Mendel's Dwarf (15 page)

We have something in common.

Curious how acquaintance merges into friendship. In retrospect it seems to have been a developmental progression, like the turning on of genes during ontogeny: encounter, acquaintance, familiarity, friendship. But is that it? Is there really this logic to it? Or am I merely ascribing purpose to a thing that is nothing more than the chance coming together of two lost souls? They were lost for quite different reasons, but then castaways on an island might not have come from the same shipwreck.

Whatever the dynamics of the thing, quite soon it was the norm for me to wait every Tuesday and Thursday for Miss
Piercey to come out of the library at the lunch break—other days were left for the Primers and Codons and Vectors with whom I worked. But twice a week I would wait for her. Mousy and apologetic, nodding earnestly when one of the staff addressed her, looking at the world with those surprising, mismatched eyes, she would smile suddenly when she caught sight of me. I think she felt safe in my company. I think she felt like a child again. Oh, I know the mouthings of amateur psychology make depressing reading. I know Freud is about as interesting as Ealing on a wet Sunday afternoon. But there must be some reason for Miss Piercey and Doctor Lambert befriending each other; conscious or unconscious, there must have been some end in mind. Was it nothing more than the mutual attraction of unfortunates?

The pub was called The Pig and Poke. “I’m the pig,” the landlord used to say if anyone asked, “and”—pointing to the barmaid, a middle-aged woman of brassy phenotype and terrifying invective—“she’s the poke.”

“You wouldn’t even touch the edges,” she would retort. “It’d be like picking me nose with a matchstick.”

The other members of the Institute used to go to the Prince of Wales, so we had the place more or less to ourselves and after a while the landlord (
Mine Host, Eric
—proclaimed on a notice above the bar) began to recognize us. “What you do, then?” he asked. “Work round here, do you?”

“I search for genes,” I told him.

He eyed me shrewdly. “I got a mate in Clerkenwell deals in Levi’s,” he confided. “No mucking, genuine article. You interested?”

Peals of laughter from Miss Piercey. The misunderstanding became a standing joke, a link with the place. “Find any Levi’s, then, Professor?” Eric would call from behind his beer taps whenever we came in. “Got any five-oh-ones?”

“Isn’t he a scream?” Miss Piercey would say.

It wasn’t exclusively the pub, of course. There were lunchtime
concerts at the Albert Hall, just the thing for the cultivated office worker or the impoverished and intellectual student. Rather hesitantly I suggested we get tickets for a series on the Slav composers. She was very keen. “I love romantic music,” she confessed, as I feared she would; but then, to my surprise, she added, “although I’m happy with the classical period. What I won’t stand for”—and those eyes narrowed surprisingly—“is the twentieth century. Well, that’s not quite true. I’m okay with Dvo?ák, but then Dvo?ák’s not really twentieth-century in spirit, is he?”

“I thought middle-European nationalism was very twentieth-century.”

Her expression was reproving. I’d found out her real passion. “I mean the musical
form
. Bartók begins to lose me, and people like Janáček—ugh!” She shivered. I’m in the mood for confession: found her shiver alluring. I made her sit through a performance of the absurdly named
Glagolitic Mass
, and she almost writhed with displeasure in the seat beside me as the chorus writhed with pleasure up and down the scales of the piece. “The whole of my lunch break for that!” she exclaimed. “Great splashes of sound that seem to go nowhere. Have you noticed that every time a melody comes along he deliberately
destroys
it? Did you notice? What’s wrong with melodies? Why does the twentieth century hate them so?” But she enjoyed the Janáček piano recital I took her to. Afterwards I bought her a recording that included one of the pieces that was played:
On an Overgrown Path
.

“Most of it is about the death of the composer’s daughter,” I told her, after she had said how much she loved it. That didn’t put her off. I would sometimes go into the librarian’s office and find her playing it on her portable tape recorder. Mousy Miss Piercey. There was a little more to her than I had assumed.

So we would lunch together, and occasionally listen to a concert together, and then we would return to the Institute and go our separate ways, she to the stuffy confines of the library, I to
the laboratories, the penetralia, the holy of holies, the inner sancta of the twentieth century.

What would Great-great-great-uncle Gregor have made of the labs, I wonder? He had to argue with Abbot Napp for extra space to plant more peas in the garden at the back of the monastery. What would he have made of the corridors and rooms with their humming machinery, their computer terminals, their ultracentrifuges, their slabs of electrophoresis gel, their oligonucleotide synthesizers, their automatic DNA sequencers? What would he make of the fact that we can actually read the messages enshrined in the hereditary particles whose existence he could infer only from watching the way they behave?

“What do you actually do?” Miss Piercey asked. “Aside from the joking with Eric and all that, what do you actually
do?
”

Many things. But one thing in particular. I search for the gene that caused me.

Frau Rotwang’s skirts brushed the dew from the grass as she walked beneath the lime trees. A dachshund scampered alongside her and, from time to time, tied its leash around her ankles. When this happy event occurred, Mendel supported her elbow while she skipped on one foot and bent down to disentangle herself. Her ankles—one of them was disclosed for a moment while the leash unwound—seemed impossibly slender. Her dress was buttoned tightly to her neck, where a small froth of white lace bubbled up from underneath. Narrow ankles, narrow waist, slender neck. A mere slip.

Glancing at him with that smile, she asked, “Are lady visitors allowed?”

“Within the gardens, of course they are.”

One of the fathers—Anselm, it was—came along the path. He nodded to the couple as he passed. There was a faint hint of
disapproval about his expression. “They are so forbidding,” she said when he had passed.

“Who are?”

“The monks.”

“But I am one.”

Briefly she touched his forearm. “Not you, Gregor. The rest.”

“Anyway, we are not monks.”

“I thought—”

“Friars. Our vocation is amongst the people. And fifty percent of the people …”

“… are ladies.”

“Fifty percent are
women
,” Mendel corrected her. “I’m not sure that is the same thing. I think rather
fewer
are ladies.”

“I’m sure I know nothing about that, Pater Gregor.” She laughed, blushing faintly, bringing color to her name. “Now show me your … children.”

“Over there.” He pointed across the lawn, beyond the greenhouse (a building in its own right, this, with brick wings two stories high), toward the wall of the refectory. Peas. He was becoming quite obsessed with them. At first it had been fuchsias, sensible, pretty fuchsias. But now it was only ever peas.

“Lead me to them.”

They crossed the grass, ducking under the lower boughs of the limes, caught up in the heavy, cloying scent of the trees, a sensual, female smell at odds with the dusty masculinity of the place. Beneath the refectory windows were the beds, with peas standing in chaotic, anarchic rows, hanging from the pea-sticks like drunks. Rows and rows of peas. “A kitchen garden,” she exclaimed.

“An experimental plot. Over there you may see the fourth-generation hybrids from the first series—”

The dachshund lifted one stunted leg and sent a stream of yellow piddle onto the base of one of the plants. Frau Rotwang cried out in horror: “Adolfus! You ill-mannered child!” Almost
apologetically, almost as though he were to blame, Mendel muttered something about the exigencies of nature. The dog sniffed at his handiwork.

“But why are there paper bags?” Frau Rotwang asked, as much to distract from the embarrassment as out of any particular interest. The peas—perfectly ordinary garden peas—appeared to have blossomed paper bags. One wondered, one did wonder, whether dear Gregor wasn’t a little eccentric. As though in answer to the question, he took one of the uncovered flowers, a deliciously purple and mauve creature just like a butterfly, and opened the petals with his blunt, farmer’s hands.

“The bags protect the flowers from pollination by means other than my paintbrush.” He withdrew his finger and showed Frau Rotwang a smear of golden pollen. “I, Gregor Mendel, am the one who commands the matings here. No pea may mate without my consent. In nature it is blind chance that determines what crosses take place. Here it is I. I have even grown some of the plants inside the greenhouse to be sure that weevils do not get into the flowers and interfere with my own work. The pea weevil, for example.
³
When I was in Vienna, I presented a paper on the pea weevil to the Vienna Zoological and Botanical Society. It is a determined little fellow, and I cannot trust it not to transfer pollen from one flower to another. I have to be extremely careful, Frau Rotwang,
extremely
careful.”

“And did it? Did it pollinate where it shouldn’t have?” The word
adultery
, a horrendous, a terrifying, word, seemed to rise up out of the sultry air of their conversation.

“I found that it did not. I am the only pollinator.”

“Surely the Almighty has some say in the matter.”

“The Almighty works through chance. Chance is his instrument. Thus you”—she looked at him with her cornflower blue
eyes—“thus you, Frau Rotwang, have blue eyes through the chance of your mother and your father …”

“So do you, Father Gregor.”

For a moment they looked into each other’s eyes. He felt quite faint. The hot spring day, the heavy perfume of the lime trees, the closeness of the woman with her intense cerulean eyes, all these things contrived to …

“Are you all right, Gregor?”

“A little warm. This soutane.” But this soutane was hiding things he could barely admit, even to his confessor. He eased his collar. “So impractical in the sun. Black absorbs heat, did you know that? White reflects, black absorbs. If you come over here, you may see some of the results of my labors. Seed color, for example.” He took a branch and held it for her inspection. The flowers at the upper part of the plant nodded and danced like butterflies. “This is a hybrid of the second series. I have just started considering my characters in pairs to discover the relationship of one set of characters with another set. Here you will see that the flowers are carried at the axes of the plant, over there they are at the terminal point. That is another of the characters that I am working with. Another is the seed color.” He snapped open a pod to reveal a row of glistening seeds. Six were yellow, two were green.

“Oh.” There was something startling about seeing them lying there, couched in cool green, something disturbing and visceral, as though they had been discovered in their most intimate moment.

“Take them.”

She hesitated. “I can eat them?”

“Of course.”

“I can
eat
your experiment?”

He offered up the cleaved pod. “Please.” She reached toward the seeds. Her fingers were thin and long, her nails as perfectly shaped as almonds.
Mandel
, almond. A single yellow pea was
selected, nipped out by those nails, and lifted to her mouth. She had rouged lips, closed like a bud. He watched closely as she took the pea. There was a sudden glimpse of moist tongue.

“Mmmm. Sweet.”

“Take another.”

“Really?”

“A green one.” Somewhere in the background, one of the gardeners was clipping a hedge. The sound was a monotonous rhythm underlying the capricious delights of this presence beside him.

“Green.” Another pea vanished. Her mouth worked. The sun seemed unduly hot for the time of year. He wiped his brow. “Another.”