The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  I talk to him in my head all day. An entire grammar session can pass at the university without me noticing. Jihad Johnny can predict the end of the world and I don’t hear a thing. In the evening, when I walk to the market downtown I can go blocks without registering faces, without even noticing the streets I’ve turned on or hearing the shopkeepers calling out lines in a dozen languages. Instead I rehearse my conversation with Mark should he ever call. I imagine he is telling me that he is sorry, I practice saying that it’s not too late for me to come home again.

  But he doesn’t call, and he doesn’t write, save for a few brief e-mails rushed in response to the long letters I compose to him about the loneliness of Damascus and how much I miss home. One of his earliest responses says, I’m so sorry that I haven’t written, but I’ve been busy working on my dissertation. I’ve been in good spirits lately. I am so happy to hear that you are settling into your new life.

  It brings me to tears.

  I CAN’T MAKE SENSE OF IT, and sometimes I think that if I could be wrong about something so basic as being loved, then I’ve been wrong about everything. I had been sure. I had honestly thought that I had possession of my own life.

  Yesterday evening, the doorbell rang, and as always I ran to the window to see if it might be him, but it was only a heavyset man sauntering across the courtyard toward the opposite side of the house. I thought nothing of it until the Baron began to knock insistently on my window a few minutes later, and I recognized a peculiar look of discomfort in his eyes that made me suspect that he might be calling me in for something other than coffee.

  An agent of the Syrian secret police was waiting for me in the Baron’s room, sitting at the table and wearing a badly cut black polyester suit, faux leather shoes, and shiny striped socks pulled up high around his ankles. Unlike the secret police in films, there was nothing sleek or even secretive about him. Instead he was busily tearing apart one of the Baron’s prized pastries and licking the syrup from his fingertips.

  His visit was not entirely unexpected, but I was surprised that it had happened so soon. The secret police, or mukhabarat as they are known in Arabic, are notorious in Syria, known for keeping files on anyone of interest and listening in on conversations. The mere mention of them can awaken fear in the hearts of locals and foreigners alike. As an American on a government program who intended on spending a year in the country, I was automatically suspicious.

  I took a seat across from him and waited for him to finish his pastry. He reached over to grab a cigarette out of the Baron’s pack, lit it, and left it to hang in the ashtray between us.

  “Your name?” he asked me in Arabic by way of greeting.

  “Stephanie Saldaña.”

  He pulled a notebook out of his bag and began to scribble down something resembling my name in Arabic letters.

  “Where are you from?”

  “America.” He knew that I was from America, of course. That was the only reason I could fathom for why he had come.

  “Where in America?”

  “Texas.”

  He smirked. “Texas! Do you know George Bush?”

  I didn’t dignify that question with an answer.

  From then on we settled in for an intense round of interrogation.

  “What is your father’s name?”

  “What is your mother’s name?”

  “What is their address?”

  “What does your father do?”

  “What does your mother do?”

  “What are the names of your siblings?”

  “How old are they?”

  “Where do they live?”

  “What do they do?”

  It was terrible to speak of my family members as though they were objects, characters in a story, and not who they are, living and breathing human beings whom I care about. Just saying their names felt like a betrayal. I couldn’t understand the reason for this line of questioning, particularly since the Fulbright Program had all of my personal details, and when I was finished giving my family’s background I hoped that I was done. But Mr. X picked up his cigarette and finished it before lighting another, and I sensed that he was just getting warmed up.

  “Where did you go to high school?”

  “Where did you go to college?”

  “What did you study?”

  “What year was that?”

  “Nineteen hundred ninety-nine? Well then, what have you done for the last five years?”

  Trying to answer his questions in Arabic was exhausting, particularly since my answers were meaningless. His purpose was to intimidate me, perhaps to see if I would trip up. I spent half an hour taking him through the list of countries I had recently visited: Egypt, Jordan, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Spain, China, and Lebanon. He asked me to name them twice. I remembered, twice, not to say that I had been to Israel. I listed all of my jobs and hoped that my prior work as a journalist would not put me under suspicion. He wrote each job down in a long list in his notebook. It all felt, very oddly, like being asked to undress in front of a stranger.

  I had been guilty of so much in my past, but not of any of the things he suspected me of.

  He waited until the end to ask the cruelest question.

  “Are you married?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered softly.

  “How old are you again?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “And you’re not married?” He looked shocked. “What’s wrong with you?”

  I was so taken aback that it took me a moment to answer. “I’m waiting,” I said, biting my lip.

  “Do you know how old girls are when they get married in Syria?”

  “I don’t know, eighteen?”

  “Younger even. No one would ever dream of waiting until she was twenty-seven.” Then he wrote down on his pad of paper Not married, as though it were a matter of national security.

  Then, at last, he was finished. He reached across the table to shake my hand. “Welcome to Syria,” he said.

  I watched him walk across the courtyard with his thuggish gait, his chin raised high in the air. The Baron walked him to the door, shut it behind him, and turned the latch. Then he returned to his room with his eyes gleaming.

  “Bravo, Stefanito,” he said. “Coffee?”

  But that time I declined. I crossed the courtyard to the washroom, closed the door behind me, and then turned the water on.

  For a moment I thought that it was not only my life that I no longer possessed—I no longer even possessed myself. I was no longer a poet, or a scholar, or a traveler; it did not matter that I loved the sea or listening to the cello. Now I was simply an American. Something bigger than me and beyond my control had become the sum of me, canceling out the rest.

  I stood in front of the mirror for a long time, scrubbing myself down with hard yellow soap, trying to get clean again.

  8.

  BY NOW I’VE MADE A SINGLE FRIEND in my class at Damascus University: Michael, the quiet American banker from Washington, D.C. Michael resembles Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties transplanted to Damascus. He always comes to class wearing neat, preppy shirts and ironed slacks that look strangely comical in the midst of our class conversations about dynamite and Apache helicopters. I can’t quite figure out why he’s here, though I guess he could be an undercover weapons inspector—he has that responsible and earnest though somewhat lost, still-haven’t-found-what-I’m-looking-for aura about him. Most Americans I’ve met at the university are either Fulbright scholars or Mormons studying Arabic on their mission abroad, so that a standard joke when meeting an American is “Fulbright or Mormon?” Michael is one of the first non-Mormon, non-Fulbright, non–potential Islamic extremist Americans I’ve met in Damascus, making him a rare and rather fascinating species.

  He is my ally at school. Whenever Jihad Johnny begins one of his tirades about Americans colonizing the world, Michael looks in my direction and catches my eye with a deadpan expression before barely smiling with the edges of his mouth. Right n
ow we are in hell together, his smile says to me. And thank God, because I need to know that I am not in this alone.

  Michael first approached me during break at the end of our first week of classes. We had just finished a discussion session led by Suleiman the Magnificent on the subject “What are your favorite weapons?” It had been full of enthusiastic participation. Submarines, tanks, machine guns, and of course nuclear bombs had all made the list, but we never settled on a favorite. There were just too many possibilities.

  Our classes had recently taken an alarming turn for the worse. A discussion session on “Is marriage necessary?” earlier in the week had led to all-out war. The secular Europeans had all said no, because marriage is nothing more than one person’s desire to own another person. Suleiman the Magnificent had said of course, because if a child was born out of wedlock he could not inherit his father’s property. When he mentioned his desire to marry four wives, Aisha the Turkish madrassa student began screaming at him, quoting the Quran and accusing him of never being able to treat four wives equally as the prophet Mohammed had. Though I normally kept silent in class, I raised my hand and suggested that two people might want to get married because they were in love. The Europeans all burst into laughter.

  When Michael finally pulled me discreetly aside, I was deeply relieved to have another sane person in my corner. “Are you as scared as I am?” he whispered in English. English was forbidden in our class.

  “I would be scared,” I whispered back. “Sadly, ninety percent of the time I have no idea what’s going on.”

  “You’re lucky,” he assured me, and flashed a smile.

  I know nothing about Michael except for the fact that he is an American. Yet in light of my visit from Mr. X of the secret police and the rather radical nature of my other classmates, I’ve decided that it is enough to have a single person to trust. I look forward to seeing him every day arriving for class exactly on time in his neatly pressed shirts, some semblance of order in a world suddenly so unpredictable, his shirttail tucked in and his belt firmly fastened, not a single hair out of place or the smallest scuff on his shiny brown loafers.

  Sometimes after school we sit together in a coffee shop and review grammar together, and I love the chance to speak to him in English, for all of those foreign words to be balanced out by the weight of the familiar. We splurge and buy three-dollar cups of coffee at InHouse Coffee, a new chic Syrian coffee chain with menus only in English, where the Syrian jet set gathers to drink frozen cappucinos and watch music videos flashing on giant screens. The girl behind the counter wears a green baseball cap, and when she hands me my coffee she chirps the only full sentence she knows in English: “Have a perfect day!” My days are so far from perfect that I have to try hard not to laugh at her.

  Michael is also homesick, and so tonight we’ve bypassed the coffee shop and decided to see a film together, less a date than our mutual attempt to engage in something reminiscent of our pre-Syrian life. I choose the closest modest outfit I have to “American girl clothes,” loose khaki trousers and a long-sleeved maroon shirt, and I walk to the Sham Palace Theater to meet him.

  The Sham Palace Theater is the only theater in Damascus that shows English-language movies, mostly B-list movies that barely make it to the theaters in the States. But tonight we’re here to see Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, which has been selling out for weeks. Though the Syrian government censors everything from books to films that enter the country, not a single moment of Moore’s film has been censored. Locals have been reveling in the public blasting of President George Bush by one of his own citizens, proof that they are not alone in their disdain for him. We buy our two tickets, and when the usher in his black suit shows us to our seats, shining his flashlight on two chairs in the back, I look around and notice that we are the only two foreigners in the room.

  Then the curtain parts and the credits begin. From the light emanating from the movie screen I can make out groups of teenaged girls in headscarves, a few couples, and large groups of young men seated in rows. Together we sit transfixed as we watch the war enter into the room. The screen fills up with American soldiers riding in tanks, breaking into houses. Iraqi women are awakened from their sleep. Children wail. The audience and the film seem to fuse into one, and the people around me sink back into their chairs, staring wide-eyed.

  Then it comes again—that sense of being tied to something bigger than I am, something beyond my control. As the film rolls on, I start to feel claustrophobic. Each time an Iraqi speaks, there are no subtitles. Everyone around me simply understands, viscerally. But I don’t—I’ve never heard the dialect, and they speak so quickly. It is only when the Americans speak that I understand, and the subtitles flash on-screen so that everyone else in the room begins to read. People are wounded in two languages. But for the most part, English is the language of those who are killing. Arabic is the language of those who are dying.

  I sit between Michael and a Syrian man, who keeps shifting his feet back and forth on the ground in front of us. I can feel Michael responding to the English. I can feel the other man’s silence and his body reacting each time an Iraqi speaks. Sometimes he hides his face in his hands. Sometimes he looks down at the floor. When a young African-American soldier in the film says that he would never return to Iraq to kill another country’s poor people, he whispers quietly to the screen, Shukran leki. Thank you.

  But other American soldiers say terrible, shocking things. Around me the people shiver. I shiver also. Most of all I think to myself, with new, uncomfortable confusion, Listen to that. They’re speaking my language.

  9.

  A DAY LATER, Michael and I are studying together in his house in Bab Touma, just a few blocks down from my house. His host family is traveling for the week, much to his relief, and so we make space for ourselves in their traditional living room, spreading out our books and papers on the table. Michael rents a tiny bedroom on the second floor of this family’s house, just between the rooms of several siblings, which means that he has no privacy. Perhaps I do have the most beautiful room in Bab Touma, after all.

  He pours me a glass of tea, and I realize that it is the first time I have been alone with a man other than the Baron since I left Mark in Boston. It feels oddly intimate. “So, what do you think of the other students in the class?” he asks. “How about that Jihad Johnny?”

  I laugh. Johnny had been wearing the same floor-length gray robe to class every day for a week now, and his beard was getting longer. He had recently mentioned that he planned on settling in Syria for good. Unfortunately, despite his enthusiasm for the subject, his Arabic didn’t seem to be improving. As a result the Germans had usurped his role as the most vocally anti-American students. “I don’t know where they dug up those people,” I confess. “They’re scary. I hope they wait until I finish class before they kill me. I’d like to die with at least intermediate Arabic.”

  He smiles, and I see his face relax into an unfamiliar, less guarded, and more human face. “I always said that you should never trust a foreigner who comes to study in Syria.”

  “Apparently not.”

  It is a common joke between us. Since, mathematically speaking, there are very few Europeans and Americans living in Syria, and we figure some of them must be up to no good, we often speculate on their ulterior motives. Pretending that our classmates are spies and double agents makes memorizing grammatical points more interesting.

  I turn again to reviewing my Arabic flashcards, flipping through a list of jungle animals left over from a text of socialist parables: monkey, giraffe, elephant. I am looking at a picture of a monkey when I notice that an uncomfortable silence has settled in the room.

  I watch Michael moving his pencil back and forth on the table nervously. “Listen, Stephanie, there’s something I want to tell you,” he says. “But I need you to keep this to yourself until I leave.”

  I nod, nervously. I’m not sure that I’m prepared to carry other people’s secrets in Damascu
s.

  “I’m Jewish,” he announces. A weight drops off of my heart. So that was all. There are so many Jewish foreigners studying in Damascus that they may as well open up their own yeshiva. Though many of them lie and say that they are Christians, this is just to make daily life easier, not because they have some sinister, secret agenda. Damascus was once home to one of the most ancient Jewish communities in the world, and there are even a small number of Syrian Jews still living a few streets down from my house. It makes sense that Jews would be interested in Damascus, and as far as I know there is nothing expressly keeping an American Jew from studying here.

  “I actually live in Israel,” he continues. Now he had me. “I made up that entire story about being a banker in D.C.”

  “Wow.” I try to think of something to say, but he has left me speechless.

  Israel and Syria have been official enemies for more than fifty years, the border between the two countries an impassable no-man’s-land except for the few United Nations workers authorized to travel between sides. Israelis, and anyone who has ever been to Israel, are prohibited from visiting Syria. In fact, according to most Syrians, Israel doesn’t even exist, and the question on visa applications asks only, “Have you ever visited Occupied Palestine?” While some foreigners travel to Israel and Syria on separate passports, it took audacity and a certain stupidity for a Hebrew-speaking Jew living in Israel to come spend a month in Syria studying at a state-run institution. It was a miracle that Mr. X had not found out. The entire spectacle was as shocking and unlikely as a Syrian trying to slip, quietly and unnoticed, across the border to spend a few months in Tel Aviv learning Hebrew. All the foreigners at the university were so frightened of even mentioning the word Israel that we collectively referred to it as Disneyland. While I had often met foreigners who looked forward to visiting Disneyland, I had never met someone in Syria who worked there.