An Imperfect Lens

by Anne Richardson Roiphe

  “I am not a trusting man,” said Dr. Malina. “We have had our troubles here. But I trust you to make good use of these fowl. Let me know what you find.”

  “I will,” promised Louis.

  On the ride back to town, Louis asked Dr. Malina, “Is it better here now that the British have taken over the city?”

  “As many people as ever need my services,” said Dr. Malina. He sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. The two men were silent. The wheels turned on the road, a donkey brayed in the grass by the railroad tracks. A train came by and released black puffs of smoke into the sky. Louis said something, but the train whistle sounded and Dr. Malina did not hear or respond to his words.

  With high expectations, Louis took the geese to the laboratory and watched as Marcus plucked the feathers, reserving a handful for examination, and placed them in a sack, which he later dumped into a large box of hospital waste—bandages, syringes, and empty ointment tubes—which he had found in one of the corridors of the basement.

  “Should we cook the birds for dinner?” asked Marcus. “After you’re done with them, of course.”

  Louis shook his head. He did not want science confused with cooking, although there were many similarities in the practice of each.

  He had to begin by cutting into the bird on the table. He pulled out its intestines, and scraped a little of its spleen onto his glass. Would it be there? What small creatures were moving still in his goose? The bird’s body was not yet rigid, and the tiny creatures that always eat the dead had not yet arrived. Maybe he would find his cholera.

  Hours later the two geese had been finely chopped, their inards examined on slides. Dye had been placed on the slides. Este had helped him prepare the slides. He had shown her how to carefully boil the glass, holding the tongs as far from her body as possible. There were microbes in the tissues, all right, but when they were cultured in the gelatine-filled glass, they seemed to die almost immediately. When placed inside the rabbit Nocard had selected for this purpose, nothing happened to the rabbit, whose pink nose wrinkled, whose ears pricked up at the sound of his footsteps, who seemed to greet him affectionately even though he had injected into the creature something that should have caused cholera. Five days passed and the rabbit nibbled on grass and the geese rotted inside a box and nothing happened, no cholera.

  This was a dead end. It had not been a bad idea, but it had led nowhere. He needed a new idea. Where did ideas come from? Would he get another idea, or was he dry like a well in a time of drought? He tried to force an idea to come into his mind. He opened his notebook and wrote down again everything that he had tried and that had not worked. Failure should teach him something; this he had learned from Dr. Pasteur. No failure was wasted. Cholera seemed not to jump from one person to another because of simple proximity. The wives and husbands of cholera victims did not necessarily fall ill with the disease. Those taking care of the ill sometimes became ill, but often did not. This meant that air itself was not the carrier of the disease, breath of the victim was not dangerous. But what was and why? He threw himself down in his chair, and a snatch of music came to him, a childhood song his mother used to sing, something about a baby squirrel eating a nut his mother brought to him. He hummed the tune. He had forgotten the words. He thought about his favorite soup. He fell into a light sleep. He could almost hear himself breathing in his sleep. He woke with a start. A black fly was sitting on his eyelid.

  ESTE WOKE IN the morning and looked at herself in the mirror. She was satisfied by what she saw. She was eager to get to the laboratory. Everything there was interesting. It was all strange and new. She was useful. She knew she was useful. But of course she couldn’t stay there all the time. She put her hand up to the mirror and saw her diamond reflected in the glass. She was to be a married woman, a person whose word must be taken seriously. She would give orders in her own house. She would invite Phoebe over to afternoon tea. She would sleep in the biggest bed in the house. She would have her favorite desserts every night. What a shame she could not show her ring to her brother. She would be the first to make a success of herself, although everyone always thought so much of him and now he was far away and possibly would never return and she would be the only child the family had. These, she understood, were not exactly proper thoughts. She erased them as soon as she thought them. She dressed herself and went downstairs. “Mama,” she said on seeing her mother at the breakfast table, “we must get started on my wedding dress.”

  The next day she and her mother were looking at sketches of wedding dresses that had been sent by boat from Paris to Lydia’s sister’s stepdaughter last season, when an unexpected visitor was announced. It was Eric Fortman, who wanted to express again his gratitude to Lydia for having found him a place in the Marbourg firm, giving him a second chance, opening the door for his happiness, and so on. The man was so grateful he not only kissed Lydia’s hand but placed in her lap a box of the toffee that was sold at exorbitant prices on the rue Rosette, saying the roses he had sent were not enough. Lydia blushed. Este told Eric to sit down and tell them a story he had heard in his travels. Este rang the bell, and from the kitchen the maid brought another setting for the table and offered Eric a hot roll and some jam. He told them of an island where the natives had coal black skin and none wore clothes except for necklaces made of large pink and white seashells, where giant tortoises crawled along the beach, and where the children hung from slings made of palm leaves in their mother’s arm. Monkeys lived in the huts with the people, and small green and yellow birds sat on the shoulders of the children. They had no marriage on this island, no priests to tell people what to do.

  The women were appalled. “Did you make this up, just to shock us?” Lydia asked.

  “Of course not,” he said.

  “Did you see this yourself?” asked Este.

  “No, ma’am,” said Eric, “but I heard about it in Toulouse when I was introducing some café owners to the virtues of Glen MacAlan scotch.” He helped himself to another roll and some more butter.

  “Savages,” said Lydia, in a voice fierce enough to make Eric move his chair back a few inches.

  Este said to her mother, “They probably wouldn’t think too much of you, either.”

  Eric laughed. The girl had spirit. The girl was glowing. Virginal juices running, of course. He would have to make a fortune for a girl like that. He had spent his life among salesmen and their customers. He did not know much about the ways of women in the parlors, with drapes at the window and chairs with little monkey paws for legs, and he knew nothing of Jews, who he had never before realized had wives and mothers and daughters, too, just like everyone else. He had thought of them as peddlers who had sprung full grown from some dark place in ruined cities ready to take advantage of decent men who had fallen on bad times. He had been mistaken.

  In his laboratory, Louis waited for Este to arrive. He was disappointed as the hours passed and it became clear she was not coming. “Perhaps she has fallen ill,” said Louis to Nocard.

  “She has other things to do, my friend. She does not belong to us.” Nocard said this kindly. “We’re a temporary amusement for her, that’s all.”

  “Too bad,” said Roux, “she has a good way with her hands. She works well. Perhaps she’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Louis said nothing.

  9

  IT WAS FORTUNATE, perhaps, that most cholera victims never made it to the hospital. It was fortunate that most of the poor in Alexandria did not think of the hospital when they fell ill. They returned to their beds and died there, leaving the problem of the bodies and the sheets and the foul smells to those they loved and left behind. Nevertheless, the hospital was full.

  A child had died no longer than fifteen minutes ago on Ward B. The chief administrator wrote a quick note to the Sister of Charity who sat in a chair at the ward’s door, and stamped it with his seal. She showed the Frenchman to the bed on which a little boy lay, his hand still in his mother’s, although she could no longer
offer him comfort.

  How were they to get this child away from his mother? Emile and Louis had no reason to be embarrassed. No harm could come to the child now. Louis, however, was embarrassed. He pulled on the stem of his unlit pipe and coughed a small anxious cough. Emile put his hand gently on the mother’s shoulder. “Madame,” he began, “I am Emile Roux, and this is my colleague, Louis Thuillier. We are scientists from Paris, from the École Normale, the laboratory of the famous Dr. Pasteur. We are searching for the cause of the cholera that has just taken your little boy. If you let us have him, we would appreciate it. He will help us in our cause. He will be a hero.” The woman said nothing. She threw herself on the body of her child. She grasped the side of the cot. She would not look at them or speak to them.

  “She won’t,” said Roux. The two men went back to the lab.

  An hour later there was a knock on the door. It was the sister from Ward B. “We have another child,” she said, “without a mother or a father, found on the quay an hour ago. He was alive when brought in, but no longer. You could have him.” The sister peered around Louis and stared at the oven and the glasses and the autoclave and the gas lamps. She heard the dog barking in his cage at the new intruder. She saw the rabbits. She let out a long sigh. “Hurry,” she said. They followed her.

  Louis picked up the child, whose hair was matted and whose sunken eyes revealed the small shape of his skull as if the grave had already done its work.

  Once back in the laboratory, they cut some tissue from the child’s arm. As they began, there was a knock on the door. Este was there. She turned pale when she saw the child on the table, but did not hesitate to steady the small chest as Roux cut out some bowel. It was not easy to do. Roux had never done this to a human being before. He pushed away a wave of nausea. He pulled out some bowel and put it in a bowl.

  “We should take the brain and the heart and the lung,” said Louis.

  “Yes,” said Roux.

  The two men worked for three hours, very carefully. Este brought them bowls and jars and recorded carefully the part and the date, with a large I on each note. The I stood for Italian, because the child seemed to her to have come from the Italian community.

  Nocard joined them. He drilled a hole in the side of the head and, with a syringe, pulled out tissue that might be valuable. Este, no longer pale, labeled the brain tissue.

  For Louis, there was transgression in this act. No matter how he reassured himself that his purpose was noble and the child would have a finer destiny under his knife than he ever had enjoyed in his living days, he could not entirely repress his fear of the ghosts that lingered around the graveyard of Amiens and his reverence for the holiness of the human soul and his fear of retribution by some watching fate that might not approve of his disrespect of the child’s body. He saw the boy’s small male genitals and averted his eyes.

  Nocard took a small knife and pulled out the child’s left eye and placed it in a jar Este offered him. Este shook the jar so she could see the eye from every angle. Edmond was very interested in diseases of the eye. He had puzzled over them often in the collies that accompanied shepherds to the fields.

  Later they closed up the skin as best they could, covering the many places where they had entered the body. They pulled a blanket over what remained of the child’s face. Este washed down the table and boiled the cloth that she used to do it. Roux said to her, “Thank you for your work.”

  She was pleased. Louis had said nothing, but he looked at her with fondness in his dark eyes. She left. It was time she went home. Her mother would begin to worry. Anippe, who always accompanied her, was leaning against Marcus in the alley. The two of them smelled of sweat. “Hurry up,” Este said to the maid. When they reached the square, they found a carriage.

  Este washed her hands again and again before changing into her dress for dinner. She did not feel sad, which was curious. She did not feel tired, which was also a surprise. Perhaps it was silly of her, a conceit that was bred of exaggeration, but she was convinced that she was changed, altered, improved. She was a new person who only seemed to be the old one. She had seen the human body as it really was, a tangle of blood and tissue, purple matted bulges that ran from leg to heart, from brain to finger. She had not been useless. She wanted to tell her mother about her day, but thought better of it. She would not even tell her father.

  The men were tired. What were they going to do with the remains of the body? Nocard went back to the apartment and brought his own smoking robe. The three men wrapped the body in it. It was easy for Louis to carry the body out the back entrance without being noticed. It was late at night, and the shops on the street were closed. A few carriages went down the main avenue, but none came in the side street.

  Emile took the wrapped body from Louis when they reached the Eastern Harbor. He pulled off the robe and waded out into the softly breaking waves. Louis and Nocard took off their shoes and joined him. Together they pushed the small body far enough into the waves so that it didn’t return to shore on the next lip of foam. There were no carriages on the street. They walked along like three friends out for a night’s frolic. Finally they arrived at the hospital and made their way back to their laboratory through the silent corridors. After cutting off a small piece of the robe’s inner fabric for later examination, they burned the cloth in their oven. Smoke billowed out across the room. With it came a smell of scorched cotton. They washed their hands in freshly boiled water. Emile fell asleep in his chair. Nocard went back to the apartment to sleep. Louis couldn’t sleep and he couldn’t sit in his chair by his lab bench. He was too tired to work, too tired to think, but still unable to close his eyes. He wanted to say some words, a prayer. But what words, what prayer? He had wanted to tell Este that she had been a help, that he was glad she had been at the laboratory, but the words had not come. Why, he wondered was it easy for some men to say the right thing and hard for others? Was something wrong with him that he was most quiet when he most wanted to make an impression?

  He was a logical man, and there was no logical reason for the anxious way he paced the room. But there was an illogical reason. He had behaved like a grave robber. He had behaved like an insane criminal. There had been such a case in a village not so far from Amiens, it was in the papers, a lunatic who chopped up his victims either to hide his crime or to achieve some unholy pleasure. Louis defended himself against the accusation of sacrilege, but of course it was he himself who made the accusation. A scientist should not fear God’s judgment; that was for priests and mothers.

  In the morning the three men washed and shaved, changed their clothes, and ate breakfast at their regular café. They were all suddenly full of high spirits, hope had returned. Surely they had harvested the cholera microbe. It was waiting for them.

  ON SUNDAY, ESTE did not go to the laboratory. She and her mother went to a birthday luncheon for Madame Clotilde Auguste, who had been the headmistress at Este’s school, a school for Jewish girls in Alexandria, with an emphasis on French culture and the domestic arts. The luncheon was held at the home of one of the graduates of the school who had married a lawyer who now worked for the Crown, representing their interests in issues of maritime law. The women were dressed in pinks and beige, in lace blouses and silk skirts. It was a great pleasure for Este and Lydia to see what everyone else was wearing. The table was set with crystal glasses and Limoges plates. The silverware was monogrammed, and Este admired the tiny silver saltcellars that were in the shape of swans with silver wings that actually moved. The windows were open and the wind blew hard and occasionally a shutter would slam, startling everyone. Nevertheless, the summer heat was heavy. The women drank orange juice with slices of lemon floating at the top of each glass. Este showed off her ring to her former classmates. They were impressed. Este was the first among them to be engaged.

  “Are you so happy you can’t breathe?” asked one.

  Este said, “I can breathe.”

  “Do you dream of him every night?” asked anothe
r.

  Este paused. She did not dream of Albert. “I never remember my dreams,” she said.

  The young women talked of linens and glassware. The older women talked about their children. They boasted without seeming to boast, this one is giving me such headaches because he can’t decide whether to take his exams in philosophy or architecture.

  “I have had such wonderful letters from Jacob,” Lydia said. The hours of the afternoon passed swollen with heat, eased with conversation.

  Madame Clotilde kissed Este on both cheeks. “You are beautiful,” she said.

  “As are you, madame,” Este replied.

  “I’ve heard,” said Ruth, who had been in the class behind Este, “the Arabs are savages in Jerusalem and there are no conveniences and the hotels are dirty and Jerusalem belongs to thieves and kidnappers. They don’t even receive the papers from Paris or Moscow until six months after they’re published, can you imagine?”

  Another young woman interrupted, “Your brother had to leave Alexandria. He must be lonely without his family.”

  “He’s well,” said Este, “very well.” Her eyelids felt heavy. She was bored. She wished she had gone to the laboratory. She was never bored there. She thought of Louis bending down to pick up a beaker, his fingers gently placed around the glass neck, his head turning to look at her looking at him. She was no longer lethargic. A strange new sensation seized her body. It was not unpleasant, but it was alarming.

  A pastry with almonds and honey was passed around by the maid. “Delicious,” said Lydia.

  “Wonderful,” said Este.

  “If only it would rain,” said Madame Auguste.

  “The fish from the lake are dying on the shore. The lake is so shallow,” said Este’s friend Margarette, whose family came to Alexandria from Amsterdam.

  “It always is, this time of year,” said Lydia.