Mendel's Dwarf Read Online Free Page B

Great-great-great-uncle Hans Gregor.”
    The laughter rocked and swayed around the room, around the small focus of my body and around the wreckage of my absurd boast. Great-great-great-uncle. “Great-great-great,” they called. “Great-great-great! Great-great-great!”
    “Shut up! There will be silence! ”
    The laughter died away to mere contempt. “You will open your notebooks,” Mr. Perkins repeated in menacing tones, “and take down this dictation …”
    After the lesson they confronted me in the playground and taunted me with Uncle Gregor. “He’s one of them,” they shouted. “He’s one of Mendel’s dwarfs!”
    I’m not, of course. Mendel’s dwarfs were recessive. I am dominant. But at that time I didn’t know anything very much, except evasive glances and a brisk smile on my mother’s face and a cheerful but unconvincing assertion that what matters is what you are like inside. It’s easy to say that. All’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds. At home I had small chairs and a small bed and low bookshelves. The books were the normal size.
    “Mendel’s dwarf,” they cried after me in the playground. “Mendel, Mendel.” The name became a taunt, a chant of loathing. I retreated to the bike sheds, but they confronted me there, their knees hovering in my line of sight, their feet stamping at me as though I were something to be trodden into the dirt, a cockroach perhaps. “Mendel, Mendel, Mendel’s dwarf!” they called, and the feet came through the bike racks at me until acouple of older girls came in. “Leave off him,” they said carelessly. “What’s he done to you, poor sod?”
    “He’s Mendel’s dwarf.”
    “Oh, piss off.”
    The boys went, chastened by age and sex. The girls eyed me with distaste through the bike racks. One of them seemed about to say something. Then she shrugged as though the effort didn’t seem worthwhile. “Come on,” she said to the other. “Give us a fag.”
    I left them lighting up their Woodbines and scratching themselves.

    “It’s a problem you have to live with,” the headmaster advised me. I told him I’d not realized that before, and thanked him very much for sharing his insight with me. He answered that being insolent wouldn’t help. Or being arrogant. I asked him whether being submissive might. Or being recessive. He told me to get out of his study.
    A problem you have to live with . That’s a good one, isn’t it? It isn’t something I live with , as I might live with a birthmark or a stammer, or flat feet. It is not an addition , like a mole on my face, nor a subtraction , like premature baldness: it is me . There is no other.
    The curious thing is that I am doubly cursed. I am like I am, and yet I want to live. That’s another character, a more subtle one than dwarfism, but an animal character nevertheless, possessed by almost every human being. The Blessed Sigmund Fraud was wrong. There is no death wish, no Todeswunch . If there were, no animal species would survive, and certainly not our own damned one. But if there were a death wish, things would have been a lot easier for me: head in the oven, overdose of pills, fourth-floor window, the possibilities are endless. In theunderground I’ve often stood on the edge of the platform as the train came in, and thought about it. But no, you’ve got to live with it. You aren’t actually given the choice. No one is. I use the second person to include the whole of the human race. No one is exempt. You are all victims of whatever selection of genes is doled out at that absurd and apparently insignificant moment when a wriggling sperm shoulders aside its rivals and penetrates an egg. “What have we got here?” Mother Nature wonders. “What combination have we thrown up this time?” It’s like checking over the results of some lottery, the numbers drawn every day, every minute of every day; and every time someone a winner and someone a loser. No need to say which I was.

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