Mendel's Dwarf (33 page)

“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 natural? 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.