Virgins of Paradise

by Wood, Barbara

  Still, life was good. And he reminded himself that it profited a man nothing to dwell upon the unhappy past, that it was necessary at times to pause and take stock of his blessings. And Ibrahim Rasheed decided that he was more blessed than most. After all, he was a man of prestige and substance, and a vital component of society. In a country where poverty and a burgeoning population strained its medical-care system, good doctors, the caring and skillful ones, were hard to come by, and so Ibrahim was very much in demand. He thanked God every day for continued health and vigor: despite having turned seventy, he could boast possessing the constitution of a man much younger. What better proof than the fact that his new wife was finally pregnant.

  But his brief moment of cheer came to an end. Remembering the lab results, Ibrahim dialed Dahiba's number once more, but again heard only silence at the other end.

  "Hip sways on eight counts," Dahiba said, "ending with a sharply defined lock." Dressed in a leotard and skirt, she demonstrated while her student watched, holding her arms out, and swinging her hips while her shoulders and rib cage remained still. "Now listen for the taqsim. Let the music pour into you like sunlight, feel it shimmer along your veins and bones until you become that sunlight. This is a very difficult section, you have to feel it to be able to dance to it."

  Dahiba and her student watched the tape player as they listened, as if expecting to see musical notes float out of it. They were the only ones in the studio; Dahiba no longer gave classes, and taught choreography only to individual, carefully selected dancers. Everyone wanted to learn from Dahiba, but not everyone was chosen. Mimi felt particularly fortunate.

  "There," Dahiba said, as she stopped the tape and rewound it. "Did you feel that? Can you dance to that?"

  "Oh yes, madam!" At twenty-eight, Mimi had a background of eight years in Oriental dance and ten years of ballet before that. She was good, and she was ambitious. Although she still only performed at clubs and not yet at the five-star hotels, she was rapidly making her way up in the competitive dance world, and her ambition shone in her blue eyes as she tightened the scarf around her hips and prepared to imitate her mentor. Mimi's real name was Afaf Fawwaz, but she was following the latest vogue for dancers to take French names.

  As Dahiba pressed the "play" button and turned to watch Mimi, she saw her nephew Mohammed in the doorway, ogling Mimi as if his eyes were going to fall out of his head.

  "Get away from there, boy!" she shouted, starting to close the door in his face. "Have you no shame?"

  He fell back, stunned.

  Mimi.

  In a red leotard and black tights.

  "Well, what is it?" Dahiba demanded.

  "Uh—Uncle Ibrahim telephoned—you're to go to his office at once. He said it's important—" He turned and fled, Mimi's amused expression pursuing him like a jinni.

  Feyrouz's coffeehouse faced the small square at the end of Fahmy Pasha Street, not far from the block of government buildings where Mohammed worked. It was a small, ancient establishment with a tiled façade decorated with elegant Arabic calligraphy. The interior was dim, the walls lined with benches where men passed the time of day drinking sweet coffee and playing dice or cards, making fun of their government leaders, their own bosses, and even themselves. Feyrouz's was the special hangout of young clerks; other coffeehouses around the city were the haunts of performers, intellectuals, displaced fellaheen, wealthy businessmen, or homosexuals. There was a coffeehouse for everyone, and they were nearly all the exclusive domains of men.

  As Mohammed turned off the main boulevard and entered the narrow lane, he saw, not the graffiti-covered walls or the red motor scooter chuffing by with four men on it, but Mimi's dimpled smile when he had stammered like a schoolboy in front of her. He had only seen her in person twice before: when she was stepping out of a taxi in front of the Cage d'Or, stunningly long legs preceding a voluptuous body, and in the Khan Khalili, as she was hurrying through the crowd with a costume over her arm. Other than that, he had only seen her on television, playing a small part in a popular soap opera. But it had been enough; he had fallen in love with her.

  And now he had seen her close-up. In a leotard and tights. Practically naked.

  As he entered the square, an Egyptian woman in Western dress emerged from a dry-goods shop and walked ahead of him, high heels click-clacking on the broken pavement. Mohammed's attention was suddenly diverted from Mimi to the abundant rear end captured in a snug skirt in front of him, and as he neared the coffeehouse, where his friends were already seated at a table inside, Mohammed suddenly reached out and grabbed a handful of firm, feminine buttock.

  "Aiiee!" the woman shrieked, whipping around and whacking him with her purse. As Mohammed covered his head to protect himself, while pedestrians shook angry fists and hurled abuse at him, his friends sitting near the door of the coffeehouse laughed and howled.

  "Ya Mohammed!" called out a handsome young man after the woman had marched off and the crowd dispersed. He sang, "In paradise, they say virgins dwell/Where fountains run with wine./If'tis right to love them in the life to come/Surely 'tis lawful in this life as well!'"

  With a red face, Mohammed made his way inside and took the jibes of the customers and proprietor like a good sport.

  Feyrouz, a one-armed veteran of the Six-Day War who spent most of his time playing backgammon with old soldier friends, brought tea to the shamefaced young man, while his wife, a massive woman in a black dress and black melaya who sat all day by the cash register, sharing lewd jokes with the young men who came in, cried out, "By God, Mohammed Pasha! It is your hand that needs a zipper!"

  They all laughed, Mohammed included, as he sat with his friends and accepted Feyrouz's glass of tea. As he tried to listen to the latest gossip and jokes his friends had to offer, his thoughts strayed again to Mimi. Bismillah! Taking lessons from Auntie Dahiba! Then might it not also be possible to meet her? It made a man's head spin!

  Salah, a handsome young man who worked as a junior clerk at the Ministry of Antiquities, and who told wonderful jokes, a new one every day, which increased his popularity, said, "An Alexandrian, a Cairene, and a fellah were lost in the desert, dying of thirst. A jinni appeared before them and offered them each one wish. The Alexandrian said, 'Send me to the French Riviera, in the company of beautiful women.' And poof, he was gone. The Cairene said, 'Put me on a splendid boat on the Nile, with plenty of food and women.' Poof, the Cairene was gone. Finally it was the fellah's turn. He said, 'O jinn, I am so lonely, please bring my friends back!'"

  The young men laughed and drank their tea, which was so thickly sugared that it was cloudy.

  "Ya, Mohammed Pasha!" said mustached Habib, using the antiquated title with affection, as had Feyrouz's bawdy wife. "I have a prize for you." And he pulled a popular film magazine out of his pocket, thrusting it at Mohammed.

  The four young men leaned in close as Mohammed flipped through the pages, wondering what the prize was, and when he came to a color photograph, they all cried out.

  Mohammed's eyes nearly popped from his head. It was a picture of Mimi in a seductive gown.

  "She is a rocket!" Salah declared.

  "How would you like to be married to her?" said one of the others, jabbing Mohammed with an elbow.

  "Any wife at all!" cried Salah, who, like Mohammed and the others, was hoping to save enough money to get married. "But you are lucky, Mohammed Pasha. Your uncle is a wealthy doctor who lives in a big house in Garden City. You can take your bride there."

  Mohammed laughed with them, but felt the old gloom settle over him again. Salah might as well speak of fairy tales and fantasies. The house on Virgins of Paradise Street was run by Great-grandmother Amira, and Mohammed had no great yearning to be under her eyes. His father's house was no better, with Omar gone so much of the time and Grandma Nefissa giving orders to Nala and his half-brothers and sisters. By God, a man needed privacy with his bride! "Bokra. Tomorrow," he said miserably. "Inshallah."

  Salah clapped his friend on
the back and said, "They say that Egypt today is run by IBM!" And he enumerated on three fingers: "Inshallah. Bokra. Ma'alesh!"

  They all laughed, but Mohammed's laughter was forced. He couldn't stop thinking of Mimi. The photograph in the magazine was from a movie scene in which she played an evil woman who seduces a pious man. Mohammed couldn't take his eyes off her blond hair, so long and silky and pale, guaranteed to drive a man mad. By God, he thought, the laws of the old days made sense, when a woman had been required to cover her hair. How else was a man to lead a chaste and pious life?

  Mimi's platinum curls made him think of his mother, who, for some reason, the family pretended was dead. He never heard from her, except on his birthday, when a card always faithfully arrived. He had saved them all so that he now had a collection of twenty. Mohammed would not allow himself to ponder the deeper, troubling questions: Why had she left, why didn't she come back, and why would no one in the family talk about her?

  "By God!" cried Salah. "Let's go to the cinema and see this Mimi film!"

  "It's playing at the Roxy," said Habib, who downed the rest of his tea and left a five-piastre note on the table.

  As the young men jumped to their feet, causing the older patrons to comment on the impatience of youth and what was the use of hurrying when life was so short?

  Mohammed noticed a man just outside the coffeehouse, watching him. Mohammed frowned. The man was familiar. But from where? And then he remembered him from the days of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Mohammed had briefly belonged before his father had made him quit. What was the man's name?

  "Y'Allahl" said Salah, tugging his sleeve. "Let's go!"

  As the lively young men left the square, laughing, arms linked, Mohammed felt the man's eyes on him. And as they joined the crowds on the boulevard, Mohammed suddenly remembered his name. It was Hussein, and Mohammed recalled now that he had been afraid of him.

  As Dahiba gave baksheesh to the little boy who had watched her car while she was in Ibrahim's office, she saw a crowd entering the Roxy Cinema across the street. When she saw her nephew Mohammed among them, she almost called out to him. And then she stopped herself. She got behind the wheel of her Mercedes, honked her horn and pulled out into the single lane of traffic; when, a few minutes later, traffic became tied up and she was stopped beneath a Rolex billboard, she put her head on the steering wheel and started to cry.

  The women were gathered at the gazebo, Rasheed aunts and cousins and nieces, enjoying the cool weather and the bounty of Umma's kitchen, while Amira herself oversaw the harvesting of freshly blooming rosemary, the delicate blue flowers and gray-green leaves going into separate baskets held by two of her great-granddaughters—Nala's middle girl, a thirteen-year-old who didn't have a gift for herbs or healing, and Basima's ten-year-old daughter, who did.

  Just as the mother of Ali Rasheed had passed on to Amira the ancient healing knowledge she had learned from her own mother, so had Amira through the years carefully seen to it that the secrets were handed down to the Rasheed women. Some of the recipes that made up her medicines were so old they were said to have been invented by Mother Eve, at the beginning of time. "Did you know," Amira said to the girls, "that the rosemary plant will not grow higher than six feet in thirty-three years so that it will not stand taller than the Prophet Jesus?"

  "What do we use it for, Umma?" the ten-year-old asked.

  And Amira thought wistfully: Yasmina possessed such a thirst to know, always asking which herb was used for what ailment. Yasmina, whom I mourn every time I mourn our beloved dead. "The flowers give us liniment, and from the leaves we will make an infusion to cure indigestion."

  She looked up at the gray February sky and wondered if it was going to rain. Surely it hadn't rained so much in the old days? Someone on television had said that unexpected effects from the High Aswan Dam, completed in 1971, were only now being felt, and one of them was higher precipitation in the Nile Valley, due to evaporation from the immense Lake Nasser behind the dam. Rain now fell where it had never fallen before; ancient tomb paintings were being eaten away by moisture and fungus; stagnant pools of water along the Nile, flushed away during flood season in the past, now remained standing, producing disease. Not only were the times changing, she thought, but the physical world was changing as well.

  The days seemed to be racing by now. Wasn't it only yesterday that Zeinab had been born, and last week, Tahia and Omar? Arthritis had settled in Amira's hands, and occasional spells of tightness invaded her chest. But she had entered her eighties with grace. Because for years she had taken great care of her complexion, using ancient beauty secrets, she had the face and carriage of a younger woman. But her soul, she sensed, was growing old. How many pages were left to her in God's book?

  More memories had returned lately, more dreams. She felt as if she were swimming in some great cosmic circle, as if, the closer she neared the end of her life, the closer she came to its beginning. Now she saw the details of that long-ago caravan: the colorful tassels on the camel's fittings; stout tents pitched against the stars; men around a campfire singing: "Ya Moonbeam, spill across my pillow, warm my loins ..."

  The vision of the square minaret was now joined by the memory of a fragrance—something sweet and heavenly. Had she stood in an arbor when she had gazed upon that humble little tower? Or had she been inhaling someone's perfume? When would she find it? For years she had been saying, "This year I will go to Arabia." But the years had slipped through her fingers like sand. She had always said, "Tomorrow I shall go," until the tomorrows now numbered fewer than the yesterdays.

  "Rosemary is good for relieving cramps," Camelia said, as she retrieved a delicate blue blossom from one of the baskets. She was sitting in the gazebo with her son, six-year-old Najib, a good-looking boy who had inherited his mother's amber eyes and his father's tendency toward chubbiness. Although the boy bore the tattoo of a Coptic cross on his wrist, Camelia and Yacob were raising him in both the Christian and Muslim faiths. Because of her dancing career, Camelia had had no more children after Najib; but Yacob was content with his son and with Zeinab, his adopted daughter. And their fears of a troubled future had not come to pass. Although violence continued to break out between Muslims and Copts, Camelia and her husband enjoyed a new prosperity, as his paper grew in circulation and his reputation as a writer gained stature, and Camelia became the number one dancer in Egypt. Her fans had not abandoned her for marrying a Christian, Yacob's readers had not deserted him for marrying a dancer. "Ma'alesh," everyone said. "Never mind. It is God's will that you be together."

  Camelia eyed the delicacies the servants had brought out, but she did not take any. Lent had just begun—between now and Easter, Coptic Christians were forbidden to eat anything that had a soul. They were, in fact, restricted to beans, vegetables, and salad, because cheese came from a cow, and eggs from a chicken. But Camelia didn't mind. Her life had been made richer by her union with Yacob, who had drawn her into the mystical and beautiful world of a people who had been in Egypt since before the time of Mohammed. The Copts, followers of St. Mark, enjoyed a history rich in stories and legends and miracles; Yacob had in fact been named for the first man whom the infant Jesus had healed during the Holy Family's flight into Egypt.

  Camelia looked over at Zeinab sitting beneath cascading wisteria with a cousin's baby in her arms. At twenty, Zeinab was a lovely young woman. Only the leg brace detracted from her pretty face and winsome smile. And consider, Camelia thought, how wonderful she was with her little brother, Najib. From the hour Najib had been born, Zeinab had been like a mother to him. Surely there was a man in all of Egypt who would marry Zeinab, a good man who could look past her physical flaw and see the loving heart underneath?

  Once in a while, when Zeinab laughed, or tossed her light brown curls, Camelia caught a flash of Hassan al-Sabir, and she would be reminded of the girl's origins. And then she would feel a stab of the old fear, that Yasmina might suddenly show up one day, and tell Zeinab the truth, that she was
the product of an adulterous union, her father murdered, her mother banished. There had been little fear, over the years, that the secret might slip out among the family: the younger Rasheeds thought that Camelia was indeed the girl's mother, and the older ones guarded the truth. But Yasmina's appearance would shatter the carefully constructed illusion, and the truth, she feared, might destroy Zeinab.

  Always ready to counter other people's opinions, Nefissa spoke up and said, "Rosemary! Everyone knows that the best remedy for cramps is chamomile tea," and she smiled down at the baby in her lap, her new great-granddaughter, Asmahan's child. At sixty-two, the downswept curve of Nefissa's mouth had become so permanent that even when she smiled, her lips curved down instead of up. Arrogance had also joined her features, in the arching of her carefully painted eyebrows, because now she was a great-grandmother, a most venerated rank.

  Still, Nefissa didn't like to think of Tahia as a grandmother; how ancient it made her feel! Where had her youth flown? Hadn't it only been yesterday that she had shamelessly enticed an English lieutenant into her carriage? Nefissa tried not to dwell on the old days, but on her present bounty. Her only regret was that her daughter never remarried after Jamal Rasheed died. Tahia still held stubbornly to her belief that Zachariah was going to come back someday. How could she cling to such a mad dream, after nearly fifteen years had passed with no word from him? Perhaps he had drowned in the Nile, Nefissa thought, as she rocked little Fahima in her arms. Perhaps he joined Alice in damnation.

  When Nefissa heard Zeinab laugh, she regarded the girl whose hair caught the sunlight and whose eyes closely resembled Yasmina's. There was something of Alice in her, too, in those long smooth arms, and the way she crooked her wrist. And when Nefissa saw the dimples in Zeinab's cheeks, she saw Hassan al-Sabir.