Mendel's Dwarf (26 page)

“Are you all right?” I asked. My eyes had begun to accommodate to the dark. The exiguous light that seeped through the curtains from the light shaft now gave vague substance to the room, to the bedside table and the chair and the ghostly body laid out like a corpse in front of me. The ghost’s voice came back to me after what seemed like a long pause. “We shouldn’t,” she whispered.

My fingers moved. “Why not?”

She sighed, having no particular answer. “What do you want to do?”

I was shaking. With fear, with excitement, with impure joy, I don’t know. I have no wish to classify and delimit my feelings. All I know is, I was shaking as I knelt before her like a supplicant at an altar (because it was the easiest way, in fact) while she presented herself like one of my mice, making small, mouselike sounds, a faint whimpering, a mewing, a desperate
cri du chat
. My once-trembling fingers had found sudden and surprising dexterity.

“Oh God,” she whispered, although surely God had nothing to do with it. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

I leaned forward and tasted her, and she had a strange and bittersweet flavor that I had never imagined nor could ever describe: taste mingled with touch, a mysterious combination. Unsteadily I got to my feet and poised behind her, the mattress wobbling beneath me, her buttocks clutched for capricious support. “Be careful,” she whispered in the darkness, rather absurdly. “Oh God, be careful.” I leaned forward against her. “You’re so big,” she said. “So big.”

That night my semen coursed in glutinous coils into the core of Miss Jean Piercey: tiny bullets of potency, as potent as any
other man’s, wriggling and shivering their way out of the acid world of the vagina, hoovered up by the nuzzling trunk of her cervix, sucked, pulled, wafted up through the darkness of her womb toward the distant tubes.

We slept apart. I didn’t want her to wake and find me beside her.

She looked drawn in the dawn, as though she hadn’t slept properly. “What do we do now?” she asked, fiddling disconsolately with a teapot and kettle. A scene of domestic bliss. Giant Honey Pops for breakfast.

“Continue as before, more or less,” I suggested.

“And what if I get pregnant?”

The sound of water pouring. An exhalation of steam. Otherwise, silence. In the midst of that silence did she, I wonder, compute the odds? Was she even aware that they existed?

“If
what?
”

She stirred the brew. “Pregnant,” she repeated.

“How in God’s name …?”

“What’s it got to do with God? You always say you don’t believe in him.”

But God had much to do with it. The Egyptian god Bes was an achondroplastic dwarf. He was the god of entertainment, the god who frightens away the demons; but he was also the god who protects pregnant women. “But aren’t you on the pill or something?”

“I told you to be careful. But I didn’t want to stop you. In case you misunderstood.” Speaking thus to the sink and the pot of steaming tea and the frosted window beyond whose panes was a decorative light shaft full of drainpipes and electrical conduits. “I thought you’d think I didn’t want you,” she said softly. “There can’t be much chance, can there?”

“You sound like a schoolgirl.”

“Do I? Do you know how schoolgirls are?”

I ignored the taunt. “The chance of me, my dear, the chance of
me
happening was one in fifteen thousand. And here I am. Chances are things that have a habit of happening. So when was your last period? And why the hell aren’t you on the pill, anyway?”

She looked up suddenly, her mismatched eyes bright with anger. “I didn’t need to be, did I? I didn’t need to be on the pill, because Hugo Miller couldn’t make babies, could he? I thought I’d told you that. All his sperm is …” She searched for the word, and found it sure enough. “Deformed. Two tails, three heads, I don’t know what.” She sniffed. “Anyway, my last period was about a fortnight ago.”

I buttered my toast
with
care.

1
. Kalmus and Fry,
Annals of Human Genetics
43, 1980; Profita and Bidder,
American Journal of Medical Genetics
29, 1988.

G
od.

You were wondering when I was going to get around to him, weren’t you? After all, Mendel was a priest, a friar who had dedicated his life to the service of the Almighty. He must have celebrated mass every day, either alone in one of the side chapels of the convent church, or before a congregation up at the ornate high altar, the fanciful, florid, and fantastic Silver Altar, with a thirteenth-century icon of the Madonna and Child buried in its center. He was ordained in 1847 and was thirty-six years a priest. That makes thirteen thousand masses, more or less. Thirteen thousand recitations of
Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem coeli et terrae
—I believe in one God, Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. It has a quaint, old-world ring. The question is, did he?

Jean went to church. This startled me, I’ll admit. It was the very first Sunday after I had picked her off the streets, so to speak, before we had any kind of real intimacy (although Benedict
the diminutive goat was speculating, of course, speculating all the time on the possible and the impossible). “I’m just going out for a bit,” she told me while clearing away the breakfast things. She seemed almost furtive, as though she had a secret to hide.

“Going where? It’s Sunday.”

“Precisely.”

The church she had found (she had spied out the land in advance) was a redbrick confection designed during the last century by William Butterfield. Saint Mary Magdalen. In its neo-Gothic extravagance it might have been a branch of the Royal Institute for Genetics; but of course it also looked the twin (dizygotic, not identical) of the convent church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary at the Augustinian Monastery in Brno. In fact you could put those two buildings side by side and an untrained eye would be hard put to distinguish between them for style and date: both slate-roofed; both dark brick (the one red and black, the other dusty mauve); both grimed by traffic fumes; both pinnacled and buttressed; both witnesses to arcane rites and superstitions and redolent of incense. There is a difference in date, of course. The Augustinians’ church in Brno was consecrated in the fourteenth century, whereas a plaque beside the main door of Saint Mary Magdalen is

to commemorate the laying of the Foundation Stone on
28th May 1856
by Doctor Edward Bouverie Pusey
On behalf of the Ecclesiological Society

You’ll notice the date: the height of the Tractarian movement in England, when Pusey was expounding the doctrine of the Real Presence, and Newsman was going over to Rome; exactly the same time that Father Gregor, Roman by birth and upbringing, was watering his first-generation peas and about to discover a real
presence deep inside them, the factors for tall and dwarf, for pure white and dark, corrupt purple.

“Do you believe, then?” I asked her.

“Of course I do.” There was a note of defiance about her reply, as though she expected an argument. It transpired that she also used to sing in the church choir in Ruislip. “They’ll miss me. I used to take the soprano solos, me and another girl.”

“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.