The Butterfly Mosque (32 page)

“I don't want to be one of those immigrants who's treated badly because they can't prove anything about themselves,” he fretted.

“We won't let that happen,” I said, though I was afraid of the same thing. As we began the green card application process, I was surprised to find I felt more restless instead of less so. Our lives, from this point onward, would be unwieldy and nomadic; going home would always mean leaving another home behind. By this time, we owned an apartment in a suburb of Cairo, filled with arabesque wooden furniture from one of the last traditional workshops in the city. Even when my life in Egypt frustrated me—which was often—I felt anchored to it. It was reassuring. It was something I had created from the ground up, on my own. Home-sick
as I was, I would return to the United States as something of a stranger, without a credit history, a rental history, or professional roots in any particular place. Something Ahmad told me in Iran—at some tea shop or other—haunted me: “If you want to leave your country, leave before you're thirty.” He never mentioned how best to return.

I watched Omar closely during trips to the American Embassy, looking for signs of anxiety or fear. I knew he was doing this for me. The material comforts of the first world didn't tempt him much; he was satisfied with the spiritual comforts he had at home. He had mastered his environment. As Omar leaned back in a plastic chair outside the intake area of the embassy—containing more Americans than I'd seen in nearly four years—I felt a little eddy of guilt. Being Cairene is not like being American; Cairenes are specialists, with skills and instincts unique to their unforgiving city. Americans live in broader strokes, taught to paint over whatever cultural surfaces they encounter. Both are immune to assimilation, but for very different reasons.

“Bitfakari fi eh?
” Omar asked me;
What are you thinking?

“Nothing.” I smiled and touched his hand. We were an island in a sea made up of damp official forms, dimpled along the edges where their owners clutched them. This was a waiting room in every sense. Around us were middle-class Cairenes in their best suits, listening for their numbers to be called. A delegation of Coptic monks sat in a row. Anxious eyes told me that for many of these people, America meant an escape—from political oppression, chaos, social upheaval, economic strife, or fundamentalism, any one of a hundred things. But not for Omar. He sat with a sad
half-smile, his long fingers folded in his lap. For Omar, America meant exile.

I knew I was risking my marriage by taking it across the Atlantic. New York, Boulder, Boston; these places would never be to Omar what Cairo was to me. But the United States was my home, and I couldn't go the rest of my life with my back turned to it. I might begin to forget what I was. But would we forget what our marriage was, once we uprooted it? I wondered. Omar wondered, too. When we began filling out his visa application, he asked me whether I would love him in America the way I loved him in Egypt. Yes, of course, I insisted. The third party in our marriage—geography—said nothing, but waited in the background to be recognized. Omar could hate America. If he did, I might never be able to live in my country again. There was no certainty. Then again, there never had been—all love is risk. We would go forward and hope. The rest was written on our palms, an inscrutable poem known only to God.

Early that May, Omar's green card came through. We made plans to leave Egypt in late June. In the interim, we unknit our Cairene lives, pulling out the stitches that bound us to people and things. Our car we left in Ibrahim's capable hands. My house plants went to cousins who lived down the street. Spare keys went to Sohair, who promised to check on our apartment twice a month.

Since moving to the far side of Cairo, we had only been in the habit of visiting Sohair, Fakhry, and Ibrahim in Tura twice a month or so. Once we set the date of our departure,
we started going once or twice a week. The drive became a ritual: we crossed a short interim of desert to meet the Ring Road, followed that for a while, then went south along the Corniche, hugging the Nile. That stretch of road and river are perfect in my memory. I can close my eyes and see a succession of minarets: as you exit Tura Bridge there is one directly ahead of you and one on your left; then comes another, smaller, nestled in a slum; then there is a beige stretch of wire-topped wall, patrolled by policemen half-asleep on matched horses; and behind that wall is the butterfly mosque. Still in prison, but not imprisoned, it sits patiently, stone on stone, as if it has folded its wings and come to rest at the bottom of the jar, waiting for the inevitable day when the jar will crack. The prison may be gone in ten years, destroyed in one of Egypt's intermittent coups and revolutions. Or it may stand another hundred. It doesn't matter; the mosque will outlive it. On the day the dissidents inside those walls are freed, the mosque will be free also. It will unfurl; it will catch the light as the sun goes down across the river, and proclaim that it, too, has a destiny.

Since we would be separated from
molokheya
(a spinach-like soup) and stuffed doves and real baklava, Omar's relatives wanted to feed us. There was a rush of family lunches. Aunties made their signature dishes, the desserts they knew I liked, and the twenty or thirty of us who were closest in our vast tribe sat together for hours, each one unwilling to be the first to leave. I was reminded, with pain whose intensity I did not expect, of the strange, limping last weeks I
had spent in the United States before moving to Cairo. It was a burden to be so loved. I felt unworthy of it.

“I honestly don't know what I will do on Monday and Wednesday afternoons,” said Sameh the last time I saw him. It was a thick evening, the air clogged with the perspiration of the Nile and the filth of human industry. He sat in his office at the language center, talking to one of his students from the Delta—who, just as Sameh predicted, stared at me slack-jawed and unspeaking for the entire duration of my visit. Sameh gave me a morose, sympathetic smile.

“To think—at our first lesson you could barely put four words together,” he said. “
Wa delwa'ti bititkellimi wa betif'hami. Enti misrayya ba'a, khalas.
” (“And now you speak and understand. You're Egyptian, it's over.”)

“Hashoofak b'khayr,
” I told him;
I'll see you well.
It's something you say when you're only leaving for a little while.

Sameh nodded.
“In sha'allah.
”

During the last couple of weeks before our departure, I took to wandering the city by myself. It was an odd thing for a man to do, and unheard of for a woman. Cairo is not conducive to wandering. It presses on you like a dirty hand, and with a stinking mouth shouts in your ear. If you're wise, you take a cab or a car or the subway from point to point, and shut out as much of the in-between as you can. But I was leaving. I could afford to spend myself on the city. I walked through the alleys behind the Mosque of Imam Husayn, dense with the smells of fat and cumin, and was amazed to
remember a time when these things were unfamiliar. Sometimes I took a book with me and sat at a café alone. During the day, Fishawi's—the famous
ahua
(café) at the heart of Khan al Khalili, where Omar and I had one of our first conversations—was almost quiet. I could drink black tea with mint and watch the sunlight bake the carved wooden doorways, undisturbed, under the bemused, oddly tender watch of a handful of day waiters.

When I could, I visited Husayn itself. The mosque is not as grand as Sultan Hassan or as whimsical as Al Rifa'i, where the last shah of Iran is entombed. But the presence of the shrine—the gilt house of unseen remains, the last physical traces of the last imam holy to both Sunnis and Shi'ites—makes its atmosphere unforgettable. The imam was among the last people to whom I said good-bye before we left. It was a day in June when the heat was tempered by a wind off the Mediterranean: you could tilt your head up and catch a water-drenched breath of oxygen, proof of some more rarified existence in some other place, beyond the city. I took off my shoes at the door of the mosque and walked inside on bare feet. The women's side was crowded: girls, young boys, and their mothers and grandmothers sat in bunches and rows, praying or talking quietly. I threaded my way toward the shrine. Picked out in silver and marble, it stood at the center of the mosque, accessible from either side. Men and women, hushed or reciting Quran under their breath, pressed against the railing that protected the imam from too much adoration. I found an empty spot next to a woman in a dust-spattered abaya. She gave me a little
smile and patted my hand. I lost my composure. Standing there, in the damp human crush of my religion, I began to cry. Not for the things I was leaving, but for the things I was taking with me—all I had fought for, all I had lost, and a joy so potent it felt like pain.