The Hormone Factory (5 page)

She began to cry. That’s when the panic set in; it wasn’t her tears but the news of her father and his threat that made my blood run cold.

“What’s your father’s name?” I asked, staring at the weeping puddle of misery. I lifted her chin with my finger and she looked up at me through teary eyes.

“Sam Salomons.”

That’s when I knew I was really in trouble.

9 …

Salomons was an old schoolmate of Rafaël’s, a chemistry professor, and, like Rafaël, a German Jew. I had met him at the soirée in the Levines’ canal house, when he had just accepted a position at Farmacom. Levine had told me that he recruited Salomons because the man had untold influential connections in the scientific world. Soon enough, once we had won the licensing battle, we were going to need the help of his German contacts to launch our insulin products on the European market. I just couldn’t risk getting in trouble with this important, highly respected man, who, I suspected, would cling to his old-fashioned moral principles. A disgruntled Salomons could scuttle our entire operation. Besides, I didn’t know how I could face Levine if Salomons made trouble for Farmacom as a result of my randy behavior. I still considered Levine my mentor back then; I looked up to him a great deal. I might have arrived at a different decision some years later, when our relationship had cooled somewhat, but on the day Rivka came barging into my office, I didn’t want to rouse his ire and cared deeply about what he would think about my philandering.

I knew I had to act quickly to appease Salomons’s wrath; I’d have to pay a visit to Rivka’s father as soon as possible. I had a
few urgent pieces of business to dispose of before I was free to take care of it, so I sent Rivka home in the car with Frank, with a letter to give to her father, a letter that, for once, wasn’t dictated to Agnes. Using my own fountain pen and a sheet of Farmacom’s brand-new stationery, I humbly begged Salomons’s forgiveness for being responsible for the state his daughter was in, rhapsodized about her irresistible charms, and declared that, given his permission, I would be honored to marry her.

Years later, Rivka complained bitterly that no one had ever asked her what
she
thought about getting married. Since she had come to my office as her father’s messenger, I’d always assumed that she agreed with her father’s ultimatum. Besides, we had no choice in the matter. Rivka had gotten herself knocked up, and once you’ve made your bed, you just have to lie in it. There were only three options for a girl in her condition: you could get rid of the unwanted child, your mother could adopt it and pretend it was one of her own, or you got married; there was no other way out. Today there is a fourth alternative—you can raise the child yourself as a single mother, but as far as its being an improvement over those first three choices, I have my doubts. After seeing what happened to Rosie, I know it can lead to all sorts of problems.

• • •

As far as my marriage to Rivka, however, we actually made a good go of it for a surprisingly long time. Of course we were young; I was twenty-seven, Rivka just eighteen. Matrimony had never appealed to me, even as a child, and I had been determined, with every fiber of my being, to hang on to my freedom. But once I found myself in this impossible situation, I resigned myself to the inevitable. And I have to confess that the times in
my life when I’ve actually managed to remain monogamous, as I was during the first months of my marriage to Rivka, have been few and far between. It wasn’t twinges of so-called conscience or decency that caused me to be faithful at first; I’ve never been very much bothered by those, luckily. It was quite simply because having her was enough for me. Rivka was energetic, funny, and sensual, and, in spite of her pregnancy, she had such an inexhaustible enthusiasm for sex that, coming on top of my busy and exciting work life at the factory and with Farmacom, it left me with no energy for further sexual escapades. It wasn’t until the birth of our daughter Ruth, when Rivka seemed to lose interest in our love games a bit—understandably so in light of the sleepless nights, the feedings and colic and other afflictions requiring endless consolation, sapping her energy—that I turned to other women. I have never—almost never, anyway—been faithful to one woman again since. But the very fact that Rivka didn’t leave me until twenty-two years and four children later proves that, in spite of everything, I was always able to satisfy her needs. I’m not the type to be with a woman and then ignore her. I’m a man with a big heart, with a great deal of love to give. It’s simply more than one woman can handle.

10 …

All my working life I’ve had a framed picture of those two bloody Canadian geniuses hanging on my wall. It’s a sunny day, and they’re posing in front of a low building with the dog whose pancreas they’ve removed. You can tell it’s windy from the ballooning lab coat of the bespectacled forty-year-old and the rippling necktie of the fresh-faced student, still wet behind the ears but confidently smiling into the camera. The one who looks unhappiest is the dog, evidence that it isn’t much fun having to go through life without a pancreas. The dog should have been given the Nobel Prize for his ordeal, but the prize went to those two smug-faced Canadians instead. That photograph makes my blood boil every time I look at it, which is why it’s hanging in such a prominent spot. It’s the perfect goad, the fly in the ointment. Having those two windbags looking down on me every single day provoked the hell out of me. What kept me going was knowing the day would come when I’d triumphantly toss that photo in the trash—the day Rafaël, accompanied by me, of course, would fly to Stockholm to collect the coveted award. I’d have the Nobel diploma mounted in the same frame and hang it right there on my wall, to trumpet the world’s recognition of our work. The fact that, lying here in my bed, I’m still forced to stare
at those two assholes, who’ve never grown a day older, means that my dearest wish has never come true. I may have only three years of secondary school under my belt, but I’ve been awarded an honorary doctorate; I’ve sat with government ministers on advisory boards; I’ve been received by the queen; I was part of the prince consort’s inner circle and was given the proud title of “royal merchant.” Not bad, is it, for a boy from the sticks? But that one distinction I most wanted always eluded us, and it still makes me spitting mad.

• • •

I can’t remember ever feeling more elated than the day we inaugurated our own laboratory at the De Paauw plant. Not only had Rafaël’s Amsterdam lab been equipped with top-of-the-line apparatus, but a floor of our factory was now dedicated to a second Farmacom laboratory, furnished according to the professor’s specifications. Here the discoveries explored in Amsterdam were to be developed further, and the new hormones readied for commercial production.

What a contrast there was between the lab and the rest of the plant! I was used to the hustle and bustle of the factories, where everything was aimed at delivering the most merchandise to the widest possible market. Our industrial site had always been a din of clashing sounds. The hiss and whistle of the train ferrying in the livestock to be slaughtered. Trucks with their racing engines and claxons, either bringing in raw materials or being loaded with the finished product for delivery. The loading carts pushed by big bruisers in overalls, their hefty wooden wheels clattering across the cobblestones. All day long the bellowing cattle and men’s shouts provided a deafening jangle, punctuated by the shrill report of the bolt gun shooting a metal pin through a pig’s
skull while the dull thud of the sledgehammer sending some calf to its maker produced a steady background hum, accompanied by the crack of the woodcutters’ axes chopping the firewood for the many ovens, the hammering from the carpenter’s shop, and the sigh of the glassblowers’ bellows. Their mournful notes underscored, in a minor key, the shrieks of the pigs smelling death before the pin pierced their brains or the butcher’s knife slit their throats. There was also the clang of cleavers from the slaughterhouse floor, where butchers were busy breaking down the carcasses, and the clatter of typewriters floating out of the offices of the secretaries and accountants (the latter wore white coats for no other reason than to distinguish them from “ordinary” workers), all of it contributing to the sense of urgency and energy pervading the plant.

But how different it was in the laboratory, our first improvised “hormone factory,” still so vulnerable and new that you felt you had to close the door to the sanctum very gently behind you, afraid the entire place—nothing but a rickety assemblage of glass, cork, rubber, and a few support stands on wobbly tables—would otherwise collapse like a house of cards.

Nowhere in the company was time of greater essence than here, where the rattle of the teletype machine might at any minute sound the alarm that the hormone we were so desperately trying to find had been discovered by some other lab somewhere else in the world.

But if there was any such pressure, there was no outward sign of it; the sparsely furnished space was a sea of tranquillity that instilled a feeling of calm and serenity, and I loved to spend time in there. Whenever I stepped into that lab I felt my chest swell with pride, gratified to see my bold initiative playing out here in my own factory, in the form of a squadron of scientists
bent over distilling flasks, microscopes, steam baths, and scales. Their white lab coats were spotless in contrast with the workers’ coveralls, which were usually spattered with blood, fat, and feces. To distinguish the biologists from the lab technicians, the former’s coat collars were notched. Leaning against the wall, I liked to watch them work, monitoring the bubbling, fermenting, odorous concoctions while jotting down the odd notation. Invited to peer through their microscopes, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was on the slides. The squirmy, slithery, wriggly organisms in those minuscule droplets only gave up their secrets to those who had learned to decipher them. Sometimes I’d feel a stab of regret, and perhaps anger, at the fact that these gentlemen (and even, yes, even the occasional female, for crying out loud!) had been given the right to analyze this stuff, whereas I was dependent on their knowledge, their noodles, their brains.

I liked to walk past the cages housing the lab animals. This living rabble was nothing like the stacks of pig and beef carcasses dangling in our slaughterhouse. The rabbits, mice, and rats and, later on, roosters, dogs, and apes were confined inside small cages. Depending on what had been injected or surgically removed, they might be either agitated or semi-comatose, some of them whining softly from horniness or pain.

I have never taken pleasure in the slaughter of animals, but I am not sentimental about it either, the way some people are nowadays. To me killing animals is just as much a part of life as shitting, eating, or making love. All four are necessary, in ascending order of gratification.

I lived next door to the plant as a child, and so pigs being driven to slaughter was something we took for granted, just as we thought nothing of the fact that in the morning, when the factory opened, a crowd of scruffy men would be gathered outside
the gate, like sperm cells milling about inside the fallopian tubes waiting to strike when the time is right. My father would pick out a few of the sturdiest and least filthy men from the throng of yokels and offer them a job for the day. Once his selection was made, he ordered the foreman to tell the rest of the bums to scram; he didn’t like people loitering outside the gates. The dejected look of those fellows as they trudged off reluctantly, muttering darkly and dragging their feet, reminded me of the way the calves moved as they were being led to slaughter. From a young age I understood that there wasn’t any point resisting the law of survival of the fittest, and that you had to make sure you were one of the ones coming out on top.

Aaron was different; he felt sorry for both the animals and the unemployed scum my father sent packing. Once, when we were very young, as we stood watching, each clutching a sandwich in a clammy little hand, one fellow kept insisting, begging my father to give him a job. “My kid’s sick in bed and he’s starving.”

The gaunt, emaciated man tugged at my father’s sleeve with one hand and held out the other beseechingly. As the foreman slapped his hand away, Aaron darted forward to offer the man his sandwich. The poor devil reached for it, but my father knocked it out of his hands, sending it flying into in a mud puddle. Aaron received a box on the ear for his trouble, and as the beggar bent down to retrieve the bread, the foreman kicked him in the butt, landing him facedown in the mud. My father and the foreman turned and walked back inside the gate, leaving Aaron standing there bawling, more upset about the man than his own smarting ear. I grabbed my blubbering brother’s hand and dragged him back into the house.

11 …

We did eventually manage to secure the licenses for the insulin. It was mind-boggling, the effort Levine and his team put into getting it done. Levine was unstoppable in his determination to turn Farmacom into a world-class outfit, the first to make the insulin drug commercially available in Holland and the rest of Europe. He worked day and night, barely allowed himself time to eat or rest, and demanded the same total commitment from his coworkers.

His passion for research knew no bounds. For countless days and nights Levine and his assistants rammed massive amounts of animal pancreas through a simple fruit press, twisting the screw a couple of turns tighter every so often to wring out the essence drop by precious drop into a flask placed underneath. Someone had to stay in the lab all night to check that the pressing went on uninterrupted, and Levine did not excuse himself from that duty.

He was likewise first in line to try out the rudimentary insulin preparation once it was ready to be tested on humans. He had no hesitation about injecting himself with the serum, which could have sent him into a potentially fatal coma. I did try to stop him, chiding him that he was too important to the business to risk his life. He looked at me, smiling, and shook his head.