Andrea Barrett: Ship Fever: Stories

But none of this seemed important to me. In the greenhouse, a policeman had asked Tati what had happened, and Tati had said, “I stuck his hand with my knife. But the rest was an accident — he tripped over that block and fell.”

“Why?” the policeman had said. “Why did you do that?”

“My granddaughter,” Tati had said. “He was…feeling her.”

The policeman had tipped my chin up with his hand and looked hard at me. “Is that right?” he’d asked. And I had nodded dumbly, feeling both very guilty and very important. Now my mother was telling me that I was of no consequence.

“Am I supposed to hate Germans?” I asked.

A few years later, when Tati was dead and I was in high school and Hitler had dismembered Czechoslovakia, my mother would become loudly anti-German. But now all she said was, “No. Mr. Leiniger shouldn’t have bothered you, but he’s only one man. It’s not right to hate everyone with a German last name.”

“Is that what Tati does?”

“Sometimes.”

I told my mother what Tati had shouted at Leiniger, repeating the foreign sounds as best as I could. My mother blushed. “ Nêmecky means ‘German,’ ” she said reluctantly. “ Prase means ‘pig.’ You must never tell anyone you heard your grandfather say such things.”

I did not discuss this conversation with Tati. All during that fall, but especially after Leiniger died, I’d come home from school to find Tati waiting for me on the porch, his knobby walking stick in his hands and his cap on his head. He wanted to walk, he was desperate to walk. My mother wouldn’t let him leave the house alone but she seldom found the time to go out with him; my brothers could not be bothered. And so Tati waited for me each afternoon like a restless dog.

While we walked in the fields and woods behind our house, we did not talk about what had happened in the greenhouse. Instead, Tati named the ferns and mosses and flowers we passed. He showed me the hawkweeds — Canada hawkweed, spotted hawkweed, poor-Robin’s hawkweed. Orange hawkweed, also called devil’s paintbrush, creeping into abandoned fields. The plants had long stems, rosettes of leaves at the base, small flowerheads that resembled dandelions. Once Tati opened my eyes to them I realized they were everywhere.

“ Hieracium ,” Tati said. “That is their real name. It comes from the Greek word for hawk. The juice from the stem is supposed to make your vision very sharp.” They were weeds, he said: extremely hardy. They grew wherever the soil was too poor to support other plants. They were related to asters and daisies and dahlias — all plants I’d seen growing at the nursery — but also to thistles and burdocks. I should remember them, he said. They were important. With his own eyes he had watched the hawkweeds ruin Gregor Mendel’s life.

Even now this seems impossible: how could I have known someone of an age to have known Mendel? And yet it was true: Tati had grown up on the outskirts of Brno, the city where Mendel spent most of his life. In 1866, when they first met, there was cholera in Brno, and Prussian soldiers were passing through after the brief and nasty war. Tati was ten then, and those things didn’t interest him. He had scaled the white walls of the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas one afternoon, for a lark. As he’d straddled the wall he’d seen a plump, shortlegged man with glasses looking up at him.

“He looked like my mother’s uncle,” Tati said. “A little bit.”

Mendel had held out a hand and helped Tati jump down from the wall. Around him were fruit trees and wild vines; in the distance he saw a clocktower and a long, low building. Where Tati had landed, just where his feet touched ground, there were peas. Not the thousands of plants that would have been there at the height of Mendel’s investigations, but still hundreds of plants clinging to sticks and stretched strings.

The place was magical, Tati said. Mendel showed him the tame fox he tied up during the day but allowed to run free at night, the hedgehogs and the hamsters and the mice he kept, the beehives and the cages full of birds. The two of them, the boy and the middle-aged man, made friends. Mendel taught Tati most of his horticultural secrets and later he was responsible for getting him a scholarship to the school where he taught. But Tati said that the first year of their friendship, before the hawkweed experiments, was the best. He and Mendel, side by side, had opened pea flowers and transferred pollen with a camel-hair brush.

On the last day of 1866, Mendel wrote his first letter to Carl Nägeli of Munich, a powerful and well-known botanist known to be interested in hybridization. He sent a copy of his pea paper along with the letter, hoping Nägeli might help it find the recognition it deserved. But he also, in his letter, mentioned that he had started a few experiments with hawkweeds, which he hoped would confirm his results with peas.

Nägeli was an expert on the hawkweeds, and Tati believed that Mendel had only mentioned them to pique Nägeli’s interest in his work. Nägeli didn’t reply for several months, and when he finally wrote back he said almost nothing about the peas. But he was working on the hawkweeds himself, and he proposed that Mendel turn his experimental skills to them. Mendel, desperate for recognition, ceased to write about his peas and concentrated on the hawkweeds instead.

“Oh, that Nägeli!” Tati said. “Month after month, year after year, I watched Mendel writing his long, patient letters and getting no answer or slow answers or answers off the point. Whenever Nägeli wrote to Mendel, it was always about the hawkweeds. Later, when I learned why Mendel’s experiments with them hadn’t worked, I wanted to cry.”

The experiments that had given such tidy results with peas gave nothing but chaos with hawkweeds, which were very difficult to hybridize. Experiment after experiment failed; years of work were wasted. The inexplicable behavior of the hawkweeds destroyed Mendel’s belief that the laws of heredity he’d worked out with peas would be universally valid. By 1873, Mendel had given up completely. The hawkweeds, and Nägeli behind them, had convinced him that his work was useless.

It was bad luck, Tati said. Bad luck in choosing Nägeli to help him, and in letting Nägeli steer him toward the hawkweeds. Mendel’s experimental technique was fine, and his laws of heredity were perfectly true. He could not have known — no one knew for years — that his hawkweeds didn’t hybridize in rational ways because they frequently formed seeds without fertilization. “Parthenogenesis,” Tati told me — a huge, knobby word that I could hardly get my mouth around. Still, it sounds to me like a disease. “The plants grown from seeds formed this way are exact copies of the mother plant, just like the begonias we make from leaf cuttings.”

Mendel gave up on science and spent his last years, after he was elected abbot, struggling with the government over the taxes levied on his monastery. He quarreled with his fellow monks; he grew bitter and isolated. Some of the monks believed he had gone insane. In his quarters he smoked heavy cigars and gazed at the ceiling, which he’d had painted with scenes of saints and fruit trees, beehives and scientific equipment. When Tati came to visit him, his conversation wandered.

Mendel died in January 1884, on the night of Epiphany, confused about the value of his scientific work. That same year, long after their correspondence had ceased, Nägeli published an enormous book summarizing all his years of work. Although many of his opinions and observations seemed to echo Mendel’s work with peas, Nägeli made no mention of Mendel or his paper.

That was the story I told Richard. Torn from its context, stripped of the reasons why it was told, it became a story about the beginnings of Richard’s discipline. I knew that Richard would have paid money to hear it, but I gave it to him as a gift.