by Trish Doller
“No?”
“My parents are very open-minded compared to many people of their generation,” she says. “But this would be too much for them. Muslim women may only marry Muslim men.”
“Does that mean—never mind.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She studies me for a moment. “Were you going to ask about my brother?”
“No.”
Maybe I say it too quickly, but the corner of her mouth tilts in a way that suggests she doesn’t believe me.
“The rules are different for men,” Aya says. “It is preferred they marry Muslim women, but they are allowed to marry Christians or Jews. His wife does not have to convert to Islam, but their children must be Muslim. But if we are talking about my brother, I think my mother would not want him to marry someone outside our faith.”
“I don’t want to marry your brother,” I say, my eyes on my sandwich instead of her, so embarrassed that it feels like my face might burst into flame.
“But maybe you would like to kiss him?”
“Oh my God. No.”
Aya laughs so hard I think she might slide off her bench onto the floor. “I’m sorry. I should not tease you. I understand my brother is very good-looking—some of my friends think so—but all the time he is cooking, cooking, cooking, and nothing turns his head.”
“Yeah, he seems really focused on becoming a chef.”
“It is better that way. Men are supposed to save up their money and establish households for their wives before they get married.”
“That’s a long time to be alone.”
Aya shrugs. “We have our families, friends, work, prayer, and Allah. We are not alone.”
She has a point, but it still seems out of sequence to me. Aren’t all those things made better with love? My parents dated enough people to know they were right for each other. They saved their money together. Worked together to make a home—for themselves and for me.
Rather than giving voice to those thoughts, I take a bite of my burger, and everything tastes . . . not wrong, exactly, but the meat, the cheese, the ketchup, even the pickles, taste different. McDonald’s is the one place in Egypt where I expected consistency, but it’s another adjustment I have to make. I put down the sandwich and look at it for a moment, as if it might miraculously conform to my American standards. Then I pick it back up for another bite.
CHAPTER 13
H annah’s face appears on my computer screen and the first thing I notice is the new blond streak in her dark hair. It looks really cute and I tell her so. She pulls the pale color—about the same shade as my hair—through her fingers, and I feel a little sad that she dyed her hair without me.
“I finally talked my mom into letting me do it,” she says.
Mrs. Gundlach is pretty old-fashioned about . . . everything. Hannah wasn’t allowed to get her ears pierced until she was sixteen, her school uniform skirt has always been hemmed exactly to the dress-code regulation length (which is why Hannah always wears pants to school), and her mom would probably disown her if she even thought about getting a tattoo. Permission to put a blond stripe in her hair is a huge victory for Hannah.
“Jess helped me with the color,” she says. “And I have to put it back to normal before school starts.”
“That’s, um—” Bitterness lodges in my chest like a pebble in a shoe. Between Hannah and Owen, it feels as if I have been replaced by Jessie Roth. “That’s cool.”
“She’s not you,” Hannah says quickly. “It’s just—”
“I get it. We can’t freeze time until I get back.” I smile. Change the subject. “How’s the Romanian boyfriend?”
“He’s not—” She glances away shyly with a little smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. On a computer screen it’s hard to tell, but it looks like she might be blushing. “I don’t know how it happened, Caroline. On the first day Vlad was this cute-but-I-cannot-be-bothered-with-this-language-barrier-thing-right-now guy, but working together every day, talking all the time . . . he just kind of grew on me.”
“So have you been on actual dates and stuff?”
“I guess Emilee’s party was our first real date,” Hannah says. “But before that we spent a whole afternoon watching movies in his dorm room. He likes to read what the people on the screen are saying. It helps with his English.”
“Your mom’s okay with you dating him?”
“He ticks all her boxes,” she says. “Clean-cut. Polite. And he’s Catholic. She actually invited him over for dinner.”
With five siblings, dinner at Hannah’s house can be overwhelming. Two of her younger brothers—both wrestlers—are eating machines, while the youngest is still working on his hand-eye coordination when it comes to using utensils. It isn’t safe to sit near any of them.
“If he survived your family, he’s gotta be brave.”
Hannah laughs. “Right? But he has a big family too, so he gets it.”
“Have you kissed him yet?”
“Maybe.”
“Hannah!”
“Okay. He kissed me after I drove him back to the dorms the night he came for dinner,” she says. “He definitely knows what he’s doing. But we won’t tell my mom about that.”
Adam comes to mind and I wonder if he’s ever kissed a girl. Dating might be against the rules, but maybe kissing is a rule he’s broken.
“I hate to ask,” I say to Hannah. “But what happens when the summer ends?”
“I’m trying to live in the moment and just enjoy it, you know? I don’t really want to think about that.”
“Check it out.” I stand up and angle my laptop away from me, so she can see the new chair. Mom found a DIY recipe online for cleaning velvet, which not only woke up the color but banished the old-chair smell.
“Perfect,” Hannah says. “Where did you get it?”
I tell her all about my visit to the Friday Market as I pan the computer slowly around the room, explaining that Adam scored deals on everything that wasn’t from IKEA.
“Wait. Who’s Adam?”
“Okay, so the thing about Cairo is that the traffic is nuts and I don’t have a driver’s license, so when I need to go somewhere, I have a driver.” I settle back in front of my computer. “Adam’s dad is my regular driver, but he’s been sick lately, so Adam took over a couple of times. He also helped my dad build the furniture.”
“Is he cute? Or is he all beardy?”
“What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know.” Hannah shrugs. “My only frame of reference when it comes to the Middle East is Osama bin Laden.”
“He was a terrorist.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I just thought all the dudes there had beards.”
“The Middle East is a huge place—a bunch of different countries that have their own cultures. Not all the men have beards, just like not all the women wear hijabs, but misconceptions like these are how people end up believing that everyone from the Middle East is a terrorist.”
“I don’t think that! Caroline, you know I don’t think that!”
“Just making sure.”
An awkwardness settles over us, but I push through it, hitting send on a picture I took of Adam haggling at al-Gomaa. “Anyway, being cute and having a beard aren’t mutually exclusive, but Adam does not have a beard and he is very cute.”
“Very? I feel like you’re leaving something out of this story.”
“There’s nothing to tell, Hann. He’s Muslim.”
“Ooh! Forbidden romance.”
“No romance.”
My e-mail dings in her in-box and Hannah gasps. “Oh my God! He has Jon Snow hair!”
“Right?”
“Caroline, he’s really hot. Are you sure there’s noth—”
“Who’s really hot? Can I see?” Hannah’s younger sister, Michaela, appears in the corner of the frame, near their bedroom door. Hannah shrieks and shoots out of her chair to slam the door, shouting that Michaela will
regret life if she doesn’t stay out. I can’t help laughing. The sisters share the room, and Michaela—three years younger than us—has always wanted to be a part of whatever we’re doing. It drives Hannah crazy.
“I miss that so much,” I say when she returns to her desk.
“You can have her. I’ll Bubble Wrap her, pack her in a box, and send her to you. Speaking of which . . . it’s box time. You first.”
Sitting on my nightstand is a box wrapped with a brown grocery bag, my address and Hannah’s return address written in black marker. We sent each other care packages, promising to wait to open them until we could do it together. Now I pull the box onto my lap and start peeling away the paper.
“Since I’ve been working so many hours, there’s a common theme to this one,” she says. “I hope it doesn’t suck.”
Inside is a four-piece box of chocolate saltwater taffy, a plush Woodstock, a small woodcarving of my name, and a tiny bottle of sand tied with a bit of twine—all things from Cedar Point.
“It definitely doesn’t suck.” I unwrap a piece of taffy and pop it in my mouth. The taste recalls memories of the amusement park. Hannah’s dad works in the maintenance department so we grew up at Cedar Point. As little girls we had favorite horses on the carousel—we called them ours and pretended to grant other park guests permission to ride them—and as we got older, we turned into bona fide coaster enthusiasts. One evening last spring, when the park wasn’t crowded, we rode the Blue Streak fifteen times in a row. “Now that I’m completely homesick, it’s your turn.”
Hannah tears into her box and pulls out one of the scarves I bought at the Friday Market. It is blue, orange, and red with a bit of orange fringe. I also added a brass Sphinx that I had Tarek buy for me (since I was still afraid to haggle on my own) and a bottle of Egyptian sand.
“This is so beautiful.” Hannah drapes the scarf around her shoulders. “Maybe I could ship myself to you instead of sending my sister.”
“I wish you could.”
“Me too.”
“I should go.” The dawn adhan will be starting soon. Even though I slept a few hours before our chat, it’s still the middle of the night and I’m tired. “Give my love to everyone.”
“Just so you know,” Hannah says, “Owen is not dating Jessie. She likes him, but he only went to Emilee’s party with her because he was too nice to say no.”
One ill-advised text message aside, Owen and I have upheld our agreement. No e-mails. No phone calls. He didn’t even respond to that text. “It’s not my business anymore.”
“Are you over him?” Hannah asks. “Because I don’t think he’s over you.”
“I’m trying to be. He needs to do the same.”
“That’s what I told him.”
“I’ll send you another box soon,” I say, thinking that when Mr. Elhadad is feeling better, I’ll ask him to drive me to Khan el-Khalili so I can find something really special for Hannah. “Love you to the moon.”
“And back.”
We log off and I sit in the darkness, listening to the incessant hum of traffic and the near-constant honking that has become the background music of my life. When the adhan begins, I open the doors and drag my chair onto the balcony to listen. It isn’t so scary anymore, especially now that I’m getting used to it, now that I know people who rise before the sun to say the prayers and perform the movements that accompany them.
My thoughts wander to Adam, and I wonder if he ever grumbles about having to wake so early in the morning and how often he goes back to sleep afterward. Hannah was correct that I didn’t share the whole story. Adam and I are in a gray zone between strangers and friends, but somehow that doesn’t stop me from thinking about him more often than I should. And it doesn’t stop my heart from thumping like a dryer full of sneakers.
After the last strains of the call to prayer fade, I climb into bed and tip into sleep almost immediately.
I wake when my cell phone beeps with an incoming text.
From Adam.
The sun is barely up and my phone says I’ve been asleep for only about five hours. It’s odd that he would text me at all, but even more odd that he would send it so early in the morning. But the oddest thing of all is that he sent the message in the hours after I’d been thinking about him, which means he must have been thinking about me, too.
My father must take a rest from driving for the next two weeks. If you need to go somewhere, please tell me and I will drive you.
What about the restaurant? I text back.
He needs his business more than I need my job and now we have hospital debt to repay.
Will you be able to go back?
There are too many people looking for work.
I stop myself from asking how long it will take to pay off Mr. Elhadad’s medical bills. This is not a boundary I have any business crossing and I don’t want to make Adam feel worse about sacrificing his job. Could it take his family years to pay down the debt? What if they can never pay it back? My heart breaks for Adam, for the dreams he has to put on hold.
I need a driver today. My thumbs fly across the keypad as I decide to keep Adam as busy as possible. My savings—mostly money earned babysitting the Wagner twins down the street—are not bottomless, but I will give all of it to him if necessary.
Destination?
Anywhere. You choose.
CHAPTER 14
The place Adam chooses is an old, walled-off portion of the city where a heavy wooden door is set into an ornately carved stone gatehouse. A blue plaque affixed to the wall reads SHARIA MARI GERGES, but that is only the name of the road, not the landmark. Although there are small clusters of tourists here and there, it is quiet and not crowded with people.
Adam holds open the door for me. I sneak a glance up at his face as I pass and find him watching me with those light brown eyes. Curious eyes. He offers a shy smile and I’m not sure what’s happening, but I think I like it. I smile back. Look away first.
We pass through the gatehouse into a long, narrow courtyard where cacti and palms rise up from garden beds that run down the middle. At the opposite end of the courtyard, a stone staircase leads up to a double-spired church with a cross atop each spire.
“What exactly is this place?”
“The Coptic section of the city is where the oldest Christian churches stand,” Adam says. “And just beyond the walls you will find the oldest synagogue in Cairo.”
“I didn’t realize—I mean, I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that I didn’t think other religions were allowed here.”
“I will not try to tell you that Christians and Muslims always worship peacefully in Egypt,” he says, “because Christians were killed a few months ago in a bombing of the Coptic cathedral. But Egypt has a small Christian population and this place holds some of their history. Maybe your history too?”
Adam could have taken me to a famous mosque or even to a modern Egyptian shopping mall—either of those things would have been perfectly fine—but to bring me to a place of Christian history strikes me as a deliberate choice. A really thoughtful choice. “Thank you.”
“I confess that I have never been here,” he says. “So everything I am telling you is only what I have learned on the Internet this morning.”
“That’s still more than I know.”
“So this church is Sitt Mariam, which means St. Mary, but it is more commonly called al-Muallaqah—the Hanging Church—because it was built on top of an ancient Roman fortress. Inside I think we will see how it is possible to build a church without no foundation.”
The courtyard walls are adorned with brightly colored mosaics of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, angels, and either saints or holy men—even I’m not completely sure—their halos set in golden tiles that sparkle in the sun. One mosaic depicts Joseph leading a donkey carrying Mary and the infant Jesus on its back. I know this image. “This is the holy family’s flight to Egypt.”
When I made my first communion, Grandma Rose gifted me with a thick book fill
ed with Bible stories that I would sometimes read at night before bed. One of the most exciting and scary stories was about how King Herod ordered all the firstborn sons of Judea to be killed because he feared Jesus would one day take his throne, so Joseph took the family and escaped to Egypt. In the story, angels appeared to him in a dream when it was safe to go home.
“None of the Bible stories ever describe what their everyday lives might have been like. They focus on Jesus as an adult, performing miracles and dying on the cross,” I explain as we make our way up the stairs to the church. “So it’s a little surreal to think about his family living here, just being regular people.”
Grandma Irene has a picture of Jesus hanging on the wall of her living room. He has white skin and blue eyes, and Dad always calls him Classic Rock Jesus. Never have I believed Jesus was white—geography and history say otherwise—but being here in Egypt makes it that much easier to imagine. The holy family would probably have looked like the people around me; they would have had brown skin like Adam.
“They traveled through the country for more than three years,” he says. “And it is believed that while in Cairo they lived on the site of what is now the crypt beneath the Abu Serga church. We can see the site if you like.”
“I would.”
Even though my brain has wrapped itself around the fact that Christianity has roots in this part of the world, it doesn’t stop me from expecting the Hanging Church to look like our church back home. Ours is also called St. Mary’s, but it is a Gothic-style Roman Catholic church nearly the size of a cathedral, with soaring arches and big stained-glass windows. So I’m stopped in my tracks when I see that this church is covered in the arabesque patterns of Egypt. Painted designs tangle themselves around the arches between the pillars. Carved wooden patterns cover the walls. Even the woodwork of the pews is an intricate lattice so different from the plain benches at home. But as I stand in the main aisle, the smell of polished wood and candle wax and the faint scent of incense are exactly the same.
“This is really beautiful.”
“It is,” Adam agrees. “The seating is strange to me. At the masjid we have only a large empty space for worship.”