An Imperfect Lens (10 page)

He saw an archway down at the end of a narrow street, so narrow the sun barely entered and the air was cooler. The street reminded him of the rue St.-Denis in Amiens, behind his lycée, where the boys would go to smoke before the bell. He turned into that street. Above his head a woman leaned out a window and threw the contents of her pail down below. The foul-smelling water splashed up at Louis but did not touch him. He went on.

His step was fast. The warm wind from the ocean stroked his face and blew his hair about. He walked quickly past the mosque at the corner and noticed the intricate iron vines that looped around the now-closed gate. How long it must have taken for someone to have made that gate. How many days or perhaps years it must have taken, and it was worth it, look at it. He almost paused but did not.

Back in the laboratory he tapped his foot, he bit his lip. He waited for more ideas to come to him.

There was a knocking at the metal door. Louis opened the door to find Este standing there, her shawl pulled over her shoulders as if she suffered from a chill. Her pale face looked up at him. “May I come in?” she asked in a small voice. He nodded. She walked over to the laboratory table. “Tell me about the cholera. How are you looking for it?” Her manner was neither polite nor rude, she was simply intent on answers. She had many questions. Why is the cholera in Alexandria? How did it get here? Why are you sure it is some living creature that is causing this? Can you prevent it? Can you cure it? When you find the small thing, will you know how to kill it?

Louis answered her questions one after another. He was ashamed at how often he had no answer.

“What is this?” she asked, pointing to the autoclave, and he explained it to her. “What is this, what are these?” she asked, and he explained the plates set out in a row, where he would try to grow something from the matter of cholera victims. “May I look?” she asked when he explained about the lens and the small size of the enemy and the need to distinguish its shape from all the other living shapes that moved across the lens. He brought over a high stool so that she could peer down and see the glass he prepared for her, just water with something swimming in it, moving back and forth across the surface. He had placed his hands on her waist, naturally, to help her climb on the stool, so intent was he in helping her to see. But then an instant later he was embarrassed. This was not right. He felt her ribs through the material of her dress. He blushed. She was not thinking about his hands. Este had trouble with the microscope. She saw her own eyelashes, dark and long, flickering in the reflection. Louis leaned over her shoulder, inhaled a smell of coconut and sesame oil, and adjusted the lens for her. He slipped another slide under the lens. At last she saw the living thing crawling across the lens. She turned toward him, amazed. “How wonderful, Monsieur Thuillier!” she said. Este put her hand on his shoulder. “You are a real adventurer,” she said. Louis blushed to the tips of his ears. Este saw his blush and knew exactly what it meant.

Roux took Este to the back of the laboratory and showed her the animals in their cages. “Oh, the poor puppies,” said Este.

“We must defend our species,” he said.

Este was not entirely convinced. Louis had little patience with people who shed tears over the lives of beasts. Este heard his unspoken criticism.

“You have to sacrifice them, I understand,” said Este. “I want to see more,” she said to Louis. “Please, I want to see more.”

“I have to work,” he said. The words were short, but his voice was kind.

“Let me stay and help,” she said.

“There is nothing you can do,” he said.

“I’ll watch you,” she said. “I’ll learn.”

Louis hesitated.

“Of course she can stay,” Roux called out from across the room. “Just don’t touch anything without asking, and stop talking so we can think.”

Este nodded. Louis looked at her across the table. He sighed. Would she interrupt his train of thought? Would she make ignorant comments and drive him mad with constant questions? Why had Roux been so agreeable? Louis looked at her black hair, a strand now loose and falling over her eyes, eyes still red-rimmed from tears. “I thought,” said Louis, “you were interested in poetry, not chemistry.”

That was then, this is now, Este thought. She said nothing.

Nocard staggered through the small door holding two large cages, in one of which ten rats had been placed. It had cost something to pay the little boys down on the docks to capture the rats alive, as Nocard had insisted. He had to go first to the consul, wait for two hours for the secretary to see him, and then wait while an allowance of funds was produced from the account that the ministry had set up for its scientists. In the other cage was a kitten curled in a ball, barely alive.

“You remember Este Malina,” said Roux. “She wants to watch us awhile.”

Nocard nodded, put out his hand to shake Este’s, decided that might not be right, patted her on the shoulder instead, grinned at her. He hoped he hadn’t made a fool of himself. He assumed Roux had agreed to the girl’s presence to enhance the mission’s friendship with necessary and useful friends. Nocard left.

An hour later, there was a banging of metal against the wall, a low howling, and Nocard reappeared in the doorway pulling a wooden cart with wheels. On the cart was a large cage in which a brown dog was snarling and whining and drooling. The dog was frightened, as well he might have been. Nocard was pleased with his find. “A stray down by the lake, some boys were throwing stones at him. He was hungry. I gave him some of my bread. I caught him with a rope. Look at him,” he said. “Strong muscles, good coat, not sick. He will serve us well.” Emile came over to look at him. Louis turned his head away. He did not like to see the panting and the heaving of the chest. He did not like to see the dog’s eyes searching the room with terror. He did not like the smell of the dog, which had soiled its cage. But he accepted the dog as a necessity. They would, as soon as they were able, give the animal cholera, and when the dog sickened they would have material to work with.

Emile bent down to the cage. “What is this lump behind his ear?” he asked Nocard.

Nocard bent over too. “It could be a healed bite, from another stray,” said Nocard. “It could be an additional bone in the skull.”

“Is it a wound?” asked Emile. “I think I see some blood beneath the fur. Is it infected? We need to know.”

“I’m not sure,” said Edmond.

The animal was pacing back and forth. He was whining a low, terrified whine and occasionally opened his mouth and cried. He barked and snarled and backed away as far as he could when Edmond tried to put his hand into the cage to feel the lump. “We have to take him out,” he said.

Emile opened the door of the cage, and Nocard was putting the rope on the dog’s neck when he leapt forward, knocking Nocard down. His glasses fell on the cement and broke into three pieces. The rope lay on the floor, useless. Este backed up against the wall. She did not scream or call out. The dog was larger than he had seemed in the cage. He snarled. He stood there. Edmond, blinded without his glasses, started to rise from the floor. The dog stood over him, growling a long, low growl. Emile rushed to the oven to get the iron shovel. The dog lunged at Edmond, who threw his hands up to protect his face. Louis bent over and forcefully pushed Nocard out of the way. Louis stood before the dog, which now rushed at him, sinking his teeth into his knee. Nocard stumbled to his feet. Louis knocked the brass gas lamp off the table and it fell in front of the dog, which, startled, paused a second, releasing Louis’s flesh. In that second Louis moved behind the table. Edmond recovered his rope. The dog, confused, stood still and Emile had no need to use his shovel. Este saw that Louis was a brave man. She said nothing. She had not uttered a sound, for which all the men were grateful.

Back in the cage, the dog settled down. He drank some water and curled up in a far corner and went to sleep. “This is not a rabid dog,” said Edmond, who had left his spare glasses in his bedroom, but couldn’t remember exactly where. “The dog,” he said, “was just alarmed.”

“Reasonably so,” said Louis.

“Let’s pour some alcohol on that wound,” said Emile. Louis boiled some water and, although it was still hot, swabbed his wound.

Nocard put alcohol on the bite marks, which were not very deep, hardly a scratch. He said, “This will heal quickly.”

“Thank you,” said Edmond to Louis. “You saved my handsome face.” Despite the sharp stinging in his knee from the antiseptic, Louis smiled.

Edmond went to the back of the laboratory to see his other animals. Este went with him, and was asked to tilt the small cage of a rat downward. The rat clawed at the bottom of its cage and slipped and slid into the bars while Edmond poured the urine that then collected in the corner into a container.

8

ERIC FORTMAN CLIMBED down the carriage steps, paid the driver, and decided to walk the rest of the way to the Malinas’ home, where he was headed.

He had just been employed by the Marbourg & Sons importing firm, run by Lydia’s cousin Rudolph. There was no question he would be an asset to the firm. He was on his way to report the good news to Lydia Malina and thank her for her kindness in making it possible for a stranger to begin a new life in a foreign land. He had taken lodgings near his place of work, and now he was certain good fortune was smiling on him once more. He was hoping that when he was ushered into Lydia’s drawing room, her lovely daughter would be there. He had almost taken a wife in Liverpool, but then had decided against the lady in question, who had acne scars across her cheeks that were visible in bright sunlight, and he had thought that in time he might do better and anyway his ship was soon due to embark. This Malina girl was perfectly complex-ioned. He understood she was almost engaged. But engagements could be broken.

DR. MALINA TRIED to finish with his last patient a little early. In fact he finished rather late. Albert was coming to dinner, along with his father and his sister Phoebe. Albert’s father had sent Dr. Malina a note informing him that Albert had purchased a ring and wished to give it to his intended as soon as possible. The news had made Lydia’s head swim. She had to lie down immediately. This was pleasant news, of course, but it brought home the reality of her daughter’s fate, and actually she had preferred her daydreams to any reality at all. There was no hiding from the passage of time and its necessities, but she was certain that when her daughter left her house she would be doubly bereft.

IT WAS IMPORTANT to find out if any particular animals had gotten sick in the areas where cholera had killed. Animals sickened all the time, but it was possible that dogs or cats or birds in cages, or sheep kept in pens or chickens in the yard, were more likely to harbor the cholera virus than other animals. If many of one kind had died recently, then perhaps the microbe could be found in their remains, perhaps their tissue could be used to give other animals cholera. Louis was given the task of exploring the neighborhood down by the wharf to see what he could learn. Marcus was to go with him.

Behind the café, they passed a dark stream running down an alley. In the foul-smelling water, human waste and dog waste combined. A glass jar floated by, and a woman’s stained cloth disappeared far ahead. The water washed over the cobblestones and the stream ran past a door, which opened and an arm reached out and dumped a few cooked potatoes from a pot, around which tiny flies swarmed into the dark stream. The waiter at the café had taken his break in the back alley, where he urinated against the wall. His water joined the stream. As he stepped back, his heel sank into the dirty water. He walked back into the café, and his footprint stained the floor. He wiped up the mark with his hand, a swift motion, one bend and it was gone.

“I’m hungry,” said Marcus. “We need to stop and have some sausage. I can’t go on without food.”

Louis glared at him. “Not yet.”

Marcus sat down on the curb. “I can’t go on without at least something to quench my thirst.”

Louis noticed that his own throat, too, was dry. “No,” he said, “we have work to do.”

At the Grand Square, Louis asked about the health of the cat that slept on the rug in the back of the tobacco shop. The cat rolled over on its back to let the sun’s rays fall on its stomach. It was fine. No cats had been found dead in the streets of the neighborhood. Marcus asked a group of little boys headed off to the lake to fish if they had seen any dead cats or dogs. The boys shook their heads. Had they understood the question? Louis wasn’t sure. They asked in the back room of the bar at the wharf where sailors were smoking and a strange sweet smell filled the room. Rats, dead rats, but there are always dead rats, one sailor told Louis.

Perhaps in the countryside, Louis thought, perhaps the cholera has attacked the sheep and the pigs in the villages. Marcus and Louis took a carriage to the Office of Agriculture, which was in the large white government building behind the Exchange. It was guarded by two English soldiers playing cards at a small table near the entrance. No unusual reports of animal deaths. Nothing of interest, said the clerk. Except that the third assistant who did the filing in the office had died of cholera just the week before. That explained why papers were piled on every surface of the small office.

THE MEAL WAS over. The serving girl had carried the dishes out to the kitchen, where Abbas was waiting with heated water to scour the pots and pans. Dr. Malina had moved into the drawing room and was smoking his last cigarette of the evening, and his wife was writing a letter to her son, telling him about her day, how she had picked out a peach-colored satin fabric to be made into a dress and the leftover yardage to be used as a shawl. She wrote to him about the crow she had seen on the balcony whose angry eyes had warned her that danger was everywhere. She wrote to him about his Uncle Tomas, who had been walking in the rue Nebi Daniel when a workman carrying a long board had knocked him down and he had lost consciousness and hadn’t regained it until his wife produced a steaming apricot pudding by his bedside. He had always been very fond of apricot pudding, and he immediately opened his eyes and asked for a spoon. She didn’t want to bore him with her letters about nothing at all, but she wanted him to know that her days were continuing, to remind him that she breathed the same air that he did and was close by even if she was not in fact close by.

Albert’s father had excused himself after dinner and walked home. Albert asked Este if she would like to walk down to the sea. She would. She put a shawl around her shoulders and ran her hands through her hair to make sure her curls were at their fullest and most appealing.

The couple, and they were almost certainly now a couple, walked, not holding hands but with shoulders almost touching, down the wide avenue. They were followed at a discreet distance by Anippe, Este’s maid. They heard the wind rustling in the long leaves of the palm trees and they heard the rattle of carriage wheels, and they saw the lights in the windows of homes and they passed the hibiscus that guarded the path to the boardwalk. When they came to the beach, where their families had cabanas, they walked out onto the sand. The moon was no more than a sliver, but its light cracked open the heavens, the Milky Way spread across the dome.

Este said, “I used to hate going to bed on a night like this. Perhaps when we are married I will never go to bed.”

Albert put a hand gently on her shoulder. “I have this for you,” he said. He took a box from his pocket and handed it to her.

She knew, of course, what was inside. She opened the box and saw the diamond ring, clear and large, set in gold prongs, lovely, the moonlight glancing off its sides. “Yes,” she said, “it’s perfect,” and slipped it on her finger.

Albert wanted to tell her how he had gotten it at a bargain price, but thought perhaps that wasn’t the most tactful thing to say. “I will get you more jewels,” he said instead. “You will have enough diamonds to open your own jewelry store.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I always wanted to be a shopkeeper.”

He laughed. She was not stupid, his bride-to-be, and that was something.

“Have you met the French scientists?” she asked him.

“No, I haven’t. Are they very boring?” he asked.

“No,” she said, “not boring at all.” She started to describe to him what they were doing in their laboratory.

“Enough,” he said. She stopped.

As he led her back to her house, he slipped his pocket watch out and glanced at the hour. His night was not yet over.

When Este returned, she found her father at his desk. “Look at my ring,” she said.

He looked. His saw that the ring was of substantial size. “Fine ring,” he said, and kissed his daughter on the cheek. He saw the round curves in her face in the orange light of his lamp and the small scar on her chin that came from a fall from a chair before she had gone to school. He would have said something to her, something about the passage of the years, the pleasures that he hoped she would have, the way it would be when her own time came to bring a child into the world. He wanted to say that he would allow no pain to reach her, but that would be bravado, a lie. A man did not tell lies to his daughter. His jaws ached with something he could not name but that had everything to do with his child and his desire to keep her as she was, in the lamplight, her eyes reflecting the glow, her hair a little damp, down on her forehead, and her smile, the one he believed she saved for him but probably gave indiscriminately to all. “Good night,” he said abruptly. His voice sounded curt, even rude, in his own ears. Este left the room.

He considered the cholera. Should his wife and child move elsewhere for the time being where they would be safe? It might cause panic if he, a physician on the Committee of Public Safety, sent his family out of town. Cholera would leave Alexandria in time, it left everyplace it visited in time. How soon would it go? When would it be satiated? He turned to read in the sheaf of papers on his desk.

It traveled in caravans across Syria, where it reached Aleppo in
November 1822. It appeared in 1821 at Basra in the Persian Gulf, and
killed, in less than three weeks, between fifteen thousand and eighteen
thousand human beings. The Persian army which had defeated the
Turks near Erivan and had pursued the enemy westward fell prey to
cholera. The soldiers retreated to Khoi in Iran, where they dispersed,
disseminating the infection throughout the country. Cholera appeared
in 1819 in Port Louis, Mauritius, where it had arrived with a ship from
Trincomalee, Ceylon. The disease had broken out mid-ocean. It killed
six thousand on the island within weeks. In 1829 cholera crossed the
Chinese Wall, swept through Mongolia, and eventually traveled to
Moscow. It sailed on the Arabian dhows that traded all along the shores
of Arabia toward the East African coast. Cholera broke out among the
troops of Said-bin-Sultan while they were attacking Bahrein. It broke
out in Mecca in 1831 and killed some twelve thousand pilgrims. It
appeared in Nicaragua and Guatemala and in New Orleans and
Charleston, South Carolina. Cholera progressed along the trade route
from Canton to Burma and branched south along the Irrawaddy River
toward Rangoon in 1842. Cholera appeared in 1851 in Cuba and in
the Grand Canary Island, where it caused nine thousand deaths in a
few days.

Statistics, graphs, numbers of the dead disturb the mind but do not panic it. Piles of bodies lack conviction. It doesn’t matter that we know the body stinks in death or that it bloats with gas as the hours pass. It doesn’t matter that we know that each number on the chart, whether from a town or a city, a farm or a jungle, represents a single person who was necessary to himself, to a mate, to a child, to a friend, to a fiancé, to a mother. When the numbers grow so large, we can no longer imagine faces, arms and legs, necklaces and moles, haircuts and earlobes. When the numbers jump far out beyond our capacity to feel, they produce a numbness that is not so much protective as genuinely bored. This is natural. Even when the numbers of those lost to tidal wave, volcano, hurricane, train wreck, fire, flood, or war change their numerical account, are revised downward or upward, we are not shaken into a new conviction. Fear for ourselves comes slowly. The numbers may have been exaggerated or undercounted, but they always crash into the smallness of our imagination, our inability to hold reality in both hands at once. We mime horror at what we have heard, but our souls do not shake or tremble. Large numbers of bodies are in many ways far less upsetting than a single corpse. Anyone who could grasp the statistics, hold in their minds the fingers and toes, the lift of the bridge of the nose, the short finger of the left hand, of the three-billionth victim, would go mad. We are capable of mourning only one by one, and a mass grave leaves as light a touch on our hearts as none at all.

For now all was well in his family, all was as it should be. This made Dr. Malina uneasy. Something would shift, something in the fortunes of the family would change. He had no evidence for this premonition except his experience, or perhaps it was Alexandrian history that made him gloomy. He thought of the Macedonian who had taken the spit of land that was once an island empty of civilization. He thought of Antony, who died because Octavius defeated him, of Cleopatra, who died because she had backed the wrong general, and of the Ptolemys replaced by the Roman emperors, and of the Roman emperors replaced by the followers of Muhammad, and the Christian martyrs, a hundred thousand of them, slaughtered like chickens for a feast, and of the Jews beaten and mutilated by the angry Greeks, and of the Copts and the Catholics assassinating each other, and of the French chased by the British and the warships in the harbor with their loud guns and flags flying high or flags drawn down, and the wounded in the hospital and the bin of limbs that gathered in the basement awaiting disposal. He thought of General Arabi and his followers defeated in distant sandy battles. He thought of Alexander himself, lying under the streets, wrapped in gold cloth, resting in his glass coffin, bones now and dark air surrounding the sightless sockets where his eyes had been. He thought that something evil would come to his family, something that all his skills could not avoid.