The Hormone Factory (12 page)

“Incidentally,” Rafaël snickered, “whether the sultans were correct in their assumption is questionable. There are known cases of eunuchs—a minority, to be sure—who remained capable of having erections, even orgasms. So they may have been having a wild old time in those harems, especially since the ladies didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant. This was possibly the seraglio’s best-kept secret.”

The Dauphine, our walking music encyclopedia, mentioned that in seventeenth-century Italy, boys were castrated at the age of eight or so, usually in the hope that the castrato’s voice would bring the mutilated child’s family untold wealth, although in reality that seldom happened. If the boys did manage to survive the horrific surgery, performed without anesthesia, all most of them had to look forward to was a life of hardship. Easy to spot by virtue of their luxuriant locks crowning an otherwise hairless, excessively long-limbed body that gave them a tottering, unsteady gait, sooner or later they all wound up obese. Most of the castrati lived out their lives shunned by society.

“In 1904,” said the Dauphine, looking pointedly around the table, for she did so like to show off her exhaustive musical training, “I attended a performance by the castrato Alessandro Moreschi in Rome’s Sistine Chapel. He was not, sad to say, a particularly great singer; his ‘Ave Maria’ was a startling feat rather than a truly moving interpretation. I think the man—perhaps that’s not the right word for it; what do you call such a creature?—well, anyway, I think he owed his fame largely to the fact
that he was one of the last of his kind, because castration has quite fallen out of fashion.”

Her voice held a note of regret. The company peppered her with questions: What did he look like, how big was his rib cage, did his face have feminine features, and how would she describe his voice?

“It’s almost a pity,” mused Samuel Klein, a pharmacologist who had been a major player in the breakthrough we were toasting, a little peanut of a fellow whose appearance belied a quick, sharp wit, “that those Italian castrati are no longer around. We could have been of considerable help to them, and we’d have had a whole bunch of clinical test subjects thrown into the bargain.”

“We do still have access to some neutered men,” Rafaël reassured him. “There are plenty of accidental castrations, as well as cases where the testicles are amputated for medical reasons. And then of course there are the virtual eunuchs, men who, even if the gonads are intact, don’t have the normal sexual drive. That affliction is caused by a deficiency of the same testes hormone; we know that now. So we’ll have more than enough customers for our clinical trials!”

We all drank to that.

Silberstein, a chemist whom I had turned down for a permanent position in our firm and who had fled Nazi Germany a year earlier, told us how in his fatherland homosexuals were being pressured to get castrated to cure their “disease,” which ran afoul of the Aryan ideal of manhood. Would Farmacom someday be able to help these unfortunate creatures by giving them back their sexual apparatus? The conversation now took a different turn, from discussing hormones to bemoaning the barbaric practices that were becoming increasingly common across the border.

After dinner the party moved into the living room, where we were offered coffee, cognac, and Rafaël’s Cuban cigars; for the ladies there were filter cigarettes in the sterling silver case on the coffee table.

The company included a number of recent refugees from the Third Reich. Most had fled to our country alone, hoping to build a life for themselves here before sending for their families. They were all extremely worried and distressed by the reports reaching them of what life was like for the ones they’d left behind; the situation was getting more desperate by the day. To make matters worse, there was no guarantee that the reluctant Dutch government would grant them and their threatened family members permission to remain in the Netherlands.

• • •

Setting up a German subsidiary ten years earlier had been an excellent move. Germany was a big country, and it had become our main export market. But the current dictatorship and growing reign of terror over there made me less and less inclined to invest another cent in Farmacom Deutschland and someday run the risk of having it confiscated by that piece of shit and his followers, the ones who had declared outright war on our people. Besides, a worldwide boycott of German goods had already put the kibosh on our export operation. I thought the boycott was a rather surprising knee-jerk reaction, by the way, probably owing more to political expedience than to sympathy for the victims. After all, the Chosen People haven’t ever been all that popular anywhere in the world. It’s no wonder that one of the Jews’ favorite jokes is the one in which Isaac sighs,
Isn’t two thousand years of being the Chosen People enough, Lord? Couldn’t you give some other race that honor for a change?

Because we had a branch in Germany, and also because we had given all those German-Jewish refugees jobs in our Farmacom operation, there was a growing perception that our company had links to the Third Reich. There is as little room for nuance in business as in politics. The refugees were mainly friends or colleagues of Rafaël’s; people who turned to him or his Dauphine for financial help, employment, or introductions that might lead to a coveted residence permit—and they never seemed to come away empty-handed. Rafaël simply assumed that I was just as anxious as he was to offer help to these erudite men, reduced by dire circumstance to penniless beggars. Our waterlogged country, which had always had a reputation for hospitality and tolerance, and once upon a time had been a haven of refuge for my own forefathers, was in these crisis years turning into an increasingly inward-looking, provincial place, afraid of both a flood from the west and a deluge of refugees from the east. A fearful nation, it allowed itself to be intimidated by the thug across the border, and was therefore not keen on letting in more of the persecuted outcasts. Besides, the brownshirts in our own midst were growing more vociferous, spewing their hateful invective all over the place, and our own citizens were starting to hear them out with increasing enthusiasm. In uncertain times folks tend to be drawn to ruffians who, by shouting simplistic slogans and wild accusations and by dragging up ancient prejudices, manage to heap the blame for all their problems on some innocent scapegoat. A fearful populace wants to see blood, and the demagogues provide plenty of ammunition, first in word and then in deed, as they set upon the black sheep in an orgy of bloodletting.

My position as CEO of a fast-growing company was rather precarious. I was responsible for keeping my workforce employed, and for that I needed the goodwill of the world at
large. And it really stuck in my craw to find the notion taking hold that our company, Farmacom, born and nurtured on good Dutch soil, was actually a German concern, or at least intimately linked to Germany. I had to use every means at my disposal to dispel that idea. For that reason I sold the German subsidiary, and I put new policies in place to stop doing business with our eastern neighbor and not to employ any more foreigners, especially German nationals. Besides, it showed we supported our government’s efforts to bring down the high unemployment rate.

Rafaël and I disagreed on this issue, although he himself had taken Dutch citizenship some years earlier, just before that dirty bastard seized absolute power. Prompted by his desire to distance himself as much as possible from the abhorrent goings-on in the Third Reich and to show his loyalty to his new homeland, he may also have been motivated to some extent by a desire to please me, knowing how patriotic I was.

However, Rafaël’s sense of loyalty to the asylum seekers streaming in from his former fatherland kept growing stronger. He tried to find a job for every poor, persecuted Yid who came knocking on his door with some sob story, and kept importuning us to take on more German Jews. As if our firm wasn’t practically a Jewish ghetto already.

The more dire the situation inside Germany, the more Rafaël’s once-shrewd business sense abandoned him, as his indignation about what was being done to his people intensified. He did everything in his power to sever all links with Germany. As a member of the faculty, he put considerable effort into getting the university to boycott an important Munich conference. The way he saw it, participating in that conference was sleeping with the enemy.

Of course I shared his anger at what was happening, but I was finding it increasingly difficult to accede to his over-the-top demands, motivated as he was by the urge to be the savior of anyone who needed his help. I had to do what was best for both Farmacom and the De Paauw Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Co. Never bite off more than you can chew. A firm that allows itself to be governed by emotions is doomed to fail.

And so that evening in Rafaël’s living room, I found myself in a rather difficult spot. The emotional, tipsy exiles were growing more and more belligerent: Why wasn’t I offering more of them jobs? I was the only one at the party in a position to do so, and they sensed my reluctance, although I tried to be as noncommittal as I could.

“If we Jews fail to do everything we possibly can to rescue our brothers from Hitler’s clutches, and to help them where we can, how can we expect the rest of the world to do so?” said the Dauphine tartly, topping off the brandy snifters.

“But we are already doing all we possibly can,” I replied defensively, sensing the eyes of the entire company glaring at me. “We are in the process of divesting ourselves of our German subsidiary; we have offered lots of people positions in the company; we have donated generously to the refugee organizations; but I do have to remember that my first responsibility is to the firm. If Farmacom should come to be viewed around the world as a German concern, it’s curtains for our business, and that means the bread line for all our workers, Jew and non-Jew alike. We’re in a difficult quandary and have to be extremely careful how we handle it.”

“But, Mr. Motke,” said Silberstein, “don’t you understand how serious this is; don’t you see how easy you have it, compared with us? To you it’s just about employment opportunities and
corporate profit margins. To us and our wives and children back in Germany, it’s a matter of life or death.”

There were nods of agreement all around.

Rivka had been following the discussion intently, and now she put in her two cents. “Motke,” she said, “a German firm or a Jewish firm, surely those are two very different things? Surely the world can be made to understand that taking on asylum seekers means taking a stand against that despicable regime? Surely if Farmacom and the De Paauw Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Company are seen to be helping the
victims
of Hitler’s tyranny, it will generate goodwill for the firm around the globe, and open up new markets abroad?”

The buzz that greeted my wife’s comments made clear that she had a receptive audience. I suddenly saw red. My own wife trying to teach me a lesson, here at this gathering; how dare she?

“Talk is cheap,” I retorted haughtily. “What do
you
know about running a business, Rivka? My responsibilities are far greater than any of you can possibly comprehend.” I stood up. “Come, Rivka,” I snapped at her. “I have to be at work again in the morning, unlike some of the people here. Have a pleasant evening.”

Rivka hoisted herself from her chair with visible reluctance and a pointed shrug, went up to the Dauphine to kiss her goodbye, and gave the company around the table a smile and a little wave. Rafaël followed me into the hall to see us out.

“It’s a shame,” he said, helping me into my coat, “that it had to come to this. I wanted this evening to end on a festive note. I do very much appreciate, Motke, that you have made Farmacom possible. And I am over the moon about our latest achievement. But surely you see that we are now at a point where commercial considerations ought no longer to be the key motivation. This is about life and death, as Silberstein said, and we all know that
evil doesn’t need much incentive. If humankind just stands by and does nothing, it’s enough to let atrocity prevail.”

“Ah, but nice guys finish last,” I responded, and stomped outside without waiting for Rivka, who, when she finally came out, got into the passenger seat next to Frank. In a silence more deafening than any provoked by our sporadic fights over twelve years of marriage, we drove home to our mansion in the sticks.

21 …

The thirties were bleak years in many respects.

The months following the party fiasco saw me working even longer days at the office than before, up to my neck in negotiations, contract signings, and expansion plans, or else away on increasingly frequent business trips that took me, and sometimes Aaron, to England, America, South America, and China—territories where it was necessary to nail down new and existing business contacts and get subsidiaries off the ground. My intensive workload was occasionally lightened by a fling with a factory cutie or a diverting seduction in the lobby of some foreign hotel.

Rivka was kept busy looking after our four girls. She was a cheerful and enthusiastic mother, and I admired her for not taking out on the children the coldness that had arisen between the two of us. She also continued running her enrichment programs for the factory girls. Since our visit to the Levines, she had thrown herself into volunteer activities, assisting refugees who had managed to reach our country despite the strict border controls and the country’s fractious mood. Whenever we happened to run into each other at home, she’d insist on telling me their tragic stories in a reproachful tone of voice, as if
I
, and not the Satan across the border, were the one who’d been mistreating all those poor schmoes.

• • •

The discovery of the male hormone did not bring us the success we were expecting from the get-go. It was a big headache at first, because a major German company had registered some premature patents that could conceivably block us from putting Levine’s invention into production. Moreover, the fact that the discovery had been the brainchild of a Jew goaded the German government into doing everything in its power to claim it as an Aryan achievement. That nest of crooks was in the habit of appropriating Jewish discoveries and chalking them up to the master race.