WE SPEND THE FIRST FEW DAYS OF CLASSES reviewing tedious sentences meant to teach us impossibly obscure grammar, including how the numbers one and two, three through ten, and eleven to nineteen all require different rules. But my heart is not in it, and while the teacher is writing out sentences I let my mind wander off to the streets of my old neighborhood in Boston, or the scent of food from the Chinese restaurant around the corner of my old house, the sound of the wind rustling through the trees in autumn, and most of all, the man I left behind.
At the end of the week, after working from the blackboard, we buy our Arabic textbooks at last, photocopied and bound in bright pink plastic, nothing like the gorgeous textbook of calligraphy I’d been dreaming about. Still, for a moment I’m excited enough about Arabic to pull myself from my reveries and to focus again on why I’m here. I’ve been waiting years to learn Arabic in an Arab country, to finally read the love poetry of the famous Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani or perhaps excerpts of a short story by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani in the original. I’ve always found Arabic to be a language of stunning beauty, and in poetry it becomes music. It is the language Muslims believe that God used when he revealed the Quran, choosing the most perfect language, the one that all people will speak when they arrive in paradise. For Arabs, to learn Arabic is to stumble through the language of God.
I open the first page of my textbook and run my fingers along the columns of curls and loops moving backward from right to left across the page. I have never held a book containing so much of a foreign language with the knowledge that I will actually eventually decipher the meaning of the words. When Christine, the fluent Canadian, volunteers to read from our opening text, for once I feel a surge of joy upon hearing her voice.
She reads the first sentence quickly and flawlessly, and I silently translate it to myself. Then I repeat it once again in my mind, trying to sort out where I went wrong. Today, the distribution of food is more dangerous than the atomic bomb.
I scan the classroom to see if the other students are also confused. My teacher is busy flashing his hands open and making explosive noises. When he says Hiroshima, I know that I have translated correctly. I write atomic bomb in English in the margin of my text before continuing on to the remainder of the article, which describes how developed countries are able to control poorer countries by cutting off their access to food.
This is how I learn that there will be no poetry, and that our classes will be an occasion to learn the language of Baathism, the story of class struggles and the cold and dry vocabulary of war. Though I still don’t know how to order in a restaurant, in the next week I’ll learn the words unemployment, depression, suicide, famine, and starvation. Instead of memorizing Arabic poetry, I’ll read about the crisis of Syrians from the countryside moving to the city. I’ll memorize the words soldier and war, politics and explosion, and learn my grammar through a story of a freedom fighter from Libya who refuses to be paid for his deeds.
A few days after our first text, we come upon a word that no one in the class recognizes, fard. My teacher is left to communicate via charades. He pretends to push the chalkboard. He presses his fist against his hand. Then, his face brightens.
“America tries to tafrid its opinions on the rest of the world,” he announces triumphantly in Arabic.
Everyone nods and scribbles in their margins obediently. I continue looking at him in bafflement, until I finally register the meaning and rush to record it on my text. To force, I write down in my margin. As in America tries to force its opinions on the rest of the world.
5.
WHEN I RETURN HOME FROM SCHOOL in the afternoon, exhausted and deflated, Juanez is waiting for me in his green track shorts and tank top, the door to his tiny room propped open, the sound of an Arabic soap opera escaping from his television. After I have taken two steps into the courtyard he jumps out of his seat and starts gesturing to me wildly, waving me into his room.
“Hey Grandfather, were you at school?” he asks suspiciously.
“Yes, I was at school.”
“Have you showered?”
I shake my head. I don’t know how I could have showered if I was at school.
“Okay, yalla, yalla, hurry up, go take a shower,” he says, dismissing me with his hand. “I heated up the water for you.”
After two and a half weeks in the house off Straight Street, I still cannot determine if the Baron loves me deeply, desiring to dote on me at every opportunity to reveal his affections, or if he simply thinks that I am completely incompetent. I am confident that, given encouragement, I could heat the shower water myself. Not that I can actually call what we have in our bathroom a shower. Our old, traditional house did not originally have a bathroom, as the people who once lived here did their bathing in the hammams, or public baths, that were once a staple of social life in all Arab cities. In recent years my neighbors have adapted a concrete storage room in the corner of my kitchen to double as a bathroom. Yes—when the Baron told me that I had my own bathroom, he neglected to mention that I also shared it with all of the other members of the sprawling household, who enter it via “my” kitchen door. He also forgot to mention that there is no bath, no shower, and no shower curtain in this bathroom. “Bathing,” in our washroom, means sitting on a red plastic stool and scrubbing myself down with soap, then filling a bucket full of hot water and pouring it over my head.
I’m actually lucky—bathing in my house works on the class system, and as a result of my inflated rent I’m allowed to bathe every single day in “my bathroom,” a privilege normally reserved only for the Baron. The rest of the house can only bathe every Thursday, when they file one by one down from their rooms and scrub off a week’s worth of grime and smoke. Still, it’s hard to think of myself as lucky as I sit on the plastic stool, turn the rusty metal spigot, and fill up the small metal basin with the almost scalding water the Baron has prepared for me. I dip in a plastic bucket, ladle out a portion of water, and pour it over my head and repeat until my whole body is at least moderately wet. I scrub myself with olive oil soap. Then I sit for a moment, naked, covered with soapsuds, on that red plastic stool and remember what life was like not long ago, emerging from the shower and into a warm flannel robe, to drink a cup of tea and speak to the man I loved, in my own language.
When I finish rinsing off, I quickly dress, slightly suspicious of how thin my curtains have worn through the years, and then peer out of my front door and wave into the Baron’s room to signify that I’m done.
“Have you finished?” he always asks, as though I might have stopped a shower in the middle because I suddenly felt the urge to chat.
I nod in reply. “Well then, Na’iman, Grandfather, may you be blessed,” he answers, bestowing on me the traditional Arabic blessing for those who have just showered or received a haircut.
“Allah inam aleek, And may God give you pleasure,” I respond. And then he rushes into the shower himself, before the water gets cold.
Apparently, the Baron interprets the fact that I speak Arabic at roughly the level of a second grader to mean that I actually possess the mental capacity of an eight-year-old child. He speaks to me very loudly, repeating everything two or three times. He is alarmed that I do not understand Syrian household appliances, and out of courtesy and lack of Arabic vocabulary, I have chosen not explain to him that these models have not been used in America for several decades. How can I not know, he asks me in frustration, that a toilet can be flushed simply by pouring a full bucket of water down it? How, after twenty-seven years on earth, did I not understand how to operate a central heater, called a sobba, powered by a small and to my eyes potentially lethal tank of slowly dripping petroleum? When my fan breaks, he calls in a repairman to take it apart and rebuild the engine. How do I not know that this is cheaper than buying a new fan with all new materials?
When the Baron finishes his shower, he knocks on my window, a sign that it is time for the second of our daily coffee sessions. Now that I am in schoo
l, we are down to three coffees a day. The first daily coffee session is for waking up, the second is Arabic pop quiz, and the third is for the evening news. The second is a cruel variation on Chinese torture.
The Baron waits until I take my seat, and then he casually pours me a cup of coffee. He turns down the sound on the television, takes a seat across from me, leans over the table, and asks, “How long have you been here? Two weeks already? When are you going to learn to speak Arabic?” He sadly shakes his head in disbelief, then reaches across the table and knocks on my skull, pretending to listen to a hollow sound. “Is there a brain in there?” he inquires. Then, without giving me time to respond, he points to the trash can.
“How do you say that in Arabic?” he demands.
This continues for half an hour. He manages, with frightening telepathy, to ask me only words that I do not know the Arabic equivalent to. What! I don’t know the word for “freezer”? For “ceiling fan”?
He opens his refrigerator and pulls out an obscure Armenian pastry that I have never seen before, waving it in front of my face like a fish in front of a dolphin’s mouth.
“What is this?” he demands. Five hundred grams of fat, I think to myself. “Shaobiyya,” he says. “Repeat after me.” I parrot his words, and he hands me the pastry in reward. I dig in.
Five minutes pass before he casually asks, “Grandfather, what is that you’re eating?”
There is no escape. Even if I do know the word in Arabic, he mocks me for not knowing the word in the Syrian dialect, which, when I learn it, he replaces with another word with a slightly different meaning, but which he insists is more appropriate.
He holds out a coffee cup for my inspection. “What’s this?”
I smile proudly. “That’s a kass.”
He groans. “A kass is a cup. That’s a finjan, a coffee cup. How many times have I told you that?”
He grills me on Lebanese actresses, on types of liquor, on random varieties of Armenian sausage. After the first humiliating session, I returned to my room, took out my scissors, and spent the next several hours taping up small paper squares all over, identifying wall, floor, window, salt, pepper, butter, and, of course, trash can in Arabic until the rooms around me resembled a kindergarten classroom. Now, they are the first things I see when I wake up in the morning, the slips of paper fluttering in the wind sobering reminders of just how much I do not know.
6.
MY FIRST ARABIC TEACHER once explained to me that there is more than one word for returning in Arabic: irjah means to simply return anywhere, but aouda means to return to a place that belongs to you. You can irjah to the supermarket, but you aouda to your homeland. Aouda has the quality of the sacred about it.
Sometimes when I trudge back to the house after school, or when I watch those two birds alighting in the tree each evening, I wonder if aouda can even apply to me anymore. Do I even have a home? Other than the Baron, who has nothing better to do with his time, is there anyone left out there in the world waiting for me? If I disappeared, would anyone even know that I was gone?
Every morning when I awaken in Damascus, in that brief space between the merchants shouting outside and the appearance of the Baron’s face in the window, I lie in bed and think about the life I’ve lost. I try to picture myself a few weeks ago on the other side of the world, in a steel-blue house on a quiet, oak-lined street in Cambridge. I’m wearing a thin floral dress with small straps at the shoulders. Mark has just returned from the library. From our bedroom window I watch him park his bicycle against the tree in the front yard. Then I run to the kitchen and flip open a magazine, so that he can’t tell that I’ve been waiting for him.
Beside me, the rings from our morning cups of tea are still visible on the breakfast table, and I rub at them gently with my fingertips. The tree outside the kitchen window is blooming white flowers. A few minutes later Mark walks in and wordlessly sets a CD of tango music into place and pours us two glasses of red wine. Then he reaches over and pulls me up from the table and folds his hands into mine.
I resist him until he pulls me up closer to him, and then I stand on top of the toes of his heavy black shoes. He moves me like that, picking me up with every step, until he finally lifts me off the ground entirely and swings me over the kitchen tiles.
“You’re home early,” I whisper in his ear.
He is just about to whisper something back when I hear a tapping on the window.
“Grandfather! Yalla, it’s time for coffee!”
And then, just that quickly, my entire life is gone again.
I LIVED FOR TWO YEARS IN CAMBRIDGE, and one year in that house on the oak-lined street with the man I loved. In retrospect, it feels as though I spent as much time losing that house as living in it. I had just returned to America after being abroad for many years, working as a journalist and studying in several countries scattered across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. I was exhausted from wandering from place to place without ever pausing long enough to truly rest. I had lived in eight different rooms in eight different years and traveled through more than twenty countries. By the time I settled into that final house, my body no longer even experienced jet lag, as though it had accepted homelessness as a permanent country in which it now lived.
I was in my last year of a master’s, twenty-six and utterly alone. I was also diving headlong into what might have been one of the earliest midlife crises in history. My heart had torn in so many places that I had little hope of setting it right again. In the last five years, I had left behind a thoughtful French teacher with soft brown eyes on the island of Corsica, a linguist in China, a scholar of Ottoman studies on the way to Lebanon, a British historian on the way back to America, and a half-dozen other men in cities along the Silk Road. I have always loved too easily and often, and each of these loves bruised me in its own unique and particular way. The problem wasn’t that I was unlucky in love—it was that I was chronically incapable of staying in place. Every year, no matter what the circumstances of my life, I woke up one morning overtaken by an almost primal desire to pack my bags and flee to the other side of the earth. It did not matter if I happened to be waking up in someone’s arms, or if I had finally arrived at a place of contentment. I needed to keep moving. The men I cared about could not be blamed for not wanting to follow me.
In time, I became a master at destroying my own happiness. I traveled. I fell in love. When it was time to settle down, I packed up my bags and left again, only to wake up in another unfamiliar room, alone. I grew adept in the art of waking up in strange rooms scattered across continents. I woke up in Costa Rica, on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert in western China, along the banks of the Nile. I woke up in a village in Umbria, Italy, in a grassy field in the south of Spain, in a hotel room in Crete with my belongings missing. I became accustomed to trying to remember where I was in the morning. Sometimes it was romantic, such as when I woke up in a small hotel on the Greek island of Patmos, a few steps away from the sea. Other times it was just plain sad. One night I was jolted awake in a forty-eight-hour sleeper bus in rural China. We had just crashed into a mountain, and snow was coming in through the window. The doors had been crushed shut, and around me people were frantically climbing out of the broken windshield and into the cold. I stared at the snowflakes catching in the moonlight and thought to myself, I don’t even know where I am. If I had died, how long would it have taken for anyone to know that I was gone?
After a few years of drifting, I was lucky enough to stumble upon a newspaper editor in Lebanon who thought of my years wandering the planet writing the occasional travel article as valuable work experience. I left another boyfriend, bought a plane ticket, and headed to Beirut for my first real job. Six days after I arrived, two airplanes flew into the Twin Towers.
I was sitting in a rooftop café having lunch, and suddenly around me cell phones were going off. Everyone kept saying Amerka, Amerka, and because I couldn’t understand any other words, all I knew was that something had gone te
rribly wrong in the place where I was from. That night, I sat on the floor of the apartment of a girl I barely knew, watching television, too shocked to cry. Over and over, those two towers were collapsing onto the earth. It happened so quickly. As I watched footage of people weeping in the streets, clinging to one another, for the first time I understood how reckless I had been with my own life, how much I had taken everyone I loved for granted. They could be gone in an instant, and I would be all the way on the other side of the world.
I also learned what it was to grieve completely alone.
I wanted desperately to go home again. I wanted to be with my family. I wanted to tell them that I loved them. I certainly didn’t want to be in Beirut, Lebanon, sleeping on someone’s couch because I didn’t even have an apartment of my own.
If I were a braver person, I would have cut my losses and caught the first flight back home again that week. But I had, unbelievably, fled two countries, three states, and four men in four months. I was too ashamed to go back. I was also just beginning to convince myself, along with those I knew, that I lived a glamorous, enviable life. The truth was, I kept running in part because I didn’t have a home to go back to anymore. I hadn’t been a good friend, daughter, or lover to anyone in many years. I had spent the last Christmas holidays in China, far from my family. I rarely spoke to them (much less the man I left behind in China). I had lost touch with most of my college friends. While I had collected new stamps on my passport, they were settling down to build careers and have families. And while I had spent many years thinking of their lives as boring, it was my life that had taken on a quality of the mundane. I was a professional wanderer, and though the countries I passed through were different, in time the ancient cities and foreign languages began to blend together. I sent home photos of an exotic Roman city on the Lebanese coast, and in return I received news of a friend’s child being born. There was no comparison.
The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith Page 4
