An Imperfect Lens (7 page)

“Papa,” said Este, “what can we do so we won’t get the sickness?”

Another man might have said,
Pray.
Still another might have said,
Take the boat to Istanbul.
A third might have said that her fears were exaggerated, most everyone would be fine, but Dr. Malina said calmly, “This is the world we live in. We share it with cholera.”

“That’s intolerable,” said Lydia.

“Yes, it is,” said Dr. Malina. “But, my dear, don’t we have a dessert to serve with this meal?”

Lydia signaled the maid. The dessert, a pastry of honey and cream, was served and the conversation turned to a performance of
Hamlet
by a touring German company at the Zizinia Theater, which was said by the reviewer in the
Express
to be more remarkable than last year’s
Comedy of Errors
by the same troupe.

After dinner, coffee was served in small cups with gold handles.

“My son,” said Dr. Malina to Louis, “would have enjoyed meeting you. I am sorry he is not here.”

Envy of the absent son sprang unwanted into Louis’s brain. He pushed it away, but in its trail a longing came for his own father who had never left Amiens, who had taken his Sunday meal at his sister’s for over thirty-five years, and who believed that doctors were charlatans, only after a man’s purse.

“My son,” Dr. Malina said, “is looking for business opportunities. He plans to make a fortune. He is a romantic, my son, in a world that little tolerates romantics. You, on the other hand, I can tell, you are not a romantic.”

“I leave the dreaming to others,” Louis said. That was not completely true, although it was the answer that pleased Dr. Malina.

In fact Jacob had not gone to Palestine entirely of his own free will. He had been a student at the university, studying the law. Ismail Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, had spent his money so foolishly, on so many massive palaces and grand gestures, that the treasury was bankrupt and Ismail had to sell the Egyptian shares in the Suez Canal for a fraction of their worth. The great powers of Europe feared that Egypt would fall into financial ruin and political chaos. Due to political and military defeats, debts were owed each year to the Turkish sultan. Debts were owed to other European banks. Pressure was put on Ismail Pasha and he agreed— bitterly, one imagines—to leave Egypt and transfer the power to his son, Tewfik Pasha, who would do whatever the foreign powers expected of him. In June of 1879, Ismail went by carriage from Cairo to Alexandria and then out onto the quay. He stepped into his yacht, the
Mahroussa,
and sailed away. The
Mahroussa
was furnished with large Goebelin tapestries, depicting bloody battles in delicate embroidery, Italian marble tables, mirrors with gold frames, mosaics with rubies and emeralds, and mother-of-pearl decorations. The problem was that many who were on the quay, many who saw the ship being loaded, many who did the loading, many who in the darkness of the night walked across the ship’s decks before it sailed, knew that the pasha had, in addition to the ornaments already in the yacht, stripped Egypt of many bars of gold, of gilt mirrors, of jewels of great value, of rare antiquities, of gold candelabra, of vases made of mother-of-pearl, of a fortune’s worth of Egyptian treasure. Rumors abounded, and Jacob published a signed piece in the university’s student paper about the theft of the heritage of Egypt, accompanied by the looting of the treasury of cash, bonds, and stocks by the former pasha. It was a bold piece, full of a young man’s righteousness. It contained a call for restitution and a plea for a government unburdened by corrupt officials, royalty or not. It was seen by some as a support of Arab nationalism, and by others as treason. It would have been wiser not to write or publish such a piece.

The Malina family was visited two days after its publication by the Egyptian police, who were prepared to take Jacob away. Lydia had cried, and Este had stood by her brother’s side, holding his hand. Abraham Malina promised to bring his son into court the following morning. He also went to his vault and withdrew a bundle of banknotes, which he gave to his suddenly very polite visitors. In the night he visited the chief of police, and it was arranged that Jacob was to leave Alexandria within days and never return. Never, as Abraham Malina, explained to his son, doesn’t mean never, it means until political events turn again. A week later, Jacob sailed. Abraham Malina said to his son, “If you have opinions of any sort, write to us, not to the papers.” Father and son embraced. It had been a sad parting.

Este leaned toward Eric Fortman. She had noticed his straight back, his dark and somewhat bloodshot eyes that spoke of rum and gambling and late nights. What good stories he would have to tell, if she could get them out of him. “Come to the concert with us tomorrow night,” she said. “It will be Mozart and it will be lovely, and they serve tea and cakes afterward.”

How could he do that, he thought to himself, his pockets were empty. He could not let these people pay for him, even at a concert. These Jews were not very practical people, he thought to himself. But he was wrong. Mrs. Malina had already figured out what to do with Eric Fortman.

It was a hot night, the shutters were open to the street. The light that had been in the Pharos had been extinguished over a year ago by the British shells, but the lamps were lit on the balconies of the yellow stone houses, and on the floors made of timber brought by ship from the forests of Lebanon lay carpets of orange and blue and crimson, swirls and diamonds, vines and berries, carried from Asia in long, slow caravans. The fountains in the courtyards below sent streams of water into the basins made of stone quarried from the banks of the upper Nile. Inside the Malina apartment, Louis heard sounds of carriages going by, wheels turning on the stones. He heard a group of boys heading out to a café, their harsh laughter rising to the terrace above, a vendor of orange drinks called out to his customers as he pushed his cart along. The clip-clop of donkey hooves receded down the street.

The moon had risen, a simple sliver in the still-pale sky above Lake Mariout. Louis went out on the terrace. Along rue Sultan Hussein the street lamps were lit. At the Café Noir, beneath a large poster of the pasha, men sat at little tables that spilled out along the sidewalk, under the arches that led to more cafés, more mosaics on the floor, more coffee urns, more water pipes with their long stems, smoke billowing up in the draft reaching the terrace across the street. Louis could, if he leaned off the balcony far enough, see the round window of the Orthodox synagogue. He could not see its great red door. The sound of backgammon chips, or was it crickets in the marshes by the lake, floated up toward the starlit sky. In the back of the café the men were playing billiards. Louis smelled the salt of the sea, only a quarter of a mile away, lapping against the barriers of the Eastern Harbor, gently rolling the ships that waited in port. The drinks on the tables down the street were pale ambers and greens, and the glasses were shaped like tulips. There was music from the end of the street, a strange instrument wailed on and on. Louis didn’t like the music. He couldn’t find the melody. It sounded to him as if someone was moaning.

Beneath the balcony on rue Sultan Hussein a man walked slowly, slowed by the Alexandrian heat, slowed by his own thoughts. It was Dr. Robert Koch, who was this evening concerned about exercising his muscles, keeping fit, keeping his notes in order. He was taking a stroll.

Over by the opposite side of the room, Este stood by Eric Fortman’s side. Smoothing down the satin ribbon at her waist, she said, “What a good night for a drive. We should go to the beach and see if the little insects with their lights in their behinds are crawling in the sand.” Eric had never heard of little insects with such lights. He nodded his head. Este moved closer to him. “See the moon,” she said. “I used to watch it out my window when I was a little girl, and thought it disappeared when I could no longer see it. How stupid of me.”

Mrs. Malina saw her daughter’s back, and she saw the muscles in the man’s neck tighten and she saw her daughter’s hand on his sleeve. She moved quickly. “Este,” she called, “come away from the draft.”

Este replied, “There is no draft, Mama, the air is still,” and did not move.

“Mr. Fortman,” said Mrs. Malina, “I call on you to bring my daughter to my side.” He did so immediately. “Has Este mentioned to you,” said Mrs. Malina, offering Eric a tray with toffee candy wrapped in gold paper, “that her fiancé, Albert, was sorry not to be able to meet you this evening. He had work to do at his bank.”

When her mother turned to Emile to describe to him the joys of swimming at the Alexandria seaside, Este whispered in Eric’s ear, “I am not married yet, so you may talk to me all you like.”

6

MARCUS WAS HAVING a far less pleasant evening. He had taken Masika out for a stroll on the promenade down by the sea. All had begun well enough, with Masika licking her ice with her bright pink tongue and letting some of the sugar water drip down her small and very pointed chin. She was wearing a yellow dress she had made from some curtains the hotel had thrown in the waste bins, and the threads of the dress glittered in the light. The ocean smelled of salt and dead fish washed on the shore and shellfish and orange peels and date pits tossed by Alexandrians off the promenade onto the sand below, and the light of the moon on the water made Marcus dizzy with joy. Perhaps it would be days more before he had to spend real hours in the laboratory, boiling and stirring and stoking the brick oven, feeding the animals and cleaning their filth. Tonight he was as free as a bird, and holding on to his hand was a girl who did not speak French but who laughed at everything he said. Thank God, thanks for the mercy of God, he thought, for unlike his employers he was a believer.

Marcus did not take an ice from the vendor. He was worried that the sweet water would drip on his chin and on his shirt and make him look foolish. He needed one hand to hold Masika by the waist. He needed another hand to wave at the wonders of the boardwalk, the musicians by the café, the old man feeding the birds. So the pair spent the evening in the cool air by the sea, and the moonlight and the lamps from the shops were like invitations to pleasure. Later, when the moon was in the middle of the sky, Marcus found a spot on the sand under the boardwalk. Above them the pair could hear the steps of passersby, their voices rising and falling. He moved slowly. He didn’t want to frighten her away. He slipped his hand over the top of her dress. He felt the smooth skin of her breasts and he reached farther down and found the rising nipples, full and erect. He lay down on the sand with her. She was not without experience. She had liked her experiences. There must be some reward for hours of drudgery in the back-rooms of the hotel. She was not afraid of the baby that might come of such things. It would or it would not happen. The hotel would fire her or they would not. She would return to her village or she would not. Her mother would raise the child or she would not. The future was too far away, too shadowy for concern. At the moment she could only pay attention to the French boy with his curly hair and his big eyes and his hands doing all the right things to make her willing, although she had always been willing.

Her dress did not have many buttons, but they were small. They were cheap and seemed to break in his fingers as he pulled at them. He was concentrating hard on extracting the girl from the folds of material when she cried out in pain. Had he hurt her? He stopped. She had a pain. She pointed to her stomach. She had a cramp, she demonstrated by opening and closing her fist. She smiled at Marcus and he pulled off the dress, picking it up by the hem and gently moving it over her shoulders and then her head. There she was. She had no slip. She had only a cloth wrapped around her important parts. She herself took off the cloth and the two lay next to each other. She shivered, although the air was warm.

Before Marcus could remove his own clothes, she screamed again. She moaned and waved at him to move away. She scrambled to her feet and moved farther back under the boardwalk. Marcus heard a sound, and smelled a foul smell. When Masika came back to him, her thighs were soiled and her eyes were wild and her lips, just a few moments ago so full and succulent, seemed now to be dry and thin. She sat on the sand and panted. “I need to go back to the hotel,” she said. But Marcus, of course, did not understand. He stood there, uncertain. The smell was not an aphrodisiac. She looked at her belly, which was now swollen, and whispered, to no one in particular, the name of the grass used in her village when the stomach turned sour. Marcus didn’t know the word, or the grass. What should I do? He ran sand through his fingers as if he were still a small child.

As he stood there, the illness invaded her intestines. It was sending out its poisons, against which the lining of her stomach was helpless. They entered the stomach wall and served as pumps, pulling fluid from her body, turning everything solid into liquid, creating a flood of liquid that pressed against the walls of her intestines and forced itself out. The illness took over her body like the army of a colonial power, spread out, killed whatever was in its way, and settled itself in groups, in clumps, in prime territory and began rapaciously to mine the area, to claim the reward for its troubles. It reproduced itself a million times. It sucked out minerals. It dried up everything around it. Masika’s heart beat irregularly. Her lips turned blue. The blood could not reach her hands, which curled in pain. Little white flakes of tissue were washed away in its rush downward. Pools of fecal liquid gathered by her hips. He suggested she go wash in the sea. He showed her with gestures and walked himself to the water’s edge and back again to illustrate his point. She understood him but seemed unable to stand. She tried to crawl forward. She was hit again by another spasm. This time she did not move away.

Marcus did not know what to do. He could get help from someone on the boardwalk, but then he would have to explain what he was doing with a naked Alexandrian girl. Was it a crime in this country to make love to a girl on a beach under the boardwalk? What would his employers say? Would they send him back to Paris, and then what would become of him? All these thoughts kept him in one place as the girl vomited and sweated and seemed to be running a fever. He would have held her hand, but he was afraid of her now. He didn’t want to touch her.

An hour passed, and Marcus had retreated up to the boardwalk. It was now well past midnight, and there were few people in sight. A man and woman in fashionable clothes that might be seen in Paris. A man with a cigar, brooding at the water’s edge, a group of small boys pulling something they had just taken from somewhere, laughing to each other, smoking cigarettes whose ends glowed in the dark as the group passed Marcus. The shops had closed. The stars were moving in the sky in their orderly manner, constellation by constellation, Milky Way spilling down over the dome of heaven and underneath the boardwalk. Masika had lost more water than a body can lose, she had emptied her bowels and then again and again until only thin water emerged and she sobbed to herself, and prayed to her God, and asked for her mother. She knew she had done wrong, terrible wrong, and was being punished. What had she done? She had no idea. The odor around her rose, although she no longer cared. The smell was of bad eggs, old garbage, dead creatures stuck in the corners of the hotel floor-boards, a spoiled-fish smell, and something else, worse than all those put together, a smell that would make a passerby choke. Above her, Marcus, watching the iridescent insects spring through the sand, appear and disappear with the blink of his eyes, grew faint as he attempted to breathe only through his mouth. She was alone and grew weaker, and then, while Marcus leaned on the railing above, a lone figure on the deserted, late-night boardwalk, she died, covered in her own body liquids. There was sand in her hair and under her fingernails and grains of sand stuck to the sweat of her skin. With the first sign of dawn in the sky, Marcus went back to the hotel. He didn’t look under the boardwalk. He knew what he would find. He felt ill himself, tired and frightened and wanting forgiveness, but for what exactly he wasn’t sure.

AFTER THEY HAD returned to their hotel room, Roux wrote a long letter to his wife. All was well, the laboratory space had been arranged at the European Hospital. The next day they were moving into an apartment nearby that had been given to them by the French consulate. Madame Cecile Girard herself had arranged for the comforts of home, sent her maid to stock the kitchen and air out the bedrooms. Emile and Edmond would share the larger one; Louis would take the smaller. Alexandria was hot and dirty. On every corner, at the doorposts, there were beautiful clay pots filled with huge red flowers whose name he did not know. He would have the concierge mail his letter in the morning. Roux lit the gas under the copper plate on which he had placed a small amount of mercury. He didn’t want to fill the room with toxic fumes, but a small amount would protect them, might protect them, was better than no protection at all, probably. The small flame glowed in the dark. Nocard, who had accepted all offers of wine and brandy, fell into his bed with his clothes on and wheezed so loudly that Roux shook him awake several times, but then, exhausted himself, he let the man snore and ignored all but his own night visions.

Louis had checked Marcus’s room again when he returned to the hotel and had knocked with all his might on the door, loud enough to wake the dead, he thought. No Marcus. He went to his room and fell on his bed. He wanted a glass of water, but was too tired to light the lamp and heat the glass that rested on the lip of the basin, so he ignored his thirst.

Nevertheless, sleep did not come. It wasn’t the heat. The night had cooled the temperature in his room. It wasn’t Nocard’s heavy breathing that kept him awake. The wine he had drunk had been more than he was accustomed to. He had never liked the poetry they had read in school. It seemed to him without use or valuable information. Was it perhaps a sign of ignorance on his part? Should he have read Baudelaire? Did he care if Este thought he was ignorant? He did not. With that thought, he fell asleep. In the early morning he awoke to the calls to prayer from the mosque at the square. He listened to the strange words with their mournful reminder that man is not in control of his fate, and he bolted upright with hunger. Yes, he needed breakfast, a good breakfast, and then he would be ready for work.

THE CHILDREN OF the cabana cleaner, three of them, who lived with their father in the hut behind the rows of cabanas that led to the boardwalk above the sea, rose early in the morning and went down to the sand to see if anyone had dropped some coins, some treasure, a handkerchief, a piece of candy still wrapped in colored paper, a letter, a pin. They raced across the sand and then stopped as they smelled something foul. They followed the smell beneath the gray wooden boards, a little away from the steps, and saw a girl, a naked girl, lying with her lips blue, her arms spread, her body limp, and over her thighs and in pools beside her was the watery substance that had belonged to her when she lived. The oldest child had a good heart and stepped near the girl and took off her own small shawl and draped it over the girl’s exposed parts. In doing so she stepped in the mud beside the body and she brushed at it with her hand. The children all ran to tell their father, who came running down the steps. He reported the body to the local police. When the police did come and found no identification on the girl, only a dress some yards away, now stained and torn and wet from the dampness of the sea, they put her into a cart and took her off to the burial grounds for paupers and indigents, where her remains were thrown in a pit without ceremony or pause.

The cabana keeper’s daughter had her breakfast, which, as always, consisted of a piece of round bread with a quarter of an apple, and she ate the bread with her hands, and a piece of the apple’s peel got stuck between her teeth and she put her fingers in her mouth to release it.

Her small body held on longer than one might think possible.

Masika’s mother had walked with her daughter down to the road that led to Akubir and from there to Alexandria. Word had come back to the village that girls could work in hotels and make more money in a week than their families could gather in a year. It wasn’t quite true, this rumor, but it led many girls who were not yet married, who had fed the cow and petted the dog and carried baby brothers and sisters on their hips, to imagine other things.

Masika’s mother had a story she told herself each night. It was about her daughter, who one morning serves coffee in his room to a widowed merchant from Cairo who finds her shy smile the solution for his heartsickness and buys her a ring and gold bracelets and promises her servants and riches if she will marry him, and Masika, with joy in her heart, embraces the merchant. The Goddess Isis, who is perhaps one of Muhammad’s wives, has arranged all this in return for Masika’s mother’s constant devotion. When Masika’s mother had seen her daughter walk until her back disappeared in the rising dust made by her footprints, when she could no longer make out the small pack of belongings her child carried on her shoulder, she had wept. It is not true that because you are poor and have more mouths to feed than food to feed them, each child is not inked into your story, indelible ink, ink that stains, writing on and on in the most illiterate of mothers’ minds. Human beings are not cats, to let their litter range out into the world without another thought. For Masika’s mother there was a grieving for her child that would never go away, a grieving that had nothing to do with Masika’s death, which the mother could not know of, because who would tell her, who there in the large city of Alexandria would know that Masika lay in the pit? The hotel manager assumed she’d run away. Because of the lack of tourists, he did not hire another girl in her place. When one of the other girls, the one who spoke French, asked Marcus if he knew where Masika was, he told her to mind her own business. Masika vanished from Alexandria with the same fanfare that had accompanied her arrival.