by Simon Mawer
“There it is,” said the nurse proudly, as though the child had something to do with her. “What a tough little thing.”
“You look exhausted,” Hugo said to his wife, and Jean smiled at him and achieved that trick women have, to comfort the expectant father when it is the mother herself who should be comforted. “I’ll be all right,” she told him, as though she had a say in the matter. “A bit tired, but I’ll be all right.”
Coincidence. The simultaneity of events. Jean lies on a bed in the Hewison Fertility Clinic while I mount the podium of a lecture theater at the Masaryk University of Brno, watched by the worthies of the university, by the officials of the Mendelian Association of America, by representatives of Hewison Pharmaceuticals, by members of the Mendel Symposium. Jean brings comfort, while I trade in discomfort:
“One hundred thirty years ago, in a school building not far from here, a quiet, introverted, stubborn friar gave a lecture on the breeding of peas. With that lecture he lit a fuse, a fuse that burned unnoticed for thirty-five years until the very opening of this century, when the bomb exploded. The explosion is going on still. It engulfed me from the moment of my conception …”
There is a spasm of pain and guilt on the faces in the audience.
“Perhaps it will engulf us all eventually.”
Silence. The heartbeats gallop onward, careering toward delivery.
“You may plot the course of this explosion as a cosmologist might plot the evolution of a supernova: it began with prejudice and it blossomed with legislation.” There is a slide flung up on the screen, a list of salient events and dates. “It began in the early years of the century with the foundation of such organizations as the Society for Racial Hygiene in Germany and the Eugenics Education Society in Britain. It reached an important marker in 1933 with the Eugenic Sterilization Law in Germany, and high tide in 1939, by which time almost four hundred thousand German men and women had undergone eugenic sterilization.”
The pain mounts, swelling inside her, racking that slender, white body as though determined to assert its mastery. She breathes in small gusts of trichloroethylene and the pain recedes. A nurse times the intervals between spasms as an interrogator might time the length of torture, turning subjective experience into a measured science, waiting for the confession, waiting for the moment when the body yields up only what is expected—the truth. “There’s a good girl,” she says comfortingly. “Won’t be long now, dear.”
Dilation of the cervix is complete by 9:15 A.M. The coincidence is exact. I deliver my lecture; Jean delivers my child. Times are corrected for difference in time zone. I have thought of everything—at precisely 10:15 European Time I glance at my watch and move from the past to the present:
“The old eugenics died with the Third Reich, but make no mistake, the new eugenics is with us. It isn’t in the future, it is here and now. There are modern eugenicists here in this lecture theater at this very moment.” People shift uncomfortably in their chairs and glance around surreptitiously to see if they can spot one another. Is there some kind of password, a subtle sign of recognition? The chairman looks anxious. “Each year in the United States alone some thirty thousand babies are conceived by anonymous sperm donation. At the very least the donated sperm is certified to come from genetically healthy donors. At the worst it comes from William Shockley.”
And the nervous silence fractures into laughter. They laugh with relief, their mouths open like fish gasping for water; while I, poor dwarf, stand before them and wonder about my child. “Or if not from a Nobel Prize winner for physics, perhaps from the father of them all, Hermann Muller, the man who first conceived—if you will forgive the expression—of a sperm bank.” More laughter. Good old Ben.
“We all know Muller, don’t we? He’s one of ours: a geneticist, the man who demonstrated the link between ionizing radiation and mutation, the man who worked on the mutational effects of the Hiroshima bomb. Nobel Prize in 1946. Hermann Muller gave his sperm to the Repository for Germinal Choice on the condition that it must not be used for twenty-five years after his death. That brings it to maturity just about now.”
They laugh at my circus act, but what I tell them is only the truth.
“In the first edition of his book on eugenics, Muller, like the good old-fashioned socialist he was, favored the breeding of children who embodied the characteristics of Lenin and Marx. Things had changed by the second edition. By the second edition, Muller was back in the States after his sojourn in Russia. By the second edition, Lenin had been dropped in favor of Descartes; and Marx had lost out … to Lincoln.”
They are rolling in the aisles. Ben Lambert is a regular guy, they think. Tears are running down the chairman’s face.
“But it isn’t a joke.” They don’t want to believe me. There is nothing funnier than Nobel Prize winners making idiots of themselves. It is the most marvelous joke, surely. “Today respectable medical clinics are offering sperm sorting to enable parents to choose the sex of their children.”
The laughter stumbles, like a dwarf on a doorstep. Surely Ben the clown, Ben the circus act, Ben the regular guy who is so brave and so goddamn funny, is not going to fall down on this one …
“The clinics call this service ‘family balancing.’ A recent opinion poll in the States suggested that, if given the choice, sixty-seven percent of couples would choose to have a male child. One wonders where the balance is in that.” The remaining laughter is a paltry, anxious thing. The clown has fallen, and it isn’t for laughs. He’s not waving his arms around like a fool while the hanging gardens roar and sway with mirth. This is no pratfall.
“Then there is the other matter, the question of genetic disorder. Forget gene therapy. Gene therapy is way in the future. I talk of today. Today the same clinics offer screening for genetic disease and genetic diagnosis of pre-implantation embryos. Who can blame them? The demand is there, isn’t it? Which of you would want a child with anencephaly, or Tay-Sachs disease, or”—the art of the well-tempered pause, timed to the nearest nanosecond—“achondroplasia?”
Silence. I can play them as one would play a fish, a foolish flapping trout, gasping and thrashing and not knowing which way to turn.
“Now you can choose your embryos and implant only the healthy ones and thus avoid the unpleasantness and waste of having to abort fetuses that you don’t want. Thus you improve the genetic stock without even mentioning the idea …”
In the delivery room, Jean lies with her legs up in some kind of harness. Her vulva gapes, a maw of coral red, rimmed with matted hair—a dwarf’s cave from which a dwarf is struggling to emerge. Oxytocin, a nine-amino-acid polypeptide coded for by a gene on chromosome 20, lashes at the muscles of her uterus. The acolytes of obstetrics crowd around. Gowned and masked, Hugo Miller hides in the background and barely watches. Jean breathes deeply and the nurse beside her whispers encouragement and a brown and wrinkled thing presses at the entrance of the cave …
“That is today. Today you can already screen for a thousand or so disorders. But what of the future?” What indeed? Of course they already know about the future, most of them. The future is there in the test tubes back in the lab, in the gels and the genomic libraries. The future is a strange beast in the final throes of birth. “In the future—the near future—you will be able to choose other qualities in the embryo: the child’s eye color, hair color, skin color, and height. Height is one of the most significant, because of all our prejudices it is the most ingrained and the most insidious. We love height.” I stand there before them, deformed and diminished. They writhe in their seats, as though I have them skewered.
“Hitler,” I tell them in case they hadn’t already guessed, “Hitler would have loved it …”
“There we go.” The head emerges, flips over the threshold of the cave, discovers features—a brow, eyes clenched tight, a nose. Fluid flows from the old, wrinkled mouth. The face turns toward its right, almost conversationally, as though it has been called to look at something, the mol
e on the inside of her right thigh, perhaps. A thin cry escapes into the oppressive air of the delivery room. “Luverly,” a voice says. Hugo Miller faints.
“At least the old eugenics was governed by some kind of theory, however dreadful it may have been. The new eugenics, our eugenics, is governed only by the laws of the marketplace. You get what you can pay for.”
In the lecture theater there is only silence—the silence of complicity.
“Are we really such intellectual dwarfs”—ah, they shiver at that one—“as to imagine that the laws of supply and demand can be elevated to the level of a philosophy? Because that is what we have done. We have within our grasp the future of mankind, and as things are going the future will be chosen according to the same criteria as people now choose silicone breast implants and liposuction and hair transplants. It will be eugenics by consumer choice, the eugenics of the marketplace. All masquerading as freedom.”
The baby shoulders its way out, the obstetrician’s cupped hands supporting it, feeling around its neck for the umbilical cord. “There we are, dear. Bear down, bear down. There we are …” There is a momentary air of relief in the delivery room, a fleeting sensation of triumph. Then a sudden disturbance—“Oxygen,” a voice calls. “Oxygen!”
These things happen simultaneously: the baby is lifted up with its umbilical cord hanging from it like a gray gut; an oxygen mask is clamped onto Jean’s face; Hugo Miller is hurried out of the room. The baby is a boy, but no one remarks on the fact.
I flew back that afternoon. “It was wonderful to have you share your ideas with us,” Gravenstein said as she left me at the airport. “A real privilege.”
The plane was half-empty, the cabin staff uninterested in the passengers, more concerned with some kind of dispute that was going on among them, an argument over shifts and hours. They slung shrink-wrapped trays of food down as one might toss feed in front of penned animals. Through the windows, in the raging, sterile world on the surface of the wing, the sun dazzled like an explosion, like the great flash that had swept across the Nullarbor Plain almost forty years before. We crossed the new greater Germany and the Low Countries, and began the slide down from a bright universe of light, down through layers of cloud into a twilit world where car headlights glimmered in the rain and streams of tourists returning from Ibiza shivered as they waited for their luggage.
I phoned from the airport. “I’m sorry, sir,” a sterile voice told me. “We cannot divulge information about patients over the phone.”
“But I’m a close friend, for God’s sake!”
“I’m very sorry, sir.”
The telephone at 34 Galton Avenue went unanswered. I retreated to my cave and lay there, wounded. Not until next morning did my telephone ring: it was Hugo Miller on the other end.
Overweight, oedemic, short of breath, Mendel knew his fate. He had discussed it with his nephews, medical students the pair of them. He had heard his heart pounding in his ears as he lay in bed. He had struggled for breath while lying down, and felt the breathlessness drain away as he sat up. The diagnosis was not difficult even in those days: his heart was failing and the fluid was backing up in his tissues, swelling in his legs and blocking the efforts of his kidneys and his lungs.
He had a woman from the town and a nun to look after him. They bandaged his legs and feet and helped him from bed to sofa. They changed his dressings and they brought his food and they dealt with his bedpan when he couldn’t shuffle to the bathroom. He rarely complained. He faced his last illness with a stubborn stoicism, the same stubbornness that had driven him to plant his damned peas and count them, thousands of them, year after year; the same stubbornness that had caused him to battle with the taxman to the bitter end; the same stoicism that had caused him to utter the words Meine Zeit wird schon kommen—my time will come—when the whole world ignored his work.
On December 20, 1883, he wrote this to Josef Liznar, one of his former pupils, now professor of meteorology at Prague:
You are now entering upon the years of most active work, whereas I must be said to be in the opposite condition. Today I have found it necessary to ask to be completely excused further meteorological observations, for since last May I have been suffering from heart trouble, which is now so severe that I can no longer take the readings of the meteorological instruments without assistance.
Since we are not likely to meet again in this world, let me take this opportunity of wishing you farewell, and of invoking upon your head all the blessings of the meteorological deities.
Best wishes to yourself and your wife,
Gregor Mendel
You see? There at the end, that wry joke—no invocation of the God of the Christians; just the meteorological deities.
He died seventeen days later.
Miller met me outside the Hewison Clinic. A grayness had come into his face. It had chased away the bright red anger that used to lie just below the surface, and left him devoid of any kind of energy. He fingered things distractedly—the lapels of his jacket, the newspaper beneath his arm, the bouquet of flowers that he held awkwardly against his chest—as though he had been struck blind and was searching for some vital message of explanation. “Good of you to come, Ben,” he muttered as I approached. “Good of you to come.”
He merely shrugged when I asked about her. “They don’t seem to know anything, that’s the problem. An embolism, they say. Amniotic fluid or something. They say they’ve done tests, they say all sorts of things. But beneath it all, they just don’t know.”
Together we went through the automatic doors into the foyer of the clinic. Subdued lighting and air-conditioning gave a constant atmosphere to the place irrespective of whether it was day or night, cloudy or fine, sweltering August or dank February outside. A fountain was playing quietly in one corner. An original Klee from the private collection of John Hewison hung on the wall, adding strange, embryonic shapes to the amniotic quality of the place. From inside her glass tank the receptionist nodded recognition when Miller approached. “Of course,” she said when he gave his name. “Of course.” She told us the room number and bestowed on us a smile of encouragement.
A notice board advertised:
Miller rearranged the bouquet of flowers in his arms like an inexperienced father holding a baby for the first time and looked down. “Okay, Ben?” I nodded. There was an absurd camaraderie between us, an artificial thing constructed of embarrassment and dread, and a shared incomprehension. Together we set off in the direction of Maternity.
What was I expecting? You’re wondering, aren’t you? What was on Doctor Benedict Lambert’s mind as he walked through the corridors of the Hewison Clinic beside the cytologically cuckolded Hugo Miller? No one thing, of course. No single, succinct idea occupied the Lambert brain. The remarkable thing about the human mind is that it can hold so much at once, such simultaneous complexities of thought, such bewildering coils of sensation. So: triumph, curiosity, horror, anticipation, plain fear, I felt all those at least. Perhaps a few more. A multiple hybrid of emotion, a monster spawned by the malign hand of chance.
MATERNITY
There was a plain corridor, hushed and humming. Each door bore a mother’s name. One or two boasted a florid ribbon of blue or pink. There was a thin wail of infant on the comatose air.
MRS. JEAN MILLER was down at the far end, behind a notice that warned NO VISITORS PLEASE.
A doctor, as crisp and white as cauliflower, came out as we were about to knock. Her expression was brisk and optimistic as she greeted Hugo. She barely registered surprise at the sight of me at his side. She would have delivered monsters, easing them out of the distended vulva with practiced hands, glancing knowingly at the obstetrician as she did so: dwarfs, spina bifida, anencephalics, mongols, clubfeet, harelips, conjoined twins, the whole gamut of mutation and mistake. She was hardened in matters of teratology.
“This is the baby’s godfather,” Hugo explained. “Ben Lambert.” The doctor seemed to find that quite reasonable, the kind of
surrogate status you might expect from one such as me. “She’s quite comfortable,” she said, holding the door open for us to enter.
How, I wondered, how could the doctor tell? Jean lay motionless on a bed in the center of the room, like a corpse on a catafalque. Gleaming machinery obtruded pipes and wires into her inert, mouse-gray form. Beyond her was a window that looked out onto the neo-Gothic buttresses of the Royal Institute for Genetics. At the foot of her bed was a cot from which came the faint, penetrating noise of neonatal presence.
The doctor gave a bright, hopeless smile. “She has the will to get better, that’s the thing.” But it was plain that will didn’t come into it. Jean was not willing anything. She was lying still beneath a sheet, with wires coming from her head and her chest, with a tube draining from her nose, with an intravenous drip inserted into her arm, with all the intrusive apparatus of modern medicine keeping her just this side of the divide. Oscilloscopes traced the flashing lines of heartbeat and brainwave.
“Where shall I put the flowers?” Miller asked. There were vases of gladioli and chrysanthemums ranged around the catafalque. A nurse moved among the blooms like an acolyte performing some obscure religious rite. One expected candles burning.
“Give them to me,” the nurse said. “Aren’t they lovely? I’ll get another vase.” Were they lovely? They were hybrids, polyploids, monsters in their own right—waxy, florid, and deformed.
I went to the bedside. From where I stood, Jean’s profile appeared etched against the window—the gentle dome of her forehead, the crest of her brow breaking into the second, suave wave of her nose that itself was poised delicately to break across the purse of her lips. Oh, I had watched that profile, seen it laugh, seen it sip, eat, speak, cry, and, in the forgiving shadows, kiss. Oh, I had seen it all! “Jean?” I called softly. “Jean?” But Jean didn’t answer. It wasn’t clear whether she was even there any longer.
