An Imperfect Lens (16 page)

“Yes,” he said, but he didn’t.

“Shall I bring you the chloride now?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, but he didn’t want her to move away. Este did move. She went to the shelf and pulled down the bottle they needed for the morning’s work. She could feel him staring at her back. Of course it was impossible. She knew what her father would say: he was not one of them. She knew her mother would begin to weep. She wondered if she was a bad person, an untrustworthy person.

Louis said, “Come, we’ll see what our oven has produced.” He forced his limbs to move. His steps were stiff. He came close to the open fire. He stared at the flames for a long moment. She wanted to follow him, but she didn’t. His face was flushed from the heat. A bead of sweat appeared on his forehead. Outside the window, a flock of small black birds had settled on the ledge. They ruffled their wings, they hopped about on their bent legs, legs that seemed too thin to support their bodies. They let out sharp cries, plaintive, unlovely. Louis went to the window and banged on the glass. Alarmed, the birds took flight. Este told Louis that she must go out for a walk. She woke Anippe and they left the laboratory.

Why did she leave so suddenly? Louis was confused. She would return. She said she would return.

But she didn’t come back. Sitting in her own drawing room hours later, she was thinking about the flawed diamond, and she knew she would not marry a man, the brother of her best friend or not, the object of her imaginings for years or not, if he was less than honorable, less than fine. She wanted, in fact a man, an unsuitable man, from a different place.

That evening, Abraham Malina sat in his favorite chair reading a paper from the English Academy of Science.

Whether it was 1865 or 1866 when cholera appeared in America is
uncertain. Some say it came to America on the German steamer
England.
It is certain that cholera was rampant in New York during the
summer of that year. The railways that had been extended from the
coast into the interior carried the disease all the way to the frontier. A
military camp in Newport, Kentucky, became a breeding ground from
which the disease spread to the surrounding area, and New Orleans lost
about 1,200 lives from the disease, which disembarked from returning
troop ships. The entire number of deaths in America in this outbreak are
estimated to be about 50,000, which is not so very many considering
other waves of the epidemic worldwide, but on the other hand, consider
the unbearable sorrow that followed when the young soldiers who had
escaped the perils of the battlefield returned home to die of cholera.

10

THEN THEY FOUND IT. It was Louis who saw it first, a round form, a new form that his eye had never seen before. He called Roux to come and look. It took Roux a long time to locate it, but then he too saw it, pressed between the two pieces of glass, floating in a drop of blood from the stool of the child who had died of cholera. Nocard left the rabbit whose brain he was examining and came to the table. He jiggled the microscope with his large hand and then apologized again and again in case he had dislodged the microbe or ruined the slide. He hadn’t. When they took turns and looked again, there it was. When Este arrived, they were laughing and slapping each other on the back. “Be cautious,” Roux said, “we haven’t proved it, we haven’t tested it.” They knew that work would have to be done, hard work, experiments repeated over and over in order to demonstrate its existence without a doubt, to convince those who would challenge them. Este looked through the microscope. She saw it, too, a round little ball that seemed to move purposefully in the blood fluid.

Roux did send a telegram to Pasteur that they had found something promising, a strong possibility that it was the cholera microbe. They would test it carefully.
Be of good cheer,
the telegram said. Dr. Koch was waiting in the telegram office to send a request for more funds to the Berlin Institute. Roux said to him, “I think we’ve found it.”

The German’s heart sank to his heels. He had worked in this hot, foreign place for nothing, if the French had found the object of their search. They would ridicule him in Berlin. They would forget his other accomplishments. They would remove him from his position. He would have to go back to being a country doctor, treating babies with rashes and women with boils. He offered his congratulations to Roux and asked if he might come visit the Frenchmen’s laboratory and see their discovery for himself. “Of course,” said Roux graciously. “We would welcome your advice on the next steps to take.” Roux was very pleased with himself, but remembered to be both polite and cautious.

Este was excited. This would be the first really important thing that had happened in her life. She was flushed with excitement. She couldn’t wait to tell her father. He would be so pleased. An hour later Dr. Koch knocked on the door. He was brought in and given the stool by the microscope. He adjusted the lens. He stared at the round ball. He tried not to smile. He tried not to let his delight show. He did not want to be considered a man without morals or decency, but he was relieved, very relieved. The round ball the Frenchmen had found was only a blood platelet, necessary for clotting to take place. This he had discovered for himself a long time ago, when he was working in his makeshift laboratory in the back of his doctor’s office in Wollstein. He told Roux and Nocard and Thuillier what they had actually uncovered. He demonstrated to them that these round balls existed in everyone’s blood. He took a drop from Este’s finger, and there they were.

Dr. Robert Koch went back to his own laboratory feeling quite content, but still sorry for the French, who had thought they had grasped the grand prize. As for the French mission, along with Este, they were too disappointed to do anything else that day. It was a hard day. Roux sent a telegram to Pasteur.
Ignore previous
telegram. Error found.

INSIDE A LARGE, nondescript, white stone government office building, now inhabited by the English, guarded by a few British soldiers, the heat was heavy. The open windows carried the dust from the street into the rooms, where it settled on heavy wooden desks, on deep Oriental carpets, on brass ornaments and gas lamps. Outside, a few camels were tied to a post, their owner trying to get a travel visa through Egypt to the Sudan. The British had trouble with the Sudanese. Uprisings were put down, only to rise again. There had been the decisive but costly battle against Arabi just a few years before. This man who was trying to obtain a pass had some ordinary commerce in mind, unless he was a spy for the nationalists who wanted the British to leave Egypt. In these offices, no one was trusted, no one was assumed to be a friend. The natives were still speaking French, reading French newspapers, despite the fact that it had been months since the French essentially granted the town to Lord Cromer. The English soldiers and the English diplomats tried to go everywhere in threes. They wore their pistols at their sides. They shook their heads and frowned at passersby as if daring anyone to assault them, and yet they were assaulted. Sometimes they were merely pelted with soft melons and peaches, or sometimes a woman poured some slop down on them from above. Sometimes they were jumped from behind by someone with a knife, or a rope was pulled around an English neck. Sometimes they were found in an out-of-the-way alley, their boots taken, their jackets gone, their throats cut.

Which is why three English lieutenants were trying to compile a file on Dr. Malina. He might be spying against the British for the French, or reporting on troop movements for the Turks, perhaps for money or perhaps out of pure Jewish hatred for decent Christians. The intelligence office had discovered that his son had written an article for the university paper that embarrassed the Egyptian royal family. The son was gone now, out of the country, but the father might be in communication with him. The British believed that they should at the very least learn more about this Dr. Malina. Never mind that he was a respected doctor and a member of the Committee of Public Safety. That very position might give this Jew cover to report on the Alexandrian situation to enemies of the crown.

A young officer, his mustache not yet respectably thick, said that he had noticed an Englishman coming from the Malina house the other day. He had engaged him in conversation. He was a former employee of the Glen MacAlan Scotch Company and was planning on staying in Alexandria for a while. He seemed like a decent enough fellow. He had befriended Dr. Malina. He had explained the circumstances and they sounded reasonable. He might be a source of information. The officers agreed he was just the sort of man who might serve his country well enough if asked. One of the lieutenants stood up, preparing to leave. He said, “We have had instructions from London to avoid those parts of town where the cholera has visited. Tell your men to stay away from the wharves and their usual pleasure pursuits for the time being.”

One of the lieutenants shook his head. “What are the odds of my men obeying that order?” The others laughed.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Este’s mother had a headache. She took to her bed and closed the curtains so the light of the sun would not bother her eyes. Este’s friend Phoebe, sister-in-law-to-be, had invited Este for lunch. She walked the few blocks to Phoebe’s house, stopping at the glove store to order a replacement for the white glove with pearl buttons that she had ruined. The salesman at the glove store bowed when he saw her. He bowed to all his customers. He, too, was a member of the synagogue. He tried to detain her with an offer to show her the long suede gloves that had just arrived off the boat from Lyons the other day. He offered a plate of strawberries that she could dip in the saucer of sugar that he kept on the counter. She declined, afraid strawberry juice might drip on her dress. The store owner had a pharaoh hound, whose long neck and pointed ears were signs of his good breeding. Este petted the dog on his head and allowed him to lick her face. “Ah, sweetness,” she said to him.

Outside in the street, the heat made her gasp. She drew in the air but it didn’t seem like enough air. It was moist and humid. A donkey cart moved quickly down the street, splashing dust and water and the remains of a persimmon on the bottom of her dress. She hurried on, brushing by Dr. Koch, who was only now on his way to his own laboratory, having slept longer than usual because he had been up into the early hours of the morning considering the cholera’s elusive ways.

Este wrapped her arms around Phoebe, smelling the fresh orange water her friend had used to wash in the morning. How good it was to have a friend, even if you can’t share your confusion or confide the trouble that you could see ahead. “We can now call ourselves sisters and it will be true,” said Phoebe squeezing Este’s arm.

“Let’s wait until after the wedding,” said Este.

“But why?” said Phoebe.

“Because,” said Este, “I don’t want to tempt fate to harm us.”

“That’s stupid,” said Phoebe. “You’re my sister now, really. All of our lives we’ll share our troubles, when a child is sick, when one is born, when we get fat and ugly and when we have swollen ankles and loose teeth, we will know each other, and there will be no secrets between us, ever. Isn’t it lovely?” she asked, feeding a small yellow bird in a cage a little of her cake. Este agreed it was lovely. There was, however, something a little false in her smile, a little diffident in her hug. Her own childhood, she thought, had vanished quite suddenly while Phoebe’s remained.

While the two young women visited with each other, promising a fidelity more serious, perhaps, than that of man and wife, the shop owner, as he was putting away a tray of leather gloves, felt a cramp in his stomach, a cold in his fingers. He shuttered his store, left his merchandise on their shelves, sorted by color and size, some in boxes and others in fine paper, and went home to his wife and lay on the bed and, despite the cold compresses, the warm tea, the blanket his wife wrapped around his feet, he died just as Este returned home and hurried up the stairs to see if her mother’s headache had improved. It had.

Later she found Louis in the drawing room. He was waiting for her father to come in. He had promised to tell the doctor of any progress in the laboratory. Dr. Malina was too busy to come and see for himself. “Louis,” Este said, “do you think God created cholera, and if he did, why?”

“I suppose,” said Louis, “the cholera, if it had a brain, could ask the same question about us—what are we here for except as a food source, and surely, if we disappeared, another equally felicitous meal would become apparent, one that was not attempting to discover its hiding places.”

Este laughed. This was good conversation. She so rarely had good conversations.

EMILE HAD PURCHASED in the market three wooden camels in graduated sizes, for his children. They had miniature reins and red carpets on their backs. Carved by some villagers in the swamp area near Aboukir, they smelled of cedar and palm oil. He packed them carefully in a towel and put them in his suitcase. He had bought a silver beaded shawl for his wife. Would it seem strange in Paris, this object that was so common in the stalls of Alexandria? He hoped it would seem exotic but not peculiar. He had been working with chicken blood. Chickens had their own cholera, perhaps different from the kind that affected human beings. He wanted to see if he could transmit the chicken cholera to a rabbit. The problem was that his particular chickens did not seem to have the disease. They pecked eagerly at their grain, they hopped about and fluffed their feathers as if life would go on forever. They left waste all over the papers Edmond had placed in their cage. Perhaps the chickens in Alexandria were not susceptible to cholera. He mixed a little of the feces they had saved from the cholera victim with some water, and injected the substance into the chickens. If they became ill, that would provide a valuable clue. They didn’t. Emile had gone to the Exchange and sent a telegram to his wife. It was an expense, but he felt he needed to reach her as soon as possible. He felt this with an urgency that startled him.
Working well, am fine,
nothing to report as of now. Miss you and children.
He knew that when his wife received his words, she would read not only the actual message but all the things left unsaid, the non-telegram things. It would all be clear to her. This thought steadied his hand as he pulled a chicken up toward him by the throat.

Nocard’s dog had developed a large tumor on its left hindquarter. It made him limp as he moved around his cage. His eyes had become bleary. His fur was matted. The dog was sick. This was interesting news. But the dog did not exhibit any of the signs of cholera. When Roux and Thuillier examined its blood under the microscope, they found nothing unusual. “The dog seems to have a cancerous tumor,” said Nocard. “An unfortunate coincidence. In a place of cholera, under our very eyes the beast has become cancerous.” The dog licked Nocard’s hand when he put it through the bars and fed him a sugar lump, then he lay down in a corner of the cage and whined in his sleep. Nocard said, “I will put him out of his misery. He is no longer any use to us.”

Louis said, “Let us at least look at the tumor. Perhaps there is a kind of cholera tumor that grows only in dogs.”

“Do you imagine,” said Nocard, “that just because there is cholera in Alexandria, there is nothing else that eats at us?”

When Emile and Louis went out to the café at the corner for their coffee and baguette, Nocard carried the weakened animal, which offered no resistance, to a table and there injected him with a solution that soon caused his heart to stop. “Damn,” Nocard said. “Damn everything.” He kicked at the leg of a table on which Louis had prepared a culture in a dish of raspberries and oil to study under the microscope. The table vibrated, the dish crashed to the floor. The microscope threatened to follow, but wobbled on its base and remained upright. Nocard went out to find a new dog.