The Butterfly Mosque (31 page)

Charisma
is a silly word for this quality of Abdullah's. He didn't go out of his way to be charming or friendly, yet his presence was spellbinding. It was an aura of benign and formidable power, and of great intelligence. Meeting him, it became conceivable that an entire tribe could be organized around a single person. When we went back to Cairo, Sohair would ask me, with a twinkle in her eye,
what I thought of Abdullah, and I could think of no reply but, “Talking with him, I understand how polygamy worked for all those years.” She would laugh so hard she had to hold on to a chair to keep from falling over.

When Abdullah offered to take the four of us out into the desert to visit a hot spring, we said yes almost in unison. We left early the next morning, piling into a colossal, retrofitted Range Rover before the sun was high.

“Ready?” Abdullah asked when we were situated. “You'd better hold on.” The Range Rover had no seat belts. We took off, winding through the palm groves until we reached the open sand. This was the Sahara as it is most often envisioned: the “sea into which no oar is dipped,” dune after dune of vanilla-colored sand stretching a thousand miles into the distance. Even with the rise of modern technology and sophisticated satellite locating devices, it is one of the least-explored places on earth. I watched Omar as we went bumping over the dunes: he was watching the horizon, turning every so often to grin at us in silent glee. Mohab leaned precariously out one window with his video camera, filming, using his free hand to keep the incongruous newsboy cap he wore from flying off his head.

“You'll fall out!” I said as the nose of the truck went up and came down with a jaw-rattling thud.

“No, I won't!” Mohab smiled, gripping his hat, and I caught my breath as we tipped down a thirty- or forty-foot dune toward a tiny oasis sheltering in a broad ditch below.

The oasis—a stand of palm trees, some brush, and a few flowering plants—veiled a deep spring around which the Siwans had built a circular retaining wall. Nearby was a
bamboo shelter where I went to change—not into a bathing suit, but into a cheap galibayya I didn't mind ruining. The path to the shelter went through a dense patch of brush. Abdullah told me, in an offhand unconcerned way, to watch for snakes, and I shrieked and ran the rest of the short way. When I had changed I came back out and joined the men by the spring, which sent little eddies of vapor up into the morning air.

I sat on the retaining wall and dipped one foot in the water: it was the perfect temperature, very warm but not hot. One by one we all slid in, taking seats on the bathing steps that led down from the wall. The palms made dry whispering sounds as they moved overhead and beyond the oasis the sand rose up yellow-white in the sun. When we went back to Siwa proper there would be an e-mail from the State Department waiting in my inbox, asking very politely whether I was registered at the local embassy (I was), but for now I was happy without reservation—the happiest, I think, that I have ever been. I knew then what Heaven must look like: a garden in a desert, all unapologetic and sudden green, where there were friends to talk to and springs to bathe in. You couldn't think about war there, or injustice, or sacrifice, only wonderful simple things. It was un-Babel—everyone present spoke at least three languages, but for a few reverent minutes we didn't need to use a single one of them.

Omar and Abdullah broke the spell, speaking quietly in Arabic. I didn't listen until I heard my name.

“Willow is a writer,” Omar was saying. “She has written about Egypt for western magazines.” Like so many educated Egyptians I knew, Abdullah was trying hard to
believe that the banality and misinformation western media spread about his culture were the product of ignorance, not conspiracy. Earlier he had voiced quiet concern that western outrage over Arab attitudes toward homosexuality was being used as a smoke screen to divert attention from the exploitative gay sex tourism perpetrated by western travelers.

“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.

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”

F
OR 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.