The Hormone Factory: A Novel

by Saskia Goldschmidt

  “She told me she had found a way to endure your unwanted advances. Whenever you pulled her close, untied her apron, tugged down her undies, put her hand on your prick and then made her move it up and down, when you made her put it in her mouth or you put it inside her”—Rivka spat out the words in a voice containing nothing but revulsion—“she’d pretend she was drifting up and away, that she wasn’t down there on that disgusting sofa. She was looking down from above, feeling absolutely nothing, watching you taking her, devouring her, as if she were looking at some man and some girl who had nothing to do with her. And once you’d pulled your schlong out of her, she’d go to the bathroom and vomit until nothing came up but bile. And then she’d return to her workstation and go back to filling pill bottles, ignoring the glances from the other girls, who were all smart enough to know what was going on, and trying not to think about it anymore.”

  It had never even occurred to me that the girls I lured to my sofa might not appreciate my advances, even though Aaron did try to warn me. I’d just taken his rebuke as yet another sign of his troubled soul; I thought he was envious of my easy conquests. I was, after all, an attractive, successful man. I sincerely believed that if the girl did show some resistance at first, it was only out of a sense of propriety, and that deep in her heart she had to be flattered by my attentions. I did not recognize myself in Rivka’s description of me: a vile brute forcing innocent victims to pretend they were somewhere else in order to endure a horrific rape. I was just floored. I wanted to tell Rivka that, I wanted to explain to her how it had looked to me, but she didn’t give me that chance.

  “When her aunt found out she was pregnant, she ordered Rosie to get rid of it, even though by that time she was already showing, and so pretty far along. She was told that with a baby on the way she couldn’t stay in her aunt’s house. Rosie refused to submit to a back-alley abortion, which led to a terrible fight. One night her uncle threw her down the attic stairs in hopes of making her miscarry. She still has the scars from her fall on her face and arms. Another time her aunt gave her a big mug of coffee to drink, brewed with a good helping of sulfur from matchstick heads. When Rosie realized it was poison, she refused to drink it, but the uncle and aunt forced it down her throat. But the child in her belly is a stubborn one; it’s determined to survive, welcome or not. Rosie couldn’t really tell me why she was so keen on protecting the fetus, when having the baby would only create even more problems for her.

  “ ‘It’s not the baby’s fault, is it, that I got myself knocked up?’ she said to me. ‘The day before my uncle pushed me down the stairs I felt it move for the first time. After all I’ve been through, am I supposed to spend the rest of my life feeling guilty for murdering my baby as well?’

  “After that, her aunt and uncle told her she couldn’t stay. She begged and pleaded with them not to throw her out until the day of the trial, and they agreed on the condition that she wear a baggy coat when she went out. Whenever there were visitors, she had to go sit in the attic; they didn’t want her to be seen by anyone. The day of the trial was the first time she had appeared in public. The judge had asked her who the father of the baby was, but she’d refused to say. Leaving the courtroom, she’d had no idea where to go. That was why she agreed to come with me, and told me the whole story.”

  “So—did you take her to your parents’ house?” I asked. My wife and my employee, both of them pregnant by me, in my in-laws’ house—I couldn’t think of a worse scenario.

  “She did come with me, on the condition that I wouldn’t tell anyone who the father was. She wanted to get as far away as possible from our town, from the factory, from her family, and especially from Aaron and you. We’ve done quite a bit of talking these past few days, and I have found a place for her in Amsterdam. She’ll be safe there for the time being; the people there are helping her to look for work, and then we’ll see. I’m going to keep in touch with her and have promised her she doesn’t have to worry about money.”

  I nodded.

  “And as far as the two of us go,” Rivka went on, “I’ve been giving that a lot of thought too. The moment I realized what you’d been up to with Rosie and God only knows how many others, something inside me just died. I cannot and will not love a wicked man, even if he is the father of my four girls and the unborn child I am carrying.

  “I dread the day it is born. What will I do if it turns out to be a boy? I wish I believed in God. I’d have fallen to my knees and begged him to give me another girl. How can I be a good mother to a child who later in life may be capable of doing to others what you have done?

  “I seriously considered taking the children to live with my parents for a while. But if I were to tell my father and the rest of the world what you have done—what sort of future would my children have? Your reputation for depravity would rub off on them. If the world weren’t such a terrifyingly dangerous place right now, I do think I’d have the guts to leave you. But with a child on the way, and that lunatic next door drooling about his Thousand-Year Reich, I don’t dare. So I’m staying put for the time being. Our marriage is merely a business deal from now on, for the sake of the children. If someday I change my mind, or if the political situation changes, I’m out of here. With the children. You can take one of the guest rooms, and I’d appreciate it if you would be gone as often as you can. Just immerse yourself in your work; isn’t that what you really want to do anyway? And if I ever catch you so much as touching one of the factory girls again, if you turn out to be a hopeless case and can’t make yourself stop, I’m taking the story straight to Volk en Vaderland. Let those brownshirts go to town on you; see if I care.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but she stood up and walked to the door. “Mordechai, I’m not interested in what you have to say. You’ve been pulling the wool over my eyes for far too long. Don’t you remember the time I told you that I felt you were out on an iceberg somewhere, and there was a wild and savage sea between us? I’ve lost the will to swim over to your side. I’m giving you permission to float away, as far away from me as possible, in fact. As long as you make sure that for the children nothing changes. It’s for their sake that I am staying, to give them as happy a childhood as possible.”

  She shut the door quietly, and the clacking sound of her heels on the floor tiles faded gradually away.

  34 …

  I longed for my wife the way the Israelites once longed for the fleshpots of Egypt, but her rejection of me was so final that I had to accept her proposal of a marriage on ice, and believe me, it was agony, a festering wound.

  At first I assumed that I would be able to win her back. So I tiptoed through the house, was on my very best behavior, and took great care not to upset the apple cart. I paid ample attention to the children, treated them more affectionately than was my wont, and did everything in my power to please my wronged wife in the hope of melting her iceberg, though she seemed set on remaining in a permanent state of war with me. Consoling myself with the thought that the birth of our baby would surely move her to forgive me, I waited, more patiently than ever before, for that day to arrive.

  • • •

  At Farmacom my return was greeted with relief, and I was immediately up to my ears in work obligations. It was urgent that we hammer out a deal with the German firm that had taken over our subsidiary in order to contain the harm done by the loss of our important Austrian market. The brutal annexation of Austria had taken a big bite out of our European sales territory, a serious hemorrhage from our bottom line.

  The vacant office space left by my brother’s abrupt departure was temporarily taken over by one of our staff, but in view of the increasingly complex, multifaceted nature of our business, it was important to find a heavy hitter, someone to strengthen and energize our management team. Even though Aaron had never been a very dynamic executive, I couldn’t help noticing that his absence left a big hole, not only on account of his foreign connections, but also at home, since he had always had a better rapport with our emp
loyees than I did.

  We had to hire more people for our chemical-pharmaceutical division, and right away, for new synthetic substitutes were being invented all around the world at an ever-accelerating pace. This meant new opportunities for us, but also fresh pitfalls. What to make of the British breakthrough that now made it possible to fabricate the female hormone synthetically, in the lab—so much simpler than our method of processing the urine of pregnant mares, which involved a huge capital outlay? A synthetic version of our testosterone hormone also already existed. It was the start of a great sea change for our industry: our line of work had become an exploration of substances imitating the effects of the naturally occurring hormones, often yielding superior results. A wild new horserace had begun worldwide, and we were going to need a great deal more manpower to keep up.

  Furthermore, the precarious political situation compelled us to take steps to safeguard our business in case of an invasion. The Munich Agreement, in which the charlatan Neville Chamberlain, the bloody fool, had simply handed Sudetenland over to the great power-hungry bully in return for the worthless guarantee that the pig would leave the rest of Czechoslovakia and Europe alone, wasn’t exactly reassuring.

  “Peace for our time,” Chamberlain declared once he was back on British soil after shamefully haggling out this deal like any low-down huckster. The idea that the prime minister of the nation that had become our most important export market (now that we could no longer sell our products to the den of thieves next door) could have let himself be hoodwinked by that brute filled me with rage. Not only did he hand Sudetenland to the ogre on a silver platter, but he also signed a non-aggression pact with that archfiend from hell! Still, there was nothing for it but to make the necessary preparations in case an invasion of our country obliged us to hightail it over to Chamberlain’s stomping ground. A cousin of mine, Simcha de Paauw, ran the English branch of the De Paauw Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Co. I had turned the shares of our foreign subsidiaries over to him in the form of a collateral loan. The deal was that in the case of an invasion, these would become property of the English branch.

  I deposited duplicates of all the manufacturing instructions of our medical preparations in a London bank, and we converted our subsidiary, which we had set up in the early thirties, into a British limited company: Farmacom Laboratories Ltd., transferring the clients, brand names, and other rights. In this way we were able to honor any past deals with our competitors. We were bound by various hormone-consortium agreements, but the way we had structured those agreements gave us leeway to sell our products to our English partner without violating our commitments, although our rivals can’t have been very happy to find their hands tied through such legal ruses.

  It also allowed us to honor our existing commitment to Levine, giving him (in my opinion, much too great) a say in various aspects of the business: hiring and firing, product launch, quality control, publicity materials and advertising campaigns, as well as third-party agreements. No matter how much Levine’s need to crack the whip rankled with me—his thirst for power invariably reminded me of the proclivities of his identically mustachioed countryman—I could not afford, in these uncertain times, to alienate him even more than I already had with my tomfoolery. We were still in the process of renegotiating Levine’s contract; the old one was about to expire, and we were bogged down in haggling over his excessively stringent demands. For the time being, therefore, he had an equal stake in the British firm. Even with all my gloomy forebodings about the situation in Europe, however, I could not have predicted back then that his role in Farmacom would shortly be curtailed. I had no problem picturing that piece of fascist gallows-scum next door as our soon-to-be dictator, but the notion that I’d ever be rid of Levine’s tyranny wasn’t even a pipe dream yet, let alone a reality I could count on.

  • • •

  In October 1938, our annus horribilis, Rivka coldly informed me that Rosie had been delivered of a daughter. The young mother had named her Chana. That name, Hebrew for “mercy,” moved me more than I dared to admit. The baby appeared to have weathered the attempts on her life while still inside the womb and had come through with flying colors. She seemed healthy, and Rosie, according to Rivka’s curt report, was philosophical about the unsavory way she’d been saddled with an offspring, and did not seem to hold it against the baby. Mother and child were to remain at the Amsterdam shelter for the first couple of months, and once Rosie was used to motherhood, she would be moved into a place of her own. Rivka saw to it that she had everything she needed. I’d have liked to visit her but was explicitly forbidden to contact her, and besides, exacerbating Rivka’s ire was the last thing in the world I wanted.

  Babies don’t give a damn about the circumstances of their birth. I wished I could have told my youngest offspring just to stay inside that warm womb of Rivka’s for the time being; he’d never get a better deal outside. But my innocent boy was deaf to my quiet plea to postpone his arrival in these glacial times. On a freezing cold day in December, one month after Kristallnacht, when the brownshirted murderers across the border had given the world a foretaste of what they had in store for our people, I received a phone call from Marieke, our housekeeper, informing me that my wife was in labor and had just been driven to the hospital in the city. Rivka had not sent for me, but my loyal Marieke thought it unfair to keep me in the dark about the baby’s imminent arrival. I raced over to the clinic, which happened to be located not far from the prison where my brother had been serving his sentence for the past nine months. Since I wasn’t any different from any other father sitting around waiting helplessly for his child to be born, I was asked to sit outside the delivery room. Never is the true uselessness of the male species more evident than when our wives are in labor, huffing and puffing, screaming, raving, bellowing, and bearing down. Giving birth is a cruel, excruciating ordeal that just goes on and on until the exhausted mother is finally dilated enough to spew the baby out into the world—a rude ending to the kid’s peaceful sojourn deep inside that warm body. Maybe all our male philandering can be traced back to this: that we’re made to feel so utterly dispensable at the one moment of human existence that really counts.

  I took a seat on a metal chair in the maternity clinic’s icy corridor, cringing at every scream that reached my ears from behind the closed door. From time to time the door would open to let out a nurse who would push me back down onto my chair with a reassuring gesture and explain that my wife was having a hard time, and that it was a difficult labor, which was why it was taking her a long time to dilate—quite surprising, actually, in light of the fact that she’d had four previous straightforward deliveries—but that I should on no account be worried and just stay calm and wait. I waited but was far from calm. For, unlike the nurse, I did have an inkling as to why this birth was so much harder than the previous ones. I was sure it was Rivka’s apprehension that was making it difficult for her to open up, which had been a breeze for her with the girls. But how to explain that to the nurse? And anyway, what difference did it make? So I waited, racked with fear that my wife would not survive this arduous labor, and yet pumped with the secret hope that, in spite of Rivka’s apprehension, the child would be a boy.

  I sat there until deep in the night. At one point there had been a shift change, when the obstetrician going off duty had tried to assuage me with some more evasive reassurances before hurrying home. I must even have nodded off for a bit on my rickety chair, because when I was startled awake, I saw that an hour had gone by. It was close to six a.m. and a drizzly day was dawning when the delivery room door swung open and an exhausted-looking nurse walked over to me.

  “Congratulations,” she said, smiling, “you are the father of a healthy boy.”

  I felt a rush of joy before anxiety about what the announcement had left out took over.

  “And how is my wife?” I asked.

  “She is very tired,” said the nurse, “but that’s no surprise; it was an unusually tough delivery and has left he
r quite drained. So drained that she didn’t have it in her to take the child in her arms after it was born. But that’s bound to change once she’s had a good rest,” she concluded. She said she’d let me go in briefly, even though my wife had indicated she wanted to be left alone. “But,” she said, nodding kindly, “that’s not unusual, and then they’re only too delighted to show off the baby to the papa. Go ahead, go have a look, but don’t stay long.”

  I knew perfectly well that Rivka’s despair at having given birth to a boy wouldn’t change to delight when she saw me, but I couldn’t resist the temptation of seeing with my own two eyes how she was, and to have a glimpse of my first son.

  She was lying prone on the metal hospital bed, the crib at her side. Her face was averted from the bassinet, and when I entered she did not react. Approaching the bed cautiously, I whispered her name, placing a tentative hand on her hair. She shook her head free.

  “You’ve had a hard time of it, haven’t you, my love,” I said carefully, “but I hear you were a trooper.”

  Slowly she turned her face toward me, opening her eyes. “Don’t take advantage of the situation, Mordechai,” she said, sounding terse and weary. Her eyes filled with tears, which she swabbed away angrily. “Have a look at your son and then go, leave me alone. Tell the girls not to come yet.”

  A sob escaped her, and she turned her back to show that as far as she was concerned the conversation was closed.

  “What about a name?” I asked. “We haven’t discussed it yet, but he needs a name, I need a name for his birth certificate.”

  “I’ll let you know in three days,” she said, indicating she couldn’t bear my presence any longer with a wave of her hand.