Mendel's Dwarf (9 page)

A nanosecond is defined as the maximum length of time in normal company during which a dwarf may forget his condition.

Dinah and I were silent in the car, leaving things carefully unsaid. Words have an awful finality about them. You can’t
unsay
them, can you? Better choose your words with care, if you decide to use them at all. Better to say nothing at all most of the time. As she drew the car to a halt outside my hall of residence, she turned to me and broke that equivocal silence. “I’m very fond of you, Benjamin, you know that, don’t you?”
Fond
. It’s an evasion. I remember my father saying that of my mother. In his case it meant he didn’t love her. “You know that?” she repeated.

I nodded. You should see my nods. They are big, absurd things, my head being about the same size as my body. You can’t miss them. They are the gestural equivalent of screaming. Then she touched me very gently on the cheek. “Now you’d better go or you’ll be late. Don’t they lock the place up at midnight?”

“I’ve got a key.”

“Still.”

She watched me from the car as I waddled my way up to the main door of the hall. As I reached up to turn the key, I heard her start the engine and drive away.

She’d kissed me.

Darling Dinah, I must apologize for my clumsiness in kissing you. You see, I’ve had no practice and therefore I find it difficult to judge the niceties of the technique, whether and for how long to insert the tongue, whether the tongue should be involved from the start or only after a decent interval, whether to oppose the inner surface of my mucous membrane against the outer surface of yours (a wet one) or whether to keep to the strict lip-to-lip variety (a dry one and therefore possibly more acceptable). I suppose that I might have acquired some information in this regard from my parents, but, you see, I never once saw them exchange a kiss of that nature. And let’s face it, trying to imitate what they do in the films is hardly the way. So I write both in a spirit of apology and in the hope that, in return for all the help that I have given you with the work of Seymour Benzer, you may pay me back in kind and instruct me in the details of this particular matter. Personally (you may be at odds with me over this) I favor the wet kiss …

No, of course I didn’t write it … but I found
her
letter the next day in my post box in the entrance hall.

Dear Benjamin, I really must thank you for all the help you have given me. I reckon I know just about everything I wanted to know now, so I won’t bother you anymore. Thanks everso. Dinah
.

Thanks everso. Not the summit of the epistolary art.

Two days later I saw her in a lecture and I plucked up enough courage to go over to her. She was talking earnestly with one of the lecturers, perhaps rather too earnestly, perhaps with rather too much interest in ignoring the diminutive figure making its
way through the dissolving crowd toward her. I tugged her skirt. “I want a word,” I said. “About linkage and recombination.” She came away without a fuss, almost obediently, really; following me out of the building and around one of those concrete corners that are the main architectural features of such university campuses. There was a kind of flying buttress overhead and the words
Support the Minors
spray-painted on the wall. I couldn’t tell whether the slogan referred to little dark men who labored underground or to some obscure campaign for children’s rights.

“I’m in love with you,” I told her. I was looking at her knees. I know a great deal about knees, the peculiar form of them, the awkwardness, the plain ungainliness of them. But these knees were slender and elegant, the delicate contour of each patella like a nacreous burial mound of all my hopes.

“I knew you’d do this,” she said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

She was almost in tears. “Can’t you see it’s impossible?”

“Of course it’s impossible,” I retorted. “It’s the impossible that attracts me. When you’re like I am, who gives a toss about the possible? You are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever known—correction: the most beautiful woman I’ve ever
seen
, which includes every edition of
Penthouse
over the last ten years—and I want you to be in love with me too.”

“But I
can’t
be.”

“I’ll say it for you: you can’t love me because I’m hideous and deformed, a freak of nature, and people would stare. Very well, love me in private. I won’t push it. I don’t get many moments like this and I’m playing it off the cuff, but I’ll offer you this: nothing at all. No obligations, no commitments, nothing. I just want to hear you admit it. You love me.”

“This is bloody ridiculous.”

“Don’t use that kind of language. It doesn’t go with the English-rose look. I’ll make one concession. You can say this: ‘I
would
love you if you weren’t a shrunken monster.’ ”

It is something to make a girl weep. When you are like I am, even that is something. I left her weeping gently and I walked away.

Benjamin is a Jewish name.
Binyamin
. It means “son of the right hand.” The right hand is the lucky one, so Benjamin means “lucky.” You might consider it rather a misnomer. The extent to which there is a genetic control of left- and right-handedness is not clear. It has been postulated
¹
that it is an example of incomplete dominance, dominant homozygotes being right-handed, recessive homozygotes left-handed, and heterozygotes being ambidextrous, but the prejudice of societies toward those who use the sinister hand is totally transparent. The prejudices toward those who have been as unlucky as this particular son of the right hand are something else altogether …

1
. M. Annett, “A model of the inheritance of handedness and cerebral dominance,”
Nature
, 1964.

I
got a first class degree. You expected that, didn’t you? I got a first, and I got a Medical Research Council grant, and I slid with ease into what I was destined for. No circuses for me. No schoolteaching, either. The true, abstract poverty of scientific research.

“I am certain there will be no problem that
we
can’t overcome together,” the Professor of Molecular Biology said at interview. “None whatever.” He was referring to physical problems. Scientific ones were another thing altogether. I began my doctorate at Oxford in October of the year that Uncle Harry died.

Harry Wise died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of ninety-something, while taking a shower. Longevity has a genetic element to it,
¹
as well as a good slice of luck: obviously Great-uncle Harry had a lot of luck. Equally obviously, he didn’t inherit his great-uncle Gregor’s corpulence or his failing heart … but then neither have I inherited Harry’s bony frame or his longevity:
achondroplastics do not survive well beyond their fourth or fifth decade. I am awaiting the outcome with curiosity.

The name on both Uncle Harry’s death certificate and his will was still Heinrich Weiss. Phenotype may be modified but it doesn’t change.

The residue of my said moneys shall stand possessed in trust in equal shares (if more than one) for such of them my niece the said Emily Lambert and my great-niece the said Beatrice Lambert and my great-nephew the said Benedict Lambert as shall be living at my death provided …

“He’s left the loot to us,” my sister Beatrice exclaimed. The final codicil had a romantic flavor to it:

I desire that I be cremated and my ashes scattered to the wind from the seashore when the wind is blowing in a southeasterly direction
.

So it was that on a meteorologically apposite afternoon Beatrice, my mother, and I stood on the esplanade at Eastbourne, Beatrice holding aloft an urn supplied by the Eastbourne Crematorium and looking positively pre-Raphaelite in flowing dress and loose hair. Gulls hung in the wind at about the same height as us, eyeing us in case we had sandwiches. Mother held her hat on against the wind. “I think it’s morbid,” she kept saying. “That Wise family always was a bit touched. Why couldn’t he be put in the ground like anyone else?”

But it all appealed to Beatrice. “It’s rather endearing. How far do you think he’ll get?” She had assumed that he wanted to be blown back toward Austria.

“Pevensey?” I suggested.

“That’s not even out to sea. Surely he’ll make Calais with this wind.”

“Calais is miles away. Dieppe, more like.”

“I once went to Dieppe with your father,” Mother said. “On a day return. I never dreamt we’d send Uncle Harry there.”

The gulls screamed with laughter and derision at the whole absurd performance. Beatrice removed the top of the urn and peered in at him. She showed me a pile of grayish powder.

“I don’t want to see,” warned Mother. “It’s not right, somehow. Like seeing him without any clothes on. Come on, get on with it. I’m dying a death, it’s that cold.”

So Beatrice raised her arm. She called “Ready, steady … go!” as though someone were taking part in a race. Then she shook the urn, and Harry Wise sprayed out into the air like a little puff of washing powder. The gulls swooped expectantly, but even they didn’t read the wind correctly, for at that very moment there was a gust and a swirl, and the cloud of powder swept around and blew back in our faces.

“Oh, how awful!” Mother protested, coughing and flapping. “I really think that’s the end!”

We were back in his bungalow in time for tea. Mother fiddled in the kitchen while Beatrice and I conducted a rapid search through his desk for unpaid bills and the like. Beatrice opened drawers with relish. “It’s horrible going through the old boy’s stuff,” she complained unconvincingly. “I hope we don’t find dirty pictures or anything. I feel he might be watching.” It seemed better not to tell her that in a sense Uncle Harry
was
still present, ancestral dandruff in her hair and on her shoulders.

While she went through the contents of the desk, I, partly in hope of those dirty pictures, partly with a sense of continuity with my distant Mendelian past, concentrated on the lower drawers. Perhaps there would be something, a scrap of a letter maybe,
from Great-great-great-uncle Gregor. Among the papers—envelopes of dusty photographs, bundles of dusty letters all sequestered away in cardboard boxes—I came across the portrait photograph of Gottlieb Weiss with his first wife and the stout priest, the one taken in Vienna. Somehow it lacked the vividness I recalled from seeing it as a child. The figures appeared wooden and inert, the face of the cleric a patch of white, barely recognizable as the famous friar.