Mendel's Dwarf (8 page)

The school careers officer looked me up and down (mainly down) and hummed a bit. “University,” he suggested. “With your exam forecasts, you should be able to get a place. What subjects interest you? I see … er, biology.”

“Genetics, really. Mainly genetics.”

“Right.” He appeared to be searching for escape. “Quite the coming thing.”

“And if not?”

“If not?”

“If I don’t go to university. If I want a job.”

“Ah.” The man scratched himself and thought a bit.

“Do you mind if I sit down?” I asked. “My back is hurting. It hurts after a while. Lordosis.”

He seemed flustered. “Lordosis?”

“Inward curvature of the spine.”

“Oh, of course, of course. Please …” He got up and fussed around to get a chair. “I thought … Yes, please do sit down … yes, do …”
I thought you already were …

I clambered up onto the chair and sat there looking at him. He was balding (sex-limited autosomal recessive), brown-eyed (autosomal dominant), and embarrassed (environmental/social character). “You were going to suggest what job I could do,” I prompted him.

“Ah, yes. Well …” His embarrassment deepened. “Perhaps … er, it’s a bit tricky, this one.”

“I might not get my grades.”

“Quite, quite …”

“And then what would I do?”

He scratched himself. “Perhaps …” He coughed and flicked vainly through a pamphlet on his desk. Then he looked up with the light of inspiration in his eyes. “Perhaps the circus?”

Cretin. Congenital thyroid deficiency in which ossification of the bones is delayed. There is retarded growth of the brain and overgrowth of the anterior pituitary. In an untreated case the child becomes a physical and mental dwarf
.

Not me, is that quite clear? Not me. People seem amazed when they discover not only that I am not mentally retarded, but that I am actually more intelligent than they are. Of course I
went to university. Not dreaming spires, not towery and branchy between towers, not cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, or river-rounded; but not a bloody polytechnic either. Plate glass and sloping lawns and halls of residence named after worthy and forgotten philanthropists, where things were always a little too high, and the door in the nearest bathroom had to be adjusted because some fathead of an architect had placed the handle right out of my reach. He’d probably won some prize or other, too. The stairs were pitched so that I had to pause on each landing to get my breath back, and in the lift I couldn’t reach any button above the second floor; but at least the authorities had the decency to give me a ground-floor room. I began to find some sort of place in life, like an animal discovering its niche in a complex ecosystem.

After Mendel’s ordination there was a short period as assistant parish priest in Altbrünn. He found the experience unpleasant. The city hospital was just up the road and came within the ambit of the friary: a
Krankenhaus
like any other
Krankenhaus
of the time. In those days the principal requirement for hospital work was a strong stomach, and the principal qualification for surgery was speed. The song of the bone saw was oft heard, and the shriek of pain. Anesthesia was at the experimental stage in Britain and the United States; Lister’s discoveries on antisepsis had not yet been made; Pasteur had only just completed his training. Blood and lymph, feces and urine, the stench of gangrene and the sound of pain—pure, irremediable pain—these were the features of hospital life. There was the powerful sensation that mankind was mere flesh, mere mechanics at the mercy of random and chaotic nature. Mendel found it too much.

“He is very diligent in the study of the sciences, but he is much less fitted for work as a parish priest, the reason being that
he is seized by an uncontrollable timidity when he has to visit a sickbed or see anyone ill and in pain.” Thus Abbot Napp to the bishop. It was with relief that the young friar found himself packed off to a nearby town as a substitute teacher, while an application to sit the examination for a teaching certificate was forwarded to the authorities in Vienna.

I suppose they were beginning to wonder what they could do with him. People who can, do; people who can’t, teach. Shaw, of course. They pushed Mendel into teaching science, but he seemed to enjoy the work, and in the summer of 1850 it was decided that he should sit the examination. His examiners included the Minister for Public Works, von Baumgartner, and the newly appointed Professor for Experimental Physics at Vienna University, Christian Doppler, so don’t think we’re talking about provincial nonentities. A minister of the government of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, and Doppler of
THE EFFECT
: he of the ambulance siren that drops in pitch as it passes by; he of the
eeeee
—
yowwww
as the racing car screams past you down the straight; he of the Red Shift that tells us all, poor creatures, that the galaxies are racing away from one another at a few hundred kilometers every second. Maybe they are all trying to get away from
us
.

Thus, in the late summer of 1850, Mendel found himself seated in a bare room in the Ministry of Finance in Vienna, being interrogated about physics. He failed. His answers confirmed the opinion that the examiners had already formed from his written papers:

Still we hope that if he is given opportunity for more exhaustive study, together with access to better sources of information, he will soon be able to fit himself, at least for work as a teacher in the lower schools
.

What is the expression? Damning with faint praise? Sketchily educated, ordained in haste and possibly repenting at leisure, Mendel failed at the one thing he apparently wanted to do.

Let me tell you a joke. He who has sides to split, prepare to split them now. When I was still an undergraduate, I thought a girl had fallen in love with me. A normal girl, I mean. The thing is, I don’t fancy my own kind. Like attracts like, you say? But it isn’t true, is it? There’s the attraction of opposites, the lure of the positive for the negative, surely far more powerful than any mutual recognition and understanding; and there couldn’t have been anything more opposite than Dinah. The very name conjures her up. She was—still is, for all I know—tall and slender, ectomorphic and dolichocephalic (whereas I am merely phallic). She was blond of hair and cream of skin, entirely perfect and loved by one and all. And she made friends with me. We sat next to each other during lectures, and I was able to explain the odd point to her, matters of recombination and linkage; and we had the occasional coffee together afterwards.

“Come out for a drink with us,” she suggested. “Why not? I’ve got a car, d’you know that?” Carelessly, flicking away the perfection of pale hair, bending her mouth into a carefully constructed careless smile. “Why not come for a drink with us?”

I became something of a curiosity among her friends. They were creatures of that peculiar breed which inhabits a world of certainties. Certain that there is a God, they were certain that he didn’t impinge upon their own existence except to emerge once every four or five years and vote Tory. Certain that there is an inalienable right to wealth and material contentment, they were certain that only certain people were entitled to it. Certain that beautiful is good, they were profoundly disturbed by my presence. “It’s Ben!” they’d cry doubtfully as I waddled into the inn beside the creamy, callipygian Dinah. “Good fellow, Ben. Jolly good chap.” They said it in such a tone that made you realize they were trying to convince themselves. “Climb up on a stool. Come on, up you come! Have a pint.”

“A half,” I would insist.

“A half! Only a half?”

“A halfling,” one of them exclaimed, the one
who
had read
The Lord of the Rings
and fancied himself a medievalist.

“Oh, piss off,” they answered him.

Those evenings were full of beer and raucous laughter and darts competitions and silly games in which you sat around in a circle and did things that usually involved speed of reflex and mild humiliation of the loser. Banging your hands on the table in the correct sequence and drinking a pint of beer if you got it wrong, for example. To their collective surprise, I could play that one as well as they could.

“Good fellow, Ben! Spot on!”

“What reflexes!”

Once we played some kind of quiz game, but only once. I knew all the answers.

“Quite a phenomenon, our Ben. Quite a brain.”

“Big enough head to hold it all.”

“Oh, piss off.”

“You know he’s some kind of relative of Mendel’s,” Dinah told them. “That’s right, isn’t it, Ben?”

“Who’s Mendel?”

“What’s that make him? Mendel-son?”

“Wasn’t Mendel that doctor fellow at Auschwitz?”

“That’s Mengele, you berk.”

No, the evenings alone with Dinah were more to my taste.

Oh yes: evenings alone with Dinah. “Ben, for God’s sake help me” was her plea. “I don’t understand a bloody thing.” Her eyes were azure (autosomal recessive, with a high incidence among people of Nordic origin) pools of anguish and helplessness. “I’ll cook supper for you if you help me with this bloody essay.” So, long into many a night, I helped her with the rII section of T4 phage and the cis-trans test and countless other little matters. She was having problems with the microbial genetics course, you see.

“Oh Ben, you are a darling.”

I suppose she thought I was safe. I provided not only academic assistance, but a shoulder to cry on (metaphorically, for God’s sake: she couldn’t be expected to lean down that far) without the concomitant risk normally associated with opening your heart to someone of the opposite sex. Because after the lessons we talked, or at least she talked while, more or less, I listened. Mainly she talked about herself, about her family, about her ambitions. What she was doing reading for a degree in Anthropology and Biology, I couldn’t imagine. She wanted to get into television, into journalism, into something creative, so she said, so said whole generations of benighted youth. So it should have been something like English and Drama, something pleasingly adaptable to late-night talk shows and clever dinner parties, but instead it was Anth. and Bio. “Actually it was meant to be medicine, but my grades just weren’t good enough. My people were awfully fed up with me.”

My people
. You can tell, can’t you? When she asked about me, it was
your family;
but she had
people
. I imagined them on horseback, the men in the vanguard with spears and swords, the women and children taking up the rear with the kerns and gallowglasses in attendance. They’d possess some peculiar blood group so you could tell them apart from the common mass of humanity, the Kell blood factor or something. Of course, I never met them. I saw her mother once in the distance: she was a tall and equine woman who doubtless neighed and bucked as she straddled the
paterfamilias
during the monthly ritual rutting; but I was never introduced. It wouldn’t have been appropriate, I suppose. What’s in a distant relationship to an obscure Austrian friar beside the kind of familial connections they were used to?

Anyway, having done badly in her exams and having thus failed to get into medical school, dear Dinah wasn’t very good at her biology either. Gene mapping and cistrons just weren’t her thing. But she tried very hard. And she learned. And she kissed me.

Ah! You were wondering what would happen, weren’t you?

We had just achieved understanding of some particularly difficult matter to do with recombination in
Neurospora;
and she kissed me. We were at the same level—she seated at her desk, me standing beside her—so the maneuver was technically possible. “Oh, you are a
darling
, Benjamin,” she cried. Benjamin was, is, not my correct name, of course. It was her name for me. “You are Benjamin,” she used to say. “Benjamin Bunny. I am the only one allowed to call you Benjamin. All the others may make do with Ben.”

She called me Benjamin and she kissed me.

You are vulnerable. You have little practice, you see. Practice is what is needed, practice in interpreting the signs. Dinah kissed me and I kissed her back and for a moment, just a moment (difficult to measure without a chronometer as sensitive as mine—say about one nanosecond), our lips touched. Then she snatched her head away. “It’s late,” she said. “I’d better take you back.”