Virgins of Paradise

by Wood, Barbara

  "Auntie, what is going on?"

  "They're letting us out! Hurry, before they decide it's a mistake!"

  Outside the gates, the whole family was waiting. The bewildered aunt and niece were received with cheers and embraces.

  "Hakim!" Dahiba cried, going to him. "My God, are you all right?"

  Amira embraced Camelia, murmuring through her tears, "Praise God in his mercy."

  But when Zeinab reached for her mother, Dahiba said, "Camelia is ill. We must get her to a doctor at once."

  "No, I'm all right," Camelia said in amazement. "I'm pregnant! Umma, those doctors years ago were wrong! I can have children!"

  The women stared at her in shock, and then a silence settled over the crowd as all eyes turned to Amira. She reached for Camelia's hands and said, "To everyone the fate God gives him, granddaughter of my heart. This is His will, inshallah."

  "Umma, there is a man, Yacob Mansour—"

  And just then Ibrahim's car appeared in the lot, and when Camelia saw Yacob in it, with a full beard, looking thinner, his face scarred, she ran to him, laughing and crying at the same time.

  "But how is it you're here!" she said.

  "It is thanks to your father. If it weren't for him, I might have perished in prison."

  "We are going to get married, Umma," Camelia said.

  And as everyone gathered round to congratulate them, Amira silently thanked God, sparing also a thought for the other granddaughter, Yasmina, praying that she, too, wherever she was, had found happiness and love.

  PART SEVEN

  1988

  THIRTY-NINE

  T

  HE TOYOTA LAND CRUISER RACED ALONG THE DIRT ROAD that abutted the canal, scattering goats and chickens and kicking up a cloud of red dust. Fellaheen women at the river, hoisting tall jugs onto their heads, turned to see the familiar vehicle race by, the sun-bleached logo of the Treverton Foundation barely visible on its doors. When they saw how wildly Nasr the Nubian was driving, the women thought: An emergency for the doctor.

  On the veranda of his small residence that looked out over green fields and the blue Nile, Dr. Declan Connor heard the car coming as he finished suturing and bandaging a man's foot, which had been sliced by a hoe. Both men turned as the Toyota roared up the track toward them, and when the fellah saw the dust the four-wheel-drive kicked up, he said, "My three gods, Your Presence! That man is in a hurry to get to paradise!"

  The Toyota came to a squealing halt and Nasr's perspiring black face appeared through the settling dust. "The plane is arriving, Sayyid!" he shouted with a grin. "Al hamdu lillah, the supplies are here at last!"

  "Thank God! Get over to the airstrip right away! Don't let anyone get his hands on the cargo!"

  Nasr gunned the engine and the Toyota raced off down the dirt road.

  "All right, Mohammed," Connor said. "We're done here. Just try to keep that foot clean."

  Going inside for his hat, which hung on a hook next to a calendar with all the days marked off, Connor noted that the X through today's date marked exactly eleven weeks to go until he said good-bye to Egypt, and to the practice of medicine, forever.

  As he made his way around the house to where another Land Cruiser was parked, the fellah limped after him and said with a grin, "The new assistant arrives today? Maybe this one will be a pretty nurse, Your Presence. With a big bottom."

  Connor laughed and shook his head. "No more nurses, Mohammed," he said, as he climbed into the Toyota. "I've learned my lesson on that score. They've promised me a doctor this time. My replacement. The man who will take over after I leave."

  Jasmine wondered if she was sick from the turbulent airplane ride, or if the malaria was upon her again.

  The doctor in London had warned her that it might be too soon to travel, but she was finally going to be working with Dr. Connor again, and she had wanted to waste no time in coming. She had once vowed that she would never come back to Egypt, but when she was recuperating in a London hospital after falling ill in Gaza, a Foundation representative had visited her, explaining the need for a physician with a knowledge of Arabic to assist Dr. Connor in Upper Egypt. Jasmine had volunteered to go.

  It was strange to be in this twin-engine airplane flying low over fertile fields and canals where buffalo turned their eternal wheels, blindfolded so that they wouldn't get dizzy; strange to be flying in a modern machine over a land that was both ancient and timeless, as if she rode a magic carpet over the little villages with their tiny domes and minarets—above it all without being part of it. When her flight from London had landed at Cairo International Airport, she had expected to feel some sort of psychological jolt, perhaps a mental relapse into anger and depression. And when she had stepped down to the tarmac and drawn in her first breath of Egyptian air in twenty-one years, she had braced herself for a stunning spiritual blow.

  But nothing had happened. She had hurried with the rest of the passengers toward Customs and baggage claim, as if she were in any airport in the world, rushing to make any connecting flight. Still, she had felt slightly surreal, as though she were in a bed somewhere, having a strange dream. She had had the odd notion that if she looked at herself in a mirror, she would find that she was transparent. It was the medication, she told herself, plus the effects of the illness, wearing off but still influencing her mind. For why else would she have imagined, two hours later and taking off from the same airport in this small plane, that she was a ghost floating above Cairo? She had looked down and seen desert, and then green, and then, in the distance, the city where she had been born, cursed, and died. And it had struck her that she had taken the long way around coming here, to be at last up in the clouds with the birds and the angels and ghosts of the dead.

  Am I back? she wondered as she felt the twin-engine De Havilland suddenly vibrate. Am I truly back? Or is this just another hallucination brought on by the illness? In London, when she had burned with fever, she had imagined she was back in medical school, in the cadaver lab where, for some reason, she was dissecting Greg.

  Although it was a cool February day, Jasmine felt hot. Picking up the paper she had bought at the airport, with a headline that read, new bush administration's ambassador to egypt arrives, she fanned herself. She had scanned its pages earlier, reading the editorials, the movie reviews and, something new, "singles" ads placed by women seeking marriage partners. The ads listed the usual facts—age, education, family—but each also included a subtle color discrimination, as women described themselves in descending order of desirability from white, and "wheaten" color, to olive, and finally to black. On the front page was the story of a young man who had been overseas on a study program, and when he had come home had found a bottle of medicine in his unmarried sister's bedroom. Being told by a pharmacist that it was an abortifacient, he had killed the girl. But when the autopsy revealed that not only had the girl not been pregnant but that she was in fact still a virgin, it was further discovered that the victim had been having menstrual problems, for which the local chemist had sold her this "cure." When the defense attorney declared at the murder trial that his client was innocent on the grounds that his motive had been to defend family honor, the man was acquitted.

  Jasmine set the paper aside and contemplated the panorama beyond her window—a great yellow ocean, the Sahara, bisected by a bright green strip, the Nile Valley. The demarcation between desert and vegetation was so sharp that it looked from the air as if a person could stand with one foot on thick grass, the other on sand. Jasmine saw herself like that, divided in two, one side wanting to be back in Egypt, the other fearing it. She had worked hard to distance herself from the cruel past and its unbearable memories. Was being here again going to tear open old wounds?

  But she would not let herself think about the family in Cairo, or Hassan al-Sabir, who had been the instrument of her exile. She thought only of Declan Connor. Nearly fifteen years had passed since they finished the translation of the health manual; now they were going to be working together aga
in.

  The pilot said something over the drone of the engines, and when the plane began to lose altitude, Jasmine looked down and saw creamy sand dunes, rocky outcroppings, a jumble of ruins that might have been a cemetery, a primitive road scratched into the desert, and finally a shed, a wind sock, and a landing strip.

  She saw two vehicles arriving in a cloud of sand, bumping over the rough road and braking to a halt at the end of the strip, where there was little more than a radio shack and a peeling sign that read al tafla in Arabic and English. And then she saw the drivers of the Toyotas jump out and come running toward the plane, holding on to their hats as it taxied toward them, two men in khaki, wearing bush hats, a black Nubian and a sunburned white man. Connor! Her heart began to race.

  When the plane came to a halt, the two men ran toward it, and a fellah in a galabeya came running from the radio shed, attracting the attention of a group of black-clad Bedouins squatting with their camels in the shade of an enormous rock.

  "Al hamdu lillah!" Connor shouted to the pilot who waved from the open cockpit window. "Salaamat!"

  "Salaarnat!" the man called back. Like Nasr, the pilot worked for the Treverton Foundation, taking his plane into remote desert areas, or to the far reaches of the Upper Nile, wherever medical supplies and personnel were needed. While the Nubian went to open the rear cargo hatch, Connor helped the fellah chock the wheels and secure the aircraft. Then he went to the passenger door, praying that his replacement was on board. But when he saw a woman emerge, wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt, her long blond ponytail shining in the sunlight, he frowned. And then his eyes widened in amazement. "Jasmine?"

  "Hello, Dr. Connor," she said, jumping down. "I can't tell you how good it is to see you again."

  "My God," he said, taking her hand. "Jasmine Van Kerk! What on earth are you doing here?"

  "Didn't the London office tell you I was coming?"

  "I'm afraid communications this far up the Nile aren't very dependable. I imagine I'll receive notice of your arrival in a week or two! This is marvelous! How long has it been?"

  "Six and a half years. We last met in Nevada, at the test site, remember?"

  "How could I forget?" he said. He held on to her hand for a moment longer, then said, "Well! Better get the cargo transferred. I hope they sent the jet guns I asked for."

  As Connor strode away to help Nasr load aluminum boxes labeled world health organization into one of the Toyotas, Jasmine turned toward the east, the direction of the Nile, closed her eyes and took the cool wind in her face. They are five hundred miles away, she told herself. They are far away in Cairo; they cannot hurt me.

  Connor finally came back and said, "Is this all your luggage?"

  "Yes, just the one case."

  He threw it into the back of the second Toyota and said, "All right, we'd better get going. We've got to get these vaccines into the refrigerator."

  Jasmine had to grab on to the dashboard as Connor stepped on the gas and the four-wheel-drive swerved in the sand and raced away from the airstrip. When they turned onto a dubiously paved road that cleaved sand dunes, he said, "So you finally came back to Egypt. As I recall, you were resistant to the idea. Your family must have been glad to see you."

  "They don't know I'm here. I didn't stop in Cairo."

  "Oh? The last time I saw you, you were headed off for Lebanon. How was it?"

  "Frustrating. And then I was assigned to the refugee camps in Gaza, which were worse. The world seems to have forgotten the Palestinians."

  "The world doesn't give a damn about a lot of things."

  Jasmine gave Connor a startled look. Although he still spoke in the British accent and with the compelling voice she remembered, she detected an edge that hadn't been there before. He had changed physically as well, she realized, as she regarded his profile against a backdrop of yellow, treeless desert. It occurred to her that he looked as if more than seven years had passed since she had last seen him, as if, in the meantime, life had dealt severely with him. Connor had always been tall and thin, but now the gauntness was more pronounced, the cheekbones and jaw more sharply etched. The intensity was still there, the vitality and energy she had once found so infectious. But now she thought she sensed an undercurrent of anger.

  "I can't tell you how good it is to see you again, Jasmine. And how glad I am that you decided to come here. I've had a hell of a time with staff. London keeps sending me unmarried women, and I always end up having to send them home. They don't cause trouble, you understand, but, well, you know what the fellaheen are like. Unattached females are always trouble."

  "What about men?" she asked, wondering if he truly was angry, or if she was imagining it; but noticing also how vigorously he handled the steering wheel, as if he were trying to tame it.

  "I've had two male assistants," he said, squinting through the windshield's glare, his face almost angry. "The first was an Egyptian medical student putting in his stint required by the government. He spent a month being contemptuous of the fellaheen and left abruptly with a trumped-up health complaint. The second was an enthusiastic American volunteer who came hoping to convert the fellaheen to Christianity and had to be sent home after a week."

  He shook his head. "Can't say I blame them, though. It's not easy dealing with the fellaheen. They're like children, they need watching. Sometimes they think that taking a medicine all at once is better than spreading it out. And that if one inoculation is good, then five ought to be five times as effective."

  Steering the Toyota onto a dirt track that bordered the edge of vegetation, he said, "Last year, a fellah returned from Mecca with holy water, which he dumped into the village well, hoping it would bless everyone. The water turned out to be infected with cholera and we were threatened with a regional epidemic, so we had to get around fast and inoculate everyone in the area. But these people are terrified of injections and will do anything to avoid them. One unfortunate bastard, who didn't fear the needle, saw it as a way of making money. For a fee he took a man's place in line at the mobile clinic truck. He had received twenty cholera shots before we found out, and by then he was dead."

  Jasmine rolled down her window and felt cool, dry desert air on her face. She drew in a deep breath to clear her head. It was suddenly too much—being back in Egypt, and with Connor again. "Then I'm glad to be of help to you," she said.

  "You aren't here just to be my assistant, Jasmine. You're my replacement."

  "Replacement!"

  "Didn't they tell you that? You're going to be taking over after I leave."

  "No, they didn't tell me. When are you leaving?"

  "I'm sorry, I thought you knew. I'm leaving in eleven weeks. Knight Pharmaceuticals in Scotland has offered me a job as director of their tropical medicine division."

  "Scotland! Is it for research and development?"

  "Administration. A desk job, strictly nine to five, with no more patients, no more bush hospitals where we have two people to a bed. To be frank with you, Jasmine, I'm sick of trying to help people who refuse to help themselves. I'm also tired of sunshine and palm trees. Most men dream of retiring to the tropics, but I'm going where there's plenty of rain and fog."

  She stared at him. "What about your wife? What will she be doing?"

  He gripped the wheel as the four-wheel-drive raced along the desert track. "Sybil is dead. She died three years ago, in Tanzania."

  "Oh. I'm sorry." Jasmine returned to the window and closed her eyes, inhaling the bracing air that was starting to deliver the moister scents of loam, grass, and river. Declan was angry; she saw it in his knuckles, and heard it in his voice. But angry at what, at whom?

  They left the desert and were soon driving past fields of winter wheat and alfalfa watched over by ragged scarecrows and fellaheen bent over hoes, their galabeyas hiked up, waving cheerily at the passing car. Jasmine said, "How is your son, David?"

  "He's nineteen now, in college in England. A bright boy. I'm amazed he turned out so well, considering the upbringi
ng he had. But I intend to make all that up to him. As soon as I'm settled in at the new job, I'll have him stay with me. We'll go trout fishing."

  "You make it sound as if you are leaving the Foundation altogether."

  "I am. I'm going to put away my shingle, Jasmine. No more house calls."

  As they bounced down the dirt track between fields of tall sugarcane, they came upon an old man riding a donkey sidesaddle, tapping it with a stick. He raised a hand in salute and said in Arabic, "Is this your new bride, Your Honor? When is your wedding night?"

  To which Connor replied, "Bokra fil mishmish, Abu Aziz!" And the elder laughed.

  "Bokra fil mishmish," Jasmine murmured, thinking of Zachariah, who had first called her Mishmish, and wondering what had become of him. In Amira's only letter to Jasmine she had said that Zachariah had gone off in search of Sahra, the cook.

  Declan said, almost to himself, "'Tomorrow when the apricots bloom.' A nice way of saying, 'Don't hold your breath.'"

  Jasmine saw the tension in his neck and jaw. She wanted to ask how Sybil had died. "Your Arabic seems to have improved, Dr. Connor."

  "I've been working on it. I remember how you used to laugh at my accent, when we were translating the manual."

  "I hope I didn't offend you."

  "Not at all! I liked the way you laughed." He looked at her, and then away. "And my accent was terrible. Even so, I always could speak Arabic better than I could read it or write it. Being born in Kenya and growing up speaking Swahili, which is heavily influenced by Arabic, always gave me an advantage. It's a beautiful language. Didn't you once say that Arabic sounded like water flowing over stones?"

  "Yes, I did. But I was only quoting someone else. Do you still recite the names of muscles when you say grace?"

  He laughed, and Jasmine thought he relaxed a little, she saw a glimpse of his former self. "You remember that, do you?" he said. She wanted to say, I remember a lot about the months we spent on the translation. I especially remember our last night together, when we almost kissed.