An Imperfect Lens

by Anne Richardson Roiphe

  The cabana keeper’s daughter had her breakfast, which, as always, consisted of a piece of round bread with a quarter of an apple, and she ate the bread with her hands, and a piece of the apple’s peel got stuck between her teeth and she put her fingers in her mouth to release it.

  Her small body held on longer than one might think possible.

  Masika’s mother had walked with her daughter down to the road that led to Akubir and from there to Alexandria. Word had come back to the village that girls could work in hotels and make more money in a week than their families could gather in a year. It wasn’t quite true, this rumor, but it led many girls who were not yet married, who had fed the cow and petted the dog and carried baby brothers and sisters on their hips, to imagine other things.

  Masika’s mother had a story she told herself each night. It was about her daughter, who one morning serves coffee in his room to a widowed merchant from Cairo who finds her shy smile the solution for his heartsickness and buys her a ring and gold bracelets and promises her servants and riches if she will marry him, and Masika, with joy in her heart, embraces the merchant. The Goddess Isis, who is perhaps one of Muhammad’s wives, has arranged all this in return for Masika’s mother’s constant devotion. When Masika’s mother had seen her daughter walk until her back disappeared in the rising dust made by her footprints, when she could no longer make out the small pack of belongings her child carried on her shoulder, she had wept. It is not true that because you are poor and have more mouths to feed than food to feed them, each child is not inked into your story, indelible ink, ink that stains, writing on and on in the most illiterate of mothers’ minds. Human beings are not cats, to let their litter range out into the world without another thought. For Masika’s mother there was a grieving for her child that would never go away, a grieving that had nothing to do with Masika’s death, which the mother could not know of, because who would tell her, who there in the large city of Alexandria would know that Masika lay in the pit? The hotel manager assumed she’d run away. Because of the lack of tourists, he did not hire another girl in her place. When one of the other girls, the one who spoke French, asked Marcus if he knew where Masika was, he told her to mind her own business. Masika vanished from Alexandria with the same fanfare that had accompanied her arrival.

  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 mor
e 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 i
n 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.