The Butterfly Mosque (14 page)

Tura was a neighborhood that required capitulation and assimilation. It was not enough to be good natured or attentive or even Muslim; to be accepted there we would have had to convert to the church of lower-middle-class Cairo, a badly educated, puritanical segment of society. The fundamentalists south of Tura at least had a measure of idealism; the conservatism of our neighbors arose from undiluted desperation. Theirs was a culture of suspicion, grasping and covetous, whose elaborate rules and limitations were the products of minds ever-conscious of the nearness of ruin, the very real possibility that one's family could slip back into poverty. No one was comfortable, no one was safe, and so Jo and I, with our strange clothing and papery skin and alarming habits, were considered threatening.

When Omar warned us that Tura was much more conservative than our old neighborhood, and said we should pay a little more attention, we readily agreed, but the fact of the matter is that we had no idea what to pay attention
to
. “More conservative” to us meant that we should both be home when male guests came over and avoid wearing T-shirts or tight pants. We didn't know “more conservative” meant that two single women had no business living
alone, and if by circumstance they were forced to do so, they should have no contact of any kind with the opposite sex, make as little noise as possible, and not go out at night.

I don't think Omar realized this either. The Middle East is one place for men, and an entirely different place for women. He was almost as puzzled and alarmed as we were by the neighborhood's summary rejection of its two palest residents. It would take me months to understand why we inspired so much fear, and to guess at the questions my neighbors must have been asking themselves. Would we cheat someone, lead someone's son astray, or call down the wrath of our infamous embassy, and in doing so ruin a family? The place breathed panic, and we added to that panic, and so we were hated.

I clung to politeness on principle. One Friday afternoon I was buying fruit from a local vendor—dusty oranges, which, when peeled, gave off a delicious scent at odds with the general odor of factory fumes—when the latest prayer session let out at the fundamentalist mosque and a column of men trickled through its doors into the hazy light. I kept my eyes downcast and tried to avoid them, but found myself caught between a man and his small son, who had wandered a few feet away from his father.

“As-salaamu alaykum,
” I said to the man, thinking it would be ruder to say nothing. He stared at me for a moment before wordlessly gathering his son in his arms. I flushed and looked around, hoping no one had overheard. Refusing to return this traditional greeting is one of the worst insults one can offer a fellow Muslim. I hurried home.

When I described what had happened to Omar, he didn't believe me.

“He was probably just confused,” he said. “He doesn't expect
as-salaamu alaykum
from a foreign woman.”

“But I was wearing a head scarf.”

“Perhaps he thought you were wearing it to be culturally sensitive.”

“Omar, he looked
right at me.
”

Omar reached over to play with the hem of my sleeve. “I get so worried about you,” he said. “If I had known—it's not usual for people to behave this way. They don't behave this way to one another.”

It was true. Sohair's immediate neighbors, who were familiar with my situation, were very kind to me. And I saw my own neighbors being kind to each other. But it was small comfort.

A few days after we moved in, I woke up to a ringing doorbell, so late at night that it was almost early. Unnerved, I stayed as I was, cocooned in the stained blue quilt that matched my stained blue mattress. After a pause, the ringing continued. Because she could sleep through anything, Jo had taken the room looking out to the busy road that ran along the Nile, so I wasn't surprised when her light stayed off. Fumbling in the dark, I pulled on a robe and went to the door. Through the peephole I saw a guard and one of the local
zabelleen,
the Cairene untouchables, whose lives and livelihood revolve around the collecting and sorting of
the city's garbage. I hesitated in the doorway. By Egyptian rules, I was well within my rights not to answer; I was a woman, they were two men, it was the middle of the night. On the other hand, refusing to answer did not necessarily mean the men would leave. Since one of the men was a military guard, it could be important—I wouldn't have put it past the local authorities to announce a fire by sending long-winded delegations door-to-door. I opened mine a crack.

“Aiwa?
” I asked coldly.

“Mise' al'khayr hadritik,
” responded the guard, using the polite form of
you.
The
zabell
stood with his eyes politely downcast. The two men didn't look especially threatening, so I stayed to listen. The
zabell,
I gathered, after his request was simplified several times, wanted to buy an ancient, broken vacuum we had found in a closet and put outside to be salvaged. I stared at him.

“Just take it,” I said, baffled.

“Really?” asked the guard.

“Yes, for God's sake, good-bye.”

He apologized and I shut the door and went back to bed.

The next morning, I caught up with Omar in the staff room at school and told him the story.

“The weirdest thing happened last night,” I said, trying to decide whether I should be casual or serious and settling on casual. “A guard came to our door at two in the morning with one of the
zabelleen,
trying to buy that old vacuum we found.”

He leaned forward. “What?” There was carefully restrained anger in his voice. I tried to hide my uneasiness.

“Yeah, they showed up like it was the middle of the afternoon on market day—”

“He came to
your door
in the
middle of the night
with
another man?
”

I could sense something was very wrong.

“Yes.”

Omar stood up abruptly. “I have to make a phone call,” he said, taking out his mobile.

“Was that bad?” I asked, feeling ridiculous.

“That was a test,” he said curtly, and headed for the door.

On the bus home I pressed him for details, but he was evasive. Eventually I gathered that the military guards who patrolled our complex liked to press their advantage with inhabitants they perceived to be weak. They were attempting nothing so overt as rape or theft, but something psychological—in international politics and on their own streets, westerners bullied them; now they had a chance to bully vulnerable western women. Better yet, one of these women was about to become a member of an Egyptian family, which presented its own unique possibilities.

Outside the luxurious world of expatriates and the westernized elite, a middle-class Egyptian family functions as a chain forged to protect intangible (and for a westerner, unthinkable) virtues like honor and status—which, in reality, represent that family's influence over whatever tiny corner of the Egyptian socioeconomy they've managed to carve out
for themselves. The guards had identified me as my new family's weakest link. Now they were out to discover how far I could be pushed and, by extension, how far Omar could be pushed.

Omar, as it turned out, could not be pushed at all. He went to the local administrative office, and the result was the sentencing of the guard in question to eight days in prison. Omar came back to our apartment and told Jo and me this, as a reassurance.

“Prison?” Jo looked at me anxiously.

I bit my lip. I wanted to resolve the situation but I couldn't stand the thought of sending anyone behind that awful half-kilometer of dun walls and barbed wire.

“I'm not sure anyone needs to go to
prison
over this,” I said. “I really feel like he was just being an idiot to see what he could get away with—I don't think he was out to hurt anyone.”

“It will teach him a lesson,” muttered Omar, but I could see he was beginning to waver. Later, he would argue with the guard's commanding officer on his behalf, and the sentence would be reduced to a pay suspension.

Despite Jo's and my fervent prayers, the guard was not transferred to another building. He continued to sit in our filthy concrete lobby like a two-legged Cerberus, chanting the Quran and glaring at us with open hostility as we passed. Relief only came in the early morning, when he slept on his stool with a blanket pulled over his head. We learned to tiptoe around him when we left for school in the chill of seven a.m.

After this falling-out with our guard, Jo and I began to rely heavily on the goodwill of the local grocers, who ran a
duken
on a side street near our building. Since there was no local coffeehouse, possibly due to the influence of the fundamentalists, the
duken
was the default center of local life. Everyone passed through its doors to buy their eggs, olives, cheese, and bread, as well as cooking oil and matches and other household necessities. For some reason—I don't know what, though I am thankful for it—the grocers took pity on us and it was because of them that our stay in Tura was not completely unbearable.

I was nervous around them at first; I had learned better than to be too open with any man to whom I had not been formally introduced. For the first few weeks I practically snuck around the store, collecting all the things I needed instead of asking the shop boy, and avoiding eye contact whenever possible. It was not always an easy maneuver. In college I took modern standard Arabic, the language of the press; the colloquial dialect of Egypt used a completely different vocabulary. In order to understand the label on a packet of beans, I had to stare at it for several minutes, which gave other people in the shop ample time to stop whatever they were doing and stare at me. One day, when I was scrutinizing the labels above a row of spice jars, I heard a voice over my shoulder.

“Erfa,
” it said, and a hand pointed to one of the jars. I looked up wildly. It was one of the grocers. He was about thirty, had a mustache, and was smiling mildly.
“Ismaha erfa,
” he repeated.

“Shokran,
” I muttered.

“Afwan,
” said the grocer gently. “
W'da camoon.

Camoon.” “Camoon,
” I repeated,
cumin. Erfa,
I was fairly certain, was cinnamon.

He nodded.
“Sah, hadritik.
”

It was the beginning of the pattern that would characterize our interdependence, for such a relationship can't really be called friendship in the sense that we mean it in the West. Jo and I shopped at Mohammad and Namir's
duken,
and they taught us street Arabic. We would come in, together or separately, and after wishing us good morning or good afternoon or good so-late-it-can-only-be-Cairo, Mohammad and Namir would quiz us.

“What's this?” Mohammad would ask, holding something up.

“That's an egg,” I would say.

“Red or white?”

“Red.”

“And this?”

“Cheese.”

“What kind?”

“Falamank?
I don't know for sure.”

“It is
falamank,
and it's fresh, have a little.”

They were always courtly and mild, and by treating us this way, in front of other customers, I think they helped chisel away at some of the suspicion that our neighbors had built up about us. Mohammad and Namir subtly defended our honor by insisting that within the confines of their shop we should be treated like Arab women; that is to say, with the proper degree of respect. I first noticed it when I was at
the store one afternoon buying our daily bread, and a round-faced, middle-aged man approached me and asked, without preamble, “Excuse me, but are you American?”

Such a question, innocuous in the States, was hugely forward in Tura. In the split second it took me to decide whether I should answer according to my rules or the neighborhood's, I noticed that Namir and Mohammad had stopped stocking the shelves and stood very still, looking at the man with an expression that was not friendly. Without speaking, but very clearly, they were saying
Stop, go back, and approach her more suitably.
The man understood, and ducked his head so that he looked up at me instead of down, a symbolic gesture of submission.

“I'm sorry, Lady,” he said in Arabic.

“It's nothing,” I replied. Mohammad and Namir had relaxed, but were still listening.

“I ask only because my wife is also American,” the man continued, switching back to English, “and I thought perhaps you might like to visit her. She is always eager for familiar faces. She is in the United States now but she will be back next month.” He recited their address, and gave a short bow.

“I'd be happy to,” I said, charmed and confused at once. “Thank you.” It was inconceivable to me that any other American should exist in Tura.

“Not at all,” said the man, bowing again, and left.

There was a near-audible sigh as the door closed behind him, and the owners of the
duken
went back to their sweeping and stocking.

“Kulu tamem?
” asked Namir,
Everything's okay?

“Yes,” I said. “Everything's fine.”

He looked as though he wanted to say something else but stopped himself, deciding instead to slip an extra loaf of
fino
bread into my bag on top of the sale, a gesture of sympathy I never fully understood. In the coming weeks I paid attention to the women I saw in the neighborhood, hoping to spot the mysterious American, but I never found her. Perhaps she was one of the women who veiled their faces, resisting identification, beyond the reach of race or provenance. Or perhaps, despite my own experience slipping in and out of Turan behavior, I, too, could be fooled.

I still bear the internal and external scars of that place. I incubated so many intestinal parasites that I learned to distinguish between bacterial and amoebic dysentery by the presence of a certain kind of pain. One kidney infection turned severe and nearly put me in the hospital. And the insects: the swarms of mosquitoes that raised welts on Jo's and my arms and feet, the maggots and full-grown caterpillars we found in our food, the spiders that left bites as delicately colored as stargazer lilies, which would go numb, bruise, and open into sores if left untreated. We developed a condition I jokingly termed “anorexia bacteriosa”: a deep-seated disgust that arose from repeated exposure to vile things in our food, which caused us to eat smaller and smaller meals spaced further and further apart, until we would only eat when driven by faintness. For a long time I couldn't stand the feeling of a full stomach, and rarely ate more than it took to stem hunger. Anything more and I
began to imagine I was full of carrion and rotting. Photographs of Jo and me from this time period reveal two women who are only vaguely recognizable: ashy-skinned and solemn, with dark rings around their eyes.