Virgins of Paradise

by Wood, Barbara

  "You will come and visit us often?" Maryam said, as the doors of the van slammed shut. "You won't let distance separate us?"

  "There was a time," Amira answered, "when I would have hesitated to leave my house. In fact, I was afraid to leave. But that time is long past. Of course I will come and visit you, you are my sister."

  Amira linked her arm through Maryam's and, remembering the days when she had been terrified to go out into the world, when she had not even discarded her veil, even though Ali had given her permission to do so—thinking, too, of how that brutal separation from her mother long ago had left her with a legacy of insecurity—Amira realized that she was very much looking forward to visiting Maryam in her new apartment on Talaat Harb Square.

  PART FOUR

  1966-1967

  TWENTY-TWO

  W

  E MUST BE CAREFUL NOW, YASMINA. A DEEP WOUND SUCH AS this can be tricky." Ibrahim was speaking in English so that the child's mother, a fellaha who had recently come to live in the city, would not understand and become alarmed.

  "What happened?" Yasmina asked. She had just arrived at her father's office to fill in for his nurse, who had the evening off.

  "A stairway broke—There, there," Ibrahim said, switching to Arabic. "Be a brave boy. Just another minute and we'll be all through."

  As her father gently rinsed the wound, Yasmina gave the child a reassuring smile. He was like many of the children crowding into the nearby neighborhood. Peasants leaving their farms and pouring into the city in search of better prospects were being crammed into flats and apartments meant to hold one tenth the number; they filled rooftops and alleys with makeshift shelters, garden plots, chickens and goats; they slept in stairways and broken-down elevators. And so accidents frequently occurred, with archaic wooden balconies suddenly giving way, whole buildings collapsing without warning, or, as in the case of Dr. Rasheed's young patient, rotten stairs splintering. The boy had gotten a nail in the calf of his leg.

  "All right now, Yasmina," he said, returning to English. "We have washed the wound thoroughly, syringed out the dirt, and soaked the wound in potassium permanganate. What do we do next?"

  Yasmina had put a white lab coat on over her dress, and bound her hair up in a white scarf, as her father's nurse always did. She handed her father a basin of purple liquid she had just mixed. "Gentian violet," she said, "unless an antibiotic ointment is indicated."

  "Good girl," Ibrahim said, gently applying the solution to the boy's skin while the mother, an ageless woman wrapped in a black melaya, watched silently. "As you know, a deep wound that does not bleed much, such as this one," he said, "is likely to become highly infected. This boy is lucky, his mother knew enough to bring him to me. Very often, when they see no bleeding, they assume the wound is minor and ignore it. Septicemia and tetanus develop, and the victim dies. There," he said, setting aside the basin and removing his gloves. "We never suture a wound of this type, so I'll leave you to bandage it while I draw up some penicillin."

  As Yasmina wrapped the skinny leg with clean gauze, it occurred to her that the child was about the same age as her own son, and yet this fellaheen boy was smaller than three-year-old Mohammed, causing her to wonder if the fellaheen really improved their lot by coming into the city, or if they were better off staying on their farms by the Nile.

  After administering the shot, which made the child, who had been quiet up until now, burst into tears, Ibrahim said to the mother in Arabic, "Bring your son back to me in three days. In the meantime, feel his forehead. If he gets warm, bring him back right away. If his leg becomes hard and rigid, or if he seems to move his head a lot, bring him back. Do you understand?"

  She nodded, shy eyes peering over the black cotton melaya she had held across her face through the whole visit. When she reached beneath the cloak and came out with money—half-piastre coins—Ibrahim refused them, saying, "Prayers are more valuable than money, Umma. Pray for me at the next holy festival."

  After the woman and child were gone, Ibrahim went to the sink and washed his hands. "We probably won't see them again, Yasmina. If the wound becomes infected and the boy gets sick, his mother will most likely take him to a magician to have the jinns exorcised." He looked at his daughter, who was cleaning up the instruments and supplies, and he felt his heart fill with pride. To give free medical treatment to the local peasants was his own idea; Ibrahim confessed that such work left him with a deep feeling of satisfaction at the end of each day. But he did not expect such service from Yasmina, who must certainly feel more comfortable with his wealthy patients. And yet here she was, helping him out during his "free clinic" hour when the fellaheen came.

  "Are you sure this is what you want to spend the rest of your life doing, Mishmish?" he asked. "Being a wife and a mother is a noble occupation. Why do you want to be a doctor? As you can see, it can be a frustrating business."

  She gave him a teasing smile. "Why did you become a doctor, Father?"

  "I had no choice. Your grandfather, God give him peace, dictated to me how my life was going to go."

  "What would you have preferred to do?"

  "If I had it to do over again," Ibrahim said, as he dried his hands, "I would go and live on one of our cotton farms in the Delta. I had thought for a while that I would like to be a writer. Of course, I was young at the time. Don't all young people dream of being writers?"

  Yasmina watched him as he carefully brushed his hair, using broad sweeps above each temple, where she noticed a distinguished silver was replacing the gray. Yasmina thought that her father, nearing fifty, was still very good looking, and even though his waistline had filled out a little, she decided that it made him look like a man of substance. She could see why her mother had fallen in love with him.

  As she separated the clean instruments from the used, and carefully disposed of the gloves and soiled gauze, as Ibrahim had taught her to do, she watched him out of the corner of her eye while he jotted notes on an index card, his gold pen catching the light. And she realized that her father was entering the age that Yasmina thought was the most becoming to Arab men, the mid-life stage when they seemed to shake off youthful pretensions and self-involvement and take on the finer qualities of maturity and dignity. She had observed the same features in her university professors, in the older men who sat in the coffeehouses, even in elderly street beggars, and she wondered if it was perhaps a national or racial trait, this natural stateli-ness that seemed eventually to come to most Arab men. Even her husband, Omar, although only twenty-four, was already exhibiting early signs of it, most likely, Yasmina suspected, because of his frequent dealings with community leaders and prominent businessmen.

  She imagined the day when Ibrahim would pose for a family portrait as Grandfather Ali had done, sitting on a chair as if it were a throne, surrounded by devoted subjects—his family. Yasmina saw herself in the group, at his right hand.

  "We no longer own the farms in the Delta, Father," she said teasingly. "You would have been thrown out of your writer's paradise. And then what would you have done?"

  Ibrahim went to the window and looked out at the neon lights that were starting to flicker on as day gave way to night. Now that the siesta hours were over, people were launching themselves into the streets for an evening of business or entertainment. Cairo! Ibrahim thought, as he watched a line form in front of the Roxy Cinema. City of restless souls. "Probably I would have gone into the streets and sold potatoes," he said, watching an elderly sweet-potato vendor wheeling his cart among the theater patrons.

  Ibrahim turned and looked at Yasmina, who was replacing the supplies in the white metal cabinets. She had removed her scarf, and her blond hair tumbled down her back. From this angle she resembled Alice, he thought; she possessed the same grace, the same careful movements. But Yasmina's ambition had not been inherited from her mother. Perhaps, he thought, she had gotten it from himself, but it was a determination he had not been aware he possessed.

  When Ibrahim took a moment to exp
lore the prospect of Yasmina becoming a doctor, imagining how he could convert the room adjoining the office, where he had once brought prostitutes, turning it into a second office and examining room, he found that the idea very much appealed to him. If she were to become a doctor, he thought, then he could bring her into the practice with him; she would treat the women and children, while he saw to the men; they would work as a team, share opinions, consult with each other, the Doctors Rasheed. And she would be here every day, bringing her own special luminescence to his office.

  "But you have a son, Yasmina," he said. "Shouldn't you be devoting all your time to him?"

  "I do, mostly. Auntie Nefissa likes to have him, too. Right now, they're at a puppet show."

  "Well, until Tahia does her duty and produces a child, Mohammed is Nefissa's only grandchild."

  Yasmina turned around and faced him. "Father, I have managed to earn two years of university credits. In another two years Mohammed will be starting school. I would like to go into medical school then."

  "Aren't you too young to be a doctor?"

  "I shall be twenty-six when I finish!"

  "An old woman," he said. "I don't know, Mishmish. Medical school is no place for a young lady of your class and breeding. It doesn't seem proper. I think I would rather see you give me more grandchildren. After all, Mohammed is nearly four. He needs brothers and sisters."

  She laughed. "My son has more cousins than he can handle. A brother or a sister would only confuse him!"

  Yasmina knew the family was wondering when her next child was going to come. They didn't know about her use of birth control, or that she had briefly considered obtaining a divorce from Omar, three years ago. But a discreet enquiry into the process had revealed that, while a man wishing to rid himself of a wife simply had to recite "I divorce thee" three times, a woman could obtain a divorce only on a few specific grounds: if her husband had been put in prison for a long term; if he had a terminal illness; if he was certified insane; if he had beaten her so severely that she was permanently injured.

  An older woman with whom she did volunteer work at the Red Crescent had offered her some advice. "Lawyers! Courts! Petitions!" Zubaida had declared. "Any woman with a brain between her ears knows the quickest and easiest way to get a man to divorce her. Didn't it work for me, twice? Both husbands, egotistical donkeys, a big mistake marrying them. But there is an old remedy, my mother called it putting poison in the stew. Its ingredients are simple: keeping an untidy house, allowing noise while the husband entertains male friends, providing insufficient food for honored guests, letting the children be disrespectful in front of others—all little darts to wound his masculine pride and honor. If those fail, a good ridiculing laugh in bed while he attempts sex does the trick."

  But Yasmina was not that desperate, and besides, since Omar had graduated from the university and gotten a good job with the government, he was away on overseas assignments, often for months at a time. His absence plus her secret use of a contraceptive, as well as the time she spent pursuing a university degree, were what made life with Omar tolerable. It even seemed, she was beginning to think, that their relationship might be improving; Omar was more respectful of her lately, and when he had returned from his last assignment overseas, he had brought her a gift. Supposing that this was how marriages grew, and that in time perhaps even love would come into their lives, Yasmina was beginning to see a fuller picture of her future.

  "But I want more, Father," she said. "Yes, it's a wonderful thing to be a mother. But I feel confined in such a role. When I attend classes at the university, or when I come here to help you, I almost feel like a different person, as if I am waking up, or becoming my real self. How I envy Camelia her dancing career!"

  "Your grandfather did not approve of women becoming doctors."

  "But it is you I'm asking for help, Father, and you are not Grandfather Ali."

  "No," he said slowly, surprised by her words. "I am not my father, God rest him. Very well, Mishmish. After your mother and I return from our trip to England, we will talk about it."

  She gave him a hug and as Ibrahim returned it, he realized that he was secretly pleased with Yasmina's ambition and her courage to speak up to him. If only he had had such courage ...

  There was a knock at the outer door, and when Ibrahim went to open it, he was surprised to find his niece's husband, Jamal Rasheed, standing there.

  "Forgive the intrusion, Ibrahim," he said, "but necessity has its own laws. May I come in?"

  Alarmed my Jamal's abruptness, forgoing the customary polite exchange, Yasmina offered him a chair and said, "Is it Tahia? Is she all right?" Although her cousin had left the house on Virgins of Paradise Street when she had married Jamal Rasheed, Yasmina continued to see her often. She knew that Tahia was trying to get pregnant, but so far had been unsuccessful.

  "My wife is fine, God be thanked. Ibrahim, the military police have been around, asking questions."

  "What sort of questions?"

  "About you. About your political leanings, about your bank account and investments."

  "What? But why?"

  "I do not know. But I have just now learned from a friend, I cannot tell you who, that the Rasheed name is on a certain list."

  "What list?"

  "The one belonging to the Visitors of Dawn."

  Ibrahim went to the outer door, peered up and down the deserted corridor, then locked the door, came in and locked the inner door, also, before saying, "How can we possibly be on this list? My family has no argument with Nasser's government. We are peaceful people, Jamal."

  "I swear upon the chastity of Sayyida Zeinab that it is true. You must be careful, my brother. The military police are powerful; Minister Amer is greatly feared. Now that the Army is in charge of everything, if a man so much as criticizes Cairo's unreliable telephones, he is arrested and his property seized in the name of the state."

  Jamal looked around, as if one of Nasser's notorious spies might be hiding in Ibrahim's examination room. "Listen to me, Ibrahim. Your family is in danger. No one is exempt from these madmen. They come in the night, force their way in, and arrest the men of the family. Many are never heard from again. This time it is not like before, during the Revolution, when you were arrested. This is far, far worse, for they can take your house, your bank account, all that you own."

  Suddenly, from the street below, came a clamor of honking horns and cheering voices. Yasmina got up and closed the window as Jamal continued in a low voice. "Ibrahim, you know my sister, Munirah, who is married to the rich manufacturer? They came to her home late last night. She and the children were forced out into the street while the soldiers impounded the house and everything in it. They stripped the rings from her fingers and the necklaces from her daughters' necks. Then they took her husband and eldest sons away. You don't hear about these things because the newspapers are afraid to print them. But it is the rich who are the targets of this scourge."

  "In the name of God, is there no way we can protect ourselves?"

  "I'll tell you what I have done. I signed over the deeds of my apartment houses to Tahia and my female cousins. Then I closed my bank account and hid the money. If the Visitors of the Dawn come to the house of Jamal Rasheed, they won't find much. Believe me, Ibrahim, there is nowhere to turn, no one you can trust. Even some of those who once had power have been stripped of that power."

  "But why should my name be put on that list? By God, I have led a peaceful life since the day Farouk sailed from Alexandria. My family and I are blameless! What does Minister Amer have against me?"

  "Ibrahim," Jamal said, "it is not Amer who is after you. It is his under secretary, a man little known to the people, but one of immense power. And once he places a name on that secret list, there is no escaping it."

  "Who is this man?"

  "Someone who was once your friend. Hassan al-Sabir."

  "Poor Ibrahim," Alice said, as she accepted a cup of coffee from Maryam Misrahi. "I'm afraid all he remembers
of England is how my father shunned us when we went there for our honeymoon. Eddie was wonderful to Ibrahim, of course. Edward was like my mother, they both adored the East. But my father believed I had married beneath myself." She paused and heard faint strains of music coming from the next apartment—Arabic music, which she had never quite gotten used to. "I'm so glad we're taking this trip," she said. "I feel almost as if England is being given a second chance!"

  "Family is important," said Suleiman who, at seventy, had the appearance of a man who has settled comfortably into retirement. "Maryam and I would like to travel and see the children, but they are spread all over the world, and I fear we aren't up to such an odyssey any more." He looked at Amira, who was also visiting, and said, "Your son is a good man, to spare the time from his medical practice and take his wife back to her homeland. It is something I wish I had done when I was younger, traveled around the world and visited my children."

  "I thank God for Ibrahim," Amira said, measuring sugar into her coffee, hiding her anxiety in the small rituals of spooning and stirring. She chided herself for her groundless fear—that she might never see her son again once he left—and she fought to hide it from her friends. "May God grant you safe journey," she said softly to Alice, "and a speedy return."

  A modest balcony jutted out from the Misrahis' apartment, not big enough to accommodate people, but large enough for the pots of geraniums and marigolds Maryam cultivated. Its best feature was a large sliding-glass door that could be opened to admit the sultry September evening air, along with cooking aromas and sounds of traffic. As the diaphanous curtains stirred in the late summer breeze, Alice took her coffee and went to look out over the small balcony, which also had a view of the Nile. "I heard somewhere," she said, "that lotuses are called brides of the Nile. Why is that?"