I looked around for Omar. He was sitting in the back of the room with a group of teachers who chatted quietly in Arabic. Many of the women wore head scarves and loose robes in green and ocher. The men were dressed in carefully pressed oxford shirts. There was something a little desperate in the razor-sharp creases of the fabric, as if it was very, very important for these men to make the right impression. When the vice principal called for our attention I sat hastily in the chair next to Jo’s, troubled; I sensed that it would be inappropriate for me to approach Omar in this setting. There were two competing Egypts in the room: that of the westernized upper class and that of the traditionalist. As westerners, Jo and I were automatically considered part of the former group. I realized that for the past couple of weeks, Omar had been sneaking me into his Egypt—a place where I did not belong, and could not be sustained.
I kept looking over my shoulder at him, trying to read his expression. He listened attentively to the vice principal with his arms crossed, and leaned over every so often to comment to the man sitting next to him. I never caught him looking at me. I watched Jo as she took notes on her legal pad, and plotted my next move.
When we broke for lunch, I ambushed him.
“Hi, how are you,” I said, trying to strike a true note between cheerfulness and reserve.
“Bored,” said Omar, smiling. “None of what we are discussing can be applied in an Egyptian classroom. This training program was made for western teachers.” His accent sounded heavier than I remembered.
“That isn’t why it’s boring,” I said, and he laughed. There was a pause. “What are you doing after work?” I asked finally, and cursed myself in silence for sounding forward.
Omar shrugged. “I’ll call you and Jo in the evening,” he said.
“If you want. I mean if you’re free. Don’t feel obligated to find things for us to do.” I could feel myself turning red, and felt childish.
“I don’t,” he said, and turned back to the lunch table.
Omar called that evening, inviting us to meet Nuri, one of his close friends. The four of us went to a café in Maadi. As soon as we ordered, Jo excused herself to go to the bathroom, with a glance in my direction that inspired me to do the same. When the door was shut behind us, she turned to me in alarm.
“It’s two guys and two girls,” she said. “Are we on a date?”
“Jesus,” I whispered, and forced down a nervous giggle. She might be right: as far as I knew, most unmarried Egyptian girls didn’t appear in public with men unless it was in large mixed groups. Ben accidentally dated a girl for weeks before figuring this out.
“What do we do?” asked Jo.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should act really uptight, so they get the idea.”
“Maybe.” She tilted her head with a mischievous expression. “If it is a date, who’s going out with who? Nuri sat down across from you and Omar sat down across from me.”
I felt a stab of anxiety. If I was going to be tricked into a date, I didn’t want it to be with the wrong person.
“Do you really think Omar would sell us out like this?” Jo’s expression had turned serious.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “Let’s just see what happens.”
We went back out with primly downcast eyes. I planned to stay as quiet as possible, but Nuri was a lively conversationalist, and I was soon sucked in.
“I can’t believe you’re going to teach American history,” he said to me over the rim of his coffee cup. His English was excellent, and lethal. “These kids don’t even know their own history. This is exactly the kind of western cultural takeover Egypt is turning a blind eye on.”
“I’d rather teach them their own history,” I said, “but I didn’t set my class schedule.”
“When we try to teach our own interpretation of Middle East history, we get in trouble with the accreditation people,” said Omar in my defense. “They watch what goes on in schools that use the American curriculum.”
Nuri looked disgusted. “Perhaps, perhaps. But it’s fashionable among Egyptian kids now to be illiterate in Arabic. Can you believe it?”
“That’s an exaggeration,” Omar scoffed.
Nuri grinned. “You used to be very concerned about the decay of the Arabic language ya Omar.” He turned to us. “Did you know that he refused to speak English for almost seven years?”
“I got more moderate after that,” Omar said sheepishly, then paused. “Now it’s difficult—I have liberal friends and conservative friends, Egyptian friends, khawagga friends, this religion and that one. I have no frame of reference.”
“To hell with your frame of reference!” said Nuri, tilting his coffee cup up to drain it. “We must make up our own. We must be good people before we are anything else.”
“It’s isolating,” said Omar quietly. “Without a viewpoint that is even a little mainstream, it’s isolating.”
I looked up at him, surprised.
“I know exactly what you mean,” I said.
Later, when Omar dropped Jo and me off at our apartment, Jo found a delicate way to ask whether we had, in fact, just been on a date.
“No!” said Omar, and laughed. “I brought Nuri because he is one of the only men I know who can see women as friends. So I trusted him. No, that was not a date.”
“Oh good!” Jo laughed, too. “We didn’t think you’d do that to us, but we had to check.”
As Omar’s cab disappeared into the dust, I felt less relief than regret. Jo and I kicked off our shoes at the door and went into the kitchen to eat mangoes. I lay my head on the chilly granite counter.
“I have a crush,” I said.
Jo’s eyes went wide. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“How bad is it?”
“Pretty bad. Very bad.”
She paused with a mango in her hands. “Is that a good idea?”
“I’m almost sure it’s a terrible idea.”
“What are you going to do?” Jo slid a knife under the mango’s skin, releasing a flowery scent into the air.
“Maybe nothing.” I lifted my head and pouted at her. “It’s too complicated.” It was, I thought, the politest way to say what I was thinking. In my mind, the idea that Middle Eastern men were dangerous misogynists was an established fact. I had been told as much on television and in newspapers and on film. My experiences being ogled and propositioned in Cairo confirmed it. All that kept me from articulating this was a thin veneer of liberal education, and even that provided no counterargument—only the tepid belief that it was bad manners to generalize.
“You’re not going to tell him?” asked Jo.
“If he doesn’t feel the same way, we would probably have to stop seeing each other. That seems like the kind of noble thing he would insist on. Anyway, there would be too many cultural barriers.” I watched her, hoping this politically correct hint would save me from having to be explicit. “Right?”
Jo smiled. “Of course there would be barriers. But Omar’s not just some guy off the street. He’s smart and sensitive and he’s awfully attached to you.”
“Ugh.” I slumped back down on the counter, feeling guilty. “You’re right. I’m being an idiot.” It disturbed me that I couldn’t unlump Omar from the faceless mass of Middle Eastern men I had been taught to fear. In the back of my mind was a lesson I’d learned watching the movie Not Without My Daughter and reading horror stories in women’s magazines: they always seem like nice guys. It’s only after you’ve gotten involved that you discover the honor-killing wife-imprisoning fundamentalist reality beneath the facade. Were there layers of Omar’s personality I couldn’t see? The possibility made me hesitant.
“I’m very comfortable,” I said to Jo, holding out my hand for a slice of mango. “That’s the problem. I’m very comfortable not dealing with this. Denial is a river in Egypt. I’m so there. I can see it out the window.”
Jo laughed. Unconsciously, I had diagnosed myself: I was very comfortable. I lik
ed having the luxury to avoid messy cross-cultural entanglements. I liked being a non-Muslim so much that I kept my new religion a secret and prayed alone behind a locked door. Even the person I most wanted to tell, the person I couldn’t stop thinking about, knew nothing about my conversion. To the rest of the world, I was an upper-middle-class American white girl with bland politics and polite beliefs, and in this coveted social stratum I was happy. The status quo had been good to me. I was reluctant to abandon it—even for love, even for God.
Road Nine at Twilight
I am not to speak to you—I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone,
I am to wait—I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
—Walt Whitman, “To a Stranger”
WE FOUND EXCUSES TO SPEND TIME TOGETHER. ALL ER-rands, great and small, required each other’s company: on this we silently agreed. I turned down invitations to dinners and parties at expat watering holes in order to go with Omar to souks, tailors, or gritty outdoor cafés where I was the only westerner. I began to anticipate his phone calls in the hours after school, when Jo and I made little meals of bread and olives and stood on our balcony to watch the hazy landscape. At night, Jo often went out with our coworkers; I did nothing that did not include Omar.
One evening he called, sounding depressed.
“I have to see the dentist,” he said, “there’s no use putting it off. I wanted to call to say good night first since I won’t see you until tomorrow.”
“You don’t like going to the dentist?” I asked with mock surprise.
“I hate it. I’m afraid of him, to tell the truth.” He laughed at himself.
“Would it help to have company? I’ll come if you want.”
“You would?” This was a step beyond our cheerful codependence.
“Sure.”
He arrived at the apartment half an hour later.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” he said. “I don’t want you to get bored.”
“Don’t be silly.” I pulled a galibayya tunic over my T-shirt as we left the apartment. The evening was still new, and a wet, dewy scent had settled over Maadi. We walked through the dust to Road Nine, a genteel tree-lined street where old and new wealth mingled. Though antiaristocratic in most things, Omar was picky about dentists.
“It’s the third part of a root canal,” he explained to me as we walked. “I had the second part just before you arrived.”
“You must have been in pain.”
“I was.”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“I didn’t want you to think I was a weakling.” He grinned. I held back a smile, happy at this small sign that he cared what I thought of him.
Since Omar and I weren’t married, engaged, or related, deciding how to arrange ourselves in the dentist’s waiting room was an interesting thought experiment. First, I sat down on a couch across the coffee table from Omar. This, I thought, was appropriately ambiguous. Spotting a man who looked inclined to chat me up, I got off the couch and sat down next to Omar instead. I felt a little thrill of vindication when he turned toward me protectively.
“You look nervous,” I said.
He shook his head, mouth set in a grim expression. “It’s like a phobia,” he muttered. “A dentist phobia.”
“You know what I’ve found helps in situations like these?” I asked.
“What?”
“Playing word games. You know, like I name a celebrity, then you name another one whose first name begins with the first letter of the first celebrity’s last name. It takes your mind off things.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Oh, you know, I say Gary Oldman and you say—”
“Omar Sharif?”
I paused. “There is no letter ‘sheen’ in English. I can see the bilingual element is going to cause problems.”
“Whatever. This isn’t helping.”
I hid a grin with my hand. An assistant called Omar’s name and he followed her into the examination room, shooting me a pained look over his shoulder. As soon as he was gone I felt isolated, shifting under the open stares of the other patients in the waiting room. Hoping to look busy, I flipped through a couple of Egyptian beauty magazines that lay on the coffee table. Somewhere in the bowels of the office a drill started up. I tried not to giggle as I thought of Omar, so collected and dignified, submitting meekly to the dreaded dentist. This was, by far, the weirdest nondate of my life.
Four years ago—no, two years ago—I could not have envisioned this, I thought. I could not have guessed that I would stop drinking at twenty-one, or that a dentist’s office could become the scene of a clandestine romance. I had come to Islam and to Egypt without plans or expectations. I did not know who I was going to become, having made choices that steered me so dramatically off the path I was raised to walk. Everything from 9/11 to the Arab bad guys in action movies made me worry that those choices would lead to tragedy. Instead, they had led me to someone who was familiar from the moment he appeared on my doorstep, someone who cared enough to translate this confounding new reality into a language I understood.
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.