Read in his absence

The proceedings of the eighth international congress of zoologists lie on my desk as a scan and not as a book, printed in Jena in 1912, two years after the days in Graz they record. The paper was read out on a Thursday afternoon, half past two, in the lecture hall of the institute of hygiene. Subject: artificial insemination in mammals. The byline reads Elias Iwanoff of St. Petersburg, which is the volume's spelling of the man my first novel is haunted by.

Halfway down printed page 626 the paper calls in two authorities, Hertwig and Heape, and then argues in one sentence that crossing man with the anthropoid apes loses its repellent character and can be settled in a laboratory without offending morals or religion. The line above says the testes will do, from a male that may have been shot on a hunt the day before. Further down the page: the thirty million horses of Russia. The sentence sits there like an item in a household ledger.

He did not read it out himself. The proceedings say he was prevented from appearing: a W. Redikorzeff of Charkoff read the paper in his place, so it entered the room in a stranger's voice. Nobody writes down why he stayed away. Sixteen years later the same argument had state money behind it, an expedition to Guinea, two dates written down in 1927. I cannot call it his first public statement: the page fixes a date, not a rank.

I would like to sit in that hall once. I have never been to Graz, and the address of that hall in 1910 is one of the things I failed to establish. There is no plaque. I looked. My own companion archive still has him proposing it there in person. Tonight I draft the corrections in the notebook: the word first goes, and the route on the map goes with it. That is the only room I get to enter.