by Simon Mawer
“She’ll do them all, then.”
“Dawn, she’s called. Her voice wasn’t as good as mine. Isn’t. Isn’t as good.”
And Father Gregor, what exactly did he believe? Some of his letters are extant. Iltis quotes from them in the biography. There are letters to his nephew Alois Schindler, to his parents and his brother-in-law, to one of his fellow friars, and of course there are the ten he wrote to Nägeli. In none of them is there a mention of God. Not a mention, not even a conventional piety.
My Dear Parents … Your grateful son, Gregor.
Nothing else. When he tells them of the attempt on the Emperor’s life in Vienna (1853), Franz Joseph’s escape is merely “lucky.” Not “by the grace of God”; just “lucky.” The failed assassin is “executed on the 26th of last month,” but no mercy of God is invoked. Mendel was delighted to learn that everyone was well at home and that his younger sister was happy in her married life. He sent his love. He didn’t send his blessing. He merely sent “good wishes for the Easter holidays”; and signed himself their “grateful son, Gregor.”
It is hard to demonstrate a negative, but at the very least all this epistolary evidence points to a priest who had managed a remarkable separation of faith from daily life. At a time when Charles Darwin, who once planned on taking holy orders, is struggling with the religious implications of his scientific work, Gregor Mendel is apparently ignoring them entirely. For example, in 1870, when a tornado struck the city of Brünn, he wrote a long account of the phenomenon for the Society for Natural Science (they may not have appreciated the work on inheritance in garden peas, but at least they’d be able to understand this):
Although the spectacle is a most imposing one from a distance, a tornado is extremely disagreeable and dangerous for all those who come into close contact with it … it is only to a lucky chance that I owe my having got off with nothing more than a fright.
Not the hand of God, you’ll note. Lucky chance. After a meticulous, objective, exact description of the storm (our tornado was an exception to the law which meteorology has recently established for the rotating of storms in the northern hemisphere, according to which the rotation is always counter-clockwise … all the objects that were hurled in through the eastern windows of my quarters came from the SSE, SE, and ESE … but according to the law of circular storms the missiles ought to have come from the NNE, NE, and ENE …), he goes on to give an account of some local women, in town for the grape harvest, and their views of the phenomenon:
… they came to the conclusion that Old Nick had broken loose, and they took refuge in a neighboring watchman’s hut. But the Evil One sought them out in this retreat, for a moment later the roof was torn from above their heads, and they had much ado to save themselves from being carried away with it … my informant was greatly concerned lest he should scatter the burning brands he was obviously carrying with him over the town …
Old Nick. No hand of the Almighty, no God moving in a mysterious way (the cause of tornadoes is still uncertain, and Mendel’s own explanation is impressive in its attempt to link objective observation to physical theory), no merciful God letting the good people of the town off with nothing more than damage to buildings. In fact, no God at all. Just a joke about the superstitions of peasant women.
I have a theory about that storm. In a letter dated September 1870, Mendel is still reporting optimistically on how his work is going; but a mere fortnight later the storm struck. His report to the Society for Natural Science, Mendel doesn’t even mention it, but that storm destroyed the magnificent greenhouse in the monastery garden, the greenhouse that he had used for more than a decade for much of his experimental work. I think the destruction of the greenhouse, coming as it did on top of the scientific world’s indifference to his discoveries, broke his heart. It wasn’t God, of course; it was nothing more than the same lady whom Mendel understood so well, who was, is, so much a part of his theory of inheritance—random, destructive, but also occasionally creative Lady Luck.
And Benedict Lambert? What is his relationship with the Prime Mover?
“Don’t you believe, Ben?” Jean asked me sorrowfully. She asked it more than once, as though in the meantime I might have changed my mind, or seen the error of my ways, or suffered my own road to Damascus. “Don’t you believe in anything?”
“I believe you’re sitting there. I believe in you.”
“But that’s obvious.”
“That’s why I believe it. A merciful, personal God is far less obvious, which is why I don’t believe it. You must admit”—I held my hands out, as though to display myself just in case she hadn’t noticed—“it’s a bit difficult to believe that a loving God could do this to me.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Ben,” she said. “Poor, poor Ben.”
But, of course, there is more to it than merely being a victim of one of nature’s practical jokes. There is also my work. You see, in my work I have called God’s bluff—I have looked behind the scenery. From the auditorium the whole set looks very impressive. There is a reasonable three-dimensional effect, a sense of perspective, an adequate illusion of depth. You can even believe it well enough when you are actually on stage and trying to remember your lines, trying to come in on cue, trying not to upstage one actor or steal the scene from another. But I have peered behind the scenery … and there’s nothing there. Just the darkness and a few bits of scaffolding. Nothing else. Not even the back wall of the theater.
Give me a platform and I can move the earth. Archimedes, of course—everyone knows that. But he was talking more than just a bit of elementary physics. He knew that he hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of moving the earth. He too had seen behind the scenery.
Give me the nucleotides and I can make Man in my own image.
How did Jean reconcile her faith with the fact that she was living in sin? That is a question I failed to answer. So too did she, I guess. It weighed on her, that’s certain. Those few weeks together were eaten into by guilt. Exactly how is difficult to explain. At the time I didn’t want to inquire too much, didn’t even want to talk about it, in case, as with so many phenomena in science, the mere act of observation changes what you are observing. Best leave it alone and see what happens.
And then again, does it matter? Seen from another perspective, those weeks appear strangely ephemeral, an evanescent coming together of persons to make a transgenic creature that doesn’t survive long, a chimera.
The practicalities of the relationship? You want to know, of course. How did we do this, how did we arrange that? How did we …?
What do you want—photographs?
I didn’t move into the bedroom with her. I suppose I wanted to spare her the fright of seeing me as I was; and as she never suggested that I should, I guess that she was happy to be spared. So it was in all-forgiving and all-absorbing darkness that we actually coupled. Sometimes it was funny—no, at first it was always funny—and sometimes it was ecstatic. Often we laughed; sometimes we wept; and occasionally, just occasionally, I had the sensation that I was almost freed from my bonds. Whoever, whatever, tied the knots of this tortured and twisted body of mine, for those few weeks Jean’s agile fingers began to loosen them. Sometimes I felt that her perfect body was almost consuming my own, the beautiful engulfing the ugly, the good swallowing up the evil; but on other occasions I sensed that I was fouling her.
You may have detected a change of tone in that passage. Benedict Lambert has lost his sharp, sour cynicism. Well, yes—for a while. But I’ll bring it back, don’t worry. Modern stories don’t have happy endings. For the moment, though, leave me with that: connubial bliss, domestic contentment, spiritual communion; and strange looks from the neighbors. At the corner shop I think they presumed we were brother and sister. At the Institute we began to keep strictly apart, indeed we actually stopped our biweekly lunches; and like any new wife she complained that she saw less of me than she used to before it all happened.
“You’re always coming bac
k late.”
“Do you want to see more of me?” I asked.
She looked at me thoughtfully, her mismatched eyes seeing more than I ever used to give them credit for. “What do you want me to say, Ben? Of course I do.”
“Is that the truth?”
“Of course it’s the truth.”
“The whole truth?”
“Is this a court of law?”
“What are you hiding, then?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Ben, I’m hiding nothing.” She laughed. One of those bad-tempered, dismissive laughs. But I did wonder what her motives were for all this. I wondered it then, in my ignorance; I wonder it now, in my wisdom.
“I don’t understand what you see in me,” I told her, and her reply was subtly tangential to the question:
“It’s precisely what I see in you that matters.”
The trouble was, I had no experience, nothing beyond that awful abortive friendship with the girl called Dinah. I had no yardstick against which to measure things, no test of fidelity, no assay of affection. In the laboratory I understood the context in which my molecules, my fragments of DNA, my pet proteins, operated; living with Jean I was adrift. Often I found her distracted and miserable—“What’s wrong?” “Nothing.” “Is it my fault?” “No”—and I had no means of judging whether the problem was trivial or terminal. Sometimes she would laugh at something—a silly, edgy laugh—and I didn’t know whether it was laughter at my expense, or our expense, or just at herself.
So what did I bring to her? Isn’t love an exchange, a give and take? What was my own contribution to this ménage à une et demi, apart from sarcasm and impatience and an ego the size of my own overgrown head? Well, there is one part of my body that is entirely unaffected by my condition, I can assure you. I have already told you that. Once the barriers were down, once we had slipped past them and reached the territory of shared delights, Jean Piercey clung to that particular part with all the desperation of a shipwreck victim clinging to the wreckage.
I warned you that cynicism would return.
Then she began to tell lies. Truth is, after all, only relative, and even DNA, that most innocent of molecules, lies. For example, the dinucleotide sequence CG is a mutational hot spot1—the cytosines (C) of such pairs tend to be methylated, and a methylated cytosine may be deaminated into thymine (T). Thus the message no longer reads CG but TG, and when the molecule replicates, the mistake will be repeated: the other strand in the ladder will no longer have GC but AC. A mutation. The lie will have been repeated, and like any lie it may be repeated often enough to be mistaken for the truth.
The result is me.
Jean’s lies were similarly trivial in their essence—hushed conversations on the phone, terminated abruptly when I came in (“Oh, no one that matters. A friend, that’s all”), unexplained absences from the library, that kind of thing. Nothing that mattered or was even significant except to a mind such as mine. I knew that she had been in touch with Hugo, but this was not that. I am trained to spot the lie, to pick out the mismatch, to see the mutation. This was something other. Eventually I confronted her, sat her down in the armchair in the sitting room, with subdued afternoon light coming down the light shaft from the exiguous garden, and quizzed her. She looked away from me.
“What’s going on, Jean?” I repeated. “You’re hiding something from me. What is it? Look at me, for Christ’s sake.” I remember that her tape of On an Overgrown Path was playing, the piece entitled “The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away!” with its strange arpeggios and measured, hymnlike melody.
She looked at me. One blue eye, one green. The sky and the earth. “I’m pregnant,” she said.
1. Duncan and Miller (1980), “Mutagenic deamination of cytosine residues in DNA,” Nature 287, 560–61.
Doctor Benedict Lambert and Miss Jean Piercey discuss the future. The future is a mere jot buried somewhere within the endometrium of her uterus, a thing no larger than a grain of wheat but infinitely more alive. They discuss the chances, which are, precisely, fifty-fifty one to one, one half, point five. It’s the same thing, however you wish to look at it. I chose my words with care: “There’s a fifty-percent chance of it being”—pausing, loathing the word, finding no other—“normal. At present, prenatal diagnosis by ultrasound is uncertain. Anyway, it isn’t possible at all until after the twenty-fifth week, which is rather late. So it’s the toss of a coin …”
“Then we’ve got to stop it.”
“Of course. If that’s what you want. I can hardly plead on the part of the child.”
Her eyes, her matchless eyes, blistered with tears. “You’re not being fair.”
“Tossing a die isn’t very fair. It just happens.”
Abruptly she changed tone, like changing gear in a car. From muddled pleading she endeavored to become businesslike. “But we’re responsible. And the situation that we’re in. I mean, I’m still married. And we’re not. So how could we possibly …?”
I held up my hand. “There’s no argument. I agree.”
“But you’ve got to see things from my point of view. From his point of view—”
“His? That’s a toss of a coin as well. Same odds.”
She snapped at me. “His, hers, you know what I mean.”
“I do. I’ve agreed. There’s nothing more to discuss.”
“It’d be a terrible problem for the child, Ben,” she said. “Our situation—”
“Me, that’s what you mean. Me. The child might be like me.” That brought a moment’s silence.
“That’s being unfair.”
“Of course I’m being unfair. Unfair is the only weapon I have.”
She looked down at me. Miss Jean Piercey looked down at me just as I had, for so long, looked down on her. “All right, Ben,” she said. “If you want to force me to say it, I will: the child might be like you. And I wouldn’t want that.”
I am inured to hurt. You build bastions around you, Maginot lines of defenses, iron curtains of barbed wire and razor wire, minefields and free-fire zones. Watchtowers stand guard and searchlights play over the whole area with a chalky, bleak whiteness, throwing everything into harsh relief. There are no gates. And Jean Piercey had walked through, past the guards, over the tripwires, ducking beneath the coils of wire and skipping round the fencing and lying down before me with that magical, impossible thing: a normal body. Oh, how I loved her body! I’ll avoid the question of soul and stick with matters of the flesh, things I can measure, things I can understand. How I loved the trivial imperfections of her body, the rough skin of her knees, the tiny tributaries of broken veins on her legs, the variegations of color on her hands, the faint brushstrokes of hair on her arms, the embarrassed flush of a blackhead on her chin, the mole on her thigh, the looseness of her breasts, the unevenness of flesh around her nipples, the strange, hypnotic fragrance of beast and angel, of mire and myrrh, that hung about her. And this body wanted to destroy my child, which might be me, a second Benedict, another squat and crumpled creature, betrayed by mutation and the courtly dance of chromosomes.
Well, of course. What would you have done?
The technicalities were easy: Certificate A of the 1967 Act (not to be destroyed within three years of the date of operation) to be completed by two medical doctors—
We hereby certify that we are of the opinion, formed in good faith, that—(ring clause number four)—there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped.
—and a booking made at a convenient clinic. They were very caring people at the clinic, full of gentle explanations couched in reassuring terms. One of the counselors took me into her office. It was a homely place with positive pictures on the wall: Van Gogh’s sunflowers, a Bonnard of a half-naked girl washing herself at a zinc tub, a Monet of a boating party on the Seine. Did those ethereal girls in silk chiffon get pregnant, I wondered? It seemed unlikely. The fat-bottomed girl at the tub was quite another thing
: she probably already was, and by someone else’s husband.
“Are you a friend of Jean’s?” the counselor asked. Her phenotype was difficult to ascertain: hair dyed pale silver, eyebrows meticulously plucked, irises glinting behind tinted contact lenses, skin burnished by UV light, body strapped and girded and padded.
“I’m the father. Not of Jean Piercey,” I added with a smile. “Of her child.”
Barely a flicker across the featureless maquillage. “I see.”
“I’m sure you do. That makes it pretty incontrovertible, doesn’t it? The argument for abortion, I mean. No adequate prenatal test. Fifty-fifty chance of ending up like me. Who’d bet a lifetime on the toss of a coin?”
She gave an abstract smile, abstract in the sense that it signified neither amusement nor sympathy, nor anything else that might normally be subsumed under the signifier smile. “Termination,” she corrected me. “Not abortion. And once the medical decisions have been made, the reasons are not our concern.”
“I’m sure not. But I expect they’d have agreed if there was a one-percent chance of a cleft palate, so who can complain?”
“Jean is the one we need to care for now,” she said.
“Of course. We’re hardly caring for the child, are we?”
“The conceptus,” she said. “A child is quite another thing.”
“It certainly is. Do you know what my job is?”
“Is that of any importance, sir? We came here to talk about Jean. But if you only wish to talk about yourself …”
“I’m a geneticist,” I said. “I work on DNA probes to try to identify genetic disorders. So far I’ve failed to find one that will enable my own condition to be identified, and as a result of that failure I’m conniving at the destruction of my own child.”
Her tone never wavered. “Would you like to speak to another of our counselors, sir? We have Mr. Morgan available at the moment.”