by Simon Mawer
“Do you mean have I dumped you in it? Do you mean have I played the kind of practical joke on you that life played on me? That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it? Did I close my eyes and pick one out at random? God knows, that’s what God did with me.”
She made a sound, like the cry of a mammal in pain. “Ben,” she cried. “Ben … please …”
And suddenly fulfillment was transformed into anger. Anger at the docile stupidity of her, at the pleading, whining kindness of her, at her naïveté. “Well, you’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?” I said to her. Then I put the phone down.
Unforgivable? Have I forfeited all sympathy? But you must understand I have never looked for your sympathy. Even if at times I have gained it, I can assure you I have never sought it out. Sympathy is an unctuous, slimy emotion. It is tainted with Schadenfreude, rank with contempt, fetid with the implication that I, the target, am somehow less than you, the sympathizer. I don’t want your sympathy. I have never asked for it. Never so much as once have I played the poor, sad dwarf, smiling through his tears.
Another call that was put through to me that morning was from the BBC. One Jake Toogood. “You must be just about sick of people calling at the moment,” he said, and I agreed with him heartily. “But I was wondering whether we might meet up to discuss the possibility of our doing a documentary about you. Not just the scientific thing, but the personal interest as well. How does that sound?”
“I really don’t think—”
“Just a chat, to see how the land lies. Don’t throw me out without hearing me out, there’s a good fellow.”
Jean standing at the mouth of my cave. Jean pallid about the mouth, the iron railings standing over her head like a crown of virtue. Jean railing at me with accusation and censure. Jean clambering up onto the moral high ground while descending the steps that lead down to the door, a different Jean from the shrinking gray moth of the past. “How could you do this, Ben?” She spoke in italics, almost as though speaking to an idiot child that has crapped on the carpet. “How could you do this to me?” She was dressed all in black, as though she had come to mourn something.
“You’d better come in.”
“Are you trying to get revenge or something? Is that it?”
“No, it’s not it.”
“Because you’ve succeeded. Oh yes, you’ve succeeded.” Her accent slipped when she was angry, the ugly vowels of the Midlands breaking through the varnish that she had acquired since moving to London. “You’ve had your revenge. You’ve had it.”
I ushered her in through the front door, watching the way she moved, eyeing her from the angle of Ben, examining the sleek and subtle motion of her legs, the delicate flexing of them as she sat at one of the upright chairs (designed for normal people, this one). “Stop looking at me like that.” She turned away from my gaze, her hand going distractedly to her hair as though she felt something was out of place. Her eyes, those mismatched eyes, stared round my cave with a vagrant cast in them. “You’ve changed the curtains.”
“I’ve changed my life.”
“Don’t try that.” She looked back at me and shook her head. “For God’s sake, don’t try to play on my sympathy, Ben.”
“Because you haven’t any?”
“I haven’t any left,” she snapped. “You’ve used it up, don’t you see that? You’ve exhausted it.” She held out helpless hands. “You must tell me, Ben. You can’t just leave me like this … If you don’t, I’ll get rid of it again—”
“It’s not it.”
She stared at me as though she had only just noticed me crouching there. “What’s not it? What the hell do you mean? You’re always playing with words. You’re always playing with people, for God’s sake. As though it was some kind of game.”
“It?”
“Oh, shut up.”
There was a moment’s truce. She tried once more: “What’s not it?”
“The baby’s not it.”
“What do you mean?” She touched her belly. Oh, how well I knew it, that pale, sleek presence beneath the folds of her dress, that fold of silken sin, umbilicus bulging slightly, abdomen declining gently toward a shadowy valley. How well I had known its fragrant pastures, its hidden pubescent delights. “What do you mean?” she repeated.
“It’s not it. It’s a boy.”
A stillness. She sat there in my dwarf’s cavern, a giantess among the normal men, gravid with a boy. “You know?”
“Of course I know. It’s a he. He’ll have blond hair from your mother—isn’t that right?—and a widow’s peak from my father. His skin will be pale and freckled like your own, and his eyes will be brown like mine. His nose will be aquiline like my father’s, but he will not have my father’s cleft chin. He will be, like my mother, left-handed. This, incidentally, is a disadvantage, left-handed people having a lower life expectancy than right; but I don’t think you want to worry about that too much. Above all, above every other little quirk and curiosity that he possesses, he will grow straight and sleek and will eventually reach five feet eleven inches. He will be … normal.”
Jean watched me carefully. It was an expression that was quite new to her. But then she was changed in so many ways. “You can’t know all that. You can’t.” Her expression metamorphosed. Her eyes hardened. Her lips tightened, turning white at the corners. There was a pallor about her neck. “You can’t know all that,” she repeated, and her voice was louder now, as though there were some force behind it, driving the sound out through her teeth. “It’s another of your bloody, superior jokes. You can’t know about everything, you and your bloody genes, you can’t know everything! You can’t play God!”
By now she was shouting. It was positive feedback, anger making her angrier still, like the cascading effect of enzymes, the second stimulating the first to stimulate the second, a dangerous and unstable cycle of hate and loathing and loathing and hate, until she was standing over me like a harpy, with her fists clenched and her face contorted. “YOU CAN’T PLAY WITH ME LIKE THIS!” she screamed. “YOU’RE NOT GOD!”
And then she hit me.
That, I suppose, broke the cycle. After the storm comes that sullen calm, and a thin drizzle of tears. She sat down in her chair and covered her face with her hands. “I’m sorry, Ben. Oh God, I’m sorry.”
I picked myself up, touching the side of my head where the skin smarted. She made to rise, but I held up my hand as though to ward her off. “I’m all right,” I said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m quite all right. And I do know he’s a boy. I do know he’s a boy and I do know he’ll be tall. I didn’t play God, Jean. Unlike God, I chose … with something approaching love.”
She smiled bitterly. Miss Jean Piercey smiled through tears and misery at her dwarf. “Love of whom, Ben?” she asked. “Yourself?”
“Of course we want the labs and all that. I mean, it’ll be great to have you going over some of the simpler techniques, demonstrating the gene machine, that kind of thing—can you really make your own genes?—but …”
“No, you can’t, yet. But what?”
“But we’re also after the personal thing …”
Jake Toogood was heavy and loose, with an ill-fitting fawn jacket and a crumpled navy shirt with the name Armani embroidered discreetly on the pocket flap. He had a cleft chin (autosomal dominant) and a fringe of blond hair (autosomal recessive) hanging in a long curtain around the edge of a bald cranium (sex-limited autosomal dominant). His accent was Cockney hybridized with transatlantic. He turned his nose up at the quiche and ordered wine rather than beer and asked me whether I really wouldn’t rather be somewhere other than The Pig and Poke. I told him that I was quite happy with the place, that it was my local, that I felt at home there, that at least it wasn’t a pretentious little wine bar run by someone called Damien; and Toogood suddenly found qualities in the place that he hadn’t seen before.
“Great, Ben,” he decided, “just great. It’s just the kind of thing we’re after—the personal interest. Frien
ds, family, how you cope with life. Getting up in the morning, getting to work, doing the shopping, getting a beer in the pub, all that kind of thing. As well as the genetics. Incidentally, Ben, are your parents—?”
“There’s just my mother.”
“Is she …?”
“Is she what?”
He looked awkward. “Normal.”
“She’s normal.”
“And your old man?”
“Also normal.” I looked him straight in the eye. “I’m a mutant.”
He barely winced. “That’s great, Ben. Great. Might your mum …?”
“I haven’t even said whether I will yet. I’m not a bloody circus act—”
“Circus? Christ, no, Ben. Grant me a little more taste than that. This is BBC 2, for God’s sake—bread as well as circuses, that’s the idea. A bit of everyday life, a bit of real science. I want to show that people like you are … just like people like me. Only smaller. Know what I mean? I saw that ‘Science Scene’ program you did. All very well and good, but the guys doing science documentaries are rather the breathless schoolboy type, aren’t they? You know—‘Wow, how many megabytes is it? Can you fly to the moon with it?’ That kind of thing. No, I see this film as Benedict the man, struggling with life like anyone else struggles with life, only …”
“Only?”
“Only more so. Your voice-over explaining how you cope, what drives you, what you believe or don’t believe, you know the kind of thing? I want it to be your story, from your viewpoint. Literally, as well.” He crouched down, just to make it clear. “Lots of low camera angles. The world according to Ben.” He cut at the air with the blade of his hand.
“What’s that guy doing?” Eric called from the bar. “Giving you grief, is he?”
“He’s from television.”
Eric nodded as though that explained all. “How’s Jean, by the way? Haven’t seen her for ages.”
At Eric’s words, Toogood’s eyebrows rose. He tensed visibly, like a pointer sensing game. “Who’s Jean?”
“A friend.”
The fact of a friend, a female friend, lay there between us. Toogood swallowed, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, and leaned toward me. Behind him the pinball machine uttered a shriek of joy and rang up thousands and thousands of points. “Not a girlfriend, is she?” he asked in a whisper. “These days we can handle almost anything we like on TV. What I mean is, do you have a girl, Ben?” He smiled a gap-toothed smile that had excited Olga when we’d looked around the laboratories. “Or a boy, for Christ’s sake, if that’s what suits you. It doesn’t matter one way or the other. But what does a guy like you do for sex?”
“A Scientist of Our Time” went on the air a few months later. You will have seen the thoughtful documentary. You will have watched the world according to Ben, a world of low camera angles, of upward slants, of obstacles provided by the things of everyday life—chairs, laboratory benches, public lavatories, buses, and, of course, people. Perhaps you asked yourself why. Why did Benedict Lambert ever walk the streets of London against the background of his own caustic commentary on the passing tide of humanity, their genetic quirks, their mutations, and their variations? What was his motive?
“… all these people on the King’s Road, staring at me in horror and pity, are no less victims of their genes than I. It is just that my condition is more apparent and is considered a defect …” pause for a woman with a dachshund to pass by “… except in the case of this breed of dog …”
Whyever did he discuss matters of race and gender, of beauty and ugliness, of behavior and comportment?
“… instances of clearly inherited behavior are few. There is monoamine oxidase A deficiency, which leads to aggression and violence; there may be a form of male homosexuality, with its gene located on the long arm of the X chromosome; there are few others yet. But I’m afraid they will come …”
Whyever did he bare his barrel chest to the world?
“… you learn to live with the physical problems. It is the emotional wounds that never heal …”
Why did he waddle, like a circus act, across the television screens of the nation? Why did he climb, like a clumsy chimp, up the rungs of a great helical DNA ladder constructed in the television laboratories out of plastic and metal, to perch on the key to his lifelong search, an adenine: thymine base pair? Why did he squat there like the great god Bes on his throne and observe the camera, the audience, the whole bloody world through a three-dimensional puzzle of plastic atoms to ask why?—why should a man be at the mercy of a molecular maze such as this? “A reasonable estimate is that on average every one of us carries about four harmful recessive mutations. Sometimes, if you are unlucky like me, you carry a dominant one …”
Why?
Of course the question is false. Scientifically, I mean. Philosophically as well, in all probability. We are what we are; there isn’t anything else. But still you find yourself asking, don’t you?
WHY?
On New Year’s Eve, 1866, Mendel sat down and wrote to Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli, enclosing a copy of the paper. Nägeli was Professor of Botany at the University of Munich. An appropriate man to turn to, you might think. In his own work Nägeli had mapped the cellular nature of plants and identified the zones of cell division in shoots and roots. In his writings he had already touched on the question of inheritance. He had been one of the first to make a distinction between inherited and acquired characteristics—between nature and nurture—and in the manner of scientists throughout the ages had attempted to clarify the vagueness of his ideas by coining terms.
Oh, the deception of naming, the seductiveness of language! Give an idea a name and it suddenly appears to take on a concrete existence, beauty becoming a yardstick against which we can measure our loathing or our admiration, truth becoming a testament enabling us to lie, love rearing its ugly snake’s head and handing you the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Oh, the reification of abstracts! Think of Kultur and you want to reach for your gun. Think of Lebensraum and Volk, and the storm-troopers begin to march. Think of Rassenhygiene and the ovens begin to smoke. Nägeli’s own particular coining was not exactly sonorous, but still very Germanic—idioplasm: the material of inheritance. He saw the idioplasm as being built up out of corpuscular hereditary factors, but until this moment had nothing in the way of empirical evidence to support the idea. Now this vague and fanciful concept was about to have substance given to it.
Highly Esteemed Sir,
The acknowledged preeminence that your noble self enjoys in the detection and classification of wild-growing plant hybrids makes it my agreeable duty to submit for your kind consideration the description of some experiments in artificial fertilization.
I suppose it was the manner of the day, but one does wish Mendel hadn’t cringed quite so much. If I could have acted as secretary, things would have been rather more terse and to the point. Perhaps:
Dear Nägeli,
I enclose a copy of my recent paper on hybridization in Pisum which I feel you ought to read. If you don’t grasp its importance, for goodness’ sake pass it on to someone who might …
But that, I’m afraid, is wishful thinking. The answer from Nägeli came two months later. It reeks of condescension:
Honored colleague,
It seems to me that the experiments with Pisum, far from being finished, are only beginning …
Only beginning! Eight years, and somewhere around thirty-three thousand plants! Only beginning! I feel rage mounting like a substance in my throat. It is something that I need to hawk up and spit out, foul and pungent, into the eye of this bearded fraud. He might have gained eternal fame by recognition of the enthusiastic, naive friar from Brünn; he might have gained applause instead of opprobrium, immortality instead of the dusty death of a minor entry in the encyclopedia. But Professor Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli cannot see beyond his own nose. We are forced to witness Mendel bowing down before this second-rater:
In the projected experiments … I sh
all be entering a field in which your honor possesses the most extensive knowledge, knowledge that can only be gained through many years of zealous study …
Extensive knowledge, indeed. Mendel had suggested that he might repeat the garden pea work with Hieracium, hawkweed. This ugly beast was Nägeli’s favorite experimental plant, but it is an absurd plant for artificial crossing. It is a member of the Compositae family, along with the daisy and the dandelion, which means that it has flowers composed of minute individual florets no more than a millimeter in diameter. Artificial pollination has to be carried out using a lens. But there is worse, far worse than this. The plain fact is that the hawkweed genus usually sets seed and produces offspring without fertilization. It is, in the florid world of botanical language, parthenogenetic.
I particularly like that term. Parthenos is, of course, a maiden or virgin. Mary the mother of Jesus was one such, and according to dogma she produced her son by the process of parthenogenesis, which means, quite simply, virgin birth. Mendel would have believed this dogma, or if he had doubts he would have suppressed them, but let that point go. The term parthenogenetic applies to hawkweed no less than to the Virgin Mary: hawkweed makes babies without sex. Hawkweed is quite useless for genetics.
One wants to weep. One wants to be able to call across the gulf of one hundred and thirty years, across the Communist dictatorship and the Greater Germany of the Nazis, across the smoking ruins of two world wars; one wants to shout out a warning across the implacable barrier of time. But he is deaf to all entreaty, the stout, stubborn friar with the puzzled expression and eyesight growing ever weaker as he struggles with minute flowers with even more minute sexual parts, as he attempts the impossible, to make the damn hawkweed breed.
Yet there is this, toward the end of his eighth letter to Nägeli, written in July 1870:
Of the experiments of previous years, those dealing with Matthiola annua and glabra [stock], Zea [maize], and Mirabilis [four-o’clock] were concluded last year. Their hybrids behave exactly like those of Pisum. Darwin’s statements concerning hybrids of the genera mentioned in The Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication … need to be corrected in many respects.