An Imperfect Lens (23 page)
Este returned with the packet of letters she had taken from her mother’s drawer. They were wrapped in a violet ribbon. She opened the ribbon and handed him a letter. The stamp was blurry, blue, and nothing more than a stamp. Just then Lydia returned.
“My dear,” she said to Eric, “how very nice to find you here.”
“I was just admiring the stamps from Palestine,” he explained to her.
She took the letter that was in his hand and wrapped up the pile with the ribbon and left the packet on the small table near her elbow. The conversation went on. No one wanted refreshment. Este excused herself, claiming exhaustion. Lydia explained to Eric that she needed to retire to change for dinner. Her husband would be coming in at any moment. She stood up. Eric went to the door, thinking he had no hope of obtaining the letters, when there was a loud sound in the hall. Lydia rushed out the door to see her maid standing in a jumble of broken dishes and glasses that were intended for the dinner table. The maid was weeping. Lydia had to console her, picking her way carefully through the broken glass. Eric swiftly took a few of the letters out of the packet, placed them in his jacket pocket, called out a farewell, and made his escape down the stairs.
The Malinas had been kind to him, of course, a shipwrecked stranger, an accidental meeting. They were not people deserving of an unfortunate fate, but then the decision was not his. He was only a spear-carrier in some larger drama that he barely grasped. A man does what he has to when it comes to his own skin. So Eric Fortman believed. As for the pretty young lady who had no intention of marrying him, she was not his concern. He thought of her with contempt. She had wounded his pride. That galled him. A burning sensation rose in his chest. She would regret her haughty manner. It was probably true, he decided, that these people did not mean England well. He would do what was necessary.
Back in his room he read the letters. They could be coded, hidden meanings underlying the innocent sentences. He read them again and again. Finally, toward midnight, he grew tired and lay back on his pillow. It was then that his tooth began to throb. A deep, aching pain in the jaw that grew worse as the constellations drifted across the sky and the moon, shining its light into the harbors of Alexandria, slid across the dark dome of the universe and shooting stars fell through the air, their brief light flickering high above the waves. Eric heard the call to prayer, the hooves of a horse on the stones, and the cry of a child who had woken hungry. He tried a warm washcloth on his face. He tried a glass of the whiskey that he kept in a cabinet by his bed. He tried to think of pleasant scenes from the days of his boyhood. Nothing brought sleep. His tooth throbbed on.
In the morning he obtained the name of a dentist from his landlady and, sitting in the chair staring at the curtain pulled in front of him, he waited for the dentist to put the big metal instruments in his mouth, to pull at his tooth, to pour alcohol on the bleeding gum, to torture him with the pain of it all, and he took comfort in the thought that pain could be passed on, given to someone else. He felt misused by fate. He felt justified in his actions. He was afraid of the approaching footsteps of the dentist. Later his jaw was swollen, his mustache stretched oddly across his puffed-out upper lip. He bought a pipeful of soothing hashish from the boy behind the bar of the café on the corner. He went home and slept like an innocent child. He woke with a plan in his head, a way to serve the interests of his country.
PASTEUR HAD WAITED for a wire to arrive. He rushed to gather his mail from his front hall every afternoon, hoping that a long letter from his mission in Alexandria would bring good news, some progress, some hint of a direction, perhaps one that he, in Paris, could propel forward with some insight gained of experience, washed in his own genius. He had some concerns. It was taking a long time. He was a patient man—any scientist is by definition the very soul of patience—but this after all was a race and in a race if you are standing still you are falling back. Emile had sent progress reports. They were working, no doubt, but everything tried so far had proved useless. How long would the epidemic last? This was the time to find the microbe, while the disease was sweeping through the city. Later it would be more difficult.
MARCUS HAD A purse now in which he kept his private money. It was fat. This money was earned in the late-night hours by the shore. It was easy. During the daylight hours he ran his errands for the French mission, boiled their plates as he had been instructed. Boiled their water as he had been told, washed their sheets. In the early evening he cooked the dinner for the men and cleaned up after them. But he had filled out some since his arrival in Alexandria. He was no longer a mere boy. He was looking for investment opportunities. He had learned that he had assets, cards in his hand to play. He enjoyed his evening walk along the promenade. He enjoyed the ladies in their silk petticoats and the men smoothing down their hair, tousled by the wind from the sea. He enjoyed the smell of peanuts and palm oil and beer and perfumes. He had learned a good deal of Arabic in the marketplace. He had made a few friends among the boys who drove their donkeys through the streets back and forth on errands for the owner of the dance palace by the dried-up stream behind the railroad tracks at the far end of the lake.
Everyone in Alexandria was always moving. They did a good business, Marcus saw. He had spent an evening with several Alexandrians who dressed in women’s shawls and painted their faces and listened to a violinist play Mozart on a terrace concealed with muslin curtains from the peering neighbors. He had seen the dawn arrive in Alexandria with his young arms around someone whose name he would forget by noon, but whose smell would stay with him until dinner. He had learned enough Arabic to persuade a respectable shop girl to come with him for the sake of pleasure alone. He had learned enough to converse with the little boys who played in the alley behind the hospital. He had picked up some English and could wish the officers at the port a good morning, and wave at them in a manner that elicited a return wave. He had tasted absinthe and had smoked hashish. He was expanding his mind. He believed in his fortune, his good fortune. This was a perfect city for a boy with ambition, and he had become a boy with ambition. Which was why he now resented the fact that his name was omitted from the invitation that had come from the Academy of Science to a reception for the visiting scientists from France and Germany, their names in large script.
DR. MALINA RECEIVED a packet from the Committee of Public Safety. It contained the week’s count of cholera victims. It was the same as the week before. Dr. Malina checked the numbers twice. It was good news, or possibly so. Epidemics grow in intensity. When they stop claiming more and more victims, they ebb quickly. One week of stability was not cause for rejoicing. The count could be wrong, the stability an illusion. Or it could be an accurate count but simply reflect a pause in the epidemic, a moment for the cholera to rest before surging forward again.
DR. ROBERT KOCH had worked as he always worked, whether at home or away, with steady concentration, a cool head, and a critical eye, especially on himself. He looked for organisms that were invading the tissues around and in the intestinal lesions, and isolated them. Koch had examined slide after slide, culture after culture, and could not make out a specific organism that might be responsible for cholera, and then, late in the afternoon of a day that had begun shortly after dawn, he saw something that he had seen repeatedly in the tissues of the cholera-infected patients. It was possible that this was the organism. He wasn’t sure. He needed more tissue, he needed to test it more carefully. He thought he was on the right track. He drew pictures of what he had seen. He searched through all his slides to see if this particular creature appeared in all of them. It was work that required a steady hand and a good eye. He prepared slide after slide with the suspected organism pressed down between two thin pieces of glass. He put blue dye on the slides, hoping it would make the organism stand out clearly. It wasn’t always possible to make out the shape of the creature he thought might be responsible. He drew pictures, wrote in his notebooks, checked and rechecked what he had seen through the lens. He took the sample in which he had seen the organism and tried to grow it in cultures. It grew, but so did many other organisms. When he injected his brew into his mice, they did not sicken, but this did not prove that the small, wiggling form he had seen was not the source of the disease. Every few hours Koch washed his hands again in bichloride of mercury, a solution that would kill organisms on his fingers, keep peril and contamination at bay. Koch was hopeful. He was not ready to announce to the scientific community that he had seen the cholera and had drawn its picture. He was almost certain, but almost was not good enough. He did not want to be embarrassed before his colleagues, made a laughingstock in the academies.
His was not a temperament to exult, to dance in his bedroom. He was a solitary, sober man, but he did allow a small trail of happiness to follow in his footsteps as he went about his usual day.
ESTE WAS HURRYING to get to the laboratory. She was hastily pulling on her clothes, trying to button faster, to smooth down quickly, to get Anippe to tie the ribbons with more speed. In a dish warming near the oven was a culture that she was particularly hopeful might be of use. She pulled a comb through her curly hair. It stuck in a tangle for which she had no patience this morning. Anippe was extracting the comb carefully so as not to hurt her mistress when Este, exasperated, found herself in tears. She wanted to see Louis. She wanted to be by his side. She needed to be by his side. Her haste was not just a concern for the growth in the dish, but also for the man who was telling her everything important she needed to know, who had made interesting the most ordinary of matters. Her haste was to see him. He is the man I am meant to marry, she thought, and the certainty of that, the firmness of the fact that fate had so intended it, dried her tears. And soon sent her on her way.
ERIC FORTMAN WAS sitting in his office at Marbourg & Sons. He considered his finances. The salary paid him was sufficient to keep a single man in good order. The additional monies that fell his way were, if managed well, not spent extravagantly, enough to provide a man with the option of starting his own business, a matter that Eric Fortman had always considered beyond his capacity, his place in life. But here in Alexandria, all things were possible.
That afternoon he made his way to the tent at the bazaar where a man, sitting on a small stool above a wooden box with a bottle of ink resting in one corner, would write a letter in French or German or Italian or Arabic for a few pennies, for those who were unable to do it themselves. He was an Arab scribe and he made decorations on each of his letters, little drawings of flowers or insects. His customers, who might not be able to read the words he had transcribed, appreciated the drawings. They always smiled. They thanked him. Therefore the scribe was in high demand, and the line for his attention was long. The blind used his services, and this was a city where the eyes roamed about in the heads of many, unfocused, veiled, useless. Those who had come to Alexandria to save themselves from local droughts or from arrest sought his services. The smells of the bazaar nearly overwhelmed Eric as he stood in line. Juice from betel nuts stained the streets where it had been spat by a thousand passersby. Peels of oranges lay on the ground along with pieces of fig and ends of cigarettes, and a muddy puddle had gathered in which small, dark insects were moving over the surface. Eric Fortman did not like this slow line. He was an Englishman, entitled to faster service. He did not want to stand like this. But he knew that should he shoulder his way to the front there would be an outcry from the others, a screeching in Arabic that would bring a policeman or a soldier. This, at the moment, he did not want. So he stood there, outwardly patient, inwardly cursing the slow-moving hand of the scribe.
When at last it was his turn, he presented a letter to the scribe. It was Jacob’s letter to his parents.
“I want,” he said, “a letter that I dictate to you, in similar handwriting as this, as close as you can come.”
The scribe looked at him. He shook his head. “I don’t do that,” he said in English, and repeated it in French and Italian and Arabic.
Eric was prepared for that response. He took out his purse and pulled out some bills. The scribe’s eyes opened and closed. He considered for a moment, and then pulled out a piece of paper. Placing Jacob’s letter on one side, he wrote what he was told. Eric Fortman kept it simple and short. The less of the letter there was, the less likely anyone would contest its authorship. The letter spoke of plans to start a fire in the English barracks in Alexandria. It spoke of friends in Jerusalem who were willing to supply money to aid the cause of driving the British from Egyptian shores. It spoke of plans to cause chaos in Alexandria that might spread to Cairo. The handwriting was almost that of the letter he had presented the scribe. It was not exact. Eric could see certain errors, but it was close enough that at a glance it would appear to be from one Jacob Malina writing from Jerusalem. He took his letter back to his office and placed it in the envelope of the original. He paced back and forth. Had anyone seen him at the bazaar? Would the validity of the letter be investigated? Would he end his days in a prison cell? It will be all right, he told himself. The British officers for whom he was working were not so particular. They would be pleased and would not inspect the handwriting, or doubt his good English word.
In this he was right. When he sat down in the small room, the same room in which they had previously met, and handed them the letter, claiming he had obtained it at the Malina home, where it had been sitting in a pile of letters he had taken when the opportunity arrived, they asked no questions. They passed the letter around. They thanked him for his service to the Crown. They told him that he was a true Englishman. They promised that if he had special needs, they would do whatever was possible in his favor. They offered him a beer. He drank with them. That’s that, he said to himself, when he left their offices. He felt as light as a feather. He noticed the beautiful English girl who passed him on the street. He noticed the swallows on the rooftop. He appreciated the multicolored beaded curtains in the doorway of the café he passed. He went down to the docks to check on the expected arrival of a cargo ship from the Ivory Coast bearing valuable animal skins that would be made into coats for the ladies of London and Paris. The air was heavy and humid. He heard the shouts of the donkey boys. There was sweat on his forehead. But all in all, he thought, the climate of Alexandria offered many advantages over other ports.