Читать книгу The Butterfly Mosque - G. Willow Wilson - Страница 10

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 errands, 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.

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?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I’m saying.”

I took a breath, caught a yeasty lungful of cat, and began coughing. We continued down the road in philosophical silence.

A few days later, Omar invited us to observe a lesson at Beyt al Oud, the music school where he studied with Iraqi lute maestro Naseer Shamma. The school operated out of an eighteenth-century house built in the traditional Arab style—there was an open courtyard called a salamlek, where concerts and group lessons were held, and above it a screened series of rooms used for practice, formerly the harem. While Omar chatted with Naseer and his students, Jo and I explored the house, admiring the high, painted ceilings and narrow stone stairs, and the latticework balcony where women of the house would sit to observe the men, centuries ago. We were lingering in the balcony when I told Jo that Omar and I were engaged. A lesson was in progress below us in the salamlek, and little melodies drifted up one by one, playful and sad. Omar chatted with Master Naseer near a dry tile fountain. Secluded behind the lattice, we could see everything without being seen. Jo squeezed my hand and said nothing. We listened to the music for a few more minutes before heading downstairs arm in arm.

When we were alone back at the apartment, the questions began.

“What about all the religion stuff? Don’t you think that’s going to cause problems between you?”

“I’m a Muslim.”

Jo immediately looked worried. “You converted for him?”

“No, I converted before we ever said anything to each other. He had no idea I was a Muslim until we had the getting-married discussion.”

“You converted before?” Worry became surprise. “When? Can I ask why?”

A gnawing sensation began in my stomach. I felt like I was back in fifth grade health class, when they separated the boys from the girls and taught us the Latin names for our anatomy and the mechanics of sex, all with a grim detachment that seemed Kafkaesque in retrospect. I could never quite shake this reaction to the question “Why religion?” To me it would forever feel like health class; like condensing something ineffable into a series of events. I knew, also, that I wasn’t really being asked to explain my conversion, I was being asked to defend it. It was this that unsettled me most.

“I tried to be an atheist,” I said plaintively. “It didn’t work.”

“Okay, yeah, but why Islam?”

“I discovered I was a monotheist. Believe me, I was as unhappy about it as you are. That rules out polytheism. I also have a problem with authority, which rules out any religion with a priesthood or a leader who claims to be God’s representative on earth. And I cannot believe that having given us these bodies, God thinks we should be virgins unless we desperately feel a need to reproduce. That rules out any religion that’s against family planning or sex for fun rather than for procreation. Islam is antiauthoritarian sex-positive monotheism.”

“Islam is sex-positive? Come on.”

I fought back my frustration. “In Islam, celibacy is considered unhealthy and unnatural. The best way for a Muslim adult to live is in a committed, sexually joyful relationship with another Muslim adult. That sounds about right to me.”

“You see the way women are treated here. You walk in the streets. It’s like being a hunted animal! If that’s sex-positive I’m the freaking pope.”

“I’m not arguing with that. It’s disgusting and hypocritical and wrong. And I don’t think there’s a single Muslim cleric out there who’d disagree with you. This is not Islam. This is a society in freefall. This place is a mess. Egypt is at a lower point today, today, than it has been in its entire history.” Tirade over, I realized my hands were clenched.

Jo looked out the window, into the street where we were harassed on a daily basis. Cairo was crawling with unemployed, furious, infantilized men who were still sleeping in their childhood beds and taking orders from their mothers. Parents of girls were demanding more and more in bridal settlements and real estate, putting marriage—and therefore adulthood—out of reach for many in this poverty-stricken generation. As the middle class shrank, marital expectations rose; by marrying well, a working-class girl could help her family climb back into a “respectable” social stratum. There was no higher goal than being ibn i’nas or bint i’nas, the son or daughter of genteel people. The stress this put on working-class men was almost unfathomable. These were the men who hunted us and hated us. In their eyes, they had been betrayed by female social mercenaries and denied their dignity by a class-obsessed society. I was marrying into a country on the verge of a meltdown.

Jo turned back from the window and studied me, sunlight illuminating her thick blonde hair. “Are you happy?” she asked.

“I’m happy,” I said. It was a lie; I was terrified. There are few things more overwhelming than love in hostile territory. Despite my anxieties, I couldn’t show any hesitation. My confidence was the only thing that would convince my friends and family that this was a good idea. I had to be disciplined about my own anxieties and focus on calming the fears of others.