Virgins of Paradise Read online

  PRAISE FOR BARBARA WOOD

  "A master storyteller. She never fails to leave the reader enthralled."

  —Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, author of A Woman of Independent Means

  "Barbara Wood is an entertainer."

  —Washington Post Book World

  "An accomplished storyteller."

  —John Jakes, New York Times bestselling author

  "Wood makes her fiction come alive with authentic detailing and highly memorable characters."

  —Booklist

  Other Books By

  BARBARA WOOD

  The Dreaming

  Green City in the Sun

  Soul Flame

  Vital Signs

  Domina

  The Watch Gods

  Childsong

  Night Trains

  Yesterday's Child

  Curse This House

  Hounds and Jackals

  The Divining

  Books By

  KATHRYN HARVEY

  Butterfly

  Stars

  Private Entrance

  Turner Publishing Company

  200 4th Avenue North • Suite 950

  Nashville, Tennessee 37219

  445 Park Avenue • 9th Floor

  New York, NY 10022

  www.turnerpublishing.com

  Virgins of Paradise

  Copyright © 2012 Barbara Wood. All rights reserved.

  This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Cover design by Gina Binkley

  Interior design by Mike Penticost

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wood, Barbara, 1947-

  Virgins of paradise / Barbara Wood.

  p.cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59652-861-1

  1. Sisters--Egypt--Fiction. 2. Women--Egypt--Social conditions--Fiction. 3.

  Cairo (Egypt)--History--20th century--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.O5877V48 2012

  813'.54--dc23

  2012006391

  Printed in the United States of America

  12 13 14 15 16 17 18—0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Ahmed Abbas Ragab, with love and gratitude.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book could not have been possible without the help of some special people. I would like to thank my friends in Cairo, in particular the Ragab family—Ahmed, Abdel Wahab, Sana'a, and Fatima. Dr. Khadija Youssef, for enlightening me on Arab feminism and the rights of modern Egyptian women. Samira Aziz, for providing such a wonderful look into the life of Nile villages. Homeyra Akhavani, for sharing her experiences as a Muslim woman adjusting to American life. And most especially, "Sah-ra"—Carolee Kent of Riverside, California—star dancer at the Meridien Hotel in Cairo, for giving so generously of her time, for her marvelous depiction of a dancer's life in Egypt, and for giving me permission to use her description of the zeffa wedding procession. I am also grateful to Anne Draper of Riverside, and my sisters in Middle Eastern Dance, for their support and contributions. Artemis of Pacific Grove, California, and the staff of Sisterhood Bookstore in Westwood are also to be applauded for their efforts and success in filling my nearly impossible requests for hard-to-find research material. Finally, I could not have written this book without the support and encouragement of my husband, George.

  A NOTE ON ARABIC PRONUNCIATION

  Transcribing Arabic into the English alphabet poses a challenge, as there are only three vowel sounds in Arabic. Pronunciation of a word can vary from region to region, even from one person to another, and the same word might appear in a variety of spellings in various English translations. I have chosen a conventional form that is comfortable for the English speaker. All names and foreign words are pronounced as they are written.

  The word fellah (Egyptian peasant) is pronounced fell-AH, with the accent on the second syllable.

  There was a Door to which I found no Key: There was a Veil

  past which I could not see; Some little talk awhile on Me and Thee There

  seemed—and then no more of Thee and Me.

  —The Rubáiyát of Omar Kháyyám

  Women shall with justice have rights similar to those exercised against them, although men have a status above women. Allah is mighty and wise.

  —The Koran. II: 228

  PART ONE

  1945

  ONE

  L

  OOK THERE, PRINCESS, UP IN THE SKY! DO YOU SEE THE winged horse galloping across heaven?"

  The little girl searched the night sky, but saw only the great ocean of stars. She shook her head and received a warm hug. As she continued to gaze, seeking the flying horse among the stars, she heard a rumble in the distance like thunder. Suddenly someone was screaming, and the woman who held her cried "God help us!" In the next instant, fierce black shapes descended out of the darkness, gigantic horses with riders dressed in black. Thinking that they had come down from the sky, the child tried to see their great feathered wings. And then they were running, women and children, trying to hide in the tents, while swords flashed in the light of the campfire, and cries rose up to the cold, impersonal stars.

  The child clung to the woman, as they huddled behind a large traveling trunk. "Be quiet, princess," the woman said. "Don't make a sound."

  Fear. Terror. The child was roughly torn from the protective arms. She screamed.

  Amira awoke. The room was dark, but she saw that the spring moon had spread a silver mantle over her bed. As she sat up and turned on the lamp, flooding the room in comforting light, she pressed her hand to her chest as if to calm her racing heart, and thought: The dreams have begun again. And because they had, Amira had not wakened rested, for the dreams that visited her sleep were troubling—memories, perhaps, although she wasn't sure if they were of real events or of imagined ones. But whenever they returned, she knew they would dog her through the daylight hours, and she would be compelled to live the past during the present—if they were indeed memories from the past—as if two lifetimes were unfolding simultaneously, one belonging to the frightened little girl, the other to the woman who was trying to make order and sense of an unpredictable world.

  It was because a baby was about to be born, Amira told herself, as she sat up and tried to determine how long she had slept. It was strangely quiet. With each birth in the big house on Virgins of Paradise Street, the visions came back to haunt her sleep. Calming herself, she went into the elegant marble bathroom that she had once shared with her husband, Ali Rasheed, now five years in his grave, and, without turning on the light, ran cold water from a gold faucet. She paused to regard herself in the mirror and saw how the moonlight bleached her face. Although Amira did not consider herself beautiful, others did, and commented upon it. "Promise me you will marry again," Ali had said on his deathbed, just before World War II broke out. "You are still young, Amira, and so full of life. Marry Skouras, you are in love with him."

  Amira splashed water on her face. Andreas Skouras! How had Ali known that she was in love with him? She thought she had kept her feelings so carefully hidden that not even her best friend could have guessed how her heart leapt every time the attractive Skouras came to the house. Marry Skouras. Could it be so simple? But how did the king's minister of culture feel toward her?

  Straightening her hair and clothes—she had lain down for a short nap in anticipation of her daughter-in-law's coming night of labor—Amira crossed the bedroom to the door. The moonlight was illuminating a photograph on the nightstand, and the mustachioed, hawk-nosed man in the silver frame seemed to be beckoning to her.<
br />
  She held Ali's picture in her hands, drawing comfort from it, as she always did when troubled. "What do the dreams mean, husband of my heart?" she whispered. The enormous house, normally alive with the noise and sounds of the generations who lived within its walls, was silent. The only signs of life, she knew, would be coming from the suite below, where her daughter-in-law lay laboring to bring her first child into the world. "Tell me," she whispered to the photograph, to Ali Rasheed, rich and powerful, the last of a vanished generation, "Why do the dreams always come back when a baby is about to be born? Are they omens, or is it my own fear that creates them? Oh, my husband, what happened to me in my childhood that makes me experience such terror each time new life is brought into the family?" Amira sometimes dreamed about a little girl, a child crying deep, desperate sobs. But she didn't know who the child was. "Is she me?" she asked the photograph. "Only you knew the secret of my past, husband of my heart. Perhaps you knew even more, but never told me. You were a man and I was but a child when you brought me to this house. What secrets did we leave behind when you took me out of the harem on Tree of Pearls Street? And why can I remember nothing of my life before I was eight years old?"

  There was no answer, only the rustling of cottonwood branches in the garden outside, as a spring breeze swept over sleeping Cairo. She replaced the photograph. Whatever answers Ali might have possessed had gone with him to his tomb. Amira Rasheed was left with unanswered questions about who her family was, where she came from, what her real name was—a secret that not even her family knew; when her children were little, and they would ask about her side of the family, she would say evasively, "My life began the day I married your father, and his family became my family." For she had no childhood memories of her own to share with her children.

  But there were the dreams ...

  "Mistress?" came a voice from the doorway.

  Amira turned to the servant who stood there, an elderly woman who had been with the Rasheeds since before Amira was born. "Is it time?" she said.

  "The lady is very near, mistress."

  Placing her dreams and thoughts of Andreas Skouras behind her, Amira hurried down the silent hallway, her slippers whispering along rich carpets, her reflection captured in crystal mirrors and gleaming gold candelabra, the air filled with the scent of polish and lemon oil.

  Amira found her daughter-in-law attended by the aunts and female cousins who lived in the house, comforting her, whispering reassurances, and praying. Old Qettah, the astrologer, was there, too, in a dark corner of the room, poring over her charts and instruments as she prepared to record the exact moment of the baby's birth.

  Amira went to the bedside to see how far the girl's labor had progressed; she still could not shake off the effects of her recent dream. It had seemed more than a dream, more as if she had actually only just moments before been sitting in a desert encampment gazing at the stars, and then had been brutally taken away from someone who had been trying to hide her. Who was the woman in her recurrent dream? Did those loving arms belong to her mother? Amira had no memories of a mother, only dreams of that strange, star-filled night. She sometimes felt she had not been born of a woman, but had sprung straight from those brittle, distant stars.

  But if my dream is indeed the fragment of a memory, she thought, reaching for a cold cloth to place on her daughter-in-law's forehead, then what happened after I was taken away? Was the woman killed? Did I witness her death? Is that why it is only in dreams that I can remember the past?

  "How is it, daughter of my heart?" she asked the young wife struggling to bring forth her baby; the poor girl had been in labor since early in the day. Amira prepared an herbal tea made from an ancient recipe that the Prophet Moses's mother had supposedly drunk to ease her own labor, and as Amira coaxed her daughter-in-law to drink, she studied the distended abdomen beneath the satin cover, and was suddenly alarmed: something was not right.

  "Mother—" the young woman whispered, pushing away the tea, her feverish eyes shining like black pearls. "Where is Ibrahim? Where is my husband?"

  "Ibrahim is with the king, and cannot come. Now drink the tea, it possesses the power of God's blessing."

  Another contraction came on, and the girl bit her lip, trying not to cry out, because for a woman to show weakness during childbirth was to dishonor her family. "I want Ibrahim," she whispered.

  The other women in the room wore silk veils over their heads, their bodies were scented with costly perfumes and clothed in expensive dresses because they lived in the house of a wealthy man. Twenty-three women and children resided in the women's wing of the Rasheed mansion, ranging in age from one month to eighty-six years. They were all related, all Rasheeds, being the sisters and daughters and granddaughters of the first wives of Ali Rasheed, founder of the clan; they were also the widows of his sons and nephews and cousins. The only males in these apartments were boys under the age of ten, after which, according to Islamic custom, they would leave their mothers and move into the men's wing on the other side of the house. Amira reigned over this women's wing, once known as the harem, where the spirit of Ali Rasheed still ruled. The large portrait that hung over the bed showed him surrounded by his wives, concubines, and many children, his women veiled, his hands adorned with heavy gold rings—Ali Rasheed Pasha, sitting on a chair like a throne, a heavyset, powerful man, wearing robes and a fez like a potentate from the previous century, his name still invoked five years after his death. Amira had been his last wife; she had been thirteen when they married, and he, fifty-three.

  Her daughter-in-law's mouth opened in a silent scream. Amira changed the damp pillow for a dry one, and blotted the girl's forehead.

  "Bismillah! In God's name!" whispered one of the young women who was assisting at the bedside, her face as white as the almond blossoms arranged around the room. "What is wrong with her?"

  Amira drew down the satin bedspread and was startled to discover that the baby had inexplicably turned and was no longer in the normal birthing position, but lying transversely. It reminded her of another night, nearly thirty years ago, when she had just been brought to this house as a bride. There had been a woman in labor, one of her new husband's older wives, and that baby, too, had lain sideways.

  Both mother and baby, Amira recalled, had died.

  To hide her alarm, she said soothing words to her daughter-in-law and beckoned to one of the women, a cousin, who was burning incense to keep jinns and other evil spirits away from the childbed. Amira murmured to her that they were going to have to manipulate the baby back into a normal, head-down position. The delivery was near; if the child became wedged in the birth canal, both mother and baby could be lost.

  Like other women in the household, the cousin was greatly experienced in all the problems of a difficult childbirth, but as she gazed down at the distorted abdomen, she froze: which end was the baby's head, and which the feet?

  Amira reached for an amulet she had placed earlier among the birthing tools, an object of tremendous power because it had been "starred"—placed on the roof for seven nights in order to absorb the stars' light and power—and clasped it between her hands to draw out its magic. A voice on the radio, tuned to the nightly reading of the Koran, chanted, "It is written that nothing will befall us except what God has ordained. He is our Guardian. In God let the faithful put their trust."

  After gentle manipulation, Amira managed to turn the baby into the proper position, but as soon as she removed her hands, she saw the abdomen slowly change shape as the baby turned again to lie sideways across the birth canal.

  "Pray for us!" one of the women murmured.

  Seeing the look of fear on the other women's faces, Amira said calmly, "God is our guide. We must hold the baby in the correct position until it is born."

  "But is this the head? What if we are sending the child down feet first!"

  Amira tried to hold the baby in the proper position for birth, but with each contraction, it stubbornly swung back into a transverse lie. Fin
ally she knew what had to be done. "Prepare the hashish," she said.

  As a new, pungent aroma filled the room, joining the perfume of apricot blossoms and the smoky frankincense, Amira recited a passage from the Koran while she scrubbed her hands and arms, drying them on a clean towel. She was drawing upon knowledge learned from her mother-in-law, Ali Rasheed's mother, who had been a healer and who had passed her secret arts to her son's young wife. But some of Amira's learning went even farther back than that, back to the harem on Tree of Pearls Street.

  She watched while her daughter-in-law drew on the hashish pipe until her eyes glazed over. Then, gently guiding the baby from above with one hand, Amira proceeded to reach up for the infant with the other.

  "Give her more of the pipe," she said quietly, trying to visualize the position of the infant.

  The girl tried to draw in the smoke from the hashish, but the pain became unbearable; she turned her head away and, unable to stop herself, screamed.

  Amira finally turned to one of the women and said, calmly and quietly, "Telephone the palace. Tell them Ibrahim is to come home at once."

  "Bravo!" cried King Farouk. And because he had just won a "cheval," his winnings were paid seventeen to one, and his entourage gathered around the roulette table burst into cheers.

  But one man who applauded the king's victory, Ibrahim Rasheed, and who said, "Take a chance, Your Majesty. Luck is with you tonight!" had no heart for the entertainment. When the king wasn't looking, he stole a quick glance at his watch. It was getting late, and he was anxious to telephone home and see how his wife was faring. But Ibrahim was not free to leave the table; he was part of the royal entourage and duty bound, as the king's personal physician, to stay at Farouk's side.

  Ibrahim had been drinking champagne all evening, something he rarely did but had turned to tonight to calm his anxiety. His young wife was pregnant with his first child, and he couldn't recall, in all his twenty-eight years, having ever been so nervous.