Virgins of Paradise

by Wood, Barbara

  "Very well then!" she said, standing up. "If you won't eat, I shan't force you."

  As she reached for the tray on the bedside table, she felt a sudden cramp in her abdomen. Without warning her knees gave way, and as she fell to the floor, she vomited.

  Mohammed yelled for help, and Amira came in. As she assisted the nurse to her feet, she said, "Did you have any nausea?"

  Huda glumly shook her head. Vomiting without preceding nausea was one of the first signs of the disease. Now she, too, had cholera.

  The black limousine, no longer shiny because of the khamsin dust, pulled up in front of the house, and Dahiba and Camelia got out before it had completely stopped. Hakim wasn't happy about them going past the government quarantine signs, but he said nothing other than that he would take care of Zeinab in the meantime. Dahiba didn't even knock. She marched up the path, and opened the front door as if she had left this house only yesterday. "Bismillah!" she said. "It stinks in here!"

  As they quickly made their way up the stairs to the women's side of the house, they saw stacks of clean sheets, basins of soap and water, hospital gowns and surgical masks outside the bedrooms. The strong odor of disinfectant did not cover the underlying smell of sickness.

  Amira was in the hall struggling with a large bundle of dirty sheets, a white surgical gown over her black dress, her hair wrapped in a white bandanna. Dahiba sighed and shook her head, "My mother, the Sayyida Zeinab of Virgins of Paradise Street."

  Amira looked up, startled. She stared for a moment at her daughter, then said, "Fatima, praise God."

  "My brother tells me you won't allow the windows to be opened, Mother."

  "The disease is carried on the wind. Desert jinns have brought cholera to this house."

  "Cholera is caused by bacteria, Mother, a tiny germ you can't see."

  "Can one see jinns? Please, daughter, go away, before you get sick."

  "Ibrahim inoculated us, Umma."

  "He inoculated his nurse, too, and she is sick."

  "It doesn't work with everyone. I place my trust in God. Now I want you to get into bed."

  "You must leave," Amira said, but with less conviction.

  "Since when is a family not allowed to take care of its members? It is times such as these that give meaning to a family, otherwise what are we, what do we have?" Removing her scarf and rolling up her sleeves, Dahiba helped her mother into bed. "I am going to take care of things now, Umma," she said, "starting with you. And I shall have no argument about it."

  Amira did not argue further. Her head fell back onto the pillow, she closed her eyes and thought, Praise to the Eternal One, my baby has come home.

  When Ibrahim arrived he first made the rounds of the bedrooms, checking each patient, administering tetracycline as needed. He was upset to find Huda confined to bed; he had warned her that the vaccination was only 80 percent effective. But she was holding up well and taking her situation stoically.

  Finally he went downstairs to the kitchen, where water was being sterilized for drinking, and servants were ironing great piles of freshly laundered sheets. Sahra, looking gray and fatigued, was at the table preparing lunch trays for the sickrooms. Ibrahim rarely visited the kitchen, as it was the women's domain, but he came in now as a doctor, trying to root out the cause of this minor epidemic.

  It was frustrating; he had just spoken again with the health inspector, and they still hadn't located the source of the disease. Dr. Kheir said six other families within the vicinity now had it. What Ibrahim couldn't fathom was why every adult in this house, with the exception of Zachariah and himself, had caught the cholera. The very youngest had also been spared. Why? What had everyone else ingested that the babies and the boy and he had not?

  He surveyed the kitchen, as if he might find the culprit squatting there—a jinni, as his mother believed. Then he looked at Sahra, who had had only a mild case and had responded immediately to the tetracycline. "Sahra," he said, "have you been washing your hands with soap before preparing the meals, as I told you?"

  "Yes, master. I've been washing them a hundred times a day." And she held out her right hand to show him how raw it was.

  He looked at the bowl she was holding, whose contents she was about to spoon onto the sickroom trays. "What is that?" he asked.

  "It is kibbeh, master. Very good for sick people. You yourself have a fondness for it."

  He frowned. "Yes, but kibbeh is always cooked, isn't it?"

  "This is a new recipe, master, which does not call for the meat to be cooked. The butcher himself told me about it. He said it is very popular in Syria. But the meat is fresh, as you can see. And the butcher cubed it himself, while I watched."

  Ibrahim brought the bowl to his nose and sniffed the mixture of lamb, onion, pepper and cracked wheat.

  "There is nothing wrong with it, master," she said anxiously. "Everyone enjoyed it. There was none left over."

  "What are you talking about? Have you prepared this dish before?"

  "Four nights ago, master. Since the family was gathering for the holiday I thought something special—"

  "The night before my wife fell ill?"

  When she nodded dumbly, Ibrahim thought back to that evening, and suddenly remembered that he had not eaten dinner with the family because of an emergency at the hospital. And Zachariah would not have eaten the kibbeh because of his aversion to meat.

  He hurried from the kitchen and telephoned the Ministry of Health. "Dr. Rasheed, I was just about to call you," Dr. Kheir said at the other end. "We have traced the disease to a new butcher in your area, a Syrian. He arrived a week ago from Damascus and we have found that he is a carrier. The bacteria is in the meat. Has anyone in your household purchased meat from him recently?"

  Ibrahim ran back into the kitchen, yanked the bowl from Sahra's hands and smashed it on the floor. "Haven't I told you a thousand times that meat must always be cooked? You could have killed us all!"

  "I—I'm sorry, master," she said. "It was special, for the holiday. The new butcher—"

  "Is a carrier, Sahra. He gave us the disease!"

  She stared at him with wide eyes. "But Mr. Gamal wasn't ill!"

  "A carrier isn't sick with it, he just passes it on to others. Don't you know you could have killed us all?"

  She started to cry. "I am sorry, master. Before God, I didn't intend any harm."

  He ran his hands through his hair, suddenly feeling very tired. "My God, look what your mistake has cost us. And now my nurse is sick, and my mother as well."

  "The Sayyida is sick?"

  "Pray that we have caught it in time. At her age, this disease can be deadly."

  "Yes, master," Sahra whispered, her face wet with tears.

  Zachariah woke before dawn, unable to sleep. Today Tahia was going to be told about her husband. He knew his father was planning on telling her, but Zachariah wanted to break the news to her himself. Deciding that he would take her breakfast to her, he went down to the kitchen where he found the servants in a turmoil. The ovens had not been lit, they said, and the bread dough had not been set overnight to rise.

  Knowing that Sahra, as head of the kitchen, preferred to see to these duties herself, and therefore was usually the first of the household staff up in the morning, Zachariah went to her room behind the kitchen, wondering if she had finally come down with the cholera.

  But, to his surprise, Sahra's bed had not been slept in, and her clothes were gone, along with the family photographs she always kept on one wall. Sahra herself was nowhere to be found.

  THIRTY

  I

  T'S POSITIVELY HOWLING OUT!" DECLAN CONNOR SAID, peering through his office window. "I've never seen the campus so deserted."

  A warm evening wind blew through the pine trees and alders and jacarandas that dotted the medical school grounds, sending dried leaves rolling along illuminated walkways, and tiny whirlwinds of litter and dust. Although Halloween was still days away, a human skull, painted orange to look like a jack-o'-lantern
, glowed in the window of the anatomy lab across the way—a student prank.

  Jasmine looked up from the typewriter and felt her heart skip to see two of him, the real Connor, and his reflection in the glass—a man who looked too serious and conservative for this liberal school, and who seemed to generate, as he always did, a personal energy that Jasmine felt even from this distance. Or perhaps, she thought, it was only in her imagination that she was touched by his infectious vigor. After working with Connor for six months, she knew what a determined, ambitious man he was.

  "Well!" he said, coming away from the window. "Where are we now? The last chapter, is it?"

  The last chapter. Jasmine didn't like the sound of it. It meant their work together would soon come to an end.

  "It's a brilliant idea, this," Connor said as he stood behind her to see what she had typed. "I'm going to have a similar chapter added to the African version."

  The new chapter had been Jasmine's idea; it was titled, "Respecting Local Customs," and was written for the non-Arab, laying out a few simple but important rules to enable the foreign health worker to get along with the villagers. After a few rather obvious recommendations such as, "Be friendly and helpful," and "Do not argue with the local native healer," she had listed the rules specific to Arab culture: "never ask a man about his wife; never eat with the left hand; never pay a compliment to a woman about her children."

  "You have no idea," he said as he leaned over her, his hand on the back of her chair, so that she smelled his Old Spice, "the problems that have arisen when well-meaning volunteers have committed such simple errors as breaking a tribal custom. The Kikuyu, for instance, consider it a great compliment if you lay your hand on top of a child's head. By not doing so, you can insult someone. Now this last one you have here, Jasmine, about not complimenting a woman on her children ..."

  While she explained to him about the evil eye and the fellaheen's fear of envy, she felt herself become very warm. If his hand should slip, if he should accidentally touch her—

  Greg, she thought. She must keep thinking of her husband, Greg. Even though Greg Van Kerk, whom she had married to avoid deportation, wasn't really her husband.

  As they had expected, the Immigration and Naturalization Service had indeed investigated them, questioning the landlady, their teachers, Greg's friends, Rachel's family. The agents came to the door every so often with badges and notepads and personal questions, and Jasmine and Greg, pleasant and cooperative, were always able to send them away satisfied, their secret still safe. Legally, they had been husband and wife for nearly seven months; Jasmine was officially Jasmine Van Kerk. But, despite the marriage certificate, they were just roommates. As Greg had said, not even the INS could plant a spy in the bedroom.

  She thought about the past six and a half months of saying good night and closing the bedroom door, hearing the springs of the sofa bed in the living room creak beneath Greg's weight. Six months in a comfortable relationship with a man who was intelligent and considerate, who had rescued her from deportation and who deserved her respect. If only she would fall in love with Greg.

  But the problem was, she had married one man and fallen in love with another.

  Declan went back to his own desk, and as Jasmine watched him go through their manuscript one last time, she couldn't help comparing the two men—Declan with his energy and intensity, which she found infectious, and Greg, so laid back that he seemed to possess the Arab philosophy of bokra—tomorrow—an attitude she quite liked because it reminded her of home. Declan was a meticulous dresser, Greg was not; Declan had made a success of himself and had ambition, Greg was still halfheartedly struggling with his master's thesis. But both men were kind, both made her laugh, and she was fond of one and in love with the other—the wrong way around.

  She had no idea how Declan felt about her, but it didn't matter, she told herself each time she began to think about him, to wonder what it would be like to be with him. Connor was married, his road was set. Just as Jasmine's was set.

  Although she was uncertain about her future with Greg, and where they were going, she knew where she was going: to learn medicine, and to take her skills wherever they were needed. That much she owed to Declan Connor. Through working with him and experiencing his energy and seeing how clearly he understood his purpose, Jasmine had sharpened and defined her own—to practice the kind of medicine she had watched her father practice in Cairo. Ibrahim Rasheed had once been a king's personal physician; he still commanded large fees. But he also treated the growing peasant population within the city. And there, working with him in his office, dispensing medicine, learning from him, Jasmine's dream had been born. Working with Connor, Jasmine had seen her goal become focused.

  And she knew it was that she must concentrate on, especially in moments when she began to feel sad, knowing that Connor was leaving when the semester was over. "Sybil and I can't seem to stay in one place for long," he had explained at the beginning of their project, back in March. "We even met on a hospital ship. I know it's good to teach new doctors, and I've enjoyed working at this school, but I miss the field. As soon as this translation is finished, Sybil and I are off to Morocco."

  Jasmine had met his wife, a professor of immunology, when Sybil had brought their son to the office, five-year-old David, a knobby-kneed little boy in short pants and English accent who had made her think of her own son, Mohammed. In that moment, Jasmine had envied Connor's wife.

  He turned over the last page of the manuscript, a glossary of basic Arabic terms, and said, "It looks as if we've done it! Al hamdu lillah!" And Jasmine laughed, as she always did when he spoke Arabic, because he spoke it with a British accent. He had once told her his favorite story about himself and his personal approach to languages. "It was in Kenya, at the mission, and I was invited to say grace at an important dinner for visiting church representatives. I was quietly reminded that the prayer must be in Latin, but as I don't know any prayers in Latin, I had to think quickly. So I bowed my head and recited, 'Levator labii superioris alaeque nasi,' the name for the little muscle on the side of the nose. They all said, 'Amen,' and we got on with the business of eating."

  Now they were done with the book. They had only to insert Jasmine's new chapter and they could send the manuscript off to the London publisher.

  "I have an idea," he said suddenly. "Let me take you to dinner. I haven't paid you anywhere near what you're worth, it would make me feel better if you'd at least let me buy you dinner."

  Jasmine stared at her fingers on the keyboard. Dinner! They had spent six months working closely together on a project that had been confined mainly to this office, and usually in the evenings, sometimes late into the night. But intimate though it had seemed, there had always been the fact of work between them, the business aspect of their relationship, and Jasmine had been able to maintain her distance. But dinner would put them on a different, dangerous level.

  "You can't possibly refuse me," Connor said, coming around her desk and turning off the typewriter. "I know you haven't eaten since dawn because it's Ramadan." He smiled and added, "I don't know how you do it. The Jews are more reasonable about fasting, just one day, on Yom Kippur. To do it for thirty seems like madness."

  She put her hands in her lap to hide her sudden nervousness. "Ramadan is even harder in the summer when the days are longer!" she said.

  "Yes, I remember. Even cheerful old Habib got irritable over his ironing. That was when I reminded myself never to be in Egypt during Ramadan. Now then, you choose the restaurant," he said. "Make it as pricey as you like."

  "Will your wife be joining us?"

  "Sybil is teaching tonight."

  Jasmine hesitated. In Egypt the rules were clear: A woman did not go out alone with a man who was not a relative. Especially a married woman. But was she really married? She and Greg had signed a paper, and she had taken his name. That was all. But even though she told herself that it would be just a friendly dinner with Connor, a meal in a public place, she was a
fraid—of her feelings, and of revealing them.

  "Besides, I have a surprise for you," he said, his eyes twinkling with a mischief she had come to recognize. He had had the same look the day he had played a prank on Dr. Miller in Parasitology.

  "A surprise?" she said.

  He went behind the filing cabinet and brought out a large square envelope. "I've been saving it for a special moment. Now's as good a time as any. Go ahead, open it."

  Jasmine saw the British stamps, and Declan's home address in the Marina. As she opened it, he said, "I had them send it to the house because I didn't want you to see it before I did."

  She slid out the contents and saw that it was a photocopy of a book jacket, the title in bold black letters, Dr. Grace Treverton's When You Have to Be the Doctor: A Rural Health Care Handbook for the Middle East.

  "I submitted several sketches," Connor explained, "because we couldn't very well use the same illustration that's on the original version. As you see, they've made the child and mother look Middle Eastern, and the grass hut in the background is now a mud-brick dwelling. This is the final cover."

  Then Jasmine saw the surprise, at the bottom, under the illustration: Revised and Translated by Declan Connor, M.D., and Jasmine Van Kerk.

  "I'm afraid there's no money in it for you," he said, "no royalties, but your name will be seen by a lot of people. The Peace Corps has just placed an order for copies, and so has the French group Doctors Without Borders."

  She kept her eyes on the cover; she couldn't look at him. "I don't know what to say," she said softly.

  "There's nothing to say. All I can say is, thank God that student I hired never showed up." He fell silent and she felt him studying her. Then, more quietly, he added, "And of course it was smart of you to get married."