The Hormone Factory (22 page)

He was too open, too ready to show his hand; my warnings fell on deaf ears. Traitors never sleep, I told him over and over again, but he’d just laugh and insist on doing it
his
way, always so damn cocksure of himself, that boy! But what do you expect—a child of affluence, with no firsthand experience of how evil or dangerous those sharks can be. Born into the lap of luxury, could have anything his heart desired, grew up in a normal family—well,
normal
, I mean, what’s normal? Normal doesn’t exist. Normal is a Russian pogrom, normal is Christ on the cross, normal is a whore in a brothel. To Ezra, normal was a mother who never loved him and who was irked by his indisputably boyish behavior. His spunk, his aggressiveness, his competitive streak, and, young as he was, his determination to get the better of his sisters; all that unruly behavior annoyed the hell out of her. She
never tried to hide it, and the enthusiasm and pleasure she took in raising our daughters was totally missing in Ezra’s case. Was it just my genes, or was Rivka’s attitude somehow also responsible for turning him into this testosterone-driven man, addicted to the chase, the attention of women, the overwhelming need to be seen, to be known, to be
felt
?

In the many interviews he has given, he likes to confess with a certain measure of pride what his three weak spots are: his love of money, his fondness for women, and his Jewish birth. And every time I tried warning him not to put himself in the spotlight, he would pat me on the back, laughing, saying the times were different now, that xenophobia and petty-bourgeois notions about sex were no longer relevant. “Thanks to the Pill—the one
you
created a worldwide demand for!” he said, to stroke my ego, “anyway, thanks to the Pill, times have changed, Father, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for it. In your heyday you had to be on your guard; woman trouble could ruin your reputation. But nowadays showing off your weaknesses is a perfectly good strategy.” That was the kind of naïve swagger I’d hear from him when, on one of his visits over from the land of the brave, he made time to have lunch with me. “All you need to make it to the top is a slick presentation; a thorough grasp of the facts couched in short, easy sound bites, never too complex or involved; a healthy dose of humor; and a knack for showing your human side.” And then a pitying smile for his old father, so sadly behind the times.

Living it up, overconfident and at the top of his game, thinking himself invulnerable, he blazed his own trail through the world of international power brokers.

The fact that death has not yet come for me, forcing me to be an impotent witness to this, to watch my son fall into the
very same trap I once narrowly escaped, is the ultimate cruelty. And as if that weren’t enough, I have no way to communicate with him. Neither my personal Florence Nightingale nor the cute young thing has any notion that I am still compos mentis; that it’s only my tongue and the other motor skills that don’t work, like a stubborn horse balking at taking another step.

The young thing leans over me, telling me three times that the man on the screen is Ezra, my son. As if I can’t fucking see that for myself. She interprets the garbled sounds coming out of my trap as a sign that I don’t know what’s going on. She explains to me that my boy is in New York and, sadly, can’t come visit me. I fling my head wildly from side to side to make her understand I want to speak to him, but she doesn’t get it, and when my eyes start leaking—not out of sentimentality, dammit, but because my body tends to weep from every orifice, not just the stupid dribble from the tip of my beast—she takes a tissue to dab at the tears on my face. She does it gently, but it feels like a scouring pad lacerating my thin skin and I let out a scream of pain, of impotent rage, of my terrible yearning for one last exchange with Ezra, my son, my Benjamin, my Achilles’ heel.

37 …

Even before our country was overrun by the jackbooted henchmen of the great jackass, I had known that if the worst happened, I would have to hustle big-time to save my own neck. Not only was my religious background a lethal liability, but so were my government connections and my business, which the Kraut vultures would no doubt have their beady eyes on. I had done everything I could to ensure the firm would keep going in the event of war, but now it was time to take steps to save myself and my family in case our country fell.

Toward the end of April 1940 I met with Levine, who had a ticket to sail to America, where he was scheduled to give a series of lectures.

Over the past few years he had been much in demand as a speaker abroad. Thanks to his reputation as head of one of the most highly respected laboratories in the world, his discovery of testosterone, his knack for cranking out promotional articles for top scientific journals, as well as the worldwide professional network he had built up over the years, he received untold invitations to attend conferences, to give lectures, or to join advisory boards around the globe (the only exception being the ever-expanding nation next door). He liked to accept these
invitations, doubtless flattered by all the attention and respect. They also allowed him to bask in the unencumbered mood of those faraway places, reminiscent of the rosy, carefree times our own part of the world had enjoyed in the roaring twenties. The somber, oppressive damper the brownshirts had cast over our continent had yet to reach those other shores, so it was a joy to go there. Besides, by traveling abroad he could get away from the strain that had come between the two of us. We never seemed to see eye to eye these days, whether it was about a board meeting, some transaction involving doctors or pharmacists, or even a simple phone conversation about his damn contract renewal, on which we had yet to come to terms. Too many cooks spoil the broth, as they say, and the heady partnership of the early days had turned into a never-ending power struggle. Coming as we did from such different perspectives, we were constantly at each other’s throats. We pecked at each other like two angry fowl in a cockfight—he, the venerated professor and great man of science, facing off against me, the royal merchant attempting to steer our firm safely through the greatest crisis the world had ever known. Our once mutually beneficial accord was now all rivalry and strife, each of us convinced he was right.

As I walked into Levine’s office, he told me he was calling off his planned trip. “I expect all of Europe will be at war soon, therefore I’m not going,” he said somberly.

The brownshirts had invaded Denmark and Norway earlier that month, and there were persistent rumors that the great shithead’s troops were amassing on our borders, and although our government kept putting out unfounded bulletins claiming there was nothing to fear, there weren’t too many suckers out there still allowing themselves to be lulled to sleep. Anyone with a grain of common sense knew that the
Gröfaz
(the Greatest
General of All Time) would not rest until he had the entire continent under his thumb, with Great Britain thrown in for good measure.

“But Rafaël,” I replied, “you have just given me the exact reason you
should
get out of here while you still can. You are in the fortunate position of possessing both a ticket and a visa; I don’t know a soul who wouldn’t envy you. Why don’t you just go? You’ll never have a better opportunity.”

He looked at me haughtily. “Do you really mean to say that I ought to save my own skin, even if it means leaving my family behind, my institute, and my employees? Do you really think that’s the right thing to do? Don’t I have an obligation to do everything in my power to protect the people who are dependent on me in this time of crisis? Shouldn’t I at least
try
, come what may?”

They were rhetorical questions only. He was implying that the very
thought
of saving himself and leaving the people he lived and worked with to their fate was quite reprehensible and, as far as he was concerned, not even worthy of consideration.

“If there’s anyone who will be capable of helping them when Hitler starts running the show around here, it is me. My name, my connections, my money—I’ll use everything I’ve got to protect them. I shall try, anyway. I could never look at myself in the mirror again if I fled now, leaving everyone who’s dear to me in the lurch. If I did that, how could I ever call myself a mensch again?”

There he went once more, rubbing his moral superiority in my face, putting me in my place. If I’d had a ticket and a visa, I’d have jumped at the chance to get out of there. On reaching safety, I’d have made every attempt to bring my family over. Although calling it “family” was a stretch these days—it implied
an intimacy that for the past two years had been lacking in our household.

Once out of the country, Levine could have pulled out all the stops to have the Dauphine and his children, now nearly all adults, join him. But his scathing attitude would have made any objection sound ignoble, so I just shrugged, muttered that it was too bad we had to miss such a great opportunity to promote our latest products, and then coolly changed the subject to other orders of business.

That short meeting at his lab was the last time I was to see him before the shit hit the fan. We met again five years later in the exact same place. By then the once so respectable laboratory had been trashed. Barely a stick of furniture was left, the windows had been stripped of their wooden frames, and the doors were gone, all used for fuel during the Hunger Winter of 1945. But the damage done to the laboratory was nothing compared with the estrangement between us after five years. In fact, the dressing-down Levine gave me on that day just before war broke out would be the last he’d ever give me. Or, rather, the last I ever allowed him to give me. By the time I was back, after the war, I no longer gave a flying fig about his so-called moral superiority and simply forged ahead, ignoring him. The moment the brownshirts were finally licked, I made sure that Mordechai de Paauw, Royal Merchant, Purveyor to Her Majesty the Queen, would from now on be the sole potentate ruling over the Farmacom empire.

38 …

I was startled awake by the roar of aircraft engines overhead. I thought for an instant I must be dreaming, and then realized what was going on.
“Too late!”
everything inside me was screaming. “You’ve missed the boat!” Oh, sure, I
had
transferred our subsidiaries’ shares to London for safekeeping, had neatly deposited all our manufacturing secrets there as well, had locked away the purest samples of insulin and other preparations in a vault, and set up an emergency facility in another part of the country; but in the end, there I was, asleep in the fucking guest room as the scumbag was crossing our borders with his overwhelming military force, and twelve thousand
Übermenschen
were parachuting down on us, having brought neither myself nor my family to safety. I hadn’t even taken the first concrete steps to arrange our departure. Maybe I’d had too much on my plate with everyday concerns, or perhaps, like so many others, I’d been counting on the odds that, despite all the portents, it wouldn’t happen all that soon, and we needn’t be in a rush to leave our comfortable life at home just yet. I had been sticking my head in the sand so that I wouldn’t have to venture out into the unknown, so that I wouldn’t have to rouse myself from the
stupor of familiar habit. In acting like an ostrich I certainly had lots of company, but Christ, how I kicked myself, lying there in that solitary guest bed, hearing the engine drone overhead—the noise of a cataclysmic flood that would very shortly swallow up all the land.

I got out of bed, threw on some clothes, hastened downstairs, and turned on the radio to hear confirmed what I’d already suspected: our country was at war. I rushed into the hall to try to reach one of my government contacts on the phone, and there I ran into Rivka in her nightgown, her hair in disarray and a worried look on her face, surrounded by the girls, gathered on the stairs like a bunch of white ghosts.

“It’s war,” I announced. “I think we should try to get away.”

“Away?” Rivka exclaimed, frowning. As if she hadn’t heard the part about being at war. “What do you mean, away, where should we go?”

I explained that our little town lay not far from the Dutch army’s outermost, and probably very weak, line of defense, and that we’d have to try to make our way north, across the so-called Holland water line, where the big cities were. The closer we could get to The Hague, the better. Preferably The Hague itself, since, as the seat of our government, I assumed it must be the safest spot in the country right now; the royal family, the cabinet, and parliament would certainly be defended to the last. Once there, I would be able to call on my highly placed connections to help us escape from the country, should that be necessary.

“Escape from the country?” asked Rivka. “Where would we go, then?”

I sent the children upstairs, telling them to get dressed and pack a suitcase. The girls, led by Ruth, quietly tiptoed back up the stairs.

I explained to Rivka that the firm and I were prime targets for the brownshirts, but that she and the children weren’t any safer, since seizing a large and profitable business would mean getting rid of inconvenient heirs. Rivka, apparently, had never thought of her own situation in those terms.

“But what about Aaron?” she said, visibly reluctant, “and my parents? And Rafaël, and Sari, Rosie, and …?” She began naming others one by one. It was impossible for her, it seemed, to cut and run, leaving the whole
mishpocha
, everyone she cared for, behind.

Aaron. I hadn’t thought of him at all. He was serving the last month of his sentence; in a couple of weeks he would be a free man. From time to time I’d hear news about him from Rivka, invariably along the lines that, unhappy and guilt-stricken, he was just sitting out his tedious incarceration and refused to give any thought to his future. Surely it ought to be possible in these extreme circumstances to spring him from prison—some kind of bribe might do it—so that he’d be able to leave with us.