Virgins of Paradise

by Wood, Barbara

  He puzzled her. Although he still resembled the man who had taken the microphone on the back of a truck and fairly shouted for the establishment of a social conscience, and smiled the same smile that had made her heart soar fifteen years ago, inside, she knew he was different. She almost didn't know him. Jasmine wanted to ask: What happened to change you so? Why do you insist that you no longer care? Why do you say our efforts here in Egypt are futile? When she sometimes watched him sit alone in the evening, smoking one cigarette after another, squinting into the smoke as if searching for answers, she wanted to say to him, "Please don't go. Stay here." In five weeks she would lose him.

  It wasn't just her love for him that made her want to help—the love that she knew had been born one rainy afternoon when she had taken a fateful shortcut through Lathrop Hall on her way to the dean's office. There was now another reason for wanting to help him. Declan Connor was the reason she had come back to Egypt. And for that, she would always be grateful.

  Because a miracle seemed to have happened.

  "Tell me, Sayyida Doctora," Um Tewfik said, as she nursed a baby at her breast. "Does your modern medicine really work?"

  As Jasmine held a stethoscope to the chest of an elderly woman who complained of fever and weakness, she said, "Modern medicine can work, Um Tewfik, but it depends on the patient. For instance, a fellah named Ahmed came to me one day with a bad cough. I gave him a bottle of medicine and told him to take a large spoonful of it each day. He said to me, 'Yes, Sayyida,' and went away. But when he came back a week later, the cough was worse. 'Did you take the medicine, Ahmed?' I asked. 'No, Sayyida,' he replied. 'Why not?' I asked. 'Because I could not get the spoon into the bottle.'"

  The women laughed and agreed that all men were helpless, and Jasmine laughed with them, at her own joke. She could not recall when she had felt so happy, or so alive. And this was the miracle.

  As she examined a curious rash on her elderly patient's arm, Jasmine found herself thinking back to her first early days in England, over twenty years ago, when she had gone to claim her inheritance and had met her only Westfall relative, the old earl's sister, Lady Penelope. Jasmine had been received warmly in the woman's cottage, and, over tea, the elderly Penelope Westfall had said, "Your mother inherited her fondness for the Middle East from her mother, your grandmother, Lady Frances. Frances and I were best friends, I imagine she must have dragged me to see The Sheik a hundred times. Poor dear, married to my stuffy, unimaginative, and decidedly unromantic brother! Frances committed suicide, you know."

  But Jasmine hadn't known, and the news had come as a stunning blow. Her mother had never mentioned how Grandma Westfall died, that she had, as Aunt Penelope had put it, "Laid her head one day in the oven and turned on the gas." But this new knowledge had started Jasmine thinking about things she had not considered before: that Uncle Edward had supposedly accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun, and that Alice had died in an automobile accident. But were these stories true, or had the truth been covered up? Was there in fact a history of depression and suicide in the family?

  While Jasmine had never contemplated taking her own life, in those first months after she left Egypt she had known a deep and dark depression that had frightened her. And then, when she had made the decision to return to Egypt to work with Dr. Connor, and she had braced herself for the anger, the grief, all the emotions she had kept bottled up since Ibrahim's pronouncement of death, to her surprise, nothing of the sort occurred. She had experienced instead a miraculous rebirth, and with it had come the old happiness and joy that she had known long ago, as if they, too, had lain hidden away with the bad memories, repressed, not to be faced. Just to speak Egyptian Arabic again, which felt so good on her tongue, and to taste once more the food of her childhood, to hear the distinct, self-mocking laugh of the Egyptians, who took neither themselves nor life too seriously, to sit by the Nile and contemplate its changing from sunrise to moonrise, to feel the rich soil beneath her hands and the hot sun on her shoulders, to be connected again with the ancient rhythm of the Nile Valley—all these things had awakened and revived her both physically and spiritually.

  But, in a strange twist of irony, with her rebirth had come the discovery that something seemed to have died in Declan Connor.

  "Do you have blood in your urine, Umma?" she respectfully asked the elderly woman veiled entirely in black. "Do you have pain in your abdomen?"

  When the fellaha nodded to both questions, Jasmine said, "You have the blood disease that comes from stagnant water." She would have administered an injection right then, but the health team had encountered such a staggering number of schistosomiasis cases in the last few days that their supply of the drug Praziquantel had run out. "You will need to visit the district doctor, Umma," she said, writing out instructions on a piece of paper. "This medicine will remove the sickness from your blood, but you must avoid walking through stagnant water from now on, because you will be infected again."

  The elderly woman took the paper, looked at it for a moment, then silently moved away. Jasmine suspected that the doctor would not be visited, and that the paper would be boiled in tea to produce a magic potion.

  "By the heart of the blessed Ayesha, Sayyida!" Um Tewfik said, as she removed the baby from her breast and covered herself. "Can you give me a potion to make babies? My sister has been married for three months and so far there are no babies. She is afraid her husband will get tired of her and look for another wife."

  The others shook their heads in sympathy. Lucky women got pregnant in the first month.

  "Your sister will have to go to a doctor for an examination," Jasmine said, "to find the cause of her trouble."

  But Um Tewfik shook her head and said, "My sister knows the cause. She told me she was walking across a field three days after her wedding, and two ravens flew ahead of her. They sat down in an acacia tree and looked right at her, and she said she felt a jinni enter her at that moment. Clearly, Sayyida, that is the cause of her barrenness."

  Seeing the firm set of the woman's jaw, Jasmine said to Um Tewfik, "Your sister could be right. Tell her to take two black feathers and wear them under her dress, down here," and she pointed to her own abdomen. "She is to wear these feathers for seven days, and recite the opening sura of the Koran seven times each day. Then she must put away the feathers for seven days, and after that wear them again. If she does this over a period of several weeks, the jinni will be cast out."

  This was not Jasmine's first instance in prescribing magic. With each golden sunrise and each scarlet sunset, she felt Egypt reclaim her—the old, mystical Egypt Amira had taught her about long ago. So that now, when Jasmine listened to the wind, she heard the howls of jinns upon it; and when she delivered a baby, she recited ancient spells to ward off the evil eye. Jasmine understood the power of the centuries-old mysteries, she had seen magic cure what antibiotics could not, she had seen the power of superstition succeed where medicine had failed.

  "Look at the way the Sayyid watches you, Doctora" Um Jamal said, and the women cast quick, shy glances at Declan across the square. "May I divorce, by God, if that man is not in love with you!"

  The women's laughter floated up out of the square like the flapping of birds' wings, the young wives enjoying this rare occasion to mingle and socialize, because all too soon they would have to go back to their mud-brick homes and strict sequestration.

  "Tonight at the feast of the Prophet," Um Jamal said, "I will cast a love-spell on the Sayyid for you, Doctora."

  "It won't do any good," Jasmine said. "Dr. Connor is going away soon."

  "Then you must make him stay, Sayyida. It is your duty to do so. Men think they come and go as they please, but it is at our pleasure that they do so, although they do not know this."

  And the younger women, only just beginning to realize their real hidden power, giggled.

  "The doctora should marry the Sayyid and have babies," said Um Tewfik, and the older women agreed, nodding heads draped in black veils.<
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  "I am too old to have children, Umma," Jasmine said, removing her stethoscope and folding it into her medical bag. "I will soon be forty-two."

  But Um Jamal, a woman of impressive stature, past childbearing years and possessing an enviable twenty-two grandchildren, gave Jasmine a playful look and said, "You can still have babies, Sayyida. When I had my last, I was nearly fifty. May I divorce!" she added with a satisfied sigh, "if I did not give that man nineteen living children! He never looked at another woman!"

  Although Jasmine laughed, she thought how sometimes, when an infant was placed in her arms, or when she saw mothers and daughters together, she would feel the ache of losing her own two babies. Even though she accepted her losses as God's will, she still sometimes wondered what it would be like to have a little girl of her own. She thought of the poor angel born on the eve of the Six-Day War. The child would have been twenty-one now, if she had lived. And it wouldn't have mattered to Jasmine that the baby was part of Hassan al-Sabir; she would have loved her with the same devotion these fellaha mothers showed to their own daughters.

  And she thought every day about her son: Did Mohammed wonder about her, did he ever mention her or ask about her? Did he think of her as being alive, or was she like Auntie Fatima of long ago, a woman whose photographs had been removed from the family album, a woman as good as dead? Jasmine thought that just once she would like to observe Mohammed from a safe place. Not to approach him, not to upset his life or inflict pain or shame upon him, but only to watch him with a mother's loving eyes, to see how he laughed, how he walked, to hear his voice and imprint it upon her memory. Mohammed was a man now; Jasmine had carried the boy in her heart all these years, but she couldn't conjure up the man he must now be. Was he like Omar? Was he spoiled and selfish? No, she decided. Mohammed was part of her, he was part of Alice; there would be kindness in him as well.

  Um Jamal said, suddenly grave, "In all honor and respect, Sayyida, you should marry the Sayyid. You are together all the time. It is not good, an unmarried woman with a man."

  "There is nothing to worry about," Jasmine said, because the fact was that she and Declan were rarely alone together, or even together at all, because each time they came to a village and were given fellaheen hospitality, Jasmine and Declan were always separated, she to sit with the women, he with the men. And the sleeping accommodations usually meant that Jasmine was taken in at one house, Declan at another. The only times they were really together, so closely that they touched, were when they were in the Land Cruisers, bumping over rough roads, following dirt tracks between fields of cotton and sugarcane.

  Finally she wished the women "Mulid mubarak aleikum,"—a happy Prophet's birthday—and the young wives vanished as efficiently as they had assembled earlier, disappearing down narrow alleys with babies in their arms or in slings on their backs, children clutching their mothers' brightly colored granny dresses. The older women, wrapped in black veils and shawls, dispersed to the few shady spots in the square, to eat nuts, gossip, and watch the afternoon pass until the evening celebrations began. Jasmine was left alone to pack up her medical equipment, and her memories.

  She looked across the square, and Declan's eyes met hers.

  When he realized he had been watching her, he quickly looked away. Snapping his medical bag closed, he said to the men collected in front of Abu Hosni's coffeehouse, "I'll see you at the festivities tonight, inshallah."

  As he started to leave, a fellah in a ragged galabeya suddenly materialized from the crowd of onlookers and proffered a large Egyptian scarab carved out of limestone. "I sell it to you, Sayyid," he said cheerfully to Declan. "Very ancient. Four thousand years old. I personally know the tomb this came from. For you, fifty pounds."

  "Sorry, my friend. I am not interested in old things."

  "Brand new!" the fellah said, thrusting the scarab at him. "I personally know the man who made this! Best craftsman in all of Egypt. Thirty pounds, Sayyid."

  Declan laughed and headed across the square, meeting Jasmine half way. "I promised Hadj Tayeb I'd give him a lift to the cemetery," he said. "He wants to take offerings to his father's tomb. Shall I drop you at the convent?"

  The convent, where Jasmine enjoyed the hospitality of Catholic nuns, while Declan had been given accommodations at the imam's house, was on the other side of the village. The festivities would be starting soon, and she and Declan would join the men's and women's groups, once again to be separated. "I would like to come with you," she said. "If it's all right. I am told there are some interesting ruins near the cemetery."

  The Land Cruiser bounced over dirt tracks until cultivated fields and mud-brick houses were left behind and stark wilderness stretched ahead. Hadj Tayeb sat between Jasmine and Declan, holding on to the dashboard, pointing the way. The setting sun was in their eyes, a fiery ball in a pale, flawless sky, tinting the desert with rich hues of yellow and orange, streaked with the long black shadows of rocks and boulders. Finally, they saw what looked like a small village up ahead, but as they drew near, they heard no signs of life, just the desert silence and the lonely whistling of the wind.

  The three stepped down from the vehicle, and the elderly fellah led Jasmine and Connor down narrow lanes that might have belonged to any village, past doorways and windows, and under crumbling stone arches. The "houses" were all domed, and they looked to Jasmine like row upon row of great beehives, constructed of mud brick, layered with dust and sand.

  When they reached the tomb of the Tayeb family, the old Hadj pointed with a shaky finger and said, "The ruins lie over there, Sayyid, on the ancient caravan route."

  As they left him to pray, striking across the plain with the last of the sunset in their eyes, Jasmine said, "The village women told me that the ruins have magic healing properties. The villagers go there sometimes to chip away stone from the columns, and make medicines of it."

  There was little left of the goddess shrine that had served desert travelers thousands of years ago—only two of the original columns still stood; the rest lay broken among boulders and debris. A few ancient paving stones were visible where the sand had been blown away, indicating a causeway leading to what looked like a small sanctuary. Behind that rose a rugged escarpment thrust up millennia ago from the desert floor, a great, barren scar that separated the Nile Valley from the Sahara Desert.

  "This was once a very busy caravan route," Declan said, as they picked their way among the rubble. The silence was profound, and the setting sun had turned the columns a stunning rust red against the sky. "I imagine travelers stopped here to pray for a safe journey. They would have camped in those caves over there."

  "It looks as if someone has been camping here," Jasmine said, poking the toe of her shoe into a circle of blackened rocks.

  "Desert holy men are drawn to these lonely places. Mystics, mostly. Sufis. Christian hermits."

  Jasmine came upon the statue of a ram. The head was missing, and the flat place where his neck had been made a perfect seat. As she sat down, she said, "Why isn't there any excavating going on here? Why haven't the archaeologists fenced this place off?"

  Connor looked out at the barren plain stretching away to the horizon. In the distance, he saw the squat black tents of Bedouins. "Probably lack of funds," he said. "This looks like a small, insignificant shrine. Not worth the bother, I should imagine. Maybe Egyptologists were here once, in the last century, when European archaeologists plundered Egypt. Hadj Tayeb said that he and Abu Hosni had once convinced some of the captains of the Nile cruise boats to stop here and bring the tourists in. But after the long trek from the river, the tourists had been disappointed. And so the boats don't stop here any more."

  Jasmine looked up at him, as he stood silhouetted against the lavender sky, the wind stirring his hair; it was longer now, with the first signs of silver at the temples. "Declan," she said, "why must you leave?"

  He walked past her, his boots crunching over broken pavement that had been laid long ago. "I have to leave. For my own sur
vival."

  "But you are needed so badly here. Please, listen to me. When I arrived at the refugee camps in Gaza, I was so appalled by the conditions, the way the Palestinians are being treated, that I almost couldn't stay. And then I went to the Treverton Foundation Clinic, and I saw what good they were doing—"

  "Jasmine," he said, facing her as he stood in the shadow of a looming column, "I know all about the camps. I know all about the conditions people are living in, all over the world. But you and I aren't going to change it, not one bit. Look," he said, turning to the column. It was decorated with carvings so worn down by wind and sand that they could barely be made out, but as the sun shot its last rays over the escarpment and momentarily deepened the shadows, the engravings stood out in relief. "Do you see this?" he said, pointing to scenes of men working the fields, buffalo turning water wheels, women grinding corn. "These pictures were probably carved three thousand years ago, and yet they could have been done today, because the fellaheen live today exactly as their ancestors did. Nothing has changed. This is the lesson I've learned after twenty-five years of practicing medicine in the Third World. No matter what you and I do, people will remain the same. Nothing changes."

  "Except you," she said. "You've changed."

  "Let's just say I woke up."

  "To what?"

  "To the fact that what we're doing here—in Egypt, in the refugee camps—is nothing but an exercise in futility."

  "You didn't use to think so. You once thought you could save the children of the world."

  "That was during my arrogant phase, when I thought I could make a difference."

  "You still can make a difference," she said, and he saw a challenging look in her eyes.

  The sound of footsteps over the gravel suddenly disturbed the desert silence, and Hadj Tayeb came puffing toward them. "My three gods," he said. "God had better call me to Him soon, or else I'll be useless in paradise! Ah, these ruins. My village could make money if the tourists would come. But after they see Karnak and Kom Ombo, they look at this and say, 'Only two columns? Why should we pay money to see only two columns?' Abu Hosni and I are thinking of building new columns here, and making them look old. By God, but I am tired."