An Imperfect Lens

by Anne Richardson Roiphe

  To a town with cholera, to a town where cholera waits, few but the most intrepid travelers come. All who could had postponed or canceled their visit. This meant that the kitchen help had lost their jobs and the owner of the hotel went to the bank for a loan to see him through and the repairs on the marble counter of the bar, which had chipped over time, were not made and the rooms were not as free of sand as they might have been had the staff been more than minimal. Cholera did not simply attack the intestines of its victim, it ravaged the pocketbooks of the entire town, spreading hunger and despair and sending thousands to pray and thousands of others to shutter themselves up in their rooms.

  The concierge of the hotel, a tall, thin Egyptian with a mustache, whose languages included Arabic, French, Russian, English, German, and Italian, with a reasonable grasp of Turkish, bowed his head slightly and offered Roux, who was clearly the senior member of the party, a large white envelope with an embossed gold seal on the cover. Roux, who was engaged in writing down his expenses since docking, handed the envelope to Louis. When Louis opened it, casually, as if he had often received letters in foreign countries, as if he were an experienced man of the world, he found an invitation to dinner with all their names at the top in fine calligraphy, at the home of the French consul, General M. Girard, that evening. The adventure had begun.

  When they arrived in their suite and the bellboy brought up their bags and the carton of bottles and chemicals were safely stored in the Khedivial’s basement, Louis immediately brought out his good suit, the one he had purchased for the trip with the money that Pasteur had pressed into his hand with express instructions as to tailoring and cut. The suit was placed by the window, where the wrinkles might hang out and the fine cloth breathe in the slight wind that blew in clouds of mosquitoes, allowing them to swarm over the bowl of dates and figs placed on the dresser by the maid. Marcus withdrew to his own small dark room at the back of the building, near the cook’s quarters, and again fell asleep, successfully shutting out all the sounds of the alley below, the shouts in Arabic, the scent of cat urine, the pile of oranges rotting in a barrel, the wail of a woman who had some terrible complaint against a child whose loud weeping brought no forgiveness.

  Nocard went off to meet an Italian veterinarian who ran a small animal clinic. Roux went out to find a French-speaking barber. Louis went for a walk. He turned the corner of the rue Cherif Pasha and found himself on rue Rosette. He was determined to keep the railroad station across the street in sight. He did not want to lose himself in the winding streets.

  Roux was directed to the barber just down a few doors from the hotel. The barber had once been the personal barber of the French general who had administered the protectorate. The less said about the general’s last days, the better. A barefoot Arab boy brought a bowl of warm water to the counter, and the barber wet his brush and began to lather Roux’s face. The Arab boy brought a second bowl of water for the rinsing. There was a loud scream in the street. The barber cut Roux, a small cut, but a little blood ran down his cheek. The barber rushed to the door of his shop. The Arab boy stopped his sweeping. A woman carrying a sack of bread had been knocked down by some soldiers in a carriage. The English soldiers were gathered anxiously around her, picking up her bread, gesturing apologies. “It’s nothing,” said the barber, returning to his chair. But the water was no longer warm. “Bring me another bowl,” he said to the boy, who took away the now too-cool water in which, invisible to the barber, his helper, or Roux, mortality had beckoned. If the water had fallen on his lips or dripped from his mustache onto his tongue in a moment when his mouth was open, what then? Roux closed his eyes while the barber trimmed the back of his hair. For a moment or two he fell into sleep.

  As Louis walked and stared and wiped the dust from his face, the market stalls were gradually cleaned of the day’s merchandise. The cafés on Place Muhammad Ali were empty. Soon only a few dogs prowled beneath the tables as rodents, bellies low to the ground, ventured out in the cover of the early-evening darkness. In the gutters lay rejected chicken parts, cores of fruit, shells of nuts with meat clinging to their brown-skinned sides, leaves from spice trees. A lamb’s ear bled slowly into the puddles. A child’s comb with broken teeth floated below the tea merchant’s bench, along with a discarded packet of fine tobacco meant for chewing. The invading cholera bobbled along unseen among the day’s refuse. Its desperate journey had already been long, and the hours were growing short for it to find its destination, a place to spawn, to fulfill its role, to be itself, amid the jiggling and rocking, the living and the dying, the chemical exchange, the impersonal but ever-so-personal assault that its own existence required. Louis had walked farther than he intended, and he hurried back to the hotel. He needed to change for dinner.

  Dinner was served late in this country, long after the sun had gone down and the ceramic tiles on the floors had cooled in the evening air. A call to prayer floated over Alexandria. From the towers of the mosques came the sound, clear and demanding, harrowing in its claim. Thuillier smoothed his hair, put on his suit, which was perhaps of a heavier material than it ought to have been, and, looking in the mirror, found himself pleased. Roux had declared that tonight they would ask for space for their laboratory, perhaps in the French hospital. They would present their credentials to the consul, which included a note from Louis Pasteur himself, asking that all kindness be shown his assistants in their important task. Louis went down the hotel’s winding staircase, running his hand along the banister, whose carved surface was made up of many loops of snakes, leaves, and berries, down to the lobby. In the lobby he remembered Pasteur’s strict instructions on cautionary hand-washing. He went back up to the basin in his room and washed his hands in the water that had been boiled and sealed off some hours before. He went downstairs again without touching the banister, then out the door past a uniformed attendant wearing a red sash, with a sword at his side. The attendant bowed. Louis returned the bow, not certain whether this was correct form. He fairly leapt into the carriage that was waiting there. His colleagues, already seated, made room for him. Roux handed the driver a card with the consul’s address as Louis leaned back on the purple velvet seat with long, gold-threaded tassels on the cushion, and tried to keep his left leg from bobbing up and down with unseemly excitement.

  The hoofbeats of the horse on the stones below him, the rocking of the carriage, reminded him of his sea journey. Their carriage rode down the rue de Soeurs past the Café Ptolemy. In the warm night air, the sidewalk tables were filled. At one of them, Dr. Robert Koch, a dour-looking German, his mostly bald head shining in the reflected gaslight, his long mustache groomed with care, his black Turkish coffee left untouched by his elbow, his thick glasses pinching his nose, was sitting alone. He was writing notes on a pad of paper that he would soon stuff into his pocket. A telegram from the Health Office in Berlin had informed him that the Frenchmen were coming. What did that matter to him? The year before, he had announced the discovery of the minute organism that caused tuberculosis. One out of every nine deaths on the continent was caused by tuberculosis. All Europe was talking about him, his genius. He had proved Germany the equal of France, a political matter that was not of much interest to the scientist himself.

  The French consulate was in a white stone building on rue Nebi Daniel; the French flag hung at the entrance. A circular drive-way for carriages provided ample space to view the narrow arched windows, glimpse the courtyard just beyond the entrance, see the orange trees that were planted like sentries before the door. It was as grand a building as the ministry where he had obtained his documents, and the opera where he and his friends from the École Normale had seats in the highest balcony, where he could almost put his hands on the gold carvings of nymphs and dolphins that decorated the ceiling above, and perhaps it was as grand as the hospital where he had visited his chemistry professor, who had been run over by a cart carrying bits of stone masonry down a narrow alley and had suffered brain damage from which he never recovered. That visit
had much impressed Louis, who could recall the smell of carbolic acid and the hush in the halls, but the structure of the building itself had gone unnoticed due to his more pressing anxieties that day. Now he noted the iron grillework on the windows decorated with fleurs-de-lis, now he noticed the parapets with their tiny domes rising from the sloped roof. The lamps were lit within, so that the building itself seemed to glow with a man’s brightest hopes.

  Louis was inexperienced in the ways of society. He was not certain whether his gloves should be given to the servant or not. It was hot, he hadn’t needed the gloves. He was not sure that his suit was exactly the style of those worn by other men of stature in Alexandria. He knew his speech still carried certain expressions from Amiens, a phrase or an emphasis here or there that marked him as something other than a Parisian and something other than a son of an educated man. It didn’t matter, he knew. In his calling, as in the priesthood, it was mind that counted, rather than origins. It was loyalty that mattered, loyalty to the obligations of reason. He carried his faith in his breast as surely as any crusader moving east toward Jerusalem had ever done. Nevertheless he was awed by the footman and the consul general himself, who offered a warm hand and a glass of red wine. “Welcome, welcome,” said the beribboned consul general, M. Girard, whose job it was to welcome his countrymen passing through.

  “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 o
n having kittens any minute now.”