An Imperfect Lens

by Anne Richardson Roiphe

  Of course, thought the Englishman, when the serving maid who brought him the breakfast he had no means of paying for, informed him that there was cholera in town. I’m such a lucky man.

  WHILE LOUIS WENT off to join Nocard and Roux at the European Hospital, Marcus explored the city. He had cashed in some francs he had won in the kitchen of the hotel in a bet, and took a carriage. Riding in the carriage suited him. He resolved to do it often. He went down rue Nebi Daniel, where it was said that under the Mosque Alexander himself had been buried in a gold robe inside a glass coffin once upon a time, up to Râs el Tin, the Cape of Figs, where the fort had once protected the city, over to the shallow Lake Mariout, formed out of the sea, sealed into the land, like a sigh, unable to escape the lovesick breast. After a few hours, Marcus dismissed the carriage and set off on foot. He purchased an orange and peeled it slowly while walking. He sucked in the juice, letting some of it trickle down his chin. As he looked out over the port where their ship had docked only a few days earlier, he saw a crowd gathered and he wandered over. He watched the salvage operation as small boats rowed out in the still-turbulent sea and brought back seaweed-covered boxes of loose tea leaves dried on the docks of Burma. Marcus made his way to the front of the crowd and watched as a box carried by a black Arabian boy fell to the ground, spilling the tea on the damp planks of the pier. Marcus, so quickly that only an owl sitting on a cart a few feet away noticed, bent down and scooped up a handful of the tea leaves and stuffed them in his jacket pocket. They were damp and did not smell appealing, but they would dry again in the sun and perhaps offer some special pleasure at a moment when some special pleasure would be needed. Marcus saw a young girl with a rope of blue beads around her neck, carrying a basket of fish toward the market. He couldn’t help the response of his body to the slow shifting of her thighs as she moved through the crowd. He followed her. Two British soldiers blocked his way. He moved into the street and made himself small, a child perhaps, an innocent child.

  When they had passed, Marcus looked for the girl. He could see her back moving quickly down a narrow street. Marcus ran to catch up with her. A donkey cart appeared suddenly in his way. The man with the cart screamed at Marcus to move. The meaning was clear enough. Marcus pressed himself to the white stone wall. There was a cloth hanging over the open window. Marcus grabbed the cloth for balance. Cholera had gathered in the threads when the cloth was washed a few hours earlier in the stone basins in the back courtyard of the building where all the families brought their wash, including one that had lost a child the night before to the vomiting and bowel sickness. The cloth that hung across the doorposts was clean to the naked eye, but the microbes grouped about the red threads that served as a border for the fabric. They waited for someone’s fingers, fingers to go to mouth, once in the mouth they would swim to the gut and there it would begin. Marcus clutched at the cloth for a few seconds, but his hand didn’t go near the border, not near where the microbes waited. When the donkey cart passed, he could no longer see the girl and he returned to the main street and headed back to the hotel.

  THE CHIEF OF the hospital was eager to be associated with the French mission. He read Dr. Malina’s letter and barked out orders to several sisters who were passing by. The sisters led the visitors to the back of the building, to an area that had been used for storage. The place was a jungle of discarded beds with their frames bent, and there were piles of sheets so ripped as to be worthless except for rags. There were basins that were dented, and rubber blankets with holes, and boxes of cotton squares that had turned green with mildew. There was, however, an oven that would serve for heating beakers, and there was a gas supply that could be used to bring water to a boil. It would be fine. Roux asked for some orderlies to clean the place. Nocard explained that animals would be kept in cages in the far back or outside in the dusty yard. There was a walled-off corner where Marcus could sleep.

  Out the small side window, covered now in dust, Louis could see the café across the street, could hear the clicking of the backgammon pieces on the boards, could smell the tobacco, heavy, as if a woolen blanket had been pulled across his mouth. This would be a lucky place. It would be a fateful place, perhaps one worthy of a plaque on the building one day, but that was as far as he was willing to let his imagination go. The men went to Café Fort to celebrate their new laboratory. Louis pulled at the stem of his pipe. They ordered Turkish coffee, which came in a large enameled pot with a long, skinny spout. Louis tasted it and made a face. Nocard slapped him on the back. “Adjust,” he said.

  “Are you ever going to get married?” Roux asked Nocard, who shrugged.

  “My mother is always asking me that same question. But I have no need for a woman to tell me what to do, to take my money, to bring her many garments into my closet. A woman is not as good a companion as a dog.”

  Roux picked up his beer and said, “You’re a fool. A man gets many more pleasures from a woman than he does from a spacious closet or a dumb beast.”

  Nocard said, “It simply has never interested me, all this fuss about women. I don’t like their perfumes. I don’t want to talk about the weather. What would I do with a woman?” he asked.

  “Have a child,” Emile answered.

  “I’d rather take care of a litter of piglets than a child,” Nocard said.

  There was silence at the table.

  “I’m an odd fellow,” said Nocard.

  “I know,” Louis said. “We don’t all have to live the same life.”

  “You’ll be a lonely old man,” said Emile.

  “No, he won’t,” said Louis. “He’ll have me as a friend.”

  Nocard smiled and, putting down his spoon, reached out to pat Louis on the back, enthusiastically.

  “We should start to move our things,” said Louis.

  “Relax,” said Roux. “Herr Koch has to eat also, and sleep, and pay attention to his bowels.”

  THE CHIEF OF the hospital, who had not been invited onto the Committee of Public Safety because he had been rather outspoken in favor of the nationalist leader General Arabi in the recent difficulties, was nevertheless determined to stand with his colleagues on the front line of defense of Alexandria. He found in the hospital library a copy of an old journal of medicine in which he read this account, supposedly translated from the Sanskrit, believed to have been written in Tibet during the reign of Ti-Song De-tsen, somewhere between A.D. 802 and 845.

  When the strength of virtues and merits decreases on earth, there appear amongst the people, first among those living on the shores of the big rivers, various ailments which give no time for treatment, but prove fatal immediately after they appear. It suddenly destroys the vigor of life and changes the warmth of the body into cold, but sometimes this changes back into heat. The various vessels secrete water so that the body becomes empty. The disease kills invariably. Its first signs are dizziness, a numb feeling in the head, then most violent purging and vomiting.

  The chief of the hospital, who had trained for some four years in Toulouse, did not pay much attention to the decrease in the world’s virtues or merits. After all, he had never known an increase in virtue, and cholera seemed to come and go regardless of a man’s merit on individual or national grounds. There had already been four major outbreaks of cholera in his own century. Here it was again, the fifth pandemic. How small it made a man of medicine feel to see the thing sweeping toward him, a tidal wave no human hand could stay.

  ESTE MALINA WAS eighteen years old, and it was time she became engaged. She had studied piano with her aunt’s cousin on Memphis Street. She had gone to the Jewish school, in the Jewish quarter, with a girl named Phoebe, whose father, an architect and designer whose family came from Constantinople, had done the restoration on the synagogue. Phoebe had an older brother, Albert, who had just begun to work at the Bank Loewenwald, known to all in Alexandria as the Bank of the Jews and highly valued for its clear understanding of markets and its astute managing of funds. Over the years Albert had often watch
ed his sister’s friend playing under the orange tree that stood in the center of their courtyard, her voice rising and falling with the intensity of whatever game the girls were playing. One Sunday afternoon Albert was recovering from a late night and drinking lemonade on a balcony above the garden. This was after a summer rain that had dampened the yellow tiles on the courtyard patio. The sun came through the leaves of a potted orange tree and rested on Este’s black hair, and her hands fluttered as they brushed away a cloud of approaching flies, and then she leaned back in her chair and clapped her hands as if ordering the insects to alter their route, and frowned at them as if they were naughty children. In that instant, Phoebe’s brother Albert chose his wife.

  It was a choice he knew would please his family and hers. Some men are drawn to politics. Albert was not one of them. He found excessive passion on the subject of government unseemly, grotesque, and possibly dangerous. Este’s brother was a perfect example of the results of such foolish passions. Albert was not interested in poetry or music, although he liked a good song sung by a lady of the night. He was most certainly uninterested in architecture. His father’s drawings bored him. His buildings, while admired by others, seemed ordinary to the son. He was not interested in antiquities, although he had been surrounded by them all his life. He was most certainly uninterested in debates about religion, although he did what was required for the reputation of his parents. He did not think that his own comfort and convenience were minor matters in the universe. He did not think that every little Arab boy that begged alms from him deserved his generosity. He was certainly not an unkind man. Rather, he had seen at an early age that the blind and the deaf, the lame and the poor, the thousands of poor, the dreary girls and dirty boys of other quarters, other places, were a fact of life, like the jellyfish in the sea that could sting a swimming boy, or the insects in the air that left welts on your arms. He had looked up at the constellations and had for only the briefest instant marveled at the distance of stars and the brilliance of moon. He had simply seen the earth for what it was, a temporary abode for his temporary existence, and he intended to make the most of his time.

  He disliked it when his shirts were placed in his drawer without attention to their colors. He did not want his servants sleeping or smoking, or pilfering from the family kitchen. He believed in history as entertainment, something one enjoys as a schoolchild, but not as a force in one’s own life, which he expected would be as comfortable as the accounts rendered in his office. He was fond of his sister, Phoebe, who would put her soft hands around his forehead and rub gently if he had a headache. He believed in his family, mother, uncles and aunts, cousins and their children as a factual good in the world, worthy of feasts and good wines and entertainments of song, and he was obligated to them as he assumed they were obligated to him. He believed that all men wanted money to preserve what they had and to gain more of the sweet goods of the world. He loved a good brandy, a fine cigar. In other words, he was a happy man, and there can be no doubt that happy men make good husbands. They do not drink themselves to death or challenge the authorities and end up in prison or run away with maidservants or take any steps that would upset the order of things. This is preferable to a revolutionary or an artist dreaming in his garret and losing his teeth to malnutrition and his lungs to the foul air in the alleyway.

  Despite the fact that Albert had made up his mind, one morning he followed Este and her mother to the market and, lurking behind a pile of barrels that contained dried fruits from the farm-lands outside of town, he watched as Este ran her hands over a red fabric. He observed her while her attention was focused on the juice stand at the end of the street, where the Italian vendor was calling out to potential customers, “Cold, cold, refresh your tongue, cold, cold, on your parched lips. Cherry and chocolate, raspberry and lemon.” She would do, he decided. He appreciated her white blouse and the dark blue ribbon that tied her hair back from her face and the heat of the day causing drops of perspiration to appear on her forehead. He also told himself a mate for life should not be picked by appearance alone, character was important, family mattered and good health mattered and good teeth counted, and he considered the question of fertility.

  How could one know if a woman would bear children? “Most of them do,” said his father. “What a question,” said his cousin Martin. “It is bad luck to think up problems you do not have.” Albert went off to dinner, a cigar in his pocket, money enough for the ladies of the night who invited visitors to board their houseboat anchored by the shores of Lake Mariout, where musicians played all night long, one could smoke anything, and strange brews were offered that burned the throat and caused the heart to rush about in the chest. Also the ladies themselves, Arab but speaking French, or French but speaking Arabic, or Greek, or Italian, a breast or a thigh exposed, who laughed at anything said, and danced in ways that were stirring. Albert was particularly fond of Bennu, who had a bright red scar that ran down her back, which she claimed came from a guard at Tewfik Pasha’s palace who had grown angry with her when she refused to marry him. In the houseboat there were private rooms, closed off by thick curtains, in the back and down some little steps, small rooms where you couldn’t stand tall, your head would crack against a beam, rooms in which the beds rocked with the tide, rooms that let a slice of brittle moonlight in through tiny windows, rooms in which the ladies of the houseboat allowed, for a price, almost anything. Not that the young man was imaginative or capable of endless play or needed to extend his time. He flung himself at the women and fell back drunk and exhausted, and went home flapping his arms as if he could fly back to his childhood bed, where a serving girl might bring him a cup of mint tea and some clean pillows on which to lay his head.

  Albert drank many beers that night and fell into a sound sleep on the cushions of the lounge while the houseboat rocked with the slight motion of the harbor waves and the more ferocious rhythms of the human body in natural, if not proper, agitation. As the dawn came up over the Pharos and the light on the water turned silver, Albert struggled to his feet and pressed his hair flat to his head. There were red lines in his eyes. He considered that all the animals went two by two into the Ark. He considered that a banker needed a wife to bring the blanket of civilization up over his injudicious nakedness and present him to society in a flattering light, and that a man was not a man until he had his own household and that it was time for him, never mind the uncertainties, to proceed. The houseboat would always be here. He would not be banned because of a wedding ring.

  It was time to get his father to ask Dr. Malina for his daughter’s hand. His step, as he went home that morning, watching the early-morning moisture on the hibiscus in the doorways, watching the terns that had steered into the city looking for garbage on the port streets, watching the windows open and the curtains blowing forward, meaning the wind was from the east. A China wind like this was good luck. His step was not as direct as it might be, but his body was alive with anticipation, satisfaction with his decision.

  As he pulled the bell on his door, signaling the sleeping servant to rise, a man in a dark hat, better suited to the cold winters of Germany than to the warm nights of Alexandria, a man with glasses and a small, well-groomed beard, passed behind him. It was Dr. Koch, hurrying to his laboratory. He wanted to see the slide he had prepared the night before, and he could not wait for the sun to rise. He had cut tissue from a cholera victim’s bowel. He had examined it carefully next to the tissue of a woman who had died in childbirth. He had obtained his samples by insistence, by bribery, by sending his assistant, Gaffkey, into the funeral home at the corner. He would compare the two tissue samples. If he found anything of interest in the tissue from the cholera victim, he would draw it in his notebook. He would save it to see if it could be seen again. If something appeared under his lens that was not in the bowel of the dead woman, that might be something. On the other hand, it might not. Women in childbirth might have different fluids in their bodies than men do. He would leap to no conclusions.
He would simply record what he saw. He had confidence in his eye. He had confidence in his drawing hand. He had confidence in his brain. He also loved the opera. Unfortunately the Alhambra, an open-air theater where opera was performed, was closed for the season. At the opera he would have relaxed, allowing his brain to float with the music. If there had been an opera in this strange city where he must stay for a while, he would have felt more at home. He hummed the melodies he remembered as he walked along. This soothed him. The sand was blowing again in the streets. It caught in his mustache and his sideburns. He brushed it away. Thank God, Berlin had a decent climate, not overheated like this Alexandria. It was planted with evergreens and maples along the avenues, and was only a short distance from mountains and lakes. Berlin did not stink of animals and yesterday’s oranges, the air held no grains of ever-blowing sand, and a person could find an opera company in full performance almost at any time of year.

  OF COURSE, ALBERT’S father approved, despite the unpleasant trouble that Jacob Malina had brought down on himself. He met with Dr. Malina that very afternoon. Dr. Malina had to talk to his daughter and his wife. But he shook the architect’s hand cordially and offered him a drink of his best port. Dr. Malina half expected Este to swoon in horror, to shriek that she loved the cook, or that big-eared Arab boy from the corner house, whose kite kept falling—not so accidentally, he had thought—into their courtyard. He expected Este to complain, she was too young, she was not in love. His reasons for this expectation were based solely on experience. Nothing ever went as one wished, graciously, simply, well. He sighed and prepared himself for the worst as his wife and daughter came down to dinner. However, Este smiled a small, sweet smile and shyly asked his opinion. What was this?