The Butterfly Mosque (16 page)

I seek for a treasure
outside of myself;
I know not who holds it
nor what it is.

—Cherubino, in
The Marriage of Figaro

S
HORTLY AFTER
J
O AND
I
MOVED TO
T
URA
, I
QUIT MY JOB
at Language School to write full-time. A few of my articles had been published in the United States, and in Cairo a new English-language opposition paper,
Cairo Magazine,
had just been launched. I went to the first open meeting without expectation, bringing with me a few clippings of work I'd done for the
Weekly Dig
back in Boston. The magazine had rented offices in a building on the edge of a genteel but shabby district, near one of the palaces built for King Farouk in pre-revolution days. The World War II-era buildings felt vaguely European, with hexagonal facades of flaking plaster fronting the streets, which were bathed in dust. Climbing the stairs of the building at the address I'd written down, I came to a door hanging loose in its frame, beyond which I heard voices speaking a dozen varieties of English.

“I
told
you, I just don't like the glossy paper.”

“It's just the sample stuff! The second issue will be in—”

“It's too
tabloid.
”

“I know. Yes. I agree. The second issue will be matte. There's someone at the—”

The door opened, revealing a woman about my age who I immediately knew was American. We were wearing near-identical yoke-necked sweaters over button-down shirts. I'd made an effort to pull myself together and look like how I thought an American college graduate should look, and was glad I had succeeded.

“Are you here for the meeting? Come in.” The woman smiled and opened the door wider: beyond her, half a dozen people were making their way through a haze of cigarette smoke with laptops and copy paper in their arms. The office was a series of rooms painted powdery colors, lit by bare fluorescent bulbs. Large old-fashioned windows looked out over a dim alley, the sort Mahfouz would have written about, home of a thousand dust-caked histories. In the main room was a large whiteboard already crowded with deadline reminders and story leads; around it in a semicircle were sitting eight or ten people, almost all under thirty-five, with their notebooks at the ready.

“We're just about to get started,” said the woman who had let me in—her name was Faye, and she was the managing editor. “You can go ahead and take a seat.”

“Thanks.” I slipped into a chair at the outer edge of the circle as Faye called the meeting to order. We all introduced ourselves. The culture editor, a silver-haired cheerful-looking man, was Richard Woffenden, a longtime fixture of the expat community. The rest of the permanent staff was made up of young Egyptian and American reporters. There were
two interns from the journalism school at Cairo University who were barely out of their teens. Even at that first meeting, I could sense that the people involved were unusually driven, that their goal was not only to tell the big stories, but to foster young Egyptian writers who, by virtue of their firsthand experience, could tell them better. That's a kind of altruism one doesn't often find among reporters scrambling to publish and be noticed.

My first assignment was relative fluff:
The Marriage of Figaro
was going to be performed in Arabic at the Cairo Opera House and the magazine needed someone who knew both enough Arabic and enough opera to write about it. That was how I found myself sitting along the wall of a rehearsal room one afternoon not much later, under dappled light, listening to a young soprano named Reem sing the part of Cherubino, and thinking about synchronicity. In college, shortly after I got sick, I had gone to see a student production of
Figaro
with some classmates. At that point, I wasn't used to waking up day after day after day
sick,
my partying truncated, my grades in constant danger, managing pain and sleeplessness. I had trouble sitting still for long periods and was only comfortable moving or lying down; during the second act I began to feel light-headed and achy. But when I forced myself to focus on the stage, I was surprised to find that comedic opera was actually
funny.

“What do you think?” asked Reem in English, sliding into a chair. She was glowing and slightly out of breath. Beyond us, the Countess was lamenting her unfaithful husband; the Count sat in a corner with his understudy, arguing about Turkish coffee (“It's bad for your voice!” the Count claimed).
Through the starburst-patterned lattice over the windows, which gave the room the aura of a mosque, the sky was blue; the usual pale blanket of pollution and dust had cleared.

“I love it,” I said to Reem. “It's funnier in Arabic than it is in Italian. Classical Arabic is so serious, you know? Anything sub-Quranic sounds hysterical in classical anyway, so when it's stuff like, ‘Who's that at the door?' and, ‘If you want to play, little Mr. Count,' you want to fall out of your chair.”

“Sub-Quranic.” Reem laughed. “I have never heard this word.”

“I made it up.” I flipped open my notebook. “Even though you're performing Figaro in Arabic, you've kept the original Italian setting and costumes. Do you think there is such a thing as universal art? Art that anyone can appreciate, no matter where he's from?”

“Do
you
think so?” Reem asked.

“No,” I said, “I don't. I think there are universal ideas, but there is no universal art form to describe them.”

“Maybe you are right,” said Reem politely.

“You disagree?” I wondered if what I had said made sense to her.

She tilted her head. “I think every person knows what stories are,” she said. “That is universal.”

I turned this statement over in my mind, unsure, as with so many conversations across second languages and inherited perspectives, of whether we had achieved a profound understanding or none at all.

I often wondered the same thing about the situation in Tura. Jo and I were never integrated into the neighborhood,
and I doubt we could have been if we lived there for decades. But as time went by our neighbors passed from open hostility to grudging tolerance. Occasionally they would even forget themselves and be kind, because it was far more usual for them to be kind; they were kind to one another, and the abrupt chilly way they treated (or avoided) Jo and me is a mark of how much we must have frightened them. When I describe our strange relationship with our neighbors to other Americans, I ask them to imagine two single, sari-clad, Bengali-speaking Indian women of obscure purpose setting up shop in small-town Oklahoma. It's the sort of situation that might never result in harmony, but one should not take that failure as a symbol of an imagined greater failure; it does not mean that there is no hope for understanding. All it means is that in close quarters, we overthink, second-guessing our own innate assumption of common humanness, which, I now think, boils down to a common need for kindness. We are cruelest to those who remind us of our capacity for cruelness. It was this that made Jo's and my relationship with our neighbors so bitter: it was clear that they did not like who they became around us.

I have seen the reverse as well: westerners from the most liberal backgrounds, whose beliefs are tolerant and broad-minded, find themselves unable to function in a society that requires them to live so conservatively and in such limited circumstances. They are forced to resort to the ruling-race social tactics they hate in order to get by, and then hate the Egyptians for making them hate themselves. This is the heart of the clash of civilizations: not the hatred of the Other, but the self-hatred produced by the Other. This is what makes
hatred so easy to propagate, and so difficult to counter even for those who question its authenticity.

Though our relationship with our neighbors was improving, life in Tura remained somewhat arbitrary, as if the goal of the place was to cultivate ambivalence. One day the fruit seller would hand us the first tangerine of the season with a smile and refuse payment; the next day a
khamaseen
sand storm would send choking dust through the tiniest cracks in our walls, invading our mouths and nostrils, and we would cough up black slime for days. Or the Hammer, overcome by some merciful impulse, would prefix his dawn prayer-call with a few minutes of Quran recitation so lush and beautiful that I awoke holding my breath. Then, inevitably, he would start his angry howls and I would wonder what I was meant to feel.

I was reconciled to these persistent contradictions in an unexpected way. When I told Omar about the black kitten I raised when I was young, he bought me a Siamese cat as a present. She turned out to be pregnant. Jo and I watched her grow from a sleek feline into something shaped more like a football, and we spent time on our dial-up internet connection to learn about cat gestation and birth. On the day she went into labor she lay down at my feet and looked up at me helplessly: the first kitten was stuck.

“What do we do?” I asked Jo, whose horrified expression reflected my own.

“In the movies they always boil water and lay down a sheet,” she said. We sat in silence on the couch for another minute. “I'm calling Sumaya,” Jo said finally, referring to an acquaintance of ours. “Her cat had kittens a couple of
months ago.” She got up and hurried out of the room. I stroked the little brown-and-cream head pressed against my ankle.

“Sumaya says we have to help get the kitten out,” Jo said, returning with the phone in one hand. “She says it will probably be dead. If we don't get it out, the other kittens will die, too.”

I stared at Jo, feeling nauseated.

“Okay,” I said. “I—okay. How do we do that?”

Jo looked down at the cat, which was making little pained noises. “I think—I think one person has to hold the cat and the other has to pull out the kitten. I'll hold the cat,” she said, before I had a chance to interject. We washed our hands and lifted the cat onto a clean, faded pillowcase. With one eye closed—the way I watch horror movies—I tugged a tiny, half-birthed body free of its mother. Sumaya was right: it was dead, its nose and mouth an airless, bloodless white. Six other kittens followed. Four were black or gray and black, and two were spotted gray and brown, like little smoke-colored leopards. Their father must have been one of the feral Egyptian Mau said to be descended from the temple cats of the pharaohs. Nowadays they roamed the streets and garbage dumps, unwanted pests.

The kittens immediately started dying. Jo found the mangled remains of the two feeblest ones the next morning. The mother cat had eaten them. Another kitten was deformed and too weak to nurse; it only survived another few hours. When we found a fourth kitten dead two mornings later, Jo burst into tears.

“I'm tired of picking up bodies,” she choked, pressing her palms over her eyes.

I put my arms around her, feeling sick. There was a sweet, fetid smell in the air: a death smell. The grotesque-ness of our surroundings was suddenly too much for me. The layer of grime—dirt and grease and worse—that had been all over the apartment when we moved in had never quite gone away, no matter how much we scrubbed. A block away, the cement factory chugged out its awful fumes. Even the Nile, so deceptively serene, ran with sewage and the corpses of animals. No wonder the kittens were dropping off one by one. This was a place where nearly 3 percent of human babies died before their first birthday. How could anything born in this environment survive?

Only the two spotted kittens made it through the first week. I watched them in apprehension, looking for signs of weakness. They surprised me by thriving. Both were athletic feeders, and within a couple of weeks grew round and thick-furred. When they were barely bigger than teacups they began tottering around the apartment on unsteady legs. Jo and I would pick them up to keep from stepping on them, holding them to our faces to inhale their warm milky scent. My attitude toward the little drama began to change. If not for Jo and me, all the animals would have died. Instead, the cat and two kittens were alive and healthy. Another Turan experience defied categorization. What had occurred? Was it awful or wonderful? Should I give thanks or give up?

I had to let go of my need to compartmentalize. In Tura—and it is tempting to extend this generalization to the rest of the developing world—very few beautiful things are unmarked by arbitrary hardship. The reason Omar and his family and their neighbors could function in such an uncertain environment was because they did not expect life to be tidy or orderly, and their happiness did not depend on experiences that could be labeled. In colloquial Egyptian there is no term for
a good day.
Neither, I should add, is there a term for
a bad day.
There are beautiful days, black days, inky days, and blessed days; days can be described but not categorized. This was the secret of life in the gullet of the Nile.
Kun;
“Be.” Good and evil, chaos and order, joy and tragedy—they were all brought into being with the same single word.
Kun, fa yakun;
“Be, so it is.”

I had been a Muslim for six months, yet I'd never gone to a mosque for Friday prayers. After enduring months of sermons from the Hammer of the Infidel, I suspected that going to Friday prayers would be worse for my faith than staying home. In my mind, brick-and-mortar Islam was divided into a banal and aggressive present, represented by the Hammer; and an ethereal unreachable past, represented by the butterfly mosque. Between the two floated the Quran, which seemed at times to relate to neither; its words seemed to represent an accidental glimpse of universality, a momentary lifting of the curtain between lesser and greater truths. Something as cumbersome as organized religion couldn't do it justice.

I've had conversations with members of other faiths about this dilemma; about the peculiar music of holy books, so rarely reflected in the legalism of the faiths that spring up around them. A devout Christian friend from back home in Colorado once read me her favorite passage from the Book of Job: “And though worms destroy my body, yet in this flesh shall I see God.” She paused afterward and then said, “We'll never get there.” When I had been in Egypt for half a year, I knew what she meant. I had seen enough of bureaucratized conversion and unqualified sheikhs to wonder whether modern Muslims would ever “get there” either. The first time I went to Friday prayers in a mosque, I braced myself for disappointment.