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Authors: Saskia Goldschmidt
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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 workedin 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
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 workedin 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
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