An Imperfect Lens (20 page)

“You’ll find such a woman,” said Este.

“I have found such a woman,” said Louis.

Este gasped. He turned away. He was afraid he had said more than he should. She said nothing, but she felt many things, among them triumph.

ERIC FORTMAN SAT at the table in the British offices in a back room of the consulate. He had not been escorted there voluntarily. “It seems,” said one of the uniformed officers, “that your bank account is growing very well in Alexandria.”

“That is true,” said Eric. “I am employed by Marbourg & Sons.”

“We know,” said the officer. “We have been talking to certain captains of ships you have inspected.”

Eric felt his lip tremble. “Everyone takes a little on the side,” he said meekly.

“We are interested in you,” said the officer. “We are concerned that you will lose your position.”

Eric pulled at the edge of his mustache. He was trapped. Adrenaline raced through his system. But he wasn’t trapped after all. The officer went on, “We would, however, overlook this unseemly matter if you would perform a small service for the Crown.”

“Anything, anything at all.” Relief rushed through his body, his arteries pumped eagerly, his brain cells trilled and shook. All would be well.

“You know Dr. Abraham Malina.”

“Yes,” said Eric.

“We need information on his political activities.”

“I’m not quite certain,” said Eric, “that he has political activities.”

“That is not for you to decide,” said a junior officer, picking up the thick file before him, which had Eric’s name in bold print across its face. “The man is a Jew,” said the junior officer.

“There are many Jews in Alexandria,” said Eric.

“And they are all untrustworthy,” said the junior officer.

“He has a lovely daughter,” Eric offered.

“We are not interested in his daughter,” said the officer.

“I am,” Eric muttered as he rose to his feet, but then he came to his senses. What could one man do to right the injustices of the world? Was it his fault if the Crown decided it had an enemy in a man of medicine in a distant port? His responsibility was to himself. He had no one else to rescue him from difficulties, no family, no connections in the foreign office, the home office, or the palace. He had only himself, and while he would never, without reason, have harmed the family that had been so hospitable to him, he now had more than a reason, he had necessity, a cold wind on his back. He promised the officer he would do his best for England because he was a true patriot. This is all nonsense, he reassured himself. Nothing will be asked of me. It will blow over, and the little agents of the Crown will find someone else to scare.

“A TERRIBLE THING has happened,” said Dr. Malina to his wife. She held her breath. “Albert has attacked his friend Achmed. It seems Achmed supplied Este’s ring to Albert from his stock. Achmed claims he gave his friend exactly what his money would buy, but Albert expected to be given a higher quality ring. At least that is what Achmed says. Achmed will likely lose his eye.”

Lydia felt relieved. Whatever she had imagined the terrible thing to be, it was far worse than the words she heard. “Achmed can see with his other eye,” she said. “A man can go through his entire life with one eye without ever missing a sunset.”

Dr. Malina stared at her as if he had never seen her before. “That’s not the point,” he said. “Albert attacked his friend. What might he do to our daughter if he gets angry with her?” Dr. Malina glared at Lydia as if she herself had harmed their child. “What kind of a man is he?”

“A young man,” said Lydia. “A hotheaded young man who felt insulted by the crack in the ring he had given his fiancée. He was embarrassed. He was ashamed. Perhaps his behavior was not the best, but it is over now.”

“No,” said Dr. Malina, “I don’t think it’s over. Achmed’s father will not think the matter closed. There will be more trouble.”

Lydia put a light hand on her husband’s shoulder. “No,” she said, “the families are friends. The boys have known each other all their lives.”

“I heard at the Medical Society meeting on Tuesday last that some of families of the dead are blaming the Jews for the epidemic.”

“Jews again,” said Lydia. At last she allowed some worry to enter her voice. “We poisoned the wells in Zurich with the Black Plague, and we brought the pox to Hamburg, and we’re dropping cholera into the streets so the Christians will die, is that it? What monsters we must be.”

“None, not a single one, of the doctors at the meeting thought the Jews were at fault,” her husband assured her. “Dr. Loudine said that superstition and ignorance should be ignored.”

“That’s a comfort,” said Lydia. “But this has nothing to do with Albert.”

“Only that Achmed is Muslim and Albert is Jewish and the argument between them might force the communities to take sides, adding fuel to the small fire already started,” said Dr. Malina.

“This is just a private quarrel. If anyone is injured, it’s Este, who was given a poor ring by a man she has entrusted with her life,” Lydia said. “We are at home here.”

“At the very least, this engagement must be broken and broken now. I do not want our family involved in this dispute,” said Dr. Malina.

“Your daughter needs to be married,” said Lydia.

“Not to Albert, she doesn’t,” said Dr. Malina. “That matter is finished.”

ESTE LAY ON her bed, the moonlight came in through the window. Almost a full moon, it cast its white glow over her sheets, over her nightgown, and made her pale skin seem even paler, ghostlike. She had unpinned her hair, which lay on the pillow around her, dark and curling. She was not sad that Papa had broken her engagement. She did want to be a married woman and have children of her own. But she was not sorry that her father had insisted that Albert was now an unsuitable mate. She had wanted to be Albert’s bride for such a long time. But that was a while ago. Other things mattered to her now. Perhaps she could join her brother in Palestine and take care of orphans or lepers. Perhaps Louis Thuillier would take her to Paris and introduce her to the great Pasteur himself. The thought of Louis Thuillier sent a small shiver down her spine. This made her happy and unhappy. It did not seem possible, a future with Louis, but it did seem right, right in some profound way that defied her sense. She knew that Louis did not have enough money to take care of her and the children she would bear him. But she continued to think of herself in Paris with Louis, his hand on her arm, his shoulder leaning against hers in a train, his eyes on her back as she walked away from him, his eyes on her face as she walked toward him. It did not displease her that her destiny was not yet known, that the book of life was still open for her, that she was now safe in her own bed and all lay ahead.

She considered Louis Thuillier. The thing she felt for him she gave no name, but she recognized that there was nothing commonplace about it. What if he became a famous scientist and she was his wife accompanying him to Paris and Berlin, to London and Istanbul and Geneva, where other scientists would praise him and place ribbons around his neck, which he would give to her and she would keep in a velvet-covered box on her dresser? What if she helped in the laboratory? What if she herself made a contribution to her husband’s work? She imagined herself in his laboratory in Paris, preparing the small dishes to receive the drops of diseased matter, recording the day’s activities, labeling bottles and maybe more. She would learn more. She would learn everything he knew. Would it matter to her if she couldn’t see her mother and father every Friday night? It was only natural for children to move away from the family. If her brother could do it, she could do it, too. Of course the thought was also worrying. Papa would never allow it. Louis was not one of them. It was unthinkable. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. She got out of bed, turned on the gas lamp, reached for her often neglected diary, and wrote,
I am an
eagle and must fly away from my nest.
She filled the page with question marks that grew smaller and smaller and stretched out line after line. On the next page she wrote,
Poor Achmed. I hope nothing
happens to his remaining eye. It would be so terrible to be blind.

ON HIS OWN bed, in his own shirt, having left his socks on because he didn’t want to see that they needed both washing and mending, Louis, too, was unable to sleep. He was working. His notebook was on his lap. His lamp was burning dully by his side. He had written,
All living things eat to survive. The cholera eats what?
He thought of his enemy like a swarm of ants, though far smaller, of course, swarming over the water, like water bugs looking for something to eat. He thought of the cholera like an army of rain-drops falling on sheep and cattle and chickens, looking for something to eat. If he knew what it was that they ate, he could coax them out of hiding.

He thought of all the munching and crunching, chewing and swallowing, the gulping and sipping and grinding and clawing and pulling that was required to live. We are nothing more than digesting machines, thought Louis, and the thought was comforting. The mountain lion and the yeast are different in size but not in behavior. They both devour, open their mouths and absorb and send out waste and live on because they do so and would die if they did not. Man, too. Why was it this way? Louis did not know. Perhaps it was God who had created all living things, who had designed them to consume each other in an unending round of mastication. Even human beings were no more than a food source for maggots and even smaller things. That was certainly so. Louis held his pencil in his hand and nibbled on his own lip. Were there unseen creatures on his pencil, climbing the spine of his notebook? Were they all killing something smaller and weaker than themselves? He felt like weeping. But why?

The sisters in his school had taught him that there were two main branches of life, plants and animals, and insects rested somewhere in between. Could the cholera be an animal without an enemy? If so, it would be unique. Everything else that lived suffered and died at the hands of something else. What would eat the cholera? He thought of the tigers in India. He had seen pictures of them. They had eyes that blinked when the light changed. They had noses that smelled prey. They had cubs that climbed rocks after them. He thought of his dog, who leaped about and barked with joy when he returned from school. What thrived, what nourished itself on the cholera? But what of the cholera? It wouldn’t be drowned. It wouldn’t die in a fire. Was cholera the only immortal creature on earth?

His mind slipped to Este. What was she doing? Was she, too, in her bed? He thought of her there, and the muscles deep within his body were pulled tighter. He was ashamed. Edmond was writing a letter to his mother while eating a honey pastry, his fifth for the day. Emile was sound asleep in his bed. Marcus had not returned to the laboratory for several days. The mattress on the floor was unoccupied. Where was Marcus? Louis wondered if he was in a café, listening to the songs of a woman wrapped in silk, with the flesh of her arms appearing and disappearing under the gyrations of her body.

There is more to life than eating, he said to himself. There is also reproduction. Without reproduction there is no history, no story, no breathing, no copulating, nothing but rock and mineral and death. How did the cholera reproduce itself? The answer to that question had to wait until he could see the cholera. But still in his mind he heard the sucking sounds of creatures smaller than ear mites consuming flakes of things that had themselves once lived. God help me, he said to himself, and tried to sleep. The very trying kept him awake.

DR. MALINA WAS also having trouble sleeping. He was hoping that Achmed’s eye would begin to heal. Had he been right to cancel his daughter’s engagement? He was not a man given to self-doubt, but banishing Albert from his daughter’s future would have consequences that he could not imagine, good or bad. He rose from his bed, entered his study, and read in Macnamara’s book an entry for 1817.

Within three months from its appearance the disease has been generated throughout the province of Bengal, including some 195,915 square
miles and within this vast area the inhabitants of hardly a single village
or town has escaped its deadly influence. The army of the Marquis of
Hastings camping in Vindhay Pradesh was devastated. The march was
terrible for the number of poor creatures falling under the sudden attacks
of this dreadful a fliction and from the quantities of bodies of those who
died in wagons and were necessarily put out to make room for such as
might be saved by conveyance. It is ascertained that above 500 have
died since sunset yesterday.

ACHMED WAS RECOVERING at home. His mother had made a bed for him in the downstairs library. She had placed her best sheets on the bed and brought pillows from all the other beds in the house to prop behind her wounded son. Every hour, she sent the servant in to ask him if he needed anything, and she herself stayed outside his room all through the night, sitting on a small stool and praying that his sight would be restored. When Dr. Malina arrived in the late afternoon of the fourth day after the attack, he removed the bandage. He looked at his patient’s eye, from which a pale green pus was flowing, and felt his patient’s sweating forehead. He shook his head. The eye would have to be removed. Dr. Malina sent his assistant for his surgical tools. He told the man to bring from his chemical closet enough anesthetic to blur the pain. Achmed’s mother wept. His father cursed the Jew who had done this. Dr. Malina ignored the curses. It was natural that the man would be upset. A Jew does not pay attention to every insult to his tribe. If he did, he couldn’t live with his neighbors or do business in the marketplace or move about his city without fear. Dr. Malina assumed that the insults were signs of the pain in the other man, not the shadings of his own portrait. It was not entirely clear to Dr. Malina why the eye had become infected. Was there something he should have done to prevent it? What? The young man screamed in pain despite the anesthetic that was poured through a tube into his mouth. It had not been enough. It often was not enough, although too much was sometimes mortal.