Virgins of Paradise

by Wood, Barbara

  Jasmine hadn't told him the details, that she and Greg had been strangers at the time. She knew he assumed that she and Greg had already been lovers, and she wanted to maintain that illusion; it helped her to keep distant from Connor, and from her own growing feelings toward him.

  "Well? What do you say? Dinner in town?"

  She finally looked up and when she saw his attractive smile, and the way the overhead lights sharpened the chiseled lines of his face, she said, "Yes, that would be very nice," and felt her heart gallop.

  But as they were getting ready to leave, the telephone rang. Jasmine picked it up; it was Rachel, sounding urgent. "Sorry to bother you, Jas, I know you're working. Can you come over right away? Grandma Maryam is asking for you."

  She glanced at Connor. "But it's Yom Kippur, Rachel. Do you want visitors?"

  "She isn't well, Jas. She hasn't been out of bed for a week, and she says it's important that she talk to you right away. Can you come?"

  Jasmine hesitated. "Just a minute." She put her hand over the mouthpiece. "Dr. Connor, a friend of mine is ill and asking me to come and see her right away."

  "But of course you must go. We can make dinner another night."

  "All right, Rachel, tell Auntie Maryam that I'll be there as soon as I can."

  When Jasmine hung up, feeling both relieved and disappointed, for she knew that now they never would make that dinner date, Connor said, "Wait a minute, Jasmine. Before you go I want to say something. I had planned to tell you tonight at dinner, but I'll tell you now because I might not get another chance." He paused and thrust his hands in his pockets. Jasmine had the feeling he had rehearsed what he was about to say. "Working with you on this project has meant a lot to me," he said, "more than I can say. You'll make a splendid physician, Jasmine, and I know you'll take your skills to where they're needed. I hope ... well, I just hope we have a chance to work together again someday."

  "Thank you, Dr. Connor, I hope so, too."

  But when she turned to go, he stopped her. "Jasmine," he said, coming close to her, his hand on her arm.

  They looked at each other for a moment, hearing the October wind make the dry trees outside crackle. Connor bent his head, and Jasmine, with her heart racing, raised her face to his.

  And then he suddenly stepped back, before they could kiss. "I'm sorry, Jasmine. If you only knew—"

  "Please don't," she said. "Perhaps someday our paths will cross again, Dr. Connor. If it is God's will. Ma salaama."

  "Ma salaama," he said.

  Rachel was waiting for her in the driveway. "What is it?" Jasmine asked, squinting in the late afternoon sunlight.

  "I'm not sure. It's rather mysterious. My grandmother says she has something for you. Apparently it came in the mail a few days ago."

  Jasmine's heart leapt. Something from the family! A letter? Her father asking her to come home?

  As they went inside, Jasmine's stomach suddenly growled. She laughed and said, "Sorry, I've been fasting."

  "Today's a Jewish holiday. Why have you been fasting?"

  "It is the tenth of Ramadan."

  Rachel didn't respond; she always felt vaguely uncomfortable when she remembered that Jasmine was a Muslim. And now, something new: jealousy over Jasmine's special relationship with her grandmother. Although of Egyptian Jewish descent, Rachel felt little affinity for the country Jasmine and Maryam shared; she had never been to Egypt, her father's birthplace, and knew little about it. But Grandma Maryam's heart was still there, Rachel knew, and so Jasmine claimed a special part of Rachel's grandmother that Rachel herself never could.

  The house was quiet. "The others have gone to Temple," Rachel said. "I stayed home with Grandma Maryam. She's grown very frail in the last few months, Jas. She's only seventy-two, and I can't find anything wrong with her. We're all quite worried."

  This was the first time Jasmine had been in Maryam Misrahi's bedroom; it was filled with possessions she had brought from Cairo, even a few things Jasmine remembered from visits to the Misrahi house long ago. But a large portrait on the wall stopped her. It was of Maryam and Amira, years ago, two young women with marceled hair, Maryam faintly flapperish, Amira young and smooth-faced, with heavy sultry eyes like a silent movie star's. And she was wearing not the mourning black Jasmine had always seen her in, but a white dress that looked like gossamer.

  "You resemble her, you know," came a voice from the bed. "Cover your blond hair, and you are Amira."

  Jasmine had never been aware of how much she favored her Egyptian side; the blond hair and blue eyes seemed to be all that she had inherited from Alice's family. And she marveled now to realize that the young woman in the portrait—Amira—could almost be her twin.

  She went to the bedside and was startled to see how Maryam had aged in just a few months. Jasmine regarded the white hair and recalled the red-haired woman who had been such a familiar figure in her childhood. "What is it, Auntie?" she asked, sitting down. "What is wrong with you?"

  Maryam spoke in Arabic. "I was there the night you were born," she said. "Your grandmother and I always helped each other at childbirth. I helped deliver your Auntie Nefissa, and Amira brought my Itzak into the world. It was all so long ago. Another world, then, on Virgins of Paradise Street."

  "Yes, it was," Jasmine said quietly, thinking of the magnificent Turkish fountain in the garden, the gingerbread gazebo where Amira held her afternoon teas, like a queen holding court.

  "Are you enjoying medical school?" Maryam asked.

  "There is a lot to learn, Auntie. It takes up all my time." Jasmine wished she could tell her about Connor. But Jasmine hadn't even confessed her secret to Rachel.

  "You'll make a fine doctor. You are the daughter of Ibrahim Rasheed and the granddaughter of Amira, how could you be otherwise? What news have you of the family? I haven't heard from your grandmother in a while."

  Jasmine told her about the latest letter from Alice, news about the cholera scare. "There is some worry that Tahia's baby will have discolored teeth because of the tetracycline. And Sahra, our cook, disappeared, no one knows where to or why." Jasmine didn't add how the letter had terrified her, until Alice had assured her that Mohammed had come down with only a mild case of the illness. It frightened Jasmine to think that her son might get sick and die and she wasn't there to help.

  "Why did you send for me, Auntie?"

  "Don't lock the past out of your heart, Yasmina. I can see it in your eyes, you don't want to talk about your family. I asked for you to come because today is the Day of Atonement. I want you to make amends with your father. Family is everything, Yasmina. Amira writes to me—well, she has her grandson Zachariah write for her as she dictates—and she talks about everyone in the family, and she asks about you. I don't know what happened between you and your father, Yasmina, but you must make amends."

  "Auntie Maryam, my father and I can never be friends. He doesn't love me—"

  "Love! Oh, child, you don't know what love is." Maryam reached for her hand. "My dear, I know why you married the American. I know that you wanted to stay in the United States. But please, listen to me, you do not belong here, any more than I do. You and I belong where our hearts are, on Virgins of Paradise Street. You have a son there, a little boy who needs his mother."

  "They would never let me see him," Jasmine said, looking down at the aged hand holding hers. "Omar took Mohammed from me, and the law says I can't see my son." And as far as my family is concerned, I am dead.

  "What does the law know about a mother's heart? Go back, Yasmina, and God will help you find a way." Maryam gave Jasmine a long, searching look, then she reached for something on her nightstand. "This came to me the other day. It is from my sister in Beirut."

  Jasmine saw that it was a book, The Sentence of Woman, and it was written in Arabic. The author's name was Dahiba Raouf. "She is your Auntie Fatima, did you know that?" "Yes," Jasmine murmured in amazement as she turned the pages and saw the poems. When she came to the back of the book, and read, "An
Essay by Camelia Rasheed," a shock went through her. Maryam sighed. "You Rasheed women always were very opinionated. I wonder if Amira knows about this book." Jasmine was spellbound as she read her sister's words: "In matters of sex," Camelia had written, the man comes to the battle fully armed. His armor is society's approval of whatever he does, his weapons are its laws. The woman has nothing; she is defenseless. She comes to the battle without so much as a shield. She is doomed to lose.

  Men are the sole proprietors of the planet. They own the grass and the seas and the stars; they own history and the past; they own women and the air we breathe. They even own the drop of semen they leave inside us; they own the products of a woman's womb. Nothing is ours. We don't even own the sunshine we walk through.

  Jasmine was stunned. When had Camelia developed these ideas? How, in Egypt's society, had she learned to think like this, to take her feelings and opinions and place them into words and sentences?

  She continued to read:

  A man has the option of either claiming a child as his own or not. He can say, "That child is not mine." How arrogant that men have given themselves this power, for it is the woman who grows new life in her body, with her blood, oxygen, and cells; she carries it, feels it there, sings to it, nourishes the new spirit from her own. And yet the man, for whom the sex act was but a moment of pleasure, can claim ownership of that new life in another person's body. He has the power to acknowledge it and allow it to live, or he can deny it and let it die.

  Jasmine stared at the page. Was Camelia speaking of Jasmine and her son? Or had she been thinking of Hassan al-Sabir when she wrote this, and the disgrace that had befallen Jasmine because the child had been his and not her husband's? She closed her eyes and pictured her black-haired, amber-eyed sister. How brave of Camelia to write this! But how could she be so bluntly honest in these words, and yet be so deceitful to a sister? Had she been so in love with Hassan that jealousy had driven her to expose Jasmine's secret to Nefissa?

  A folded newspaper clipping fell out from between the pages of the book. It had been cut out of a Beirut newspaper, and someone had written in the margin, "Reprinted from Paris Match." It was an interview with Camelia, "Egypt's newest rising star."

  "Will you read it to me, please?" Maryam said. "My eyesight is so poor, and," she added sadly, "no one in this family reads Arabic any more."

  The article was about how a celebrity like Camelia, female and unmarried, had to work very hard to protect her reputation. "It is not easy being a single woman in Egypt," she had told the Match reporter. "In Egypt, if a strange man speaks to a woman on the street, and she responds, even by saying, 'No. Go away. Leave me alone,' he takes this as an indication that she is available and he will pursue. The proper reaction is to ignore him, pretend he is not there; he will get the message and leave, respecting her and knowing that she is a moral woman. It is difficult, to treat a human being as if he were invisible or did not exist. In France you would call this rude, but it is the Arab way."

  "Yasmina," Maryam said. "Why aren't you and your sister friends? A sister is precious, Yasmina."

  She felt the older woman's eyes searching her face, but Jasmine would not speak of things she refused even to think about. If she denied the past hard enough, she could send it away. It never happened.

  "Camelia betrayed a secret," she finally said, "and because of it, I was thrown out of the family, and my son was taken away from me."

  "Ah, secrets," the older woman said, thinking of her own son, Rachel's father who, at that moment, was with the family at the Temple for Yom Kippur service— her son who thought Suleiman Misrahi was his father, and who called Moussa Misrahi "Uncle." She laid her hand on the slender book and said, "I understand about secrets, Yasmina. But listen to me, today is the Day of Atonement. And Ramadan is the month of atonement. Go back to Egypt. Ibrahim will welcome you. He will forgive you."

  "It's late, I had better go, Auntie. I'll come back soon to see you." But Maryam shook her head. "I've kept Suleiman waiting too long. It is time I joined him. And this new world in which Arab hates Jew—I cannot understand it. I do not want to be a part of it. Good-bye, Yasmina. Ramadan mubarak aleikum. May you have a blessed Ramadan."

  When she came in, Greg was at the dining-room table, typing his thesis, the floor around his feet littered with books, wadded-up bits of paper, and half-empty coffee containers. "Hi!" he said. "Is the book finished?"

  She leaned against the wall, feeling momentarily lightheaded from having fasted all day. "I stopped by Rachel's. Auntie Maryam wanted to see me."

  "Is she sick?"

  "She just wanted to give me something."

  "By the way, an INS agent dropped by a while ago. You'd think they had better things to do than harass us. He asked the usual questions, tried to get nosy—Hey"—he got up and went to her—"are you all right?"

  "I'm sorry. Seeing Auntie Maryam ... it upset me."

  "Have you eaten yet? I'll be glad to cook. I'm in the mood for chili. How about if I open two cans tonight, instead of my usual one? I know how you love my gourmet cooking."

  She wanted to go back to the school and see if Declan was still there. She wanted to go out to dinner with him, and stay with him, and cry in his arms. But she said, "Thank you, Greg, I would like that."

  "Come on, sit down. Dinner will be ready in a few minutes." And he went into the kitchen.

  As he started opening cans, he felt her watching him from the doorway. She was doing this more and more lately, pausing to look at him when she thought he was unaware of it. He sensed her perplexity, her restlessness, and he wondered if she was experiencing the same budding desire he had for her. She was a woman both virginal and sexually experienced, a combination he found to be a powerful aphrodisiac. And she was so sad, she seemed so vulnerable and lost that she generated profound feelings in him of wanting to take care of her. "I don't know where I belong," she had once confessed. "My mother and I were the only fair-haired ones in the family. We never did quite fit in; people would stare at us. I wondered if maybe I could find a place among my mother's race, but in England I felt no connection. On the outside I look as if I belong here in the West, but my heart is Arab. And yet I can never go back. Is there a place for me in the world?" Greg realized now that he wanted to help her find that place, perhaps even to be that place.

  It was the first time in his life that he had felt this way toward anyone. The only child of rootless scientist parents, raised by indifferent nuns, Greg Van Kerk had never learned what it was like to be needed, to be cherished. Cold science and hard religion had nurtured him; "family" meant getting Christmas and birthday cards from exotic places where the local geology was clearly more fascinating than a son. Now, his sudden "tropism," as he thought of it, toward Jasmine had him completely derailed.

  The TV was on and a bulletin suddenly interrupted the program, the voice-over saying, "Egyptian troops are overwhelming Israeli soldiers along the Bar Lev Line on the Suez Canal's eastern bank." Jasmine suddenly buried her face in her hands and started to cry.

  "Hey," said Greg. "Hey, what is it?" He turned off the television set and sat down next to her, putting his hand on her shoulder. "I'm sorry. You're worried about your family, aren't you?"

  He couldn't bear the way her shoulders shook as she cried, she looked so fragile and helpless. He was overwhelmed again with the desire to comfort and protect her. He put his arm around her shoulders and was surprised when she turned and buried her face against his chest. Then he took her into both arms, and drew her close. When their lips met, it was in a kiss salty from tears, but passionate. Medical and anthropology books tumbled from the sofa. Greg spoke in half sentences, between hungry kisses, "I just can't bear—" "I've been so badly wanting to—" Jasmine didn't speak, imagining that Greg was finishing the kiss that Declan had started.

  They ended up on the floor, Jasmine oblivious of the wet spot beneath her bare back, where a Coke had spilled. They drove at each other so fiercely that the coffee table was shove
d aside, one of its legs breaking.

  Jasmine saw the ceiling spin; and realized she was thinking of Connor.

  THIRTY-ONE

  P

  EOPLE WERE DANCING IN THE STREETS, CANONS AND SKY rockets were exploding, and everyone was shouting, "Ya Sadat! Yahya batal el ubur! Hail Sadat, Hail the Hero of the Crossing!" And already, with the war only just over and Egypt victorious, an enormous billboard dominated Liberation Square depicting Egyptian tanks rolling across the canal, Egyptian soldiers planting a flag on the opposite side, and Sadat, in huge profile, watching over it all. He had redeemed Egypt. He had given his people back their pride.

  From the humblest alley to the most magnificent mansion, families were rejoicing over the return of God's grace to Egypt. Lanterns had been strung in the garden and along the high walls surrounding the house on Virgins of Paradise Street, and music and laughter poured from the open windows out into the balmy November night as the family celebrated the signing of the cease-fire between Egypt and Israel.

  The men were in the salon, smoking, arguing politics, and telling jokes, while the women bustled in and out of the kitchen with food and glasses of tea. The entire family was gathered there; except for Ibrahim, who had been called away to see to a neighbor's boy, who had had a firecracker go off in his hand.

  Zachariah was listening to his cousin Tewfik rage about the deplorable state of the cotton industry: "Nasser's plan didn't work. The government pays the cotton farmer so little for his cotton that he is turning to crops whose prices aren't regulated by the government, such as winter clover. What does the government do to compensate for the drop in cotton production? It raises the prices on the international market so that our cotton costs twice what Americans charge for their best pima variety. It is no wonder we are going bankrupt!" As Zachariah helped himself to some fried squash and decided the dish could be improved with the addition with some onions, he wondered what had happened to Sahra. No one seemed to know why she had left so suddenly, or where she had gone. He missed her special dishes and he missed her homely tales of village life. Had the cholera frightened her off?