The Butterfly Mosque (6 page)

Omar emerged an hour later looking shaken but relieved. “
Yalla?
” He held the door open for me and smiled when I looked back at him.

“This is—” He trailed off, following me outside into the damp heat. “I'm really glad you came. Thank you.”

I could feel his hand hovering over my shoulder. Part of me wanted to stop suddenly and collide with his outstretched fingers, so he could touch me without feeling at fault. But this was not the way. I kept walking, and made a decision.

During a break in training the next day, I asked Omar if I could talk to him in private after work. I kept my voice and my posture carefully neutral; if we were overheard there would be scandal. For a moment Omar looked startled. Recovering, he agreed in an identical tone. Only his eyes betrayed anxiety, and, I thought, hope. For the rest of the day he kept me within sight, if not within arm's reach, though we did not speak to each other again.

After work, when Jo left to make posters with her co-teacher, Omar came over to the apartment. There was a moment of awkwardness when he stepped through the door—though we had gone all over the city together we had never been alone in private. The simple intimacy of standing with him in a closed room was almost frightening. I was used to having Cairo as a chaperone.

“I love you,” I said in a rush. “And I know what that is going to mean. I mean, I know that's not a small thing to say, especially since—” I ran out of air and swallowed. “But I had to say something. I'm sorry.” I grimaced. This wasn't meant to come out in such a graceless, forward mess.

A smile played over Omar's face and disappeared, then returned, like the sun between patches of cloud. “Give me your hand,” he said, reaching out with his. This was a proposal. In Egypt, acknowledged love and an offer of marriage are the same thing, so for us, marriage came like love; an emotion and not a decision. Until the day we made it official, we would ask each other “Will you marry me?” almost whenever there was a lull in conversation but the real proposal was put forth and accepted that afternoon when he put out his hand and I took it. We had never been on a real date. We had never kissed. We had known each other for just over a month.

“There's another thing,” I said, hesitating. Omar looked at me expectantly. I forced the words to arrange themselves on my tongue. “I'm a Muslim,” I said.

Omar slumped forward with an expression of profound relief. “Thank God,” he said. “Thank God. That makes so many things easier.”

“You're not that surprised,” I said, laughing.

“You're right.” Omar sat up and grinned at me. “I guess it's because I've never become this spiritually close to a non-Muslim. There has always been a, similarity, between us, in that way. No, I'm not surprised.” He put his arm around my shoulders and folded me against him. “I'm just very, very happy.”

The texture of the shirt and the warmth of the shoulder I lay against unknotted my anxiety. Once you discover that the world rewards reckless faith, no lesser world is worth contemplating. Omar touched my hair, laughed, and said he had no word for its color. He wound a strand around his finger and kissed it. There were so many things, he said, so many things he had been waiting to tell me since before he had seen my face or knew my name.

Omar lived with his divorced mother and younger brother on the border of Tura, an industrial district just south of Maadi. Jo and I had been to their apartment once, briefly, and said quick hellos to his mother Sohair, a striking woman in her fifties with eyes rimmed in heavy kohl. I was surprised that Omar still lived with his family at twenty-eight. In Egypt, though, this is normal—most Egyptians stay with their parents until marriage. Interdependence is valued over independence; living alone and hoarding one's resources is seen as antisocial. Until I learned that all of my unmarried colleagues and friends still lived with their families, it was difficult for me to process.

The fact that Omar disappeared every day to visit an
American girl had not gone unnoticed. The evening after we got engaged, Omar called to tell me that he had announced our intentions to his family. His tone was matter-of-fact, as if we were discussing plans for a dinner or a day trip to the pyramids.

“You just told them? Just like that?” I bit my nails.

“Just like that,” he said. His voice was firm and cheerful.

“And they didn't freak out?”

“No. They have concerns, of course, but they're happy for us. They want you to come over for lunch so we can all talk.”

Though Omar's divorced mother and father were both nontraditional—they had been secular leftists in the wake of the revolution—it was still shocking for a young man to get engaged without first asking his parents' permission. Omar was not afraid of appearing eccentric. When his generation became religious, defying the westernized, socialist tendencies of their parents, he forged his own unorthodox path. He defended his music against the fundamentalists, and his piety against the secularists, at a time when people were pressured to choose a side. By simply announcing that he would marry me—without fanfare or apology—he was saying that he would tolerate no opposition.

The day of the lunch, I spent half an hour trying to decide what to wear. I was still getting ready when Omar arrived to pick me up.

“I feel like we're doing something wrong,” I fretted as I put on my shoes. “I don't like just showing up like this. ‘Hi, I'm your white American in-the-closet-convert future daughter-in-law. I've brought you some flowers and a catastrophe.'”

Omar shook his head. “We're not doing anything wrong. This is our decision.” He smiled. “Everyone is going to like you.”

“Everyone?” I looked up at him flirtatiously.

“Yes, everyone.” He squeezed my hand. “I love you.”

When we arrived at their apartment, I paid closer attention than I had the other time I'd visited. It was a snug space: two tiny bedrooms and a kitchen leading off of a main room that served as the living and dining area. Spread throughout the apartment was a great quantity of books. On almost every wall there were shelves lined with philosophies and histories in Arabic, novels in English and French. They competed for space with a few houseplants and a framed picture of Gamal Abdel Nasser, leader of the Egyptian revolution. On a wide couch in the main room lay two of Omar's ouds—ancestors of the lute—and an electric guitar.

Omar's mother, Sohair, came out to greet us. I let out a breath when I saw she was smiling.

“Hello, my dear,” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. “Come sit down, please. Will you take tea?”

Another head poked around the corner from the hall: it was Ibrahim, Omar's younger brother. He came into the room with bright, wide eyes, holding out his hand. He was fairer than either Sohair or Omar—as a child he had been red-headed, a characteristic of his father's family, who hailed from the Nile Delta. He was six years younger than Omar, a year older than me.

“Ahlan,
” he said, shaking my hand. “Do you know
ahlan?
It means welcome.”

“I know
ahlan,
” I said, feeling suddenly shy.

“She took Arabic in college,” Omar chimed in. “She knows a lot of words.”

“Not really. I've found out everything I know is useless. I can tell you the new secretary is Lebanese, but I can't ask for directions.”

Ibrahim laughed. “That's all right. We will teach you whatever you want to know.”

As the four of us sat together and talked, I began to relax. Sohair and Ibrahim asked about my history and expectations, always kindly and without judgment. Despite the unorthodoxy of our sudden announcement, it was clear they were happy and a little relieved that Omar had found someone he wanted to marry. He had, I gathered, been fussy about potential mates in the past. It was unusual for a pious person to have interests as diverse and artistic as Omar's, which made looking for a wife more than usually difficult. When Omar insisted he would only marry a woman who was both religious and intellectually independent, his mother told him to be realistic. He was in his late twenties, an age when Egyptian men are expected to choose a wife and leave the family home. It was time, she thought, for him to make a decision.

Sohair was a revolutionary. Though Nasser's dream of a democratic, industrial Egypt had never come to pass, she held on to hope. Her energy and idealism were formidable: at my age she socialized with leftist politicos, earning her translator's diploma while pregnant with Omar. She and her sons' father divorced when Omar was in high school. Afterward, she had educated and provided for her children on her own, refusing help from relatives and friends. In recent
years her job as a translator had taken her across Europe and West Africa; in a few more years she would travel to the source of the Nile with a group of backpackers half her age. The hardships she had faced as a young woman seemed barely to register—she had boundless optimism, and was more fearless at fifty than I was at twenty-one.

“Do you have a good relationship with your parents?” she asked me at one point during that first lunch together.

“I do,” I said, running one finger nervously around the rim of my teacup. “And I don't want to keep secrets from them. I just think it makes more sense to tell them in person, after they've had a chance to meet Omar.”

“When are they coming?”

“December, for Christmas. It's just another couple of months, so—” I trailed off and fiddled with my teacup again. A couple of months was not a long time, but it was long enough to make me feel guilty for concealing something so important.

“It's your choice,” said Sohair, patting my hand. “If you think this way is best, then this is what we will do.”

We sat down to a traditional meal of ground meat baked in filo dough, with rice and cucumber salad. Ibrahim talked about '70s power ballads and his fear of scorpions. I laughed when he and Omar argued over heavy metal bands. Ibrahim would later tell their extended family, “My heart is open to her,” calming the fears they might have had about Omar's American fiancée. I felt safe sitting in the bright living room with Omar and the people who knew him best. At the same time, I wondered if Sohair's confidence in me was misplaced
—I wondered if I knew what was best. I wondered if I knew what I was doing at all.

Omar's father was an artist and lived alone on another floor of that same apartment building in Tura, in a flat littered comfortably with evidence of his craft: brushes in jars of turpentine, palettes left drying on newspapers, canvases leaning against the walls.

“My dear Willow,” he said when Omar introduced us, enunciating each word. “For so you must become: precious.” His name was Fakhry, but to me he was always Amu Fakhry, the word for
uncle
conveying my respect for him as an elder. He was in his early sixties and had a heart condition that made him tire easily, but his expressive eyes were youthful.

“I'm glad to meet you,” I said, and kissed him on the cheek. I handed him the bouquet of flowers I had picked out at a local shop. He smiled, delighted.

“They are beautiful,” he said, putting them in a green glass vase. “The color, everything is good. I pay attention to these things because I am a painter. I search for details.”

We looked at some of his paintings. He was a devotee of Picasso, and had copied several of his paintings. A canvas based on “The Frugal Repast” caught my eye.

“This is amazing,” I said.

“You like it?” Amu Fakhry seemed pleased. “Then when it is finished, I will give it to you.”

“I would hate to take it away from you—”

“No, you must have it,” said Amu Fakhry. “Art is not for the artist. Art is for other people.”

We smiled at each other in silent agreement. From that moment, we were allies and coconspirators. The painting I admired would arrive wrapped at my doorstep several weeks later, with one addition: the bouquet of flowers I gave Amu Fakhry had appeared on the table near the subject's elbow, picked out in daubs of pink and green.

It's very easy to keep secrets from people who live thousands of miles away. It's much less easy to keep them from your roommate. I wanted to talk to Jo about my news, but I was a little afraid of her reaction. If I told her about the engagement, I'd have to tell her about my conversion as well, and that was a conversation I was not yet prepared to have with anyone whose opinions about religion were as strong as hers.

“Every time I see the word
God,
my brain shuts down,” she told me one afternoon as we were walking in Maadi. After the news of a death in Jo's family, a colleague at school had given her a book of inspirational essays and sayings. She had read it dutifully, but it didn't stick. “It makes me suspicious of the whole book, even the parts I like. There were some beautiful ideas in there. But I just can't see God, God, God, and take them seriously.”

“Why not?” I asked. We were walking along a street we'd named Dead Cat Road, in honor of the bloated tabby carcass that had been lying in the median for weeks. We stepped into the street to avoid him.

“The word doesn't mean anything positive to me,” Jo said. “I'm not religious, and I feel like God is forced on me in a way that seems dishonest and manipulative.”

“Not everyone thinks of God as a big white guy who floats on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel pointing at people,” I said irritably. “You could think of Him as something more pervasive and universal.”

This got a smile. “I could,” she said, “but that forces me to work too hard as a reader, which means the book isn't written well enough to catch my attention without using the word
God
as a crutch.”

“What?
” I squeaked. A
boab
in the doorway of a nearby apartment building stared at me. I ignored him. “Are you saying that if a book contains the word
God,
it's
badly written?
”