Virgins of Paradise

by Wood, Barbara

  But rather than lift his spirits, as he had hoped, the champagne was having the opposite effect. With each glass, with each cheer from the crowd around the roulette table, the more morose he grew, wondering what he was doing wasting time at amusements he didn't find amusing. He looked around at the king's companions and saw a regiment of young men who all looked exactly like himself. We are like identical worker bees, he thought, as he accepted another glass from a passing waiter. Everyone knew that Farouk chose his attendants with a particular eye for attractiveness and polish—olive-skinned young men like Ibrahim Rasheed, who had handsome brown eyes and black hair, all in their late twenties or early thirties, rich and idle, wearing tuxedos ordered from Savile Row in London, and speaking an affected English that they had learned while attending school in England, as had most sons of Cairo's aristocracy. And yet on their heads, Ibrahim noticed with uncharacteristic cynicism, they wore the red fez, the jealously guarded symbol of those who belonged to the Egyptian upper class, and some were worn tilted so far forward on their foreheads that they almost rested on their owners' eyebrows. Arabs trying not to be Arabs, Ibrahim thought bitterly, Egyptians trying to pass for English gentlemen, and speaking not a word of their native tongue, because Arabic was good only for giving orders to servants. Although Ibrahim's was an enviable position, at times it secretly depressed him, for even though he was the king's personal physician, it was not an achievement he could point to with pride. The post had been secured for him by his powerful father.

  Being Farouk's personal physician had, in fact, many drawbacks, one of them being having to spend evenings such as this, wasting time beneath bright lights and listening to an orchestra play rumbas while women in seductive gowns danced with men in tuxedos. As the king's doctor, Ibrahim was required to be with the royal personage at all times, or at least on call; he had a telephone in his bedroom at the house on Virgins of Paradise Street that was linked directly to the palace. He had held the elite post for five years and in that time he had come to know Farouk better than anyone else, including Queen Farida. Despite rumors—only one of which was true—that Farouk had a very small penis and a very large pornography collection, Ibrahim knew that, at twenty-five, Farouk was at heart a child. He adored ice cream, practical jokes, and "Uncle Scrooge" comic books, which he imported regularly from America. His other passions included Katharine Hepburn movies and gambling. And virgins, such as the milky-skinned seventeen-year-old who hung onto the royal arm tonight.

  The crowd around the roulette table grew, everyone wanting to bask in the royal spotlight—Egyptian bankers, Turkish businessmen, British officers in starched uniforms, and various members of Europe's displaced nobility who had escaped Hitler's army. After having braced itself for Rommel's march into Cairo, the city was now in a frenzy of celebration; there was no room in this noisy nightclub for ill feelings, not even toward the English, who were expected to take their occupying forces out of Egypt now that the war was over.

  When the king called out, "Voisins!" and arranged his chips on numbers twenty-six and thirty-two, Ibrahim chanced another quick look at his watch. His wife should be going into labor at any time, and he wanted to be on hand to comfort her. But there was another, more shameful reason for his anxiety, shameful at least as Ibrahim saw it. He needed to know if he had fulfilled his obligation to his father by producing a son. "You owe it to me and to your ancestors," Ali Rasheed had said the night he died. "You are my only son, the responsibility lies with you." A man who did not father sons, Ali had said, wasn't really a man. Daughters did not count, as the old saying implied: "What is under a veil brings sorrow." Ibrahim recalled how desperate even Farouk had been that Queen Farida give him a son: he had even secretly asked Ibrahim for advice on fertility potions and aphrodisiacs. Ibrahim would never forget hearing the gun salute the day Farouk's child was born; all of Cairo had listened with held breath. They had been acutely disappointed when the salvo had stopped at forty-one guns rather than the one hundred and one that would have meant a boy.

  But more than anything, Ibrahim wanted to be with his wife, the girl-woman he called his little butterfly. The king scored another win, the crowd cheered, and Ibrahim gazed into his champagne glass, recalling the day he had first seen her. It had been at a garden party at one of the royal palaces, and she had been among the lovely young women attending the queen. He had been struck by her frailness and beauty, but the exact moment he had fallen in love with her had been when a butterfly had landed on her nose and she had screamed. As the others clustered around her, Ibrahim had made his way through with smelling salts, and when he had broached the protective feminine circle and found her at its center, he had believed she was crying, but when he realized she was laughing, he had thought: someday this little butterfly will be mine.

  Ibrahim sneaked another look at his watch and was trying to figure a way of removing himself from the king's presence when a waiter came up bearing a gold tray. "Pardon me, Dr. Rasheed," the man said, "this message just came for you from the palace."

  Ibrahim scanned the brief note. A few private words with the king, and he was hurrying out of the club, barely remembering to get his coat from the hatcheck girl, and hastily draping his silk scarf around his neck. When he got behind the wheel of his Mercedes, he suddenly wished he had not drunk so much champagne.

  Pulling into the driveway on Virgins of Paradise Street, Ibrahim turned off the engine and scanned the façade of the three-story, nineteenth-century mansion. He listened for a puzzled moment and then, recognizing the strange sound that was coming from within, ran through the garden, up the big stairway, across a large hall and into the women's side of the house, where he found the women wailing loud enough for the whole street to hear.

  He stopped when he saw the empty bassinet at the foot of the fourposter bed, with a blue bead suspended over it to ward off the evil eye. His sister ran to him and threw her arms around him, crying, "She is gone! Our sister is gone!" Gently removing himself, Ibrahim slowly approached the bed, where his mother sat with a newborn baby in her arms. He saw tears in her dark eyes.

  "What happened?" he asked, wishing his head were clear, cursing the champagne.

  "God has released your wife from her ordeal," Amira said, drawing the birthing blanket away from the baby's face. "But He has granted you this beautiful child. Oh, Ibrahim, son of my heart—"

  "She was in labor?" he said, wishing his mind wasn't so muddled.

  "Since shortly after you left for the palace this morning."

  "And she died?"

  "Just moments ago," Amira said. "I telephoned the palace, but I was too late."

  Finally he brought himself to look at the bed. His young wife's eyes were closed, her ivory face looking peaceful, as if she merely slept. The satin cover reached her chin, hiding the evidence of the life-and-death struggle she had lost. Ibrahim fell to his knees, buried his face in the satin, and said softly, "In the name of God the compassionate, the merciful. There is no god but God, and Mohammed is His messenger."

  Amira placed a hand on her son's head and said, "It was God's will. She has gone to paradise now." She spoke in Arabic, the language of the Rasheed house.

  "How will I bear it, Mother?" he whispered. "She left me and I didn't even know she had gone." He raised a tearstained face. "I should have been here. I might have saved her."

  "Only God can save, may He be exalted. Take consolation in this, my son: your wife was a pious woman, and the Koran promises us that the truly pious, when they die will be granted the supreme reward of beholding the face of God. Come see your daughter. Her birth-star is Vega, in the eighth lunar house—a good sign, the astrologer assures me."

  "A daughter?" he whispered. "Am I then doubly cursed by God?"

  "God does not curse you," Amira said, touching Ibrahim's face and remembering how they had grown together—she a girl of thirteen, he a baby in her womb. "Did not God, the Glorious and Almighty, create your wife? Has He not the right to call her to Him when He wishes? God
does nothing that is not wise, my son. Proclaim the oneness of God."

  His voice was tight as he bowed his head and said, "I declare that God is one. Aminti bittah. My trust is in God." He rose, looked around in confusion, and then, with one final anguished glance toward the bed, hurried from the room. Minutes later he was in his car, speeding toward the Nile, then over a bridge spanning the river, and finally along dirt lanes bordering fields of sugarcane. He was barely aware of the huge spring moon that seemed to mock him, or the hot wind that blasted his car with sand; he drove blindly, in rage and grief.

  Suddenly, Ibrahim lost control and the vehicle went into a spin, crashing into the sugarcane. He staggered out, the effects of champagne and shock making his head spin. He stumbled a few yards, oblivious of his surroundings or the village a short distance away, and stood for a moment looking up at the night sky. Finally, with a bitter sob, he raised a fist toward heaven. In a loud voice, he cursed God, again, and yet again.

  TWO

  D

  AWN CAME, THIN AND PALE, AND AS IBRAHIM OPENED HIS eyes, he saw the sun shrouded in mists like a veiled woman. He lay still, trying to think, to remember where he was; his body ached, his head was throbbing, and he was consumed with a terrible thirst. When he tried to move, he discovered that he was sitting in his car, which was tilted at an angle in a forest of tall green sugarcane.

  What had happened? How did he come to be here? And where, exactly, was here?

  And then it came back to him: the summons from the casino, the drive home, finding his wife dead, then the desperate flight through the night, the car going out of control—

  Ibrahim groaned.

  God, he thought. I cursed God.

  He pushed the door open and tumbled onto the damp earth. He couldn't remember anything after that angry curse, yet he realized he must have climbed into the front seat and fallen asleep.

  And now he felt sick, and so thirsty he thought he could drink the Nile.

  As he leaned against the car and vomited, he saw to his dismay that he was still in his tuxedo, the white silk scarf around his neck, as if he had just stepped out of the casino for a breath of air. He couldn't remember having felt this wretched ever before in his life. He had dishonored his dead wife, his mother, his father.

  As the morning mist began to burn off, Ibrahim sensed the vast blue sky open above him, and he felt his father, the powerful Ali Rasheed, looking down from heaven, thick eyebrows meeting in disapproval. Ibrahim knew that his father had occasionally drunk alcohol, but Ali would never have been so weak as to vomit afterward. For nearly all of his twenty-eight years, Ibrahim had tried to please his father, to meet his high expectations. "You will study in England," Ali had said to his son, and Ibrahim had gone to Oxford. "You will become a physician," the father had commanded, and the son had complied. "You will accept a post on the king's staff," Ali, now the minister of health, had instructed, and Ibrahim had joined Farouk's circle. Finally, "You will continue the tradition of honor in our family, and you will give me many grandsons." But all his efforts to gain his father's approval seemed to have been dashed in this one humiliating moment.

  Ibrahim sank to the rich earth and tried with all his heart to ask God's forgiveness for his weakness—for running out on his mother, Amira, for not praying over his wife's body, for driving to this desolate place, and for cursing the Almighty. But Ibrahim could not find the humility within him. When he tried to pray, his father's implacable face kept coming to his mind, confusing him. Did all sons, he wondered, see their father's face when they tried to picture God?

  As he looked around in the direction of the Nile—he desperately needed water—he heard his father's voice come thundering through the tall sugarcane: "A daughter! You can't even accomplish what the simplest peasant can do!" Ibrahim wanted to cry to heaven: Did I not try to produce a son? Was I not ecstatic when my precious little butterfly told me she was pregnant? And hadn't my first thought been: Here at last is something that my father hasn't given to me but which I have created on my own?

  Holding onto the fender, he vomited again and again. As he straightened up and gasped for air, his mind cleared, and in a single, stunning revelation he saw the root of his anguish. And what he saw shocked him utterly: It is not her death that drives me to madness, but the fact that I have failed to prove myself to him!

  Ibrahim wished he could weep, but, like the prayer for forgiveness, the tears refused to come.

  As he steadied himself against the car, assessing how deeply into the mud it was mired, how he was going to get it out, if there was a village or a well nearby, he suddenly saw a figure standing a few feet away, watching him. He would have sworn that she had not been there a moment before; dark herself, she seemed to have arisen from the dark earth, barefooted, in a long dirty dress, an earthenware jug balanced on her head.

  He stared at her, seeing that she was a fellaha, a peasant girl, no older than twelve or thirteen, watching him with large eyes that were more filled with innocent curiosity than fear or wariness. And then his eyes fixed on the tall pitcher she carried.

  "God's peace and compassion upon you," he said in a dry voice, barely hearing himself over the pounding in his head. "Will you offer water to a stranger in need?"

  To his surprise, she stepped toward him, lifted the jug from her head, and tilted it. As his hands shot out to catch the fresh river water, he recalled the few times he had visited his vast cotton farms in the Nile delta, and how shy the peasants were who worked for him, how the girls would run when they saw the master coming.

  God, but the water tasted of heaven! He cupped his hands and drank deeply, then splashed the water over his head, his face, and into his mouth again. "I have drunk the most expensive wine in the world," he said as he ran wet hands through his hair, "and it could not compare with this sweet water. Truly, child, you have saved my life."

  When he saw the bewildered look on her face, he realized he had spoken in English. He felt himself smile, a strange sensation against the backdrop of his grief. "My friends tell me that I am lucky," he said, continuing in English as he washed his hands again and splashed the cool water over his face. "Because I have no brothers, I received my father's entire legacy, which makes me a very rich man. Oh, I had brothers once, my father had several wives before he married Amira, my mother. Those wives gave him three sons and four daughters. But an influenza epidemic before I was born carried away two sons and a daughter. My youngest brother died in the war, one of my sisters died of cancer, and my two remaining older sisters live now in my house on Virgins of Paradise Street, because they never married. And so I am my father's only son. It is a big responsibility."

  Ibrahim looked up at the sky, wondering if he could see the face of Ali Rasheed in the endless blue, and as he inhaled the fresh morning air, he felt his heart constrict like a fist in his chest and tears rise in his chest. She was dead. His little butterfly was dead. He held his hands out and the girl poured more water into them; he scrubbed at his gritty eyes and ran his wet fingers through his hair again.

  He took a moment to look at the fellaha, thinking she might even be pretty under all the grime, but he knew that the hard life of a Nile peasant would make her old before she was thirty. "So I have a baby daughter now," he went on, pressing down his rising grief. "My father would see this as a failure. He considered daughters to be an insult to a man's virility. He ignored my sisters when we were growing up. One of them lives at home now, she's a young widow with two little children. I don't think he ever embraced her all the time she was growing up. But I think daughters are nice. Little girls are sometimes like their mothers—" His voice broke.

  "You don't know what I'm saying," he said softly to the girl. "Even if I were to speak in Arabic, you wouldn't understand. Your life is simple and already laid out before you. You will marry a man chosen by your parents, you will have children, you will grow old and perhaps live long enough to be venerated in your village." Ibrahim put his hands to his face and began to weep.
<
br />   The girl waited patiently, the empty water jug cradled in her arm. Ibrahim finally composed himself. Perhaps, with the girl's help, he could get the car out of the mud. He spoke to her in Arabic, explaining how she must push on the hood when he gave the signal.

  When the car was once again up on the dry dirt track, the motor purring softly, inviting him to go home, Ibrahim smiled sadly at the girl and said, "God will reward you for your kindness. And I would like to give you something." But as he went through his pockets, he found he had no money with him. And then he saw how she eyed the white silk scarf that was still draped over his shoulders, so he removed it and handed it to her.

  "God grant you a long life," he said with tears in his eyes, "a kind husband, and many children."

  After the car disappeared down the track, thirteen-year-old Sahra spun around and raced off toward the village, forgetting that her water jug was empty, thinking only of her prize—a length of fabric as white and pure as the breast feathers of a goose, and so soft that it felt like water in her fingers. She couldn't wait to find Abdu and tell him about her encounter with the stranger, show him the scarf. Then she would tell her mother, and then the entire village. But first Abdu, because of the wondrous thing about the stranger—hadn't he resembled her beloved Abdu?

  As Sahra made her way down the narrow lanes, where cookfires filled the early-morning air with pungent smoke, she thought how lucky she was. Most girls never knew what sort of a husband they were going to marry; the bride and groom were strangers on their wedding day. And a lot of girls went on to lead unhappy lives, which they proudly bore in silence, because a complaining wife was a disgrace to her family. But Sahra knew she would not be unhappy when she married Abdu. Abdu, who laughed so well, and made up poems, and gave her the strangest feeling deep down inside whenever he looked at her with those eyes as green as the Nile. She had known him since childhood—he was four years older—but it had only been after the last harvest that Sahra had started seeing him in a different light, and Abdu had started paying her a different kind of attention. The whole village assumed Sahra and Abdu were going to marry. They were first cousins, after all.