Vagabond Virgins

By Ann Cromey

It was perhaps unheard of in 1964 for two young blonde Mormon girls from Salt Lake City to hitchhike though the Middle East. My sister and I were driven by a desire for adventure to see the world beyond Utah. But we wanted to remain Mormons, to be able to return to our family, our culture, the world we belonged to. In order to do this, we had to keep our virginity. The Mormon religion requires a temple marriage to enter the Celestial Kingdom in the next life. You cannot be married in the Mormon temple if you are not a virgin. You not only lose your chance of going to the Celestial Kingdom, you risk becoming an outcast from your family as well as your church.

Staying pure proved to be very difficult because we traveled only with boys. And as we formed romantic attachments to some of those boys, our struggle to stay chaste became harder and harder, even as we became more and more determined not to lose our virginity. We traveled through Egypt, Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey, and then to Greece, Rome, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Germany, and finally to Spain and Morocco. We had adventures in cultures very different from Mormon America, but we did not want to become exiles from our own roots. We thought we would return to Salt Lake City to marry good Mormon men and become mothers.

This memoir is about our realization, like that of other young women in the early Sixties, that our lives were not our own; they had been determined by the patriarchal culture we’d grown up in. As our horizons broadened, we saw that we no longer had to be bound by the narrow confines of Mormonism. We could strike into territory that was perhaps dangerous, certainly unknown, but was of our own choosing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9781304499158

Book preview

An Antique Land

As the boat from Naples sailed toward the fabled city of Alexandria, I watched it rise from the sea like a pile of golden coins, dust coating everything in a shimmer of light. The buildings crowded to the waterfront, looking as though they had been formed of ancient clay, pushing against each other as did the throngs of pajama-clad men who filled the narrow alleys. One building rose higher than the others, unfinished, seven stories high, wooden scaffolding winding around it to the top. Marching steadily up the scaffolding was a continual stream of thin brown men in dusty loincloths and nothing else, woven baskets perched on their heads, one hand grasping the basket so as not to spill the precious cement before it could be deposited to form yet another layer of the building. Watching these men as they carried their baskets to the top, I felt transported back thousands of years to the time the great pyramids had been built, surely by men who looked just like these, swarming over the pyramids in their loincloths. At the moment the boat sailed into the harbor of Alexandria, I entered a new world, the mysterious East of history.

It was raining all over Italy in the spring of 1964, so a dozen of us young Americans staying at the youth hostel in Naples had bought nineteen-dollar tickets and set sail for the warmth of Egypt on the Akdeniz. I slept the first night in my third–class bunk in the pitch-stinking, rolling depths of the small ship. When I awoke, I was so sick I decided I would lie in my bunk and die rather than stand up and move ever again. Fortunately, Susie, a very large girl of eighteen who was on the boat with us, rousted me out of the bunk, forced me to eat a dry soda cracker, took me by the hand and led me up to the fresh air, where I sat on the deck and watched the other kids she had rescued throw up all over the deck. I was grateful to her for taking care of us in her motherly way.

I looked to see if my sister Boo had been brought up from the depths, but she was nowhere in sight. Later I learned that she and two German boys, Gunther and Gerd, had claimed a small deck at the back of the ship, where they spent most of the voyage in their private hideout.

I ate an orange and some Italian bread I had in my rucksack, and, feeling better, stood at the rail watching the sun sparkle on the sea below, reveling in the wind blowing through my long blonde hair, excited to be speeding towards North Africa.

One of the boys from the Naples youth hostel sauntered up to stand right next to me. It’s amazing, isn’t it? he asked after we had both stared out to sea for a while.

What is? I asked, turning toward him and staring up to see who he was. He was tall, with a lanky body. His too-long black hair glistened in the sunshine. There was something about him that didn’t look exactly American. His face was tanned, and his eyes were blue. I liked his Levis and his khaki shirt. His black leather boots made him seem very masculine, and I was immediately attracted to him. I thought maybe I’d met a Hemingway hero.

Sailing the wine-dark sea on our way to Egypt, he answered. I wondered how he knew I’d be impressed by his quoting Homer. Maybe he said that kind of thing to all the girls.

Being on this boat makes me feel that I’m sailing toward a whole new life, I told him. He asked me about my old life. I told him I was from Salt Lake City and that I had been working for the Republican Governor of Utah in the afternoons after my classes at the university. I had been saving my money, and I had romantic notions about going to Paris to learn French like Jackie Kennedy, although I didn’t really approve of her, since she was a Democrat. My dad thought Paris would be sinful, so when I met a girl in my French class at the University of Utah who was going to Geneva, I went to Switzerland with her and enrolled at the University of Geneva.

The tall boy clamped his lips together, trying hard not to laugh.

But Geneva hadn’t been romantic at all. It was cold and dreary and I was unhappy there.

Are you a Mormon? he asked.

Yes, I said, lifting my chin a little defensively, watching to see what his reaction would be. He didn’t comment.

He told me his name was Maris and that he was a student at the University of Michigan and was planning to be an engineer. His parents had come from Latvia. There’s a whole Latvian community in Michigan, he said. That made him seem exotic to me.

So why are you traveling to Egypt? he wondered.

I wrote to my younger sister, Boo, and told her how miserable I was in Geneva. She wrote back and suggested she come travel with me, and we could have adventures. I told her I had lots of American dollars left because Europe was so cheap. She borrowed three hundred dollars from our Uncle Hort, dropped out of college, and bought a ticket on Icelandic Airlines.

But what are you doing on this boat to Egypt if she came to travel in Europe with you?

It was raining everywhere we went in Europe. I was tired of standing in the rain every day, getting drenched while we hitched rides. So when a guy named Pete we met in the youth hostel in Munich told us he was on his way to Egypt and asked if we’d like to go, I immediately said yes. I thought traveling in Egypt would be exciting, and my sister is very adventuresome. She would go anywhere.

You told him yes, this guy you’d just met?

Egypt seemed romantic and mysterious. I never thought of white slavery or anything dangerous like that. It turned out Pete wanted girls to hitchhike with him because he couldn’t get any rides by himself. Even though he was a whiny creep, I got my heart set on going to Egypt, so we hitched to Naples with him. Did you notice him in the hostel, that guy who was sewing his Jockey underwear into a money pouch so he could carry his money around his neck?

"Oh, that weird guy," Maris said, and we both laughed at poor Pete.

Maris and I spent the bright day together. We sat on the deck in the sun and talked. When it got dark, we were still talking, and then we were lying together on the deck watching the stars. Maris put his arms around me and kissed me softly until I felt the kiss in every part of my body. We kissed and pressed our bodies together on the deck, at first gently and tenderly and then more fiercely until the rough wood hurt my back as Maris lay on top of me, kissing me hard. We hadn’t taken any clothes off, but I was already frightened about protecting my virginity. I was a Mormon girl, and I absolutely couldn’t have sex with a boy before I was married. His kisses were arousing me so much that when he unbuttoned my shirt and cupped his warm hand over my breast, I didn’t stop him. But when he tried to unzip my jeans, I grabbed his hand and moved it away. I felt guilty that I was kissing him so passionately when I’d just met him. I struggled to sit up and managed to say, We have to stop.

He held me as we fell asleep on the deck. At two in the morning I woke up and lay transfixed under a sky painted thick with bright stars. Feeling guilty that I had let Maris go so far, I went below and took a hot, hot shower, fiercely scrubbing my whole body until my skin hurt. Perhaps I thought I could wash away my sexual feelings for him and keep myself out of danger. My body was clean, but I still felt wicked, and I still longed for him. I went back up the stairs and lay down to sleep next to Maris.

Farouk

In the morning we disembarked, blue-jeaned Americans pouring into the crowded streets of Alexandria where the men wore stripes; blue-and-white stripes, brown-and-white stripes, long striped and buttoned cotton shirts over loose striped pants. The women swept by in black cotton tents, their kohl-rimmed eyes peering darkly out, a scent of mystery emanating from their hidden bodies.

An Alexandrian approached us. My name Farouk. I will be your guide? he asked hopefully. With him we walked the streets of the city. The castle struck my imagination most—old and crumbling golden stones, the sun pouring over it, the blue sea restless beside it, the wind blowing around it. I wanted to stay a long time. We ate beans and spiced vegetables and yoghurt for lunch in a tiny café, my first Levantine meal. The vegetables were way too spicy for me, and I didn’t like the beans at all. The yoghurt was good, though.

Later, in the evening, all of us walked on the sea wall, heading to the Indian circus. The stone wall was narrow, with the road on one side and the sea on the other, and I slipped on the rough stones and turned my ankle. I had never been to a circus before, and I marveled at the dazzling performance, but by the end my ankle had swelled and hurt terribly. I order you carriage? Farouk offered sympathetically as he saw me limping, leaning on Maris’s arm, my face contorted in pain. Maris and I rode in splendor to the youth hostel in an open black phaeton pulled by a swift horse through the dirty, bustling, ancient streets, making me feel like a memsahib from the 19th Century, an English colonial.

Kidnapped

The warden at the Alexandria youth hostel had a fondness for United States passports, most likely because they were worth fifty dollars on the black market, so in the morning as we were all packing our rucksacks to go upriver to Cairo, it wasn’t surprising that Maris found his passport gone. It only took one day to replace a passport then. Will you come to the embassy with me to get a new passport? he asked me after breakfast.

I was extremely attracted to him after our night together on the boat. Now I had to decide whether to wait with him another day or go with Boo and the others to Cairo. I didn’t want to leave Maris, but I thought I should go with Boo to protect her. After all, I was her older sister. I agonized for a while, but desire won out over duty. Go ahead, I told her. Maris and I will meet you at the hostel in Cairo. She was spending time with Gerd, one of the young German boys from the boat. You’ll be safe with Gerd and all the other kids.

Okay, she said, clearly not minding, and she smiled at Gerd quite happily. They all left for Cairo and I stayed behind with Maris in Alexandria.

I went with him that morning to the American Embassy. While he negotiated with the officials there, I sat in the waiting room surrounded by large photos on the walls of beautiful American places: Grand Canyon’s vivid red and orange rock formations, New York City’s skyline, the four familiar faces on Mount Rushmore. The photos made me feel how far I was from America. Except for sending letters from the Embassy, there was no way of telling our parents that we were in Egypt. In 1964 there were no international telephones, certainly no Email. They must have been worried about us. They would have no idea what we were doing or where we were unless I sent them a letter, which might take weeks to arrive. In my excitement to see new lands and have adventures, I hadn’t given any thought to how our Mormon parents must have felt about having their only daughters alone and so far away in a Muslim land.

I crossed to the reception desk, bought a postcard of the lighthouse in the harbor of Alexandria, and wrote to Mom and Dad, telling them we were in Egypt, that we had gone there by boat, and we would be traveling up the Nile for a while. I signed it with love from Boo and Ann, bought an American stamp from the nice American lady from Ohio, and gave it to her to mail.

The following day, Maris and I left the hostel and walked through a silent city on cobblestone streets to the highway so we could hitchhike to Cairo. It was April, already ninety degrees in the early morning. Tall palm trees bordered the deserted road and the sky was nearly white, bleached from the heat. There was no traffic at all, and the only sound was the rustle of the palm fronds as they brushed against each other. As we stood with our arms stretched out to hail any cars that might come along, a streak of black suddenly raced by at a hundred miles an hour, stopped, and backed up to where we stood at the side of the road. It was a long Cadillac limousine, and in it were five men: one Egyptian and four Italians.

I felt nervous about getting into the car with them, but since it might have been the only car on the road that day, I got in and squished myself onto Maris’s lap. The small high-voiced Egyptian was a nephew of King Farouk, who had recently been deposed, and the Italians were his harem. They were big men, boisterous and jolly, nightclub singers by profession. Get in, get in, boomed their cheerful Italian voices as they pushed together to make room for us and our rucksacks. To our delight, they spoke English, and they laughed and teased us as we raced through the desert all the way to Cairo. I leaned back against Maris, aware of his strong legs under me and his arms around me. As we approached the city, Antonio asked us, Where you want to go?

To the youth hostel, I told him. I was so naïve it didn’t occur to me that they might take us somewhere else. There were four of them, and they were all big. Maris was young and skinny. I had no idea where the youth hostel was, and I didn’t have any idea of what could happen to young white women in Cairo. I didn’t know whether the car was headed entirely in the wrong direction.

Soon we found ourselves driving into the darkness under an apartment building next to the Nile. When they pushed Maris and me into a tiny elevator, I really began to worry. I exchanged a frightened look with Maris as the elevator rose. He looked scared, too. I didn’t know where they were taking us, but I didn’t think the youth hostel was up there.

On the top floor, we entered the most beautiful room imaginable. The prince’s penthouse was so large it took up the whole floor of the building. The huge dining room was spread with gorgeous carpets and furnished with bright divans and brass ewers with graceful, slim spouts and large round beaten-brass trays. I gazed down from the tall windows, bewitched by the graceful white-winged feluccas sailing on the Nile below us. The palatial penthouse was the most enchanting home I had ever seen, straight from The Arabian Nights, more beautiful than all my imaginings of royal Egypt.

Lunch with a Prince

As I was watching the white boats carried swiftly down the Nile like swans lifting their wings, Maris and I were approached by one of the prince’s servants. With a small bow he gestured to us that we should join the others, who were sitting cross-legged on the carpet around a large, low brass table.

In my faded jeans and plaid cotton shirt, I wasn’t dressed for an elegant luncheon, and Maris was still wearing the green khaki shirt he’d worn the day I met him. Trying to be nonchalant, I sat down in the circle on the carpet with the Italians and the prince. The prince sat very straight, wearing a white silk coat embroidered with red and green flowers over slim white trousers. A white turban gave him an exotic look. He was a small man, perhaps in his thirties, with delicate features and a pointed beard. His skin was the color of tea in a porcelain cup. His black eyes darted from one of the Italians to the other in merriment, as they were evidently teasing him and making jokes. When he asked a question of Maris or me, one of the Italians translated.

A silent procession of servants began to serve us, one course after another, each more delectable than the preceding one. First a delicious green herb soup called milookhiyya, delicately spiced with cilantro. The prince looked at Claudio and evidently asked where we were from. After Claudio told him we were Americans, he and the prince spoke for a few moments. Then Claudio told us that the prince was a nephew of the Egyptian King Farouk, who had been trapped in his palace and forced to abdicate twelve years before, in 1952, by a group of his own military officers. The American ambassador had helped him and his family escape to the royal yacht. The prince is grateful to the Americans for preserving the king’s life, Claudio said.

The next course was a baked golden fish surrounded by tomatoes and rice, which the servant displayed on an artfully arranged platter before carving the fish and serving it to us. Flavio asked us, in his lyrical Italian accent, What do you do in America?

We’re students, replied Maris, and we’re taking a holiday from our university studies. Just then a servant offered a tasty fool midammis, a fava bean salad, bowing low as he did so. The prince asked if we were enjoying Egypt. After Claudio translated, I told them we were indeed, especially in his beautiful home. After that, we ate delicious biram ruzz, white rice with chicken.

As we enjoyed a fabulous baboosa for dessert, a sweet cake with lemon syrup, the Italians entertained us by joking with each other and singing snatches of songs and telling us, louder and louder, America! Great country! I love America! as the servants kept refilling the wine glasses. The prince sat quietly, smiling at Maris and me like an indulgent uncle.

I fell in love with Middle Eastern food at that meal. And Middle Eastern hospitality. I was amazed that the Prince had taken two strangers into his penthouse and treated us to a most exquisite repast. This would never happen in Salt Lake City, I thought. I couldn’t remember ever having dinner at anyone’s house who wasn’t a relative. If you went to a Mormon home to visit, no one offered you any refreshment at all, not even a glass of Kool-Aid. My friend Evelyn had married young and shortly afterward her mother had died. I invited her and her husband to Thanksgiving dinner at my parents’ home. When I told my mother, she said, I don’t want strangers at our Thanksgiving dinner. You tell Evelyn she cannot come. Burning with anger and embarrassment, I called Evelyn to tell her. I was thinking in this gorgeous royal home that Muslims were much nicer than Mormons.

Though I didn’t realize it then, this was my first encounter with homosexual men. I was to see this casual attitude toward homosexuals in all the Muslim countries Boo and I visited. The men were openly affectionate with the prince, reaching out to touch him as they talked, and I was intrigued. Even fifty years later, the Mormon Church does not accept homosexuals. This Muslim society seemed much more humane to me.

Sex for Sale?

After lunch, Claudio, the liveliest of the Italians, said, Please come to the nightclub where I sing tonight. You will be my guests. A chauffeur wearing an especially impressive turban drove us to the youth hostel.

That evening Maris and I strolled along the Nile to reach the club, holding hands, watching lights dance romantically on the water. It was hot and smoky inside the nightclub, and we were seated very close together at a small table. I felt like a kid in the sophisticated ambiance, especially since I was still wearing my blue jeans. We ordered lemonades. One of the most important teachings of Mormonism is not drinking alcohol. I had guiltily drunk a few beers in college and some whisky sours on the Queen Elizabeth when I sailed to Europe, but I thought it was a wicked thing to do.

My bare arm was resting on the table, and Maris began to run his fingers softly and slowly up to my shoulder. Claudio’s Italian love songs seemed directed straight at us as we moved closer to each other, listening to each romantic song. I kept my eyes on Claudio or looked down at my lemonade, too embarrassed to look at Maris and give away how much I wanted his touch. On the walk back to the hostel, we kept our arms around each other, laughing when we bumped into each other. I wanted desperately to be close to him. He kissed me goodnight and went to sleep in the boys’ dorm, while I went to the large room where the girls slept.

In the morning, while we ate our youth hostel breakfast of pita bread, white cheese, and yoghurt, Boo said, I’m going with Gerd and Gunther to ride horses to the seven pyramids of Saqqara today. Wanna come? I did want to go, but my stomach was so upset from drinking the untreated water and eating the strange, spicy food that I didn’t dare go with them to ride horses.

Maris could see how disappointed I was. He leaned toward me and said, I’ll stay in Cairo with you. That cheered me up. We set out, walking along the river, to see the city. After a while I suddenly felt so sick I couldn’t stand up any more. On the grass next to the Mohammed Aly Museum, we lay down to rest and fell asleep in the hot sun. When I opened my eyes and sat up, I saw a circle of men and boys crouched on their haunches like buzzards, watching us. One of the boys made clear what they wanted. Me next? he asked, pointing at his skinny chest. I’d forgotten what I had been told: in Muslim countries, any woman who isn’t protected by a man is considered a whore. Although I had my man lying next to me, I realized they thought my sexual services were for sale, and that Maris had already enjoyed them, since we were shamelessly lying in a public place.

I was horrified. Maris, wake up! I shouted, reaching over and punching his arm. These guys think I’m a prostitute! He grabbed my hand and we stumbled down the street to get away from the sickeningly lecherous circle of men. My idyllic view of Muslim culture had been rudely shattered.

The Riddle at the Sphinx

The next morning, before the Egyptian sun had begun to bake the city, Maris and I left the hostel to explore Cairo. Pushing through the narrow streets wasn’t easy, and I often had to turn sideways to pass among the crowds of people. Haunting Arabic music drifted from cafés and the smells of spicy food enticed me as I parted throngs of men in their striped two-piece pajamas and the few women in their voluminous robes.

We climbed the winding stairs to the top of a mosque’s minaret to see the great pyramids on the other side of the city. Finding ourselves out of view, we began kissing, more and more intensely. Once or twice we stopped to look out at the pyramids, but not for long, as we could scarcely keep our hands and mouths from each other. That afternoon we rented a small boat and Maris rowed us down the Nile, passing beautiful white-sailed feluccas. Later at the Hilton Hotel I strode boldly into the women’s luxurious restroom, its walls of pink marble, its huge expanses of mirror, its stacks of white hand towels an ornate contrast to the hole-in-the-ground toilets I’d grown used to in Egypt. As Maris and I waded through the water in the reflecting pool in front of the hotel, I relished the coolness swirling around my legs. No one stopped us. We were Americans.

Near sunset, we ran for a bus which carried men riding on top, squashed into the doorways, or packed into all the seats and aisles, but a few men nevertheless grabbed our hands and pulled us onto the steps of the bus, where I clung in terror. I scarcely noticed I was the only woman on the bus. We reached the Son et Lumière, an outdoor sound and light performance near the pyramids, and Maris bought bread and cheese and oranges from the vendors lining the road to eat during the performance. The dramatic lights and booming narrative and the fabled pyramids rising behind the stage carried me back to ancient Egypt. Afterward, we hitchhiked back to Cairo, singing and laughing joyfully all the way to the youth hostel.

Our generous new Italian friends, Claudio and Giantane, rented horses for Maris and me the next day. We rode like explorers through the dusty air to the golden pyramid of Cheops, the biggest one. In 1964 you could pay a small fee to crawl to the center of the pyramid. I felt as though I were alive twenty-nine hundred years before Christ when the pyramid was built. I wriggled on my belly, fighting claustrophobia in black darkness on the cold stone through a two-foot high passage into the inner chamber of the pyramid. Standing up in the very center, I remembered the treasures I’d seen in the Cairo Museum which had been taken from this hidden room: painted friezes of dark-haired women with huge almond-shaped eyes walking amid tall papyri; the gold-shrouded king lying in his sarcophagus, his eyes ringed with black, gripping the scepter and fly-swatter crossed over his chest. I thought of the many slaves who’d died with him, sealed and suffocating in this very chamber, and I shivered in the cold empty room.

I crawled after Maris out into the sunshine and we mounted our horses to race across the sand. Stopping at the foot of the gigantic inscrutable Sphinx carved from stone eons ago, her lion’s body and human face standing guard over the desert, her awful presence seemed to enter my soul. A wave of terror swept over me as I stood in front of that great mythological beast who would kill those who couldn’t answer her riddle. My own riddle bounded into view. I was thousands of miles from Utah and my family instead of home finishing University and getting engaged to my high school boyfriend. Gazing at the Sphinx, I was gripped by questioning whether I should go back for the fall term, or having launched myself into the world, whether I should venture farther and farther into it to see what I could learn. Did I want to live the life I had always dreamed of, growing up Mormon in Salt Lake City? Or did I want to give up that life to become a wanderer, an explorer, an adventurer? Instead of