An Imperfect Lens (4 page)

“Here are our chemists from Paris,” the consul said as he lifted his glass to them. “They have just arrived at our door in time to save us from the cholera. They have come directly from the laboratories of Louis Pasteur.”

All heads in the room turned to stare at the three men, who stood at attention as if they were in a parade.

“No, no,” said Dr. Roux, turning red. “We don’t have the cure. We do not have the cause, we cannot save anyone until we have the cause.”

“Then find the cause,” said the consul with a hearty laugh. “We expect you to find it before the Germans do. France depends on you.”

At dinner, Louis was seated next to the very round, rosy-colored wife of an Alexandrian doctor who had studied in Marseille and who served the consulate staff and the small French community with responsibility. His wife told Louis that her husband, Dr. Malina, had saved the child of the caliph of the city, who had been gasping for breath until her husband brewed herbs that cleared the child’s lungs, steam had filled the room, and soon the little one was clamoring to be allowed in the garden. The first course seemed to be a thumb-sized fish lying on a bed of mushrooms. The concoction had a strange smell. Louis picked up his fork and mutilated the fish, mashing it into the mushrooms, without bringing the smallest piece to his mouth. Slowly he drank a glass of wine, after wiping the rim of the glass with his napkin. He was afraid the glass might not have been washed properly, with sufficiently hot water to kill any organisms that might have been clinging to its surface. While the wife of the doctor was talking about the tours he must take of the city’s prominent ancient glories, he glanced down the table and saw a young woman with long dark hair tied back with a bright green ribbon. Her skin was coffee-colored, like that of the natives. Her eyes were dark and wide. Her neck was long and graceful. “Who is the young lady down the table?” he asked his companion.

“My daughter,” replied the lady. “She is beautiful, is she not?”

“She is,” he said.

“Beauty is an asset in a woman,” said the wife of the doctor.

“Of course,” said Louis. Not wanting to seem like a beast, he added, “Beauty is worthless without character.”

“True,” said the wife of the doctor, “but character is often worthless without beauty—in a woman, that is.”

Louis fell silent. What should he say next? How could he approach the daughter? How soon? He fondled his pipe in his pocket. “I can see,” said Louis, “that she gets her eyes from you.”

The woman smiled, her full cheeks dimpling. “There are many beautiful young women in Alexandria,” she said. “It’s because of the sea air, which is so good for the skin.”

“But your daughter is not yet married?” said Louis.

“No,” her mother answered, “Este is not, not yet.”

Louis had never in all his life been served by a butler. There seemed to be ten of them in the room. He had never before tasted the fowl with tiny bones that floated in a gravy on his gold-rimmed plate. He had never before eaten from such a plate. He had never put such a large silk napkin on his lap before. He had never tasted such fine wine. In fact he did not like it quite so well as the kind purchased by the glass at any corner café in Paris, but he knew enough to know that this was his failure, not his host’s.

The table conversation turned on the possibility of a gold mine in the desert outside the city, which was being explored by some English company that had just hired forty day laborers and carted them off to begin work. With his napkin Louis rubbed his knife, spoon, and fork. He rubbed them hard. Pasteur had been very specific about silverware. Louis told his dinner companion that his mother, who lived in Amiens, made very fine soup out of lamb bones. Every time he looked down the table at the woman’s daughter, he felt almost ill. A weakness in his muscles, a melancholy of enormous proportions, swept over him. It was here that he discovered that yearning was not entirely a pleasurable condition. He had discovered that the greatness of the mountain, the snowdrifts clinging to its side, the shadows of passing clouds, the rise and fall of green valley, the ridge of evergreens upright toward the sky—these things, because of their very immensity, the way they dwarf the human observer, seem to tear at the mind most unkindly, hinting at unattainable bliss, leaving trails of sadness behind like the lifting morning mist. This same sweet sadness Louis Thuillier experienced at the consulate’s dinner table along with the taste of the meringue that crumbled in his plate, surrounded by raspberries soaked in cinnamon, pricked with cardamom. He left his dessert wine untouched. He could not wipe the rim without the risk of staining his napkin with wine.

“We need,” said Roux, “gas and water, and an oven easily available. We need space for our animal subjects. We want to start immediately.”

The consul smiled agreeably. Everyone wanted something from him. Everyone expected him to deal with the authorities, to explain, to arrange. This new group would be tiresome.

“We hear so much of your great Pasteur,” said the consul.

Louis was pleased with this remark. Edmond ignored it. He was eating his second, or perhaps it was his third, dessert. There was a trace of crème fraiche on the edge of his mustache. Roux understood that the consul would help, but was not eager.

“I have seen too much of this cholera,” said the doctor, who was a member of the Committee of Public Safety, a recently formed group of well connected Alexandrians.

“How many?” asked Louis.

“We don’t count the dead, unless they are Europeans,” said the doctor, “but among the natives, the dock workers, the sailors, the girls who amuse them, we have an uncomfortable number. The telegraph office at the west end of Boulevard Ramleh has lost two of its managers, the Banque Imperiale Ottomane has lost four vice presidents. The nuns at the Convent of St. Catherine have lost more than ten sisters. Our cook tells us that her cousins are leaving Alexandria and returning to the countryside. The hospital has devoted a floor to the patients who come in by the hour. However, many die within the hour, so we are not overcrowded. I have considered sending my wife and daughter to my wife’s cousin in Germany, but they refuse to go. We are alarmed but not yet panicked.”

“I understand,” said Roux.

“And the dogs and the cats?” said Nocard. “Are they suffering as well? Are there many strays? Are they kept as pets? Have they had many rabies cases? Are the puppies well formed at birth?” The doctor was himself uninterested in animals. The wife of the consul general, Madame Cecile Girard, leaned forward to look more closely at Nocard. She liked a man who understood that animals are God’s creatures, too. “Monsieur Nocard,” she said, “my dog is well and my cat is planning on having kittens any minute now.”

“That’s good, Madame,” said Nocard.

“Personally,” said the consul general, “I don’t like the cat. She leaves hair on the cushions.”

“I myself,” said the doctor to Emile, “believe that the air is foul in this city. The air is the most likely source of the cholera.”

“How would that be, sir?” asked Louis.

“It just is,” said the doctor.

“Pasteur—” Louis began.

“Yes, I know Pasteur thinks that invisible little organisms cause our troubles. Perhaps he is right. We wait for proof,” said the doctor, slapping the young man on the back in a friendly manner.

Nocard supplied seeds for a parrot that flew free about his garden and would come when called. The bird spent the cold winter months on the shelf above the stove. Nocard felt a kinship with animals of all kinds, guinea pigs, hamsters, rodents, squirrels, and, above all, cats and dogs. When he put his big hands around their rib cages, and listened to their beating hearts, allowing wet noses and moist tongues to touch his face, he felt true love, accompanied by a desire to serve the beasts in all matters. If his passion was not tempered by scientific curiosity and a willingness to do anything to pursue the truth, he would have been an unpleasantly sentimental man. He was, however, able to cut, tear, nip, and cause great pain to the very creatures he nestled against his chest. The only sign of strain was an occasional tic in his eye.

Este had noticed the young man who was seated next to her mother. She had admired his long, slender fingers. She had liked the way he inclined his head toward whoever was speaking. She liked the way he pulled at the lip of his pipe, seriously, carefully, as if the pipe itself deserved a certain courtesy. His eyes were dark and his face intense. A few gentle curls rested on the back of his collar and bounced about with each step he took. He stared hard at everything, as if he had never been to a dinner before. She was sure he was a poet as well as a scientist.

When the men rejoined the women, Madame Girard brought her Persian cat, named Apple, into the room and placed him on Nocard’s lap. Nocard appreciated the cat’s spectacular fur and her fine sharp teeth and he felt the fetuses within. “All’s well,” he said, “six of them I think, the birth should be without complication.”

Madame Girard then told him the name of the most distinguished veterinarian in Alexandria, as well as the name of the stable in town where the consul kept his horse and carriage.

“We must talk more. You should have dinner at my home,” the doctor said to the three scientists.

“We would like that,” said Louis. He would. He pulled at the stem of his pipe. A certain nervousness had come over him. He had trouble keeping the fire going. He hoped none of the other men noticed his difficulty.

Louis wandered over to the bookcase, where Este was talking with the consul’s wife about Lord Cromer, the new British governor, whose not-so-private affair with the Egyptian wife of a prominent member of the shooting club was a subject at every gathering, at least among the women. The consul’s wife crossed to the other side of the room. It was time to leave the young people alone. Este turned to Louis and said in perfect French, “Monsieur, what do you see in the sky when you wake up in the morning?”

What kind of question was this? Louis considered his answer carefully. “I see if it is likely to rain or not.”

“I meant,” said Este, with a hint of impatience in her voice, “the colors. What do you see above your head?”

“I see,” said Louis, “whatever is above my head, blue, gray, the atmosphere. It doesn’t arrive in surprising shades.”

Este tried again. “When you look at the stars, what do you see?”

Whatever did she want him to say? Louis tried to give her the answer she was looking for. “The stars are far away. We see them in different parts of the sky as the earth moves around the sun.”

“I know that,” said Este. “The stars, when I look at them, make me afraid. They seem so cold and indifferent.”

“They probably are,” said Louis, “indifferent. I’m not sure about cold. They could be hot like our sun.”

Este gave up.

Well, he wasn’t a poet. She had always wanted to meet a real poet, or at least a man with poetry in his heart. That was not the man before her. She turned away from him and joined her mother, who was extolling the virtues of her seamstress to the wife of the owner of a steamship company. For his part, Louis found her peculiar. He had no further interest in her.

Two flights below the drawing room, the undersized Arab boy who was a relative of the cooks was washing the dishes as they arrived from the dining room. He was standing on a stool so he could reach the sink. The water came from a pail he had to fill and refill from a large jar. Carefully he placed the wine goblets with their gold-leafed rims into the water. Suddenly his hands shook as he reached for the next glass. He leaned against the edge of the sink and cried out in pain. He fell to the floor, staining himself, writhing in brown fluid and calling to God to save him. He was carried down to the servants’ quarters, where he was left alone to face his maker. Another Arab boy mopped the floor, not as thoroughly as he might have.

WHILE LOUIS WAS dining at the consul’s table, Marcus was making friends with the few remaining maids in the hotel. Young girls plucked from their village homes, still full of memories of wading in the Nile, walking through the high grass behind the goat, listening at night to the rain on the thatched roof, wearing little, carrying baby brothers and sisters on their backs. The maids, now far from home, uniformed, clung to each other at night, stroking hair, petting, leaning one female body against another. Marcus had found them in the laundry. He followed them back to their dormitory room, where there were so many cots that each girl had to walk over the beds of the others to lie down. They had startled eyes and rough hands from the washing they did every day, but a swinging of their hips revealed that they had not abandoned all hope for pleasures. Marcus spoke no Arabic. Their French was confined to
merci
and
oui.
This was sufficient for the encounter Marcus enjoyed on the top floor in a tiny room in which brooms and rags had been stored. It was sufficient to restore Marcus’s full confidence in his good fortune, and to allow him to find his land legs.

When Louis knocked on his door, intending to remind him to wake early, Marcus was not in his room. Marcus in fact had fallen asleep in the bed of one of the maids, who had caught him in her arms and pulled down his trousers and played with him as if he were a toy.

IN THE EARLY morning, as the sun was pushing itself up over the waters of the Mediterranean, while waiting for Roux and Nocard to join him, while a sharp ray of light lingered on the rooftop of the loading shed at the end of the wharf, Louis Thuillier enjoyed a very pleasant breakfast on the terrace of the hotel, watching the carts of the merchants, piled high with fruits and chickens and almonds and baskets of figs, pass by on their way to the bazaar. His equilibrium had returned.

Nocard went off to the stable, wanting to check the condition of the horses and perhaps obtain some saliva samples to culture. He stopped at the market on his way to purchase some carrots for the beasts. He kept his gloves on while he held the carrots, even though they were wrapped in brown paper. The carrots looked innocent, orange and plump, with the normal bumps along the tips, but Nocard knew that a raw carrot might be as dangerous as a sharp knife.