An Imperfect Lens

Home > Other > An Imperfect Lens > Page 21
An Imperfect Lens Page 21

by Anne Richardson Roiphe


  “All we know,” said Dr. Malina, “is that at some point the epidemic will recede.”

  “Why will it retreat?” asked the railroad man, who was a German from Düsseldorf.

  “We don’t know,” said Dr. Malina.

  “You know very little,” said a Coptic priest.

  Dr. Malina said nothing.

  “MAMA,” SAID ESTE, “would you miss me if I went abroad?”

  “You’re not going abroad,” came the answer.

  “I want to do something great with my life,” Este said.

  “Do you have something in mind?” asked her mother.

  “I could marry a great scientist and help him in his work,” said Este.

  “Rubbish,” said the mother, “girlish rubbish. You like your petticoats ironed. You like orange juice in the morning. You like soft sheets and you like to ride in comfort when you go to the beach and you want the servants to bring your biscuit at night and wash your clothes. You keep asking your father to purchase a private carriage for your comfort.”

  “I don’t care about the carriage,” said Este. But she did care, just a little.

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, Eric Fortman came to call. He found himself alone in the drawing room with Este. Her mother was visiting her old aunt in the Jewish Home for the Aging, where Este had refused to accompany her.

  “Your brother,” he asked her, “does he dislike the British?”

  “You mean all the British?” asked Este.

  “No, I mean the British soldiers.”

  “I don’t know,” said Este, who didn’t. “Now he is just thinking about olives.”

  Eric asked, “Is there a secret passageway in this house?”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Este. “Whatever for?”

  “I was wondering if your father sent many letters to Palestine?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Este. “He writes to my brother often.”

  “In the Great Event,” asked Eric, “did your father support the British?”

  “Of course,” said Este, “we’re of the European community. We’re not Arabs. Stop being so tedious. I hate politics myself. I’m really interested in science.” This interest, though recent, was sincere.

  “I think,” said Eric, “that if I were of your people, I might have an interest in politics.”

  “Why?” said Este. “Whatever for?”

  Eric shrugged. He wasn’t sure what he meant himself.

  “Have you taken the train to Aboukir yet?” asked Este.

  “I haven’t had the time,” said Eric. “Come with me one Sunday,” he suggested. She smiled.

  She was a lovely woman, he thought. If he married her, then the British consulate might be satisfied. He would be right in the middle of the family, and if any plans were laid, he would be sure to hear of them. He could use a wife. He was of the right age. His future would be assured at Marbourg & Sons, and who knew what place he might find if Dr. Malina wished the best for him, his only son-in-law.

  “Este,” he said, “I must confess something to you.”

  “Really?” she said. She knew it was coming, the way you can tell when it will rain, by the turning of the leaves and the darkening of the sky and the wind rustling through the bushes. She sighed.

  “I do not have a fortune,” he said, “but I am a hard worker and clever, and my future here in Alexandria is bright, and I have feelings for you, deep feelings.” (Was this the way it should be done? He hoped so.)

  “I feel friendship for you, too,” said Este, moving to a chair a little farther away from him.

  “I am perhaps a little mature for you,” he said, “but that makes me wise and able to protect you. If you encourage me, I would talk to your father. I have no doubt he would approve of our union.”

  Este, who had many doubts, said, “I think this conversation is too serious for such a lovely afternoon.” She rang quickly for the servant, who was on her knees washing the entrance floor, which Dr. Malina had recently insisted be cleaned three times a day.

  Eric decided to move quickly, decisively, women liked it when you moved with certainty. “I want to marry you,” he said.

  Este said, “You’ve startled me.”

  “I didn’t mean to be so sudden,” Eric said.

  “That’s very kind of you, but my father would not approve. It’s not you,” she added quickly. “He likes you very much. But we marry within our people,” she said, thankful for the excuse. “But I’m sure you will find the right bride. So many women would be happy to have the honor of your company.”

  “But not you,” said Eric.

  “It’s not that,” said Este, although it was exactly that. “I am really too young to marry, don’t you see?” She did not want to hurt him. She did not want to see the hurt in his eyes.

  “Please,” she said, “don’t be angry with me, we must be friends.” She had wanted to say, I am already taken, although that would not have been true, at least not outside the confines of her own mind.

  She did want to tell Phoebe that she had received another proposal, but of course, with the matter of Albert between them, she thought better of the idea. She did want to tell her mother, at least, about Eric’s offer. Este wanted Eric out of the drawing room, but he showed no signs of leaving.

  He changed the subject. “I am very interested in stamps,” he said to her.

  “I didn’t know that,” said Este. “You’ve never mentioned an interest in stamps before.”

  “Haven’t I?” he said. “I thought I had. I would be interested in seeing the stamps on your brother’s letters from Palestine.”

  Relieved that the conversation had turned, Este promised to show him the letters from Jacob one day.

  “I’d like to see them now,” he said. She hesitated.

  “As a special favor?” He looked at her sadly.

  She left the room to fetch them. He changed chairs. He paced about on the rug. He saw nothing of interest to report. There were medical books on the shelf. There were books in Arabic whose titles he could not read. There were books in German and Italian that seemed to be about myths, judging from the embossing on the leather covers. There was nothing about a plot against the Crown. The furniture was excellent, but hardly revealed designs against public order. The painting on the wall was a portrait of Lydia as a young woman. He lifted the painting up. Some dust rose from the disturbed frame. Behind it might be a safe that held the secrets he had been told to find. Behind it was the wall, faded to a lighter shade of rose than the rest of the room.

  Este returned with the packet of letters she had taken from her mother’s drawer. They were wrapped in a violet ribbon. She opened the ribbon and handed him a letter. The stamp was blurry, blue, and nothing more than a stamp. Just then Lydia returned.

  “My dear,” she said to Eric, “how very nice to find you here.”

  “I was just admiring the stamps from Palestine,” he explained to her.

  She took the letter that was in his hand and wrapped up the pile with the ribbon and left the packet on the small table near her elbow. The conversation went on. No one wanted refreshment. Este excused herself, claiming exhaustion. Lydia explained to Eric that she needed to retire to change for dinner. Her husband would be coming in at any moment. She stood up. Eric went to the door, thinking he had no hope of obtaining the letters, when there was a loud sound in the hall. Lydia rushed out the door to see her maid standing in a jumble of broken dishes and glasses that were intended for the dinner table. The maid was weeping. Lydia had to console her, picking her way carefully through the broken glass. Eric swiftly took a few of the letters out of the packet, placed them in his jacket pocket, called out a farewell, and made his escape down the stairs.

  The Malinas had been kind to him, of course, a shipwrecked stranger, an accidental meeting. They were not people deserving of an unfortunate fate, but then the decision was not his. He was only a spear-carrier in some larger drama that he barely grasped. A man does what he has to when it comes to
his own skin. So Eric Fortman believed. As for the pretty young lady who had no intention of marrying him, she was not his concern. He thought of her with contempt. She had wounded his pride. That galled him. A burning sensation rose in his chest. She would regret her haughty manner. It was probably true, he decided, that these people did not mean England well. He would do what was necessary.

  Back in his room he read the letters. They could be coded, hidden meanings underlying the innocent sentences. He read them again and again. Finally, toward midnight, he grew tired and lay back on his pillow. It was then that his tooth began to throb. A deep, aching pain in the jaw that grew worse as the constellations drifted across the sky and the moon, shining its light into the harbors of Alexandria, slid across the dark dome of the universe and shooting stars fell through the air, their brief light flickering high above the waves. Eric heard the call to prayer, the hooves of a horse on the stones, and the cry of a child who had woken hungry. He tried a warm washcloth on his face. He tried a glass of the whiskey that he kept in a cabinet by his bed. He tried to think of pleasant scenes from the days of his boyhood. Nothing brought sleep. His tooth throbbed on.

  In the morning he obtained the name of a dentist from his landlady and, sitting in the chair staring at the curtain pulled in front of him, he waited for the dentist to put the big metal instruments in his mouth, to pull at his tooth, to pour alcohol on the bleeding gum, to torture him with the pain of it all, and he took comfort in the thought that pain could be passed on, given to someone else. He felt misused by fate. He felt justified in his actions. He was afraid of the approaching footsteps of the dentist. Later his jaw was swollen, his mustache stretched oddly across his puffed-out upper lip. He bought a pipeful of soothing hashish from the boy behind the bar of the café on the corner. He went home and slept like an innocent child. He woke with a plan in his head, a way to serve the interests of his country.

  PASTEUR HAD WAITED for a wire to arrive. He rushed to gather his mail from his front hall every afternoon, hoping that a long letter from his mission in Alexandria would bring good news, some progress, some hint of a direction, perhaps one that he, in Paris, could propel forward with some insight gained of experience, washed in his own genius. He had some concerns. It was taking a long time. He was a patient man—any scientist is by definition the very soul of patience—but this after all was a race and in a race if you are standing still you are falling back. Emile had sent progress reports. They were working, no doubt, but everything tried so far had proved useless. How long would the epidemic last? This was the time to find the microbe, while the disease was sweeping through the city. Later it would be more difficult.

  MARCUS HAD A purse now in which he kept his private money. It was fat. This money was earned in the late-night hours by the shore. It was easy. During the daylight hours he ran his errands for the French mission, boiled their plates as he had been instructed. Boiled their water as he had been told, washed their sheets. In the early evening he cooked the dinner for the men and cleaned up after them. But he had filled out some since his arrival in Alexandria. He was no longer a mere boy. He was looking for investment opportunities. He had learned that he had assets, cards in his hand to play. He enjoyed his evening walk along the promenade. He enjoyed the ladies in their silk petticoats and the men smoothing down their hair, tousled by the wind from the sea. He enjoyed the smell of peanuts and palm oil and beer and perfumes. He had learned a good deal of Arabic in the marketplace. He had made a few friends among the boys who drove their donkeys through the streets back and forth on errands for the owner of the dance palace by the dried-up stream behind the railroad tracks at the far end of the lake.

  Everyone in Alexandria was always moving. They did a good business, Marcus saw. He had spent an evening with several Alexandrians who dressed in women’s shawls and painted their faces and listened to a violinist play Mozart on a terrace concealed with muslin curtains from the peering neighbors. He had seen the dawn arrive in Alexandria with his young arms around someone whose name he would forget by noon, but whose smell would stay with him until dinner. He had learned enough Arabic to persuade a respectable shop girl to come with him for the sake of pleasure alone. He had learned enough to converse with the little boys who played in the alley behind the hospital. He had picked up some English and could wish the officers at the port a good morning, and wave at them in a manner that elicited a return wave. He had tasted absinthe and had smoked hashish. He was expanding his mind. He believed in his fortune, his good fortune. This was a perfect city for a boy with ambition, and he had become a boy with ambition. Which was why he now resented the fact that his name was omitted from the invitation that had come from the Academy of Science to a reception for the visiting scientists from France and Germany, their names in large script.

  DR. MALINA RECEIVED a packet from the Committee of Public Safety. It contained the week’s count of cholera victims. It was the same as the week before. Dr. Malina checked the numbers twice. It was good news, or possibly so. Epidemics grow in intensity. When they stop claiming more and more victims, they ebb quickly. One week of stability was not cause for rejoicing. The count could be wrong, the stability an illusion. Or it could be an accurate count but simply reflect a pause in the epidemic, a moment for the cholera to rest before surging forward again.

  DR. ROBERT KOCH had worked as he always worked, whether at home or away, with steady concentration, a cool head, and a critical eye, especially on himself. He looked for organisms that were invading the tissues around and in the intestinal lesions, and isolated them. Koch had examined slide after slide, culture after culture, and could not make out a specific organism that might be responsible for cholera, and then, late in the afternoon of a day that had begun shortly after dawn, he saw something that he had seen repeatedly in the tissues of the cholera-infected patients. It was possible that this was the organism. He wasn’t sure. He needed more tissue, he needed to test it more carefully. He thought he was on the right track. He drew pictures of what he had seen. He searched through all his slides to see if this particular creature appeared in all of them. It was work that required a steady hand and a good eye. He prepared slide after slide with the suspected organism pressed down between two thin pieces of glass. He put blue dye on the slides, hoping it would make the organism stand out clearly. It wasn’t always possible to make out the shape of the creature he thought might be responsible. He drew pictures, wrote in his notebooks, checked and rechecked what he had seen through the lens. He took the sample in which he had seen the organism and tried to grow it in cultures. It grew, but so did many other organisms. When he injected his brew into his mice, they did not sicken, but this did not prove that the small, wiggling form he had seen was not the source of the disease. Every few hours Koch washed his hands again in bichloride of mercury, a solution that would kill organisms on his fingers, keep peril and contamination at bay. Koch was hopeful. He was not ready to announce to the scientific community that he had seen the cholera and had drawn its picture. He was almost certain, but almost was not good enough. He did not want to be embarrassed before his colleagues, made a laughingstock in the academies.

  His was not a temperament to exult, to dance in his bedroom. He was a solitary, sober man, but he did allow a small trail of happiness to follow in his footsteps as he went about his usual day.

  ESTE WAS HURRYING to get to the laboratory. She was hastily pulling on her clothes, trying to button faster, to smooth down quickly, to get Anippe to tie the ribbons with more speed. In a dish warming near the oven was a culture that she was particularly hopeful might be of use. She pulled a comb through her curly hair. It stuck in a tangle for which she had no patience this morning. Anippe was extracting the comb carefully so as not to hurt her mistress when Este, exasperated, found herself in tears. She wanted to see Louis. She wanted to be by his side. She needed to be by his side. Her haste was not just a concern for the growth in the dish, but also for the man who was telling her everything important she ne
eded to know, who had made interesting the most ordinary of matters. Her haste was to see him. He is the man I am meant to marry, she thought, and the certainty of that, the firmness of the fact that fate had so intended it, dried her tears. And soon sent her on her way.

  ERIC FORTMAN WAS sitting in his office at Marbourg & Sons. He considered his finances. The salary paid him was sufficient to keep a single man in good order. The additional monies that fell his way were, if managed well, not spent extravagantly, enough to provide a man with the option of starting his own business, a matter that Eric Fortman had always considered beyond his capacity, his place in life. But here in Alexandria, all things were possible.

  That afternoon he made his way to the tent at the bazaar where a man, sitting on a small stool above a wooden box with a bottle of ink resting in one corner, would write a letter in French or German or Italian or Arabic for a few pennies, for those who were unable to do it themselves. He was an Arab scribe and he made decorations on each of his letters, little drawings of flowers or insects. His customers, who might not be able to read the words he had transcribed, appreciated the drawings. They always smiled. They thanked him. Therefore the scribe was in high demand, and the line for his attention was long. The blind used his services, and this was a city where the eyes roamed about in the heads of many, unfocused, veiled, useless. Those who had come to Alexandria to save themselves from local droughts or from arrest sought his services. The smells of the bazaar nearly overwhelmed Eric as he stood in line. Juice from betel nuts stained the streets where it had been spat by a thousand passersby. Peels of oranges lay on the ground along with pieces of fig and ends of cigarettes, and a muddy puddle had gathered in which small, dark insects were moving over the surface. Eric Fortman did not like this slow line. He was an Englishman, entitled to faster service. He did not want to stand like this. But he knew that should he shoulder his way to the front there would be an outcry from the others, a screeching in Arabic that would bring a policeman or a soldier. This, at the moment, he did not want. So he stood there, outwardly patient, inwardly cursing the slow-moving hand of the scribe.

 

‹ Prev