An Imperfect Lens

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An Imperfect Lens Page 11

by Anne Richardson Roiphe


  IT WAS IMPORTANT to find out if any particular animals had gotten sick in the areas where cholera had killed. Animals sickened all the time, but it was possible that dogs or cats or birds in cages, or sheep kept in pens or chickens in the yard, were more likely to harbor the cholera virus than other animals. If many of one kind had died recently, then perhaps the microbe could be found in their remains, perhaps their tissue could be used to give other animals cholera. Louis was given the task of exploring the neighborhood down by the wharf to see what he could learn. Marcus was to go with him.

  Behind the café, they passed a dark stream running down an alley. In the foul-smelling water, human waste and dog waste combined. A glass jar floated by, and a woman’s stained cloth disappeared far ahead. The water washed over the cobblestones and the stream ran past a door, which opened and an arm reached out and dumped a few cooked potatoes from a pot, around which tiny flies swarmed into the dark stream. The waiter at the café had taken his break in the back alley, where he urinated against the wall. His water joined the stream. As he stepped back, his heel sank into the dirty water. He walked back into the café, and his footprint stained the floor. He wiped up the mark with his hand, a swift motion, one bend and it was gone.

  “I’m hungry,” said Marcus. “We need to stop and have some sausage. I can’t go on without food.”

  Louis glared at him. “Not yet.”

  Marcus sat down on the curb. “I can’t go on without at least something to quench my thirst.”

  Louis noticed that his own throat, too, was dry. “No,” he said, “we have work to do.”

  At the Grand Square, Louis asked about the health of the cat that slept on the rug in the back of the tobacco shop. The cat rolled over on its back to let the sun’s rays fall on its stomach. It was fine. No cats had been found dead in the streets of the neighborhood. Marcus asked a group of little boys headed off to the lake to fish if they had seen any dead cats or dogs. The boys shook their heads. Had they understood the question? Louis wasn’t sure. They asked in the back room of the bar at the wharf where sailors were smoking and a strange sweet smell filled the room. Rats, dead rats, but there are always dead rats, one sailor told Louis.

  Perhaps in the countryside, Louis thought, perhaps the cholera has attacked the sheep and the pigs in the villages. Marcus and Louis took a carriage to the Office of Agriculture, which was in the large white government building behind the Exchange. It was guarded by two English soldiers playing cards at a small table near the entrance. No unusual reports of animal deaths. Nothing of interest, said the clerk. Except that the third assistant who did the filing in the office had died of cholera just the week before. That explained why papers were piled on every surface of the small office.

  THE MEAL WAS over. The serving girl had carried the dishes out to the kitchen, where Abbas was waiting with heated water to scour the pots and pans. Dr. Malina had moved into the drawing room and was smoking his last cigarette of the evening, and his wife was writing a letter to her son, telling him about her day, how she had picked out a peach-colored satin fabric to be made into a dress and the leftover yardage to be used as a shawl. She wrote to him about the crow she had seen on the balcony whose angry eyes had warned her that danger was everywhere. She wrote to him about his Uncle Tomas, who had been walking in the rue Nebi Daniel when a workman carrying a long board had knocked him down and he had lost consciousness and hadn’t regained it until his wife produced a steaming apricot pudding by his bedside. He had always been very fond of apricot pudding, and he immediately opened his eyes and asked for a spoon. She didn’t want to bore him with her letters about nothing at all, but she wanted him to know that her days were continuing, to remind him that she breathed the same air that he did and was close by even if she was not in fact close by.

  Albert’s father had excused himself after dinner and walked home. Albert asked Este if she would like to walk down to the sea. She would. She put a shawl around her shoulders and ran her hands through her hair to make sure her curls were at their fullest and most appealing.

  The couple, and they were almost certainly now a couple, walked, not holding hands but with shoulders almost touching, down the wide avenue. They were followed at a discreet distance by Anippe, Este’s maid. They heard the wind rustling in the long leaves of the palm trees and they heard the rattle of carriage wheels, and they saw the lights in the windows of homes and they passed the hibiscus that guarded the path to the boardwalk. When they came to the beach, where their families had cabanas, they walked out onto the sand. The moon was no more than a sliver, but its light cracked open the heavens, the Milky Way spread across the dome.

  Este said, “I used to hate going to bed on a night like this. Perhaps when we are married I will never go to bed.”

  Albert put a hand gently on her shoulder. “I have this for you,” he said. He took a box from his pocket and handed it to her.

  She knew, of course, what was inside. She opened the box and saw the diamond ring, clear and large, set in gold prongs, lovely, the moonlight glancing off its sides. “Yes,” she said, “it’s perfect,” and slipped it on her finger.

  Albert wanted to tell her how he had gotten it at a bargain price, but thought perhaps that wasn’t the most tactful thing to say. “I will get you more jewels,” he said instead. “You will have enough diamonds to open your own jewelry store.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I always wanted to be a shopkeeper.”

  He laughed. She was not stupid, his bride-to-be, and that was something.

  “Have you met the French scientists?” she asked him.

  “No, I haven’t. Are they very boring?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, “not boring at all.” She started to describe to him what they were doing in their laboratory.

  “Enough,” he said. She stopped.

  As he led her back to her house, he slipped his pocket watch out and glanced at the hour. His night was not yet over.

  When Este returned, she found her father at his desk. “Look at my ring,” she said.

  He looked. His saw that the ring was of substantial size. “Fine ring,” he said, and kissed his daughter on the cheek. He saw the round curves in her face in the orange light of his lamp and the small scar on her chin that came from a fall from a chair before she had gone to school. He would have said something to her, something about the passage of the years, the pleasures that he hoped she would have, the way it would be when her own time came to bring a child into the world. He wanted to say that he would allow no pain to reach her, but that would be bravado, a lie. A man did not tell lies to his daughter. His jaws ached with something he could not name but that had everything to do with his child and his desire to keep her as she was, in the lamplight, her eyes reflecting the glow, her hair a little damp, down on her forehead, and her smile, the one he believed she saved for him but probably gave indiscriminately to all. “Good night,” he said abruptly. His voice sounded curt, even rude, in his own ears. Este left the room.

  He considered the cholera. Should his wife and child move elsewhere for the time being where they would be safe? It might cause panic if he, a physician on the Committee of Public Safety, sent his family out of town. Cholera would leave Alexandria in time, it left everyplace it visited in time. How soon would it go? When would it be satiated? He turned to read in the sheaf of papers on his desk.

  It traveled in caravans across Syria, where it reached Aleppo in November 1822. It appeared in 1821 at Basra in the Persian Gulf, and killed, in less than three weeks, between fifteen thousand and eighteen thousand human beings. The Persian army which had defeated the Turks near Erivan and had pursued the enemy westward fell prey to cholera. The soldiers retreated to Khoi in Iran, where they dispersed, disseminating the infection throughout the country. Cholera appeared in 1819 in Port Louis, Mauritius, where it had arrived with a ship from Trincomalee, Ceylon. The disease had broken out mid-ocean. It killed six thousand on the island within weeks. In 1829 cholera crossed
the Chinese Wall, swept through Mongolia, and eventually traveled to Moscow. It sailed on the Arabian dhows that traded all along the shores of Arabia toward the East African coast. Cholera broke out among the troops of Said-bin-Sultan while they were attacking Bahrein. It broke out in Mecca in 1831 and killed some twelve thousand pilgrims. It appeared in Nicaragua and Guatemala and in New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina. Cholera progressed along the trade route from Canton to Burma and branched south along the Irrawaddy River toward Rangoon in 1842. Cholera appeared in 1851 in Cuba and in the Grand Canary Island, where it caused nine thousand deaths in a few days.

  Statistics, graphs, numbers of the dead disturb the mind but do not panic it. Piles of bodies lack conviction. It doesn’t matter that we know the body stinks in death or that it bloats with gas as the hours pass. It doesn’t matter that we know that each number on the chart, whether from a town or a city, a farm or a jungle, represents a single person who was necessary to himself, to a mate, to a child, to a friend, to a fiancé, to a mother. When the numbers grow so large, we can no longer imagine faces, arms and legs, necklaces and moles, haircuts and earlobes. When the numbers jump far out beyond our capacity to feel, they produce a numbness that is not so much protective as genuinely bored. This is natural. Even when the numbers of those lost to tidal wave, volcano, hurricane, train wreck, fire, flood, or war change their numerical account, are revised downward or upward, we are not shaken into a new conviction. Fear for ourselves comes slowly. The numbers may have been exaggerated or undercounted, but they always crash into the smallness of our imagination, our inability to hold reality in both hands at once. We mime horror at what we have heard, but our souls do not shake or tremble. Large numbers of bodies are in many ways far less upsetting than a single corpse. Anyone who could grasp the statistics, hold in their minds the fingers and toes, the lift of the bridge of the nose, the short finger of the left hand, of the three-billionth victim, would go mad. We are capable of mourning only one by one, and a mass grave leaves as light a touch on our hearts as none at all.

  For now all was well in his family, all was as it should be. This made Dr. Malina uneasy. Something would shift, something in the fortunes of the family would change. He had no evidence for this premonition except his experience, or perhaps it was Alexandrian history that made him gloomy. He thought of the Macedonian who had taken the spit of land that was once an island empty of civilization. He thought of Antony, who died because Octavius defeated him, of Cleopatra, who died because she had backed the wrong general, and of the Ptolemys replaced by the Roman emperors, and of the Roman emperors replaced by the followers of Muhammad, and the Christian martyrs, a hundred thousand of them, slaughtered like chickens for a feast, and of the Jews beaten and mutilated by the angry Greeks, and of the Copts and the Catholics assassinating each other, and of the French chased by the British and the warships in the harbor with their loud guns and flags flying high or flags drawn down, and the wounded in the hospital and the bin of limbs that gathered in the basement awaiting disposal. He thought of General Arabi and his followers defeated in distant sandy battles. He thought of Alexander himself, lying under the streets, wrapped in gold cloth, resting in his glass coffin, bones now and dark air surrounding the sightless sockets where his eyes had been. He thought that something evil would come to his family, something that all his skills could not avoid.

  With that he went to bed.

  LYDIA THREW HER arms around her daughter when, at the breakfast table, her daughter thrust out her hand. “Look, Mama, what Albert gave me last night.” There was the diamond. It was raining hard, and water leaked in through the closed doors of the terrace.

  “How lovely,” said Lydia. It was of substantial size, but size, when it came to diamonds, was not the most important factor. But of course Albert would only have given his bride-to-be a diamond of the finest quality. He was in fact giving it to himself, since his wife’s assets would become his, and his wife’s financial security would be tied to his, and his father, a man of excellent reputation, would only allow his son to give his future daughter-in-law a ring worthy of the family name.

  Mrs. Malina admired her daughter’s ring. In its shiny surface she saw, like a fortune-teller reading the tea leaves, the best china plates, large silver candlesticks, a linen cabinet of silk sheets, a lifetime of choice cuts of lamb, servants folding laundry in the rear quarters, a courtyard with an orange tree and a lemon tree, and children with shining hair and dresses made from patterns sent from Paris and woven with fabrics brought over the seas from the Far East. As Lydia ate her breakfast she looked out her window and saw a yellow bird shielding itself against the rain between the ironwork on the balustrade and a potted plant whose long leaves shivered from the blows of so many drops of water descending.

  An absurd impulse overcame her. She stood up, threw open the doors, and stepped out onto her terrace, letting the heavy rain soak her hair, stain dark her dress, run down her face in streams. The yellow bird flew off in terror as she stepped forward. She hung on to the balcony rail as though she were in a ship caught in a storm. Her shoes were damp and seemed to cling to her feet. Her hair came unglued from the pins that had held it up, and it floated down her back, dark and heavy, a few gray streaks at the temples. There is a looseness, a permission granted by the rain, that a woman of middle years needs now and then, a woman whose daughter is about to leave the house and furnish a home of her own. Such a woman knows more about the passage of time, the passion of love for those who no longer need you, the way you stare at the backs of departing children and memorize the slope of their bones, the length of their eyelashes, the way the love of the mother for her child is destined one way or the other to become a bruised love, a wounded love, an almost unrequited love, an unbalanced love, a suffering love. It was this that Lydia Malina was for a moment putting aside as she turned her face into the rain and allowed it to drench her very bones.

  “Mama, what are you doing?” Este shouted out to her mother. “Come inside, close the doors, are you mad?” Lydia reentered the room, leaving a puddle on the very fine carpet that had come on a ship to Alexandria from Kashmir, imported by the Marbourg firm where she had placed Eric Fortman, who was such a gentleman, he had immediately sent her a huge bouquet of red roses to express his gratitude.

  “What were you doing out there?” Este scolded her mother. Lydia had no words for it, the joy of standing in the pouring rain.

  WITH AN ADVANCE on his salary Eric Fortman bought himself two new pairs of trousers, a jacket, and several shirts. He purchased socks and garters and boots. He told his landlady that he had been at sea, a representative of the Glen MacAlan Scotch Company for many years, but was starting a new life as an importer, a businessman, a person who remained in one place for years at a time. “Roots is it you want?” said his landlady.

  “I just want to be dry,” he said, because a man didn’t admit to a woman that he was ready to be given his tea and wrapped in a pair of arms, ready to see the same yard year in and year out and maybe even to plant some seeds of his own.

  Eric Fortman intended to become a merchant prince in no time at all. He had seen other men do it, one good purchase, a few good gambles and a man with nothing to his name, a man such as himself, a shipwreck of a man, could find himself on top of the heap, his bank account stuffed and his future assured. As it was, he now had an office at Marbourg & Sons on the quay in the Eastern Harbor.

  He was ready now for his future. He walked about among the barrels of cumin and saffron and pickled herring and stepped carefully in his new boots as he made his way through the drying fishnets. He looked out at the harbor and saw the gulls that rested on the masts of ships gathering on the jetty’s edge, and on the railings of steamships lolling in the water. He felt no regret. Home, he thought, was where England ruled, and England ruled in Alexandria, even if everyone spoke French. Cats may have nine lives, he considered, so he himself could certainly have two without disturbing the universe or calling forth the wrat
h of the gods.

  His first assignment at Marbourg & Sons was to inspect the Lorraine, a ship that had pulled into port that morning and was now unloading its cargo on the left dock. The ship was to sail for Lisbon in a week with fifty barrels of Marbourg-owned powders that were meant to cure arthritis and stomach ailments and were made from the pits of pears from orchards in the valley of the upper Nile. Marbourg & Sons did not want to send this cargo on a ship that might go down, whose hull had rotted away, or whose crew was rebellious or stupid and might endanger the barrels through their actions. They wanted a ship whose furnace fired up without trouble and whose promise to deliver was not subject to revision or apology. Marbourg & Sons had had their share of disasters at sea and had learned to inspect ships before they set sail. They assumed that their new employee, Eric Fortman, having survived a disaster, would be able to distinguish between a good vessel and a weakened one. He was dispatched to check that all would be well with the expensive powders. A simple task, a simple matter, a beautiful day on the harbor, the lighthouse rose tall at the edge of the limestone ridge, the stones in the shallow water shimmered in the refracted rays of the sun.

  Eric went on board, introduced himself to the captain of the ship, an Indian with a strange turban on his head who spoke a thick and heavily accented English. Despite his many years of travel with the barrels of whiskey sloshing in the hold below, he was not certain where the flaws in the ship would be found if they were there, but he knew how to chat up the men and ask a few key questions. He was perfectly able to pick up the mood of the sailors, angry or sad or hungry or undisciplined. He spent the morning looking at the condition of the pots in the scullery and the oars on the lifeboats, and he pulled on the ropes and checked knots and looked at the polish on the table. All was in order, he hoped. As he said his good-byes to the captain, the Indian placed a fat brown leather pouch in his hand. What was this?

 

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