And then a young woman came in, limping because of the leg brace she wore.
Jasmine had to suddenly reach for one of the bedposts. Zeinab, her daughter.
"Hello, Zeinab," she said. Jasmine looked at Camelia, and met her sister's eyes. Then she smiled at the girl and said, "I'm your Auntie Yasmina."
"Praise God!" Dahiba said, tears rolling down her cheeks. "We are a family again! We shall celebrate, we shall have a party!"
But there was one thing Jasmine had to do first.
She gave the taxi driver an address, and a few minutes later she was walking down a corridor in one of the older buildings in Cairo, scanning the names on the doors until she came to a modest sign that read Treverton Foundation. The small reception area inside consisted of a desk, chairs, and posters on the walls from WHO, UNICEF, and Save the Children Fund. A young, well-dressed Egyptian woman looked up and smiled. "May I help you?" she said in English.
"I would like to locate one of your former members," Jasmine said. "We worked together in Upper Egypt and I was wondering if you could help me."
"May I have the name, please?"
"Dr. Declan Connor."
"Oh, yes," the young woman said. "He is in Upper Egypt."
"Upper Egypt! Do you mean Dr. Connor is here?"
"He is in Al Tafla, madam."
Jasmine could hardly contain her excitement. "Would you happen to be sending a plane down there tomorrow, with supplies?"
"I am sorry, madam."
Jasmine tried to think. She could take a flight to Luxor, but then she would have to drive down to Al Tafla. Sometimes flights were unreliable, as were the roads. She had to get to Declan as quickly as possible.
That left the overnight train.
Jasmine walked down familiar narrow lanes, past the village well where women were gossiping, and when she passed Waleed's coffeehouse, she was suddenly sent back five years, and it was as if she were arriving here for the first time.
She paused when she came to the clinic, where fellaheen waited patiently on benches outside, women on one side, men on the other. The door was open; Jasmine looked in.
Connor was inside, holding a stethoscope to the chest of a child who was sitting on the desk under the watchful eyes of his mother. Jasmine watched how gently Declan handled the child, reassuring him, telling him that he must be careful with what he ate from now on. Then he explained to the mother that the boy was all right, a mild attack of food poisoning, and that she must take care what he put into his mouth. As Jasmine watched, she marveled at how little Declan had changed. She also wanted to laugh; his Arabic pronunciation was still appalling.
"There now. Off you go," he said, and when he looked toward the door, he froze.
"Jasmine!"
"Hello, Declan. I was—"
He swept her into his arms and kissed her hard on the mouth.
"My God, Jasmine! I was wondering when you were going to come back. I've been trying to find you."
"I wrote to you at Knight Pharmaceuticals—"
"I didn't go to Scotland," he said, holding her at arm's length, filling his eyes with the sight of her. "I signed on a hospital ship for a year, in Malaysia. When I came back to Egypt, I was told you had returned to England because of malaria. I went to London, and was told there that you had been put on hiatus by the Foundation, and you'd gone to California. I couldn't remember your friend's last name—Rachel. So I tried to find you through the California Medical Association, and then the AMA. I even tried the medical school. Finally I went to the house on Virgins of Paradise Street where you said your family lived. They gave me the address of Itzak Misrahi in California, I wrote to him, and he wrote back, saying you had joined the Lathrop Organization."
"Oh, no!" she said. "I went to Peru with an independent group of physicians to help the cholera victims. It was funded by Lathrop, but I wasn't a member. Declan, I tried to find you, too, I even wrote—"
"Never mind that," he said, kissing her again, while the fellaheen watched from the doorway, Um Tewfik and Khalid and old Waleed, grinning and agreeing among themselves that it was about time.
The wedding took place at the house on Virgins of Paradise Street. All the Rasheeds were there to take part in the traditional celebration, which included an elaborate zeffa procession, followed by a feast of cheese and salads, roasted lamb, grilled kebab, steaming rice and beans, sweet desserts, and coffee, while comedians, acrobats, and dancers entertained Jasmine and Declan, who sat on thrones, he in a tuxedo, she in an apricot lace wedding gown. Declan's son was also there, a twenty-five-year-old replica of his father and a recent Oxford graduate, who had been drawn into a lively discussion with Ibrahim, who had attended the same school fifty years ago.
Rachel Misrahi had come all the way from California to attend the wedding, and her father, Itzak, had accompanied her. After showing her the house next door, where he had been born but which was now the embassy of an African nation, he had spent hours reminiscing with Ibrahim about the days when they had been boys together, and Rachel had been fascinated to hear, for the first time, her father speaking Arabic.
Camelia and Dahiba danced a duet that had been part of their act years ago, as Yacob watched proudly with their son Najib, now a pudgy, handsome eleven-year-old. But his stepdaughter, Zeinab, was having a hard time concentrating on her mother's performance because of a cousin named Samir, an attractive young man who had been causing her to lose sleep lately, and who was now smiling at her from the other side of the salon.
Qettah was also there, to read the couple's fortune. She was not the Qettah who had been with the family during the Farouk years, nor the one whom Amira had visited in the Zeinab Quarter. She was the grand daughter, or possibly the great-granddaughter, of the old astrologer, and there was a younger woman with her, also named Qettah.
Two men observed the celebration from gilt-framed portraits: Ali Rasheed Pasha, in a fez and robes, surrounded by women and children, gazing sternly over a magnificent mustache; and King Farouk, young, handsome, and alone.
Sitting beneath these portraits, Ibrahim clapped along and shouted "Y'Allah!" as his daughter and sister performed a lively beledi dance. His wife, Atiya, was pregnant again, restoring his hope once more that God would give him a son. As he was thinking that there could not be a luckier or more blessed man than he, Ibrahim saw Zeinab laugh, and the way her cheeks dimpled made him think of Hassan al-Sabir, the man who had fathered her, the man who had once been his friend and brother.
Ibrahim allowed himself to think finally of that night, when he had banished Yasmina, when the world had been turned upside down and, grief stricken, he had made his way to Hassan's house. The murder had not been accidental. Ibrahim had gone with the intention of destroying the man who had betrayed a friendship and threatened the honor of the Rasheed name. Ibrahim recalled now how, even at the very end, as he lay dying, Hassan had laughed at him. That was when Ibrahim had taken a knife to him and, using his physician's skill, had removed the weapon of assault Hassan had used on Yasmina.
Amira also clapped in time to the vivacious beledi dance, feeling younger and happier than she remembered being for a long time. The family restored and all together again, and seeing Itzak Misrahi, whom she had helped bring into the world, was almost like having Maryam back.
Remembering a dream she had had recently, in which an angel had said she would die soon, she asked herself, what was "soon" to an angel? Because there was still so much to be done. Nala's daughter, for instance, was ready for marriage, and the Abdel Rahman grandson, an important man with twelve people working under him, would be perfect. Hosneya's daughter, widowed with two children, needed a man to take care of her, and Amira thought that Mr. Gamal, a widower who had a fine job at the embassy next door, would be an excellent candidate. And wasn't young Samir smiling at Zeinab in a rather significant way? Amira recalled now that he had been at the house rather frequently lately, with feeble excuses, and blushing a deep crimson every time Zeinab appeared. Amira thought:
I will speak to his mother tomorrow. And then I will help them with an apartment, if the boy cannot yet afford one.
Finally Amira thought of the childhood memories that had been restored to her, her birth-star, her true family line. And she promised herself that when her work was done, she would join her mother in paradise. But she could not make that journey yet, not while the family still needed her. Next year, or perhaps the year after, she would go.
FROM
THE DIVINING
A NOVEL BY BARBARA WOOD
NOW AVAILABLE
1
S
HE CAME SEEKING ANSWERS.
Nineteen-year-old Ulrika had awoken that morning with the feeling that something was wrong. The feeling had grown while she had bathed and dressed, and her slaves had bound up her hair and tied sandals to her feet, and brought her a breakfast of wheat porridge and goat's milk. When the inexplicable uneasiness did not go away, she decided to visit the Street of Fortune-Tellers, where seers and mystics, astrologers and soothsayers promised solutions to life's mysteries.
Now, as she was carried through the noisy streets of Rome in a curtained chair, she wondered what had caused her uneasiness. Yesterday, everything had been fine. She had visited friends, browsed in bookshops, spent time at her loom—the typical day of a young woman of her class and breeding. But then she had had a strange dream ...
Just past the midnight hour, Ulrika had dreamed that she gotten out of bed, crossed to her window, climbed out, and landed barefoot in snow. In the dream, tall pines grew all around her, instead of the fruit trees behind her villa, a forest instead of an orchard, and clouds whispered across the face of a winter moon. She saw tracks—big paw prints in the snow, leading into the woods. Ulrika followed them, feeling moonlight brush her bare shoulders. She came upon a large, shaggy wolf with golden eyes. She sat down in the snow and he came to lie beside her, putting his head in her lap. The night was pure, as pure as the wolf's eyes gazing up at her, and she could feel the steady beat of his mighty heart beneath his ribs. The golden eyes blinked and seemed to say: Here is trust, here is love, here is home.
Ulrika had awoken disoriented. And then she had wondered: Why did I dream of a wolf? Wulf was my father's name. He died long ago in faraway Persia.
Is the dream a sign? But a sign of what?
Her slaves brought the chair to a halt, and Ulrika stepped down, a tall girl wearing a long gown of pale pink silk, with a matching stole that draped over her head and shoulders in proper maidenly modesty, hiding tawny hair and a graceful neck. She carried herself with a poise and confidence that concealed a growing anxiety.
The Street of Fortune-Tellers was a narrow alley obscured by the shadow of crowded tenement buildings. The tents and stalls of the psychics, augers, seers, and soothsayers looked promising, painted in bright colors, festooned with glittering objects, each one brighter than the next. Business was booming for purveyors of good-luck charms, magic relics, and amulets.
As Ulrika entered the lane, desperate to know the meaning of the wolf dream, hawkers called to her from tents and booths, claiming to be "genuine Chaldeans," to have direct channels to the future, to possess the Third Eye. She went first to the bird-reader, who kept crates of pigeons whose entrails he read for a few pennies. His hands caked with blood, he assured Ulrika that she would find a husband before the year was out. She went next to the stall of the smoke-reader, who declared that the incense predicted five healthy children for Ulrika.
She continued on until, three quarters along the crowded lane, she came upon a person of humble appearance, sitting only on a frayed mat, with no shade or booth or tent. The seer sat cross-legged in a long white robe that had known better days, long bony hands resting on bony knees. The head was bowed, showing a crown of hair that was blacker than jet, parted in the middle and streaming over the shoulders and back. Ulrika did not know why she would choose so impoverished a soothsayer—perhaps on some level she felt this one might be more interested in truth than in money—but she came to a halt before the curious person, and waited.
After a moment, the fortune-teller lifted her head, and Ulrika was startled by the unusual aspect of the face, which was long and narrow, all bone and yellow skin, framed by the streaming black hair. Mournful black eyes beneath highly arched brows looked up at Ulrika. The woman almost did not look human, and she was ageless. Was she twenty or eighty? A brown and black spotted cat lay curled asleep next to the fortune-teller. Ulrika recognized the breed as an Egyptian Mau, said to be the most ancient of cat breeds, possibly even the progenitor from which all cats had sprung.
Ulrika brought her attention back to the fortune-teller's swimming black eyes filled with sadness and wisdom.
"You have a question," the fortune-teller said in perfect Latin, eyes peering steadily from deep sockets.
The sounds of the alley faded. Ulrika was captured by the black Egyptian eyes, while the brown cat snoozed obliviously.
"You want to ask me about a wolf," the Egyptian said in a voice that sounded older than the Nile.
"It was in a dream, Wise One. Was it a sign?"
"A sign of what? Tell me your question."
"I do not know where I belong, Wise One. My mother is Roman, my father German. I was born in Persia and have spent most of my life roaming with my mother, for she followed a quest. Everywhere we went, I felt like an outsider. I am worried, Wise One, that if I do not know where I belong, I will never know who I am. Was the wolf dream a sign that I belong in the Rhineland with my father's people? Is it time for me to leave Rome?"
"There are signs all about you, daughter. The gods guide us everywhere, every moment."
"You speak in riddles, Wise One. Can you at least tell me my future?"
"There will be a man," the fortune-teller said, "who will offer you a key. Take it."
"A key? To what?"
"You will know when the time comes ..."
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