Anxiety among Egypt’s Copts has only grown since the revolution. Enas more than once told the story of a group of villagers who attacked a Coptic landlord in Upper Egypt in March who they suspected of having an inappropriate relationship with one of his female Muslim tenants. “They cut his ear off!” she would say, her hand moving swiftly across her neck and ear. Meanwhile, abuses began to hit closer to home. Enas’s mother, Samira, who is 77, and her aunt, who is 75, shared an apartment and were routinely harassed by a neighbor, an older Muslim man. One day when the grandchildren were visiting, the neighbor became particularly vicious. “He let his dog loose on the children and called us heathens,” Samira told me, her eyes tearing up. “He had always been abusive, but after the revolution, he had more freedom to exercise it.” Shortly after the incident, Samira and her sister moved in with the family; the two elderly women now share a tiny bedroom with Enas’s three daughters.

During the spring, the family stocked up on food and other supplies, and whenever Ayman traveled abroad, the family would stay indoors; the girls didn’t go to school. It didn’t help that their local police station, looted during the revolution, had not reopened (although “the police do nothing for the Copts” is a common refrain). “We don’t feel safe without Ayman,” Enas said on one of my first visits to the family. She walked to the front door and pulled out a six-foot wooden staff from behind some cabinets. “For protection,” she said, laughing nervously. Ayman, who was sitting nearby, went to the other room and came back with a handgun he recently purchased. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It shoots blanks.”

The middle class and the educated intelligentsia have been leaving Egypt and the Middle East for decades — for America, Britain, Australia — seeking the stuff of a better life: higher-quality education, rosier business prospects, cleaner air and nicer parks. The U.S. green-card lottery is a frequent topic of discussion and intrigue, and in some neighborhoods, a person who manages to leave is referred to as a khawagga, or foreigner. And yet the revolution of Jan. 25, which was supposed to make Egypt a more hospitable place to live, may motivate more families to leave than ever before. If post-Mubarak Egypt inspires fear in people like Ayman, it may be pushing away the very people it needs most to build its new democracy.

By April, with frenzied discussion about rising Salafism in the newspapers, on talk shows and in living rooms across the country, Ayman and Enas began openly talking about moving to the United States. “I know many people there,” Ayman told me, pulling out a stack of business cards. They bore names of cities and neighborhoods with Egyptian populations: Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, Arlington, Va., Jersey City. One of his friends, he said, runs a supermarket, and another buys and sells cars. Ayman was planning to claim asylum on the grounds that Egypt had become unsafe for Copts. Though he had heard that lawyers could sell him a story — for $4,000 — he was not interested. “I won’t lie,” he said. “And I haven’t made up my mind 100 percent. After 43 years, leaving everything I have built, it’s not easy. I would be starting from the beginning.”

Leaving Egypt would mean relinquishing multiple comforts: a close-knit family; long, lazy evenings at the coffee shop, smoking a water pipe; a solid career; not to mention the difficulty of negotiating life in another language. What if Ayman had trouble finding work? What if work was all he did? It would be hard on Enas too. Though naturally sociable, she didn’t have close friends in America as Ayman did — nor did she speak English. She spent a good deal of time worrying about leaving behind her elderly mother, whom she called her “best friend.” The idea of America fluctuated for them between seeming like a land of bounty and a harsh, foreign place.

“It could be heaven or it could be hell,” Enas told me one day as we talked through the questions running through her head. “We will be walking into the unknown.”