Mendel's Dwarf (12 page)

After our interview, I wandered the temple precincts on my own. More by chance than design I found myself outside the library—the Bateson Library, named after the first director of the Institute. A bronze bust of the man stood at the entrance like the image of a titular saint at the door of a chapel. Bateson was one of those who had come second, one of the great losers, a blunt Yorkshireman who worked on inheritance in the last years of the nineteenth century, and found himself trumped by the discovery of Mendel’s paper. All that was left to Bateson was to travel to Brünn in the hope of finding out something about the man who had anticipated his own discoveries by twenty-five years. Bateson it was who coined a name for the new science:
genetics
. His etymological originality doesn’t even merit a mention in the
OED
.

I waddled disconsolately through the doors of the library, in search of the
Journal of Molecular Biology
or something. Picture me there, standing just inside the doorway, looking down the carpeted length of the main reading room. Traffic in the Cromwell Road is dulled to insensibility by double glazing. The place is warm and hushed, scented with the dry dust of books and a hint of reverence. There are chandeliers hanging from a florid ceiling. A notice warns that anyone wanting to use photocopying facilities will have to pay in advance.

Then, as I watch, someone coughs, and at the sound the woman behind the librarian’s desk looks around with a frown of impatience. Her expression barely registers surprise as she notices me standing there. “It
is
you,” she exclaims.

How do you describe one of those moments in your life when the past leans forward to tap you on the shoulder? Turning point? Crisis? Epiphany? No such thing in fact. At the time, in time, it was a moment of complete inconsequence: two graduate students were sitting together in one of the bays, holding hands and consulting the same book; another reader was seated at one of the computer terminals, staring morosely at a screenful of luminous green text; the librarian was watching me. With those eyes.

“I thought it’d be you,” she went on. “That’ll be that fellow I used to know, I said to myself. That’ll be that Benedict.
Doctor
Lambert now. I knew he’d go places.”

“Shh,” said the man at the computer. The graduate students looked up. Surprise, amusement, curiosity, plain revulsion, you could have read all those emotions on their several faces. It was all rather embarrassing.

“Maybe we’d better go outside,” the librarian suggested. So we went out and hovered around the bust of Bateson and didn’t know quite what to say. At least,
I
didn’t know what to say. She never seemed to have that kind of problem. “You could have knocked me over with a feather, I was that excited when I heard.” That was the kind of vocabulary Miss Piercey employed, a farrago of oohs and aahs and fancy-thats.

“Heard what?”

“That the new Doctor Lambert was”—she hesitated and looked embarrassed—“of diminutive stature. Not that I expected him to remember me, of course.”

Those eyes, like an ill-matched pair of costume jewels. They brought to mind a teddy bear I had owned as a child. One eye had come unsewn and my mother came to the rescue with a transplant. But she wasn’t able to match the startling blue of the original, and so the replacement had been a lucid ochre, like a barley sugar. One cornflower blue, one amber, a strange mutation. “Naturally I remember you, Miss Piercey.”

“Mrs., now.”

“Mrs. Piercey?”

“Don’t be silly. Miller. Mrs. Miller.” She made a face. “Not that it’s a grand success, but you do what you can, don’t you?”

I agreed that you did, and wondered how I was going to get out of this one. There was something faintly embarrassing about being confronted with my adolescent lusts in this unexpected manner.

“Anyway, you’ll have your own work to do, won’t you?” she said. “Won’t want to be bothered with me and my life. If there’s anything you want, just you ask.” She smiled down on me for a moment and then turned and clipped her way back into the library. I watched the gray sheen of her legs as she went, the slender curve of ankle and calf—a kind of perfection.

Miss Piercey. Miss J. Piercey. Mrs. J. Miller. I laughed when I discovered what the
J
stood for. I had imagined June. June, moon, tune, it would have fitted well enough. Do names fit their owners, or do the owners grow to fit their names? It is true, isn’t it? The name seems as much a part of the person’s phenotype as his nose or ears or eyes. Even I
feel
Benedict.

Miss J. Piercey.

Jean.

Don’t laugh.

Mendel was a celibate like me, although our reasons were perhaps; different. What did he do for sex, I wonder? Was he a hand-reared man? Did he lust after choirboys, or after respectable widows? We expect something, don’t we? True absolute celibacy is impossible, surely. There must be something, even if it is only a discreet retreat to the bathroom and a thrilling auto-caress—and while that is going on, something must pass through the mind, some image of thigh or buttock or muscled torso, some cerebral picture of silken hair or buttoned boot or tight corset. What was it that stirred Great-great-great-uncle Gregor, I wonder?

There were opportunities, of course—during those three years in Vienna, for example. Who is to say that he didn’t succumb to temptation then? Imperial Vienna, the Vienna of the Habsburgs, the Vienna of the operetta and the waltz, the Vienna of encounter and assignation in the Volksgarten. Opportunity knocks on the mind and the imagination. Heart palpitating, did he go for solitary walks around the central markets near his lodgings, where you could buy flesh or fowl for a few kreuzer? Did he look and merely wonder, or did he summon up the blood and once or twice take a girl back to the cramped lodging house just beyond the junction with Invalidenstrasse, where people came and went at all hours of the day, and blind eyes were always turned in this city that knew so much and saw so much? A young priest on his own, struggling with his books, distant from all that he knew. Lonely. Easy enough to doff the dog-collar. Easy enough to stir the sympathy of some young Slovak girl up from the country to earn an easy kreuzer in the city.

Holding strictly to his vows, he shunned all relationships with women
. Thus Hugo Iltis in the biography. The late-twentieth-century mind nudges and winks, and doesn’t really believe nonsense like that, does it? There is, for example, the conundrum of Frau Rotwang. How curious that even in the modest 1920s, Iltis should follow his disclaimer with this gentle and malicious insinuation:
Niessl, indeed, used to speak of a certain Frau Rotwang whom Mendel called upon frequently in the early years
.

Rotwang. Red-cheek. Cheeks flushed faintly with embarrassment or enthusiasm. Frau Rotwang, wife of the proprietor of one of the cotton mills that had sprung up recently along the banks of the river Zwittawa. Herr Rotwang owns a large town house near the Capuchin church and a modest but productive estate out in the country. He is frequently away on business, in Prague, in Vienna, occasionally in Munich; and Frau Rotwang—pretty, younger than her husband, modest, devout—is often on her own. She is an amateur gardener. It is a respectable pastime, and Frau Rotwang is a most respectable young lady, the kind who might be
expected to receive calls from a friar of the Augustinian monastery, a man who can offer her advice both spiritual and botanical. Walking back to the monastery from the Brünn Modern School on Johannesgasse, it is barely a detour to pass by the Rotwang house on Josefsgasse. The maid would have been familiar with the small, smiling figure of Father Mendel.

“Frau Rotwang is in the morning room, Father. Can I take the plant for you!”

“No. No, I will carry it myself, thank you.”

The heavy furnishings of a bourgeois house of the nineteenth century, all velvet and plush. Drapes on the tables, heavy brocade curtains, elaborate gas lamps (new marvel) on the walls, and woodwork everywhere—dark, ornate woodwork, giving off a smell of resin and polish and, despite the labors of a small army of maids, dust. Mendel climbs the stairs through puddles of colored light cast down onto the floor from the stained-glass panes above the landing—the Rotwang arms, fanciful and absurd, emblazoned by the morning sun.

“What a
pleasure
to see you, Pater Gregor.” That was how she always greeted him, as though his punctual arrival were always a surprise. “Do come and sit. You must be exhausted after a day teaching all those boys.” A smile, slightly simpering; a blush.
Rotwang
, red-cheek. She is wearing a dress of some stiff and shiny stuff, undoubtedly the latest thing, undoubtedly the latest color—purple like a priest’s vestments for a funeral, one of the new aniline dyes. Against this heavy dress, her neck and face are fragile and pale, like porcelain. Frau Rotwang asks the maid to bring coffee and poppyseed cake (Father Gregor’s favorite), and only then does she notice his hand hidden behind his back. A sudden coy glance. “What is it that you are hiding, Pater Gregor? You are hiding something from me …”

Of course he is, all the time. He is hiding his devotion; but in its place, with an absurd flourish, like a conjuror in one of the booths in the Klosterplatz producing a rabbit from a hat, he presents a poor surrogate—the potted plant.

The pink of her cheeks spreads. It is almost the color of the flowers on the little shrub. “For me?”

“For you, Frau Rotwang. A fuchsia. I bred it myself. I have taken the liberty …”

“The liberty, Pater Gregor?”

“Of naming it Adelaide. The Adelaide fuchsia.”

“Oh.” A small exhalation of breath. A shock. It is the first time that he has ever hinted at her Christian name, the first indication that he even knows it. The little flowers dance and bob like so many tiny ballerinas as he holds the plant out toward her.

“You are not offended?”

“No, no.” Pink, fuchsia pink, suffuses neck and face. “Honored. I am honored.” She takes the potted plant and admires it. “It is wonderful. Oh, wonderful.” Somehow she contrives to touch his arm while trying at the same time to hold the pot. The pot almost tumbles. She moves forward to save it. He grasps the pot, her wrist, her elbow, and for a moment they have stepped over the invisible barrier that convention draws between them. For a moment confusion threatens to wreak havoc amid the careful formalities of their acquaintance.

“Oh, my goodness. I think I must sit.”

He lowers her into a chair and places the potted plant on a side table. There is a blessed interruption as a maid comes in with a tray. Father Gregor feels hot beneath his soutane. The girl is detailed to take the plant to the conservatory, while Frau Rotwang regains composure behind the ornate coffeepot. The balance of things settles into its former equilibrium.

“Now tell me about your children,” Frau Rotwang says, pouring. There is the faintest innuendo about her words. Frau Rotwang has no children. Neither, for quite other reasons, does Father Gregor. But both pretend. Father Gregor’s children are his plants, particularly his fuchsias, but also his peas, rows and rows of them in the convent garden, twining glaucous fingers around one another and around the pea-sticks, clinging like children to their mother’s apron.

“You must come and visit them sometime. I could explain my ideas about them to you …”

By way of contrast, Frau Rotwang’s children are her dogs, four of them that wriggle around the skirts of Mendel’s soutane, and beg for food, and a fifth that goes straight to his mistress and cringes at her feet. “What’s the matter with you?” Frau Rotwang asks of it as she lifts it into her arms. The dog laps wetly at her chin, tries to get at a crumb of poppyseed cake that adheres momentarily to the crimson Rotwang lower lip. “Naughty little boy. You are jealous, aren’t you?” She gazes over the animal’s narrow head at her guest. “Jealous of Pater Gregor.”

The dogs are dachshunds, achondroplastic dwarfs. Father Gregor has already asked for their pedigrees …

It was in London that I finally broke my enforced celibacy. In my case there is no conundrum, and no inclination to withstand the rigors of temptation; but up to then I had had no more than a long and intense affair with a variety of glossy magazine lovelies who lolled on chaise longues or sat, bold and brave, astride chairs and touched themselves with delicate talons almost as though unaware of someone looking. There were also tawdry videos and occasionally the live equivalent, a slot-machine booth for voyeurs where you could pay rather too much to keep a shutter from falling on the vision of strapped and hirsute flesh on the far side of the glass. But the real thing, that was what I desired.