Free Mendel's Dwarf by Simon Mawer Page A

fuchsias and others, in the back garden of the monastery.
    And peas …
    Pisum sativum , the garden pea, is a member of the Papilionaceae family, a workaday group with blossoms that dance like butterflies among the foliage. These papilionaceous flowers possess five petals: the large, vivid, and vivacious standard; the two wings; and two others that form the keel or carina , a sweet, sleek, and secretive sheath. Within, moist and fragile, lie the reproductive organs. No chance choice. You select your material with care. Being food plants, they come in a number of distinct varieties, and others have already crossed them artificially with success. 2 The keel ensures self-pollination under normal conditions, so different strains are certain to be pure, and the flowers are large and therefore easily manipulated. Mendel watched and examined and thought. He had the mind of a chessplayer (he was a chessplayer) and he watched nature’s moves patiently.
    Is it possible to draw him out of the past, out of the shadowsof the few photographs that remain, out of the vague stories of Uncle Harry, out of fusty recollection and textbook repetition? Can the man live in any sense? “Watch,” he said.
    Bratranek watched. Scrawny and self-satisfied, Bratranek smiled at the sight of the younger man down on his knees among the vegetables.
    “You must get down to see properly,” Mendel muttered. “It’s no use just standing around like a damned priest. Kneel before Mother Nature.”
    Complaining, Bratranek hitched up his skirts and knelt, while Mendel rooted among the chaos of stems and tendrils for a suitable flower to show. His fingers were grimy. Just like a peasant’s. Blood will out. “These here are the dwarfs. Obviously. Obviously they’re the dwarfs. Now what we do is …” He bit his lower lip and frowned with concentration, pulling open one of the immature flowers, peering at it through his gold-rimmed glasses, muttering almost as though addressing the plants themselves rather than the thin priest at his side. “There’s my little child. Remove the stamens”—scissors snipped—“and there we are. Gone. When she is ripe, that flower will become the female parent. Bag.” He snapped his fingers behind him. Bratranek handed over one of the paper bags that he had been given to carry. Mendel slipped it over the selected flower. “Now you may watch the transfer of pollen. The useful thing is that you get flowers at all stages of maturity. Fruit down at the bottom, mature flowers halfway up, unopened buds at the top. Couldn’t be better.”
    The friar clambered to his feet and led the way over to the line of tall plants, huffing and puffing and stumbling over the uneven soil of the bed, muttering as he went. “What did Bacon say? ‘Nature reveals her secrets when put to the torture,’ was that it? But it is not torture. It is a caress.” He grinned at Bratranek, a camel-hair paintbrush in his hand. “Nature reveals her secrets when she is stroked ,” he said. He opened a mature flowerand dabbed at it and held up the brush to show a tiny speck of golden pollen on the tip. “There. This”—returning to the dwarfs, kneeling down among the ragged stems once more—“goes here.” Another bagged flower was unveiled for a moment to reveal the sequestered flower. The paintbrush slipped in among the delicate petals like a tongue. Mendel scribbled something on the paper bag and put it back in place. “Female pure tall, crossed with male pure dwarf.”
    Bratranek look pained. “This is disgusting.”
    “It may be disgusting, but it’s natural. Wasn’t your Goethe an admirer of nature?”
    “The higher flights of the human spirit, not mere sex. Anyway, what is natural about this …  manipulation? ” Bratranek pronounced the word with distaste, as though the modifier genital were implied.
    “What on earth do you imagine plant breeders do , man? Cast spells?”
    “And once you’ve performed this … unnatural