The Butterfly Mosque Read Online Free PDF Page B

to know Cairo: walking in his wake, he who had lived there all his life. He was tender with places, sensitive to the way the moods of Cairo changed from neighborhood to neighborhood. The city I was beginning to love had been a passion for him since childhood. Omar searched out the cafés and alleyways that remained undamaged by years of oppression and poverty, and shyly revealed them. The city was our interlocutor in the weeks before we could shut the door on her, when we were, for lack of a better word, friends.
    We started with places where a young white woman would not attract attention.
    â€œNaguib Mahfouz used to come here to write,” said Omar one night, over a great deal of noise. We were atFishawi’s, a crowded café inside one of Cairo’s largest fine-goods bazaars. “He sat in that little space over there. There’s a newspaper article framed above his seat.”
    I looked: in a warmly lit alcove behind us was a newsprint picture of Egypt’s Nobel laureate.
    â€œI loved
Children of the Alley,
” I said to Omar, my voice half-lost in the din.
    â€œYou’ve read it?” He seemed surprised.
    â€œIn translation. I did nothing but read depressing Arabic novels my last two years of college.”
    â€œWhy?” Omar sounded so repulsed that I laughed.
    â€œI was taking Arabic lit courses. I had to. Apparently there are no novels with happy endings in Arabic literature.”
    â€œThat’s why we don’t read them,” he said. “Real life is depressing enough. I can’t stand Mahfouz.”
    I laughed again, thinking of my earnest Arabic literature professor. And it was true—of all the Egyptians I would ever meet, a scant handful read books for pleasure, and even fewer read fiction. Omar was in the small minority of readers for pleasure, and owned shelf after shelf of historical and philosophical and religious works, but I would never see a novel in his hand.
    â€œI’m writing a novel,” I said to him apologetically.
    â€œPlease don’t be offended if I never read it.”
    â€œI won’t be.” I grinned, and realized I was flirting a little.
    After we left the café, we went to walk along the Nile. The air was humid and thick, slightly sour. “Thank you, by the way,” I said.
    Omar made a dismissive gesture. “I enjoy showing you around Cairo,” he said. “That’s the easy part.”
    â€œWhat’s the hard part?” I asked.
    â€œShowing you the society of Cairo,” he said. “That’s very different.”
    It didn’t occur to me then to wonder why he had said this. I wasn’t used to innuendo. In Cairo interest and affection have to be inferred rather than spoken about directly. Among the middle classes, there is little “dating,” and an offer of marriage must be made before a young man and woman are permitted to see each other alone. I was unaware that my friendship with Omar had already strayed into a gray area because we sometimes met by ourselves—always in public and always with a level of formality, but still unchaperoned.
    In the beginning, he treated me like a beloved, naive younger sister. He patiently answered my questions about language, protocol, and the purpose of random objects—Ramadan lamps and horsehair tassels, God’s eyes, dovecotes. He had much less curiosity about the United States, with the sole exception of music. He was the first to hear African rhythms in jazz and pentatonic scales in hip-hop, whenever either genre played on Nile FM. He loved musical cross-pollination, and talked about starting a rock band that included lutes and tablas.
    â€œI used to play in a heavy metal band,” he said with a grin, one night when we were at a concert of experimental music at the Opera House. We were in the open-air theater, a sunken courtyard surrounded by a veranda. “Before I gave up the West. I wore a lot of black and ankh