Mendel's Dwarf (45 page)

BOOK: Mendel's Dwarf

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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 rubbish 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.

T
he 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

MATERNITY

And meanwhile, what do I do? I wait. Benedict the brave waits trembling with excitement amid the soft and sensuous beds of molecular biology, amid the machines that whisper truths about the human condition for which the Bard could only write ditties. Benedict waits for he knows not what, and while he is waiting he picks delicately through the human genome like God picking through the mind of a soul in purgatory.

“Terrible about your library lady, isn’t it?” Olga says as, with her arms embracing a Perspex shield, she prepares a radioactive probe. “Have you been to see her, Ben?”

My reply is vague; but my thoughts are focused. In my thoughts I am, as always, the protagonist: Hugo Miller will deny his interest in the child and I will step in to stop the adoption order, claiming right of custody. A DNA analysis will establish my paternity. Adam will be mine; and in a sense, even lying comatose in her hospital bed, even kept alive by intravenous drip, Jean will be mine. I will have won.

Something like that.

A hushed and somnolent corridor.
MRS. JEAN MILLER. NO VISITORS PLEASE
.

Jean lies softly on her bed, dreaming of the future. The baby sleeps, with nothing to dream of. At the opening of the door a
nurse looks around from a trolley of bottles and sees Hugo Miller standing in the doorway brandishing a tape recorder. “I thought perhaps some of her favorite music … Doctor Lupron suggested …”

The nurse smiles compliance. “Why not?”

“It’s one of those Eastern European composers. She often used to listen to it.” He sets the machine down on the table near Jean’s head, and plugs it in. Quite soon a disembodied piano begins to play, a painful, nostalgic sound filtering into the still air of the room; the nurse pauses from her work to listen for a moment. “That’s lovely,” she says. “I don’t go much for the classics myself, but I do like a good tune.” Then she goes back to her work with the brisk and practiced manner of an undertaker laying out a corpse, fiddling with machinery, changing the bottle on the drip, twitching at the sheet that lies over Jean’s body, glancing at the sleeping baby. Then she pauses with her hand on the door handle. “Lovely music, isn’t it? Sad, though. Who did you say it was?” But she doesn’t listen to the answer. “I won’t be gone long,” she says. “There’s the bell if you need anything.”

Oh no, he doesn’t need anything. When she has gone he crosses the room and turns the latch on the door. Later they will ask about that latch. Why should there be such a thing on a hospital door? they will ask. And that will lead on to other queries. Was it all premeditated? Was it all planned? They will argue about it for days. Had the idea lain there in the back of his mind like a fish sliding beneath the still waters, a shark within the submarine tanks of the clinic? Had he thought it all out? What motive will they decide on? What will be the reason, the cause, the etiology? How will they explain it all away?