Virgins of Paradise

by Wood, Barbara

  As he watched her put the last of the supplies away, he heard through the open window the radio in the coffeehouse downstairs. The newscaster's somber voice was bringing the latest reports: the last of the Russian military advisers had been expelled from Egypt, police had quelled another student riot at Cairo University, and two White House aides were accused of having previous knowledge of the Watergate break-in. Ibrahim closed his window. There was never any good news. The newspapers were no better, with their daily reminders that cotton exports continued to go down and therefore his income from his Delta farms. This was a bad time for Egypt; even Egypt's greatest living writer, Naguib Mahfouz, was writing stories about death and despair. Ibrahim found himself thinking more and more about the old days, when Farouk had been in power. Had it really been twenty-eight years since he and Hassan, virile young men in their twenties with not a care in the world, had raced from casino to casino with their king?

  He returned his attention to his mother, who had surprised him by suddenly showing up at his office. This was the first time she had ever been here. "How do you intend to go to Arabia, Mother?" he asked. "By boat? By plane?"

  "Pardon me, Dr. Ibrahim, but I'll be going now," Huda said brightly, as she came back in and reached for her sweater. Despite having to care for six demanding men, she considered herself to be quite modern and liberated. And it was apparent that she had a crush on her employer. "Will you be taking your family to the river tomorrow for the Shamm el—" She turned toward the door. "What was that sound?"

  Ibrahim rose to his feet just as the door flew open and Alice came in, assisted by Hakim Raouf.

  "What is it?" he said, going to her. "What's wrong?"

  "I'm all right, Ibrahim ... I just need a ladies' room. Quickly ..."

  "Huda," he said, and the young woman was instantly at Alice's side, helping her into the next room, with Amira following.

  Ibrahim turned to Camelia. "What did she tell you? Does she have a fever?"

  "No, no fever, Papa. She said she was up all night with diarrhea. And so were some of the other members of the family."

  Huda came out. "Doctor, come quickly. Mrs. Rasheed is vomiting."

  Camelia and Hakim paced Ibrahim's office while they heard sounds of distress on the other side of the wall. A few minutes later, Ibrahim appeared in the doorway. "I don't know what it is," he said. "She's lost a shocking amount of fluid, but she's resting for the moment. I took a specimen. Preliminary microscopic examination might tell us something." And he disappeared again.

  In the small room, barely larger than a closet, which served as Ibrahim's laboratory, he prepared a slide and prayed for a tentative diagnosis. "What is it, Ibrahim?" Amira said, struck by the fact that, as he peered through the lens of the microscope, Ibrahim reminded her of Qettah examining tea leaves. "What is wrong with Alice?"

  "I am praying it's only an attack of food poisoning," he said. But when he focused the microscope and saw the distinctive, comma-shaped bacilli, moving so rapidly they resembled shooting stars, he sat back and whispered, "Oh my God."

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  W

  HAT AM I GOING TO DO? I AM ONLY THREE MONTHS AWAY from getting my degree. Is it fair they should send me back now?"

  Jasmine looked into the terrified eyes of her neighbor, a young exchange student from Syria, and saw her own worries mirrored there. The United States had broken off diplomatic relations with various countries in the Middle East, and now was revoking visas and sending students back to Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. Jasmine had not yet received her notice, but she lived in fear of it from day to day. She couldn't go back to Egypt. Her family considered her dead; in six years she had received no communication from any of them, except for regular letters from her mother.

  "They're sending us all home!" the girl said, rubbing her arms as she stood outside Jasmine's front door, where a light rain fell. "Have you received your notice yet?"

  Jasmine shook her head, but she knew it was only a matter of time. Like her neighbor, she too was only three months away from her bachelor's degree; and she had just been accepted into medical school.

  "Do you know Hussein Sukry," the girl was saying, "who has the apartment next to mine? He left last week. He was hoping to support his family once he got his chemical engineering degree. But now he is back in Amman with no degree and no job. What are we to do? Let me know if you hear of a solution," the young woman said, adding, "Ma salaama. God keep you," and she went back across the courtyard of the apartment complex, where raindrops were creating ripples on the surface of the swimming pool.

  Fighting down her panic, Jasmine looked at her watch and, seeing that she would be late for her appointment if she didn't hurry, grabbed her purse, sweater, and car keys, and rushed out, slamming the door behind her.

  A metallic sky had hovered for days over Southern California and this college community perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As Jasmine hurried to the elevator that went down to the subterranean parking garage, she glimpsed the dull sky and thought how aptly it reflected her mood. Ever since the notices from Immigration and Naturalization had started arriving, a cold, gray depression had settled over the small body of Muslim students who attended the nearby university. Why were they being punished for the politics of their countries? What did the conflict between Israel and Egypt have to do with anything or anyone beyond their own borders?

  As she stepped out of the drizzle and into the elevator, she thought of how the khamsins would be starting in Egypt now, the sandstorms that always heralded her own and Camelia's birthdays. Jasmine was going to be twenty-seven, Camelia, twenty-eight.

  When the elevator doors opened, she hurried blindly out, colliding with a young man.

  "I'm sorry!" she said, helping him retrieve the books and papers he had dropped. "I didn't see you!"

  He said, "No sweat," and handed her her purse. "Hey, it's Jasmine, right? In the front apartment?"

  Pushing her blond hair back from her face, she found herself looking into a smile she recognized. It belonged to a young man with red-gold hair and beard, horn-rimmed glasses, patched jeans, and sandals. His name was Greg Van Kerk, and he lived four doors down from her.

  "Yes, Jasmine Rasheed," she said. Five years ago, in England, when she had applied for a visa to the United States, she had changed the spelling of her first name. "I'm sorry I nearly knocked you over."

  He laughed. "I can't think of a better way to begin my day. Except maybe to have my car start. It never fails, in the rain." He gestured to a battered VW behind him. "It never starts in a month with an R in it. And wouldn't you know it, today is the one day I have to get to school." He looked at the car keys in her hand. "I suppose you're on your way to the campus?"

  Jasmine hesitated. Although she and Greg Van Kerk had been neighbors for a year, exchanging words at the mailbox, saying "Hi" when they passed in the courtyard, he was a stranger nonetheless. After six years of living among Westerners, Jasmine still had not learned to relax in the company of a man who wasn't a relative. Reminding herself that this was a different country, with different rules, and that he was someone who needed assistance, she said shyly, "I will give you a ride, if you wish."

  Two minutes later they were on the Pacific Coast Highway, heading for the green promontory where a university of twenty thousand students looked out over waves crashing picturesquely against rocks.

  "Sure doesn't feel like spring," Greg said, after a spell of silence. "I mean, when does Southern California ever have this much rain?"

  Spring, she thought as she held tightly to the steering wheel. Shamm el-Nessim. The family would be down by the Nile or at the Barrage Gardens, picnicking and showing off their new clothes. And in three days her son Mohammed was going to celebrate his tenth birthday—a day she privately celebrated—and mourned—each year. She had sent him a present, a long letter, and a photograph of herself.

  "Nice car," Greg said, touching the dashboard of her new Chevrolet.

  Jasmine rec
alled that Greg Van Kerk lived in one of the cheapest apartments in the complex, and did part-time work as a handyman around the place to help pay for his tuition. Thinking of the dented VW, and noticing his patched jeans, Jasmine was reminded again of her good fortune. The house and trust fund in England, which her grandfather had left to her, brought in a small but steady income—the old earl's guilt money, she suspected, after he had disinherited his daughter for marrying an Arab.

  Traffic slowed, and they saw red emergency lights ahead. "Never fails," Greg said. "Southern Californians freak in rain."

  "Bisrnillah!" Jasmine murmured, thinking of her urgent appointment.

  "What?"

  "I said, 'In the Name of God.' It's Arabic."

  "That's right, someone told me you're from Egypt. You don't look Middle Eastern."

  After spending a year in England, Jasmine had come to America at Maryam Misrahi's invitation, and had discovered how unpopular it was to be Egyptian in America. After the Six-Day War, the situation had become explosive, Jewish and Arab students actually getting into fights at the university, and anti-Egyptian slogans being scrawled on the walls. During her very first days in the Misrahi house in the San Fernando Valley, she had overheard an argument between Rachel, Maryam's granddaughter, and Rachel's brother, a Zionist who had voiced his opposition to having an Egyptian live with them. "Daddy was born in Cairo!" Rachel had countered. "We are Egyptian, Haroun!" "My name is Aaron," he had shot back, "and we are Jews first." That was when Jasmine had cut her visit short and found an apartment of her own. And now that things were heating up again, as the saber-rattling increased on both sides of the Suez Canal, Jasmine was glad she blended, chameleon-like, with the Western crowd.

  "I heard that the State Department is making Middle Eastern students go home. Is that going to happen to you?" Greg said, as the Coast Highway traffic came nearly to a halt.

  "I don't know," she said quietly. "I hope not."

  When he saw how she grasped the steering wheel until her knuckles were white, he wondered if it was because of the slick highway, the accident up ahead, or the State Department. He said, "It must be strange for you here. I mean, Egypt isn't like America, is it?"

  When Jasmine realized she liked the sound of Greg's voice, she tried to relax. She glanced at him; he was slouching in the seat rather than sitting in it, and the American phrase "easygoing" came to her mind. She didn't sense any threat from him, no danger to her virtue. She thought of Amira's favorite warning—"When a man and a woman are alone together, Satan makes their third companion"—and she wondered where was Satan in this car. He's back in Egypt, with my father and his curse.

  A memory started to surface: "It will be as if you were dead ..." her father had said. Jasmine pushed it down, buried it, as she always did. Suppress the past, don't think about it.

  "No, America is not like Egypt," she said, as a highway patrol officer directed them around the traffic flares.

  When she said nothing more, Greg regarded her for a long moment and noticed for the first time how blue her eyes were, and that her hair wasn't exactly blond but a dark honey. "I like your accent," he said. "Sort of British with spice thrown in."

  "I lived for a while in England before coming to America. And my mother is English."

  "What was that swearword you said a minute ago?"

  "Bismillah is not a swearword. The Koran instructs us always to have God's name on our lips. But Americans don't like to speak the name of God. This is strange to a Muslim, because the Prophet taught us to invoke the name of God as frequently as possible, to keep Him always in front of our thoughts. And also, because evil spirits fear the name of God, we speak it a lot to keep them away."

  He gave her a startled look. "You believe in evil spirits?"

  "Most Egyptians do." When she saw how Greg smiled at her, her cheeks burned.

  "So what kind of doctor are you going to be?" he asked.

  "I want to take medicine to people who otherwise have no access to it. My father has a practice in Cairo ... a lot of poor people come to him because they are afraid of the government doctors, and because people who work at the government hospitals usually require bribes. My father does a lot of work for free, but sometimes he gets paid in chickens or goats."

  "And you're going to go back and work with him?"

  "No, I will go somewhere else. There is need all over the world." She gave him a shy smile and said, "I am talking too much."

  "Hardly! Besides, I'm interested. I'm an anthropologist—well, working on my master's."

  "I am a little embarrassed," she said, her voice barely audible above the rain. "Where I come from, an unmarried woman does not talk freely with a man she is not related to, because the reputation of an unmarried woman in Egypt is a very fragile thing."

  She looked out at the churning gray ocean. She sensed Greg at her side, waiting for her to continue.

  "In America," she said, "if a woman wishes to live alone, not to marry, she has that choice. But Egyptian men believe that all women want to be married, they cannot conceive of a woman not wanting to be married." She thought of Camelia who, according to Alice's latest letter, was still unmarried. "Here in California I have actually seen young women pursue men they were interested in. In Egypt, it is only the man who may do the pursuing. It is a man's world, Egypt," Jasmine added quietly.

  Greg gave her a long look before saying, "Do you miss your home a lot?"

  Jasmine thought that it was more than merely missing Egypt; she felt as if she were constantly hungry, physically and spiritually. She was starved for her own culture, where the day was broken into five parts by prayer; she missed the street vendors on Cairo's noisy corners, the smoky smells and rowdy celebrations, the people, so quick to laugh or cry or shout. Living alone in an apartment had none of the comforting feel of a big house, with its spirits of the generations who had lived before her, and the laughter of many children and cousins, people everywhere, all of them Rasheeds, sharing beliefs, fears, and joys. Here, she felt isolated, an entity cut off from the greater body, almost as if she were truly just a spirit. As if her father's death sentence had indeed been carried out.

  "So are you the only one here?" Greg asked. "I mean, is your family still in Egypt?"

  How could she explain her father's punishment to Greg Van Kerk? In what terms could she tell him that, if she had lived in a village, her father and uncles would have been justified in killing her for sleeping with a man who was not her husband, even if he had forced her? How could she convey to him her terror of being sent back to Egypt, because she was now a ghost among the living and would be an outcast in her country, suffering a worse loneliness and isolation than any she had experienced in England or America?

  As the buildings and tall pines of the school grounds came into view, Jasmine thought: Do the dead also mourn? Because, although six years now separated her from that terrible night, not a day went by in which she did not grieve for the loss of her stillborn child and her beloved son Mohammed.

  Through Alice, Jasmine maintained a frail link with the boy. She sent him cards and presents, and Alice sent photographs back, of Mohammed at the zoo, in his school uniform, riding a horse at the Pyramids. But the letter she always hoped to find in her mailbox, scrawled in a childish hand and starting "Dearest Mama," never came.

  Mohammed was never really mine, she thought, guiding her car into a parking space. He never belonged to me. He belonged to Omar and the Rasheeds. "Yes," she said, turning off the ignition. "My family is in Egypt."

  Greg paused to look at her. When he had first moved into the apartment complex a year ago and had seen the young blond woman who occupied the expensive apartment at the front, without a roommate, keeping to herself and not attending any of the barbecues around the pool, he had thought she was a snob. After a few murmured exchanges in the laundry room and the parking garage, he had decided she was just shy. Now he thought: not shy. Modest. And it struck him that he had never ascribed that quality to anyone before. She
wasn't exactly nunlike, but her demeanor, her conservative way of dressing, even her hair, which looked as if it might be wild if set free from those barrettes, reminded him of the sisters who had taught at the Catholic schools he attended as a boy.

  But there was something even more compelling about her than exotic looks, a British accent, a hint of mystery; it was her air of overwhelming sadness, as if she were enveloped in a deep, powerful mourning. And it made him, for the first time in his life, forget for a moment his overdue rent and stalled VW, and wonder what had made her so profoundly sad.

  "Would you like to go out some night?" he said. "Movies, pizza?"

  She gave him a startled look. "Thank you, but I don't think it will be possible. I study all the time, and I must prepare for medical school."

  "Sure. I understand. Thanks for the ride," he said to her over the top of the car. "So what are you going to do?"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "I mean, about the State Department. What if they order you to leave the U.S.? What will you do?"

  "I have an appointment with the dean of the medical school," she said, her voice hopeful but her eyes betraying doubt. "Since they have accepted me for the fall class, maybe they will help, inshallah."

  "Inshallah," he murmured, as he watched her cross the lawn toward the university's massive redbrick medical facility.

  Because of the threat of rain, Jasmine decided to take a short cut through Lathrop Hall, and when the glass doors swung closed behind her, she found herself facing a long corridor filled with people in white lab coats, hurrying this way and that with clipboards and stethoscopes, alone or engaged in animated conversation. Doors stood open to laboratories, classrooms, and offices with signs reading: Parasitology, Tropical Medicine, Public Health Education, Vector-Borne Diseases. The air seemed filled with urgency and purpose; it was the world, she knew, where she belonged.