by Simon Mawer
“And the baby?” Miller was stooping over the cot, peering down at whatever lay there.
“Oh, he’s lovely,” the nurse said. “He’s truly wonderful, Mr. Miller.”
I leaned toward Jean—was it Jean? It seemed to be Jean in the way that a sculpture seems the person it portrays, seems even to breathe as you watch it, seems on the verge of speech—and I touched my lips against one smooth, gray cheek. Was it Jean? There was the soft presence of down, the faint pubescence that I knew so well. Would a kiss from the frog prince bring the sleeping beauty back to life? But Jean stayed still, her chest rising and falling gently beneath the sheets, her breath wafting in and out through her nostrils like the faint breath of a mouse.
I turned away from the bed. A tenuous wailing came from the cot at the foot of the bed, and the nurse moved Miller aside. “It’s time for little Adam’s feed, isn’t it?” She reached down and lifted the baby out, our baby, and held it up for the proud father to see. I saw a knotted, flushed face, a crest of dark hair, tiny molluscan ears, vague eyes, miniature limbs clawing at the air. What Miller saw I have no idea.
“Isn’t he a fine little one?” the nurse asked. “Does he look like his mummy or his daddy?”
The baby turned its head, looking, or seeming to look, around the room. Probably it was searching for its source of food. “There,” the nurse exclaimed, “Adam’s looking at you, Mr. Miller.”
“They can’t focus when they’re newborn,” he retorted. “He can’t see a thing.”
“But he looks as though he’s looking.”
“May I hold him?” I asked.
I saw the nurse glance at Hugo for approval. “Doctor Lambert’s the godfather,” he said, as though the status of godfather conferred some kind of right by proxy. Smiling, the nurse bent down toward me, and for a moment the scrap of flesh writhed in my arms. I felt what? I must confess that I felt something remarkable. But what, exactly? Well, I felt like my father. Is that absurd? Perhaps. Bathetic, certainly. Sergeant Eric Lambert, Royal Engineers; Mr. Lambert, ineffectual teacher of physics; Eric, inadequate father and passer-on of genes, the man who had never looked me straight in the eye. I felt like him. There was nothing cerebral or contrived about the feeling; it was vivid, even visceral—genetic perhaps, if there is something mystical in the machinations of the genome. I felt like my father. More than that, more than mere illusion, pathetic fallacy, whatever you wish to call it, for a moment I was my father. I was the man I had always longed to be. I was tall.
“Little mouse,” I told my son; and he did look like a mouse pup, one of those pink and naked things that we rear in the laboratory.
I left shortly after that. There wasn’t much to stay for, really. Doctors appeared, with the exclusive air of the priesthood about them. They showed a faint impatience with Hugo’s presence and no desire to have me around. One of them, the consultant, began to tell the others about the case, pontificating like a barrister before a docile jury.
“She’ll wake up,” a nurse assured me as I went out. “I know she will. It’s just a matter of time. We keep talking to her, keep giving her baby Adam to cuddle, and she’ll wake up. The human brain is a wonderful thing.”
Don’t worry. I’m not going to lose my grip on things. Benedict Lambert is not going to embarrass you. He is going to remain calm and remote from the muddy universe of the emotions. He is going to describe the facts, the remote horrors of modern medicine, the infusions of radioactive tracers, the brain scans, the electroencephalograms, the intravenous drips, the tubes and the needles; and he is going to remain remote from it all. The doctors talked of amniotic fluid embolism, of lesions in Jean’s brain, damage in the hippocampus, the pasture where the mind grazes among scents and smells; and meanwhile Jean lay inert and unresponsive, a mere construct of metabolizing cells, her DNA being transcribed into RNA, the RNA being translated into protein, the proteins working in their intricate and ineffable manner, and nothing happening. Nothing that was Jean.
Hugo came to see me at my flat a few days later. He didn’t warn me of his visit. There was just a shadow coming down the steps outside the front window and a ring on the bell, and there he was when I opened the front door, a grim, stolid figure like an undertaker’s mute looming over the open grave. My heart lurched—no dwarf organ, but a full-sized thing pulsing just below my sternum, making my chest throb with the effort. “She’s all right, isn’t she?” I cried.
“Jean?”
“Of course.”
He nodded, as though agreeing to the obvious. “Well, she’s just the same. They call it stable, but that doesn’t really mean anything, does it? The dead are stable, aren’t they? The fact is, they don’t know what they’re doing. Look, can I come in for a moment? I was just passing by and I thought …”
I stood aside for him. Of course he couldn’t have just been “passing by.” You couldn’t have just passed by my flat on the way to anywhere. He had come with intention and deliberation. I settled him down, made him a cup of coffee, that kind of thing. “You’re a friend, Ben,” he said, as though seeking assurance of the fact. “I need your help.”
“So tell me.”
“They’re talking about it being permanent. The damage to her brain, I mean. Even if she does wake up, she’s not going to be the same …” He perched on the edge of a chair, like a man sitting on the edge of a cliff and trying to summon up the courage to jump.
“You’ve got to keep hoping …” I said, but the sentence trailed away lamely. Have you got to keep hoping? It has always seemed a dubious proposition to me. Anyway, Hugo Miller ignored my exhortation.
“That’s not what I came to see you about,” he said. He glanced around almost furtively, as though there might be a dozen listeners hiding in the corners of my sitting room. Then he leaned forward confidingly. “I don’t know how to put this, Ben. Perhaps I shouldn’t be talking about it at all, seeing the state Jean is in, but I’ve thought about it a lot recently …”
“Thought about what?”
“The baby.”
“What about the baby? The baby is fine. It’s Jean who’s not well.”
“That’s not the point …” He picked at his fingernails and bit his lip and glanced around again. Then, finding no eavesdroppers, he breathed in sharply, looked directly at me, and said, “You see, the baby’s not mine.”
I laughed. Oh, a merry little laugh. “Not yours? How can that be?”
He seemed emboldened by confession. “I’ve done my homework, Ben. I know about all this Mendel stuff. And I know that I’ve got blue eyes and Jean’s got blue eyes—well, one of them’s green, but you explained about that, didn’t you?—and the baby’s got brown eyes. That’s just not possible. Is it?”
“Oh, but—”
“It’s unusual for a baby that young to have brown eyes, isn’t it? But it has. And they can’t have come from me.”
“These things are never certain …”
He looked straight into my brown eyes, and his own blue ones were perplexed, as though they were looking at something obvious but difficult to see—like one of those optical illusions where, once you know the trick, you can resolve a drawing of an old man’s face into a picture of a mother and child. “She’s been unfaithful to me in the past, I know she has. She confessed it. And now I think she got together with that doctor and used someone else’s sperm. And they didn’t tell me. That mine was no good, I mean, not even for that in vitro business. That’s where you come in.”
I looked around for a means of escape. “Me?”
“You can tell me. It’s my right to know, for God’s sake! You can clear the whole thing up. All I want is one of those DNA tests done—fingerprints or whatever it is you fellows call them …”
“A DNA test?”
“On the baby and on me. Ben, you must help me. I want you to find out if the baby really is mine …”
“And if it’s not?”
“I don’t want it. If it’s not mine, then I don’t want it.”
>
There is a story. It comes from Holland. It has something of the status of an urban myth, yet all the elegant simplicity of truth. A Dutch woman undergoing in vitro fertilization treatment joyously became pregnant. It duly transpired that she was carrying twins, and of course both Mummy and Daddy were delighted. The wonders of science and all that. Together they watched the little creatures on the ultrasound screen, heard the twin hearts, thrilled to the twin movements. And when the babies were duly born (one hopes—oh, how one hopes!—that the father was present at the happy event), one of the emergent babies was white-skinned and blond-haired and blue-eyed, just like Mummy and Daddy … while the other was black. It transpired that during the in vitro fertilization process, there had been contamination with sperm from a previous hopeful father …
Science as practical joke. Maybe that’s all we’re worth. Slapstick comedy. The conjuring trick gone hilariously wrong, the conjurer triumphantly pulling from the hat not a docile white pigeon but a black and raucous crow.
I looked at Hugo Miller sitting there in front of me, replete with bigotry. “You don’t need any tests,” I told him. “You don’t need any tests because I can tell you the answer here and now. The child is nothing to do with you, Hugo. Nothing whatsoever.” I savored the moment, relished the expression on his face, the stupid of surprise. “I am the father. Ridiculous Ben Lambert is the father. Adam is ours—Jean’s and mine. Nothing to do with you at all. Do you understand that? He is nothing to do with you. I was her lover and you were too damned prejudiced to realize it.”
There was a long pause. Outside sounds came down to us—an ambulance siren wailing in despair, a motorbike blaring past, footsteps clip-clopping along the pavement. Someone shouted at someone else: “Fuck off, will yer?”
“I see,” said Hugo, quite softly. He rose from my chair. There was even an ironic smile somewhere up there among the freckles and the taut nerves. “I see.” He stood on his solemn dignity in front of me and (a strange, old-fashioned gesture) half-bowed to me as though to the dwarf king on his throne. “I suppose it’s only what I guessed,” he said. “Deep down.”
There is an absurdity about the cuckold, isn’t there? Always was, always will be. Cuckold Syndrome. The ten percent of all happy and oblivious and, above all, faithful husbands who are not, in fact, the fathers of their sons and daughters. Something both absurd and touching. There is even a trite little evolutionary argument to explain their existence, that women choose them as husbands for reliability and protection, while seeking out some strapping, youthful genes to unite with their own and thus make genetically fit babies: the mother bird inviting the cuckoo to come into her warm little nest.
Hugo nodded, as though confirming his suspicions, then turned, stiffly and solemnly, and walked to the door. I watched him go out and climb up the steps from my cave, up to the street of normal height. I confess to a feeling of mild elation. Not triumph, nothing excessive—but the plain feeling that I had won. Benedict had achieved his child and passed his precious genes on to the next generation. Adam the man was in some new sense mine; and Jean, comatose or not, would become mine too. I would contact my sister to come and help me out (a nice, practical part of the fantasy, that). And I would visit Jean in hospital and talk at her, watch her; even, necrophilically, when the nurse’s gaze was elsewhere, slip my hand beneath the sheets to touch her. Oh yes, in my elation I imagined that.
A January day in middle Europe. The sky possesses that hard, enamel quality that it has when drained of moisture. Trees stand outlined against the blue like carefully dissected lungs: tracheae, bronchi, bronchioles branching into a myriad of sharply etched tips. No leaf. There is snow on the roof of the Gothic church, snow piled against the walls and against the buttresses, hard, compacted snow that has lain for weeks. The cold is profound.
In the church, before the great silver altar, beneath the geometric decorations across the vault, the choir sings Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. The setting is by Křižkovsky and the choir is conducted by a small, bouncy little fellow who was once at the choir school. He wears an embryo mustache across his upper lip. In his black frock coat he has something of the air of a circus ringmaster. He is Leoš Janáček.
Et lux perpetua luceat eis … The choir tails away into chill silence and the coffin is gathered up from the catafalque and shuffled toward the door. A crowd waits in the square outside. The people are solemn and morose, hunched in black. Clouds of breath rise from their mouths as the coffin is carried from the church and loaded into the hearse. A miter rests on top of the coffin, with an episcopal crook laid diagonally across.
The silence is broken by the snorting of the horses, by the creaking of their harness and the iron drumming of wheels on the cobbles as, at a solemn pace, the cortège makes its way into the Klosterplatz. Black plumes nod and shake in the cold air. A bell tolls from the church tower. Columns of steam rise from the horses’ nostrils. The stalls in the Klosterplatz are all closed. The booth with the bearded lady, the tent with the freak show, the shooting range, the stalls where they sell tawdry trinkets, and the beer shop where the old men drink—all are closed. The people of the town line the streets in silence as the procession passes along the Büger-Gasse toward the river.
Tears? Not many. The bishop himself has celebrated the requiem mass, but his homily was about duty and devotion to one’s vocation, not about love. The Lord Lieutenant of Moravia is there, but his thoughts hang on whether the tax disputes of the last decade will now be laid to rest with the deceased, and whether the new abbot will be a more amenable man than his predecessor. The dead man’s nephews offer masks of resignation to the world—they are medical students and must demonstrate control in the face of death. The Protestant pastor and the Jewish rabbi show ritual solemnity; the professors and teachers and members of the various learned societies of the city display the blank expressions of duty and incomprehension; the businessmen and shopkeepers are mainly curious. There are also pupils and former pupils and the common people, Czech and German alike. Some have memories of him as a younger man: it is that image they mourn. And an old lady, the widow of Herr Rotwang of Vienna, follows the hearse in a black carriage. She has memories, sunlit, curious memories of peas and fuchsias, of beans and hawkweed, of conversations never understood and emotion never expressed.
The wheels of the carriage drum on the bridge like the rattling of a salute. The procession passes out of the city and enters the cemetery through the north gate. It halts for the pallbearers to hump the coffin onto their shoulders. They shuffle it down the gravel path to where an open grave lies ready. The mourners edge nervously around the pit while the Prior of the Augustinian Monastery sprinkles the coffin with water.
“Anima ejus, et animae omnium fidelium defunctorum, per misericordiam Dei requiescat in pace.”
The bearers struggle with ropes, and the coffin edges its way into the ground.
After the ceremony the mourners disperse hurriedly, almost guiltily, almost as though getting away from the scene of some disgrace. No one, no single person in the whole crowd, understands the importance of the man who has just been buried.
The next day, with the help of one of the brothers, the prior goes through the dead man’s possessions. They find little of interest beyond the bound books. The books will go into the monastery library. The other stuff, papers mainly, all covered in that immaculate copperplate hand, appear worthless. They glance through some of the sheets, scan without understanding the pages and pages of charts and diagrams and symbols. Numbers—hundreds, thousands—beetle across the pages. Letters point arrows at other letters. Lists and columns and sums run from top to bottom like the accounts of a shop or a business, swarming like insects from one page to the next. The prior shakes his head at the absurdity of it all, at the amount of energy that the man expended at … what? Mere vanity?
The sad thing about death is the absurdity and the self-delusion it reveals.
Later that morning the man’s servant takes all the rubbi
sh out into the garden behind the monastery and piles it onto a bonfire. The paper is dry. It catches quickly. The flame is ghostly in the bright air. The smoke is a more substantial thing, billowing up toward the sky, drifting up over the fruit trees that he tended, up over his beehives, over the bushes, over the roofs of the church toward the Spielberg Hill.
The Hewison Fertility Clinic’s proud portals gleam with plate glass and travertine, like the face of an airport terminal building delivering passengers into the twenty-first century. Hugo Miller goes up the steps and the doors whisper open to admit him to the future. Watch him; many people did. The receptionist—Asian, as sleek as caramel and toffee—even smiled a warm and sympathetic welcome. Watch him: dusty red hair (RHC gene on chromosome 4), blue eyes (chromosome 19), lobeless ears, mean stature, dull mind, bad temper. What else? Anything from the Benedict Lambert catalog of the absurd and the bizarre? Jumping Frenchman of Maine Syndrome, perhaps? Benign Sexual Headache? Photic Sneeze Reflex? Piebald Trait? Whistling Face Syndrome. Misshapen Toe. Thick Lips and Oral Mucosa. Stub Thumb. Smiling Dimples. Shawl Scrotum. Rocker-bottom Foot. Round-headed Spermatozoa. Inverted Nipples. Any of those? Watch him progress through the halls of the clinic: a melange of traits and tendencies, of transcription and translation, of modifiers and moderators, of neurons and synapses; all adding up to what? What will he do? What stirs that mind?
Tell me, where is fancy bred.
Or in the heart or in the head?
Oh, indeed, tell me. If you know the answer. Curious that the most profound of the Bard’s questions should be embroidered into silly little song. But where does fancy lie? Is it nurture or nature? Solemnly, with determination and intent, Hugo Miller walks past fountain and potted palm, past Paul Klee, through the aqueous, amniotic world toward the domain of