The boyfriend in China had said it best before I left: “You know, Stephanie, you can’t go on running like this forever.”
He was right. I ran from him anyway.
In the end, I didn’t buy a ticket to go home. I did what I had always done and wrote to my family saying that I was perfectly safe and extremely happy, and that I would rather be in Lebanon than anywhere else in the world. But from then on I began to envy those people who managed to succeed at normal lives. I wanted what they had—houses and families, front yards, barbecues, health insurance. I wanted to stay in one place long enough to remember my phone number.
By the end of my year in Lebanon, I decided that if I was going to cut and run again, then I might as well run back to my own country. So it was that the following September I moved to New England and enrolled to study theology at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge. Their master’s in theology was only a two-year program, and I thought that, with summer vacation and a few holidays built in, I might be able to manage being settled in one place for that long. I didn’t really care so much about getting a degree in theology. What I wanted was to be quiet, far away from war, and rooted again to the earth. I wanted to remember who I once had been, before I had lost my bearings.
I spent the next two years in Cambridge holed up in the divinity school library reading about God, saints, and angels and learning to find a place in my own country. I made girlfriends, and we drank cocktails together on Friday nights. I bought items too large to fit in a suitcase. I went to the doctor for a checkup for the first time in many years. I acquired a mailing address and had the newspaper delivered to the front door. Every morning I passed by the corner Starbucks coffee shop, where I ordered a grande nonfat chai latte and dreamed of the day when the barista might ask if I wanted “the usual.”
I reveled in once again being around books in my own language, and often I would wander through the library and open books at random, thrilled at being surrounded by so many English words. When I needed to escape I escaped into my studies, and I used the time to finally learn about the countries I had lived in, to read the monastic texts of Greece, to study the Muslim Sufi saints who had written in Turkey and Syria. Instead of rushing away to foreign countries during the holidays, I went home to see my family. I memorized hours upon hours of Arabic verbs on the off chance that I ever needed to return to the Middle East. I managed to resemble an ordinary twenty-something student. I also watched way too many movies, sliding away from the library to catch the matinee at the Brattle Theatre off Harvard Square.
And here is where I confess what I wanted most of all: I wanted to fall in love. I wanted to know what it was like to love in America, instead of in some distant, unfamiliar country. I wanted to go on dates and chat on the phone between classes and hold hands on small streets. Well, this is not exactly true: I wanted to love like people love in the movies. I wanted to wear grown-up strappy dresses and eat dinner over candlelight and dance on the deck of a boat passing beneath the stars while a man told me that he would never, ever leave me. Still, I was willing to settle for holding hands and dating, as long as it was with a man who was willing to stay in place with me.
Even so, love managed to take me by surprise.
By the end of May, I was only a few months away from finishing my master’s program. One morning I was sitting at the kitchen table of my house in Cambridge, reading the morning paper, when my roommate Mark wandered in, still wearing his plaid flannel robe, to attempt to wash some dishes. I say attempt, because Mark was one of those Harvard doctoral students who spoke ten languages but had difficulties completing simple tasks like washing dishes and stringing together words in English. He would get caught in midsentence as he pondered the etymology of the name of a certain vegetable in a recipe or began to visualize the comings and goings of the Russian court during the reign of Catherine the Great. So it was that as I was spilling tea on the New York Times Book Review that morning, he was standing nearby with a dish in one hand and a blue towel in the other, trying his best to bring the two together.
We had been friends all year, siblings almost, and even while he was immersed in history books about the tribulations of Kazakhstan and I was buried in monastic texts, we found time to take occasional walks together beside the Charles River to catch up on each other’s lives. Yet recently I had been seeing much more of him, because we had made a pact to both wake up early and collect ourselves from opposite sides of the house in order to drink tea together. I loved our early morning routine, which felt more like home to me than anything I had lived in in many years. Mark would come into the kitchen at seven in his flannel bathrobe, and as he boiled water we would sit across from each other at the table and split our sections of the morning paper, wordlessly. He would briefly get up to remove the kettle from the stove, pour me a cup and then pour his own, and then we would continue reading until he emptied his mug and waved good-bye and disappeared for the rest of the day.
That particular morning when I entered the kitchen, the water was already boiling on the stove, and Mark was slowly and unsuccessfully drying his dish. He had forgotten to put on his glasses and so was presumably functioning in a world of fog, but he probably didn’t even notice.
I took my seat at the table and began reading the paper, and after a while he began musing aloud over the kitchen sink.
“Do you know what I was thinking the other day?” he asked me, or himself, or the wall. “What would happen if I won the lottery? Then I thought: Maybe I would buy an enormous house by the sea. But then I thought: What would I do with a house on the sea? And what about Stephanie? Would she come and live there also? Or would I need to buy her another house next door?”
I looked up at him. He seemed to be watching his sentences form in the air, word by word as in a cartoon balloon. After a full two seconds he stared at me in alarm, having just heard the words his mouth had spoken aloud. “Why would I think that?” he asked me. At which point he dropped his dish and hurried to his bedroom. I knew that we were done for.
I fell in love with Mark hard and fast, with all of the diligence and ferocity of someone who had waited a lifetime to finally love someone well. We quickly settled into the routine of a married couple. I migrated to his section of the house, and I marked my new territory by placing my poetry and theology books on his shelves alongside Uzbek and Persian dictionaries. He woke up in the morning and made me smoky Chinese tea before regaling me with the love story between Catherine the Great and General Potemkin. We drank great quantities of red wine together. We were a couple, a real American couple, albeit with slightly quirky interests. I loved that he talked to himself in Russian. I adored the terrible lime green shirts he wore to go dancing, and his addiction to Shostakovich. I loved the fact that he left check marks next to paragraphs in The New Yorker, as if to tell the authors, “Bravo! Well done!”
It was what I had longed for but never thought possible—all of the flair and intensity of life abroad taking place in an American three-bedroom apartment. We could watch Iranian films and speak about Middle Eastern policy, we could eat Japanese takeout and sample Italian wine, we could rush out on Sunday afternoons to hear a Russian symphony and still be home for the evening news. I would never have to choose again.
I was quite sure that we would live happily ever after. I was counting on it.
Admittedly, we had our problems. He was quite a bit older than I was, which meant that he actually came of age during the Cold War, whereas all I remembered of it was that the Soviet Union had boycotted the Olympics I attended when I was seven years old. He could be hawkish in his politics and sometimes thought of me as naïve, which made him infuriatingly dismissive of my points of view. He was cynical where I was optimistic, and like many historians, he mistrusted claims that could not be backed up by empirical evidence. I studied faith, and he spent his life looking for answers in foreign archives.
This tension came up most often when we spoke about religion. “Did it ever occur to you that
religious people might be delusional?” he asked me one morning over tea.
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, seeing as they talk to an invisible man in the sky. Don’t you think that this qualifies as being delusional?”
“You know what I think.”
“I was just curious.”
I didn’t feel like being baited into a fight, and so I took a moment to collect myself. “So you really think that a majority of the American population are delusional?”
“Well, frankly, yes.”
I tried to summon up a response. Finally he smiled and tapped me on the shoulder.
“Steph, I’m just kidding,” he said. But he wasn’t.
I had been raised in Catholic schools, and though I rarely made it to church anymore, I was still culturally very Catholic. I studied theology. Many of my friends and family were deeply spiritual. Still, I chose to ignore Mark’s words. I had always kept my faith intensely private, and lately I had felt so far away from any spiritual life that I reasoned I could live without it. If God existed, and if he was as compassionate as I hoped he might be, then I reasoned that he would understand that all I wanted was to be happy.
They were only words, after all. And they seemed so small beside everything else I knew about this man, who was passionate about food and music and somehow even about me, who spoke longingly of having children, who had once held my hands as we stood in front of a restaurant and said, I’m so glad that you exist.
MORE PROBLEMATIC THAN GOD, it turned out, was the fact that Mark had recently weathered a terrible, prolonged divorce. Like many a graduate student, he was also buried beneath a dissertation that he couldn’t finish, and his personal life was making it even more difficult to focus. He tried to tell me gently that, while he cared about me, his emotional plate was already full with an ex-wife and three hundred pages on the relationship between Russia and the Caucasus, and that he had no desire at all to fall in love with me or anyone else.
“Steph, I really need time, to sort out being alone, to finish my dissertation, to find peace with myself after years of struggling through my marriage,” he told me as I moved my belongings across the house. “I just can’t see myself in a serious relationship in the next year.” Over the following weeks he said it over and over again, in very clear terms, like a mantra. Yet I had no intention of giving up. I secretly believed that enough mornings of tea and omelets and newspapers would finally and inevitably add up to a commitment, even if he didn’t notice that it had happened. I would simply insert myself into his life until he couldn’t live without me.
So I began to make plans for both of us. I dreamed of how we would settle down and have children and buy our fabled house on the beach. I spoke of it quietly to other women in kitchens at dinner parties. I put my academic future on hold and began to search for office jobs in Cambridge so that we could stay together after I graduated. For the first time in eight years, I prepared to live in a house for more than a single year in a row.
Then an envelope arrived in the mailbox one afternoon in May with my name typed on the front. I opened it in front of Mark that evening. Inside I found a single piece of paper, which contained in painfully nonambiguous language the words that would change my life:
Dear Stephanie:
We would like to congratulate you on being selected as a Fulbright scholar for Syria, for the year 2004–2005.
I caught my breath. Syria.
I had applied for the fellowship eight months before and had long ago given up on receiving news. But with that one word, all of the old temptations came flooding back. Syria. Its almost total isolation and lack of English speakers made it perhaps the best country in the world to study Arabic. It was home to some of the oldest Muslim and Christian traditions anywhere in the world. Monasteries and Crusader castles and Roman cities lay scattered across the landscape, with some two hundred abandoned Byzantine cities sprinkled across the north of the country, just sitting there, because no one knew exactly what to do with such an embarrassment of riches. I had visited Syria only twice, and I had promptly fallen in love with its buzzing, outdated cities, its minarets and posters of the president, its crowded bazaars full of spices and scarves and meat hanging from hooks. I had often told myself that it was the one country on earth that I would give anything to spend a year in, the embodiment of all that remained exotic and unknown in the modern Middle East, if not the entire world. For the American scholar of the Arab world, Syria was the classic unavailable man, silent and brooding and impossible to pin down for a date, the kind of man who never returned your phone calls.
I had been lusting after him for years. I longed for him almost as much as I longed to possess an ordinary life.
We were already at war in Iraq, and the U.S. government had recently added Syria as an honorary member of its Axis of Evil. I was surprised that the Fulbright had not been canceled altogether and knew that the years in which Americans could obtain visas to Syria were possibly limited. I might never have this chance again.
Go, the voice inside of me said. Go while you can.
Unfortunately, the voice arrived right at the moment when Mark was coming around to the idea of settling down.
“It’s only a year apart,” I told him. “I know that it won’t be easy, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t try a long-distance relationship.”
But I knew it was hopeless. Mark liked to refer to his “long-distance divorce” as proof of why long-distance relationships were a bad idea. I would need to make a choice.
“You can’t keep living your life with the wind forever, Stephanie,” Mark said. “At some point, you have to decide what you want your destiny to be.”
I TOOK MY TIME, and the next months were a nightmare. We broke up and got back together again. We were engaged for an afternoon. After a terrible argument, I left the house. He didn’t come after me, and after waiting in vain for days, I had to cry and plead my way back in again. I decided to take the fellowship, not to take it, to take it. I postponed mailing my acceptance letter and skipped the orientation. I woke up in the same house, day after day. I memorized what that felt like. I wore his flannel robe. Drank his tea. Became accustomed to catching him conducting a symphony in the kitchen, or with that look in his eyes that told me he was talking to himself in his head, or perhaps to the Russian ambassador to Georgia. He began to accept the fact that I was destined to leave. Then one morning I woke up, felt the bones of his chest with my two longest fingers, and I didn’t want to go to Damascus anymore. I wanted to stay, and I wanted it more than I had wanted almost anything in my life. I wanted to plant roots, to hold out for the Starbucks barista to remember my order. I wanted to live in the same house for a second year in a row. I wanted him.
It was already August, just a few weeks from the day I was supposed to catch a plane to Damascus. Our relationship had become so broken that I didn’t know if we could salvage it. Still, I sat down in a café, pulled out a pen and paper, and summoned up the courage to write him a letter telling him that I had made my decision.
I want to be here when you finish your dissertation. I want to be here when your brother has his child. I want to be here when you wake up in the morning, when you come home at the end of the afternoon. I’m sorry it took me so long to understand, but now I’m certain. This life with you is the only country I want to live in right now…
IT WAS THE BRAVEST LETTER I had ever written. I hurried home and left it on his pillow, and then I went for a walk.
When I returned that evening, Mark couldn’t look me in the eye.
“What is it?” I asked, but I was already beginning to cry.
“It’s beautiful,” he said softly. “This is the kind of letter every man dreams of receiving.” He kept looking at the floor.
“You have to go,” he said, finally looking up at me. “You have to go to Damascus.”
It didn’t make any sense. “Stephanie, please go,” he repeated. “I’m not ready. You can’t stay. I would never
forgive myself for stopping you.”
For the first time in my life, I had offered a man everything. And he had responded by saying no.
Two weeks later Mark drove me to the airport. We stood in the terminal, and he embraced me awkwardly and promised that he would phone me often and count the days until Christmas, when we’d see each other again.
It wasn’t that he didn’t love me, he insisted. He just needed time.
I left for Damascus like a prisoner exiled to Siberia. By the time I arrived, it had become the last place on earth that I wanted to be.
7.
I PASS MY DAYS WAITING FOR MARK to call me home again. I write to him every day, and every day I rush to the Internet café to see if he’s responded. I endure four hours of classes and spend my afternoons sitting at my desk in front of my arched windows, pretending to flip through flashcards of Arabic verbs warning of death and destruction, war and famine, and watching my neighbors pass through the courtyard and walk up and down the stairs. I jump every time a phone rings. When the door opens, I imagine that Mark might have hastily packed a bag and followed me to the other side of the earth. But alas, it is a boy selling cigarettes, or a peasant woman begging for coins, the laundry boy with a white cloth sack slung over his shoulder, or one of ten thousand cousins coming to visit the Roman Catholic family upstairs.
The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith Page 5
