Mendel's Dwarf (19 page)

Repeat that conversation as often as you want, with variations for comprehension and native wit, and you have got the first phase, the collection of pedigrees. “I suppose there’s some kind of statistical analysis involved, is there?” one woman asked. “Something that will tell you the likelihood of the markers being linked to the achondroplasia gene. I mean, presumably the two things, the marker and the gene, could be inherited together by pure chance …”

“Have you studied genetics?”

She shook her head. Bright, intelligent eyes looked out from within her pug face. She was strangely beautiful, as though you could see through a glass darkly, through mere contorted flesh
and bone, to the normal woman hidden within. “I’m a solicitor,” she explained. “I avoided biology at school, but you try and find out something, don’t you? Once you’ve faced it, you want to understand as much as you can.” We were companions in this. She smiled at me with the kind of smile she might have reserved for her husband, as though I were party to an intimacy as great as any she had to offer. For a moment I pictured the two of us writhing together on a bed, clutching each other with stunted limbs. Did such a thought occur to her? She had a normal husband. She had a normal husband, and a normal son and a dwarf daughter, both delivered by Caesarean section. “You should see the looks I get. Sometimes people come up to me in the street and tell me that it shouldn’t be allowed. Complete strangers …”

Bring on the clowns. Bring on the dwarfs. Let the band start playing.

The Circus

On 29th June, being the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, titular saints of the city, the circus came to Brünn. The whole rigmarole, part fair, part gypsy encampment, a village of caravans and tents and booths, was strewn out on open ground along the banks of the River Schwarzawa, on the far side of the Klosterplatz. It was a fine sight on a bright summer’s day, with the smoke billowing and bunting flying and the bands playing and the dark Schreibwald hill rising up behind it all like a vast circus tent. There was a great parade through the town: caravans and clowns, a lumbering elephant and a cage of tigers (two), a team of jugglers and a knot of tumblers, a troop of plumed ponies and a couple of moth-eaten camels with Arab boys on their backs. Dark-skinned strangers were seen in the streets. Shopkeepers kept a closer eye than usual on their stock. Householders made sure to lock their doors.

Mendel went, of course. He could not ignore it. There was the bearded lady; there was a contortionist called The Boneless Wonder; there was a head, a living, blinking, lip-licking human head that appeared to sprout, quite bodiless, from a growing vine; there was a two-headed giant (dried and shriveled and lying in a coffin), and a three-legged boy, and, pickled in a jar like sauerkraut, Siamese twins. He had already been around the hospital, bracing himself for the experience, to take note of some of the deformities that were there. He had already made a pedigree of his own family—the receding hairline, the stoutness, the blue eyes, the myopia. He had already bred mice in the confines of his room in the monastery, and incurred the wrath of Abbot Napp as a result. How could he not turn his attention to the circus?

He went with a party from the monastery, with Pavel Křižkovsky the choirmaster and a group of the choristers and two of the other friars.

There was an atmosphere about the circus encampment. Physically it was an amalgam of crushed grass and coal smoke and the scorched smell of the lamps and a hundred other things that one couldn’t put a name to. Metaphorically it was the exotic scent of mystery and alienation, and the sensation that here the measured normality of things was mere illusion, that beneath the certainties lay chaos. There were Frenchmen and Italians, Indians and Chinese, Cossacks and Circassians, a Turkish eunuch and an Arabian belly dancer—or so the poster claimed—and, of course, there were the gypsies, the
cikáni
, their skin dark, their eyes dark, the blood of ancient Egypt running in their veins and through their tongue.

“Indian, I believe,” said Franz Bratranek in that didactic manner of his. He modeled himself on Goethe and, like the great man, considered himself a polymath. “Not Egyptian at all. Studies
of their language show its relationship with Hindu. The theory is that they migrated from India at some time in the Middle Ages and have been wandering ever since.”

“Like the Jews,” Mendel suggested.

“
Un
like the Jews,” Bratranek corrected reprovingly. “The writings of de Gobineau make the position clear. The gypsies are of Aryan stock, whereas the Jews”—
Židi
, he called them, although they were speaking German—“are Semitic, and therefore quite alien …”

“Jesus was a Jew,” Mendel remarked.

The party took its place under the great tent, amid the smell of the crowd and horse dung and straw. The boys of the choir school seethed and simmered. Křižkovsky swatted heads, Mendel fiddled with his glasses, Klacel expanded his width across the wooden bench and, to accompany the first act, in which poodles pranced stiffly around the ring on their hind legs, delivered a lecture on the matter of dog training.

Following the dogs there was a flying trapeze act. The performers were a father and his three sons. Beneath them a woman waved her arms gracefully to emphasize the aerial acrobatics taking place above. The woman wore dangerously short skirts, skirts that barely covered her knees, but fortunately she did not ascend to the summit of the tent. That would have been too much for decency. Bratranek debated whether she might be the mother, whether a woman who had borne three children might yet possess quite so athletic a frame. Mendel polished his glasses vigorously. Next came an interlude with clowns and midgets (“A defect in ontogeny resulting from a humoral imbalance in the family,” pronounced Bratranek, as though he were a doctor), and then, while the audience held its breath, a cage was assembled in the midst of the ring.

Tigers.

The word swept through the audience like a rumor of imminent disaster.

Tigers, lions, savagery. A tunnel was being assembled, leading to the outside of the tent, leading out into the darkness of the jungle.

Mendel murmured something to Bratranek, and slipped away.

Families
, that was what Mendel thought, more or less. Damn the tigers.
Families
. And he wondered how people could be so blind. Of course it was natural to think about the family of trapeze artists, and thus cloud the issue with matters of training and upbringing and childhood experience and all that kind of thing. It was necessary to separate the effect of inheritance from the effect of nurture. He had taken care to do so with his peas, making sure that the dwarf plants were transplanted where necessary so that they should not be shaded by their tall siblings. Oh yes, the physical dexterity of those trapeze artists must be inherited and, just possibly, that new choirboy’s ear for sound—young Leoš something or other—and certainly the particular construction of the voicebox that gave the potential to sing like a lark. Was that the simile Paul Křižkovsky used? Nightingale, then. But not the fact that he played the organ so, or that he could sing. A fine voice and a fine musician. No, as with the trapeze family, a child’s
gifts
were one thing, his
achievements
quite another: his achievements might depend on his gifts, but they had been developed, molded by experience and training, entirely invented, some of them. That was the distinction that Darwin failed to make in his book, to distinguish clearly between nature and nurture …

So Father Gregor didn’t go out of the tent in the search for the trapeze artists (and anyway, there was the problem of the woman). No, he went in search of the midgets. They were easy enough to find. A diminutive caravan stood on the edge of the encampment with two diminutive horses grazing nearby, of the kind bred for use in the mines. It was obvious.

A gruff voice answered his knock:
“Ja?”

“Darf ich eintreten?”

“Herein.”

German, then. He had guessed Slav of some kind. One expected German blood to have a certain purity. He climbed the steps and ducked into the doorway, and found himself in a miniature world, the inhabitants small, the furnishings small, the whole interior as though glimpsed through the wrong end of a telescope. He might have been the oddity, crouched in the doorway with his head brushing the ceiling. Three diminutive creatures peered toward him with a curiosity that equaled his own. There was a young woman with a baby in her arms, and an older couple who might have been her parents. Despite differences in age they shared common features with one another, more closely even than the common features that you find within a normal family—large heads and short limbs and the faces of pug dogs. Humoral imbalance, Bratranek had suggested.

“May I …?”

“Come in, come in,” the man replied. “Don’t stand on ceremony. In fact, don’t stand at all. You’ll hit your head on the roof.” The old couple roared with laughter. The young woman shushed them. “You a priest, are you?” the man asked. “What a surprise. We’re not Catholic, you know. Oh no, not Catholic at all. Lutherans, how about that?”

“I’ve not come to convert you.”

He shrugged. “Oh, you can try, you can try. How about converting us to …” He glanced at his wife. “… giants?” And at the suggestion, the pair of them roared with laughter once more. “Anyway, sit down,” the man commanded. “Sit down before you knock a hole in the roof.”

So Mendel sat down at their table, while the man opened a bottle of
slivovice
and poured two glasses. “What can I do for you, then?” the dwarf asked.

Mendel considered the options. “I breed plants,” he began cautiously.

The dwarf’s eyes shone. “Do a bit of breeding myself, I do. Ponies. You saw the ones outside? They bring a good price at Mährisch Ostrau. For the mines, of course. Children like them too. I’d sooner sell them for riding than for the mines, but you’ve got to make a living. Here, have a fill.” He pushed a wooden tobacco jar across the table.

“Thank you. I don’t smoke a pipe. Cigars.”

“Feel free.” The dwarf struck a match and lit his pipe with care and attention. “And what plants do you breed?” he asked through wreaths of smoke.

“Garden peas, fuchsias. Different varieties. I am looking into the matter of inheritance.”

“Is that right? A tricky thing, inheritance.” He nodded and puffed smoke and nodded again. “Tricky.” A sudden roar of applause sounded from the circus tent outside.

“Why tricky?”

The man shrugged and gestured with the stem of his pipe. “Take us.”

Mendel shifted on his chair. He leaned forward. “You?”

“Well, take the little one over there.” He gestured toward the girl in the corner with her woolen bundle. “Show the pastor, Heike, show the pastor.”

The girl Heike tilted the bundle forward to display the same pug face as the rest of them, the same domed forehead, the same flattened nose. Mendel tried to restrain a shudder of revulsion.

“That little blighter’s quite normal,” the man said.

“Normal?”

“Oh yes. Quite normal. Can’t you see? But he did for his mother, God bless her.”

“Did for her? You mean …”

“Dead. Three months ago in Vienna. Heike’s not the mother.”

“And the father?”

“My son-in-law. You’d have seen him in the act. He’s the one
that hides inside the bucket. He’s like us and yet his son is normal.”

“What happens to the child, then?”

“Oh, we’ll have him adopted. We can’t have him growing up here, can we? It wouldn’t be right. And he wouldn’t be much use in the act, would he? I mean, who’d come to see the largest dwarf in the world?” He roared with laughter, and as though his joke had been heard inside the big top, there was another burst of applause outside.

Mendel stood up and banged his head on the roof. “See what I mean?” the man said. “It wouldn’t be natural, would it?”

“I must go. They’ll be wondering where I’ve been.”

“Suit yourself.”

“May I come back? Tomorrow, maybe? I’ll bring you some of my plants. Fuchsias.”

“ ’Course,” the man replied. “Not that I can do much with plants, moving about as we do. That’s why it’s ponies. But they’ll look nice enough in here.”