Virgins of Paradise

by Wood, Barbara

  As she made her way down the busy hall, she decided that, if the dean of the school was unable to help her, perhaps someone here might. She couldn't possibly talk to everyone, but she could get to those who would be her teachers; they would certainly want to help her stay in school.

  Near the end of the corridor, a hand-lettered notice taped next to an open door caught her attention—specifically, the word "Arabic." She stepped closer to read it: "Needed. Assistant to work on book project: translation of Third World health manual for use in the field. Duties include typing, medical research, handling correspondence. Knowledge of Arabic helpful but not essential. Evenings and weekends." It was signed by Dr. Declan Connor, Department of Tropical Medicine.

  She looked inside and saw a very small office with barely enough space for the desk, chair, and filing cabinets, all of which appeared to be covered with journals, books, papers. She glimpsed a typewriter among boxes of index cards. The only occupant in the office, a man whom she presumed to be Dr. Connor, was on the phone, trying to explain to someone about requiring computer time.

  When he saw her standing there, he waved for her to come in, and said, "They've put me on hold again. I'll explain everything to you in a moment. I'm afraid we're in a bit of a rush—the publisher has moved the pub date up on me. And the World Health Organization informs me that nearly every agency in the Middle East is asking for the book."

  Jasmine was struck by two things at once: that he spoke with a British accent, and that he was very attractive.

  "While you're waiting," he said, cradling the earpiece between his chin and shoulder, "you'll want to take a look at this." He thrust a book into Jasmine's hands and, before she could speak, he was talking into the phone again.

  He had given her a large book resembling a telephone directory, titled When You Have to Be the Doctor. It bore a cover illustration of an African mother and child standing in front of grass huts, and as Jasmine flipped through the pages she saw illustrations of sick people, wounds, microbes, instructions on bandaging and how to measure and administer medication, and diagrams of the ideal village layout. Although medical and pharmaceutical terms were used, the text was in plain and simple language. Someone had inked a few notes in the margins—on a page dealing with measles, the word mazla had been written, with a question mark after it.

  Jasmine looked around the office, at the certificates and letters framed and hung randomly on the walls. There was a baffling poster of a young African male in trousers and a shirt, and he was clearly pregnant. Underneath, in bold print, was the question: "How Would You Like It?" The question was repeated below in what Jasmine presumed to be Swahili, since small print at the very bottom of the poster identified it as having been produced by the Kenya Family Planning Commission.

  Among the clutter on the desk was a sign that read: "Definition of a vaccine: a substance which, when injected into a white rat, results in a scientific paper." On another scrap of paper, taped to the edge of the desk, someone had scrawled: "Old professors never die, they just lose their faculties." Then she saw a photograph of a man and a woman and a child, standing in front of a gate with a sign that read Grace Treverton Mission; in the background Jasmine saw concrete block buildings with tin roofs, and African women carrying baskets on their heads.

  She looked at Dr. Connor, still on the phone. She judged him to be in his early thirties, but the tweed jacket and brown tie, the dark-brown hair conservatively cut, made him seem older; he looked as if he had stepped out of the past. Most men around campus these days were like Greg Van Kerk, opting for jeans and sandals and longer hair, but Jasmine thought that Dr. Connor, despite his young age, seemed to have been completely bypassed by the hippy movement.

  She tried to get his attention, but he held up a hand, indicating he would be right with her. She looked at her watch; she was due at the dean's office. She briefly considered walking out, but felt curiously compelled to stay.

  "No, wait," Connor said into the phone. "Don't transfer me, I just want—" He gave Jasmine an apologetic look and said, "I feel like a rat in a maze. Yes? Hello? Look, don't transfer me again. This is Dr. Connor in tropical medicine ..."

  Jasmine watched, fascinated. Declan Connor seemed to fill the room with barely harnessed energy—it showed in the stiff way he stood, his clipped speech, the abrupt gestures. She saw that his shirt collar was bunched up over the top of his jacket, as if he had gotten dressed on the run, and as he spoke on the phone, he rummaged through papers on the desk, making Jasmine wonder if he was a man who always did two things at once. Connor gave the impression of hurrying in place.

  She liked his looks, finding that the large straight nose and clean-cut cheeks and jaw—aggressive features, she thought—seemed to heighten his illusion of intensity. When he made a sudden move, knocking some papers to the floor, he gave Jasmine an embarrassed smile and she felt her heart give a strange leap.

  "Yes, all right," Connor finally said into the phone, and hung up with an exasperated sigh. "It's just like government bureaucracy around here!" He flashed her a smile. "But don't let it worry you. If we can't get computer time then we shall do it the way our ancestors did—with pen and paper. Well, what do you think of it?" he said, gesturing to the book in her hands. "That book was first written back in the forties by a very great lady, Dr. Grace Treverton, in Kenya. It's been updated many times since, of course, but so far it only exists in English and Swahili. The Treverton Foundation has asked me to come out with an Arabic version, for health-care workers in the Middle East. You'll see I've already started making notes in the margins."

  "Yes," she said, flipping back to a section titled, "Nutritional Education," part of which involved teaching villagers the importance of proper food handling and cooking. "But you probably won't need this part here," Jasmine said, showing him the entry on trichinosis with its commandment in bold type never to eat under-cooked pork. "You'll be working mainly with Muslims, who don't eat pork."

  "I know, but we work in Christian villages as well."

  "And then there is this"—she flipped back to the page on measles—"you have written the word mazla here. If you mean to say measles in Arabic, the word is nazla."

  "Good heavens. You didn't tell me you speak Arabic. Oh, hang on." He reached for a pair of glasses and put them on. "You're not the student I hired."

  "I apologize, Dr. Connor," she said, handing the book back to him. "I didn't have a chance to explain."

  "Do I detect the accent of a fellow countryman? What part of England are you from?"

  "I'm not from England. But I am half English. I was born in Cairo."

  "Cairo! Fascinating city! I taught for a year at the American University there—used to get my shirts ironed by a chap named Habib, on Youssef El Gendi Street. He would fill his mouth with water and spray it over the shirts, and then he would actually press the shirt holding the iron with his feet. Habib was always trying to get me to marry his daughter. I told him I was already married, but he insisted that two wives were better than one! I wonder if he's still there. Our son was nearly born in Cairo. But he chose the Athens airport, of all places, to make his entrance. That was five years ago. We haven't been back to the Middle East since. Well! Small world! What can I do for you?"

  She explained about her problem with the Immigration Service. "Yes," Connor said, "unfortunate business. Doesn't make a damn bit of sense. I've already lost three students. Have you received your notice yet? Maybe you'll be one of the lucky ones. A few do slip through the net." He paused and seemed to study her. Then he looked at his watch and said, "The student I hired is forty-five minutes late. There's a chance she won't show. It's happened before—a better job comes along. If she doesn't show up, would you take the job? You'd be perfect, speaking Arabic as you do."

  Jasmine realized that she would very much like to work for Dr. Connor. "If I'm not sent back," she said.

  "I tell you what, if you get a notice from the INS, I'll write a letter to them for you. I can't guarantee it w
ould help, but it can't hurt. And I mean it about the job. The pay is wretched, I'm afraid. The Foundation doesn't sell the book, it's given out free wherever it's needed. But we could have fun doing it." When he smiled selfconsciously and added, "Let's pray you don't get that notice. Inshallah, ma salaama," Jasmine had to suppress a laugh. His pronunciation was atrocious.

  As Rachel Misrahi pushed her way through the demonstrators outside the Student Union, she gave herself a mental kick in the pants. If only she hadn't persuaded Jasmine to use the Misrahi residence as her official address—"Saves you reregistering with the feds every time you change apartments"—because then Rachel would not now be facing the god-awful task of delivering to Jasmine the certified letter that had come from the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington, D.C.

  Rachel Misrahi, twenty-five years old and pushing her stocky frame through a crowd of women holding placards that said, starve a rat, don't cook dinner tonight, was prepared to be mad as hell if Jasmine had to go back to Egypt. Rachel had helped Jasmine get into this school, which Rachel herself had attended as an undergraduate.

  She didn't have time to listen to what the feminist protesters were angry about, but she accepted their leaflets and said, "Keep the faith, sisters," and finally made her way inside. She looked around the busy cafeteria, where she knew Jasmine ate lunch every Monday and Wednesday, between Biochemistry and Economics. Purchasing tea and a wedge of cheesecake, reminding herself that tomorrow the diet starts, Rachel claimed a littered table from which she could watch the entrance to the cafeteria.

  As she observed the mob outside dispense leaflets and shout slogans, despite the increasing rain, Rachel thought of the few attempts she had made to draw Jasmine into a feminist discussion. "After all," she had said, "you come from one of the most oppressed societies in the world, when it comes to women. I would think you would be at the forefront of the battle." But Jasmine had been curiously silent on the issue; Jasmine was, in fact, strangely silent on the subject of Egypt or her family in general. Rachel had thought she would be homesick, as a lot of foreign students were, and therefore talkative about home. But Jasmine never spoke of Cairo, or the Rasheeds.

  Finally there she was, weaving her way through the lunch crowd. "They can't help me," she said sitting down. "The dean said that if the INS revokes my visa, then I can't attend the school. One of the professors offered to help—Dr. Connor—"

  "In Tropical Medicine?"

  "He said he would write a letter, but he didn't seem hopeful."

  "I wish I could help, Jas, I really do. My dad even spoke to a lawyer friend of his. He couldn't give us much hope. If war breaks out again between Egypt and Israel, you can be sure you won't be welcome here. Let's pray that peace breaks out instead."

  When Rachel saw the naked fear in Jasmine's eyes, she wondered why she was so afraid to go home. Although Rachel felt genuine kinship with her—after hearing her call Grandma Maryam "Auntie" so many times, Rachel regarded Jasmine as a cousin—Jasmine remained an enigma. Her innocence, for example, perplexed Rachel, who knew that Jasmine had been married and had left a son behind in Egypt. How could a divorced woman seem so virginal, so chaste? Rachel recalled the time she had introduced Jasmine to some friends, a couple living together in Malibu. Jasmine had been genuinely shocked to learn that they weren't married. If it really was because of her upbringing, as Grandma Maryam had explained, and that possibly Jasmine could never assimilate into American life, why then did she seem so fearful about going home?

  Rachel was about to voice this when suddenly a man appeared at their table, a knapsack on his shoulder and a grin on his face. When he said to Jasmine, "So, how did it go?" Rachel looked at him in surprise. And when Jasmine responded, and then introduced Greg Van Kerk to Rachel, she stared in further amazement: since when had Jasmine cultivated friendship with a male?

  "Mind if I sit down?" he asked. "So what are you going to do now?" he asked Jasmine, with a familiarity that baffled Rachel.

  "I must think of something," Jasmine said. "And pray that I don't get one of those notices."

  "Uh-oh," Rachel said. "Please don't kill the messenger." She pulled the certified letter out of her purse.

  Jasmine looked at it. "So," she said quietly, "it has come."

  "Hey," Greg said, "it might not be bad news. Maybe it's a letter telling you you're one of the lucky ones."

  Rachel slit open the envelope, unfolded the letter and handed it to Jasmine. She didn't take it, but was able to read enough to know that it wasn't good news.

  She looked out at the demonstrators in the rain. In Egypt, such a gathering would never take place—the fathers and brothers of these young women would break up the meeting and take them home. Through the plateglass window of the cafeteria she sensed their pain and outrage. They were women who felt they had been betrayed; the glue that held them together was anger, even hatred, against the men who had oppressed them. Jasmine knew what it felt like to be powerless—it was Hassan al-Sabir, forcing her to submit to him in order to save her family; it was her father, punishing her for being a victim. And now policies established by men she didn't even know were destroying her plans and her life.

  This was why she had decided to become a doctor. Physicians possessed power—real power, over life and death. And someday she was going to be a woman with power, never again to be a victim of men or curses or death sentences.

  "Listen, Jas," Rachel said. "You might as well accept it. As Grandma Maryam always says, inshallah, it's God's will. Go back to Egypt, and when the political climate is better, you can come back."

  "I cannot go back," Jasmine said.

  "Well," Greg said, stretching his long legs in front of him and crossing his ankles, "there is one way you might be able to stay. I mean, there is a loophole you might use."

  Rachel and Jasmine both said, "What's that?"

  "Marry an American."

  Jasmine stared at him. "Can it be done?"

  "Wait a minute," Rachel said. "The Immigration Service caught on to that a long time ago. She would never get away with it."

  "I didn't say she should run off to Vegas and marry the first man she saw. It can be done, if it's done right. There's no doubt that the INS will investigate for a while. I mean, friends and neighbors will be questioned to see if the couple got married for legitimate reasons and not just to dodge visa regulations, and she would probably have to stay married for at least two years. If Jasmine got a divorce before that, the INS would most likely return her to her former status and ship her back to Egypt."

  Jasmine turned to Rachel. "Do you think I should marry a stranger to stay in the United States?"

  "Why not? You said girls marry strangers all the time in Egypt."

  "But that is different, Rachel. And anyway, who would do this for me?"

  Greg stretched, and his shirt came out from beneath his jeans. As he tucked it back in, he said, "I'm not doing anything this weekend."

  Jasmine stared at him, and when she saw that he was serious, she said, "But how can it succeed? I receive this notice from the government, and the next day I am married to an American? They would suspect."

  But Rachel said, "Not if you put on a good act and fool them. And anyway, they can't prove you got this letter before you got married."

  "But I did. I won't lie."

  "For God's sake, it's not lying. I never gave you the letter, did I? I opened it, I showed it to you, but I never gave it to you. Listen, Jas, of all the reasons I can think of for getting married, this is probably one of the best."

  Greg said, "Hey, I can understand if it bothers you because you believe marriage is a sacred institution or something—"

  "No," she said. "In Egypt, marriage is not a sacrament. We don't get married in a holy building as you do. It is simply a contract between two people."

  "Then that's what I'm offering, a contract."

  She frowned, her perplexity deepening. "But what about you? You would be giving up your freedom."

 
He laughed. "Such as it is! The women aren't exactly beating a path to my door, and anyway I have to concentrate on getting my master's and then start on my Ph.D. I don't intend to be a penniless student all my life. Okay, you want to know what's in it for me? I like your car. Let me have it every other weekend and you've got a deal."

  "Seriously—"

  "I am serious. You appear to be financially comfortable and I'm not. It seems to me this arrangement could benefit both of us. My rent gets paid, and the feds don't ship you back to Egypt."

  Jasmine grew thoughtful. Could it work? she wondered. Could she somehow escape the nightmare of being sent back?

  Greg said, "You can keep your maiden name if you want, but I would advise against it. We'd want this marriage to appear as legit as possible."

  But Jasmine liked the idea of shedding the name Rasheed, as if she were shedding a veil, or a stigma. But she still hesitated and, seeing this, Greg said, "Okay, you don't know anything about me. All right, here it is: Born in St. Louis at an early age, was told by Sister Mary Theresa that I'd never amount to anything, escaped the draft and therefore Vietnam because of diabetes, which I control with injections. I like cats and kids, and my dream is to go to New Guinea and discover a race of people no one ever knew existed. And I'm self-sufficient. I don't need a maid, I do my own cooking and cleaning. My parents are geologists who travel all over the world, so I didn't grow up in a traditional household where the wife was stuck in the kitchen. Believe me, my sympathies are with them," and he gestured toward the feminists who were now dispersing in the heavy downpour.

  Jasmine wondered: Perhaps this is what marriage should be, rationally arrived at between two equal partners, with no dominance or subservience, no bride-price, no fear of divorce if a son isn't produced. She studied Greg for a moment, liking the way his red-gold hair curled over his frayed collar, and realized that this was the first time she had felt that a man was looking at her as a human being and not as a sex object or baby producer.