An Imperfect Lens (27 page)

“The French,” said Este, “are no longer the masters here.” She stared at the officer. “I will go in. I will sit in the drawing room. You will know where I am. You will not have to worry about me.” She held her head at an angle as she said these things.

The officer saw the shine in her eyes and her very fortunate face. “Mademoiselle,” he said, “do not move about the house. Just sit in one room.”

He put up his arm to block Louis from following her.

“Go,” said Este. “I will wait for my mother. She will return soon. I will send word to you.”

As she walked toward the stairs, Louis called out to her, “Come back to the laboratory with me.” She did not turn around.

“I’ll find you wherever you are,” he called out to her back.

The Arab maid, Layla, not the one who had changed Este’s bed, drawn her bath, ironed her dresses for the last three years, but the one who helped cook in the kitchen, who cleaned the pots and the pans, stood in the drawing room with her battered suitcase in her hand. She looked at Este as if she had returned from the dead. Este put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “It’s all right,” she said.

The girl told her that the soldiers had ordered her to leave. “But go where, where, Mademoiselle?” she said in a tiny voice.

“Go to my aunt’s,” said Este. “She will find a place for you. Tell her what has happened. Go right away.”

The girl put down her suitcase. “No,” said Este, “take your suitcase.”

“What can I do for you?” asked the girl. Este was going to say there was nothing, nothing to be done, but then she thought of something she wanted to do.

“The soldiers will let you go through the house. Go to my room and get my Ganesh. My little elephant. It was on the dressing table, but perhaps it has fallen on the floor. Take it to the European Hospital on Boulevard Ismail Pasha, ask on the street and anyone will tell you where it is. When you get there, ask the way to the laboratory where the scientists are working on the cholera and give the elephant to the young Frenchman. Not the older one with a big mustache, not the other one who has many pounds on him, but the one named Louis. Give it to Louis from me. He will understand. Can you do this?”

The little Arab girl felt calmness return to her heart. There was something for her to do, to put right all that seemed wrong.

“And after you have done this, you must go to my aunt’s. She will take care of you.” Este wrote down on a piece of paper the address of her aunt. The girl took the paper, but held it upside down. Este then told her the address, made her repeat it three times. The Arab girl went into Este’s room and, amid the disorder, began to search for the little elephant. It was not on the dressing table. It was not in the sheets that had been pulled from the bed. It was not under the pillow. But at last she found it, beside one of the shoes that had been swept from a shelf in the closet. She wrapped the elephant in a handkerchief that she found in the back of a drawer. She picked up Este’s gold chain and some red beads and a few pairs of earrings and put the jewelry back in the pink box where it belonged, and then put the box in the drawer where it belonged. She would not rob the dead. She went to Este, who was sitting still in the drawing room, staring at nothing in particular, letting her mind drift to other times. She picked up her suitcase, said she would go with the elephant to the hospital as she had been asked, and went quickly out of the room. Este walked to the terrace and leaned over the railing until she could no longer see the girl. Would Louis understand that the Ganesh was a pledge, as good as a promise, or would he think her ridiculous to send him a child’s toy? This elephant had traveled to her all the way across the oceans from India, and while she did not consider her Ganesh a god, she was fond of him just the same.

She should have insisted that the soldiers let Louis come into the house with her; she needed him now, and he was not here. Please, please, Mama, come back; silently she chanted the words over and over as if words had power, as if words could change the way things were, as if she were not alone in the house. What had happened? Had Jacob done something in Jerusalem? Had her father angered someone at the Committee of Public Safety? She could hardly sit still, rushing from the window to the chair to the table and back again. At last she reminded herself, I am not a child. She used all her strength and pushed away fear. Her father would find a solution. The misunderstanding would be cleared up. Her mother would return soon. And then, as she soothed herself, steadied herself, she thought of Louis, his arm extended to help her out of the carriage. His eyes, black and alert, looking at her as if he had known her all his life, as if an ocean had not separated them until just a few months ago. She thought of all the things he knew and would teach her. She saw herself in his laboratory in Paris, looking at the oven, the gas tubes, Monsieur Pasteur himself greeting her. She thought of him next to her in the train from Marseille, and then, despite all, she put her head on the pillow and stretched out on the divan. She considered her luck in meeting him. What if the cholera had broken out in Istanbul or Athens instead of Alexandria? Soon she was humming her favorite aria from
La Traviata
and feeling drowsy as well. But then she remembered her father, her mother, the empty house. When would her mother return? She became uneasy as she sat up straight in a chair, as if someone, something dangerous, were in the shadows. Where was her father?

ROBERT KOCH WAS staring at his drawings. It was frustrating to have come so close and then to have to pack up and leave because the disease itself seemed to have departed. Dr. Koch sat down in his chair and rubbed his hands; sometimes they cramped in a painful spasm when he had been working too long. He looked through his papers. A diversion might help his fingers. He cleaned his glasses and then cleaned them again. He would have to go down to the Nordeutscher steamship company and book passage. He felt weary. He knew a good deal of traveling lay ahead. A man prefers his own home to all others, and in this Dr. Koch was no exception. He shuffled through his papers and found one that had slipped between two others and one unnoticed up until now. It contained an early record written by Gaspar Correa, under the title
Lendas da India.

“. . . a high mortality observed during the spring of the year 1503
in the army of the sovereign of Calicut was enhanced by the current
small pox besides which there was another disease, sudden-like, which
struck with pain in the belly so that a man did not last out eight hours’
time and an outbreak in the spring of 1543 of a disease called moryxy
by the local people, the fatality rate of which was so high that it was
di ficult to bury the dead. So grievous was the throe and so bad of a sort
that the very worst of poison seemed to take e fect as proved by vomiting with drought of water accompanying it as if the stomach were
parched and cramps that fixed in the sinews of the joints and of the flat
of the foot with pain so extreme that the su ferer seemed at point of
death; the eyes dimmed to sense and the nails of the hands and feet
black and arched.”

LAYLA STARTED OUT for the hospital with the handkerchief that held the little Ganesh in her apron pocket. She was holding her suitcase by its worn straps. It was an old, battered leather bag that had been given to her by her uncle who had traveled to Mecca one year and had no intention of ever leaving his bedroom in his sister’s house again. She had taken the coins that Este had pressed into her hand, but would not have thought that she should use them to pay for a donkey to carry her there.

She was crossing rue Rosette when a donkey boy with a shirt that flapped over his torn shorts called to her. “Ride, ride,” he said.

She shook her head and kept on walking, although the weight of the suitcase made her walk slowly and pause every now and then to regain her strength. The boy stood in front of her.

“Let me pass,” she said to him.

“Don’t be unkind,” he said. “I’ll take you for free.”

“For free?” she said. She looked at him carefully. She had heard of girls being taken and sold to slavers, or sold to the brothels where they would be locked in rooms and given opium until they lost their minds. She said, “No, no, thanks, I can make it myself.”

But the boy didn’t move. “See,” he said, “my donkey likes you. He wants to carry you through the city. My donkey is very wise and he knows a good girl when he sees one.”

She tried to suppress the smile that came to her face, but only partially succeeded. The boy moved closer. She could smell him. The sweet, heavy smell from his sweat, the cod he had had for lunch, the leeks that covered it. She noticed he had good teeth. Her arms were tired. “All right,” she said. “But go right to the European Hospital. I am on an important errand.”

The boy helped her mount the donkey. He put her suitcase in a pack at the donkey’s side and he walked along beside her. “There, isn’t that better?” he said.

It
was
better. She was riding along, listening to the clop of the donkey’s hooves and the sound of the boy talking to her about some dog he had lost and she heard the muezzin’s call and she felt the heat of the day on her neck and she saw that her blouse was wet with perspiration and stained brown from the dust. That was all right, she felt that she was lucky and that her luck would hold.

Outside the back entrance to the hospital, the Arab girl dismounted from the donkey. The boy put his hands on her waist to help her down. There was no one on the narrow street. “One kiss,” asked the donkey boy. “Just one, for the ride.” He smiled at her.

“One kiss,” she agreed.

He pushed her against the side of the building and took his kiss. She did not find it unpleasant, and held her face forward for a second kiss. The boy felt her breasts under her blouse. “Ah,” he sighed, “we could have such fun together.”

“No,” said the girl. “I have to go.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Later, maybe,” she said.

“Now,” he insisted.

The donkey stood placidly by, waiting to be run again. Inside the hospital, someone was pouring water on the floors and the water was seeping out toward the door, around which a puddle had already gathered. The boy put his hands all over the girl’s body and she twisted and turned, more in pleasure than in despair. He pulled at the strings of her apron and it fell to the ground. The handkerchief in her pocket fell into the mud. The loosely wrapped Ganesh followed.

“Look what you’ve done!” shouted the girl. How long had the Ganesh been floating in the slop by the door before she noticed it? She picked it up, checking its small trunk, its tiny tusks, and its long tail. All were in place. She wrapped it again in the now-soiled handkerchief.

“Wait for me,” she said to the donkey boy, and entered the hospital. She asked the woman with a bucket of water washing down the floors the way to the Frenchmen’s laboratory. She pointed. Layla knocked on the door. She entered. “Louis, Louis?” she asked in a soft, shy voice.

“Me,” said Louis, pointing to his chest.

She handed him the handkerchief and the drenched Ganesh that lay within it. “From my Mistress Este,” she said.

The name Este was all he needed. He clasped the handkerchief tightly. He understood. It was a message.

“What has happened?” he asked.

The Arab girl shook her head. She spoke no French. She left, and Louis took the Ganesh out of the handkerchief and held it in his hand, cradled it in each palm. It meant more to him than the watch of his grandfather that had been given to him on his graduation from the École Normale.

“Let’s see,” said Nocard. Louis opened his hand.

“She sent you a toy?” said Emile.

“No,” said Louis. “It’s not a toy.” He turned his back on his friends. He didn’t want to talk about it. This was a private matter.

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY in Alexandria had existed long before Muhammad mounted his horse and rode into the clouds. It had arrived with the first boats from the Mediterranean ports, carrying bolts of cloth and barrels of iron ore to the continent of Africa, to the upper Nile, to the far edges of the empires of military men who pulled along behind their battles, traders and scribes, scholars, and holy men. The Jewish community in Alexandria was well aware of the exiles and burnings and disasters that had befallen their brethren elsewhere. Although they themselves had survived the centuries with only an occasional burning of their homes and businesses, they were always anxious to please whatever new ruler took the throne.

The chief rabbi had always believed that emergencies would arrive and help might be needed for members of his congregation. He had carefully won the respect of the Coptic archbishop at the cathedral in the rue de L’Église, who was enjoying studying the Talmud in the chief rabbi’s study on Tuesday evenings. He had managed to persuade the vicar of the Latin Patriarchate of the Cathedral of St. Catherine to join him in a campaign for orphans of the Arab quarter. He had befriended a wealthy member of the Church of England whom he had met at the home of a congregant whose daughter had married an Englishman. The two men were both interested in Greek drama and had formed a group to read the plays in their original language. The Minister of Health had a son who had married a Jewish girl. She had converted, of course, and now attended the Armenian church, but her father-in-law would be willing to assist, or so the chief rabbi assumed.

LYDIA ACCOMPANIED THE chief rabbi on his rounds. She was left in the vestibule of the archbishop’s residence to stand and wait. She was at last ushered into the room where the prelate sat on a purple cushion placed on a high wooden chair carved with flowers and berries. She curtsied before the archbishop. He said nothing to her but waved her aside. She was sent back out into the hallway. Then the chief rabbi hurried out, and they climbed back into the carriage and went on. In the home of a wealthy congregant she was sent to the kitchen for a cup of tea. In the residence of the Coptic priest a little boy offered her a sweet while she waited on the front steps. When they visited the German consulate, she was asked to speak about her husband’s virtues as a doctor and a father. She spoke with simple sincerity. She told the assembled attachés that her husband responded to all who needed him and that he would be a good and loyal citizen wherever he lived. She told the men sitting in front of her that her cousin lived in Freiburg. She spoke of his innocence of the accusation. He had never conspired with his son to bring harm to the authorities in Alexandria. She wept as she spoke. The chief rabbi was fluent in German and translated as well as improved her words. She was sent back outside to wait in the carriage while the men talked and talked. At last the chief rabbi, looking pleased with himself, emerged from the building. He ordered the carriage back to the synagogue, where he told Lydia to wait on the steps. The sun was hot on her head. She felt dizzy. Meanwhile he went into his safe and withdrew the necessary funds.