An Imperfect Lens (9 page)

Lydia and Este went on. Este took off her wet glove and threw it away. It was ruined. When they arrived at the synagogue, they went downstairs to the women’s area, where mothers could stay with children during the services. On a large table, a basin with warm water and soap waited. Este washed her hands well, and then the two women made their way up to the balcony. The service had started. When Este peered down over the railing, she could see a crowd of men covered in white prayer shawls. She could hear the chanting of the words she did not understand. She could see the ark, which was open, and the light from the far window glinting on the silver handles of the Torah. Her father was not among the men downstairs. He was meeting with city officials about the current health emergency. Albert was not there because he never came except on the High Holidays, when it would have been scandalous if he were not there at his father’s elbow.

Este tried to catch Phoebe’s eye. She was sitting two rows behind, and the effort was noticed by all the other women along the bench, one of whom eventually whispered in Phoebe’s ear, who then looked over at her friend and smiled. They all rose and sat down again. They rose up again. They sat down again. The ark was opened. The ark was closed. The ark was opened. The Torah was walked through the congregation, and the men touched it with their shawls and kissed it with their lips. The women watched. Mrs. Malina sighed. Time passed slowly. She apologized to God for her boredom. Este let her mind wander. When she married Albert, she would at last know what other women knew. The mystery would be over. Soon she would have her own children. What would Albert talk about with her at dinner? She hated being bored. Would he be boring?

Lydia insisted that her daughter accompany her to visit a cousin. They spent the whole afternoon discussing wedding dresses, linens from Austria, and the bleak prospects of the cousin’s sons, who were both at the university and not applying themselves to their work. They had nibbled at sweets that the cousin’s cook made in the large kitchen in the back of the building, honey and raisins baked in a crescent shape. Este had tea with mint. Lydia did not like mint, and so skipped the tea. Just as they were about to enter their carriage to return home, they saw Louis and Edmond, who had been to the French consul asking for funds to make additional purchases of chemicals. Their supplies were quickly depleted. Este waved. Lydia grabbed her daughter by the wrist. “You have no interest in these strangers,” she said. Her voice was not sweet as she said these words. Este did not receive them well. She would have interest in whomever she pleased. But this she did not say. There were no further words between them, and the silence in the carriage was not amiable.

ROUX WENT TO the Committee of Public Safety to present the credentials of the French mission to the officials there. Also at the meeting that morning was Dr. Robert Koch. Roux shook his hand and expressed his admiration for the German’s work on anthrax. He relayed Pasteur’s respects. They were rivals, yes, but they were also colleagues. Both Roux and Koch agreed that, based on John Snow’s work in the 1857 cholera outbreak in London, it would be a good idea to keep the city water clean. “And how should we do that?” the president of the council had asked Koch, and Koch had replied, in a weak attempt at a joke, “I am a scientist, not a specialist in aqueducts. For that,” he added, “you need a Roman.”

Roux and Koch agreed. They did not think that burning the clothes of the victims was the answer. They did not think that quarantine would work in a city like Alexandria, where the public was always in motion on bicycles or carriages or moving carts or loading and unloading packages. They didn’t think prostitutes were spreading cholera, but then, neither had any evidence that they were not. Koch invited Roux for a glass of beer after the meeting.

Later that week Koch and his assistant, Gaffkey, had dinner with Emile Roux and Nocard and Louis Thuillier. Louis was prepared not to like the German, but in fact he found that once they started talking about their slides, their cultures, their favorite lenses, their methods of boiling water quickly, the borders that marked off the nations fell, the pride that had separated the two countries so bloodily ten years before seemed trivial. They spoke in French and English. Koch’s French was heavily accented, as was his English. Things had to be repeated several times, nevertheless the men at the table understood each other perfectly. Except that Koch was still determined to find the microbe before his new friends, and the French team was certain that despite the German’s thorough and even engaging ways, the prize would be theirs. What Koch didn’t tell them was that his plan to catch the microbe differed from Pasteur’s in certain important ways. They did discover that he did not have a veterinarian working in his laboratory. “He must handle the animals himself,” said Louis.

“That’s foolish,” said Emile. “He wastes time that way.”

ALBERT WENT TO his father. He said, “I need five thousand francs for the ring.” Achmed had asked for thirty-five hundred, but Albert saw an opportunity and took it. “You don’t want me to show up poorly before the Malinas,” he added.

Albert’s father sighed. He was not convinced that his son was interested enough in hard work, that he would be a success in this cutthroat world. But then the path had already been smoothed for the boy, and he was able to speak many languages and made a very good appearance at the table. “Son,” said the father, “you are a fortunate man, this girl is charming and a dear friend of your sister’s. We have known her most of her life, her character is beyond reproach. Can I say the same for you?” The father smiled to let his son know this was not a criticism, just an idle thought.

“I will honor her,” said Albert, “as you have honored my mother.”

This made the father rise from his seat and go to the window and pull at the curtains. “It is hard,” he said to his son, “with so many females pulling one about to stay loyal. I think it is unnatural, against a man’s nature, to wed for an entire life and pour all his capacities onto one lady’s frail bosom. Our father Abraham,” he said, “had his serving girl, and Jacob had Rachel and Leah and Bilhah and Zilpah, and you, you will not be the first to pay respect to the mother of your children while bringing presents to your friends of the night.”

Albert patted his father on the shoulder. “I’ve learned from you,” he said, “not to be so solemn. Nine commandments are more than enough.”

Albert pocketed the funds and stored them in his shaving kit, where he assumed they would rest peacefully until needed.

“YOU MUST COME downstairs to your father’s office right now,” said the Arab boy as he raced into the drawing room. “Your father wants you now.”

Este was sitting at a small desk, about to write a letter to her brother, telling him of her engagement. She had never before been summoned to her father’s office. She followed the Arab boy down the stairs and through the back door to her father’s surgery. He led her into one of the small rooms. Dr. Malina was there, standing over a table on which lay a woman, an older Arab woman, the woman who had been Este’s nurse until just a few years ago. The woman was hardly recognizable, her features had sunk back in her head, her legs were stained with brown matter. Her gray hair was matted. Her eyes were bloodshot. Her hands were shaking. It was Noona. Este cried out.

“Be calm.” Dr. Malina took his daughter’s hand in his own. “She asked for you. She wanted to see you. You must be brave.” He would have liked to protect his daughter from this grief, from the sight and the smell in the room. But he knew that the woman who had held his daughter in the night, who had been the first to teach her to say yes and no and thank you and please, this woman had a right to see the child who was no longer a child, who wasn’t her child but was her child. He had no choice but to call for Este. Noona had come to his office a few hours before. She had waited patiently in the waiting room, but then she had been in great pain and screamed, and the boy had taken her into this room and it was clear there was nothing he could do.

“Papa,” said Este, in a voice so small that she might have been a tiny child again.

“Nothing,” he said. He could see in her eyes her disappointment in him.

“Noona,” said Este, “you’ll be all right, Papa will help.” Noona did not believe her. She stroked Este’s arm. “My darling,” she said. “My darling.”

Este said, “Papa, call the boy, let’s clean the floor.”

“Not yet,” said her father. “We will have more to clean before it’s over.”

“Stay,” whispered Noona.

Este had not thought of leaving. She thought of waiting at night in the dark for Noona’s footsteps to approach her bed. She thought of Noona tying her hair ribbon in the morning. She thought of Noona telling her stories from the village where she herself had grown up. Stories about cats that changed into girls, and fish that learned to talk. “Noona,” she said, “don’t die.”

Dr. Malina put his hand on his daughter’s shoulder. He had to go back to his other patients. After he left, Este let her tears come. Also, she was angry.

Later, when two boys came and took away the empty shell that had been Noona, and Este had recovered from her first shock, she opened the door to her father’s office. “What is it, what brought it, how is this possible?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

She ran into the street without her hat, although the sun was high in the sky. She went to the European Hospital, to the laboratory of the French scientists. She went alone, without a companion. She didn’t care if anyone saw her.

In the laboratory, Nocard was mixing bowel matter with grain for dog food. Emile was boiling water he brought back in a jug from the café so they could safely drink. The heat in the room was oppressive. There was no point in starting a fire in the oven until it was needed. Louis bit down on his pipe stem. He tried to imagine his foe. It was tiny, of course, not visible to the naked eye, but it surely had a form, a mite’s form, an insect’s form, means of digesting something, means to divide itself, or mate with others of its kind. He stopped himself. He should not imagine his foe too closely or he would be looking for the wrong thing and miss it altogether. Nothing must be assumed until it was demonstrated. He knew that. If only the lens of his instrument were better, could enlarge one thousand times further, then no secrets could be kept from his peering eye.
If only
was not the way a scientist should think.

Louis Thuillier knew that the space he walked in, the food he ate, the gums of his teeth, the bruise in the peach he had left in the bowl three days before, all were teeming with creatures that gnawed and consumed parts of things, other things, made yellow what was red, made pus where clear skin had been. What Louis knew was that no matter how benign the morning, sun shining on green leaves and blue water sparkling at the landscape’s edge, something unseen was killing something else unseen and using its body for fuel. It wasn’t just human beings that needed to eat, but all living creatures, those you saw and those you didn’t. A sailboat riding the ocean’s waves, a branch of a tree floating down a river, all looked peaceful to the poor, inept human eye, but underneath the water, on the ridge of the leaf, on the blade of grass, something was dying in the mouth of something else and all creation was consumed in a continual munching and destroying, eating and eliminating and eating again, and the eating was not harmless or sweet or ceremonial or symbolic, neither wholesome nor sanctified, but simply constant. One thing lived because another thing died. No wonder Pasteur rarely smiled.

Microbes don’t think, have souls, fear death, or regret their past, so their fate doesn’t matter, shouldn’t concern the superior human mind at all. But as Louis considered the matter, he wondered if perhaps all living things didn’t have some pleasure in sliding along, in lifting wings, in guzzling dirt, in moving filaments, in letting rain and sun touch their skins. Was their death, the death of even invisible creatures, of no matter at all? These were thoughts no man should ever tell another man, for fear of ridicule. Louis ridiculed himself.

These peculiar thoughts were taking him away from action, and what he needed to do was act. Emile was boiling beakers, pincers, slides, cups. Louis left the laboratory, walking down hospital corridors in which visitors leaned against walls, an Arab child was mopping the floor, and a small lizard hung from the doorframe of the stairwell entrance. Louis found his way out and went for a walk. Perhaps if his legs moved, his mind would clear.

He walked from the promontory of Silsileh, where Cleopatra had killed herself in her barge when Antony returned after his defeat at sea. He walked past the docks where Pompey had disembarked, hoping for the friendship of the Ptolemy children, whose agent plunged a knife in his back as he stepped ashore. Louis walked past the corner where, in the time of the Ptolemies, the Mouseion had stood. Once, behind its walls, there had been a park and a zoo. All the knowledge of the ancient world had been stored inside its great library. In its study rooms were philosophers and scientists and astronomers and poets, albeit mostly bad poets, and it was there, in the third century B.C., that the scientist Eratosthenes had dissected a small desert rat. It was there that he’d almost uncovered the way blood circulates through the veins. He had measured the earth at the Mouseion observatory. He’d drawn almost accurate maps of the world. The scientists at the Mouseion knew that the world was round a thousand years before Columbus set sail. It was there that Euclid’s works were collected and preserved. There were the scrolls of Theocritus, Callimachus, Plotinus, and Hypatia. It was there that magic and superstition were held at bay by human minds eager to understand the curious circumstances of their earthbound lives.

This did not help Louis at all. The spirit of Eratosthenes did not tap him on the shoulder and whisper in his ear. He was on his own.