The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson Page A

told him to be realistic. He was in his late twenties, an age when Egyptian men are expected to choose a wife and leave the family home. It was time, she thought, for him to make a decision.
    Sohair was a revolutionary. Though Nasser’s dream of a democratic, industrial Egypt had never come to pass, she held on to hope. Her energy and idealism were formidable: at my age she socialized with leftist politicos, earning her translator’s diploma while pregnant with Omar. She and her sons’ father divorced when Omar was in high school. Afterward, she had educated and provided for her children on her own, refusing help from relatives and friends. In recentyears her job as a translator had taken her across Europe and West Africa; in a few more years she would travel to the source of the Nile with a group of backpackers half her age. The hardships she had faced as a young woman seemed barely to register—she had boundless optimism, and was more fearless at fifty than I was at twenty-one.
    â€œDo you have a good relationship with your parents?” she asked me at one point during that first lunch together.
    â€œI do,” I said, running one finger nervously around the rim of my teacup. “And I don’t want to keep secrets from them. I just think it makes more sense to tell them in person, after they’ve had a chance to meet Omar.”
    â€œWhen are they coming?”
    â€œDecember, for Christmas. It’s just another couple of months, so—” I trailed off and fiddled with my teacup again. A couple of months was not a long time, but it was long enough to make me feel guilty for concealing something so important.
    â€œIt’s your choice,” said Sohair, patting my hand. “If you think this way is best, then this is what we will do.”
    We sat down to a traditional meal of ground meat baked in filo dough, with rice and cucumber salad. Ibrahim talked about ’70s power ballads and his fear of scorpions. I laughed when he and Omar argued over heavy metal bands. Ibrahim would later tell their extended family, “My heart is open to her,” calming the fears they might have had about Omar’s American fiancée. I felt safe sitting in the bright living room with Omar and the people who knew him best. At the same time, I wondered if Sohair’s confidence in me was misplaced—I wondered if I knew what was best. I wondered if I knew what I was doing at all.
    Omar’s father was an artist and lived alone on another floor of that same apartment building in Tura, in a flat littered comfortably with evidence of his craft: brushes in jars of turpentine, palettes left drying on newspapers, canvases leaning against the walls.
    â€œMy dear Willow,” he said when Omar introduced us, enunciating each word. “For so you must become: precious.” His name was Fakhry, but to me he was always Amu Fakhry, the word for
uncle
conveying my respect for him as an elder. He was in his early sixties and had a heart condition that made him tire easily, but his expressive eyes were youthful.
    â€œI’m glad to meet you,” I said, and kissed him on the cheek. I handed him the bouquet of flowers I had picked out at a local shop. He smiled, delighted.
    â€œThey are beautiful,” he said, putting them in a green glass vase. “The color, everything is good. I pay attention to these things because I am a painter. I search for details.”
    We looked at some of his paintings. He was a devotee of Picasso, and had copied several of his paintings. A canvas based on “The Frugal Repast” caught my eye.
    â€œThis is amazing,” I said.
    â€œYou like it?” Amu Fakhry seemed pleased. “Then when it is finished, I will give it to you.”
    â€œI would hate to take it away from you—”
    â€œNo, you must have it,” said Amu Fakhry. “Art is not for the artist. Art is for other people.”
    We smiled at each other in