The Butterfly Mosque (22 page)

“I thought this was going to be a fun one-year-adventure-type thing,” she said, “but I really feel different. This place has had a much bigger impact on me than I thought it would.”

“Good or bad?”

“All experience is ultimately good.” She saw my grimace and smiled. “No, no, I'm not just being polite. I will actually miss this city. I've learned a lot, being knocked around here.”

The larger of the two kittens scooted out from under a chair and pounced on the smaller.

“I'm afraid that if I'm knocked around too much more I'll become a completely different person,” I said. “Especially if you're not here to remind me who I was.”

“This is your story now,” Jo said gently. “You'll know what to do. You'll have Omar and Sohair and Ibrahim and your father-in-law and Sameh and lots of other people. Plus, we'll come and see you, and you'll come and see us—”

What she was saying was sensible but I couldn't help feeling a stab of anxiety. Jo's departure would mark a new season of my life in Egypt, one in which I would go for months at a time without seeing another westerner. As Omar and I saw her off to the airport, I was conscious of the bright sun on my shoulders and the wind coming down from the Mediterranean. They seemed like heralds of good news. I hoped I was ready for whatever they brought.

With Jo gone, Omar and I began to think about finding an apartment together. We had several terse conversations about whether this was a good idea—the wedding was still several months away because the American guests didn't have a long holiday before Thanksgiving weekend. From a religious point of view we were already married, so legally we could do whatever we wanted—the Egyptian side of the family, however, would be baffled by the idea that we were moving in together before throwing a wedding. I thought about going back to the United States for the intervening months but Omar couldn't bear to be away from me for that long. As so often happened, we were forced into a compromise that suited no one.

Aware of our culturally precarious situation, everybody did what they could to help us. Omar's uncles and cousins brushed off the awkward explanation of our plans and told
us to go ahead with what we thought was most practical. His female relatives inundated me with advice about how to be a wife, and hints on the psychology of Arab husbands.

“My husband is very helpful around the house,” said a paternal cousin, a jolly mother of one. “I'm lucky—when I cook, he does the dishes. He also cleans up after himself. He's not a traditional man.” She paused.

“That's good,” I said, uncomprehending.

She examined my face with a quick glance, looking for a particular reaction. Egyptian women can read a conversation like a doctor reads a body. Realizing I couldn't understand what she had left unspoken, she smiled kindly. “I think Omar is more of a traditional man,” she said. “He will probably expect you to do everything around the house.”

I stared at her in dismay. “Like what?”

“The cooking.”

“Okay.”

“The laundry. The cleaning.” She hesitated. “Do you know how to cook?”

“No,” I said. I was beginning to feel a little sick.

“That's all right.” She patted my hand. “We can teach you. But you should be prepared—for a woman, there is a lot of work after marriage. Many responsibilities.”

The feeling of sickness increased. I often felt feverish now—it was one of the strange adaptations my body made to cope with the extreme heat. And though I felt hot, my mouth was always cold, as if I had been drinking ice water. When I took my temperature it was inevitably an even 98.6 degrees. The result of all this was that I'd stopped sweating. The body is clever and honest. In heat so relentless
sweat does little to cool you down; instead it robs you of the salts and minerals you need to keep your blood pressure stable. Egyptians do not sweat, not like westerners. Until now I had been pleased and a little awed by my body's ability to adapt, but suddenly it felt like a betrayal—yet another part of me rearranged for an alien way of life.

“Are you all right?” My cousin-in-law frowned.

“Fine.” I stood up, forcing myself to smile. “Thank you.”

I had not been raised to think of myself as a future housekeeper. The idea that housework was demeaning and oppressive had been drilled into me from such a young age and from so many sources that I could not remember where I first came across it. I believed it, and took the maxim to the next logical step: if housework was demeaning and oppressive, it must also be unnecessary. I was confused when the kitchenette in my college apartment got dirty. When dust bunnies accumulated under the bed, I had an uneasy feeling that the world was not functioning as it should. If people were not meant to clean, cleanliness should not require people. I still believed this, however unconsciously, and the idea that Omar might expect me to do nothing but cook and scrub floors filled me with terrifying images of domestic slavery.

He came over to my half-packed apartment that afternoon, where I was sorting through some of the books and utensils Jo had left me. As soon as he was through the door I burst into tears and asked him if he wanted me to spend my days hunched over dripping buckets of laundry.

“Of course not!” He gathered me in his arms. Standing, my head fit neatly under his chin. “Where did you get
this idea? I'm not marrying you to have a servant, I'm marrying you because I love you.”

I looked up at him. “Really?” It was a ridiculous question but I wanted to be comforted.

“Who do you think I am? Listen.” He backed up a step and took my hands. “You have this idea of a stereotypical Arab man in your head, and you keep confusing him with me. You've done it before. You're afraid I'm secretly this man, and that you'll only discover the truth when it's too late. But I'm
not.
”

He was right. Conditioning is very hard to escape, even with effort. I was still haunted by nightmare scenarios. There were moments at night, on the edge of sleep, when I was gripped by intense anxiety about my marriage. In fits like these I would invent paranoid contingencies, ways of fleeing secretly to the airport or the embassy if Omar became a fanatical tyrant.

“Sometimes I'm afraid of you,” I told him, surprising even myself.

He looked hurt. “No,” he said, “No, no. Be angry at me, be frustrated with me, but never be afraid of me.”

He would never give me a reason to be afraid—never lift his hand in anger, or call me a demeaning name, or even raise his voice. Though Omar was mild and reserved by nature, this was also a matter of principle for him. The Prophet, his role model, never beat or belittled his wives, a fact observed with surprise by his followers and contempt by his enemies. Omar took that tradition very seriously. To him, the old Islamic saying that marriage is half of religion
was absolute: his duty to love and protect me was part of his duty to God.

We began looking for apartments in Maadi, a short distance downriver from Tura. We settled on one in a dignified little building owned by a Coptic woman and her daughter. It overlooked a garden, home to a lone mango tree and a straggling English rosebush. The souk and the language center where I took lessons with Sameh were both a short walk away.

On my last day in the Tura apartment, Omar came over humming a little song he'd made up about
“sha'itina,
” my grammatically garbled word for
our apartment.
He insisted my grammar mistakes were adorable and went several years without correcting them; it was left to Sameh to prevent bad speaking habits from setting in. Omar carried bags of clothes to the car while I coaxed the cats into a large birdcage, the best we could do in the way of pet carriers.

“Will you miss having your own room?” I asked him as I put the offended animals in the back seat.

“My own room?” Omar laughed. “Have you forgotten? I've never had my own room.”

I blushed, remembering belatedly that Omar and Ibrahim shared a room, like most Egyptian siblings. In a city as crowded as Cairo, having your own space was a luxury very few people—even wealthy people—could afford.

“Will
you
miss having your own room?” Omar prompted.

“No,” I said, taking his hand. “Being with you is ten times better.”

In a day, I became mistress of a household, part of a network of households that made up Omar's extended family. By my American reckoning, it felt like I'd skipped forward a decade. In my early twenties I was supposed to be independent, living on my own and being spontaneous. That independence would prepare me for life as a wife and mother in a nuclear family, hundreds of miles from my nearest relatives. Instead I had become part of a vast tribe, linked to its communal reputation and destiny, and a participant in its welfare. Independence was replaced by interdependence. I would have to learn how to function in this unfamiliar role, and learn quickly.

The first day we spent in our new apartment was a Friday, the beginning of the Egyptian weekend. I woke up before Omar to survey my little kingdom: a small bedroom with shuttered French doors leading to the balcony, a living room, a bathroom, and a tiny kitchen. The collective space was so small that we had to put our dining table right next to the front door.

Still, it was clean and newly renovated—compared to the old flat in Tura it seemed luxurious. The walls were painted pale yellow and the tiled floor was cool in the dense summer heat. There was a gap under the front door that I hadn't yet noticed—when it admitted a procession of fat striped spiders and the geckos who hunted them, I would. The atmosphere of the place was gentle and expectant, as if the walls were waiting to see how I would cope in the private realm so closely associated with Egyptian womanhood.
Small as it was, this apartment represented one of the biggest challenges I would ever face.

Although Omar was sincere when he said he did not expect me to become a submissive homemaker, he was a man, and had very little idea what it takes to run a functioning Cairene household. There is a reason the
sitt el beyt
—the lady of the house—holds such a revered position in Egyptian society. She is the one who builds relationships with the vendors of the best meat and the freshest fruit, and argues for the lowest price; she knows herbal remedies for dysentery; it is she who cooks for ten people out of three pots when relatives drop by unexpectedly. In Egypt, women create the civilization the men merely live in.

I appreciated the fact that Omar respected me as an equal, but I knew his support was largely intellectual. “If it isn't a man's job or a woman's job to run domestic life, whose is it?” I asked him once, teasing. He tilted his head with an ironic smile. “A maid's,” he said. I clucked my tongue in exasperation. In a world where there is no such thing as bagged salad or microfiber mops, keeping insects at bay and a family fed is a constant occupation. Since people are cheaper than goods in Egypt—the country produces few consumer products, but plenty of labor—maids are employed by housewives starting in the lower-middle class, where the gap between housewife and housemaid may be no more than a few hundred pounds per month. Even when Omar's family was struggling, there had been a maid to tidy the bedrooms and wash the cement floor with kerosene to repel fleas and roaches.

The idea of having a maid made me uncomfortable. I decided to do as much as I could myself, even though this
meant I would spend nearly half of each day in the kitchen and the marketplace. On our first morning in the apartment, I went barefoot into the living room and looked out the window toward the mango tree, organizing my thoughts. I would have to go to the souk and determine which vendors sold the best produce at the best prices. There was the small matter of learning to cook without all the prepackaged conveniences of the first world. If I wanted chicken broth, I had to go to the market, pick out a live chicken, have it butchered, bring it home, and boil it. Laundry would have to become a routine, too. Because few people either owned or had ever heard of mechanized dryers, laundry was a process: after a load came out of the machine, you had to heap it all into a tub, haul it to the window where your clothesline hung, dust the clothesline, hang the clothes, then cover the whole mess with plastic sheeting to protect it from dirt and bird droppings.

This was going to be an adventure.

I dressed and left the apartment, closing the door quietly to avoid waking Omar. I loved being up early in the morning, when you could still hear the birds, and the air wasn't choked with smog. When I remember the route between this first apartment and the souk, something tightens in my chest—I miss the dark little gardened streets dripping dust from every surface. If you tapped a banana leaf you were rewarded with a shower of the stuff, which hit the ground in plumes, dispersing back into the air like drops of ink in water. What I struggled so long to understand about this city would be the thing I came to love most: beauty and ugliness are so crowded together that the
line between the two is faint and you begin to mistake one for the other.

On the first street of the souk there was a particular
fararghi,
or poultry seller, whom I would come to patronize because his birds were reliably healthy. His name was Am Mah-moud. I would go and ask him to pick out a nice-sized chicken, which he would scoop up by the wings from a cage full of squawking inmates and present to me for inspection. If I liked it, he swiftly slit its throat, whispering a
bismillah,
and put it in a barrel to bleed out. Afterward, he dipped it in boiling vinegar and tossed it into a jerry-rigged device that looked like a small cotton gin (and functioned in much the same way) for defeathering. Then he gutted it, calling to the stray cats that inhabited the alley; familiar with the sound of his voice, they would come running for scraps. The bird I would cook for lunch was finally handed to me in a plastic bag, rinsed clean and still warm.