Virgins of Paradise

by Wood, Barbara

  How long ago it seemed, her own infatuation with Hassan, her moment of humiliation when he had laughed and said, "Why should I marry you?" His murderer had never been found. A man such as he, the detectives had said, must have had many enemies. The list of people who might have wanted him dead had been too long to explore; the suspects, the police said, were as numerous as Cairo's population. And so, in the end, the culprit had gotten away. But Nefissa sometimes wondered if one day a clue was going to emerge and the identity of his killer revealed at last.

  When the baby started to cry, she got up to take it over to Asmahan, who was gossiping with Fadilla, and as she went down the gazebo steps, she glimpsed through the open gate a car parked at the curb—her sister's Mercedes. Nefissa's curiosity was piqued. Why were Dahiba and her husband just sitting there and not getting out?

  "We will go to America," Hakim Raouf said softly, tears streaming down his face. "We will go to France, to Switzerland. We will find specialists, a cure. By the Prophet, my love, if you die, I shall die. You are my life, Dahiba."

  When he broke down sobbing, she took him into her arms and said, "You are the most wonderful man ever to live. I couldn't have children and you didn't care. I wanted to dance and you let me. I wrote dangerous articles and you supported me. Has God ever created a more perfect man?"

  "I am not perfect, Dahiba! I have not been the best husband to you!"

  She took his face into her hands and said, "Alifa Rifaat's husband forbade her to write, so she wrote her stories in secret, locked in the bathroom, and it was only after his death that she was able to publish them. You are a good man, Hakim Raouf. You rescued me from Mohammed Ali Street."

  "Shall I go in with you?"

  "I wish to see my mother alone. I will be home later."

  Dahiba came into the garden and signaled to her mother from the path. Amira looked at her in surprise. It was unlike her daughter to be rude.

  Inside the house, Dahiba broke the news calmly and gravely: "I went to Ibrahim with a problem, Umma. He ran some tests. The tests say that I have cancer."

  "In the name of God the Merciful!"

  "Ibrahim thinks it might be too late to catch it. I shall require surgery, but he can't give me much hope."

  Amira put her arms around her, murmuring, "Fatima, daughter of my heart," and while Dahiba spoke of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, Amira's thoughts considered another form of treatment.

  God's treatment.

  Mohammed hurried into the house, hoping to get upstairs unseen. When he heard a commotion in the grand salon, where the women were all talking loudly at once—something had happened, but he didn't care—he rushed to his room on the men's side of the house. After two hours of sitting in a dark movie house with an audience of cheering men, he was on fire. Mimi up there on the screen, so beautiful, so in need of being possessed! Inside his room, he sat on the bed, taped her picture next to his mother's and received a shock. Because his mother's photograph was an old one, the two women appeared to be about the same age, and there was a haunting resemblance that he hadn't noticed before. As he gazed at the two beautiful faces, he thought: How could beauty be so destructive? How could such loveliness cause such misery? Hadn't his mother made him unhappy for nearly all his life? And now, wasn't this second blond beauty making him equally as wretched?

  Tears blinded him until the two photographs merged together, and Mohammed couldn't tell one from the other.

  FORTY-ONE

  B

  Y THE PROPHET'S BEARD, A MAN NEEDS A WOMAN," HADJ Tayeb declared as Declan Connor examined him. An elderly fellah with a white beaded skullcap on his head and a white caftan over his bony frame, Tayeb had earned the title Hadj—pilgrim—when he had gone to Mecca. "It isn't good to keep your essence inside," he continued in an ancient croaking voice. "A man must have release every night."

  "Every night!" cried Khalid who, as a member of the mobile health team, sat in the privileged chair next to the doctor. The rest of the men occupied chairs and benches in front of the coffeehouse that opened onto the village square. "My three gods," said the ox-bodied fellah from Al Tafla. "How can a man do it every night!"

  Hadj Tayeb said piously, "I did."

  "That's why you wore out four wives!" shouted Abu Hosni from inside the coffeehouse, and the men laughed.

  "Truly, Sayyid," Hadj Tayeb said. "You should marry the doctora."

  As the other men agreed, making racy comments about what a wedding night it would be, Declan Connor looked over at Jasmine across the village square where young fellaheen mothers were handing their babies to her like offerings. And he thought of how he had been thinking that very thing lately—of making love to the doctora.

  It was a blue and gold noon, full of flies and dust and heat; the fellaheen were getting the square ready for tonight's celebration of the Prophet's birthday, when there would be storytelling, beledi dancing, stick dancing, puppet shows, and more food than the villagers had eaten in a month. The festivities would start after the sunset prayer, the young women retiring to the surrounding rooftops to observe unseen as the men, children, and women past childbearing age crowded into the square to share a sumptuous feast with the guests of honor, the Treverton Foundation mobile health team.

  The square itself was the heart of this small, nameless village on the Upper Nile, with narrow, twisting lanes branching from it like the spokes of a square wheel. Here at the center of the peasants' lives were found the mainstays of every Egyptian village: the well, which was the realm of women; the coffeehouse, belonging to the men; the small, whitewashed mosque; the butcher shop, where even now the throats of sheep were being slit in accordance with the Koran; and the bakery, to which the villagers brought their lumps of dough every morning, imprinted with their identifying marks, to be baked in the ovens and picked up at the end of the day. Farmers with produce to sell squatted along the walls, watching over their oranges and tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, while itinerant peddlers offered plastic sandals, comic books, beaded skullcaps, and neat piles of spices—saffron, coriander, basil, and pepper, which could be bought for a penny and scooped into paper cones. The square was lively and noisy with goats, donkeys, and dogs clogging the air with their smells, children running excitedly about, and villagers clustering in curiosity around the two foreign doctors, as Jasmine and Declan Connor held their separate open-air clinics.

  "You have trachoma, Hadj Tayeb," Declan said to the elderly pilgrim who sat on a wobbly chair in front of a Pepsi sign and elaborate calligraphic renderings of the name of Allah on the mud-brick wall. "It can be treated, but you must use the medicine exactly as I say."

  Abu Hosni, who owned the coffeehouse—a cubbyhole between the village bakery and the cobbler—called out merrily, "By the Prophet, Your Honor, Hadj Tayeb is right. Why don't you marry the doctora?"

  "I have no time for a wife," Declan said as he reached into his medical bag. "I'm here to do a job, and so is Dr. Van Kerk."

  Hadj Tayeb said, "In all honor and respect, Sayyid, how many sons do you have?"

  Declan applied tetracycline drops to each of the old man's eyes, and then, handing him the bottle with instructions to apply drops daily for three weeks, he said, "I have one son, in college."

  "Only one? My three gods, Sayyid! A man must have many sons!"

  Declan gestured for the next patient, a young fellah who hoisted up his galabeya to reveal a spectacularly infected wound, and as Declan proceeded to examine it, Abu Hosni shouted again from inside the coffeehouse, "Tell me, Sayyid, why is there all this talk of birth control? I do not understand it."

  "The world is getting crowded, Abu Hosni," Declan said to the coffeehouse owner, who appeared in the doorway with a filthy apron over his galabeya. "People must start limiting the size of their families." When Declan received a puzzled look from the man, he said, "You and your wife have five children, is that so?"

  "It is, praise God."

  "And five grandchildren?"

  "We are blessed."

/>   "That is twelve people where once there were only two. Suppose every two people produced ten new people, can you see how crowded the world would be?"

  The owner of the coffeehouse waved an arm in the direction of the desert. "There is plenty of space, Sayyid!"

  "But your country cannot even feed the people who are here now. What will happen to your grandchildren? How will they live in a crowded world?"

  "Ma'alesh, Sayyid. Not to worry. God will provide."

  But Hadj Tayeb, puffing on his water pipe, said with a scowl, "The district nurse comes and holds classes for our girls. This is a dangerous thing, to give girls an education."

  Declan said, "Educate a man, Hadja Tayeb, and you educate one person. Educate a woman and you educate a family." He returned to examining the fellah's wound, trying to keep down his impatience by reminding himself that he was leaving in five weeks, and trying at the same time to ignore the feminine laughter that suddenly erupted at the well, where the women were gathered.

  He couldn't get Jasmine out of his mind.

  They had spent the past six weeks traveling from village to village, trying to inoculate the children. It was not an easy task: the team, consisting of Connor and Jasmine, Nasr and Khalid, would arrive at a village, set up stations in the square, and, with the help of a district nurse or doctor, administer BCG-tuberculosis vaccines and jet-gun shots of DPT-polio to babies between three and eight months, and then DPT-polio boosters and combined yellow fever and measles vaccines to children between nine and fourteen months old. Pregnant women received tetanus injections because of the high risk of infection after the umbilical cord was cut.

  It was long and hard work, because husbands had to be persuaded to allow their wives out of the house; the records were difficult to keep straight; and mothers needed to be convinced that girl babies also deserved to be inoculated. When they were finished, the Nubian Nasr and the district nurse would dismantle the jet-guns, pack away the syringes, and load the Toyotas while Jasmine and Declan set up separate consultation areas in the square, one for the women at the well, one for the men in the coffeehouse.

  "This wound is serious," Declan said to the man he was examining, trying to concentrate on the job at hand and not on Jasmine. "You must go to the district hospital and have this wound cleaned out. Unless you do this, you could die."

  "Death comes to us all," Hadj Tayeb declared. "It is written, 'Wherever you may be, death shall overtake you, even though you be in fortified castles. Nothing you do will prolong your life by one minute.'"

  Declan said, "This is true, Hadj Tayeb. But even so, a man who was questioning the Prophet one day about fate asked if he should tie up his camel when he went into the mosque to pray, or simply trust God to guard it for him. And the Prophet replied, 'Tie up your camel and trust in God.'"

  The others laughed and Hadj Tayeb grunted and returned to his water pipe.

  "I am serious about this, Mohssein," Declan said sternly to the young fellah. "You must go to the hospital."

  But the fellah assured Declan that he had paid ten piastres to the village sheikh to write a magic spell on a piece of paper, which was plastered to his chest.

  "You were duped, Mohssein," Declan said. "This bit of paper isn't going to cure your wound. This is backward thinking, do you understand? We are in the twentieth century now, and you must go to the hospital and have this wound properly cleaned out, or the poison will spread to your entire body."

  As Declan applied an antibiotic and then bandaged the wound, Khalid launched into a story about three fellaheen who paid a visit to a prostitute. But Declan had heard the joke countless times in the past six weeks and so he concentrated on examining the next man, at the same time surreptitiously watching Jasmine at the well with the women. They were showing her how to tie her scarf into one of the fashionable new turbans.

  But Declan knew that, although the young wives and elderly mothers-in-law laughed and teased and flattered the doctora, there was more going on than a mere exercise in fashion.

  Connor's experience in the Upper Nile had taught him that the women were the worriers of the race. While the men passed their hours at the coffeehouse, enjoying God's two most precious gifts to Egypt—abundant leisure time and endless sunshine—declaring that all a man needed to have paradise right here on earth was a wife with a big bottom and plenty of sons to work the fields, the women were going about the business of the future.

  Which was what they were up to now, Declan thought, as he watched how they surrounded Jasmine, women in ruffled granny dresses—the fashion of the fellaha—enacting a ritual as old as time. Wearing a pastel caftan and standing taller than the fellaheen women, Jasmine was almost like a priestess in their midst, whom they approached shyly, or out of curiosity, exceedingly polite and deferential, murmuring and conspiring like handmaidens and keepers of mysteries. What were the secret requests they whispered to her? he wondered. Questions about fertility, perhaps, or conception, contraception, a means of abortion, potions of death or life. Whatever it was, there, by the humble village well, the future of the race was being determined, while the men warmed the chairs in the coffeehouse, telling jokes and saying, "Why worry? Your crops fails, ma'alesh, never mind. There is always bokra, tomorrow, God willing, inshallah."

  Declan watched as Jasmine tried again, with the help of her giggling companions, to tie the turban around her blond hair, spreading a triangle of apricot silk on her head, then rolling the ends, winding them up and around and tucking them under at the back of her neck. When she lifted her arms, he could see the outline of her body beneath the caftan, the slim hips and firm breasts. A jolt of sexual desire shot through him like an arrow. It reminded him of the many evenings they had spent in his office, working on the translation. They had been fifteen years younger then, Jasmine like a girl, still innocent despite her education and having traveled halfway around the world, and himself still idealistic, still thinking the world could be saved.

  He recalled now the first time he had seen her, when she had come into his office that rainy March day. He had been struck then by her looks, finding her exotic even before she had told him she was Egyptian. There had been something timid about her, and yet assertive too. Beneath the shy façade which, Connor noticed, most Arabic women cultivated in early life, he had sensed an unusual determination. And in the days following, as they had taken the health manual apart and put it back together in Arabic, as they had worked in the close confines of his office, making each other laugh, or sharing moments of seriousness, even then he had sensed in Jasmine a division, as if two souls were struggling to inhabit one body. She would talk freely about Egypt and sometimes even her own past, but when he tried to draw her out on the subject of her family, she grew silent. He saw a love for Egypt and its culture shine in her eyes, especially when she wrote her special chapter on respecting local traditions, and yet she also seemed to want to deny her own connections with this land and its people. It was almost as if she didn't know where she belonged, and it made Declan think of the book some of the students on campus were reading at the time, Stranger in a Strange Land, and he thought: She is like that.

  And so when the project had come to an end and the manuscript was sent to London, he realized he had not learned a great deal about the young woman with whom, to his surprise, he had become infatuated. In their sporadic correspondence during the following years, he had learned little more—Jasmine had filled her letters with news of medical school, and then her internship, and finally her job in a clinic—so that by the time she arrived at Al Tafla, she was still a mystery to him.

  But then, in the six weeks since she'd come, a curious thing had happened.

  The team had taken the mobile clinic to the villages between Luxor and Aswan, and because fellaheen women were the same everywhere, they had immediately asked Jasmine, as they did any new female in the village—are you married, do you have children, do you have sons?—because these facts established hierarchy and protocol; once you knew your place, y
ou relaxed. At the start Jasmine had not been forthcoming with information, almost reluctantly bringing out her son's photographs, and talking about the two husbands—the one who had beaten her, the one who had left her after a miscarriage. She had spoken a little of a big house in Cairo where she had grown up, the schools she had attended, the famous people her father had known.

  But that had been in the beginning. After the first two weeks, Connor had noticed a curious and subtle opening up, like a house with someone inside going around flinging up the windows, one by one, until the air and sunlight poured in. Now she mentioned names; she spoke freely of Great-grandmother Amira, Auntie Dahiba, Cousin Doreya. Her laughter, also, was coming more freely, more spontaneously with each passing day. She was even starting to flirt, Declan noticed—with old Khalid, with the dour women, with the children.

  She is becoming Egyptian again, he thought, drawing up a syringe and trying to alleviate his patient's dismay. She is like a woman who has come home.

  And yet, he thought as he watched her across the square, she had not gone home. As far as he knew, Jasmine had neither telephoned nor written to her family in Cairo; she was making no plans for a visit. Considering now the determination he had seen in her fifteen years ago, the near desperation she had displayed because she might have to be sent back to Egypt, and observing how she came to life here in the villages, he wondered what drove her, what could make her so dedicated to helping these people while turning her back on the ones to whom she was related.

  As Jasmine tucked the ends of the peach silk scarf under the turban she'd made of it, she glanced at Dr. Connor sitting outside the coffeehouse with the men. She saw him quickly look away.