An Insolvable Problem of Genetics

                                                                                                           Josef Skvorecky (1924- )

This story is based upon a real event that happened to the writer’s friend Jan Bich. This story presents the racism and hypocrisy of a family that ostensibly champions egalitarian ideals.

There were some African students in the narrator’s town. They were learning Czech language. The narrator’s elder brother, Adolf, loved a movie star Jana Brejchova secretly. But when he did not get reply from her, he started to love another girl Freddie Mourek. She was a beautiful girl with white skinny figure and dark and large eyes.

Freddie was an illegitimate daughter of the Secretary of the Party cell at the Lentex linen factory in K.

One day, Freddie sang a black American song at Adolf’s house. Adolf’s father and mother became angry. When Adolf’s father asked her about her English name, Freddie said that her father’s name was Frederick Positive Wasserman Brown. He was a Black American migrant worker. Adolf’s father became very sad hearing this.

After the event, Adolf’s father borrowed books by Lysenko from the People’s Municipal Library and also started reading books by Friar Mendel. When Freddie sang Negro songs at his house the second time, Adolf’s father asked her about her father’s colour. she replied that he was completely black.

In the evening, the father told Adolf to break off his relationship with Freddie. According to Mendel, he said, Freddie would bear him a black child which would invite a scandal. People would think that the child was not of Adolf but of an African student. But Adolf said that

 it was too late. Adolf and Freddie had already had physical relationship and she was pregnant.

            The narrator overheard Adolf’s mother persuading Freddie’s mother for Freddie’s abortion. But she denied. Then, when it was sure that Freddie would be the mother of Adolf’s child, Adolf’s father, mother, sister and Adolf himself started telling the people about the law of heredity. According to the law, as they explained, a completely white mother can give birth to a black child.

            Freddie and her mother were angry at Adolf’s family for defaming them. Finally, Freddie ended her relationship with Adolf. She said that her father’s mother was a Japanese lady and her father’s grandfather was a Pygmy, a black African slave. So, according to Mendel’s law of heredity, she had a possibility of giving birth to a green dwarf. But after sometime, she gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, who had a perfect pink complexion.