“That’s good, Madame,” said Nocard.
“Personally,” said the consul general, “I don’t like the cat. She leaves hair on the cushions.”
“I myself,” said the doctor to Emile, “believe that the air is foul in this city. The air is the most likely source of the cholera.”
“How would that be, sir?” asked Louis.
“It just is,” said the doctor.
“Pasteur—” Louis began.
“Yes, I know Pasteur thinks that invisible little organisms cause our troubles. Perhaps he is right. We wait for proof,” said the doctor, slapping the young man on the back in a friendly manner.
Nocard supplied seeds for a parrot that flew free about his garden and would come when called. The bird spent the cold winter months on the shelf above the stove. Nocard felt a kinship with animals of all kinds, guinea pigs, hamsters, rodents, squirrels, and, above all, cats and dogs. When he put his big hands around their rib cages, and listened to their beating hearts, allowing wet noses and moist tongues to touch his face, he felt true love, accompanied by a desire to serve the beasts in all matters. If his passion was not tempered by scientific curiosity and a willingness to do anything to pursue the truth, he would have been an unpleasantly sentimental man. He was, however, able to cut, tear, nip, and cause great pain to the very creatures he nestled against his chest. The only sign of strain was an occasional tic in his eye.
Este had noticed the young man who was seated next to her mother. She had admired his long, slender fingers. She had liked the way he inclined his head toward whoever was speaking. She liked the way he pulled at the lip of his pipe, seriously, carefully, as if the pipe itself deserved a certain courtesy. His eyes were dark and his face intense. A few gentle curls rested on the back of his collar and bounced about with each step he took. He stared hard at everything, as if he had never been to a dinner before. She was sure he was a poet as well as a scientist.
When the men rejoined the women, Madame Girard brought her Persian cat, named Apple, into the room and placed him on Nocard’s lap. Nocard appreciated the cat’s spectacular fur and her fine sharp teeth and he felt the fetuses within. “All’s well,” he said, “six of them I think, the birth should be without complication.”
Madame Girard then told him the name of the most distinguished veterinarian in Alexandria, as well as the name of the stable in town where the consul kept his horse and carriage.
“We must talk more. You should have dinner at my home,” the doctor said to the three scientists.
“We would like that,” said Louis. He would. He pulled at the stem of his pipe. A certain nervousness had come over him. He had trouble keeping the fire going. He hoped none of the other men noticed his difficulty.
Louis wandered over to the bookcase, where Este was talking with the consul’s wife about Lord Cromer, the new British governor, whose not-so-private affair with the Egyptian wife of a prominent member of the shooting club was a subject at every gathering, at least among the women. The consul’s wife crossed to the other side of the room. It was time to leave the young people alone. Este turned to Louis and said in perfect French, “Monsieur, what do you see in the sky when you wake up in the morning?”
What kind of question was this? Louis considered his answer carefully. “I see if it is likely to rain or not.”
“I meant,” said Este, with a hint of impatience in her voice, “the colors. What do you see above your head?”
“I see,” said Louis, “whatever is above my head, blue, gray, the atmosphere. It doesn’t arrive in surprising shades.”
Este tried again. “When you look at the stars, what do you see?”
Whatever did she want him to say? Louis tried to give her the answer she was looking for. “The stars are far away. We see them in different parts of the sky as the earth moves around the sun.”
“I know that,” said Este. “The stars, when I look at them, make me afraid. They seem so cold and indifferent.”
“They probably are,” said Louis, “indifferent. I’m not sure about cold. They could be hot like our sun.”
Este gave up.
Well, he wasn’t a poet. She had always wanted to meet a real poet, or at least a man with poetry in his heart. That was not the man before her. She turned away from him and joined her mother, who was extolling the virtues of her seamstress to the wife of the owner of a steamship company. For his part, Louis found her peculiar. He had no further interest in her.
Two flights below the drawing room, the undersized Arab boy who was a relative of the cooks was washing the dishes as they arrived from the dining room. He was standing on a stool so he could reach the sink. The water came from a pail he had to fill and refill from a large jar. Carefully he placed the wine goblets with their gold-leafed rims into the water. Suddenly his hands shook as he reached for the next glass. He leaned against the edge of the sink and cried out in pain. He fell to the floor, staining himself, writhing in brown fluid and calling to God to save him. He was carried down to the servants’ quarters, where he was left alone to face his maker. Another Arab boy mopped the floor, not as thoroughly as he might have.
WHILE LOUIS WAS dining at the consul’s table, Marcus was making friends with the few remaining maids in the hotel. Young girls plucked from their village homes, still full of memories of wading in the Nile, walking through the high grass behind the goat, listening at night to the rain on the thatched roof, wearing little, carrying baby brothers and sisters on their backs. The maids, now far from home, uniformed, clung to each other at night, stroking hair, petting, leaning one female body against another. Marcus had found them in the laundry. He followed them back to their dormitory room, where there were so many cots that each girl had to walk over the beds of the others to lie down. They had startled eyes and rough hands from the washing they did every day, but a swinging of their hips revealed that they had not abandoned all hope for pleasures. Marcus spoke no Arabic. Their French was confined to merci and oui. This was sufficient for the encounter Marcus enjoyed on the top floor in a tiny room in which brooms and rags had been stored. It was sufficient to restore Marcus’s full confidence in his good fortune, and to allow him to find his land legs.
When Louis knocked on his door, intending to remind him to wake early, Marcus was not in his room. Marcus in fact had fallen asleep in the bed of one of the maids, who had caught him in her arms and pulled down his trousers and played with him as if he were a toy.
IN THE EARLY morning, as the sun was pushing itself up over the waters of the Mediterranean, while waiting for Roux and Nocard to join him, while a sharp ray of light lingered on the rooftop of the loading shed at the end of the wharf, Louis Thuillier enjoyed a very pleasant breakfast on the terrace of the hotel, watching the carts of the merchants, piled high with fruits and chickens and almonds and baskets of figs, pass by on their way to the bazaar. His equilibrium had returned.
Nocard went off to the stable, wanting to check the condition of the horses and perhaps obtain some saliva samples to culture. He stopped at the market on his way to purchase some carrots for the beasts. He kept his gloves on while he held the carrots, even though they were wrapped in brown paper. The carrots looked innocent, orange and plump, with the normal bumps along the tips, but Nocard knew that a raw carrot might be as dangerous as a sharp knife.
Roux went to the Bank of Egypt on rue Tewfik Pasha with their letters of introduction, and so the task of finding the space in a hospital was left to Louis.
Dr. Abraham Malina had his offices in the rear of his own home. The tiles in the courtyard were green and blue. In the center of each tile was a figure of a bird with a tuft on its yellow head. Its wings were open, flight eternally suspended and repeated. There, underfoot, was a bird, or rather the outline of a bird, gone was its quiver, its tremble, its appetite and its fear. There remained a form only, imprisoned by bands of geometric lines. At the center of the courtyard was a pedestal and a bowl in which rainwater had gathered. There was a crack r
unning up the side of the pedestal. A string of black beetles crawled along the crack. As he crossed in front of the pedestal, Louis saw a tiny salamander lying on its side, its stomach gone, its head mostly consumed. Ah, said Louis to himself, that’s what the beetles have found. He had no sentimental feelings as a child might for the salamander, and none for the beetles.
Louis crossed the inner courtyard, brought the servant to his feet with a pantomime of knocking on the door. The servant opened the clinic’s outer door with its small window at the top. Louis found himself in a room filled with cushions and couches. A Frenchwoman holding a small dog on her lap was waiting for the doctor, as were a German lady and her companion, who had strained her back when the sea turned rough on the voyage from Crete. The two held hands and pressed their bodies one against another in a manner that shocked the young scientist. Louis waited. The doctor did not call him.
The morning hours passed slowly. A man with a bloody nose was shown into the doctor’s office immediately, but not before he had stained the stone floor, which was then mopped by another servant who appeared from behind a screen. Louis noticed that behind the screen lay the entranceway to the rest of the house, to the room where the daughter was sitting, reading perhaps, playing the piano. A small boy appeared at his elbow and offered to fan him with a big fan. Louis did not want someone to fan him. It seemed wrong. Wrong because the offer came from a child. Wrong because the comfort of one’s body should not come at the discomfort of others, especially a stranger, especially a child. The child looked unhappy. The German ladies accepted the child’s offer, and the overflow of the moving air cooled the room, which Louis couldn’t help but enjoy.
At last he was sitting opposite Dr. Malina, sinking down in a blue velvet chair that forced him to look up at the doctor, who stood behind his desk. As Louis was about to speak, Dr. Malina interrupted him. “I am honored,” he said, “to help you in any way I can.” There was a loud knock on the door. A small boy stood there with a telegram in his hands. Dr. Malina jumped from behind his desk and, patting the boy on the head, ripped open the telegram. “My son, Jacob,” Dr. Malina said. “He went to Palestine looking for commercial opportunity. I would have preferred him to go to medical school, in France.”
“Friar Jules from my lycée went to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage and then decided to stay. He sent the entire form a letter from Bethlehem,” said Louis.
“Monsieur Thuillier,” said the doctor with a neutral tone, so neutral he could be reading the label of a prescription bottle or the timetable of the trains departing for Cairo. “Monsieur Thuillier, we are Jews, my family has been in Alexandria for three hundred years. We are Alexandrians and we are Jews.”
“Indeed,” said Louis. He felt himself pushing back in his chair and suppressed the impulse. The door to the office was off to the left behind him. He resisted turning his head to look at the door. He himself had not met any Jews, not in his village, not in his school in Paris. Though of course he had heard of them. He had read about them. Louis blushed and wished he hadn’t. “I’m not a religious man,” he said.
“Neither am I,” said Dr. Malina. “We have that in common, then. But of course we disbelieve different things.” With that, Dr. Malina smiled. It was a sad smile, a dignified smile, a smile that concealed as much as it revealed, but a smile nevertheless that intended to put the young man before him at ease but didn’t quite.
And the subject matter changed to science and where beakers could be found, and a place in a hospital, but which hospital?
“When you have your lab,” said Dr. Malina, “will you show me your invisible organisms?”
“I will. Dr. Malina,” said Louis, happiness flushing his cheeks, “may I invite you to lunch with us at our hotel?”
Dr. Malina said, “I cannot have lunch. My clinic,” and he waved toward the door. “But tomorrow night, come to dinner here, in the house. We would be honored by your company, and bring your colleagues.” Louis took the pieces of paper on which the doctor had written the name of the chief administrator of the Hôpital de Europe as well as a hastily scrawled letter of introduction.
IN A History of Medicine in English, Dr. Malina read:
Celsus, who wrote about A.D. 30, had considered Cholera the most dangerous of all the diseases of the stomach and intestines. Lommius, a celebrated physician of Brussels, who wrote in the 1600s, speaks of Cholera as the most fearful atrocissium of stomach diseases. In September 1831 a physician of Birmingham, under the signature Alpha, wrote as follows: “I have been long quite familiar and know several others who are equally so, with Cholera in which a perfect similarity to the symptoms of the Indian Cholera has existed: the collapse, the deadly coldness with a clammy skin, the irritability and prodigious discharges from the bowels of an opaque serous fluid with a corresponding shrinking of the flesh and integuments, the pulselessness and livid extremities, the ghastly aspect of the countenance and sinking of the eyes, the restlessness, so great that the patient has not been able to remain for a moment in one position.”
Enough, Dr. Malina thought, and closed the book.
Dr. Malina had a sudden need to wash his hands. He scrubbed at them as if they were recalcitrant children with the almond soap he kept by his sink.
UPSTAIRS, IN THE spacious apartment that the Malinas called home, Este Malina was holding her best tortoise shell brush with bristles made of porcupine quills and brought to Alexandria by a merchant who had ventured as far into the northern continent as Denmark. She was looking with satisfaction at herself in her mirror. Her hair was black and thick, and if she didn’t tie it up with ribbons, it would turn wild in the slightest breeze and spring into a thicket of snarls, a large bush that suggested wilderness and wind and was hardly right for a woman who would live as other women lived with sheets and pillows, with dishes and goblets and table-cloths, with men who wanted to be near her and those who were afraid to be near her, so she brushed her hair, earnestly, energetically, and while she brushed she sang softly to herself, an Arabic song her nurse had taught her about a shepherd whose goat had wandered away. The song was sad, but it was the sort of sadness that brings pleasure, creates a mood of sorrow, affected sorrow, a very good sorrow actually. The curtains blew in the wind. The weather had changed and the fog was heavy in the streets and a storm, unusual for this time of year, was approaching.
4
THAT NIGHT, across the city, some miles still out of the Eastern Harbor, a steamer, the Grey Falcon, a British flag flying from its mast, was nearing land. There was heavy fog in the air, and the captain was staring ahead while holding his wheel with a tightness that revealed to his first mate that this approach to the harbor off the shore of Alexandria’s eastern port might be more difficult than expected. The first mate promised himself that this would be his last crossing, his last staring at the sky, his last looking at the seabirds floating on the tops of gray and swirling waters. Enough, he said to himself. He had said that before. Because of the heavy fog, the high waves, the endless spray, the captain could not see the light that beamed from the lamp lit at the point of the harbor. The waves slapped at the hull, the ship rocked and clamored, and chains shook and the hooks that held the barrels to the sides of the ship let out a shriek as metal scraped against wood. There was a groaning sound, and then a howl from the port side, as the ship was pushed into the barrier. The furnace failed. The hull reared like an angry horse, the smokestacks belched black clouds, the ship’s cat hissed at the wave that rose over its head, the sailors, kicking off shoes, dove into the ocean, praying each to his God for a deserved or undeserved rescue. Silver light from dead stars rained down on the sea, but was not seen by the men in the water because of the fog and the spray. The moon was at a lopsided lumpy stage. It, too, could not be seen because of the clouds, the wet air, the wind pulling darkness across the heavens.
So it was that the passenger Eric Fortman and the majority of the crew, grabbing barrels and planks and listening in the blindness for the sounds of land, saved themse
lves and appeared, wet and scraped, frightened and full of prayers, on the shore by the side of the old lighthouse. The men on the ship were saved except for two caught in the ropes and pulled out to sea, their shouts unheeded as the waves sucked them down and their souls did whatever souls do in the sea, most likely grow damp and sink into the green buds of algae looping together under the broken boards of the ship, or flake into the thousand unseen particles of scales that, like the dander of a cat, drift with no particular destination, no mind to steer them, just soul masquerading as protein and ammonia, just molecule and its mate, set in motion, until there is not enough matter left for any movement at all, and, like a held breath, the souls of drowned sailors are like the souls of dead men on shore: gone.
The captain and his crew and their passenger, who was a representative of Glen MacAlan Scotch, a company that had booked the cargo onto the ship in Liverpool, found their way to the piers of Alexandria. Word of the wreck went through the taverns. Men rushed down to the beach, boats were launched. What plunder could be salvaged was salvaged as hands reached again and again into the cold water to pull bundles and floating boards and a sailor’s miniature portrait of his mother, and some perfectly intact bottles of Glen MacAlan Scotch, and as the survivors slept in boardinghouses while their clothes dried by the stove, others plundered and pulled, laughed and drank. The ship’s two goats had been ripped from their pen and lay dead, flies and maggots already crawling over their carcasses. The mice and the rats had floated in the water; some had survived and dashed for cover in the brush at the edge of the shore. The dawn came and the mist lifted and what was left of the broken ship bobbed against the sharp rocks as Eric Fortman woke in the cheap inn with a hunger in his belly and feared for his future. Would he end as a beggar in his hometown, a drunk in the port, who had stories to tell that no one would listen to? Would his brother feed him, his old friends find a spot for him in the customs office, or would he be forever lost? He had lost all the money he had brought for the purpose of clearing the way for the whiskey into a country where it was forbidden by the local religious authorities. The British servants of the crown, the French shopkeepers, the French schoolteachers, the British lawyers, the members of foreign delegations, all needed their whiskey. A little money in the right places made this possible. That was why he had been on this ship, accompanying barrels of whiskey that were quite capable of making the journey on their own.
An Imperfect Lens Page 4