Virgins of Paradise

by Wood, Barbara

  They were filming the dream sequence on an early November morning before Cairo became too noisy. And while ropes had been strung around to cordon off the bystanders, the crowd was growing so unexpectedly that uniformed guards carrying batons had been called in to provide further security.

  Hakim and his crew were being very careful. Filmmakers in Cairo had been recent targets of Islamic fundamentalist groups who protested the production of "immoral films with messages that go against the teachings of Islam." Hakim himself had received threats for making films that depicted strong, opinionated women who preferred living alone to marrying. Ever since Egypt's victory in the Ramadan War in 1973, the growing tide of fundamentalism was calling for a return to the traditional and "natural" role of women, and the films of Hakim Raouf, Islamic conservatives declared, put ideas into the minds of young girls.

  But it wasn't just among Muslims that Hakim and other directors had enemies; Coptic Christians were also voicing opposition to movies that they claimed constantly stereotyped members of their community in a negative light. Raouf had come under specific attack by both Copts and Muslims for having made a movie about a love affair between a Muslim woman and a Coptic man, which both sides declared offensive and so farfetched as to verge on parody.

  "It is impossible to please everyone," Hakim said. "I am answerable to God and my conscience. I can no longer be at peace with myself if I make musical comedies or melodramas. As a filmmaker I have an obligation to speak with my heart."

  Dahiba loved him for his courage, but today she had a bad feeling about the onlookers. Only the night before, a riot had broken out in the Coptic quarter of Cairo, where it was reported that a Christian had raped a five-year-old Muslim girl. Several people had been killed, buildings had burned, and it had taken over a hundred policemen to restore order.

  "Hakim," she said quietly, shivering beneath the November sun, even though the morning was warm, "I think we should stop for the day. There are angry faces in the crowd. And you got that death threat the other day, signed with a Coptic cross."

  They had also received threats because of Dahiba's book, The Sentence of Woman, which was still banned in Egypt and which, in the past seven years, had caused an uproar in the Arab world. Because she had retired from dancing six years ago, when she turned fifty, Dahiba had begun to concentrate on her feminist writings, none of which she had been able to get published, not even in Lebanon. "Shall we live like moles?" Hakim said. "God gave us minds and intellects and the choice of voicing our thoughts. If we give in, then others will follow, until Egypt is a silent place."

  Dahiba had to agree. Still, she was afraid.

  Inside her trailer, which was parked at the edge of the municipal bus compound in front of the Hilton Hotel, Camelia finished applying her Hatshepsut makeup. She was to play the renegade woman pharaoh; she was the star of the film. As she reached for the kingly beard that was to go on last, she glanced out the small window next to her mirror and saw truckloads of agitated-looking young men pulling up at the edge of the crowd. Several of them were carrying placards bearing the Coptic cross. She frowned, then turned to her fourteen-year-old daughter, who was doing homework at a small table.

  When she saw the leg brace peeping out from under the hem of Zeinab's school uniform, Camelia felt a flood of love and, recalling the unwanted baby that had been placed in her arms fourteen years ago, marveled again that, through God's infinite compassion, she should be blessed with a daughter. It also made Camelia think of Yasmina. The years had not softened Camelia's anger toward her sister; her fury had in fact grown as her love for Zeinab had grown. How could Yasmina have given up the child? "She says she doesn't want it," Alice had said when Yasmina had left Egypt. "I tried to talk her into keeping the child, but she says it reminds her too much of Hassan." Bismillah! You don't punish a child for the sins of the father! But Camelia's anger was also mingled with fear—that someday Yasmina was going to show up to claim her daughter. My sister had better be prepared to fight, because Zeinab is mine.

  "Zeinab dear," she said when she saw the young men jump down from the trucks, "please call Radwan in. Tell him I wish to see him. Quickly, darling."

  Radwan was one of Camelia's personal bodyguards, a large Syrian who had been with her for seven years. When he stepped into the trailer, she said, "Radwan, will you please take Zeinab to my mother's house on Virgins of Paradise Street?"

  "But Mama," the girl protested, "why can't I stay and watch you make the movie?"

  Camelia gave her daughter a hug. Pretty little Zeinab, small for her age, with hair growing lighter each year so that now it was the color of antique brass. "It's going to be a long day, darling, and there are too many distractions here for you to do your homework. Go to your grandmother's and I'll come for you later." She turned to Radwan. "Take her out that way," she said, nodding in the direction of the Nile. "And hurry."

  He nodded, his dark eyes flickering in understanding.

  Drawing a robe over her pleated linen dress and elaborate jeweled collar, Camelia stepped out into Cairo's smoky morning and surveyed the unusually large throng collecting beyond the security ropes. Trouble was definitely in the air.

  "In the name of God," she murmured. How could this be happening, when Egypt had finally started to make progress? Thanks to the diligence of Mrs. Sadat, the Status Laws had finally been passed by Parliament, granting women more rights and increased representation in government. But now there was this disturbing revival of conservatism, with young women voluntarily taking up the veil.

  Camelia looked to the left and saw Radwan climb into the backseat of her white limousine. As the car began to edge its way from the growing throng, she wondered if her handsome bodyguard was still in love with her, as he had once recklessly declared. Camelia frequently received declarations of love, now that she was a star, performing with twenty back-up dancers and a full orchestra. She always gently rebuffed such admirers, as she had Radwan. She didn't want lovers, or to be in love.

  As she picked her way over cables to where the scene was being shot, Camelia felt hundreds of eyes watching her. She knew what was going through the minds of these onlookers, knew that they would be thinking of her in the exaggerated terms of which Egyptians were so fond: "There is Camelia Rasheed, our beloved goddess, the most beautiful woman in the world, the most desirable woman since Cleopatra, she who blinds even the angels." When she performed at the Hilton, men in the audience would call out, "You are honey! You are diamonds!" Once, when a drop of perspiration trickled from her cheek, down her neck and between her breasts, a passionate Saudi man had jumped on a table and cried, "Oh, sweet shower from God!"

  Camelia had become used to such adulation. What she was not used to was love; she had never been in love, even though Cairo newspapers often referred to her as "Egypt's love goddess." It was a symbolic title only; the press knew that Camelia led a chaste and moral private life. There were things, however, that the press didn't know: that Zeinab wasn't really her daughter; that Camelia had never been married—certainly not to a hero who had died in the Six-Day War—and her biggest secret of all, that, at thirty-five, Camelia was still a virgin.

  "Uncle Hakim," she said quietly as she joined him and Dahiba. "I don't like the feel of this crowd. Some angry-looking young men just arrived in trucks."

  "We should leave," Dahiba said.

  When Hakim saw the fear in their eyes, he said, "Very well, my angels. We shan't be reckless. After all, the braver the bird, the fatter the cat. I shall send the crew home. Maybe we can shoot this scene in the studio."

  But just as he gave the signal to his cameraman, someone in the crowd shouted, "Death to the spawn of Satan!"

  And suddenly the mob was surging forward, breaking the ropes. Mostly young men, shaking fists and wielding clubs, they pushed the security guards to the ground and swarmed over the cameras and equipment, smashing and destroying, before Hakim's crew could even react. The security guards tried to fight back, but the numbers were overwhelming.
When a group of attackers fell upon the cameraman, beating him with sticks, Hakim rushed to his aid. One of the attackers grabbed a length of rope and threw it around Hakim's neck. Others joined in, dragging him along the ground. Then they threw the free end of the rope over a crane, and as they started to hoist him up, Hakim's face turned purple and his eyes bulged.

  "Stop! Stop!" Camelia screamed, fighting her way through the mob. "Uncle Hakim! Oh my God—Hakim!"

  Mohammed felt his skin burn with excitement, to see so many young men in white galabeyas going through the prostrations of prayer together. How many were there? Hundreds? A mere handful compared to the thousands they were keeping from crossing the university campus.

  "It happens every day now," one of the bystanders said. "They fill the central courtyard and pray, so how can anyone disperse them? Still, we must get to class."

  Mohammed also had to get to class, having just started his course of study at Cairo University. But the seventeen-year-old liked the students' prayer blockade. He wished he had the courage to join them. He also wished he could take up their uniform: a white galabeya, beard, and skullcap. How he envied these religious young men as they went around the campus, pounding on classroom doors, announcing the time for prayer, enraging professors and confounding students. They had a noble cause, a purpose. Didn't they burn, as he burned?

  When the prayer was over and the young fundamentalists dispersed, Mohammed continued on through the campus, passing booths where religious books were sold at low prices. Zealous youths gave out free galabeyas or veils to any of the young people who stopped and listened to them. And not all of them were males; some were passionate girls who, wearing veils and long dresses, handed out flyers and pamphlets explaining the need to disavow the corrupt ways of Europe and America, and return to God and Islam. Students grabbed up tapes of sermons by fundamentalist imams; if they saw a man and woman walking together, they demanded to see their marriage license; bearded young men would hit girls with sticks if their skirts did not reach their ankles; they were demanding that all businesses and shops close during the Call to Prayer; they were calling for Jerusalem to be liberated from the Israelis; and they declared that any music, especially music from the West, was sacrilegious. Finally, the extremists were calling for a return of the segregation of the sexes, especially in school, among the virginal and unmarried; students insisted that males and females should not sit together in a classroom, and fundamentalist medical students refused to study the anatomy of the opposite sex. After all, they reasoned, hadn't the pious ways of Egyptians in 1973 given them a victory in the Ramadan War? Did that not therefore indicate that this was the way God wanted Egypt to go?

  Yes, Mohammed Rasheed thought, believing that he burned for God.

  And later that afternoon, when he returned home and joined his female relatives in the grand salon on Virgins of Paradise Street, he continued to mistake the heat that gripped him for religious fervor. But his thoughts were not of God but of a girl at school, with eyes like pools of ink. How was a boy to keep his thoughts pious when girls had such eyes, such thick cascading hair and inviting hips? The students were right, women had to be sequestered. They needed to be kept on a tighter reign, so that their rampant sexuality was not a threat to men.

  Mohammed sank onto one of the divans and thought: Women are not to be trusted. Especially the beautiful ones. Wasn't his own mother beautiful? And hadn't she betrayed him by abandoning him? He never wrote to Yasmina, he didn't want anything to do with her. For the family to have declared her dead she must have committed a terrible sin, and therefore deserved to be ostracized. But whenever a letter arrived from California, he would secretly read it many times, and then weep over her photograph, in bed late at night, longing to touch that white skin and fair hair, and cursing her.

  As he waited for one of the girls to bring him tea, he looked at his stepmother, Nala, quietly knitting on one of the divans. She was pregnant again. She had given Mohammed's father Omar seven children, suffered one miscarriage, and lost one baby to a heart defect. Nala had endured her many pregnancies without complaint. Mohammed thought this was right and natural.

  When Zeinab brought him tea, he couldn't meet her eyes. Poor girl, whose mother danced lewdly in front of strange men. And how was it that Zeinab so strongly resembled his own mother, Yasmina? Because of this, Mohammed was uncomfortable around the girl he thought was his cousin.

  As he drank the hot tea spiced with sugar and mint, filling his head with steam and fragrance, bringing back the memory of kohl-smudged black eyes and wide hips, Mohammed suddenly knew what he had to do. Tomorrow, at the university, he was going to trade in his jeans for the long white galabeya of the Brotherhood. It would be his shield against the dangers of women.

  Out in the garden, Amira noted the position of the sun and decided that most of the young people should be home from school by now, starting to gather in the salon for the sunset prayer. So she collected the last of her harvested herbs and followed the path back to the house, passing what had once been Alice's garden.

  Not a trace of the English Eden was left; the papyrus and poppies and wild lilies of Egypt had reclaimed the place where begonias and carnations had once miraculously grown. In seven years, Amira had not stopped grieving for the loss of Alice and Zachariah. But she consoled herself with the thought that what happened to them had been fated, that their destinies had been joined the moment Yasmina was born, and Amira had sent Ibrahim out into the city to commit an act of charity.

  Amira entered a kitchen filled with golden afternoon sunlight, as well as the heavenly aroma of moussaka baking in the oven and fish sizzling in butter on the stove. As she put away the herbs and listened to the feminine chatter and laughter of girls and women engaged in various tasks, Amira thought how blessed she was: seventy-six, and in full possession of her health and wits, surrounded by eighteen great-grandchildren, with two more on the way. Praise God's name! The house was full again, now that Tahia and her six children lived here, and Omar's eight, plus his wife, who always came to stay when Omar was overseas on a government job, as he was now. And all the children, grown and small, no matter what their relation to Amira, addressed her as Umma, because she was the mother of the family. As such, they were Amira's responsibility, because even though the duty of finding husbands for the girls fell to the mothers, it was ultimately Amira who chose them.

  There was Tahia's fourteen-year-old daughter Asmahan, wearing the hejab, Islamic dress—her hair, neck, and shoulders covered by a veil—a self-righteous girl who strongly resembled her grandmother Nefissa, and whom Amira had once overheard telling Zeinab that her mother, Camelia, was going to burn in hell because she was a dancer. Other girls in the house wore the hejab, zealous university students who called themselves mohajibaat, "women of the veil," and who refused to sit next to men in the classroom. Their piety would make Amira's matchmaking plans easier. But some of their sisters and cousins were not so easy. Sakinna, whom the Abdel Rahman son had turned down, was still unmarried at twenty-three. Basima, still divorced, with two children, should be in a house of her own. And Samia, youngest daughter of Jamal Rasheed by his wife before Tahia, was too thin and therefore not a good bride candidate.

  And there was Tahia herself, who had been widowed for over seven years. She was still lovely at thirty-five and would make someone happy. But whenever Amira brought up the subject, Tahia always said quietly but firmly that she was waiting for Zakki. In the seven years since his disappearance, no one had heard a word from Zachariah, but Tahia was unshaken in her belief that he was going to come back someday.

  Amira herself was not so sure. Wherever the boy had gone, she had no doubt that he was on God's errand.

  She went into the salon, where some of the family members were gathered around the television set for the late afternoon news. Today's story was about the escalating conflict between Coptic Christians and Muslims. In retaliation for the killing of a Muslim sheikh in a village in Upper Egypt, a Coptic church had b
een firebombed, killing ten people.

  Amira looked at Mohammed, her scowling grandson, watching the imperious way he received a glass of tea from Zeinab. Brother and sister, but believing they were cousins, the two were similar in appearance, but in character as different as dill and honey. Amira was worried about Mohammed, about the way she caught him watching his girl cousins with falcon eyes. That boy had sex on his mind. Not that he was any different from his father at that age—Amira recalled when Omar had demanded they find him a wife—but there seemed to be a dangerous edge to Mohammed, as though a violent current ran in his veins. Amira wondered if it was the result of having been taken from his mother at a young age. She recalled how hysterical he had been after Yasmina had left, to the point where Ibrahim had had to medicate the boy just to get him to calm down. It might be wise, Amira thought now, to get Mohammed married young, before his hunger for sex drove him to an impulsive and calamitous act.

  Finally, sadly, there was no question of marriage for Zeinab.

  So much to take care of! And now, lately, Amira had been sensing more strongly than ever the call to Arabia. She had been having more dreams, more memories had returned. Strangely, the dreams of the beautiful youth who had been beckoning to her had ceased. Amira didn't know why. Had he perhaps been alive when she had dreamed about him, and was now dead? But although the intriguing boy was gone, more fragments had come to her. A voice from the past was haunting Amira: "We will be following the route the Prophet Moussa took when he led the Israelites out of Egypt. We shall stop at the well where he met his wife ..." That must have been the road her mother's caravan had taken, when they were attacked by slavers. And the oasis in her dreams—was it Moussa's Well?

  All of these fragments and dreams formed a mosaic of the past that was gradually being filled in. But what Amira still could not remember was arriving at the house on Tree of Pearls Street; she could not recall her first days in the harem. It was as though a door had been shut across that period, blocking out those days and her earlier years as well. Amira saw her past as a prisoner in a locked room. But where was the key?