The Hormone Factory (7 page)

The black-frocked prelate looked at me pensively, as if weighing my interest. A mirthless smile split his face from ear to ear. He took a sip of the watery tea that Agnes had been instructed to make weak on account of his “delicate stomach,” and then he spoke. “Indeed, for many folks poverty is a tribulation, a terrible cross to bear. But it has always been so, has it not? No, the issue of greater concern to them right now is a more recent development: the fact that so many young people now troop off to work in the factories. Many of the parents are fearful about the young girls in particular—they are being exposed to crude
behavior and harassment at work, which they are often powerless to resist.”

I nodded gravely.

“I understand,” he continued, “that in your factory the men and the women do have separate changing rooms, and that the sexes are kept apart wherever possible on the shop floor and in the canteen, yet it appears that there are still a great many instances where the young girls are forced to put up with certain improprieties, which, innocent and inexperienced as they are, they are often incapable of rebuffing. Worse, some of them may take the indecencies to which they are subjected for well-meaning attentions, which in turn may tempt them to indulge in unbecoming conduct, with all the tragic consequences that may entail.”

Even though our region had seen industrial development for well over half a century, it seemed that industry was still regarded as an intruder liable to jeopardize the area’s once-pristine innocence. People do like to place the past on a romantic pedestal, like some treasured Christmas ornament, conveniently forgetting the hanky-panky and fornication that has always been rife in the open fields or the hayloft. Who hasn’t heard the raunchy stories about rolls in the hay? They just go to show that barns aren’t only for housing the livestock and their fodder.

“We take every aspect of our workers’ safety extremely seriously,” I replied, “and do all we can to save the young girls from themselves, as well as guard them from the boorish behavior of the male personnel. But surely the parents must accept some of the responsibility too? And the Church, naturally. You yourself just acknowledged that we have tried to keep the sexes apart wherever possible. What more can we do? After all, this is a commercial enterprise, not a finishing school.”

“We do what we can, of course,” said the priest, slowly tapping the tips of his emaciated fingers together, “but in this case we need everyone to step in. In my parish, we offer informational sessions; we get women of unimpeachable repute to prepare the girls for their future housewifely duties, instructing them in the arts of housekeeping, cooking, and virtuous conduct. It would be to your credit if your company could assume some similar role in educating your workers. There are other firms in our country—not yet very many, I’ll admit—that have shouldered that responsibility. It would benefit not only your employees but your own interests as well, since it would do a lot for your firm’s general success and reputation. All in all, I know the people around here would very much appreciate that sort of initiative.”

I didn’t think much of the idea, but promised the padre I’d mention it to the other directors, and that I would keep him apprised of our decision.

When I told Rivka that night about it, she was immediately enthusiastic. My young wife had the knack of befriending folks from all walks of life, even out here in this class-conscious rural society. I had noticed this propensity of hers that first night in my Lancia, when she’d been so chummy with Frank; she always managed to win people over. In the beginning I found it quite charming; later on, her coziness with my factory girls very nearly destroyed me.

My energetic young bride wasn’t prepared to cut herself off from the outside world and stay home like some broody mother hen. Her vivacious, free-spirited nature—the quality that had so attracted me when we first met—proved to be the very essence of her makeup. I was away a great deal, of course, mostly on business, though there was also the occasional extramarital fling.
Rivka didn’t seem to mind very much. She wasn’t the type to sit around moping, waiting for me to come home. On the contrary; a women’s-libber before the concept even existed, that was my Rivka.

The priest’s suggestion found a receptive ear with her, and she immediately set out to organize instructive evenings for my workers. I doubt that my bride was the one the cleric had in mind to carry out his plan, not being of unimpeachable virtue herself (he, like everyone else, had kept a careful tab of the number of months we’d been married before her delivery). And besides, she wasn’t even Catholic. An unbeliever and a Jewess, could it be any less suitable?

Rivka wasn’t conscious of class or racial segregation. In the circles of the Amsterdam intelligentsia to which she belonged, what counted was schooling, intellect, and a sense of humor, and although most of her friends and her parents’ acquaintances were Jewish, background wasn’t considered relevant. It may have been guilelessness, a willful ignorance of the class system that reigned in these parts, or perhaps simply her gut instinct that led her to hitch the right ladies in our firm to her reformation wagon, but whatever it was, she managed, to my surprise, to assemble a motley crew of all denominations—Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, the uneducated factory rats who streamed into our plant every day in their shabby coveralls and threadbare aprons. There was particular focus on the young girls, who were instructed in a lighthearted way in the kinds of things a young woman ought to know. The subjects included how to prepare healthy meals with little cash, and the rudimentary hygiene these future housewives should try to maintain, even if they had to do so in drafty, ramshackle huts barely a step up from the peat shacks of the past, places with neither plumbing nor fresh
air. There was also some mention, without getting too explicit, of ways a girl might ward off a hot-blooded beau, provided that was what she wanted. It should come as no surprise that these instructions, doled out by my enthusiastic darling, weren’t taken all too seriously. Most of the shiksas were smart enough to count to nine, and there were few people in the factory unaware that our first child must have been conceived sometime before our low-key wedding. But that fact only made them more inclined to accept my Rivka.

During a dinner at our house, Rivka enthusiastically told some of her former schoolmates about the teaching sessions, and a plan was soon hatched not only to educate my employees, but to organize cultural activities for them as well. These cultivated alumnae loved the theater, and one of Rivka’s complaints was that she hadn’t been able to get there very often since her marriage. At school they’d had an inspirational classics teacher who had challenged himself to make his students see that the language of the ancient Greeks could inspire the young people of today. Rivka had often described in colorful detail how they had staged
The Twelve Labors of Hercules
. It had been one of the high points of her school days. (Actually, the story of Hercules has always intrigued me, especially the way it begins: Alcmene gives birth to twins with two different fathers. It was just a myth, of course, for the idea that two eggs could be simultaneously fertilized by two different men was implausible even in ancient Greece. Still, I considered it to be the best explanation yet for the fact that Aaron and I had turned out so very different in every respect.)

As the company around our dining room table grew jollier and jollier—I have always prided myself on being a generous host—it was agreed that some of them would devote one evening a week to helping Rivka mount a production starring factory
employees. No Hercules for them, of course; that wouldn’t have gone over very well with these former peasants. It would have to be a revue, lavishly produced, and all the local yokels, even workers from rival factories, were to be invited. It would definitely be a novelty in this district, a pioneering endeavor in what’s now known as sociocultural work, and it was at first roundly mocked by outsiders. Some of my co-industrialists even accused us of harboring socialist sympathies, but I didn’t see the harm in it, frankly. On the contrary, I had a notion that Rivka and her Amsterdam friends were building goodwill for our firm.

In the late spring of 1930, a large audience gathered in the converted workmen’s canteen to watch the first and only performance of
Tittle-Tattle
. It was a cabaret show: Marius and his Mice, Toontje and his Carboys, Belinda the Mystic, and Karl the Butcher-Knife Juggler. Toby from export turned out to be a gifted comedian and trumpet player, lab technician Maria played the singing saw, Has and Hanneke twirled around the stage, and Rosie pulled a test rabbit out of a top hat that looked suspiciously like one that belonged to me. Felix the foreman, assisted by a group of lab workers, staged an elaborate goat-circus act; Saartje gleefully declaimed some comic verse, and for the finale, Rivka and her friends had rounded up the would-be performers without special talents into a chorus: the Song-Singers, who didn’t even sound all that out of tune. The show was a great success, and it started a long tradition of theatricals at our plant.

14 …

“Religion is the opium of the people.” That’s the only thing that troublemaker Marx ever said with which I am one hundred percent in agreement. Religion is the anesthetic of mankind, the ultimate excuse to remain ignorant.

Three things in life have motivated me and given me the energy to accomplish what I have: one, run a successful business; two, seduce the women who appeal to me; and three, explore and unravel nature’s mysteries. For years I thought it was just a matter of time before all the riddles were solved. Silly of me, of course; it shows how naïve I was back then, for neither Mizie nor I will live to see the day, not even if Death continues to get a kick out of making me lie here in my human cage, endlessly drawing out my torment. Neither my legal offspring nor my bastards scattered around the globe—not even their children or their children’s children—none of them will be around for that glorious day. No, the human race will have gone to the dogs, dragging Mother Earth with it, long before the last mysteries are revealed.

If there ever was a God, he must have been a schlemiel, just a lousy endocrinologist who never figured out how to fix the flaws in our DNA. I’m telling you, if this schlepper had worked
in our lab, I’d never have renewed his contract, I’d have thrown him out on his ass myself, because this so-called God is just a failed biochemist with damn little creativity and even less brains who gives up too easily and has never managed to eliminate all the mistakes in the human formula. He’s had millions of years to fine-tune and experiment, and yet his alleged creation, man, is and remains a god-awful mess.

Levine and his team also needed time, of course, to locate, map, and purify the insulin, the estrogen, the testosterone, and all the other secretions. But they got it done within a couple of years, which was fortunate, since it would have been prohibitively expensive otherwise. God is a total failure from a business point of view as well—a rank amateur who has been allowed to go on tinkering for far too long without doing a proper cost-benefit analysis and without being accountable to anyone. If there is a heaven, they forgot to set up a proper finance department up there—big mistake. It astonishes me that in today’s world, where reason and commerce are so highly prized, billions of people still can’t seem to recognize how bankrupt that global enterprise Heaven & Co. really is.

• • •

I was the infidel in our family. Aaron had always left open the possibility that there might be something more after death. As certain as I was that I was right, both in business and in my private life, that’s how uncertain he was. Aaron was a bit of a ditherer. He often said he hated certainty, because it only obscured a fear of life’s unpredictability, to which I’d respond that his waffling only masked a fear of making decisions.

He was extremely skeptical of my marriage vows to Rivka. Seated in the front row in the town hall, chewing on his pencil,
he grinned when I promised to be true to my wife until death did us part. When his turn came to congratulate us, he wished Rivka good luck and whispered in my ear, “If you remain true to Rivka, as you just promised, I’ll eat a kilo of raw pancreas. I’m giving you a year.”

Perhaps he was simply jealous of my captivating little wife, or of the fact that she was carrying my child. Although I never caught him showing the least bit of envy; he never appeared to have the hots for her, which worried me. I wondered if he might be a faggot, one of those nancy-boys, or even a pederast—a rather mortifying thought.

How had Aaron and I, with nearly identical genes, having shared the same womb for nine months, grown into such dissimilar people? It was as if our respective character traits had been concocted from two radically different formulae, so that on a cellular level there wasn’t a smidgen of genetic compatibility between us. In some primitive societies a multiple birth is regarded as an abomination, the work of evil spirits, or even proof of spousal infidelity. I can’t imagine my mother being guilty of the latter; I’ve never known a colder, less passionate woman. But in indigenous societies it’s not uncommon for the weaker of the twins to be killed. In that sense, I suppose the law of nature did win out in the end. I was incontestably the stronger one. Aaron’s number came up the year he turned forty-eight. My brother keeps popping up in my thoughts now that I’m shackled here to my prison bed; I no longer seem to have any control over it.

I never contributed to his happiness; I did contribute to his downfall. But in the end, you have to make your own way in life. And if you don’t, you run the risk of falling into the trap that someone else, or history, has laid for you.

• • •

Those were hectic times. My dream of conquering the world pharmaceutical market demanded an all-out effort and considerable manpower. Opening up export markets for the insulin, as well as any future products, was essential to Farmacom’s growth. Our sales territory had expanded exponentially when we acquired a German subsidiary; within a few years its sales were four times those of the parent company.