The Butterfly Mosque

by G. Willow Wilson

“I’m not an ignorant man,” he had said, “I know there is homosexuality in every culture. But these boys who are involved are all very young and very poor, and willing to do anything for money—it’s child abuse.”

  Apparently they had returned to the same subject: Abdullah was talking about the way women’s society functioned in Siwa and how it was difficult to describe to outsiders because it was hard even for other women to participate in it. Omar told him about the profile of Sheikha Sanaa I had written, which had recently been published in Canada’s National Post.

  “Really?” Abdullah looked at me with a more frank, appraising expression than his former reserved one—it was a shift I was used to by now; among men I was often very quiet, much more quiet than most Egyptian women. Silence, the apex of modesty, was my best weapon against common male assumptions about my availability. With women it was different—I could talk and laugh and be more open about my opinions. My female friends accepted my unusual profession almost without question, but most men were surprised to learn that a woman who spoke so little in person addressed an audience in print. Abdullah’s surprise was brief.

  “What do people say to what you write?” he asked.

  I thought of the reaction to the women’s car piece.

  “Awful things, sometimes,” I said, smiling without conviction. “It’s hard to help people understand something they’ve never seen—ideas they’ve never heard of. Everybody’s scared. I don’t really think it’s possible to make a dent in this—” I waved my hand vaguely; the clash of civilizations was implicit.

  “We yet may,” said Abdullah. His tone was quiet and confident, not patronizing. It surprised me. Most people seemed to encourage me out of fondness, or, like Sheikha Sanaa, told me to pray and be good and not worry about other people.

  “And if not,” Abdullah continued after a pause, “we have our own lives.” He looked out past the foliage at the sand, and I wondered if he, too, saw this place as evidence of divine mercy. He turned back and smiled at me. No doubt shadowed his face.

  Flood Season

  The last of earth left to discover

  Is that which was the beginning;

  At the source of the longest river

  —T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

  FOR THREE YEARS, MY FATHER-IN-LAW HAD BEEN ASKING me to visit the Mahmoud Khalil Museum of Art with him. I was the only member of the family who had not heard his theories about Picasso and the French School a dozen times, and I still enjoyed listening to these little lectures. Talking with him, I discovered I’d absorbed a dismal amount of information through years of public school French, and did my best to be a good conversation partner. But something or other always came up to postpone our trip to this museum, which, according to Amu Fakhry, housed the largest number of Impressionist paintings in North Africa. It did not have much competition.

  A day came in the summer of 2006 when the weather was too hot to do anything but browse in an air-conditioned building. We drove down the Nile in middling levels of smog, and I pulled at my head scarf, letting gritty air pour over my face. The museum was a white villa flanked by lawns: beautiful in the jaunty, out-of-place way that all colonial architecture was beautiful. I waited in the shade as Amu Fakhry argued with the ticket taker, insisting that I should count as an Egyptian, and not have to pay the tourist price. I began to feel depressed.

  “Yalla,” said Amu Fakhry, holding the counts-as-an-Egyptian ticket over his head triumphantly. I smiled and took his arm as we went through the front door.

  I felt as though I was back in Boston. Everything was cool and quiet; there was a marble staircase with a red runner, rooms with large windows, vases of flowers, and paintings arranged in a way that demonstrated an articulate understanding of what they represented. The paintings themselves were plentiful—works of Degas, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Manet, and the odd John Singer Sargent from an earlier age. Gathered around them were groups of fine-art students, quartets of veiled girls murmuring to each other over their drawing boards, charcoals flying, sketching windmills and nudes.

  Their quiet engagement was striking. There is usually such noise when Egypt and Europe encounter each other. In the Valley of the Kings the tourists bark and laugh in echoing tunnels, and at French or American movies Egyptian mothers admonish their children to look away during kissing scenes that have escaped the censors, as if each culture must defend itself against the beauty of the other. If the art is beautiful then the ideas are beautiful, and this cannot be if the opposing culture is strange and backward. We decide what is civil in ourselves by deciding what is uncivil in others.

  We wandered into a room whose centerpiece was an enormous rectangular canvas. It had been painted over a hundred years ago by a Frenchman, and depicted a group of Nubian women carrying their washing to the banks of the Nile at flood, somewhere in what is now Sudan.

  “See,” said Amu Fakhry, gesturing a circle around the canvas with his hand, “the artist was a master, he draws your eye down the right side, past the women, to the brightness of the water, then up again past the temple on the other side of the river, back to the women.” He laughed with delight. “It is marvelous. Here we have found something.”

  I looked more closely at the canvas. There was a spot that troubled me—from far away it was nothing, but up close it exposed itself as a dark place in the water at the edge of the river, disguised as a stray eddy over a rock. But it had once been something else. I stepped back in surprise.

  “This was a man. There was a man here, and the artist painted over him,” I said, pointing to the spot.

  Amu Fakhry bent toward it. “Perhaps,” he said.

  I looked at the spot again. Sure enough, crouched in the water, swirling something in a sieve, was a man. The women were all looking at him impassively and his head was tilted toward them as if he was about to speak. Why had he been omitted?

  I stepped back again to look at the painting as a whole. The artist had captured the heaviness of the river and the weight it imparts to everyone around it. The women had that drowsy-alert look that announces summer along its banks, when the heat is so intense that the middle hours of the day are spent in thick, tropical sleep, the body’s only defense against the season. The artist knew all this; the heat seemed to hang in the air of the painting, shimmering on the bare limbs of the women.

  I thought, The women are unveiled. Their arms are showing. Of course he couldn’t have included the man. To do so would have destroyed the authenticity of the painting. The artist had given up his original vision so that the painting told the truth. It was beautiful, and it was true, and it was painted by a westerner. The women were left alone in the space sacred to them; they stared not at a man, but at a river, the river, swollen with flood.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Amu Fakhry.

  “Home,” I said.

  Omar and I had discussed moving to the United States off and on throughout our married life, but only in the abstract. He was uneasy with the idea. And as long as he didn’t have a green card, it would be difficult for us to visit my family together. When Omar picked up a tourist visa packet—half an inch thick—from the American Embassy downtown one winter, the consular official who handed it to him gave him a strange look. If Omar was married to an American, why didn’t he just apply for permanent residency? Omar told him he didn’t intend to live permanently in the United States. The official said it would look very strange for the spouse of an American to apply for a tourist visa. When we opened the application at home, we discovered that it required Omar to have more money in the bank than both our savings accounts put together—proof that he did not intend to immigrate illegally. I put my head down on the table.

  “This is too complicated,” I muttered. When I had gone to renew my Egyptian residence visa at Mugamma several months earlier, a government employee in a blue head scarf called me her beloved and asked me how long I wanted to stay.

  Omar petted my head. “Don’t be upset,” he said. �
��Please.”

  “What if we just did it?” I asked, “The whole thing? Lived in the U.S. for a few years so you could get citizenship, and we wouldn’t have to deal with all this visa crap anymore?”

  My husband took a breath and smiled. “Okay. Let’s think about it.”

  I wanted to spend at least part of my adult life in my own country. By leaving the United States right out of college and promptly getting married, I skipped the extended adolescence that is such an important part of American life. I could not define how I was different: in some ways I felt much older than friends my age, but in others I felt almost naive. At an age when most women were still dating, I was married, caught up in establishing a household and settling down. But because I was a woman, I was sheltered in Egypt in a way I wouldn’t have been in America. I had no idea how to operate a car beyond turning the key in the ignition; I couldn’t change a tire or even check fluid levels. I didn’t know how insurance worked. In Egypt it would be unthinkable to ask a woman to move something heavy, or perform a mechanical task more complex than changing a lightbulb; even today I have to remind myself to attempt these things on my own before asking for help.

  What I could do is barter. Using herbs, I could cure a mild case of dysentery without antibiotics. I could tell if the live duck I was about to buy was overfed to make it look healthier. I could argue with a man holding a semiautomatic rifle without feeling afraid. I could write a thousand words a day while fasting. These were the things I knew. All the strengths I had developed as an adult were Egyptian strengths. Yet I was not Egyptian, and barely a day went by when I did not feel an eddy of restlessness.

  Omar had never traveled west of Morocco, and never lived anywhere but Cairo. When I met him, he did not have a bank account—having grown up in an African cash economy, he’d never needed one. Like most Egyptian lives, his had very little paper attached to it. There was no orderly proof of his education beyond a certificate made of cheap copy paper proclaiming him a Bachelor of Science; there was no certified trail of letters to describe his self-directed study of history and linguistics, equal at least to an MA.

  “I don’t want to be one of those immigrants who’s treated badly because they can’t prove anything about themselves,” he fretted.

  “We won’t let that happen,” I said, though I was afraid of the same thing. As we began the green card application process, I was surprised to find I felt more restless instead of less so. Our lives, from this point onward, would be unwieldy and nomadic; going home would always mean leaving another home behind. By this time, we owned an apartment in a suburb of Cairo, filled with arabesque wooden furniture from one of the last traditional workshops in the city. Even when my life in Egypt frustrated me—which was often—I felt anchored to it. It was reassuring. It was something I had created from the ground up, on my own. Home-sick as I was, I would return to the United States as something of a stranger, without a credit history, a rental history, or professional roots in any particular place. Something Ahmad told me in Iran—at some tea shop or other—haunted me: “If you want to leave your country, leave before you’re thirty.” He never mentioned how best to return.

  I watched Omar closely during trips to the American Embassy, looking for signs of anxiety or fear. I knew he was doing this for me. The material comforts of the first world didn’t tempt him much; he was satisfied with the spiritual comforts he had at home. He had mastered his environment. As Omar leaned back in a plastic chair outside the intake area of the embassy—containing more Americans than I’d seen in nearly four years—I felt a little eddy of guilt. Being Cairene is not like being American; Cairenes are specialists, with skills and instincts unique to their unforgiving city. Americans live in broader strokes, taught to paint over whatever cultural surfaces they encounter. Both are immune to assimilation, but for very different reasons.

  “Bitfakari fi eh?” Omar asked me; What are you thinking?

  “Nothing.” I smiled and touched his hand. We were an island in a sea made up of damp official forms, dimpled along the edges where their owners clutched them. This was a waiting room in every sense. Around us were middle-class Cairenes in their best suits, listening for their numbers to be called. A delegation of Coptic monks sat in a row. Anxious eyes told me that for many of these people, America meant an escape—from political oppression, chaos, social upheaval, economic strife, or fundamentalism, any one of a hundred things. But not for Omar. He sat with a sad half-smile, his long fingers folded in his lap. For Omar, America meant exile.

  I knew I was risking my marriage by taking it across the Atlantic. New York, Boulder, Boston; these places would never be to Omar what Cairo was to me. But the United States was my home, and I couldn’t go the rest of my life with my back turned to it. I might begin to forget what I was. But would we forget what our marriage was, once we uprooted it? I wondered. Omar wondered, too. When we began filling out his visa application, he asked me whether I would love him in America the way I loved him in Egypt. Yes, of course, I insisted. The third party in our marriage—geography—said nothing, but waited in the background to be recognized. Omar could hate America. If he did, I might never be able to live in my country again. There was no certainty. Then again, there never had been—all love is risk. We would go forward and hope. The rest was written on our palms, an inscrutable poem known only to God.

  Early that May, Omar’s green card came through. We made plans to leave Egypt in late June. In the interim, we unknit our Cairene lives, pulling out the stitches that bound us to people and things. Our car we left in Ibrahim’s capable hands. My house plants went to cousins who lived down the street. Spare keys went to Sohair, who promised to check on our apartment twice a month.

  Since moving to the far side of Cairo, we had only been in the habit of visiting Sohair, Fakhry, and Ibrahim in Tura twice a month or so. Once we set the date of our departure, we started going once or twice a week. The drive became a ritual: we crossed a short interim of desert to meet the Ring Road, followed that for a while, then went south along the Corniche, hugging the Nile. That stretch of road and river are perfect in my memory. I can close my eyes and see a succession of minarets: as you exit Tura Bridge there is one directly ahead of you and one on your left; then comes another, smaller, nestled in a slum; then there is a beige stretch of wire-topped wall, patrolled by policemen half-asleep on matched horses; and behind that wall is the butterfly mosque. Still in prison, but not imprisoned, it sits patiently, stone on stone, as if it has folded its wings and come to rest at the bottom of the jar, waiting for the inevitable day when the jar will crack. The prison may be gone in ten years, destroyed in one of Egypt’s intermittent coups and revolutions. Or it may stand another hundred. It doesn’t matter; the mosque will outlive it. On the day the dissidents inside those walls are freed, the mosque will be free also. It will unfurl; it will catch the light as the sun goes down across the river, and proclaim that it, too, has a destiny.

  Since we would be separated from molokheya (a spinach-like soup) and stuffed doves and real baklava, Omar’s relatives wanted to feed us. There was a rush of family lunches. Aunties made their signature dishes, the desserts they knew I liked, and the twenty or thirty of us who were closest in our vast tribe sat together for hours, each one unwilling to be the first to leave. I was reminded, with pain whose intensity I did not expect, of the strange, limping last weeks I had spent in the United States before moving to Cairo. It was a burden to be so loved. I felt unworthy of it.

  “I honestly don’t know what I will do on Monday and Wednesday afternoons,” said Sameh the last time I saw him. It was a thick evening, the air clogged with the perspiration of the Nile and the filth of human industry. He sat in his office at the language center, talking to one of his students from the Delta—who, just as Sameh predicted, stared at me slack-jawed and unspeaking for the entire duration of my visit. Sameh gave me a morose, sympathetic smile.

  “To think—at our first lesson you could barely put four words together,” h
e said. “Wa delwa’ti bititkellimi wa betif’hami. Enti misrayya ba’a, khalas.” (“And now you speak and understand. You’re Egyptian, it’s over.”)

  “Hashoofak b’khayr,” I told him; I’ll see you well. It’s something you say when you’re only leaving for a little while.

  Sameh nodded. “In sha’allah.”

  During the last couple of weeks before our departure, I took to wandering the city by myself. It was an odd thing for a man to do, and unheard of for a woman. Cairo is not conducive to wandering. It presses on you like a dirty hand, and with a stinking mouth shouts in your ear. If you’re wise, you take a cab or a car or the subway from point to point, and shut out as much of the in-between as you can. But I was leaving. I could afford to spend myself on the city. I walked through the alleys behind the Mosque of Imam Husayn, dense with the smells of fat and cumin, and was amazed to remember a time when these things were unfamiliar. Sometimes I took a book with me and sat at a café alone. During the day, Fishawi’s—the famous ahua (café) at the heart of Khan al Khalili, where Omar and I had one of our first conversations—was almost quiet. I could drink black tea with mint and watch the sunlight bake the carved wooden doorways, undisturbed, under the bemused, oddly tender watch of a handful of day waiters.

  When I could, I visited Husayn itself. The mosque is not as grand as Sultan Hassan or as whimsical as Al Rifa’i, where the last shah of Iran is entombed. But the presence of the shrine—the gilt house of unseen remains, the last physical traces of the last imam holy to both Sunnis and Shi’ites—makes its atmosphere unforgettable. The imam was among the last people to whom I said good-bye before we left. It was a day in June when the heat was tempered by a wind off the Mediterranean: you could tilt your head up and catch a water-drenched breath of oxygen, proof of some more rarified existence in some other place, beyond the city. I took off my shoes at the door of the mosque and walked inside on bare feet. The women’s side was crowded: girls, young boys, and their mothers and grandmothers sat in bunches and rows, praying or talking quietly. I threaded my way toward the shrine. Picked out in silver and marble, it stood at the center of the mosque, accessible from either side. Men and women, hushed or reciting Quran under their breath, pressed against the railing that protected the imam from too much adoration. I found an empty spot next to a woman in a dust-spattered abaya. She gave me a little smile and patted my hand. I lost my composure. Standing there, in the damp human crush of my religion, I began to cry. Not for the things I was leaving, but for the things I was taking with me—all I had fought for, all I had lost, and a joy so potent it felt like pain.