The Butterfly Mosque

  I loved it. I loved it obsessively, starting the minute I stepped out of the airport and into the fetid August heat. Confronted with this city, my anxieties seemed self-indulgent. The calm of some long-dormant survival instinct kicked in.

  Meanwhile, I was a Muslim. Alone in my room, behind wooden-shuttered windows that looked out at a fringe of palms, I prayed. Prayer was difficult at first. I had never been taught to bow toward anything, or recite words when no one was around to hear them. The first time I prayed, I did not face Mecca—instead I faced west, toward home. It was there that I had first spoken to God. Mecca, on the other hand, was a place I had never seen, full of people I had never met. For a convert, I was unusually obstinate. Bowing—putting my forehead on the ground—felt embarrassing. At that time, if you had asked me what religion was, I would have answered that it was the expression of one’s love for God. Years later, a Bohra Muslim friend would suggest something very different: God, he said, is the love between you and religion. Today, this makes profound sense to me. I quickly discovered that religion is an act of will. I assumed prayer would flow naturally from belief, but it didn’t—it took practice. So I practiced, privately, without telling Jo or anyone else what had occurred.

  For a week, Jo and I barely ate. We didn’t understand how or where to buy real food. The apartment previously inhabited by Ben and his roommate sat on a side street lined with straggling hibiscus bushes. There was a series of little shops at the end of our block, but they made no sense to us. One sold finches and lovebirds in cages, another sold cell phones, a third displayed unmarked piles of computer parts on wooden tables. When we finally came across a tiny general store—a duken, we later learned to call it—we bought olives and bread. A donkey cart supplied us with mangoes. Programmed for supermarkets, we were bewildered that we couldn’t buy meat or fish from the same place we bought milk.

  One afternoon during this first proteinless week, the phone rang. Jo and I stared at it in dismay. The only other call we’d gotten was from the director of Language School, welcoming us to Cairo. Too late, I realized I had no idea how Egyptians greeted each other on the phone.

  “You answer it,” said Jo.

  “Why?” I asked wildly.

  “Because it might be someone speaking Arabic,” she said. “Pick up, quick.”

  I did.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Willow?” The voice was male and spoke in a pleasant Anglo-Egyptian accent. He introduced himself as Omar, whom I remembered from Ben’s e-mails—he was a physics teacher at LS, as we called it, and one of Ben’s closest friends in Egypt. Worried about all the trouble a couple of American girls could find in Cairo, Ben had asked him to keep an eye on us.

  “I remembered today that you arrived on the fifteenth,” he said. “I wanted to make sure everything was okay. Ben said you brought someone with you?”

  “A friend,” I said. “She’s going to be working at LS as well.”

  “Oh good,” he said politely. “Is there anything you need?”

  I decided not to tell him about our state of enforced veganism. He apologized for not having called sooner—he had been in Sinai for the past few days.

  “Can we invite you over for some tea?” I asked, grateful for his concern. “I have a book that Ben asked me to bring you.”

  “Sure,” he said. “What time should I be there?”

  He arrived an hour later and I opened the door to a tall, olive-skinned man in a button-down shirt and khakis. His expression was kind and curious, and faintly amused; he reached out to shake my hand when I hesitated, unsure of the polite way for an American woman to greet an Egyptian man.

  “This room has changed since the last time I was here,” he said as I ushered him inside. He stood in front of the coffee table and narrowed his eyes. The watercolor that hung in the living room while Ben lived there was gone, replaced by a framed print of the Ninety-Nine Names of God.

  “Whose is that?” he asked, turning to me. “Not yours, surely.”

  “Actually, it is mine,” I said.

  “Really?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Yes.” I excused myself and went to help Jo with the tea. I looked back at Omar from the doorway of the kitchen. He stood with his arms crossed, head tilted to one side, gazing at the calligraphic names. Light from the window glazed his cheek, turning it honey-colored. He smiled.

  * * *

  Omar must have noticed how little food we had in the house, perhaps because we had none to offer him. When he pressed us about what we were eating, we admitted that we mostly weren’t. “Language School usually sends someone to look after the foreigners for the first week,” he said. “You shouldn’t be left alone like this.”

  “Are there supermarkets here that sell meat?” asked Jo.

  “There are, but they’re very expensive—only for rich people and those who get paid in dollars,” said Omar.

  “We can’t do expensive,” I responded.

  Omar nodded. “Khalas. Tomorrow I’ll show you the souk. That’s where ordinary people shop. Okay?”

  Too eager for protein to say no, we agreed.

  Omar arrived promptly the next morning, bringing with him stewed fava beans and bread from a street vendor. When we’d finished eating and cleaned up, he led us out into a late morning mottled with glare and watery shadows. We took a cab a short distance to the underside of a bridge that ran over the Maadi metro stop. Here was the edge of the souk, an open marketplace that meandered through a series of cramped, unpaved alleys strung with tarps. Vendors sat behind piles of green and yellow mangoes, guavas, carrots, sweet potatoes, purple and white eggplants, and tomatoes as heavy as fists, all in dusty profusion. In stacked bamboo cages, chickens and ducks muttered to each other in the heat. Today the market was full: men and women wearing long robes and head cloths moved from stall to stall and called to their friends and neighbors.

  “You get your meat from a butcher, like that one,” said Omar, pointing at a reeking stone terrace, above which hung several carcasses that might once have been water buffalo. “But be very careful, especially in the summer—it’s easy to get bad meat. When you find a butcher you like, stick with him.”

  Neither of us had an appropriately profound response.

  “Chickens and ducks and doves come from poultry sellers,” continued Omar. “Pick whichever bird you like and they’ll kill it for you. Fruits and vegetables should be easy. For bread, go to any bakery. Most are fine. For cheese or oil or olives, anything like that, go to a duken.” He pointed to a small shop similar to the deli near our building.

  “Six stops for five food groups?” I muttered in Jo’s ear. She giggled.

  We wandered through the maze looking for fresh spearmint to use for tea. As we walked, I felt increasingly dizzy and nauseous, stifled under the long shirt and jeans I was wearing. Despite the sun beating down on my head, I began to shiver. I had a feeling that this was not a good sign.

  “Are you okay?” Jo asked. “You look really pale all of a sudden.”

  Little points of light danced in front of my eyes. “I’m fine,” I said, inwardly swearing not to faint in front of all these people. “But I should probably find some shade soon.”

  Jo turned and said something to Omar, who looked over her head at me, concerned. He spoke at a rapid tempo to a man crouched beside several boxes of greens. The man handed him a bundle of mint. Omar turned to me.

  “Do you have fifty piastres?” he asked. “I have a pound but I’m out of change.”

  I didn’t and neither did Jo. The man didn’t have change for our twenty- and fifty-pound notes. He said something to Omar, who thanked him in a long-winded way I didn’t fully understand.

  “He says it’s okay. You can give him the fifty piastres next time.”

  I looked at the man, swaying on my feet. He was grinning at me from under his turban, amused by my obvious discomfort, my out-of-placeness, maybe both.

  “Thank you,” I said in English, forgetting where I
was. Jo took my arm and steered me away from the crowd, toward the shade of the tree-lined square opposite. Omar stood between me and the light like a sundial, casting a slim shadow across my face.

  “Feeling a little better?” he asked.

  “Yes. Just not used to the heat. I didn’t sleep very well last night, either.” At some point, the insomnia caused by adrenal exhaustion had become a physiological tic. Though I was healthy now, it sometimes cropped up again when I was stressed.

  Omar quoted a few lines from Macbeth’s sleep-no-more speech, smiling in a half-blithe, half-bitter way that I would come to associate with moments like this, when his considerable knowledge of western literature showed through. It was knowledge he did not particularly want. He had been educated in the British system, the last cultural and linguistic outpost of the colonial era. In order to learn more about his own society’s literary history, he searched through the shelves of underpatronized Arabic bookstores and taught himself. This was the smile of a man who, like so many in the Middle East, wished his intellect could be put to better use.

  Feeling a little cooler, I looked up and smiled back.

  “When the hurly-burly’s done.”

  “When the battle’s lost, and won.”

  In the weeks that followed, I fell in love with the back of Omar’s head. A family matter called Jo home briefly just before the start of the school year, leaving Omar and me to roam the city together. I can still hear his exasperated voice, in some dark vein of a crowded street, saying, “Please, Willow, walk in front of me or beside me but not behind me. I am nervous when I can’t see you.” I would inevitably lag behind, lost in thought and unable to navigate without following him. I couldn’t take his arm; we touched only to shake hands. That is how I came to know Cairo: walking in his wake, he who had lived there all his life. He was tender with places, sensitive to the way the moods of Cairo changed from neighborhood to neighborhood. The city I was beginning to love had been a passion for him since childhood. Omar searched out the cafés and alleyways that remained undamaged by years of oppression and poverty, and shyly revealed them. The city was our interlocutor in the weeks before we could shut the door on her, when we were, for lack of a better word, friends.

  We started with places where a young white woman would not attract attention.

  “Naguib Mahfouz used to come here to write,” said Omar one night, over a great deal of noise. We were at Fishawi’s, a crowded café inside one of Cairo’s largest fine-goods bazaars. “He sat in that little space over there. There’s a newspaper article framed above his seat.”

  I looked: in a warmly lit alcove behind us was a newsprint picture of Egypt’s Nobel laureate.

  “I loved Children of the Alley,” I said to Omar, my voice half-lost in the din.

  “You’ve read it?” He seemed surprised.

  “In translation. I did nothing but read depressing Arabic novels my last two years of college.”

  “Why?” Omar sounded so repulsed that I laughed.

  “I was taking Arabic lit courses. I had to. Apparently there are no novels with happy endings in Arabic literature.”

  “That’s why we don’t read them,” he said. “Real life is depressing enough. I can’t stand Mahfouz.”

  I laughed again, thinking of my earnest Arabic literature professor. And it was true—of all the Egyptians I would ever meet, a scant handful read books for pleasure, and even fewer read fiction. Omar was in the small minority of readers for pleasure, and owned shelf after shelf of historical and philosophical and religious works, but I would never see a novel in his hand.

  “I’m writing a novel,” I said to him apologetically.

  “Please don’t be offended if I never read it.”

  “I won’t be.” I grinned, and realized I was flirting a little.

  After we left the café, we went to walk along the Nile. The air was humid and thick, slightly sour. “Thank you, by the way,” I said.

  Omar made a dismissive gesture. “I enjoy showing you around Cairo,” he said. “That’s the easy part.”

  “What’s the hard part?” I asked.

  “Showing you the society of Cairo,” he said. “That’s very different.”

  It didn’t occur to me then to wonder why he had said this. I wasn’t used to innuendo. In Cairo interest and affection have to be inferred rather than spoken about directly. Among the middle classes, there is little “dating,” and an offer of marriage must be made before a young man and woman are permitted to see each other alone. I was unaware that my friendship with Omar had already strayed into a gray area because we sometimes met by ourselves—always in public and always with a level of formality, but still unchaperoned.

  In the beginning, he treated me like a beloved, naive younger sister. He patiently answered my questions about language, protocol, and the purpose of random objects—Ramadan lamps and horsehair tassels, God’s eyes, dovecotes. He had much less curiosity about the United States, with the sole exception of music. He was the first to hear African rhythms in jazz and pentatonic scales in hip-hop, whenever either genre played on Nile FM. He loved musical cross-pollination, and talked about starting a rock band that included lutes and tablas.

  “I used to play in a heavy metal band,” he said with a grin, one night when we were at a concert of experimental music at the Opera House. We were in the open-air theater, a sunken courtyard surrounded by a veranda. “Before I gave up the West. I wore a lot of black and ankh necklaces.”

  I looked at him in disbelief. “So did I. God . . . you were a goth.”

  “What’s a goth?”

  “What you were. Someone who wears black and ankhs and listens to heavy metal.”

  He frowned. “But an ankh is an Egyptian symbol.”

  “That’s why we thought it was so cool. Eternal life, mummies, vampires, that kind of thing.”

  “And you were like this?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Yes. By then heavy metal was dying out—we were into Nine Inch Nails and Front Line Assembly and Delirium. I dyed my hair about ten different colors.”

  “I have never heard of those bands. I listened to Black Sabbath.”

  I laughed. “When?” I asked.

  He leaned back on his elbows. We were sitting on cushions at the edge of the theater, on steps that led up to the veranda. “In the early nineties. I was finishing high school. Maybe the first year or two of university.”

  “I started high school in ’95. So we were goths at almost the same time.” This delighted me.

  “And now you’re twenty-one? I’m seven years older than you are.”

  “That’s not so much,” I said defensively.

  “Not so much for what?”

  I flushed. “Not so much, generally.”

  “Ah.” He smiled. “Okay.”

  When the concert was over, we shared a cab back to south Cairo, snaking along the Nile-side boulevard called the Corniche. Beyond the boulevard, in the water, the white sails of pleasure and fishing boats were visible. Somehow we strayed to the topic of love; Omar told me there were four different words for it in Arabic.

  “Hob is love-love,” he said quietly, so that the cab driver wouldn’t overhear. He made a shape in the air with his hands, a transient gesture, attempting to communicate something too abstract to speak about in English. “Hob can be from anyone, for anything—you feel hob for your parents, your sister, for a good friend. For your favorite book or a very tasty mango. Or for the person you are in love with.”

  “Habibi comes from hob,” I said, recognizing the link between hob and one of the first words every newcomer to Egypt learns: my beloved. Habibi showed up in the refrain of every popular song, and was used passionately to refer to close friends and patronizingly to refer to subordinates.

  “Yes, habibi comes from hob,” said Omar. “Exactly. Then there is aishq.” The word began with the letter ayn, the same letter that began his name. It hesitated somewhere between a vowel and a consonant, and began in the very ba
ck of the throat. “Aishq knits two people together. They don’t become one thing, but they make one thing.” Again he raised his hands and laced his fingers together. “Aishq is what you feel for your spouse, what you feel for God. Well, sometimes. I don’t know if what I’m saying makes sense in English.”

  “Perfect sense,” I said.

  The cab stopped at my apartment first. Omar stepped out to sit in front with the driver, as is the custom among men when there are no women to accompany. Before he got into the front seat he reached out to shake my hand, as he always did in parting. For a moment he pressed my hand between both of his. I found I couldn’t look him in the eye. Then he disappeared into the cab, waving off my offer to split the fare. I brought my hand to my face and breathed in. Beneath the tang of dust I caught the faint sharp smell of soap.

  Jo arrived back in Egypt just before our job training was due to begin. Language School had a large campus in Giza, within sight of the pyramids. From the outside it looked much like any suburban high school campus in the States—inside, however, it was a series of bare concrete classrooms without heat or air conditioning. Rows of desks faced dry-erase boards. The bathrooms were coated in grime and sported unsanitary bidets. Despite all this, LS was considered a cutting-edge school, and set tuition proportionately.

  “If it was any barer, it would almost be like they were going for an ultramodern look on purpose,” said Jo when we arrived for the first day of training.

  “Don’t judge.” I gave her a condescending schoolmarm look.

  Jo wrinkled her nose and giggled. Arriving at the school library, we brightened up at the sight of the other teachers. The faculty was evenly split between foreigners and Egyptians and roughly so between men and women. But while the word foreigner denoted the same thing throughout the room—we were all educated and middle class, dressed in the same ambiguous nonstyle of the expatriate—the word Egyptian covered a much more diverse group. Some wore traditional clothes, but others wore Italian shoes and dark jeans, and spoke to each other in English. Of this group, the girls were especially friendly, and mingled with the expat teachers learning names and making introductions. Jo and I were swept up in the familial atmosphere as returning teachers wandered in and shouted greetings to each other, joking about weight gained and lost over the summer.