by Simon Mawer
“Brünn, Gregor. We are leaving Brünn.”
He stopped, straightened up. She looked around distractedly, searching for her parasol. The dog jumped up, wagging its tail, eager to be off. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you going?”
“Oh.” She shrugged vaguely. “I’m expected at home. By lunchtime.”
“No, Brünn: why are you leaving Brünn? For how long?”
She blushed, picked up her parasol, almost tripped over the dog. “Forever. There are business reasons, of course, but Herr Rotwang also feels the political situation is too … uncertain. Oh, I don’t understand these things. This trouble with the Prussians in Denmark. Holstein, is that it? He feels it may come to war, and Vienna will be safer. Can it really come to war over a quarrel in a faraway place of which we know nothing?”
The priest shrugged. He rarely discussed politics. He had views, of course—even, in his youth, strong ones. But involvement was a thing he shunned. They argued politics in the convent, Klacel and the others, but he tried not to get too involved. Involvement tainted you. He looked at Frau Rotwang. So admirable, so modest a lady. “We’ll keep the country house, of course,” she was saying. “But I am afraid we won’t often be here in Brünn. The town house is up for sale.”
“It’ll be different,” he said. “Without you, I mean.” The inadequacies of language; but then what else was there? There were only words. No other language applied. And words could be both a barrier and a revelation. Look what had happened, or hadn’t happened, to the paper on the garden pea. He began to put the microscope away. “I will miss our talks.”
She put out her hand and touched his arm. “I don’t want to go, Gregor,” she said, and he turned back to her and there was a moment, mere seconds in time, in which, somehow, they held hands, clumsily, he holding the back of hers—very slender, gloved in lace—and she half turning her hand so that her fingers held his. The dog whined. In the background the gardener inverted a pot, knocked it sharply, and removed a plant entire. In that moment Frau Rotwang leaned forward and kissed the friar on the cheek. Then she had called the dog and was walking over the brick floor between the plants toward the door, toward the bright, fresh day. She paused and bent to put the dog on its leash, then put up her parasol (bright pink with ribboned edges) and went out. He stood watching her through the misty panes as she went down the path toward the gate that gave onto the Klosterplatz where her carriage waited.
Miss Jean Piercey, Mrs. Jean Miller, down-soft, angora-soft, scented gently with jasmine and orange blossom, tasting of sweet pea, and sweat, and pee, a delicate and rancid melding of flavors that drove Benedict Lambert to paroxysms of tumescence: Miss Piercey, lying on my bed again, lying in the light of day seeping through the curtains into my underground lair, lying with her smile, telling the truth with her closed and averted eyes.
“Oh, Ben,” she whispered, “be careful.”
Of course. We couldn’t risk anything. We had to be careful, if one can be careful with such a thing. So she lay there passively, being careful, while I ordered her this way and that, lapping at the secret smile of her vulva, nuzzling like a truffle-hound at the downy excrescence of her femoral mole, biting, gently, the silk of her inguina and the mouse-gray of her perineum, turning her and holding open the globes of her buttocks, Miller-like, to kiss the slate-gray bud at the very quick of her. She stirred and moaned, like an animal in distress. Tight muscles unclenched like a fist to allow the entry of the tip of my tumescent tongue. I balanced behind her on the bed and poised myself against her. “Ben!” she cried from somewhere distant and indistinct. “Oh, Ben. Ben, not that. Please not that.”
But it was that. While she buried her face in the pillow and made muffled mouse-sounds of pain, it was that. A sudden explosion into the void. And quite safe.
Does it shock you? The genial and courageous Benedict Lambert suddenly become the dastard, the pervert? But what do you expect? What would you do if you had a life sentence and one miserable hour of freedom? Wouldn’t you be tempted to break a few of the rules?
Afterwards it was soft tears and gentle recriminations and apologies. I couldn’t help myself, I pleaded. You must understand. To possess you as no other ever has or ever will. Very poetic. To take a virginity from you that will never belong to anyone else. Surely you must understand. And she claimed that she did, more or less, although it didn’t seem right, that’s all. Not natural.
But what is natural? Nature is what nature does. Am I natural? Is superovulation followed by transvaginal ultrasound-guided oocyte retrieval natural? Is in vitro fertilization and the growth of multiple embryos in culture, is all that natural? Two months later, in a lab in the Hewison Clinic for Human Fertility, I watched shivering spermatozoa clustering around eggs, my spermatozoa clustering around her eggs. Consummation beneath the microscope. Is that natural? They shone in the circle of light like dancers beneath the spotlight, a whole corps de ballet flickering and jostling round the prima ballerina. Jean’s contribution had come after the heavy, coaxing hand of hormones, followed by aspiration of secondary oocytes direct from the ovaries. My contribution had come after the heavy coaxing of my own hand and a careful contemplation of Suzanne, a voluminous girl with a tendency to examine her labia minora in front of the camera.
Is that natural?
Nature is what nature does.
Was Great-great-great-uncle Gregor’s artificial pollination natural?
“I really don’t like it, Ben.” Doctor Anthony Lupron is a friend and colleague of mine. We have published jointly. We have drunk together, and on one occasion—his winning of fifty pounds on the football pools—got drunk together. I have stayed with the Lupron family in their cottage in Devon. I know his wife and children well. But Doctor Lupron did need persuading.
“What’s the problem? You’ve spoken to Jean. You know the situation. You’ve seen his sperm count. What’s the problem?”
“Not informing the partner, that’s the problem.”
I laughed. “But why should you worry about that? I mean, even if her husband were normally fertile, what would there be to stop her getting pregnant by whomever she chooses and never telling? You know as well as I do that it happens all the time.”
He knew as well as I did that DNA screening for familial genetic defects (fragile X, cystic fibrosis, etc.) has quite incidentally revealed that, all unbeknownst to the legal father, something like ten percent of the children of happily married couples have in fact been fathered by … a different male.
“I suppose so.”
“And you know that she has already been pregnant once. By me.”
He grinned. “You old devil, Ben.”
“And you know that the only alternative to what we suggest would be sperm donation, and Miller has already refused to contemplate that. And …”
The argument, you see, was incontrovertible.
I bumped into Jean and Hugo in the waiting room of the clinic after they had harvested the eggs. Hugo looked relieved at the sight of a familiar face; Jean blushed and looked away. We exchanged a few companionable words: It’s wonderful what they can do these days, isn’t it? What do you think the chances are? Doctor Lupron said we’ll know in two days. No, it didn’t hurt—they put me almost to sleep.
And then I left them to contemplate their parental future.
Which leads to the other question: What about Hugo Miller’s semen, yielded with autocaresses similar to my own, in a room just down the corridor from the place where Suzanne and I took part in our ephemeral and one-sided relationship? What about that vital fluid, surrendered with much blushing to a severely smiling nurse?
Glutinous, pearl gray, and entirely devoid of motile spermatozoa, Hugo Miller’s semen was flushed down the sink.
The fertilized eggs divide. There is a curious asymmetry about their progress: 2, 3, 4, 6, 10. You let them go that far, to the ten-cell stage. It is all natural enough. But is the magnified eye that gazes down at them nat
ural? Is the light that floods them with photons for the brief examination? And the micro-manipulators, elaborate little constructions of girderwork mounted on the microscope, Meccano creations of levers and handles and gears such as some manic child might have dreamed up, handled with such elegant skill (I watched down the auxiliary eyepiece) by Miss Allele MacMaster, graduate research student from Saint Andrews; are those particular tools natural? Is this why Australopithecus fumbled with the first fragment of flint? Allele’s delicate little Pictish hand twists and turns, and in the bleak field of the microscope the glass needle, as brilliant and sharp as a lance, skewers an embryo’s zona pellucida to inject a drop of acid Tyrode’s solution. There is a moment’s fumbling and jostling beneath the spotlight. The lance withdraws. A second probe is pushed through the hole and a single embryonic cell is snatched from the jaws of differentiation and development and spat into a separate tube.
PCR amplification of a gene from a single cell is possible. It is not easy, but it is possible.1 I did the work myself. Among all the other tubes, among the cultures and the clutter, it was easy enough to have a few things of my own, labeled with my own cryptic codes. To avoid contamination from stray DNA, I used new equipment with disassembled and sterilized micropipettes, and I set the tubes up in the sterile room. It is therapeutic work. You lose yourself in the method, in the regimented sequence of events, in the order and the organization. You forget about lost lovers. You forget about ethics. You forget that you are picking at the genetic material of your own potential children. The method is the message.
Once the right length of DNA has been amplified (60 cycles of PCR using nested primers to guarantee purity), it is the simplest matter in the world to perform a restriction digest2 and find out whether there is that rogue misspelling, that fuck for luck, that AGG for GGG deep in the heart of the FGFR3 gene. The enzyme digests … or doesn’t digest; and then the sample of digested—or undigested—DNA is loaded onto a gel and a gentle electric potential eases the fragments along, jostling and straining. Digested fragments travel farther, because smaller, than undigested pieces. The DNA is stained with ethidium bromide so that the fragments may be viewed directly under ultraviolet light to find out how far they have gone, and whether there are the telltale digested fragments that mean:
MUTATION
and therefore:
DWARF
or not. A 164-base-pair fragment means normal. Jean would have given that to all the eggs. If the sample for a particular embryo contains only fragments of that size, then her 164-bp contribution has been matched by an identical one of mine, and the embryo is unaffected. If, beside her 164-bp fragment, the lane also shows a 109- and a 55-bp fragment, then that embryo has received the mutation from me.
It was evening when I finally pulled on a rubber glove and picked the slab of gel out of its mold. It shivered in my hand like something on the edge of life, a cloudy gray submarine growth, a jellyfish. I retreated to the dark room. It took no more than a few moments to put on a protective mask, to clamber onto a stool, to lay the gel on the viewer, to snap on the UV light, and bring the slab of jelly to life. Deep inside glowed bands of ghostly mauve.
“What’s that?” Eric asked, barging in for something or other.
“Oh, nothing special.”
He put on goggles and peered over my shoulder. “Isn’t that one of ours?”
“Just checking something.”
He barged out again. The slab of jelly looked like any other of the hundreds of gels we had run. It could have been any one of them; but it was mine.
Besides the controls there were eight lanes. Eight lanes, eight embryos:
You don’t have to be an expert to read it, do you? It was one of Uncle Gregor’s ratios. Embryos 2, 5, 6, and 7 were unaffected; 1, 3, 4, and 8 were carrying the mutation. Fifty-fifty. One to one. One half. Chance, pure chance out of such a small sample as eight, had conspired to make it exact. Four of those fragile clusters of jelly, four of those proto-Benedicts or proto-Jeans, had received the extra restriction site from their erstwhile father. They were carrying the achondroplasia gene and would become, without a shadow of doubt, like me. The other four were clear. And I could decide.
The Rotwang family went to Vienna, as so many families had done in the past and would do in the coming years, fleeing political unrest. For the moment Vienna was far enough, but within seventy years you would have to travel to another continent altogether to be quite safe, and the people you would be fleeing from were those who had turned genetics into a creed.
That torrid summer, Mendel forgot Frau Rotwang. Memory is a labile thing. Whatever he had thought of her, he forgot her. At least he expunged her from the surface of his memory, from that part that wrestled with the intricate dance of genes. That torrid summer an attack of the pea weevil, Bruchus pisi, decimated his crop and he was constrained to abandon the plants that had been his children for almost a decade. He sniffed and shrugged and turned to the other species. Stubborn, bespectacled, introverted, he wandered among the beans and the four-o’clock, the campanula and the snapdragons, his scissors snipping away at anthers, his camel-hair brush slipping, penis-like, between the petals and dusting pollen from one flower to another. He collected the seeds, labeled them, and stored them; and the next season planted them out once more and waited. Yet again seeds swelled and sprouted, lines and lines of them—radicles nosing down into the soil, plumules ascending into the air, cotyledons opening to the sun like a pair of grasping hands. Rows and rows of fragile seedlings watched over by the friar, counted, reckoned, balanced—stock, maize, four-o’clock …
His ideas held, more or less (although he complained often enough to anyone who would listen about the difficulty of finding suitable plants, and the lack of time, and the lack of notice that anyone took): if you take two different varieties and cross them artificially, the offspring resemble one of the parents. (It was not always so: in four-o’clock, Mirabilis jalapa, for example, the hybrids were often intermediate between the two parents for flower color; but that didn’t upset him. Dominance was not always complete.) Then, if you self-pollinate the hybrids, the next generation gives you a ratio of three-to-one for any particular character pair; or, if the dominance was not complete as in Mirabilis, one-to-two-to-one. He had seen the same thing happen in mice. It meant that his simple mathematical model held true: inheritance was governed by particles, one contributed by each parent, no mingling of blood. There was nothing mysterious about it, nothing vague or mystical, no nameless fluids or influences, no hand of God. Just the plain facts of probability, a handing out of beads to children, like a gift from each parent, one bead from each parent for each inherited character.
Of course there were complications—pod color in Phaseolus (bean), for example. In this case he crossed dwarf bean, which has white flowers, with scarlet runner, which has scarlet flowers. The almost infertile hybrids had a variety of flower colors, ranging from scarlet to pale violet, and white flowers appeared only rarely (one in every thirty-one). Nevertheless, other characters (height, for example) obeyed the same rules as in his original peas, and even the flower color could probably be explained if, instead of the color arising from just one inherited factor, it was actually the result of two or more factors working additively.3 This would also explain the range of different colors obtained. Moreover, in the case of stocks (Matthiola) he obtained precisely similar results to the pea …
But who would listen?
He even set up fertilizations under the microscope, using single pollen grains, in order to demonstrate that his assumption of one pollen grain to one ovule was true.4 But who cared?
He demonstrated more of his hybrids to the Society for Natural Science, but species hybrids this time, things the members could understand, mules of the plant world, mongrels, bastards, mulattoes, half-castes, complex mixtures showing a blending of various characters that the audience could relate to, but that were essentially uncountable and therefore of no real scientific interest. They did not w
ant the mathematics of chance and probability or a deduction about the existence of inheritable, discrete factors. They did not, assuredly they did not, want to stare the future in the eye. “Science is physics; or it is stamp collecting,” Ernest Rutherford said. Stamp collecting was what interested the Brünn Society for Natural Science. They wanted to see bizarre crosses and strange monsters, neither one thing nor the other, neither fish nor fowl. It was the educated class’s version of going to the freak shows in the Klosterplatz. It almost came as a surprise when von Niessl (doubt that von) asked him to prepare his lecture on the pea in the form of a paper for inclusion in the Proceedings of the Society for the year 1865.
For publication Mendel went back to his original data. He tells us that in one of his letters. He went back to the original data and worked long hours going over the counts and tallies, checking them through, recalculating ratios, finding nothing out of place; then even longer hours copying it in his meticulous copperplate hand.
That torrid summer, like the thunderstorms that built up in the afternoon sky, the political crisis broke. Who now recalls the Schleswig-Holstein question, or remembers that there was a Seven Weeks’ War between Prussia and Austria? But that torrid summer, following the triumph or disaster (it depends on your point of view) at the battle of Königgrätz, the Austrian army was routed and Brünn was occupied by Prussian troops. They came as a surprise, a storm out of a calm summer day, preceded by nothing more than a vague sense of unease and a few fantastic rumors. At one moment there was the ordinary life of the city, and then, suddenly, Prussian soldiers were parading in the Grosse Platz with their pickelhauben and their new breech-loading rifles. Their band played in the Augarten. They performed elaborate maneuvers in the parks beside the Schramm-Ring and the Kaiser-Ring. The King of Prussia visited the city just as Napoleon had before the battle of Austerlitz (who could have doubted that everyone saw the parallel); and a troop of cavalry was billeted on the monastery.