An Imperfect Lens (26 page)

“Where is the doctor, his wife, his daughter?” Louis asked.

The cook shrugged. “It is not for me to say,” she replied.

Louis said, “I’ll have you arrested for theft if you don’t tell me what has happened.”

The cook looked at him. She calculated how long she had to get to the rail station. The train to Aboukir did not leave for several hours.

She said to Louis, “Sit down, are you hungry? I can fix you a good dinner if you like.”

“I’m not hungry,” said Louis. “Where are they?”

“Do I have your word as a gentleman that you will not bother me any more if I tell you? After all, what do you care, a few spoons here and there, what difference will that make in the end, when we all answer to God?”

“Yes, you have my word,” Louis shouted.

“It’s not necessary to yell,” said the cook. “I’m not deaf.” She told him that the doctor had been taken by the British authorities. It was a matter of spying, one of the British soldiers had told her. Mrs. Malina had gone to the synagogue and Este had simply disappeared into the streets. Louis hardly let her finish before he rushed out to find a carriage. Outside the house, he now saw Egyptian police guarding the door and a dozen more idly standing across the street. The neighbors were staring down from their terraces. A small crowd had gathered across the street. The Arab boy who guarded the doctor’s surgery was lying in a heap on the street. One of the police had twisted his arm until it snapped like a twig. “Why did he do that?” Louis asked.

“Monsieur,” said the boy between wails, “I do not know.” But he did, and he decided he had better get away from the house as soon as possible, and so he rose and ran, holding his wounded arm with his other hand.

Louis looked for a carriage. There were none. He looked for a donkey. There were always donkeys around. He found none. He began to run. He would go back to the laboratory at the hospital and enlist Emile and Paul and Marcus to help him find Este. This must be a mistake. Dr. Malina could not have been spying. On whom, for whom? It made no sense.

He ran down the hospital corridors, turning corners without slowing his step. He ran past the cholera ward, which was now empty except for an old man who was lying very still, perhaps already dead. Louis pulled open the door to the laboratory and saw Este sitting on a chair. Her shawl was on the floor. Her hair was falling out of its clip. Her eyes were red from crying, but she was smiling at Nocard, who had brought her a piglet that was sitting in her lap, licking her fingers, smelling the sleeve of her dress, small snorts coming from his nostrils, making his white whiskers move up and down.

ESTE LEANED FORWARD in her chair and wiped her eyes and straightened her hair. She described to Louis the entrance of the soldiers, the removal of her father, the searching of their rooms, even her room, the taking of her diary, the overturning of her small white bureau, the flight of her mother. She smiled at Louis bravely. She did not want him to think that she was without courage, or that she could so easily be reduced to helplessness.

“I will go out now,” she said, offering the piglet back to Nocard, “and find my mother.”

“Wait,” said Louis. “Let’s think first. Where might she be? We cannot search all of Alexandria.”

Este heard him say “we,” and she was grateful. Louis heard her say “I,” and was afraid he might lose her in this turmoil.

“It will turn out to be a mistake,” he said. “They will apologize to your father and send him home.”

“That’s what I told her,” said Nocard.

Emile nodded in agreement, but he was not so sure. She placed the pig back in Nocard’s hands. “This one,” she said to Nocard, “his ears seem to be infected.”

“I will look carefully,” Nocard said.

“He is number thirty-two in my notebook,” Este said. “He has such sweet eyes,” she added.

“They all do, Mademoiselle,” said Nocard.

Louis said, “We haven’t time for this. We should go find your mother. She will be worried about you.”

Este gave in. There was a small tremble of her lower lip. She washed her hands carefully in the bichloride of mercury solution. She moved toward the laboratory door. “Thank you,” she said to the two men standing by the long table. “Thank you for your kindness.”

Louis opened the door and they quickly walked into the hall. Nocard followed. He called out after them, “Be careful.” The wind from the sea was coming from the north and was blowing hard. The large fronds of the palm trees on the avenue swept up and down, and the dust flew in their faces as Este and Louis made their way.

“I am going to the British consulate and demand to see my father,” said Este. “I am sure that’s where my mother must be.”

Louis wanted to touch her sleeve. He did not dare. She was not his.

“My English is not as good as yours,” he said.

“I will talk,” said Este. “They will listen to me. I am his daughter.”

Louis was not so sure this was to her advantage. It was possible they could arrest her, too. Perhaps they had already taken Lydia Malina and put her behind bars to put pressure on her husband to confess. Confess to what? What could that man have done? He wanted to ask Este if her father had expressed any political opinions that might concern the English. He did not. He thought the question, which contained a seed of doubt about the virtue of her father, was impolite. Este paused, out of breath. A vendor standing behind a table on which he had coconut pieces spread out on a red striped cloth beckoned them over.

Este said, “I’m thirsty, let’s buy one.”

“No,” said Louis. “We don’t know who has touched them, where they have been, what they have been washed with. It’s too dangerous.”

“But the cholera is going,” said Este. “That’s why you’re going back to Paris.”

“Yes,” said Louis, “but it doesn’t go all of a sudden. It pulls back and back, but for a while it remains in these streets.”

“All right,” said Este, following him as he moved on.

When they arrived at the consulate, the guard at the door would not let them in. When Este explained that her father was inside somewhere and she must see him, the guard called over a second guard and they asked Louis to remove the lady immediately from the doorway. They raised their weapons. Louis and Este left, Este walking very slowly. She did not want the guards to think they had frightened her. They had.

Louis said to Este, “I will not go to France without you.” Este said nothing. Louis said, “I came too late to talk to your father.”

Este said, “I can’t think about that now.”

Why, what did this mean, that he was nothing to her, that this emergency made it impossible for her to care for him, that he no longer mattered to her? These thoughts gripped him and he grew silent, the kind of grim silence that makes its own sound.

“This is not between us,” she said in a softer voice. “My father is my father.” She seemed so fragile, so like an abandoned child, that tears came to his eyes, unmanly tears that he forced back instantly into his head. “Take me home,” she said.

“Of course,” he said. He wanted to tell her many things. As he looked down the street for an approaching carriage, he thought of one. “Do you know,” he said, “that when you put a little flame in a bottle and seal it, the flame soon uses up the oxygen and without oxygen the flame burns out?”

“Is that true?” said Este.

“I’ll show you,” he said. “I promise.”

Este smiled. She did want to see that. She did not touch him, but he saw her hand flutter at her side. This encouraged him.

INSIDE THE BACK rooms of the less public part of the consulate, Dr. Malina sat at a table and answered questions. Why did he want the English out of Egypt? What was his group, what were his reasons for aiding the enemies of the Crown? Why was he against the presence of the English in Egypt? Of what concern was it to Jews who governed in Cairo?

“None,” he answered, “none at all.” Why would they suspect him of wishing to harm the English, to sabotage the barracks of the British soldiers? He was not a man of politics. He was not a young, hotheaded nationalist. He was a member of a guest community, one that had lived in peace in Alexandria for centuries without causing trouble to any sovereign. He tried to reason with his captors. But they had evidence of his perfidy. They were certain they had caught a man who would do them harm. He hoped Lydia had done all that he had told her and more. As the morning turned into afternoon, he despaired.

THE TWO NEW friends, a Frenchman still a boy and the Englishman, went to the Museum of Greco-Roman Antiquities. There they learned about the excavations at the tombs of Hada and Khatby, and they saw how elegant the old things appeared mounted on pedestals in large rooms. They learned that there was an archaeological society that was respectable and set up by the Khedive for the public good. Eric and Marcus knew that there were always other paths, indirections, bribery, and parallel routes that would take them to the good fortune they knew waited for them in the near future.

Marcus and Eric walked through the bazaar. They found several stalls selling what they said were necklaces from Cleopatra’s own jewelry chest. They found three long strands of green beads that had been found near the Pyramids by some Arab men returning to their villages from a pilgrimage. The merchant who sold Eric the Ganesh he had given to Este produced a bracelet that he claimed belonged to a slave girl who had served Ptolomy himself. Eric purchased everything.

Marcus spoke to a few of his donkey boy friends who told him that they knew someone who knew how to get the stones he was asking about. Marcus was led to a man who had bought some small heads from a wanderer who sold them from the sack he carried on his back. The man, who worked at the customs office, told Marcus where he could find the peddler. He lived by the river in a shack.

Eric and Marcus took a carriage out of town. They found the shack. They waited for the man to return. At nightfall, they saw him appearing down the path. He saw them and started to run. Were they robbers or murderers? Eric caught him. Marcus was able to explain in Arabic that they were customers, not thieves. When the man gave them a relieved grin, they saw that his teeth were black and his gums were red.

He went into his shack and reappeared with a stone head of an ancient Egyptian queen. Her long nose, her doelike eyes, her headdress, were all clearly chiseled. Chips of red and blue paint were still pasted here and there on the stone. “You think it’s real?” Marcus asked Eric.

“I’m no expert,” he said. “But this fellow didn’t make it in his backyard, that’s for certain.”

“It’s real,” shouted Marcus, and so they bought it, after Marcus bargained and threatened to walk away. They also bought a small platter, a burial urn, and a dozen beads.

In the carriage on the way back to town, arrangements having been made to purchase more the following week, Eric said to Marcus, “We’re good as gold. We’ll open shop. No, not a shop, we’ll sell from a fancy house, we’ll be famous. We’ll be asked to join the Circle Khedival. We’ll walk into the Exchange like gentlemen. We’ll be the richest men in Alexandria.”

Marcus was less excited but still pleased. “It will work,” he said.

Back in Alexandria, Marcus took a carriage to the apartment he shared with the French scientists, and from under his mattress he pulled a pouch that was fat and full. The two met back at the café at the wharf. Marcus had his few possessions in a bag. He would move in with Eric just for the time being, until he could afford a grand place of his own.

ONE MIGHT THINK that as each day brought fewer and fewer victims of cholera, the mood of the city would brighten. One would expect that lanterns in dark taverns would be relit, that children would be shouting in the streets, and that flower vendors and pastry sellers in the bazaar would be jubilant with a return to normalcy. But what the cholera left behind as it receded was grief. The numbers of weeping mothers, pale fathers, shaken widows were so enormous that the city itself seemed pale, quiet, stunned. It is true that those unaffected by the disease went about their business as usual, but at night when they returned to their homes they could hear weeping coming from the windows of this place or that, and they could see children’s dark eyes peering listlessly from behind curtains. The city had lost many, and the loss hung in the air. It meant that as you walked in the public gardens you could catch the eye of a bereaved man, his face covered with stubble. It meant that when you sat at your favorite café, the lovely woman who wore a red sash over her robe and sold peanuts from a basket at the corner was gone and you looked for her in vain. It was a passing matter, this fog of grief that enveloped Alexandria. It would not last the month.

WHEN ESTE AND Louis reached the Malina home, the first thing they saw was a police carriage waiting outside. They saw two British soldiers standing idly at the threshold. One was smoking. The smell of his tobacco wafted in the air, mixing with some sweet, heavy odor from the horses whose tails were flicking at the flies that swarmed about their sweating bodies, undeterred.

“We should keep on walking,” Louis said softly.

“No,” said Este. “This is my house.”

“I am coming with you, then,” said Louis.

They approached the door. The soldiers, now alert, blocked their way. “No one is to enter here,” one said in a dull voice.

“I live here,” said Este.

“She lives here,” said Louis.

One of the soldiers slipped inside while the other blocked their way. He came back within seconds with his superior. “Mademoiselle,” the officer said, “I am deeply sorry for the disturbance here, but we found it necessary. You are free to go.” He waved his hand across all of Alexandria and the lake and the rivers and the sea beyond. “Free like a bird,” he added. He repeated himself in Italian, a language in which he felt more at home, and smiled as if he had offered her both a gift and a joke.

“I am not going away,” said Este. “This is my home.”

Louis said, “Let’s go to the French consulate. They will settle the matter.”