounded just as skeptical as the doctor who had sedated Aaron the day before.

  “Some months ago you asked me for the name of a doctor who might be able to help an acquaintance of yours with low testosterone symptoms. It occurred to me at the time it might be Aaron you had in mind. What has been going on, Motke? You owe me an explanation.”

  Unnerved, I couldn’t think of what to say. Rafaël went on. “You’d be best advised to tell me the truth. One phone call to Nijmegen will tell me all I need to know. I would very much appreciate hearing from you how it came to this.”

  “Not over the phone, Rafaël,” I responded.

  When there’s a big brouhaha, switchboard operators tend to forget that their bosses’ private affairs are not meant for their ears.

  “Can you come here?” I asked him.
>
  It would take a couple of hours for Rafaël to arrive, which should give me some time to concoct a plan. Good God, how was I ever to ride out this storm, what with Rosie nowhere to be found, my brother in the slammer, my dirty laundry hung out to dry, and the colossus from Amsterdam in a steaming rage, on his way to hear my story?

  • • •

  By the time an obviously agitated Rafaël marched into my room, I had already decided I could not hide the truth from him, not the truth about my brother’s testosterone regimen, anyway. Rafaël greeted me curtly and sat down, imperious. He looked even bigger and more imposing than usual. He stared at me with a grim, implacable look, tugging at his mustache, which, unlike his former nationality, he had not yet parted with.

  “I am listening,” he said, and waited.

  I took a deep breath and confessed the truth about my visit to the clinician, stressing that it was concern for my brother that had driven me to it, and that I deeply regretted my foolhardy actions. Rafaël glared at me stone-faced.

  “A sorry and dangerous business,” he finally decided, looking angrier than I had ever seen him. “Motke, I did not call those hormones soul glands for nothing. Even though we are still in the dark as to how they precisely function, all indications are that the substances we have been extracting don’t merely bring about physiological reactions; they also appear to have a strong effect on the psyche. We have no idea how that works. It’s a complex problem, a devilish job. In our clinical trials we are exposing patients to processes whose mechanisms we still don’t yet really understand. In fact, what we’ve been doing is dropping the patients into a minefield. We try to contain the danger by being extra prudent, leading them to safer ground with the greatest of caution. That way we are able to expand our knowledge gradually, slowly but surely clearing away the land mines. But you—always so arrogant and impatient—you thought nothing of dumping your brother into the middle of that minefield, and letting him run around among all the explosives until he blew himself up. The fact that you so contemptuously disregarded my instructions, thereby not only jeopardizing your brother’s health, but also throwing our discovery and my own reputation under the bus, that, Motke, is what I cannot forgive.”

  I said nothing.

  “That man will be traumatized for life,” Rafaël continued, “and the same goes for that poor girl. How is she?”

  I told him I had seen Rosie at the police station, that her father had thrown her out of the house, and that she had been missing ever since.

  Rafaël shook his head, incredulous. “Raped and then kicked out of the house by her father? Why?”

  I explained that in these parts, it was generally assumed that a rape victim must somehow have asked for it, and that a girl who was no longer a virgin disgraced her whole family. The father wasn’t necessarily a monster; he had, as I had seen with my own eyes, a host of other offspring whose miserable chances in this narrow-minded society would only get worse as long as Rosie remained part of the household. In the eyes of the people here, Rosie was now like a rotten head of cabbage in a greengrocer’s crate, and the simplest way to make the whole thing go away was to hustle the spoiled vegetable quickly out of sight.

  Rafaël lit a cigar and blew a thoughtful ring of smoke into the air. “Poor child,” he muttered.

  This new turn gave me the courage to give the prof an account of how I had managed to keep both the testosterone and the doctor and myself out of it.

  “Your cunning in saving your own skin exceeds by far your insight into your own limitations,” Rafaël concluded. “I should like to talk to your brother, to find out what he has gone through these past few months, and how the changes in him manifested themselves. The least we can do is learn from this horrendous experience.”

  I told him there was little chance of Aaron’s agreeing to speak with him.

  “First I had better go to Nijmegen,” he decided. “I have a bone to pick with that doctor. Let’s hope he’s been keeping good records.”

  He was about to get up, but I asked him to remain seated. I showed him the newspapers, which, besides trumpeting the drama of yesterday, also broadly alleged that not only I but Rafaël too was guilty of sexual abuse. Rafaël read the articles with an air of indifference.

  “I had heard the rumors concerning you. Whether they are true or not, only you can say. I don’t think I even want to know. But the way the supposed misdeeds of a single individual can be shifted onto an entire race, that is something I do know about. I thought moving to this country and becoming Dutch had saved me from that kind of insanity for good. Well, there it is. One cannot escape one’s destiny.”

  He pushed the papers away from him and got to his feet. With his hand on the doorknob, he turned toward me. “There has been a serious breach of trust, Motke. This incident will not improve our relationship, but we are constrained to continue it. I need Farmacom and Farmacom needs me. The situation in Europe makes parting impossible for the time being. I have considered emigrating to North or South America, as far away as possible from the approaching madness.” He pointed to the newspapers he had just tossed aside. “But there is a limit to the number of times a man is capable of establishing himself and creating a home in a new place. I don’t have the energy to do it again, I fear. I feel old, for the first time in my life.”

  As he said that, the burly, imposing colossus suddenly seemed vulnerable. Then he nodded and left the room.

  30 …

  Rosie seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. I did make several attempts to find out what had happened to the girl, but she had left no trace. Even the tabloid rats, who conducted a smear campaign against Aaron, myself, and the entire board for weeks, did not manage to track her down. Where had she gone to escape her father’s wrath and the ugly gossip of our town? Had she been given shelter by relatives elsewhere in the country, or was she licking her wounds somewhere all by herself?

  The possibility remained that one of my other employees would file a complaint against me, but the danger of that happening began to fade as time went on and nothing happened. My threats of dismissal if any of them so much as breathed a word appeared to have done the trick, and they must have been afraid that in this intolerant hick town, giving evidence against me would backfire on them. Even fat Bertha was keeping remarkably quiet.

  The padre seemed to be profiting from the same fear. His offenses did receive some attention in the newspapers, but there was no investigation, let alone a conviction. I went to see the mayor to suss out the situation, and learned the good man was so shocked at the muckraking in the popular press that he was only too eager to agree that the malfeasance ascribed to our firm’s leadership was a complete fantasy.

  I kept my word to Aaron. I didn’t so much as lay a finger on any of the girls, and in fact the horror of what happened did seem to be holding my libido in check. It turns out that fear and guilt are effective antidotes to impetuous passion.

  One evening—I had just returned home from England, where I had gone looking for opportunities to transfer part of our operation for safety in case the scumbag next door made good on his promise to invade Czechoslovakia, since the possibility of a war in Europe had to be taken increasingly seriously—Rivka remarked over our after-dinner coffee in the salon, “That catastrophic day has had yet another unexpected consequence, Motke.”

  I looked at her, alarmed. I had only just begun to relax a bit, and had stopped feeling I had to be on the constant lookout for the next disaster. She smiled, and patted her stomach. “There’s an occupant in here again,” she said. “You hit another bull’s eye, you incorrigible stud.” She went up to me and gave me a kiss. Then she said, “What would you think of seeing our harem invaded by a little guy? Wouldn’t that be the icing on the cake for our family?”

  She looked at me, glowing. Rina, the youngest of our four girls, was now eight years old, and we’d considered our family complete. Each previous pregnancy had led to speculation about a baby boy, and even though after
every birth we told each other that a healthy baby was all that counted and we didn’t care it wasn’t a boy, we did express some regret when the last one again turned out to belong to the weaker sex.

  It had never for a moment crossed my mind that our night of love in Aaron’s guest room might lead to another pregnancy—as if there was no way it could happen in such an abnormal situation. I didn’t know what to think. Of course I congratulated Rivka, but her announcement didn’t make me jump for joy, as it had every other time she’d announced she was expecting. The fact that this unplanned baby could only have been conceived during that nightmarish night made me ambivalent, to say the least. The child would be a continual reminder of my culpability, my failings, and my twin brother’s downfall. Ezra owed his existence to that whole excruciating fiasco.

  • • •

  Aaron was moved to the jail in the provincial capital, not far from our sleepy little town. Rivka visited him a few times, always returning home downcast, moved by his terrible remorse, his endless self-reproach, and his great loneliness. She was his only visitor, and even in prison he was deeply despised, reviled by his fellow inmates for being a child molester and a pervert. He never asked after me and did not want to hear her mention my name.

  Three months after the disaster it was time for his court date. Thanks to the smear campaign in the papers, the case was still a hot topic and very much in the news. I didn’t have the courage to go to the trial, telling myself that Aaron would not want me there. Rivka did go, and I came home from work that night dying to hear what happened. To my surprise, she hadn’t come home yet. It was already past seven; the nanny had given the children their dinner and was tucking Rina into bed. My three other daughters were in the salon, in a state of agitation because it wasn’t Rivka’s wont to come home later than expected. I tried to hide my own consternation from them, absentmindedly ate the food the cook served me, sent the staff home, and then played with the children, something I rarely did—a rollicking game of snakes and ladders. In their enthusiasm they forgot their anxiety. They went up to bed after I assured them there was nothing wrong and that they would see their mother at breakfast.