The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  After watching so many terrible things this last month, it is comforting to see a human body, a man in the flesh, a man I know won’t disappear into the air a few moments later. He gives me the small comfort that I am not alone here as the darkness falls each evening—and that I am not alone, completely, in this solitude I have chosen.

  Tonight, I am late walking down the path to the mountain at last light, just before prayer, and I hear his footsteps behind me.

  “Stéphanie?” he whispers. And because in this month of silence, I have heard my name spoken so rarely aloud, it causes me to shiver.

  I turn around, looking up at him, at those blue eyes. I don’t know what to do. I am still not supposed to be speaking, and I don’t even know how to pronounce the r needed to say his name in French. I stand in front of him, stupidly, a frightened animal.

  “It’s strange,” he says softly, as regularly as though I had asked him a question, “I traveled all the way to Athos to understand that the desert at Mar Musa is the quietest place in the world.”

  He fumbles in his pocket. “Wait, I brought something back for you.”

  I watch as he fishes out a tiny rosary, smaller than my palm, tied in black thread, separated by knots. Each knot contains a prayer.

  It is like a single, fragile sentence, strung together and separated by commas, with no beginning or ending.

  He places it in my hand. I close it, hold it tightly. “Thanks,” I whisper. He stays behind me, and our steps fall in line together as we walk the last path down the hillside, making our way toward the chapel.

  My month in the monastery ends like this—in a single moment containing both darkness and light. A few days later, when I finish my Exercises, certain of my monastic calling, I write a solitary quote from the Gospel of John on the final page of my notebook, Jesus’ last conversation with Peter, the verses that for me have come to symbolize my choice:

  I am telling you the truth:

  When you were young, you used to get ready

  And go anywhere you wanted to;

  But when you are old, you will stretch out

  Your hands and someone else will tie you up

  And take you where you don’t want to go.

  I am still holding them both, that notebook and the small black chaplet from Frédéric’s hand, when I climb down the mountain two days later to make my way home.

  Part Three CRUCIFIXION

  You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.

  —SIMONE WEIL

  1.

  January 2005

  DAMASCUS IS FREEZING.

  Last night while I was sleeping, I managed to dye all of my neighbors’ clothing black. It wasn’t a dream—I actually ruined all of their clothing in my sleep. I should have known better. The Baron has warned me a thousand times that I might set off an explosion or poison the entire neighborhood if I kept my heater running through the night, and for once it seems that he was not exaggerating. I’ve decided to take this latest disaster as further confirmation from heaven that my life is truly as awful as I imagine it to be. I have become a walking, talking, ticking disaster. I don’t even have to be awake to cause the world harm.

  It is January, and a month has passed since I left the monastery and the Spiritual Exercises. I have been sick in my bed off of Straight Street for the last two weeks. It began with a high fever and an exhaustion that ran so deep into my bones that I could sleep for fifteen hours straight and awaken still feeling tired. Soon a terrible cough, chest pains, and a sore throat set in. A few days later, it hurt to move my arms and legs. Bruises swelled from inside my body until I felt like someone was punching my rib cage repeatedly and drawing blood each time I tried to hold a conversation. Perhaps I am dying of tuberculosis, or avian flu, or possibly pneumonia. It is only a matter of time before men wearing white paper masks will evacuate my corpse through the back door of the house before setting fire to my sheets.

  Last week the doctor at the local clinic told me that I am suffering from severe fatigue, my body rebelling from the strain of too much prayer in the desert, too much work. “Spiritual Exercises” might just be an accurate name for what I weathered in November, for apparently I have run my body into the ground. All you can do is rest, he told me, which doesn’t help at all. It is like telling an insomniac that all he can do is sleep.

  My neighbors have started whispering about me. They are convinced that I have caught Muridat-al-Huzn, the “sickness of sadness,” a chronic and severe depression not unheard of by inhabitants of the war-torn Middle East, particularly during the long and gray winter. Hazeen, in Arabic, suggests not only sadness, but also a longing for what you can no longer have. They have no idea how much I’ve lost, though. I’ve lost everything.

  The Baron checks on me several times a day in his gentle, grandfatherly way. Every three or four hours he knocks on the door and forces me to drink bottles and bottles of 7UP, which he is convinced will cure everything from broken hearts to cancer.

  “Shrubee, shrubee, drink, drink!” he moans, cradling the green bottle at the base of my mouth and cupping my chin. “How do you expect to get better if you never drink? And are you really only sleeping under blankets? How many times have I told you to boil water, fill empty Jack Daniel’s bottles, and put them under the sheets beside you when you sleep? It is the only possible way to keep warm!”

  But he’s lying—there is no way to keep warm in this room. Sometime during the month of December, my house off Straight Street was transformed from a charming sunlit open space into the dark, frozen, inner core of hell. The marble tiles on my floor glazed over into rose-colored slabs of ice. The pages of my books began sticking together, yellowing and curling up at the edges so that now I can’t open them. Wind seeps through the windowpanes, under the door, through the cracks in the foundation. Every morning I pour petroleum into the tank of an ancient heater Syrians call a sobba, my only source of warmth, watching as it slowly drips down into the black belly of the furnace, forming a puddle. When I throw in a match to light it, this puddle transforms into a lake of fire, roaring and rattling, emitting smoke and gas fumes into my bedroom. I watch it through a circular glass window for hours. It is like owning a giant snow globe of Dante’s inferno.

  I am too sick to leave my room, and even if I wasn’t I would not know where to go. Long ago, I stopped answering my telephone or visiting the neighbors. The last place on earth I want to travel is the monastery, where God and Paolo and the accusing angels are all waiting for me. And so I have developed a routine. I wake up in the morning. I light my sobba. I let the Baron in and allow him to force-feed me half a liter of 7UP. Then I crawl back into bed and spend the rest of the daylight hours wincing at my own breath, staring at the ceiling, and quietly counting the minutes until I die.

  Every evening before he goes to sleep, the Baron knocks on the door and reminds me to turn off my heater before bedtime to keep the pipes from clogging with smoke. I have always listened, obediently cutting off the fire and crawling into my bed at midnight, waiting with dread as the room gradually lapses into coldness. Yet last night I reached my breaking point. I couldn’t bear another night of trying to sleep without any heat, shivering restlessly, and listening to the street cats screeching on the roofs outside.

  So I left the heater running when I fell asleep in the evening, just once. I was planning on nodding off for a few moments and then getting out of bed to close it.

  I woke up this morning to my Roman Catholic neighbor’s high-pitched screaming, “Ya hmar! That donkey! What has she done? Oh God! It’s not possible! Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!”

  The Baron started knocking on the door. I peeled a corner of my curtains open and peeked into the courtyard.

  A line of my neighbors’ shirts hung on the clothesline outside with their arms pinned in the air in resignation, each of them stained entirely black by my smoke. They looked like the tired and vengeful ghosts of coal miners, haunting the space between our
rooms.

  2.

  MY PROBLEMS BEGAN just after I descended that flight of three hundred and fifty stairs a month ago and attempted to pass back into ordinary life after the Spiritual Exercises. I traveled from the monastery to Damascus by taxi, watching the desert slowly revert from red stones to high weeds, then grass, then houses, and finally the bustling, familiar downtown streets of the city I knew. But when I walked up Straight Street and turned into the alley in front of my home, I found the front door standing wide open and all of the people gone. The clotheslines had been stripped of their laundry and the lights turned off. The Ustez and his wife were nowhere to be found near the fountain where they bickered in the mornings. No neighbors were complaining on the roof in the language of Jesus. For the first time since I could remember, the Baron was not sitting near the door in his plastic lawn chair, waiting for me. It was as though the world had given me up for dead and had simply moved on without me.

  I tried to open the door to my room, but the key stuck in the lock. I tried again without success. I spent the next five minutes standing at the door, pushing the enormous key into the stubborn keyhole, worried that they had changed the locks and rented the room to someone else in my absence. I prayed, silently. Finally, after my fingers ached from pressing so tightly against the keys, I looked down at my hand and noticed a small rectangular keychain with blue Arabic handwriting: bishop’s room. I had left the key to my Damascus bedroom back at Mar Musa, two hours away and on the top of a mountain, and I was now trying to open my bedroom with the key to my room at the monastery.

  There was no one at home to appeal to for help, and so I had no choice but to break back into my room by force. I walked around to the window facing the courtyard and pulled open the glass shutters, then used the pointed edge of my key to tear through the mesh wire screen, the ragged edges cutting open the palms of my hands. When the window was an empty hole, I lifted my backpack over my head and pushed it through, the bag landing with a thump on the floor, and then climbed into my room behind it. I collapsed onto my bed, locked in on both sides, wind pouring through the open window. I felt like a thief, trying to break my way back into my life.

  I passed a cold, sleepless night in Damascus, and the next evening I caught a late flight back to San Antonio, Texas, where my family was waiting to spend the Christmas holidays with me. When I arrived at the Damascus airport, the lobby was crowded with Saudi Arabians and tourists from Dubai carting mountains of suitcases, poor Syrians dragging broken plastic bags on the floor, and entire families the size of small villages waiting near the entrance, cheering whenever a loved one came into view. I felt, for the first time since I descended the mountain, an intense, painful loneliness. I had no small village to see me off, not even a village elder, no, not even the Baron. The sum of my months in Damascus was that I was as alone as when I had arrived. I boarded the plane, watching through the window as Syria descended in a haze of long, wide boulevards and streetlights beneath me. You have chosen, I told myself. This is where you will live forever.

  I arrived in San Antonio eighteen hours and three flights later. When I walked into the arrivals area, an enormous banner with a yellow ribbon greeted me, gently drifting back and forth over the hallway. San Antonio Proudly Welcomes Home Its Troops! it proclaimed. The rest of the scene looked like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy walks out of the front door of her black and white house into a world of strange and peculiarly colorful people. Crowds of men and women in starched United States Air Force uniforms chatted cheerfully to one another around the baggage claim, halfway across the world now, safe from the war. Interspersed among them were young boys in bright baseball caps and men strutting in cowboy boots, and about a thousand cell phones were ringing at once.

  I always stayed with my dad and my stepmother of many years on the rare occasions I came back home—my mother found a house on the other side of town when I was sixteen years old. So it was my father who was waiting for me at the curbside of the terminal, wearing a terrible bright red shirt, the kind of shirt that men wear only in countries where modesty is not a factor, where clothes are meant to say I am here, instead of Don’t mind me. He embraced me and then took a step back to inspect me. I was wearing a smoke-stained gray fleece with a cigarette burn in the sleeve and torn corduroys, my official Syrian monastic uniform. It was ninety degrees.

  “Hey Daughter, are we expecting a snowstorm?” he asked.

  I tore off my fleece, embarrassed, only to compound the problem by exposing a long-sleeve turtleneck torn at the seam of the neck and beneath my armpit. I could smell my own body odor, along with the faint remnants of a kebab sandwich I had eaten the night before. But to give my father credit, he managed not to look alarmed.

  “You must be starving,” he said. “Why don’t we stop off at Taco Cabana?”

  And so that was that. We drove his silver Jeep Cherokee out of the airport and around the corner, and when we reached the fast-food parking lot I stared at the giant drive-through menu with the voice coming out of it. I spoke to it, and it answered, and two minutes later a stranger mysteriously offered me a tray of food while leaning out a window. That was my homecoming—a mysterious, disembodied voice, two beef fajitas folded up in aluminum foil, and a side ofjalapeños, together with a large Dr Pepper. After four months of sanctions and thirty days of eating nothing but yogurt and goat cheese, pita bread and bitter olives in the desert, I couldn’t quite fathom fajitas. I unfolded the foil inch by inch, eating slowly, chewing each bite as many times as I could.

  For the first ten minutes I barely spoke to my father. I was too busy chewing and staring out the car window at the strange world I had landed in: lines of pickup trucks and four-wheel-drive vehicles, strip malls and billboards, the giant forty-foot sculpture of cowboy boots standing outside of the North Star shopping mall covered with flashing Christmas tree lights. I had forgotten the world could be so full of things.

  “How’s Syria treating you?” my father finally asked me. I was notoriously bad at keeping in touch when I lived abroad, and so he had no idea that I had just spent a month in silence in the desert. As far as he was concerned, I was living in a Western-style apartment with central heating, dutifully studying Arabic.

  “It’s good,” I told him. I didn’t know what else to say. That the visions in the desert can be terrifying, but on the bright side the Kurds make a mean falafel?

  “It’s cold,” I added hastily.

  “Here it’s not so bad,” he said. “Close to eighty, sometimes ninety degrees every day. I still manage to go for a swim in the pool most afternoons.”

  I nodded, wondering if there was a swimming pool anywhere in Syria. Outside, the traffic had backed up around the shopping malls into lines of a thousand cars. Traffic lanes extended over us and beside us. My father kept honking each time we slowed down. The world could have broken open from the weight of it all.

  “How about them Spurs?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “How about them Spurs?”

  It took me a moment to realize that he was asking me about our city’s basketball team.

  “You get to follow them much there in Syria? Do you watch their games on the Internet?”

  The games of the San Antonio Spurs were so far from what I had been following for the last month of my life that I didn’t know how to respond. But that didn’t seem to bother him.

  “Well, of course we’ve been watching every single game,” he assured me. “They’ve got a good lineup this year. That Tony Parker—young kid from France—he’s really something. We got you and your sister tickets for this Thursday night if y’all want to go.”

  3.

  THE NEXT MORNING, there were no bells—church, goat, or otherwise—ringing outside of my window, and so I slept. I slept through my alarm clock, then through breakfast and lunch. I slept through the sound of the dog running back and forth through his special plastic doggie door downstairs, the answering machine speaking aloud, the doorbel
l ringing. I awakened sometime in the afternoon and looked out from beneath my covers in wonder, to find myself lying in the midst of my very own bedroom, in my very own bed, and not in an austere cell in the desert, suspended over the earth.

  I dragged myself to the shower, sat on the floor, and let the water run over me in great, warm torrents. It was my first normal shower in four months, and as I looked down at my arms in the light, I noticed that a layer of smog had settled onto my skin and that some of the hairs were sticking together. In ritualized fashion, I sat on the bottom of the shower for an hour, scrubbing away smoke and dead skin until my arms glowed pink. I shaved my legs for the first time since September. Finally I dried off and prepared myself for my afternoon, taking my slow time. I looked in the wide, broad mirror as I brushed my teeth. I flushed the toilet once and then again, savoring the simple turn of the handle. I carefully used and then replaced the towel on my very own metal rack on the wall. It was so far from the cold concrete room on Straight Street with the red plastic stool and the bucket of water, the spiderweb in the ceiling and the hole rotting through the door.

  I returned to my bedroom, and after hesitating, I selected a short-sleeved white T-shirt and a knee-length floral skirt from my closet. It was a small gesture of acknowledgment that I was home in America; still, I felt strange and exposed as I allowed my white arms and legs to peer out from where they had been hidden from the sun for more than a hundred days. I walked outside, the sun beating down on my bare skin. Then, like a tourist in my former life, I set out for the enormous H-E-B grocery store around the corner, just to be around groceries. I nearly jumped back as the doors opened automatically at the entrance. I wandered slowly through the aisles. I examined peaches and pomegranates, avocadoes, five kinds of apples, mangoes and pineapples imported from Central America, taking them in like any pedestrian lost in the markets of Paris. I picked up triangles of Camembert and Roquefort and smelled them, gazed at counters of salami, pastrami, honey-glazed ham, Shiraz from Australia, drinkable yogurt. Cocoa Puffs. Lucky Charms. Golden Grahams. Cornflakes. Frosted Flakes. Bran flakes. Who thought of these things—cereal with marshmallows for each of the colors of a leprechaun’s rainbow?