Mendel's Dwarf

by Simon Mawer

  “The bags protect the flowers from pollination by means other than my paintbrush.” He withdrew his finger and showed Frau Rotwang a smear of golden pollen. “I, Gregor Mendel, am the one who commands the matings here. No pea may mate without my consent. In nature it is blind chance that determines what crosses take place. Here it is I. I have even grown some of the plants inside the greenhouse to be sure that weevils do not get into the flowers and interfere with my own work. The pea weevil, for example.3 When I was in Vienna, I presented a paper on the pea weevil to the Vienna Zoological and Botanical Society. It is a determined little fellow, and I cannot trust it not to transfer pollen from one flower to another. I have to be extremely careful, Frau Rotwang, extremely careful.”

  “And did it? Did it pollinate where it shouldn’t have?” The word adultery, a horrendous, a terrifying, word, seemed to rise up out of the sultry air of their conversation.

  “I found that it did not. I am the only pollinator.”

  “Surely the Almighty has some say in the matter.”

  “The Almighty works through chance. Chance is his instrument. Thus you”—she looked at him with her cornflower blue eyes—“thus you, Frau Rotwang, have blue eyes through the chance of your mother and your father …”

  “So do you, Father Gregor.”

  For a moment they looked into each other’s eyes. He felt quite faint. The hot spring day, the heavy perfume of the lime trees, the closeness of the woman with her intense cerulean eyes, all these things contrived to …

  “Are you all right, Gregor?”

  “A little warm. This soutane.” But this soutane was hiding things he could barely admit, even to his confessor. He eased his collar. “So impractical in the sun. Black absorbs heat, did you know that? White reflects, black absorbs. If you come over here, you may see some of the results of my labors. Seed color, for example.” He took a branch and held it for her inspection. The flowers at the upper part of the plant nodded and danced like butterflies. “This is a hybrid of the second series. I have just started considering my characters in pairs to discover the relationship of one set of characters with another set. Here you will see that the flowers are carried at the axes of the plant, over there they are at the terminal point. That is another of the characters that I am working with. Another is the seed color.” He snapped open a pod to reveal a row of glistening seeds. Six were yellow, two were green.

  “Oh.” There was something startling about seeing them lying there, couched in cool green, something disturbing and visceral, as though they had been discovered in their most intimate moment.

  “Take them.”

  She hesitated. “I can eat them?”

  “Of course.”

  “I can eat your experiment?”

  He offered up the cleaved pod. “Please.” She reached toward the seeds. Her fingers were thin and long, her nails as perfectly shaped as almonds. Mandel, almond. A single yellow pea was selected, nipped out by those nails, and lifted to her mouth. She had rouged lips, closed like a bud. He watched closely as she took the pea. There was a sudden glimpse of moist tongue.

  “Mmmm. Sweet.”

  “Take another.”

  “Really?”

  “A green one.” Somewhere in the background, one of the gardeners was clipping a hedge. The sound was a monotonous rhythm underlying the capricious delights of this presence beside him.

  “Green.” Another pea vanished. Her mouth worked. The sun seemed unduly hot for the time of year. He wiped his brow. “Another.”

  She complied. The peas went into her mouth … four, five, six, seven, eight. Six yellow, two green. Her jaw moved beneath the silk of her flushed cheek, her rot Wang. She laughed and he saw her teeth, as white as seed pearls, flecked with fragments of chewed pea. A ratio of three to one. She had eaten a three-to-one ratio.

  “Delicious,” she exclaimed.

  1. The “seed-leaf” that makes up most of the pea one eats.

  2. Fisher, Annals of Science 1, 1936, 115–37.

  3. Bruchus pisi.

  Dinner with Jean and Hugo Miller, at 34 Galton Avenue, Ruislip. It was a semidetached house of the kind that was cloned all over suburban England during the 1930s. When eugenics was at its height, when the Eugenics Society was campaigning for selective sterilization, and when Gropius and Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe were building concrete boxes all over the continent, this was what they gave the new man and his wife in Britain. “You can’t miss it,” she’d told me. “It’s the only one with the satellite dish painted to blend in with the brick.” And there indeed was the dish, painted in careful cryptic coloration and protruding from the wall just above the bay window. Everything else—the immaculately mown front lawn, the herbaceous border with stocks and sweet pea, the discreet gnome fishing in the bird-bath, the crazy-paving path, the garage with the Ford Escort standing outside—blended in perfectly with the rest of the street; but not the false brickwork of the satellite dish.

  Her husband greeted me at the front door. He was ginger-haired and blue-eyed (both autosomal recessives, chromosomes 4 and 19, respectively), and although the connection between short temper and red hair is entirely spurious, in Hugo Miller’s case you felt there was something in it. “You must be Doctor Lambert,” he told me, and his tone suggested that I had done something wrong, committed some hideous solecism.

  “There’s little alternative, is there?” I remarked, and he smiled angrily.

  In the narrow hall there was a hatrack without any hats (“the wife’s mad about antiques”) and a gleaming reproduction of an Edwardian telephone. On the wall was a print of Van Gogh’s bedroom at Arles—the room you couldn’t get out of because of the uncomfortable, lumpy bed blocking the door—and a framed certificate that proclaimed Hugo Miller a member of the Association of Registered Structural Engineers. There was also a smell, a cloying, cozy smell: the scent of domestic enclosure. “You don’t mind if I call you Ben, do you?” he asked as he showed me in. “I feel I know you already, the way the wife’s always talking about you. I might have got quite jealous.”

  Might have.

  We went through into the sitting room. Jean was waiting there with another couple. I forget their names—Coldstream? Downstream? The man was a colleague of Miller’s, a systems engineer, whatever that was; while his plump, curvaceous wife was “just a wife,” and giggled to prove it. I sat with my feet off the floor and watched the four of them through a potted fuchsia.

  “I’m so glad you could come, Benedict,” Jean said. She gave an anxious smile, as though trying out the expression for the first time. “Benedict is one of the leading researchers at the lab,” she explained. “He discovers genes. He’s awfully busy.”

  Her husband stared at me with pale eyes. “Oh, it’s Benedict, is it?”

  I shrugged. “Ben, Benedict, it doesn’t really matter. Not Benjamin, though.”

  “Benedict,” Miller repeated thoughtfully, as he attempted to strangle a bottle. He appeared to resent the fact that he had not been told. “Fine name, Benedict. Shakespearean. A very valiant trencherman, isn’t that right? An excellent stomach.”

  “That’s Benedick.”

  “We saw that wonderful film,” Mrs. Downstream added, and blushed. She was trying desperately not to stare, looking rather too much at her husband and at Jean, smiling rather too much when she did summon up the courage to look at me. Perhaps that made her inattentive to my line of vision. I glimpsed a smirk of secret white whenever she shifted her plump legs.

  Miller had finally uncorked the bottle. “Try that … Benedict.” He poured me a glass of wine and watched for my reaction almost as though he had thrown down a gauntlet or something. “It’s a little number we found on our last holiday. Comes from a bodega in Aldeanueva. Only one or two people know about it.”

  While Jean went out to the kitchen, the four of us sipped and nodded and agreed with Miller that, even in the world of wine, discoveries were still possible. That seemed to satisfy him. He liked people to agree
with him. There was a tension about him, as though every word he uttered was the opening of an argument. He sat back in his chair and watched me with those pallid eyes. “Jean thinks the world of you, you know that?” I felt he was looking for a slip, some error in my story that would show me up. “Knew you back home, didn’t she? She thinks you’re the local boy made good. Against all the odds, if you see what I mean.”

  I did see what he meant. So, presumably, did Mr. and Mrs. Downstream.

  “So tell us what you do, if it’s not too difficult for simple souls like us. I get all the gossip from Jean. Oh yes, I know all about the goings-on at your establishment. Olga and her affairs, all that kind of thing. What’s your particular angle?”

  “On Olga’s affairs?”

  There was strained laughter. “Your angle on genetics.”

  I shrugged. “It’s a bit boring, really. DNA probes, linkage analysis. We try to locate the actual position of genes on the chromosome.” Miller nodded and sucked his teeth and looked as though I was confirming what he already knew. Mrs. Downstream decided that it was all beyond her, she was sure, and she would go and see if Jean needed any help. Miller poured more wine, satisfied now that the men had been left alone. “I’ve been reading about the human genome project. Downloaded a whole lot of stuff from the Internet. You part of that?”

  “Almost everyone is.”

  “You know what they call it, don’t you? They call it HUGO. Human Genome Organization. How about that, eh?” He looked for applause, as though the merit were his. “Anyway, according to what I’ve read, it seems to me that soon enough we’re going to be able to order exactly what kind of children we want. Choosing the color of the eyes, choosing the sex, choosing anything you like. Kids by mail order.”

  “That’s rather a long way off.”

  “Don’t you believe it. Could be the biggest thing since penicillin. I’ve been on line to some clinic in the States and they’re advertising the thing already—test-tube babies, sperm sorting, all sorts of stuff. It’s not in the future, it’s here and now.”

  Jean and the Downstream woman came in with the food, and we all settled at the table. There was some bother about where I was to sit—a cushion was offered, that kind of thing. “Please,” I told them, “please just let me be. I’m quite all right.” But Miller insisted. There was a brittle quality about him, as though the glaze of goodwill might at any moment fracture. Once we were all settled at the table, he nodded toward his wife. “So if you’re a geneticist, how do you explain that, then?” It might have been some kind of challenge.

  “That?”

  “That.” We looked in vain. Jean blushed, and busied herself with serving vichyssoise. She alone knew what was coming. “The lady wife’s eyes,” Miller explained, as though stating the obvious. “I’ve always found it most alluring. But how do you explain it, eh? How does a geneticist explain that?”

  I saw Jean’s blush, and realized that I’d explained the thing to her before, over one of our lunches at The Pig and Poke. We’d laughed about it then. “You remind me of my teddy bear,” I’d told her. The memory gave me a tiny stir of pleasure. “Jean is a genetic mosaic. That’s what I’d guess.”

  “A mosaic!” Mrs. Downstream exclaimed. “HOW very artistic. I think that rather suits Jeanie. She has an artistic touch, what with her antiques and things. We saw mosaics on that trip to Rome, didn’t we, Ernest?” They did: polychromatic ones in some church or another, but there were so many of them, the churches that is, that they couldn’t remember the name.

  “Never mind that,” Miller said impatiently. “What’s a genetic mosaic?”

  I explained. Mosaic, chimera, I explained the classical monsters of the gene world. “You need to know what eye color Jean’s parents had …”

  Miller seemed surprised. “Don’t you know? I thought you knew one another as children …”

  “Blue,” Jean said. “Ben never met my parents. They had blue eyes, both of them.”

  “So one of the blue-eyed genes mutated to green. There’s a blue/green gene”—we laughed at the pun—“on chromosome 19, I think. I’d have to look it up to be sure. It would have just been a chance mutation.” I shrugged it off, as you do with mutations. “But very beautiful,” I added, and Jean blushed once more to be the object of this attention, to have her genome discussed in such intimate detail, and all the time we were, of course, skirting cautiously around another issue as though edging along the brink of a precipice: my own.

  Miller pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Then let me run this one across your bows, Ben,” he said. “I heard this chap on the radio the other day, some academic from Northern Ireland. Lynn the name? Richard Lynn? He said that there is a real danger of a decline in the genetic stock of this country. What do you think?” He poured more wine for himself, watching me with an expression that told you that he already knew, that he understood what was going through your mind, and that you were wrong. “Do you agree?”

  I shrugged. “What do you mean by ‘genetic stock’? And what do you mean by ‘decline’?”

  Jean sighed. The Downstreams paid careful attention to their plates, as though they already knew something that I didn’t. Miller’s eyes shifted. “This fellow Lynn said that it was very simple. People in high-grade jobs—us, say—have fewer and fewer children, whereas unskilled workers have more, so the majority of the population in the future is going to come from amongst the unskilled workers. Given that the unskilled are less intelligent than professional people, and given that intelligence is inherited, that means that the overall intelligence of the population is going to decline. QED.”

  “It’s outside my field, I’m afraid.”

  “No view, then?”

  “Oh, a view, yes, of course. But nothing to do with my work. You said I was a geneticist, but my work’s got nothing to do with this kind of thing. I’ve got a view about it, but it’s just a view like anybody else’s.”

  “And what about all those Africans that come over here? This Lynn fellow, he says that the best survey done of intelligence amongst Africans shows that they have an average IQ of sixty-nine.”

  I laughed. “I’d say Professor Lynn was talking nonsense.”

  “So he’s wrong, is he?”

  “He’s saying exactly the kind of thing that people said at the turn of the century. It was wrong then, and I don’t see why it should become right now.”

  “What do you mean by wrong, eh? Morally wrong, is that it?”

  “Scientifically wrong. No evidence for it.”

  “But there are tests. He quoted them.”

  “With results like that, I’d worry about the test itself more than the people.”

  “Well, what about genetic disease, then? What about this cystic fibrosis we all hear about? Or anything like that. Now that’s your field, isn’t it? You can’t deny that, can you? Diabetes and stuff. Don’t we keep all these people alive and allow them to breed, and doesn’t that mean that their mutations are kept in the population? Doesn’t that Francis Crick fellow say that such people shouldn’t be allowed to breed? What about natural selection, eh? Haven’t we eliminated natural selection? We keep people alive when in the wild they’d be eliminated because they’re weaker, don’t we? What does Doctor Benedict think of that?”

  “Hugo, please,” said Jean. “Let’s talk about something a bit easier.”

  He turned to her. His tone was very patient. “Let me talk, will you, dear?”

  She looked at me. It was difficult to read her expression. Apology? Warning? Pity?

  “You can’t expect me to applaud the law of the jungle, can you?” I asked. “If the law of the jungle held sway, I’d be dead.”

  Jean closed her eyes. Mrs. Downstream said, “Oh, I’m sure not.” Hugo Miller considered my statement. His face was mottled, as though he was attempting to hide a great anger. “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with your living,” he said. “But what about breeding, eh? Should people like you be allowed to breed?”

 
Embarrassment, adolescent embarrassment. It is an insidious thing because it possesses no status in the hierarchy of emotions. No one wrote poetry about embarrassment. Embarrassment is something you ought to grow out of, like acne; but you don’t. I clambered down from my seat like a child dismissed from the table. I ought to have stayed and fought. Benedict Lambert ought to have brought his celebrated, acerbic wit into play. He ought to have destroyed Miller with a few well-aimed shafts. But he didn’t. He merely and absurdly felt a fool.

  “Please don’t fuss,” I said to Jean. “Just let me go.” But of course she saw me out just the same, apologizing as she opened the door, following me down the crazy-paving to the gate, apologizing all the time. “Hugo doesn’t mean harm. It’s just his manner. He likes to provoke …”

  I told her to forget it. I explained that, like freckles or a harelip or a squint, you get inured to it. It was water off a duck’s back. And suddenly she gave a little cry, as though of pain, and crouched down as you might for a child, and kissed me on the lips, there on the pavement outside number 34 Galton Avenue, encircled by the embarrassing spotlight of a street lamp. “You’re so brave, Ben,” she whispered. “You always were. So brave.”

  I shook my head. “Not brave,” I told her. “In order to be brave, you’ve got to have a choice.” Then I clambered into the car and slammed the door.

  She stood on the pavement to watch me drive away. She didn’t wave, but held out both her hands open, as though in supplication. I noticed the Downstreams peering through the net curtains of the bay window, making of the scene whatever they could. There was no sign of Hugo Miller.

  A curious sensation. There is a desire to weep, of course, but you learn early not to give in to that. Lachrymal duct defect may be an inheritable condition, but my dry eyes have nothing to do with any such mutation—they are simply a result of practice. Instead of tears you learn to feel anger, anger directed at a variety of targets: the perpetrator of the offense; humanity in general; the nameless forces that have driven you to this fruitless, impotent emotion; and yourself—as though somehow you are to blame for your condition. And this anger is combined with a desire for revenge, of course. I’m only human, after all. So, a desire for revenge, a desire to see Hugo Miller beg for forgiveness or mercy or something. And something else, something infinitely more dangerous than any of those emotions: hope. That kiss, you see. Oh, like Dinah’s kiss, of course: an accident, a pure piece of mismanagement, a stray shot, aimed at the cheek but wandering off target because of the effort of bending down to my level. Or worse, if not an accident, if actually intended, then perhaps meant as some kind of consolation. Whichever way, not significant. And yet I hoped. You hope against hope, even after thirty and more years, you hope.