She went through the mail on the counter—bills, flyers for medical seminars, employment offers from two hospitals, another request for money from the University Alumni Fund, and a postcard from Rachel in Florida. Nothing from Egypt.
Seven years ago, a letter she had written to her mother had been returned with a letter from Amira: "Dear Alice is dead, God make paradise her abode. She died in an automobile accident." And Zachariah, Amira had added, had left to go in search of Sahra, the cook, who had also left the family.
And so both her mother, and her only frail link with the family, had been severed at once, as well as her only hope that her son Mohammed would ever be reminded of her. For Jasmine knew that, like Fatima before her, there would be no photographs, no mention of her. As far as Mohammed was concerned, now that his grandmother Alice was dead, his mother was also dead.
Only one more communication had come after that, six and a half years later when, last spring, Amira had sent a photograph of Mohammed at his high school graduation. It was the picture of an astonishingly handsome young man with the large liquid eyes found on early Christian coffin portraits. But Mohammed was unsmiling, as if determined not to expose his vulnerability to the camera.
The last item in the stack of mail, Jasmine was pleased to see, was a package from Declan Connor. He had sent her the latest edition of When You Have to Be the Doctor, and had enclosed a black-and-white snapshot of himself, Sybil, and their son, and a letter describing their work in Malaysia trying to fight rampant malaria. The letter was friendly and brief, with no hint of the romance that had almost blossomed between them seven years ago. Jasmine had not seen Connor since then, but they had kept in touch.
The kitchen door swung open and Jasmine glimpsed the television in the living room, and on the screen a news film of the recently released American hostages getting off a plane from Iran. "Hi," Greg said, kissing her. "How was work?"
She was exhausted. As the junior member of a pediatric clinic in a poor neighborhood, Jasmine worked the longest hours, but she didn't mind. Taking care of other women's babies helped to fill her need for her own child. Mohammed, her son, so far away, denied to her, and the deformed baby, stillborn ... No. Push the memories away. She slipped her arms around Greg's waist and said, "Thank you for the flowers. They're beautiful."
He held her for a moment, then said, "I hope you don't mind the guys being over. We're making plans."
She nodded against his shoulder. Greg was always making plans, yet few ever came to fruition. Although he'd managed to get his master's degree, she had long since stopped offering advice on how he could get his Ph.D. dissertation finished.
"It's all right," she said. "I have to get over to the hospital for evening rounds. I just came home to shower and change, and pick up the car."
Greg went to the refrigerator, took out a beer, and said, "I'm glad you're here. I have news."
She gave him a look. "What a coincidence. So do I."
As he tossed his head back and swallowed some beer, Jasmine thought again about the irony of having married one man while falling in love with another. Seven years later, she was still married to one man, and still in love with the other. But she was fond of Greg, a comfortable affection had grown between them so that occasionally they even had sex. Jasmine suspected that they made love out of a basic need for human touch; they ignited no great passion in each other, and certainly none of the excitement she had once experienced with just a glance from Connor. When she had confessed to Rachel that her marriage with Greg was based on mutual respect rather than on love, Rachel had hailed theirs as a truly liberated marriage with none of the antiquated expectations or game playing that still encumbered relationships. But Jasmine yearned for an old-fashioned marriage, and found herself once again envying Sybil Connor.
"I'm pregnant," she said.
Greg nearly spit out his beer. "Jesus!" he said. "You don't give a guy a little warning."
"I'm sorry. How else can I tell you?" She searched his face. "Are you pleased?"
"Pleased! Wait a minute, my head is spinning. How did this happen?"
"I had to go off the pill, as you know, it was giving me headaches."
"I know, but there are other ways. I mean, when did it—"
"At the Labor Day barbecue." The last time they had had sex, Greg had been drinking beer out by the pool, where a group of them had been grilling steaks and burgers. He had talked Jasmine into "stepping inside for a few minutes."
"Well, it's great, I guess." He put his arms around her again. "Of course it's great. I know how much you love kids. We just never talked about it." He drew back. "But won't you have to quit work? How will we pay the rent?"
Medical school expenses had finally required her to sell the house in England, and seven years of living with a man who didn't hold a job had drained the trust fund. They now lived on what she made at the clinic, and this pregnancy threatened that security. Jasmine suddenly felt less free in this "equal" relationship than she had at any other moment in her life. She tried to keep her tone light as she said, "I guess it's your turn to get a job now. You'll have a family to support."
He turned away and took a long drink of beer. "God, Jasmine, that's not me. I mean, I have to get my own act together before I can think of having kids. I don't even know who I am or what I want yet."
"You're thirty-seven years old."
He laughed. "Yeah, that's how old my dad was when he got my mother pregnant. Quite a coincidence, huh?" He faced her squarely and said, "Jasmine, I'll be honest. I don't want to have any kid of mine suffer the kind of upbringing I did, all those private schools, never seeing my parents."
Jasmine closed her eyes, suddenly feeling very tired. "Then what do you suggest?" she said.
He plucked a magnet off the refrigerator door and turned it over in his fingers. It was a small plastic tomato with a smiling face.
When Greg didn't say anything, Jasmine went numb. "So what is your news?"
He put the magnet back, but it fell to the floor. "The guys and I are getting up an expedition to go to Kenya. Roger is doing a study on the Maasai—"
"I see," Jasmine said. Last year it had been New Guinea, and the year before Tierra del Fuego. He hadn't gone, but maybe this time he really would go. Jasmine realized that she did not particularly care.
"I have to get back to the clinic," she said. "Where are the car keys?"
"I took the car in for servicing this morning, remember? I told you I was going to." He reached for her. "Listen, Jas—"
"Yes, I know. But you said it would be ready by five. Didn't you pick it up?"
"I thought you were going to pick it up. That's how we've always done it—I take it in, you go and get it."
Yes, she thought. Total equality. Fair's fair. "All right, I'll take the bus."
"Jasmine," he said, taking her by the arm. "Please. I don't know what to say to you."
She pulled away. "We'll talk about it later. I have to catch the bus and get to the garage before they close."
As she drove the car along the Pacific Coast Highway, she watched the rain wash down the windshield and thought about Greg and their relationship. And she saw little change from when they had first met. They had lived together, but Jasmine's life had been so consumed with medical school, and then internship, and finally the clinic, that there had been little time left to devote to her marriage. Even so, she had made an effort to try to understand the man she had married, but with little success. She had sought Greg's depths but had found to her surprise that he had none. The pleasant, laid-back surface which she had initially liked turned out to be as deep as he got. She had attempted to get close to him, but even when they had sex, she sensed him drawing away. The one time she had met Greg's mother, during a stopover when Dr. Mary Van Kerk was flying from the caves of India to the caves of Western Australia, Jasmine had found a woman as hard as the rock she studied, and a stilted mother-son relationship in which both participants seemed to have forgotten their lines.
>
After that, Jasmine had started to compare Greg to Arab men. She thought about their lust for living, their spontaneity and ferocious humor, their universal reputation for being skilled and considerate lovers. Above all, she missed their mercurial passions. Arab men cried openly, they kissed one another, and to them there was no such thing as inappropriate laughter. And if a man impregnated a woman, he felt duty and honor bound to claim the child and provide for it.
Jasmine put her hand on her abdomen and was suddenly full of wonder. The shock had worn off, now she was surprised to discover that she was actually happy. In fact, she hadn't felt this good in a long time, not since she had been pregnant with Mohammed, and later, with the poor little deformed one who hadn't survived. Perhaps this baby will be a girl, Jasmine thought, finally allowing herself to become excited. I shall name her Ayesha, she thought, for the Prophet's favorite wife. And if Greg goes to Kenya, I shall find a way to raise my daughter on my own.
As she reached over to turn on the radio, she heard a muffled sound outside the car, and suddenly the steering wheel started to shimmy. Slowing down, Jasmine managed to pull the car over to the side of the rain-slicked highway. When she got out, holding a magazine over her head because she had forgotten to bring an umbrella, she saw that the right front tire had blown.
She kicked the wheel, then looked up and down the highway. There were few cars, and she realized that, if she was going to get to the hospital on time, she was going to have to change the tire herself.
As she maneuvered the jack under the slippery bumper, she grew furious with Greg, who should have taken care of the car himself. The jack wasn't cooperating. She pushed and strained, her anger growing, encompassing now Hassan, who had abused her, and her father, for banishing her. As she struggled, her fury mounted to rage, and she started to cry, the rain mingling with her tears of frustration.
Suddenly the jack slipped, and she fell back onto the hard blacktop. "Allah!" she cried, and a sharp pain cut through her abdomen.
Jasmine had been staring for a long time at the window of her hospital room. Because it was night, the glass reflected the single light above her bed and the dimmed lights in the hall beyond her open door. She had made it to the hospital on time, but as a patient in an ambulance. A passing motorist had stopped to help her, and had called the police from a highway call box. She had been rushed into surgery, diagnosed with an incomplete abortion. The surgeons had completed it, and since coming out of the anesthetic, Jasmine had been doing a lot of thinking.
And by the time Rachel arrived, coming quietly into the room and saying, "Oh Jas, I'm so sorry," Jasmine had arrived at some answers.
"Can I get you anything?" Rachel said, sitting down. "Are they taking good care of you? I may be a doctor, but I sure hate visiting friends in the hospital."
"Where is Greg?"
"He's down at the gift shop, buying you some flowers. He feels awful, Jas."
"So do I. You know, my mother lost two children—one died in infancy, and she miscarried the second. Isn't it weird how daughters seem to repeat their mother's lives?" Jasmine sniffed back her tears. She had difficulty speaking, she was so tired. "I've been lying here thinking about my father, reliving the special times he and I had together. I wish he was here right now, because there's so much I want to tell him, explain to him. And I want to ask him questions, too."
She winced and put her hand on her abdomen. "I look back," she said, "and see that, during those times with my father, helping the homeless fellaheen women and their children, I had gotten started on a road—my life's road. But I got sidetracked. I forgot the reasons why I married Greg in the first place, and so I stayed in the relationship. But I have to move on, Rachel, I have work to do."
"First you have to rest, and let your body heal. Time enough to be superwoman."
Jasmine smiled wearily. "You're the superwoman, Rachel. With your husband and baby and medical practice."
"You'd think I could lose a few pounds, running around like that. I'm going to let you rest now. If you need me, I'll be in the lounge down the hall."
By the time Greg came in with flowers and a stricken look, Jasmine was no longer angry with him, or even disappointed. He was simply a stranger who had shared her life for a while, and who would leave as a stranger.
He sat for a long time at the bedside, unable to speak. Finally he said, "I'm sorry you lost the baby."
"It was not meant to be. This is God's will." And finding comfort in this knowledge that everything was preordained, Jasmine observed another truth: the word Islam in Arabic means "surrender," and to surrender now to God's plan brought peace.
"I mean," he said, twisting his fingers, "it's not as though you had known about the baby for long. We didn't buy any baby furniture, or anything. We hadn't made any plans."
He looked at her with tears in his eyes. She saw bewilderment in his look, the need to be forgiven, although he didn't seem to know for what. And then she realized that he was carrying a burden that he was silently begging her to lift. Recognizing what it was, Jasmine said, "You and I got married for a specific reason, do you remember? We didn't marry for love or with the intention of bringing children into the world, but to avoid a legal situation. That situation has passed, and this is a sign from God that the hour has come for us to part."
When he started to protest, and she saw how feebly he did it, she said, "I believe now that I am not fated for marriage and children, for God has taken these away from me. He has another purpose in store for me."
"I am sorry, Jasmine," Greg said. "As soon as you get your strength back I'll move out. The apartment is yours."
It had always been hers; Greg had been but a guest in it. "We'll talk in the morning, when I'm discharged. I'm very tired now."
He hesitated, bound to the bed by his perplexity, his inability to grasp exactly what had happened. A baby—his baby—had been lost. Shouldn't he be feeling something? Weren't there certain words he should be speaking? He tried to tap some hidden program inside himself, a wellspring of compassion to fall back on that his mother might have implanted in him years ago when he wasn't looking. But there was nothing there.
And now he reflected on his relationship with Jasmine and realized that nothing had been there either. They had a few memories—celebrating their first wedding anniversary on Santa Monica Pier, both still waiting for love to blossom in their lives; popping the champagne cork when she graduated from medical school; Jasmine consoling him when his Ph.D. dissertation was rejected yet again. But what did these moments add up to?
And in that instant he recognized the stranger she had always been to him, the stranger she would always be.
He bent and kissed her cool forehead. "Here are the things you asked me to bring," he said, and after he closed the door, Jasmine opened the overnight case he had brought.
She lifted out the book he had placed on top of her toiletries—the newest edition of When You Have to Be the Doctor, which Connor had sent to her from Malaysia. She opened it and read the inscription he had written on the title page, next to their names: "Jasmine, if ever you're in quick need of a prayer, just remember that little muscle on the side of your nose." He had signed it, "Love, Declan." And she smiled.
Then she reached again into the overnight case and took out the leather-bound Koran that had made the journey from Egypt with her. It was in Arabic, and it had been a long time since she had opened it.
She opened it now.
THIRTY-FOUR
Y
ACOB FRIGHTENED HER.
Rather, the thought of falling in love with him, of him loving her in return, was frightening. Camelia had worked hard to fight it, spending hours rehearsing for her show, immersing herself in choreography and costuming, filling her life so that she dropped into bed every night exhausted, entering a deep, dreamless sleep that not even Yacob Mansour could invade. But when she awoke each morning, he was first in her thoughts, the image of an unassuming man, slightly overweight, with wire-rimmed
glasses and thinning hair. And then later, at the Hilton, as she danced and smiled and embraced the applause, she would find herself searching for him in the audience until, somewhere at the back of the room, beyond the lights and the frenzied crowd, she would see him standing there, quietly watching.
Did he feel the same toward her? she wondered. Surely he felt something, otherwise why was he in her audience so frequently? And yet not once had he come backstage, or presented her with flowers, or showered her with pound notes as other men did. In fact, in the four months since she had first met him at his newspaper office, Camelia had exchanged not another word with Mansour.
She didn't know anything about him, but guessed, by the suit he wore every time he came to a performance, that he was not well off, and she knew that his struggling newspaper was supported solely by donations. She still didn't even know if he was married, having purposely avoided trying to find out anything about him in the hope that her infatuation would pass. But it hadn't. It was growing.
Over the years Camelia had constructed a defense against falling in love, so that the few times she had found herself attracted to someone, the crush had died before it had had a chance to blossom. But for some reason, Yacob Mansour had found a way around that defense. And now she didn't know what to do.
She suspected that it wasn't wise to fall in love with a Jew these days. Years ago, before the wars with Israel, Egyptian Jews had coexisted peacefully with Muslims. Hadn't the Misrahi and Rasheed families been close? But three humiliating defeats by Israel had soured Egyptians toward their Semitic brothers; intimate relationships between members of the two camps were frowned upon, and especially intolerable was a situation in which the man was Jewish, the woman Muslim.
But Camelia couldn't get Yacob out of her mind.
She bought his paper every day and read his column. He wrote brilliantly, she thought, on volatile issues, calling boldly for the government to bring about needed reform; he was courageous, even reckless, naming names and detailing specific cases of injustice. Mansour also frequently wrote glowing reviews of her performances; he never made reference to her body, which would have been highly offensive, but his adjectives in praise of her skill and talent were endless. Did she read love between those laudatory lines? Or was she just imagining it? And was she herself truly falling in love with a man with whom she had exchanged only a brief dialogue, glimpsed at the back of an audience? How was she to know, if she had never experienced love? She had wanted to ask Umma for advice, but Amira's rule was: Marriage first, love follows.
Virgins of Paradise Page 43
