The Hormone Factory: A Novel

by Saskia Goldschmidt

  I glanced at my vulnerable, unnamed son, who, after such an arduous journey, had to do without his mother’s love in these first hours of life. I stroked his soft little face, sniffed the distinctive smell of a newborn, pressed a kiss on his forehead, and left the room with a heavy tread.

  35 …

  Two days later Ruth had permission from her mother to visit her new little brother, and on returning home she gave her sisters and me an enthusiastic report, saying what a cute little fellow he was, that she’d been allowed to hold him in her arms, and that he’d refused to let go of her pinkie. She also informed me that Rivka had said my son’s name was Ezra.

  Although religion played no part in our lives, we had given all the children Jewish first names. We had no wish to hide who we were, and the more the hatred and bigotry intensified, the more important it seemed to stand up for our right to exist in the choice of names for our children. To name a child is to give it its identity and set it on a certain path in life. In the name Rivka had chosen for my son, it wasn’t hard to read her wish that he be guided not by his father and his foul behavior, but by that righteous priest of old.

  Seven days later I was allowed to go pick up Rivka and my son. We were greeted at the door by the girls, who had planned a lavish welcome for their mother and their little brother. The front door was decorated with a large cardboard stork carrying a blue baby bundle in its beak; the crib in the nursery was beautifully made up with a sheet the older girls had embroidered; a tray of baby-blue sugar treats was set out in the living room, and a long garland of their cheerful, colorful drawings spanned the lofty hallway. Their excitement over their mother’s homecoming and the addition of a little boy to their mostly female household was boundless; their enthusiasm seemed to make Rivka relax a bit. In the car she had been silent, aloof and preoccupied, holding the baby a little away from her body, as if trying to avoid physical contact with the little fellow. Feeling her daughters’ elation, watching the girls smothering their brother with kisses and caresses, her face softened somewhat, and she had to agree with the girls when they declared that this was the sweetest, cutest, loveliest little baby the world had ever seen.

  Thanks to the hospital nursing staff’s persistence and cajoling, Rivka had in the end overcome her initial resistance to breast-feeding, and her milk had come in. She’d resigned herself to nursing him, since she felt she should not deprive her son of breast milk. But after a few weeks the kid developed an unnaturally voracious appetite. He clamped onto his mother’s breast with aggressive force, biting her nipples until they were bruised and sore. And it was that very fierceness, that hunger for love, that only pushed her away further, so that I had no choice in the end but to hire Alie Mosterd from packaging to provide him with purchased breast milk—motherly warmth for a price.

  • • •

  My secret hope that Rivka’s coldness toward me would thaw once she had had her baby was dashed. If in that last month of 1938 or during the next year she had shown some understanding, if she had been willing to give me one more chance, had trusted me again, I might have found the strength to change. Like a snake sloughing off its skin to rid itself of parasites, I might very well have been able to shed my bad habits to be reborn a virtuous man. I imagined that with my wife at my side, supported and encouraged by her love, I might have done it. But then our company would in all probability not have grown into the thriving multinational it is today. Putting empathy and altruism above all other considerations won’t make you come out on top; for a business to be truly lucrative, there needs to be at least a little skullduggery. For Rivka, I’d have been prepared to give up my dream of building a major company; it would have been worth it. Her silent hostility, however, the constant unspoken recriminations goosing my sense of shame and guilt, were just too much to bear.

  As the world prepared itself for the greatest cataclysm of all time, I began to let go of my wounded ego. When it finally became clear I would never win back my wife’s love—the second-greatest blow in my otherwise sensationally successful life; the first, of course, was the symbolic mark of Cain on my forehead—I proceeded to shrug off those distressing feelings, the unbearable hurt. From that moment on, my conscience ceased to bother me—I put a lid on it and sealed it shut.

  It is only now—after the rust has eaten through my self-protective armor and reduced it to dust—that those unbearable feelings have flared up again, just like the electrical fire that once very nearly reduced our new lab to ashes. Thanks to the quick intervention of our in-house firefighting team, we were spared that calamity. But here, inside my cocoon of decrepitude, there is no one to put out the blaze.

  36 …

  This evening the young thing turned on the television for me. Very softly, so that it won’t disturb Mizie, who’s out cold one floor down after taking a strong sleeping pill. She is determined to shield me from any direct confrontation with my poor martyred son. Is she worried the excitement will deal me the deathblow I so dearly desire?

  But the sound is up just high enough for me to hear the voice of my blood, my dearest spawn, the ravenous whiz kid, as he tries to deflect the questions of the foreign journalists, the hungry European gentlemen of the press who can smell a good, lucrative story here, a story that will keep them on the air for days, weeks even, who swarm around him as he walks from the car to the courthouse. He’s holding his head high, his eyes are tired, his face drawn, but proud as ever, his bearing resolute.

  The upshot is that he is to be released on bail, set at a million dollars. Provided he surrenders his passport, to prevent him from fleeing the country. So, wearing an electronic ankle bracelet like some lab animal awaiting a lethal injection, he is now permitted to hole up in his apartment and spend his days looking out at the Hudson River or down at the pack of paparazzi bloodhounds stationed outside his building. How I’d like to call him on the phone, to give him some encouragement, to support him as a father should, and tell him to steel himself, to be a man at this critical moment—his Waterloo, with the vultures circling, intent on getting rid of him and sending the whole business down the tubes. My son, at the very pinnacle of his career; my son, a driven man, a dynamo bursting with ambition who clawed his way to the top step by step, until, at the crowning point of his career, he was made chief executive officer of the giant multinational that began as a precarious little division of our meatpacking factories. Don’t let him hang his head, he has to fight back; a sturdy anvil does not fear the hammer. Let those lawyers of his—they must be costing him an arm and a leg—get the alleged victim to withdraw her complaint. How hard can that be? The papers say the charges are a jumble of inconsistencies. It had to be entrapment, some clever plot cooked up by those cannibals who if we don’t watch out are going to gobble up all our life’s work.

  He was too open, too ready to show his hand; my warnings fell on deaf ears. Traitors never sleep, I told him over and over again, but he’d just laugh and insist on doing it his way, always so damn cocksure of himself, that boy! But what do you expect—a child of affluence, with no firsthand experience of how evil or dangerous those sharks can be. Born into the lap of luxury, could have anything his heart desired, grew up in a normal family—well, normal, I mean, what’s normal? Normal doesn’t exist. Normal is a Russian pogrom, normal is Christ on the cross, normal is a whore in a brothel. To Ezra, normal was a mother who never loved him and who was irked by his indisputably boyish behavior. His spunk, his aggressiveness, his competitive streak, and, young as he was, his determination to get the better of his sisters; all that unruly behavior annoyed the hell out of her. She never tried to hide it, and the enthusiasm and pleasure she took in raising our daughters was totally missing in Ezra’s case. Was it just my genes, or was Rivka’s attitude somehow also responsible for turning him into this testosterone-driven man, addicted to the chase, the attention of women, the overwhelming need to be seen, to be known, to be felt?

  In the many interviews he has given, he likes to confess with a certain measu
re of pride what his three weak spots are: his love of money, his fondness for women, and his Jewish birth. And every time I tried warning him not to put himself in the spotlight, he would pat me on the back, laughing, saying the times were different now, that xenophobia and petty-bourgeois notions about sex were no longer relevant. “Thanks to the Pill—the one you created a worldwide demand for!” he said, to stroke my ego, “anyway, thanks to the Pill, times have changed, Father, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for it. In your heyday you had to be on your guard; woman trouble could ruin your reputation. But nowadays showing off your weaknesses is a perfectly good strategy.” That was the kind of naïve swagger I’d hear from him when, on one of his visits over from the land of the brave, he made time to have lunch with me. “All you need to make it to the top is a slick presentation; a thorough grasp of the facts couched in short, easy sound bites, never too complex or involved; a healthy dose of humor; and a knack for showing your human side.” And then a pitying smile for his old father, so sadly behind the times.

  Living it up, overconfident and at the top of his game, thinking himself invulnerable, he blazed his own trail through the world of international power brokers.

  The fact that death has not yet come for me, forcing me to be an impotent witness to this, to watch my son fall into the very same trap I once narrowly escaped, is the ultimate cruelty. And as if that weren’t enough, I have no way to communicate with him. Neither my personal Florence Nightingale nor the cute young thing has any notion that I am still compos mentis; that it’s only my tongue and the other motor skills that don’t work, like a stubborn horse balking at taking another step.

  The young thing leans over me, telling me three times that the man on the screen is Ezra, my son. As if I can’t fucking see that for myself. She interprets the garbled sounds coming out of my trap as a sign that I don’t know what’s going on. She explains to me that my boy is in New York and, sadly, can’t come visit me. I fling my head wildly from side to side to make her understand I want to speak to him, but she doesn’t get it, and when my eyes start leaking—not out of sentimentality, dammit, but because my body tends to weep from every orifice, not just the stupid dribble from the tip of my beast—she takes a tissue to dab at the tears on my face. She does it gently, but it feels like a scouring pad lacerating my thin skin and I let out a scream of pain, of impotent rage, of my terrible yearning for one last exchange with Ezra, my son, my Benjamin, my Achilles’ heel.

  37 …

  Even before our country was overrun by the jackbooted henchmen of the great jackass, I had known that if the worst happened, I would have to hustle big-time to save my own neck. Not only was my religious background a lethal liability, but so were my government connections and my business, which the Kraut vultures would no doubt have their beady eyes on. I had done everything I could to ensure the firm would keep going in the event of war, but now it was time to take steps to save myself and my family in case our country fell.

  Toward the end of April 1940 I met with Levine, who had a ticket to sail to America, where he was scheduled to give a series of lectures.

  Over the past few years he had been much in demand as a speaker abroad. Thanks to his reputation as head of one of the most highly respected laboratories in the world, his discovery of testosterone, his knack for cranking out promotional articles for top scientific journals, as well as the worldwide professional network he had built up over the years, he received untold invitations to attend conferences, to give lectures, or to join advisory boards around the globe (the only exception being the ever-expanding nation next door). He liked to accept these invitations, doubtless flattered by all the attention and respect. They also allowed him to bask in the unencumbered mood of those faraway places, reminiscent of the rosy, carefree times our own part of the world had enjoyed in the roaring twenties. The somber, oppressive damper the brownshirts had cast over our continent had yet to reach those other shores, so it was a joy to go there. Besides, by traveling abroad he could get away from the strain that had come between the two of us. We never seemed to see eye to eye these days, whether it was about a board meeting, some transaction involving doctors or pharmacists, or even a simple phone conversation about his damn contract renewal, on which we had yet to come to terms. Too many cooks spoil the broth, as they say, and the heady partnership of the early days had turned into a never-ending power struggle. Coming as we did from such different perspectives, we were constantly at each other’s throats. We pecked at each other like two angry fowl in a cockfight—he, the venerated professor and great man of science, facing off against me, the royal merchant attempting to steer our firm safely through the greatest crisis the world had ever known. Our once mutually beneficial accord was now all rivalry and strife, each of us convinced he was right.

  As I walked into Levine’s office, he told me he was calling off his planned trip. “I expect all of Europe will be at war soon, therefore I’m not going,” he said somberly.

  The brownshirts had invaded Denmark and Norway earlier that month, and there were persistent rumors that the great shithead’s troops were amassing on our borders, and although our government kept putting out unfounded bulletins claiming there was nothing to fear, there weren’t too many suckers out there still allowing themselves to be lulled to sleep. Anyone with a grain of common sense knew that the Gröfaz (the Greatest General of All Time) would not rest until he had the entire continent under his thumb, with Great Britain thrown in for good measure.

  “But Rafaël,” I replied, “you have just given me the exact reason you should get out of here while you still can. You are in the fortunate position of possessing both a ticket and a visa; I don’t know a soul who wouldn’t envy you. Why don’t you just go? You’ll never have a better opportunity.”

  He looked at me haughtily. “Do you really mean to say that I ought to save my own skin, even if it means leaving my family behind, my institute, and my employees? Do you really think that’s the right thing to do? Don’t I have an obligation to do everything in my power to protect the people who are dependent on me in this time of crisis? Shouldn’t I at least try, come what may?”

  They were rhetorical questions only. He was implying that the very thought of saving himself and leaving the people he lived and worked with to their fate was quite reprehensible and, as far as he was concerned, not even worthy of consideration.

  “If there’s anyone who will be capable of helping them when Hitler starts running the show around here, it is me. My name, my connections, my money—I’ll use everything I’ve got to protect them. I shall try, anyway. I could never look at myself in the mirror again if I fled now, leaving everyone who’s dear to me in the lurch. If I did that, how could I ever call myself a mensch again?”

  There he went once more, rubbing his moral superiority in my face, putting me in my place. If I’d had a ticket and a visa, I’d have jumped at the chance to get out of there. On reaching safety, I’d have made every attempt to bring my family over. Although calling it “family” was a stretch these days—it implied an intimacy that for the past two years had been lacking in our household.

  Once out of the country, Levine could have pulled out all the stops to have the Dauphine and his children, now nearly all adults, join him. But his scathing attitude would have made any objection sound ignoble, so I just shrugged, muttered that it was too bad we had to miss such a great opportunity to promote our latest products, and then coolly changed the subject to other orders of business.

  That short meeting at his lab was the last time I was to see him before the shit hit the fan. We met again five years later in the exact same place. By then the once so respectable laboratory had been trashed. Barely a stick of furniture was left, the windows had been stripped of their wooden frames, and the doors were gone, all used for fuel during the Hunger Winter of 1945. But the damage done to the laboratory was nothing compared with the estrangement between us after five years. In fact, the dressing-down Levine gave me on that day
just before war broke out would be the last he’d ever give me. Or, rather, the last I ever allowed him to give me. By the time I was back, after the war, I no longer gave a flying fig about his so-called moral superiority and simply forged ahead, ignoring him. The moment the brownshirts were finally licked, I made sure that Mordechai de Paauw, Royal Merchant, Purveyor to Her Majesty the Queen, would from now on be the sole potentate ruling over the Farmacom empire.

  38 …

  I was startled awake by the roar of aircraft engines overhead. I thought for an instant I must be dreaming, and then realized what was going on. “Too late!” everything inside me was screaming. “You’ve missed the boat!” Oh, sure, I had transferred our subsidiaries’ shares to London for safekeeping, had neatly deposited all our manufacturing secrets there as well, had locked away the purest samples of insulin and other preparations in a vault, and set up an emergency facility in another part of the country; but in the end, there I was, asleep in the fucking guest room as the scumbag was crossing our borders with his overwhelming military force, and twelve thousand Übermenschen were parachuting down on us, having brought neither myself nor my family to safety. I hadn’t even taken the first concrete steps to arrange our departure. Maybe I’d had too much on my plate with everyday concerns, or perhaps, like so many others, I’d been counting on the odds that, despite all the portents, it wouldn’t happen all that soon, and we needn’t be in a rush to leave our comfortable life at home just yet. I had been sticking my head in the sand so that I wouldn’t have to venture out into the unknown, so that I wouldn’t have to rouse myself from the stupor of familiar habit. In acting like an ostrich I certainly had lots of company, but Christ, how I kicked myself, lying there in that solitary guest bed, hearing the engine drone overhead—the noise of a cataclysmic flood that would very shortly swallow up all the land.