An Imperfect Lens (8 page)

THE CHOLERA WAS in Alexandria, but where was it in Alexandria, how were they to find it? Pasteur had given them written instructions—unnecessary because the three men had worked with Pasteur for many years. Roux had been his first assistant in the discovery of the two silkworm diseases, flacherie and pébrine, and Nocard and Thuillier had been with him in the anthrax studies on sheep. But Pasteur double-checked everything. He left nothing to chance.

i. Examine under the microscope the stools of cholera-infected individuals at various stages of the disease.

ii. Examine blood samples and their culture.

iii. Try microbe purification through inoculation of various animals until one species becomes sick without dying.

iv. Find out if, in areas affected by the disease, animals have gotten sick or died from any disease.

v. When trying to transmit the disease, focus on individuals from this species, but not exclusively.

vi. Try to transmit this disease to animals by mixing suspicious matter with food.

vii. Use the organ parts as well as bodily humors and excrement in your experiments.

viii. Gather all information regarding the current epidemic.

MARCUS HAD SHOWED up early at the laboratory. He had circles under his eyes. His long lashes seemed crusted. His lips were dry. He swept the floor with great energy. He wiped the beakers so they would be sparkling clean. He carried out the one oversized green notebook that Louis used to record his experiments and dusted off its cover and then placed it in the center of the table. He filled the inkwell. He scrubbed the one window in the back of the small room so that the glass shone. He was in fact worried. His hands had been all over Masika. Did cholera leap off a girl? Was it in the air between them as they walked on the boardwalk? Why had it selected her and not him? Did he not have impure thoughts, all the time? Was that a pain in his stomach, or just a small pull of a muscle when he lifted the last barrel that had been shipped from Paris? He breathed deeply. But then he breathed shallowly. What was the safer way to breathe, how to avoid the air as much as possible? Avoid women at all times. He resolved to do this, but knew, even as he made his silent resolution, that he would not be able to keep it for very long. It was natural to lust after women, and it was natural to die. Should he have become a priest as his sisters urged him, ready as they were to sacrifice his pleasure for their own glory?

When Louis and Emile and Nocard arrived at the laboratory, Marcus begged for a chore, any chore. Louis was surprised at his assistant’s sudden dutifulness. “Are you all right, Marcus?” he asked.

“Have you had breakfast?” Emile asked.

“Did you drink too much last night?” Nocard asked, in a manner that implied that drinking too much was hardly a crime and could be understood between friends as a necessity of life.

Marcus shook his head. “Let’s go to work,” the boy said. “Now I am ready.”

THUILLIER, ROUX, AND NOCARD opened the heavy metal door that led to their new storage room. The barrels had arrived and were piled in the middle of the floor. Nocard, who had been carrying a basketful of rabbits he had bought in the market, put them in the cages in the back of the laboratory. Emile ran his hands over the workbench. “Marcus,” he called, “this should be washed down.” It was crucial that everything be clean. At the very least, they needed to rid the space of the visible crawling things that might contaminate experiments. Roux leaned into the large open oven and declared it ready for use.

Thuillier and Roux and Marcus worked together, barely talking, until noon, the beakers here, the bowls there, the little dishes in which they might grow the cholera cultures piled up over by the oven, the fire started, the long shovel hung on a hook, the gas tube linked up to the autoclave, the filter standing tall on the table, the shovel to reach into the oven placed by the brick wall, two soft chairs, a small ottoman purchased by Marcus for considerably less than he told Roux it cost, were hauled into a corner of the room by two native boys, barefoot and with scabs of unknown origin on their arms. Marcus went down the stairs to talk to the girl who sold tobacco in the corner shop. He learned at least ten Arab phrases in the course of his encounter.

Louis and Emile went to the hospital administrator’s office to report their arrival. Nocard brought in two small, whimpering puppies, and a half-dozen chickens. He placed them in cages near the rabbits. He avoided looking the animals in the eye. He would need a sheep. Later he went to the café across the street and, sitting at a small table in the shade, he ordered a beer, and then another. He took two bottles back upstairs for Emile and Louis.

The café owner was in high hopes that the need for beer from his café for the French scientists would become a permanent condition. Perhaps his beer was addictive like the white powders sold on the docks, and passed on by the ladies of the night who sometimes came to his café after midnight.

FOR LUNCH, LOUIS ate figs that had been washed in boiled water, and a sausage that Marcus brought him from the same café. He examined drops from a carafe of tap water through his lens. He saw nothing unusual. Some dust, perhaps, a tiny mite that had fallen from somewhere into the drops. He filled the bowl of his pipe and it lit quickly as he puffed hard on the stem. The pipe comforted him. He felt its warmth in his hand, and the smoke tickled his throat. The smell of tobacco was good. He decided to examine his fig leavings under the lens. What he saw was fig: its brown flesh, its watery texture, its fiber, its seed. A fig in Alexandria is the same as a fig in Paris.

Sinking into the soft cushion of his armchair in their new laboratory in the rear wing of the European Hospital, he reassured himself, he forced himself to stop the anxious knocking of his foot against the chair leg. All would be well. Koch was more experienced. Koch was famous. But Koch was older, and an aging brain in a scientist is not an advantage.

Louis knew that studies had been done on the blood of cholera victims. They had shown that the proportion of serum to solid was reduced in those who were sick with the disease. What this meant, no one knew for sure. They had tried injecting some saline solution into the victims’ veins, but that didn’t seem to help. But if the blood fluids were affected by the disease, it must be that the disease could be found in the blood.

Roux asked Marcus, whose contrition had disappeared by mid-morning, to go to the infectious-disease floor of the hospital to obtain blood and excrement from cholera victims. Roux had equipped him with several vials and a large canvas bag to carry them in, as well as a syringe and a funnel and a pair of thick leather gloves. Marcus was not pleased with this assignment. “You do it,” he said to Roux, who then threatened to send Marcus home on the next boat. Voices were raised. Marcus had tears in his eyes. “I don’t want to die,” he whimpered.

“If you die,” said Roux, “I will write to Pasteur and he will ask the government to award you a medal.”

“Just what I need when I’m dead,” Marcus said.

“What we need is bowel, bladder, vomit. Go find the cholera ward,” said Louis. “Get me some cloth, a piece of linen from the pillow the victim lay on, or a piece of the cotton used to wipe down their sweat or a blanket that covered them.”

It was true that the sick would not welcome the taking of their blood, no matter how delicately it was explained. It was also true that most people with severe stomach cramps were not interested in science or saving anyone else, or anything at all beyond their own release from pain. Marcus did not move. Louis said, “I’ll go.”

Roux said to Louis, “Wear those gloves, don’t touch anything, afterward wash your hands.” It wasn’t necessary to tell him that; Louis didn’t answer.

Louis had spoken to the mother of a small boy who had not let go of her child’s hand although the child had let go of his life. He spoke to her gently. He said he hoped to be able to save other children. The mother was not interested in other children. She closed her eyes. In a flash, Louis took the child’s drinking cup. He slipped his prize into his shirt. In the corridor, under an empty cot, he found a basin filled with the brown fluids of a victim. No one had yet come to clear it away. The body was down in the basement, awaiting a carriage to bring it to the funeral home. The bowl was not small, and it was filled up to the rim with foul-smelling liquid. He put the child’s cup under the cot for later retrieval. He carried the bowl in his arms away from his chest. He walked slowly, although he wanted to run. Back at the laboratory door, he called out for help. Roux opened the door. Louis covered the contents with a towel. He went back to the cholera ward to collect the cup. He also retrieved some bed linens that were stuffed into a bag in the hall.

In the hospital corridors he spoke in whispers with the sisters, whose gray robes with white aprons over them made them seem like moths hovering at dusk. He made his request for samples. He promised to show them the microbe when it was found. They helped him gather blood, stool, and a scrape from an open wound in a knee. After he had placed his harvest on the proper shelves and alerted Emile and Nocard to their new material, he went out in the street for some fresh air. But the air was not so fresh, it was hot and humid and damp and there were flies buzzing around his face when he tried to puff on his pipe, when he tried to wipe his forehead with his handkerchief. A fly lit on his eyelid. He shook it off. Never in his life had he seen so many flies. Was it the garbage in the streets, was it the smell of the dung from the donkeys and the horses? Why were there so many more flies in Alexandria than in Paris? As he walked toward the harbor he saw many children with bare feet, with encrusted eyes, closed with a pus that seemed to ooze down their cheeks. The children paid no attention to their eyes. They climbed and ran, chasing each other, and some begged with a small bowl by their side. Now that he was looking, he saw blindness, blindness everywhere. The man at the tobacco shop, the seller of limes and lemons at the bazaar, the rug dealer in the far stall, all blind. He had not seen so many blind people before. He had not seen so many eye infections before. When he reached the harbor he leaned over a rail on the walkway and closed his eyes. He let himself stay in the darkness for a while, the way children will play at blindness. Inside the gray wall that sealed off his sight, he felt a new rage. He would ask Pasteur, after they had found the cholera microbe, to consider the human eye. What was in the pus that flowed down the children’s faces? What was in the air of Alexandria, the sand from the desert, the salt from the sea, that made so many in the city blind? Was it something that fell into the eye from the birds above? He opened his eyes. Could it happen to him, there on the walkway by the harbor? He shuddered. He brushed the thought away. He wouldn’t accept the fear that accompanied it. He had work to do. He hurried back to the European Hospital. On the way he dropped a coin into the hand of a mother who was holding an infant whose face was covered with flies that she didn’t attempt to brush away.

LYDIA MALINA SAT with Eric Fortman at her breakfast table. A young girl with a white apron brought in a bowl of grapes, and there was strawberry jam to have with his pastry. Lydia had eaten earlier with her husband, who had called the carriage at first light to make a visit to an elderly patient who lived at the far edge of town, and had sent word to him of some new suffering through his manservant. Two donkey boys were arguing loudly, and their insults rose through the open window. A fat dove with a crooked beak sat on a palm frond outside the balcony and opened its wings to take flight and then changed its mind again and again. The sun was already warming the white stones of the building and fading the colors from the wash that hung in the back of the house from a lemon tree and an improvised pole.

“Have you been to the Orient?” Lydia asked. Eric had not, but he had been to Spain and Portugal, and he knew the ports of Morocco. He had been working as an officer of one import firm or another ever since he was eighteen. He had started as an office boy and made his way to the ships, and there he had stayed, making new contacts in port after port and cementing friendships, his own and the firms’. He told Lydia he had been orphaned at the age of five and raised by his mother’s elderly aunt, who had died before his twelfth birthday. To be so alone in the world at such an age seemed unthinkable to Lydia. Her face darkened. “How proud your mother would be if she could see you now,” she said. “We will go this morning to my cousin Rudolph. His parents lived a while in Freiburg with others in my family. He has a company on the wharf where he holds the shipments of cargo that are coming and going, and perhaps he can find a place for you.”

Eric expressed his gratitude. This was a good woman. This was a good place for his misfortune to have occurred. The end of his world had not come. He would begin a new chapter.

Lydia was eager to tell her sister about her new friend, an Englishman, a world traveler. Her sister would pretend not to be interested, but she would be. Lydia put the story into her next letter to her son. It was hard to think up things to write about when the person you were writing to seemed so far away and you couldn’t imagine his life, what he ate, where he slept, who he spoke to, and in what language, and what dangers he faced and how long it would be before you saw him again. She kept by her bedside the last letter she had received. He had described a camel hitched to a post and the stones of the old temple wall where a few old men were praying. It annoys Dr. Malina when she bends over and kisses this letter. “What are you,” he says, “some idiot girl from a village on the Nile? It is not your son, that piece of paper,” he mutters. But she pays him no attention.

7

IN THE CROWDED STREETS down by the piers near the Eastern Harbor, more deaths were reported every day. And there were other deaths that were not reported, where family members simply took a body and left it on the promenade or in an alley, and the smells of the city became even more putrid than usual. There was talk in these crowded streets, talk in the cafés and in the bazaar at the stalls that sold rice and barley and goat meat, that the rich of Alexandria were poisoning the poor, that it was a plan to get rid of them, a way of ridding the city of an unwanted population. People who made it to the hospitals, died in the corridors, died in their beds, died waiting for admission. Despite the storm that had wrecked Eric Fortman’s ship, this was not the rainy season and the gutters went unwashed as human waste gathered in the streets and people crossed over it when they walked, horses tracked it from neighborhood to neighborhood. In the grand homes along rue Memphis, along the road to Ramleh where the British had built houses to remind them of Hampstead and Bath, the occupants considered the matter of cholera and agreed that the drinking and the lack of morality in certain parts of the city caused the disease to spread. Some thought that the police should cordon off certain streets and not let the occupants out until the disease had left the city. Some thought that the government should burn the bodies of the dead or send them out to sea on barges that would sink once they were far enough away from shore.

The authorities were considering issuing an order that the sick be removed by force, if necessary, from their homes and taken to an old edifice once used to store stones brought from distant quarries. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, grandparents would be pulled by policemen and soldiers out of their beds, denied the comforts of their religion. The idea was not popular among the people.

Papers were made available to the members of the Committee of Public Safety. Keeping his patients waiting, Dr. Malina sat in his office and read:

In 1832, as Cholera spread across Europe, in Spain you could face
the death penalty for leaving a town infected by Cholera. In Paris a
rumor circulated that the rich had poisoned the wells and fountains to get
rid of the poor. In the Philippines a group of biologists and naturalists
were killed when their cases of reptiles and insects were found. The
natives thought that they were sorcerers spreading the disease. In Prussia, beggars turned up at rich people’s houses saying that they had just
left infected areas and that they would go away if paid. In St. Petersburg
a rumor spread that the sick were being lured into hospitals to be quietly
butchered. In July 1831 a mob in St. Petersburg attacked hospitals and
rescued the patients. In Budapest a rumor spread that the rich had poisoned the wells. Some rich people were captured and tortured by mobs
until they confessed that this was true. In Austria soldiers were posted on
the border with orders to forbid entry to cholera victims. In 1823 in Persia, guns and muskets were fired in the streets to frighten the Cholera
away.

Dr. Malina said to his colleagues on the committee, “We have to think of the cholera as if it were a mad dog running through our streets. We are the dogcatchers. We must do our job.” Everyone at the table nodded. No one at the table knew what to do.

LOUIS KNEW THAT they wouldn’t see the microbe instantly. How could they distinguish it from all the other living organisms that would squirm across their slides? But they could begin. Emile’s long face and sad eyes seemed less long and less sad. The basin was placed on the workbench between them. They put on gloves. They put more water up to boil. They dipped their lenses into the water. The hot plates with mercury on them warmed the air around the table.

They were preparing slides dipped into the bowel fluid. They placed some fecal material in a syringe that Louis brought to Nocard to inject in a few rabbits. Perhaps the rabbits would fall sick with cholera, and then when they examined the rabbit blood they might see the microbe. There was a deep quiet in the laboratory. The two puppies had exhausted themselves in a chasing game around the edges of their cage. The only sound came from a windowsill on which a starling sat and croaked his song into the day. There was a hum of insects on the high fronds of the palms that lined the street.

Marcus, coerced by Roux, made several trips into the main wards of the hospital. He brought a sack filled with clothes, a towel, a piece of sheet, a child’s rag doll, a baby blanket. Louis had seen nothing remarkable on his slide. Emile had noticed strands of unrecognizable matter in the bowels, but he wasn’t certain they were alive. The men took careful notes on what they saw. They drew pictures in their notebooks. They numbered their slides. Nocard injected four rabbits in the soft tissue under their right shoulders with the fluid found in the bowel that Marcus had retrieved. Would it sicken them? He wrote down the amount he had used, the color and number of the particular rabbit he had injected. He listed the colors and numbers of the rabbits he had not injected. He waited. The rabbits moved their whiskers up and down. One ate the bits of bread that Nocard had placed in a dish in their cage. Little pellets of rabbit waste were on the bottom of the cage. They looked normal. Nocard waited. In a box on one of the tables was his anesthetic, his cutting tools. He would examine the brains of the rabbits. He had anesthetized animals, cut open their skulls, and taken tissue from their brains before. He had trephined sheep, pigs, and dogs more than two dozen times in Pasteur’s laboratory. It was never pleasant. It gave him nightmares. He had become a veterinarian to ease animals’ pain, not to cause them suffering. But he had good hands, a clear eye when he had his glasses on, and he did not believe that animals had souls. He wasn’t certain people did, either, but he was quite clear on his duty to his own species.

Louis paused. His eyes were growing tired. He was mixing bowel samples with water to create a substance that could be injected into the puppies. He wrote down the exact amounts of water and bowel he used in his notebook. He numbered the experiment and recorded the day and the time.

ALBERT SAT IN the Café Loup with his best friend, Achmed, who was the son of an importer of bicycles from England, china from France and Holland, clocks from Switzerland, silver from Belgium, diamonds from the mines in Africa, fine diamonds that he sold to the men of Alexandria to decorate their women in a suitable manner. His importing firm was called the House of Horus, after the falcon-headed god of ancient Egypt. The firm had its offices on the large wharf in the Eastern Harbor with the old lighthouse in view from its second floor. The young men had met at the university, where Achmed had been a sportsman, a discus thrower, and Albert had been a fan. They had learned that despite the difference in religion of which Albert’s mother made much, they had everything in common. They enjoyed jumping off the dunes at the far end of the boardwalk, they enjoyed a good smoke, and they both believed that the British were joyless and the French were cowards and they liked to go to dog fights together and bet all that they had brought in their purses. They spent evenings together, allowing their brains to go soft with the liquids offered, the smoke swirling around, the moon rising and setting. They both liked large-breasted women with big hips and were happy to pay for them as often as they could.

“I need,” said Albert, “a diamond ring for my fiancée. Can you get it for me at a special price?”

Achmed grinned. “Of course,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” Albert said, “why women need such expensive stones. What is it, really, just a piece of glass with a nice shine to it? I wouldn’t want it if it were free.”

Achmed did not like to hear his business, or the one that would be his when his father finally died, mocked. “You have the sensibility of a pig,” he said.

“I dare you to eat one,” said Albert, knowing that neither of them would cross that line, no matter how high the wager. He poked his friend in the arm.

Achmed laughed. “Diamonds,” he said, “are the most beautiful of the earth’s fruits. Think how they sit deep in the dark earth underground, embedded in dull gray rock, until a man with a pick descends into darkness and chips away at the rock and pulls out the small treasure and brings it up to the sun, where, with the right treatment, it will let out rays that compete with the light of the sky.” He had heard his father make that speech a thousand times. “Without diamonds, no woman would marry us, and then where would we be?”

Albert said, “Better off, I suspect. But I will marry and you know it, and so will you, and Este Malina is mine all but for the diamond. But I am short of ready funds, and you know why.”

Albert had, just the week before, lost a considerable sum at a card game at which Achmed had been among the winners. Albert said, “I need a diamond I can afford.”

Achmed calculated quickly. A friend at the bank was an asset, not one you marked in your books, but an asset nevertheless. Friends who owed you a favor and who were sure to rise at the bank were not to be found like lemons on a tree. A small flaw in the diamond would not be noticed or suspected by either his friend or his friend’s bride. Business, after all, was business. He clasped Albert’s arm. “I will find for you the best diamond in my safe, and we will have it set in a beautiful gold circle, and your family will be proud of you, and your betrothed’s family will be pleased at their wisdom in allowing their daughter to marry you, and in the Belgian Congo one of my representatives will open his velvet case and fill it with more diamonds for more women in Alexandria, so all is well, all is fine, don’t you think?”

Achmed and Albert drank to their friendship, to the diamonds that traveled long distances to grace the fingers and necks and ears of women in Egypt, and to the stars that watched the boats as they sailed, and to the House of Horus that should prosper forever, and to all the objects, tables and chairs, rugs and teacups, that moved from country to country as if the material world were itself restless and in search of adventure.

A boy with bare feet and a smudge of dust on his cheek, a pretty boy who was so young he seemed like a girl, appeared from around the café’s corner. He was carrying a tray with pineapple slices. They were cut fine and rested in the shape of a heart on a wooden tray. The knife used to cut the slices had been sharpened by the boy’s father, who had dipped the whetstone in water in a shallow pail, a pail that had been used to wash the boy’s sister’s sandals. The tray was heavy for the boy to carry even with both hands, and he walked slowly, calling out to those sitting at little tables at the café. “Do you want one?” said Achmed. “Let me buy you a dozen,” he laughed.

“No, thanks,” said Albert, who did not like pineapple. The two young men waved away the pineapple seller, who then crossed the road to offer his wares to those on the other side.

IT WAS THE hour of the day when the sun was nearly unbearable and sensible people went indoors and lay down on their beds and closed their shutters against the light. It was the time of day when women put damp cloths on their heads and allowed their servants to fan them with palm leaves bound together with strips of leather. It was a time when the bank was nearly empty and the bankers took coffee in the courtyard of the nearby hotel or walked to the beach and, taking off their shoes and socks, waded in the cool water that lapped against their ankles. It was a time when the train from Cairo pulled into the station, letting a puff of white smoke rise into the Alexandrian air.

Este and her mother had taken off their dresses and in their slips lay on the couches of their dressing room and Este asked her mother a question. “If you had not married Papa, if you had not married at all, what would you have done?”

Mrs. Malina looked at her daughter. She understood the question perfectly. “I would have run off to Paris and become a dancing girl,” she said.

“You’re teasing me,” said Este.

“Perhaps,” Mrs. Malina added, “I could have become the wife of an African chief and worn necklaces of zebra teeth.” She felt a pressure in her chest, as if there was not enough air in the room. She breathed deeply.

“Mama,” said Este, “this is not a time for jokes.”

Mrs. Malina turned her back to her daughter. She did not want to look at her. “I did,” she said, “what I did, and have lived the life I expected to lead, and it has been a good life. You will do the same.”

Now it was Este’s turn to look away. Her eyes might have betrayed her thoughts, which ran backward toward her childhood.

Saturday morning, mother and daughter set out by foot for the synagogue on rue Sultan Hussein. Este’s hat had a bird made of real feathers stuck in the brim. Mrs. Malina’s was gray, with a large ribbon of yellow tied to look like a rose. They held each other by the arm as they made their way past the chestnut vendor, the fish cart, the café on rue Rosette that had placed its tables far into the walk so it was necessary to go into the gutter to go forward. As they turned the corner of rue Nebi Daniel, a man staggered toward them, perhaps a porter at the docks. His face was pale, his hands were trembling. He reached out for Lydia. She caught his arm and steadied him. She did not understand the language he was speaking. She led him to the side of a building and helped him to sit down on a step. His hands left smudges on her blouse. Lydia patted his shoulder with her gloved hand. She wiped the perspiration from his brow with a handkerchief she drew from her pocket. She ordered Este to get him some water from a nearby café. Este hurried back with the glass. Before she could offer it to the man, she spilled some of the water on her own fingers. The water soaked through her glove. Lydia offered the man the water and then called over a small boy who appeared in a doorway. She gave him some coins to bring the man to the hospital. He said he would. He didn’t.