An Imperfect Lens

by Anne Richardson Roiphe

  INSIDE A LARGE, nondescript, white stone government office building, now inhabited by the English, guarded by a few British soldiers, the heat was heavy. The open windows carried the dust from the street into the rooms, where it settled on heavy wooden desks, on deep Oriental carpets, on brass ornaments and gas lamps. Outside, a few camels were tied to a post, their owner trying to get a travel visa through Egypt to the Sudan. The British had trouble with the Sudanese. Uprisings were put down, only to rise again. There had been the decisive but costly battle against Arabi just a few years before. This man who was trying to obtain a pass had some ordinary commerce in mind, unless he was a spy for the nationalists who wanted the British to leave Egypt. In these offices, no one was trusted, no one was assumed to be a friend. The natives were still speaking French, reading French newspapers, despite the fact that it had been months since the French essentially granted the town to Lord Cromer. The English soldiers and the English diplomats tried to go everywhere in threes. They wore their pistols at their sides. They shook their heads and frowned at passersby as if daring anyone to assault them, and yet they were assaulted. Sometimes they were merely pelted with soft melons and peaches, or sometimes a woman poured some slop down on them from above. Sometimes they were jumped from behind by someone with a knife, or a rope was pulled around an English neck. Sometimes they were found in an out-of-the-way alley, their boots taken, their jackets gone, their throats cut.

  Which is why three English lieutenants were trying to compile a file on Dr. Malina. He might be spying against the British for the French, or reporting on troop movements for the Turks, perhaps for money or perhaps out of pure Jewish hatred for decent Christians. The intelligence office had discovered that his son had written an article for the university paper that embarrassed the Egyptian royal family. The son was gone now, out of the country, but the father might be in communication with him. The British believed that they should at the very least learn more about this Dr. Malina. Never mind that he was a respected doctor and a member of the Committee of Public Safety. That very position might give this Jew cover to report on the Alexandrian situation to enemies of the crown.

  A young officer, his mustache not yet respectably thick, said that he had noticed an Englishman coming from the Malina house the other day. He had engaged him in conversation. He was a former employee of the Glen MacAlan Scotch Company and was planning on staying in Alexandria for a while. He seemed like a decent enough fellow. He had befriended Dr. Malina. He had explained the circumstances and they sounded reasonable. He might be a source of information. The officers agreed he was just the sort of man who might serve his country well enough if asked. One of the lieutenants stood up, preparing to leave. He said, “We have had instructions from London to avoid those parts of town where the cholera has visited. Tell your men to stay away from the wharves and their usual pleasure pursuits for the time being.”

  One of the lieutenants shook his head. “What are the odds of my men obeying that order?” The others laughed.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, Este’s mother had a headache. She took to her bed and closed the curtains so the light of the sun would not bother her eyes. Este’s friend Phoebe, sister-in-law-to-be, had invited Este for lunch. She walked the few blocks to Phoebe’s house, stopping at the glove store to order a replacement for the white glove with pearl buttons that she had ruined. The salesman at the glove store bowed when he saw her. He bowed to all his customers. He, too, was a member of the synagogue. He tried to detain her with an offer to show her the long suede gloves that had just arrived off the boat from Lyons the other day. He offered a plate of strawberries that she could dip in the saucer of sugar that he kept on the counter. She declined, afraid strawberry juice might drip on her dress. The store owner had a pharaoh hound, whose long neck and pointed ears were signs of his good breeding. Este petted the dog on his head and allowed him to lick her face. “Ah, sweetness,” she said to him.

  Outside in the street, the heat made her gasp. She drew in the air but it didn’t seem like enough air. It was moist and humid. A donkey cart moved quickly down the street, splashing dust and water and the remains of a persimmon on the bottom of her dress. She hurried on, brushing by Dr. Koch, who was only now on his way to his own laboratory, having slept longer than usual because he had been up into the early hours of the morning considering the cholera’s elusive ways.

  Este wrapped her arms around Phoebe, smelling the fresh orange water her friend had used to wash in the morning. How good it was to have a friend, even if you can’t share your confusion or confide the trouble that you could see ahead. “We can now call ourselves sisters and it will be true,” said Phoebe squeezing Este’s arm.

  “Let’s wait until after the wedding,” said Este.

  “But why?” said Phoebe.

  “Because,” said Este, “I don’t want to tempt fate to harm us.”

  “That’s stupid,” said Phoebe. “You’re my sister now, really. All of our lives we’ll share our troubles, when a child is sick, when one is born, when we get fat and ugly and when we have swollen ankles and loose teeth, we will know each other, and there will be no secrets between us, ever. Isn’t it lovely?” she asked, feeding a small yellow bird in a cage a little of her cake. Este agreed it was lovely. There was, however, something a little false in her smile, a little diffident in her hug. Her own childhood, she thought, had vanished quite suddenly while Phoebe’s remained.

  While the two young women visited with each other, promising a fidelity more serious, perhaps, than that of man and wife, the shop owner, as he was putting away a tray of leather gloves, felt a cramp in his stomach, a cold in his fingers. He shuttered his store, left his merchandise on their shelves, sorted by color and size, some in boxes and others in fine paper, and went home to his wife and lay on the bed and, despite the cold compresses, the warm tea, the blanket his wife wrapped around his feet, he died just as Este returned home and hurried up the stairs to see if her mother’s headache had improved. It had.

  Later she found Louis in the drawing room. He was waiting for her father to come in. He had promised to tell the doctor of any progress in the laboratory. Dr. Malina was too busy to come and see for himself. “Louis,” Este said, “do you think God created cholera, and if he did, why?”

  “I suppose,” said Louis, “the cholera, if it had a brain, could ask the same question about us—what are we here for except as a food source, and surely, if we disappeared, another equally felicitous meal would become apparent, one that was not attempting to discover its hiding places.”

  Este laughed. This was good conversation. She so rarely had good conversations.

  EMILE HAD PURCHASED in the market three wooden camels in graduated sizes, for his children. They had miniature reins and red carpets on their backs. Carved by some villagers in the swamp area near Aboukir, they smelled of cedar and palm oil. He packed them carefully in a towel and put them in his suitcase. He had bought a silver beaded shawl for his wife. Would it seem strange in Paris, this object that was so common in the stalls of Alexandria? He hoped it would seem exotic but not peculiar. He had been working with chicken blood. Chickens had their own cholera, perhaps different from the kind that affected human beings. He wanted to see if he could transmit the chicken cholera to a rabbit. The problem was that his particular chickens did not seem to have the disease. They pecked eagerly at their grain, they hopped about and fluffed their feathers as if life would go on forever. They left waste all over the papers Edmond had placed in their cage. Perhaps the chickens in Alexandria were not susceptible to cholera. He mixed a little of the feces they had saved from the cholera victim with some water, and injected the substance into the chickens. If they became ill, that would provide a valuable clue. They didn’t. Emile had gone to the Exchange and sent a telegram to his wife. It was an expense, but he felt he needed to reach her as soon as possible. He felt this with an urgency that startled him. Working well, am fine, nothing to report as of now. Miss you and children. He knew that wh
en his wife received his words, she would read not only the actual message but all the things left unsaid, the non-telegram things. It would all be clear to her. This thought steadied his hand as he pulled a chicken up toward him by the throat.

  Nocard’s dog had developed a large tumor on its left hindquarter. It made him limp as he moved around his cage. His eyes had become bleary. His fur was matted. The dog was sick. This was interesting news. But the dog did not exhibit any of the signs of cholera. When Roux and Thuillier examined its blood under the microscope, they found nothing unusual. “The dog seems to have a cancerous tumor,” said Nocard. “An unfortunate coincidence. In a place of cholera, under our very eyes the beast has become cancerous.” The dog licked Nocard’s hand when he put it through the bars and fed him a sugar lump, then he lay down in a corner of the cage and whined in his sleep. Nocard said, “I will put him out of his misery. He is no longer any use to us.”

  Louis said, “Let us at least look at the tumor. Perhaps there is a kind of cholera tumor that grows only in dogs.”

  “Do you imagine,” said Nocard, “that just because there is cholera in Alexandria, there is nothing else that eats at us?”

  When Emile and Louis went out to the café at the corner for their coffee and baguette, Nocard carried the weakened animal, which offered no resistance, to a table and there injected him with a solution that soon caused his heart to stop. “Damn,” Nocard said. “Damn everything.” He kicked at the leg of a table on which Louis had prepared a culture in a dish of raspberries and oil to study under the microscope. The table vibrated, the dish crashed to the floor. The microscope threatened to follow, but wobbled on its base and remained upright. Nocard went out to find a new dog.

  Louis said to Emile while they were drinking coffee at the Café Noir in the Grand Square, “When you met your wife, did you love her immediately?”

  “No,” said Emile, “she was several years younger, a second cousin whom I met at a Christmas party one year. I thought she was a pretty child, that’s all. But then, two years later, she came with her mother to my sister’s wedding and I had some thoughts about her. Pleasant enough to encourage a visit to her family where they lived in the country, and then to take a few walks with her in our uncle’s vineyard, and there was no doubt in my mind that she regarded me with warmth and would look favorably on a proposal, and that is how it happened that I am the father of three.”

  “My God,” said Louis, “was it really so easy?”

  “Not exactly,” said Emile. “Her father had someone else in mind, but he was soon dissuaded. I did, after all, live in Paris and had my degrees, which impressed them with my importance.”

  Louis nodded and smoked his pipe. Emile stared at the donkey at the corner, which seemed to be in a particularly bad temper. Emile got up from the table and walked over to the donkey. “Hey, hey,” he said to the animal, and stroked it behind the ears. The donkey brought his head forward toward Emile and calmly let him rub the soft gray spot over his nostrils. The donkey opened his mouth and drooled on Emile’s hand. Back at his table, Emile wiped his hand with his napkin and put the napkin in his pocket. “We might just as well see what’s in that donkey’s mouth,” he said to Louis.

  Robert Koch was out for his noonday stroll. He was absolutely regular in his habits, and exercise was one of his habits. He passed by the café where the two French scientists sat. “Gentlemen,” he said, “good morning.”

  Emile jumped to his feet. Louis followed.

  “All is progressing well with you?” asked Dr. Koch.

  “Very well,” said Emile.

  “Excellent,” said Dr. Koch.

  “Are you enjoying Alexandria, Herr Doctor?” said Louis.

  “Fine city, and such history everywhere,” he said, and then went on his way with a wave of his hand.

  ESTE HAD INTENDED not to return to the laboratory. She suspected that it was improper to be there, even with her maid. She considered it was dangerous, not because of the cholera but because of the very excitement she felt in the room and the reasons she felt it. However, a day later she found herself in the very last place she had expected her walk to lead her. Was it the science or the scientist that had pulled her there? How could she separate one from the other? Louis did not waste time wondering why she had stayed away. He was simply happy to have her back.

  Nocard was attempting to brew a concoction of horse dung and cholera-infected bowel. He rubbed at them furiously. Este came and stood behind Louis. Louis thought of Madame Pasteur, who did indeed prepare slides, watch over animals in their cages, serve as her husband’s assistant when his other assistants were elsewhere. He could teach Este how to be his assistant. He thought of them together in a laboratory, his own laboratory. Louis told Este about the living yeast that died in the great vats of beets, thereby spoiling them, if the enemy organisms were not killed through heat. Louis was wanting to redo his tie, the high collar around his neck seemed loose. He thought perhaps the knot in his tie had pulled apart. There was no mirror in the laboratory where he might catch his image. Suddenly, Este reached up and pulled at the strings. “Your tie is askew,” she said, and as she came toward him he smelled her lilac soap. He scolded himself for being surprised. If the purpose of all life is to sustain its species, then he, too, would be led to reproduce. It was natural. It was normal. It was fine, the feeling he had when Este put her hands around his neck and fixed his tie. Este was embarrassed. She should not have been so forward. She should not have touched him. Was this shameful? Este walked away to the other side of the laboratory. She asked Roux what Koch was doing in his laboratory. Roux said he imagined that Koch was also injecting animals and waiting for something to develop. Este did not look at Louis again for the rest of the day. She was, however, determined to learn the name of every chemical in the jars on the shelf that very day. She had them all memorized within an hour.

  Marcus had taken Anippe out back. He had found out that the servant was in need of a dentist. She had a swelling in her cheek and a throbbing in her jaw. He had given her a lemonade he had been saving for his own lunch. The two of them went into the hospital and found an empty bed in a dark corner of a long corridor. They took advantage of the moment their brief meeting provided. The girl forgot about her tooth. Marcus felt the strength in his arms and legs. “Look at my muscle,” he said to the girl as they walked back toward the lab.

  “Very big,” she said in Arabic, and then translated the words into French. Her accent was terrible. It grated on Marcus. People should not speak French if they can’t do it right.

  THE BRITISH OFFICERS decided to find out exactly what Dr. Malina was doing. Was it treason or drug smuggling? Like father, like son. Like son, like father. They sent off a dispatch to Jerusalem. Find out what you can. What is Jacob Malina doing in Palestine?

  NEXT TO HER own wedding night, what could be a more wonderful moment for a mother than the marriage of her daughter? Was this not how the seasons were intended to move? One was married oneself, and showered with candies by one’s friends, and lifted on high by the men of the community, and everyone admired you and then real life began and you had a daughter and the daughter grew and you went with her to purchase the dress for the most important event in her life. Was this not the way it had always been, generation after generation, l’dor v’dor, as they said in Hebrew. What did it matter if the diamond that had been given to her daughter was less than perfect? Lydia tried to banish the gray mood that had invaded her mind. She could find no good reason for it. What was wrong with her? Was she afraid of becoming an old crone whose juices had dried up and who was left with sagging bones and thinning hair to watch others touch and flirt, smile and dance? She would become that old crone whether or not Este married Albert, or even if she never married at all. How could a simple woman hope to stop time?

  What she wanted most was that her daughter should not be sad. She had never been able to bear the child’s tears, over a top that had rolled under a couch or a doll that had become
stained in the rain, or the loss of their cat which had been most miserably defeated by a neighbor’s mongrel. She could not bear it, ever, the things that her child suffered, even this child who had hardly suffered at all.

  She was not a particularly superstitious woman, nevertheless she kept turning the matter of the flawed diamond over and over again in her mind. Was it a sign of some imperfection in the character of her future son-in-law, or was it a sign that something tragic that would split the family forever was already written in God’s book? Was it a sign that Este herself was in danger? Lydia called for Anippe to bring her some coffee. Was the flawed diamond simply a chipped stone, or was it a premonition of catastrophe awaiting them all?

  IN JERUSALEM, IN a small room in the back of what seemed to be a hotel, Lydia’s son, Jacob, sat with his head in his hands. He was hungry and thirsty and exhausted. He had not been able to shave or comb or wash. The evening before, he had been stopped by several large and unfriendly Turkish men wearing no official uniform, but carrying pistols. Around their waists they wore belts with sheathed knives. He thought he was being robbed, but he was mistaken. The men had pushed him against a wall as he was leaving the small office he had just built for himself in the back of the rickety building he intended to turn into Malina & Co., World Suppliers of Olives and Olive Oil Ready for Your Table. He had inked out the sign on a piece of wood himself and was waiting for the men he had hired to bring a ladder to help him hang it above the door. The sign repeated itself four times, in Arabic, in Italian, in English, in German. He had wanted to add Greek but there was no space on the board.

  There were as yet no olives in the building, but he had ordered a press to make oil. It should be arriving at the quay in Jaffa within a few weeks or perhaps months. Nothing was so certain in Palestine as that everything would be delayed, everything would cost more money than expected, primarily because the pasha, whichever pasha was in the neighborhood, would take a cut, and his top man would need a cut, and a simple merchant would bleed and bleed. He had planted three small lemon trees in the hard dirt around the building, which had once belonged to a farmer who had kept his tools and his animals under this roof. Certain odors persisted that did not stimulate the appetite, but Jacob assumed that he could air the place out, that time would make it his. He was eager to begin, to build his business, and now this misunderstanding would probably cost him many shekels, many of his father’s piastres. He knew that he had come to his ancient homeland and should feel at home, but he also knew he was an unwanted stranger here. He didn’t belong with the long-bearded ones who walked in groups in black coats and seemed not to notice that their clothes were too heavy for the warm climate. These were men, unlike himself, who had turned their back on progress. Although they were familiar to him from Alexandria, he did not belong with the Armenian priests who walked through the streets in robes and swung gold censers. He did not belong with the Arab camel dealers, or the sheepherders or the farmers of oranges and apples who loaded the carts pulled by donkeys. He had noticed the British, who were keeping an eye on everyone. They appeared in the cafés at night and asked questions about everyone’s activities. Some of them wore their red uniforms and marched about as if they owned the place, which they didn’t. The Arabs laughed at them, hated them, killed them on occasion.