An Imperfect Lens (12 page)

All three Frenchmen had grown used to Este’s questions. When had the cholera first appeared in Alexandria? They told her what they had been told by Pasteur. Cholera had appeared in Egypt in April. It appeared first at a fair in Damietta, which was situated at one of the mouths of the Nile not far from Port Said, or perhaps it came on the ships that stopped at Amsterdam. Or were the pilgrims returning from Mecca once again responsible?

How did it travel? Louis could not give Este a firm answer. Cholera had been carried to Alexandria by some means. It was not on these shores a year ago, or five years ago. He needed to consider its means of transportation. It could have come by ship, of course. Could it have come from the desert on the sand on a man’s sandals? It could also have been carried in the clouds and spilled on the city by rain. Was that possible? Had anyone considered that possibility? He doubted it. He would check the rainwater. “Emile,” he asked, “could it be in the rain?”

Emile did not have an immediate response. He was silent for a few minutes. The idea did not seem right to him, but he had learned that a careful demonstration was better than his instincts, which had their limitations. “Why not?” he said.

Louis went into the alley outside the hospital’s surgical ward and followed the line of gutter pipe. He climbed on the windowsill and from there pulled himself up on the slanting rooftop. In the pipe he saw some leaves, with bird droppings and rainwater clinging to them. He scooped up the debris and attempted to climb down. It was slippery on the roof. He had only one hand to grasp the red tiles. He moved very carefully and slowly. A seagull circled above, perhaps curious or perhaps sighting something edible below.

Back in their laboratory, his coattails soaked with dirt and his hands covered with slime, he put his prize down on the lab table and proceeded to take drops of the water and place them on glass and peer at them through the microscope. He saw a small mite with wings. He recognized the mite. It was not cholera. He saw nothing move, nothing swim, but it was hard to make out the forms on his glass because the water was dark and viscous from the disintegrating membranes of the leaves. It might be in there, his prize. He took drop after drop and examined it. He used Pasteur’s filter, removing the larger forms like twig and leaf and worm remains. Hours went by. Este went out and returned with some cheese and a pastry. Emile was placing a culture of rabbit feces and boiled water in a jar. What might grow? Louis didn’t want to stop to eat. He saw nothing. How was he to get the water clear of the leaves? He must find the microbe alive. He put the water through the filter, which served as a sieve, and pressed out the thickest part of the leafy substance, but the water was still not clear. He threw his gutter water into a barrel and rushed out into the street, calling to Marcus to search the garden of the hotel or to look in the park over by Lake Mariout. He had to find clear rainwater. It had to have gathered somewhere where it was protected from leaves. He walked through the alley. He saw an abandoned chamber pot filled with fluid. Some rainwater had mixed in there, but it was not clear. He walked to the café. He looked out back; perhaps they had discarded a bottle that had filled with rainwater. They had not. He walked toward the wharf, where a fisherman’s bucket that he used for storing fish bones or heads might have been out in the boat and picked up the rain and kept it clear. It would have been easy to find clear rainwater if he hadn’t been looking, wanting it in the way that he did.

On her way home Este came upon a boot, a single boot that was sitting behind a bench. How had the boot been left by its mate? Had a one-legged man decided to go barefoot? Had the leather chafed or pinched the single foot of its owner? This she couldn’t determine, but she took the boot and carefully carried it into her house and into the kitchen, where the maid gave her a glass jar. She took her prize to her room and poured the water in the boot into the jar.

Hours later, as darkness set in and the gas lamps of the cafés at the edge of Lake Mariout flickered and the dancing girls were painting their faces and the women of the city were stirring things on a stove, and smells came from windows of almonds and dates and lamb soaked in thyme, while the feathers of plucked chickens drifted down the gutters of alleyways along with the unwanted parts, necks and feet, livers and spleens, Louis and Roux and Nocard went to the French Café. Louis said to Nocard, “There are no women in this café.”

“There are many woman in this café,” said Nocard.

“I mean no one special.”

The two older men looked at their younger colleague in surprise. Defiantly he looked back. “I mean,” he said, “no one as special as Este Malina.”

There was silence at the table.

LOUIS TOOK DROPS of water from Este’s boot. Would he find the cholera? The water was almost clear; under the glass he saw a few flat shapes that did not move. He looked again and again. He tried different drops. He mixed a blue acid with the water in the hope that the tiny cholera would absorb the dye and stand out clearly. Nothing. He was discouraged. He could not test every drop of rainwater that fell from the sky. The fact that it was not in this shoe did not mean it was not in the rain somewhere, in some part of the city.

How else might it have come to Alexandria? Birds did not fly across oceans. It would not be in birds. But then he considered. Birds drank rainwater. Perhaps cholera did not make them sick but remained in their tissue nevertheless. If the cholera were in the rainwater, perhaps it was also in a bird. “Marcus,” he called, “we are going to look for more dead birds. Perhaps we will shoot some.”

Marcus sighed. He was not happy. “You don’t have a gun,” he said. “You don’t know how to shoot.” Louis’s father had not admired men with guns. He was a man of the town, not the woods.

Louis said, “I don’t think you can just shoot birds in the park. I will get Dr. Malina to go with us. He will know how we can capture a bird.”

“You want to buy a chicken in the market?” Marcus asked.

“No,” said Louis, “I want a wild bird, one that has been drinking from hollows in tree trunks or puddles formed by stones or swallowing water in the lake with his fish.” Suddenly Louis felt certain that he would find cholera in the wild birds. He would see the tiny microbe move across his slide. How would it move? Would it float? Would it have legs? Would it divide itself in two? He would send a telegram to Pasteur announcing his victory.

“Find out,” he said to Marcus, “where we send a telegram. Is there a telegraph office near?”

“You want me to do that now?” asked Marcus.

“Don’t bother me,” said Louis, “I’m thinking.” He was thinking about Este. When she arrived at the laboratory he would tell her about his new hope.

SO IT WAS that Dr. Malina, leaving his house before dawn, accompanied Louis and Marcus along the road to Aboukir. Nocard did not shoot. He had rejected the invitation to join them. Emile wanted to work with his bowl of feces. They crossed the Mahmoudian Canal and took the road alongside the railway tracks, past the grand villas and castle of a former pasha, into the sand and swamps that marked the route to Cairo. They had with them two guns that had belonged to Dr. Malina’s father. These were kept at the shooting club of which Dr. Malina was a member in good standing, even though he had not had time to visit the club for more than half a dozen occasions a year. These not very modern weapons had been handed to two servants to defend the women of the house at the time of the rioting a year before, when the British ships had sent thundering canon balls into the town, blasting the walls of the dike and smashing down the castle that stood on the ground of the great lighthouse, the Pharos that had once been the pride of all Alexandrians.

“The British,” said Dr. Malina, “have no respect for other people’s homes.” Louis easily agreed. “The stones are still crumbling from their clumsy diplomacy,” said Dr. Malina.

Never sorry to hear the British scorned, Louis asked what had happened. Dr. Malina told him, “It was the fault of the followers of General Arabi. They thought they could yell the foreigners out of the land. Arabi inspired them, a false prophet. In the days following the British assault they turned into savages, wild animals. The shopkeepers, the carriage drivers, the cobblers and tobacco salesmen, the porters on the docks, the makers of rope and the spinners of cloth, the servants in the houses, the clerks in the businesses that lined the wharves, all went berserk. Not just the Arabs, but the Italians, and Greeks, and Germans, too, went wild. They took what they wanted in the fires that followed the shelling. Look at the Grand Square, it is hardly itself. The great consulates were reduced to bare walls, and the shops were emptied of goods. They screamed and howled at the sky and they ran through the streets smashing windows. No one was in charge, no one could stop the screaming and the stealing. It was as if the city were trying to eat itself up, to devour its own avenues. There were fires everywhere. I went to the hospital to keep the looters away from our patients and our supplies, but they pushed me over and raided our pantries and carried off blankets and sheets and jars of jelly and pounds of eggs. I looked one of those thieves in the eye and I called him a coward and he hit me in the jaw. Nothing serious, of course.”

“How many were there?” asked Louis.

“Enough,” said Dr. Malina, whose lips were drawn tight in memory. “They tried to burn down our house of worship, but they were stopped.”

The British didn’t come on shore. For many hours they stayed in their boats and watched through their spyglasses. Dr. Malina was not fond of the British. Neither was Louis. This they had in common.

They found a marsh that seemed to stretch out miles in the distance. Long grasses grew by its shore. No sign of human life. A string of birds flew low over the muddy water. “Shoot,” called Marcus. Louis lifted his rifle. He missed. He hesitated. The line of birds went past. They drove a little way farther and the road grew narrow and almost impassable. Dr. Malina got out of the carriage and the three of them sat down on a rock. Two large geese alighted in front of them, unaware of danger, trusting to the breeze in the air, the smell of small fish gathering in pools underneath their feet. Dr. Malina picked up one of the guns and aimed at the birds. The largest one fell first. The second opened its wings in panic and rose on its spindly legs, but it, too, was shot and tipped over into the water, sinking down into the mud.

Marcus was dispatched to get the birds and put them in a pouch. “How did you learn to shoot?” said Louis, who did not think most doctors hunted.

“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.