An Imperfect Lens

by Anne Richardson Roiphe

  At ten-thirty that night, as Lydia lay sleepless in her bed and Este was staring at the stars, saying silent good-byes to her childhood, Louis fell easily asleep in his bed. He knew he would wake with the first light. He would be at the dock before the Malinas arrived. But at three in the morning he woke up. He had a terrible pain in his stomach. He was cold and shivering. He was afraid, but the pain was greater than the fear and filled his mind with its presence. He made his way out of his room. He stumbled toward Emile’s room. He opened the door and then said calmly, “Roux, I’m feeling really sick.”

  Emile woke up and saw Louis at the foot of his bed. Nocard woke up just as Louis collapsed on the floor, writhing in pain. His face was pale and sweaty and his hands were as cold as that of someone who had suffered a heart attack. His bowels had exploded and its contents were running down his legs.

  Roux said to Nocard, “I think it’s food poisoning.”

  They had all consumed the same meal, but it was possible that the portion that Louis had received had been spoiled. Emile and Nocard carried Louis back to his bed and put a blanket under his body to keep him warm.

  Louis smiled at them. He seemed to feel a bit better. Roux prepared an opiate solution for him. Louis thanked him, drank it, and fell back to sleep. Emile fell asleep in Louis’s bedroom on a chair.

  At five in the morning, as the call to prayer floated over the city and the birds on the roof prepared to fly toward the lake, Louis woke up, and there was a terrible diarrhea over the blanket and the side of the bed. He was embarrassed and tried to hide the mess from Emile. He was white, and his face had taken on a skeletal look. This frightened Emile, who woke Nocard. The two of them stood beside his bed. Nocard rushed for a pan as Louis vomited up the entire meal of the previous evening. He then seemed to feel a little better. Emile gave him another opiate solution. He fell back asleep. Emile thought about calling for a doctor. Damn Marcus, if he’d been there he could have gone for help. Nocard offered to go, but Emile said, “Let’s wait till morning. Perhaps he will be better in the morning.”

  Emile and Nocard did not name the thing they feared. They just stared at each other. Emile washed his hands again and again. Nocard heated water for them so they could boil the sheets and the blanket. At 7:00 a.m., Louis woke again. He was cold. He complained to Emile, “Please, please, let’s make the room warm. My legs are so cold.” He was shivering. “Please, Roux,” he said, “help me, I’m so cold.” He tried to stand up to go to the chamber pot, but he couldn’t stand by himself. Nocard and Emile supported him. He had another episode of diarrhea. “I need to get to the quay, to the Romulus,” he said to Roux.

  “Not now,” said Roux soothingly. “Later, maybe. They will not leave the port until evening. They will have to wait for the tide.”

  Louis tried to stand up. He fell back. He did not have the strength. His legs were shaking.

  AT ABOUT THE same time, Este stood for the last time in the doorway of her house. Her mother had already been helped into the carriage. The sun was barely visible, a pale pink in a gray sky. The sound of gulls welcomed the morning. The store owners were opening their curtains, setting out their wares on sidewalks. A child woke in his bed with an earache. A man turned his mistress over and took her again before rising to wash. Este looked at her street for the last time. She felt little sorrow and certainly no fear. She expected Louis to be at the boat, waiting for her. They would have a last conversation until they met again at Freiburg. She had written her cousin’s address on a piece of paper she intended to give him so he could easily find her. As she entered the carriage, she felt her past slip away effortlessly, making space for her future. She held her mother’s hand in the carriage. It was harder for the older woman to leave her coffee cups, her spoons, her drawers, her linens used for years and years, familiar, unremarked on, but hers. It would be difficult to leave the relatives and friends of a lifetime. Would she write to them? Would they care, or would she become a stranger, unimportant to those who she had once amused, dined, loved?

  Lydia was worried. Would they in fact bring her husband to the boat, or were they lying to her? The authorities were never to be trusted. Would she see her son again? Anxiety over her future, despair at what was being left behind farther and farther with each turn of the carriage wheels, made her stiff. Her smile at Este was wooden, empty. Her eyes were wide and frightened.

  They arrived at the quay. Their baggage was unloaded, and Arab boys carried it on board. They were helped up the ladder to the deck of the Romulus, where the Italian captain greeted them as if they were honored guests, not exiles who had been involved in criminal activity. The sun was higher in the sky. It warmed Este’s shoulders and the back of her neck as she stood watching the dock for the arrival of her father and the man whose life she wished to join.

  First she heard the wheels of the carriage and then she saw it. It stopped at the end of the quay. The carriage had come from the British consulate. Three soldiers alighted, pushing Abraham Malina in front of them. He had no baggage. His jacket seemed stained, he had lost the ascot he was wearing when he had been taken from his office. His beard was unkempt, his hair unwashed, his hands bound behind his back. As they approached the ship, the soldiers cut off the ropes that tied him and followed him up the plank. His wife rushed to his side. They embraced. Abraham Malina put his face into his wife’s neck. He wanted to hide the tears that now came to his eyes. He smelled her familiar soap. He squeezed her arm.

  “You do need to groom yourself,” she said in a whisper. He nodded. She leaned against him as if he were a wall.

  The captain said, “We sail in six hours. Welcome aboard. Exiles. Some of my best cargo have been exiles. Don’t worry, we’ll feed you well. The voyage will be easy if the weather holds.”

  “Thank you for your courtesy,” said Dr. Malina. The two men shook hands. The soldiers handed the captain the funds for the passage of the Malina family, as had been agreed upon by the chief rabbi and the Malinas’ lawyer. Seagulls settled on the rails and flew up and cawed whenever anyone approached. The cabin boy threw a piece of dirty bread into the air.

  A nearby gull flapped open his wings, flew up a few feet, and, opening his beak to show a blood-orange gullet, gulped down the morsel. Then the gull screamed into the waves, as if he had won a victory in a war that no one else was fighting. His tail-feathers rippled in the slight wind. His eyes were without kindness or sorrow, just empty black stones on either side of his small-boned face. He settled back on the rail. Sailors carried barrels of supplies down into the hold. Some crawled along around the metal funnels, others were washing down the deck. Este felt water sopping her skirt. She paid no attention. She embraced her father. “Don’t worry,” she said to him, “this will be a fine adventure.”

  “Este,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  She looked down at the wharf. She would not move from her place on the deck of the boat even when invited to examine her quarters. She leaned far forward so that she could better see Louis as he approached the ship. She was certain he would appear in a moment, any moment.

  In his small cabin, Abraham Malina took his wife in his arms. He thanked her for packing his medical bag. He thanked her for fixing his hair. He thanked her and apologized for the grief she suffered.

  “It’s not your fault,” said Lydia. She kissed him on each eye.

  She kissed him on the back of his neck. She felt his arms. They were still strong arms. “This is the beginning of the German Malinas,” she said.

  “At least,” he said to her, “our family will be safe in Freiburg, our great-grandchildren will live in that civilized country in comfort.”

  EMILE ROUX SENT an Arab child for the doctor. He sent another to the French consulate so that a French doctor could also be summoned. He send a third boy to the Italian doctor that he had befriended on the staff of the European Hospital. He sent a message to the director of the hospital. Within an hour, all the doctors had gathered at Louis’s bedside. They consulted among t
hemselves. They gave him a stronger dose of opiate, but he seemed to be failing. His breath was short, his eyes were sunken, he hardly moved. His legs cramped and gave him great pain, but he hardly had the strength to cry out. His face changed, the bones could be seen. He suddenly looked like a very old man. Feebly his arms kept thrashing about. The Italian doctor gave him an injection of ether and followed that with an injection of champagne. Neither seemed to help.

  Nocard was frantic. “We could try salts,” he said.

  The Italian doctor said, “No, salts do not help.”

  They purchased three bottles of champagne and let it sit for a while on a block of ice. They gave him sips of the champagne, which seemed to calm him down.

  The two Frenchmen started rubbing Louis’s limbs. The rubbing would keep him warm, keep his blood flowing. They pulled his bed into the middle of the room so that one could kneel on each side of him, and they rubbed his arms and his legs and his torso constantly for over an hour and then they were too tired so they let the Arab boy who had served them at the café so many times take a turn. The Italian and French doctors also rubbed his fingers and his toes. Through this, all his bowels flowed out of his body, white flakes like small pellets of rice floated in the brown waters. His breathing was worse, and his fever did not go down. The rubbing kept him alive.

  THE WOODEN GANGPLANK was pulled up. The pilot who would take them through the channel was on board. The skiff that would take him back to shore started on its way out of the harbor. The Romulus was ready to depart. Lydia and Abraham Malina stood on the deck. A little way out in the waters, three sloops bobbed in the waves. A British ironclad floated across the channel. For the last time they saw the place where the Nile had dropped its silt into the harbor thousands of years before. For the last time they saw the city where they had been born, where they had believed they would die. Este did not stop looking for Louis to appear, even as the call was given to raise the anchor, to let go the lines that were attached to the bollards at the quay’s end. The captain was at the wheel, and the ship lurched backward as the Arabs on the dock pushed it out into the waters. The small boat that would pull it into deeper waters was attached by its own lines to the ship. The rowers waited, their backs rippling with muscles. The sun was now strong and the men were sweating in the heat. Este could not believe Louis had not come. Had he not received her message from the consul’s wife? Had the girl not brought him the Ganesh? Had she misunderstood his intentions? Perhaps he would come to Freiburg and find her there, but perhaps not.

  Now everything about her departure from Alexandria was different. Este had no future. She was still a girl and yet she had used herself up, poured her love on a man who had failed to arrive. There was a terrible vacancy inside her, where her former hopes had lived. Now suddenly she understood that she, too, was an exile, that the days ahead would be difficult, lonely, that her future was uncertain. She would have to be brave. She was prepared to be brave for the sake of her mother and for her father, who would not be able to bear her unhappiness as well as his own. But in the place in a young girl’s mind where her deepest feelings reside, where the love she expects to receive sows a million blooms, there where all the colors of the universe had been painted, a wasteland now stretched out, a gray and dark landscape, with snatches of ruined memories lying about like so many buildings destroyed in a military action. There was anger, too. He had betrayed her. She would never again trust so easily, laugh so easily, love with such simplicity. Her heart had been infected by the world’s treachery and would never again heal, or so she believed as the shores of Alexandria disappeared from sight, as the ship rocked in the waves, as the smoke belched out into the blue sky. She ached in every part of her body.

  “Go away,” she shouted at her mother when she knocked on the cabin door.

  AROUND NOON, LOUIS’S condition seemed to improve. Roux reached down and felt a pulse in his arm. The French doctor checked, and he too found the pulse. The Italian doctor was not so sure. It might be a tremor, not a pulse. None of the men in the room left. Nocard went to the window to smoke a cigar. Emile Roux almost fell asleep in a chair but woke himself up. They wrapped Louis in two blankets and, one after another, continued to rub his legs. When Emile looked at his watch, he saw that it was two o’clock in the afternoon. His stomach rumbled from hunger. But now Louis had even more trouble breathing. The Italian doctor suggested that his heart might be failing, not allowing enough oxygen to enter his lungs. Louis was drawing air in and then immediately gasping for more. His lips were blue. His features grew even more gaunt. His nose was pronounced and his eye sockets seemed to swallow his eyes. But his face was still his face. He did not look like a cholera victim in every aspect. There was still some expression around his mouth, and he tried to smile encouragingly at Emile. He took his friend’s hand and pressed it. He was not capable of speech because his breath would not tolerate it.

  The Italian doctor had to leave to attend to his patients. The French doctor stayed until early evening, injecting Louis every hour and checking his pulse every half hour. He had not died. He had held on for a long time. This, the French doctor assured them, was a good sign that he might survive the disease. Nocard pressed him. “Is it a sign that he will survive, that he is likely to survive?” The doctor did not answer. All Louis’s limbs trembled now. Nocard and Emile brought in all the blankets in their apartment and placed them on top of him. His face felt as cold as stone. Emile sent the Arab boy out for some food. They ate in Louis’s room, reluctant to leave him. Emile drank a bottle of wine all by himself. Nocard left to make sure that the animals in the laboratory that were still there, those relevant to the bovine plague investigation, were fed and watered. “God damn Marcus,” he said again. He came back to the apartment as soon as he could. There had been no change for the better or worse while he was gone. Louis did not sleep.

  He knew the name of the disease that had reduced him so. If only they had found the microbe, he would have seen it, too. He wanted to fight back, to grab at the air and force it down into his reluctant lungs. He was weak. He knew he was weak. He did not want to die. He thought of Este on the ship expecting him to arrive, and he was ashamed that he had not come, or was there still time? He had lost track of the time. He would find her in Freiburg. He would go to Freiburg. He believed that he would force the illness to leave his body. He hurt, his legs hurt, his chest hurt, the cold was deep and terrible. At moments he thought about death. At other moments he refused to admit that death was waiting. He thought about confession and asking for a priest so that his mother would be comforted. He did not have the strength. It was too hard to get any words at all out of his mouth. Soon after, he didn’t care about priests at all. For hours he drifted, sleep coming, dreams of yawning holes, shipwreck, his sister bleeding, his father screaming, devouring wolves broke into his mind and receded again and again. The nightmares did not stop. They interrupted his sleep over and over. Sometimes there was pain in his limbs. Sometimes he felt empty, as if his mind had gone away, leaving only his body to shiver under the blankets.

  THE AFTERNOON TURNED into evening. The Romulus was out to sea. Lydia fought off seasickness. Her daughter stayed in her cabin. Abraham walked the deck observing the waves and the wake caused by the boat, comforted by the canopy of stars above.

  The French doctor tried more opiates. The Italian doctor returned after midnight and injected more ether into Louis’s now hard-to-find veins. The men dozed off in chairs from time to time. The only sound in the room was Louis’s shallow and pained breathing as his lungs shrieked for more oxygen and his body again and again failed to deliver. As the sky once more eased to gray and the moon turned white and disappeared, Emile and Nocard were each by Louis’s side. The death rattle began. As Alexandria was waking for the new day, Louis’s breath stopped. From a certain point of view, this was merciful.

  DAWN BROKE OVER the Romulus. Este had not been able to sleep. She had gone to the deck and leaned over the side, watching the waves lift an
d drop. She had never realized that the sky was so far above her and she so small a speck in the universe. Unmoored from the familiar, she saw herself with a seagull’s eye, a mere morsel beneath. She was sailing on a ship on a black ocean that stretched out before and behind her, endless, the sky indifferent above. This was a perspective she vowed to hold in her mind for the rest of her life.

  The word of Louis’s death went out to the French consulate. The Italian doctor carried the report to the Italian community. Word was sent to the German consulate. Dr. Koch was immediately notified. He went directly to the apartment, where Roux and Nocard were making burial arrangements. There was a race, yes, between the French scientists and the German, but in the end this was a competition among colleagues. Above all national loyalties, these men were enlisted in the cause of human knowledge. They saw themselves as linked by knowledge, linked by passion, alike in the ways they spent their time, backs bent over the laboratory table. They knew the urgency of their work. In the end, they were more like each other than like the others who walked the earth in pursuit of other matters, waved flags of their countries, traded goods across oceans, talked about national virtues, waged wars against fellow humans. In the end, they were comrades. Dr. Koch, who was not a man who wasted emotion, was deeply affected by the death of the young scientist.

  Messages began arriving, bringing consoling words and praise for Louis and his efforts on behalf of mankind. The German and Italian consulates offered their assistance to the remaining members of the mission. Marcus brought a box of strawberry cakes. The French consul sent his wife, who arrived at their quarters with tears in her eyes.

  “Had someone sent word to the Romulus before it left port?” she asked. The men had not thought of it.

  “The girl must be told,” she said. “I’ll have our consulate tell the family when the ship docks.” She spoke of her husband’s sorrow, the sorrow of all France. Nocard wanted to embrace her but held back. Emile sat down and wrote a telegram to Pasteur. He brought it to the telegraph office himself. He looked years older than he had just a day before. He had lost a friend, a colleague, to the very disease he was unsuccessfully pursuing. He was a defeated and grieving man.