An Imperfect Lens (3 page)

Everywhere the organism pushed, floated, drifted, gathered, it erased, eradicated, ignored a mother’s love for her child or a man’s desire for his wife, devoured memories fond and unfond, left church bells ringing, bodies piled on carts. Like lava rolling down from the erupting mountain, it made its own path, without regard for gardens, schools, houses of worship. It passed along on the padded feet of gophers, beavers, cats. It rested in the lumps of feces, solid or soft, that were found behind the houses, in the fields. It pushed on in the rivulets left by the rain, or remained in the ditches. The invisible invaders moved swiftly, riding into the belly of a child drinking water from a well, or of an adult putting his fingers in his mouth to remove a bit of tobacco stuck between the teeth, settling in the lower intestine, feeding and feeding without thought or regret, without memory of other places, without destiny or hope of redemption.

In his book Pasteur read:
There are records of its presence in
ancient Sanskrit. In 1817 in Calcutta and Jessore it killed 5,000 British
soldiers within two weeks. The troops of the Empire carried the disease to
Nepal and Afghanistan, to Japan and Brazil.
Time and again cholera had its way, its dreaded way, and then, having run out its path, having fewer mouths to enter, reproducing less, dying itself for want of another warm watery place, it would stop. Until it would return.

LOUIS THUILLIER TOOK a few days to visit his mother and father, who were disturbed that their son was traveling they did not know where. The papers in Amiens were full of news of the cholera in Alexandria. Louis did not want to alarm his parents, so he kept his destination a secret. Louis’s younger sister made him promise that he was not going to far-off Egypt. His mother understood that her son was an educated man, while she knew only what the nuns had taught her. She made no objections to his travel, but she stroked his sleeve, patted his hair, brought him clear water in a basin, cooked his favorite stew, brought him beer from the tavern, went into his room when he was sleeping and watched his chest move under the blanket. His older brother embraced him. His father embraced him. It was an awkward embrace, but Louis caught its meaning and felt an unmanly stirring in his chest. It was harder to leave than he had thought. But he did.

HE TOOK THE train to Marseille and a carriage to the nearby port, where he boarded the
Marie-Claire,
which was carrying bottles of wine from Alsace, bundles of embroidered linen from the north, olives from the Pyrenees, and cheeses from the farms of Provence. It also carried Louis Thuillier, Emile Roux, Edmond Nocard, and their trunks, as well as their assistant, Marcus, who was sick to his stomach for the entire journey and was unable to provide the scientists with even a half hour’s companionship. Louis spent the journey at the ship’s rail staring at the rolling sea, watching the silver pathways of the sun’s rays slip across the ocean. He considered the matter of sunlight and the prism of color that he had studied in school. He watched for signs of fish beneath the surface. He saw the clouds’ shadow darken the sea as if it were held in the claws of a giant bird. He smoked a pipe. Roux’s wife had given him one with a deep bowl as a parting gift. It burned his lips, but he did not put it aside. He smelled the tobacco, and the scent reassured him that land waited. He liked biting down on the stem of the pipe hard with his teeth. He liked the sucking of smoke and the sense of himself, a man with a pipe, a man who was worldly, not to be dismissed easily, a man with things on his mind. He liked the feel of the smooth stem in his hands. He would get used to the burning and he would learn to master the thing, which now seemed to be either too hot or too quickly turned cold in his hand as the embers in the small bowl faded and died. Hour after hour on the deck he smoked his pipe, filling and emptying it, pushing it and pulling at it, waiting for it to cool, heating it up with a match, as he watched one lone gull loop in and out among the sails. He felt the chill in the air, the wind coming up the Seine. He thought of his mother and father, his sister and his older brother, in their small house in Amiens, the cat on the empty chair, the lamp lit for the evening, its small flame beating like a moth against the glass. He thought of the roses now appearing like a lifeless bramble in the small garden, dormant, waiting for the earth’s regular path to bring back the heat of day. A grown man did not long for the taste of his mother’s soup or think of her arms pouring a pail of water into a bathtub so she could scrub her child. It was time—past time, he told himself—that he let all the pictures of his mother float down to the corner of his mind that stored such things.

Louis knew that failure of this mission was a real possibility. The microbe that caused cholera might be different from those he had already seen on his slides. It might not respond to any kind of coaxing. It might not appear in the waters or the fluids found in the city of Alexandria. It might not multiply when warm or cease to multiply when cold. It might, in fact, not be life at all, but rather dust or mucus or a chemical or a mineral whose name was unknown. He had no illusions. Intuitions, suggestions, belief itself could prove useless. All previous assumptions could be invalid. What was true of anthrax, what had caused the disease of beets, what kept the yeast alive or killed it, what plagued the sickly silkworm, may have nothing to do with what caused cholera. A scientist must be his own heretic.

“We’re mad,” said Edmond one evening as the three men finished their evening meal in the captain’s quarters.

“What do you mean?” asked Louis. “I, for one, am very sane.”

“Why, then,” said Edmond, putting his spoon into the remains of Emile’s bread pudding, “are you traveling on this ship toward a city in which cholera waits? Most normal men would travel in the other direction.”

Roux laughed. “You’re right,” he said. “We should immediately go back to France.”

“If I die,” said Nocard, “my dogs will be inconsolable. Also my greedy brother will inherit my house and my land.”

“In that case,” said Roux, “take care not to die.”

Nocard raised his glass. “To all of us, a long life, and to my brother, nothing, let him make his own way.”

Roux said, “Don’t worry, we’ll live to be old men, wishing we still had our teeth.”

In the silence that followed, Louis considered the possibility of death, his own. He could not imagine it. He could not believe in it. What he did feel was fear, a vague, nasty dryness in his mouth.

The expanse of water that lay between Marseille and Alexandria made him melancholy as he watched it for the five full days of the journey. He saw himself disappearing, leaving no trace, as the keel of the ship separated the waves, which instantly reunited behind the hull, leaving no sign in the sea that it had passed. It was hard for a man, perhaps especially a young man, to catch himself on the cusp of disappearance.

These were Pasteur’s instructions to his team, in a letter dated August 5, 1883:

i. Stay in the best hotel until you are settled. Use wine and other canned foods from France upon arrival. Have an alcohol lamp on a table at all time to heat glasses, silverware, and plates.

ii. Find immediately a very adequate apartment with the help of the Consul. Get Marcus to cook for you, and follow all caution regarding food.

iii. Try to establish a workspace in a hospital where both gas and water are in profusion.

iv. Examine blood samples and their culture.

v. Try to transmit the disease to animals by mixing suspicious matter with food.

vi. Try microbe purification through inoculation of various animals until one species becomes sick without dying.

Emile Roux read the instructions aloud to Louis and Edmond. Edmond said, “You would think we hadn’t worked with him. You would think we were schoolboys.”

Emile said, “It’s his way of worrying about us. Don’t be insulted.”

“I am not insulted,” said Edmond. “But I would rather leave his voice in Paris. Here we have our own responsibilities. Don’t read any more of his letters.”

Emile smiled. He put away the letter. “You are sure you don’t want to hear the other fourteen points?”

Edmond lay back on his bunk and closed his eyes. “I need a nap,” he said, and that was the end of that.

3

AT LAST, SHORE, the carts piled with goods rattling along the narrow planks of the docks, the strange sound of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, the gold sandy color of the buildings, the customhouse with its soldiers in uniform, braids and buttons glistening in the heat, and the donkeys with their long ears flattened back against their heads and the children with their hands out, crouching in the doorways, flies stuck to their encrusted eyelids. The smell was strange: dung, saffron, ginger, banana, human sweat, fish packed in barrels, waiting to be carried to the market. They saw turbans and loincloths, and sandals made of paper and wood. Bells were ringing, men were calling out numbers in Arabic and French and English, and sailors were tying up sails. A barrel of nails had spilled on the ground before him. Louis felt dizzy. Marcus placed the large carton they had brought on a wagon, and Louis hopped up on the front seat, with Roux and Nocard behind. Marcus rode standing on a rail in the back. They headed for the Hotel Khedivial at the corner of rue Cherif Pasha and rue Rosette, where they had taken a week’s lodgings.

The wind was blowing from the east, and with it came sand from the desert, whole grains of sand that stuck in Louis’s hair and nestled in the sleeve of his jacket and blocked his nostrils and made him cough. He put his handkerchief to his face. “Is it always like this?” he asked the driver, who unfortunately did not speak French. The hotel clerk explained as he took the papers Roux offered. “The east wind brings the sand. The west wind will make the air clear and cool. You will get used to it, messieurs,” he said, “if you stay among us awhile.” When Louis closed his mouth, he felt the granules of sand that had come to rest on his molars. “I need water,” he said to the clerk, who directed him across the lobby to a door with a beaded curtain, an arched opening. The three of them walked into the café. Marcus followed them, his eyes glazed. If he were a dog, someone would have patted him on the head; as it was, he sat at a table in the darkened room, repeating his uncle’s words as he departed Paris: “Travel is broadening for a young man. Shakes you up, it does.” He did feel shaken, but was he broadened? His stomach still heaved and he barely sipped at the absinthe drink that Louis had ordered for him. It sat on the table in a long thin glass, pale green, cloudy; the taste of licorice pleased him, but the burning in his esophagus did not. A boy who is not quite a man is not eager to know the outlines of his esophagus, the details of the act of eating, the route the food takes to his stomach. He prefers to think of himself as not so much a body with parts as a blossoming landscape, springtime in the pastures. He stared at his drink and grew sleepy. The men ignored him when he put his head on the cushion behind him and closed his eyes. The boy was with them to perform necessary labors, not to amuse them at the table. There were no other customers in the café. The lobby of the hotel had lacked the usual merchants with their bags of wares; also missing were the English ladies who traveled to exotic places when all else had failed them. The boy who sat on his heels behind a potted palm, waiting to bring a guest some cigarettes, a cigar, a towel to wipe the sweat off his forehead, was simply playing a game with a pebble he threw into a circle he had drawn with his fingers in the dust on the floor. A girl with an ostrich-feather fan was standing by the upholstered chair near the stairs, ready to make any guest of the hotel more comfortable. No one needed her attention.

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.