It was then that I knew that I had been wrong to give up my life. No one was asking for my intercession. They didn’t need me. But I needed them, now. I needed to stay on the earth, to know for the very first time that happiness there was possible.
I had wanted so much to save someone’s life. But it turned out that the only life that I could hope to save was my own.
10.
AN HOUR PASSES BEFORE I HEAR A DOOR CLICK OPEN, summoning me back to the chapel and the world. Frédéric. I recognize the sound of his footsteps, pressing against the ground as though they are part of it, barely tapping. He pulls up a cushion and sits beside me on the carpeted floor, the bottom of his gray monastic robe gathering in a pool around him. His loose blond curls hang beneath his black skullcap, and his beard has grown patchy. I can’t remember the last time I faced a man who was not my confessor or a neighbor plying me with bottles of 7Up. I’m relieved to see him again.
“It was good, America?” he asks me.
“Yes, it was good. It was strange.”
He smiles, just barely, at the corners of his mouth, and I return his smile despite myself.
“Of course. Going home again is always strange.” He pauses for a moment before adding, quietly, “I’m glad you came back. We’ve been waiting for you.”
Hearing this expressed so directly sends a pang to my heart. We sit side by side in the church. His feet remain bare despite the winter outside, making him appear even more like an antelope or some desert creature, not just a human being like the rest of us. He calmly passes one prayer bead after another through his hands, and I know that he has already guessed that I have changed my mind about a monastic vocation. It is written all over me.
I sit for a while and watch him siphon off the minutes with the beads in his hands. He asks nothing of me, and slowly I recognize the inevitable, that I will tell this man everything, the way someone confesses to a stranger sitting beside him on an airplane. I have no one else in Syria to talk to, perhaps even no one else in the world I know who can understand the place I’ve just come from. I suspect that he knows this very well, and this is why he has come.
“Frédéric?” I ask softly, and he nods, his eyes meeting mine, encouraging me. “I’m scared.”
“I know,” he answers.
I feel better now that this terrible truth has been released into the air. He nods gently. “Tell me what happened to you.”
I don’t even know where to begin. So much has happened. “Do you remember what you once told me about the Exercises?”
It had been in October, just after Michael had left Damascus. One afternoon after classes, I had left Damascus abruptly and fled to the monastery to ask Paolo if he would allow me to do the Spiritual Exercises. Yet when I had climbed my way up that long flight of stairs, it was Frédéric who had met me at the top of the mountain. Be prepared, he had told me when I mentioned the Exercises. You’re going to live your whole life over again. You’ll remember things that you didn’t even know that you had forgotten. And it had happened, just as he warned that it would.
“In the beginning, every day I went out there on the mountain and I prayed. I tried to remain focused on the Exercises. But then slowly I started to remember my whole life. I remembered my childhood. I think I even remembered things that happened before I was born. I felt the world tearing open from the inside. And for a long time it was so real, it was more real than anything I had ever lived anywhere else. The whole world became electric—almost like it was on fire.”
He nods again, not at all startled. For the first time I understand that on those evenings when I watched him returning from the mountains, he was seeing the same things I was.
“Then, after two weeks, I received a calling. Well, at least I thought it was a calling. But now I am pretty sure that I just went nuts.”
“Went what?”
“Nuts. Crazy.”
He smiles kindly. “I’m sure you didn’t go crazy, Stéphanie.”
I remember those afternoons watching Jesus cursing the fig tree and healing the blind, those few days when another world revealed itself to me that was not of my own making.
“But I did. When I was in the mountains, everything felt so clear. It was like the world finally made sense to me, in a way that made me want to live like that forever. But then I went home to my family, and that was the world that I belonged in. Everything from the desert was gone—just like that—as though nothing had happened.” For a moment I remember my family sitting around the breakfast table, how ordinary they looked, and yet how the sight of them had startled me as deeply as anything I had witnessed in the sky. “No, that’s not true. I went home and everything was different. My father was wearing this red shirt, and I just saw him sitting at a table with his red shirt. It was so strange. My dad has been wearing red shirts for as long as I can remember. But then I saw it—my dad in his red shirt, and I didn’t want to be a nun anymore. I know this sounds stupid.”
“It doesn’t sound stupid, Stéphanie.”
But it does. And I have not even told him the rest of it: seeing my mother smile for the first time in years, speaking with Mark and laughing with my siblings, or even the way the small, ordinary objects of everyday life had taken on a peculiar beauty—Christmas tree lights and sweatpants and bad country music on the radio. I had come to the desert to try to heal the world in its brokenness—and yet I had returned home only to discover that I loved the messiness of the world.
Frédéric looks at me, acknowledging my gray fleece, full of cigarette burns and smelling like petroleum, my tangled and unbrushed hair, my bloodshot, swollen eyes ringed with black circles.
“Everyone falls apart after the Spiritual Exercises, Stéphanie,” he tells me quietly. “Dima’s not doing very well either.”
“That’s easy for you to say, Frédéric.”
“That’s not true. All of us have fallen at one time or another. I also fell after I finished the Spiritual Exercises five years ago.”
He is so calm, so perpetually shining, that I can scarcely imagine him falling after anything. “What happened to you?”
“I was depressed. I grew out my beard. I stopped eating. I couldn’t even recognize myself. Everything took effort.”
I am strangely relieved to be told that I am not crazy. “What was hard for you?”
“It’s hard that everything seems so trivial after the Exercises. I think it’s not a good idea for people to leave the desert so suddenly—the body needs to learn how to transition from one experience to another. You can’t expect it to be easy, praying for eight hours a day and then trying to be normal again. It takes time.”
But it wasn’t that I had experienced culture shock. It was as though life had pulled me to every extreme and that all at once I had been given a chance to live everything, not just the spiritual life, with the depth of a vocation. “Do you think I received a calling on the mountain?”
He surveys me for a moment. “I don’t know, Stéphanie. I wasn’t there. Only you can answer that question.”
“I did experience a calling,” I say quietly. “I just don’t understand yet what I was being called to.” I remember what the poet Richard Wilbur had written, that love calls us to the things of this world. It seems more and more that this was the calling I had received on the mountain—a voice that called me away from the deep precipice over which I was leaning and slowly back to the earth.
Frédéric lets his prayer beads fall loose in his hands. “The Spiritual Exercises only begin in the desert. Your choice doesn’t mean anything until it becomes incarnate, until you take it back into the world.” He pauses to think for a moment. “Have you ever read the book of Job?”
I had often thought about the book of Job those last weeks in bed, the story of a man who gives his life to God and receives everything in return, only to have it taken away from him: his sheep, his land, the family that he loves. For me the story contained not only my life, but the stories of so many I knew who had woken up
one day to find that they had lost everything, that for some unknown reason they had been cursed by God.
Frédéric leans his head back against the wall. “I’ve read the book of Job over and over again. And finally I’ve decided that it can’t really be a story about a man who is tested by God and loses his sheep and then loses his children and then loses his fields, and then at the end of the story is rewarded for his patience by getting back another set of sheep and new fields and new children. That doesn’t make any sense to me—you can’t compensate for losing one thing just by replacing it with something else.” He stops for a moment, considering. “It must then be a story about a man who has become so tired of his life that he can no longer love his sheep, he can no longer walk his land, he can no longer see his children as though they are his own. And so they become dead to him. In this way they are completely dead to him. And he must suffer to the point of dying before he knows how to get them back.”
I imagine that moment, Job’s body blistered and worn, his mind nearly gone, and the pure recognition on his face as he enters through a door frame and looks up to see the ones he loves in a room, as though they had never left him. He runs up to embrace them, like a soldier wounded and returning from battle, the dream every refugee must have of coming home.
It is time for both of us to go. We stand up, and Frédéric hesitates at the door. He turns for a moment and looks at me.
“Stéphanie, you know, I never really thought that you should become a nun.”
His words sting terribly. “Why?”
“You don’t believe in resurrection,” he answers, his voice soft and barely audible. He does not say it cruelly. He sounds sad.
“What do you mean by that?”
“It’s simple, Stéphanie,” he says, looking in my eyes. “You don’t love your life.”
He leaves the church silently and closes the door.
11.
FOR DAYS AFTER I leave the monastery I try to shake Frédéric’s words. You don’t believe in resurrection. I have always been good at faking it—at smiling and laughing at people’s jokes, at waxing on about the possibilities in life. Still, I can’t help but feel that Frédéric has managed to nail the part of myself that I have tried to keep hidden. I was, after all, the girl who told my father when I was five years old that I feared he had only twenty-five years left to live. I was the student who in the second grade asked for smoke detectors for Christmas when the rest of my class asked for Cabbage Patch Kids. I have spent a lifetime waiting for the world to come crashing down on me. And, to be perfectly fair, I am not entirely delusional. I have managed to escape near death five times already, like the magician nailed down in a wooden box and then placed into a tank of water who always manages to emerge at the last minute, still alive.
Yet it’s been a long time now since I’ve brushed against death. For years, I could still convince myself that I was cursed, that I was living out the same battle as everyone else in my family, biding my time until I eventually died tragically. But now I can no longer delude myself. The curse is finished now. I have no idea how, or why, but I am absolutely certain of it. Now I am like someone born into a country mired in a decades-long civil war, on a day when both sides unexpectedly declare a truce. I have to learn to live again in the world.
Only I don’t know how. I’ve never tried to navigate a world without complications. I don’t know the rules. But I’ve been an apprentice to death for too long. I want so much to at least try to be happy, to remember what it feels like to be light for more than a few hours at a time.
I was thumbing through The Lives of the Desert Fathers this morning. I think I’ve finally found some guidance for life here in the world.
A brother asked Abba Sisoes: I have fallen. What should I do?
Get up again, he answered.
12.
February
MY BODY STILL ACHES, and so I’ve been taking it one step at a time. During my first few days back from the monastery, it was enough to climb out of bed and join the Baron for coffee. Then I began to answer phone calls again, to put on different clothes in the morning, to brush my hair. Finally I worked up the courage to walk to the main street of Bab Touma to buy shawarma, meat stuffed in warm pita bread, for lunch.
“You’re still here?” the man asked me as he sawed off slices of meat with a long electric knife. It gave me the feeling of being Lazarus, risen from the dead.
What is increasingly becoming clear to me with each passing day is that, much to my surprise, I am beginning to speak Arabic. This may be the only miracle I have salvaged from my time in the desert—that a month of not speaking and of hearing only Arabic have somehow made the language stick in my brain. True, many of the words I picked up—lepers and disciples and Pharisees—won’t do me much good in the market (though the lamb from Lamb of God has already proven useful in ordering lunch). But I can hear Arabic, and what’s more, I can remember it.
Recently, I have begun walking through the streets of Damascus, passing my prayer beads through my hands and practicing walking meditation. I try just to listen to the world around me, the way I listened in the desert for ghosts and angels to appear. I can hear the call to prayer, floating over the rooftops—God is great! God is great! As I walk down the winding lanes near my house, I listen to the hammers of carpenters, pounding against nails, and chain saws blowing sawdust in the air. I can hear a woman shouting before lowering a basket by a rope from her window down to the street. The fruit seller is calling, One kilo for ten lire! One kilo for ten! A coin dropping into a beggar’s tin cup rings like a cymbal. A boy passing on his bicycle tinkles his bell and calls out, Habibi! Habibi! My love! My love!
I can hear wind, funneling through a tiny alley, speaking in a low voice. The wooden shutters of houses beat back and forth against old Ottoman walls. I can hear keys, fastened on the loops of men’s belts, jingling when they walk.
I spend a few days like this, just listening. Then, very slowly, I begin receiving words.
It all starts with the Straw Man. One day, I set out to buy a juice from the jolly, slightly potbellied man who works at the corner store just across the street from my house, and it dawns on me that in all of my years of studying Arabic I never learned the word for “straw.” I point to the small can of straws beside the cash register as he hands me my mango juice. “Can I have a… what is this thing called anyway?”
He laughs, handing me a straw. “A mussasa. Or a shalamona. You choose.”
So that was straw in Arabic. I love it. It is such a useless word, a luxury. I could go my whole life without needing this word, like a diamond ring.
Now I pass by every day and buy a can of juice from him, just so I can ask him, “Do you have a mussasa?” He winks at me.
Then the Tin Man came into my life. Earlier this week, I woke up and began to make a sandwich, only to realize not only that I did not have a knife, but that I do not know the word for “knife” in Arabic. I ran outside, to the Straw Man, my ally on the street, anxious for him to help me. I began to saw at my hand furiously with my finger, until I noticed that a look of alarm had crossed him face.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No, no, I just need one of these things,” I said, pointing to my hand. He sighed in relief. “Sikkine,” he said. Go ask the man with the cart outside.
I ran to the cart, but by then I had forgotten the word again. I began to repeat the charade of sawing off my hand to the man with a cart.
He pulled a knife out, concealed beneath mountains of toothbrushes, hairpins, batteries, extension cords, mirrors, and decks of playing cards.
“Sikkine,” he said firmly. “Say it after me.”
I parroted his word obediently. Now, when I pass the Tin Man in the street, he calls out to me, “How is your sikkine?”
Today a woman ordering at a juice stall gave me carrot, a Greek Catholic priest gave me forgiveness, and a frustrated neighbor unwittingly taught me a handful of vulgar expletives, together with
the rhetorical question, So, what do you expect me to do? I love them all. I feel like a lost wanderer scooped up from the side of the road, given directions and a glass of water to drink.
I can’t fathom how I missed it, during all of these months living in Damascus, chugging through Arabic classes. The Arabic language is so poetic. My neighbors don’t just give me words—they have started giving me phrases that don’t make any sense, pure music strung out into words. When I buy something from the store, the storekeeper thanks me by saying, `Ala Rasi! On my head! He then touches his hand to his head in a gesture that shows me he would do anything in the entire world for me. Sometimes instead of saying, “You’re welcome,” he calls out, “Tikram eyoonik!” Which means, I think, “May your eye be honored.”
I am growing accustomed to their over-the-top, syrupy endearments. Men call their wives My moon or My stars. Friends call each other Ya elbee, My heart. When a day, or a landscape, or a dish of food is beautiful, it is said to be bi-jinan—which implies something like “This is so incredible that it is driving me crazy!” Even the standard greeting of Good morning, or Sabah al-kheir, is answered by the phrase Sabah al-noor, which means “Morning of light!” Though sometimes my neighbors like to mix it up, and when I call out “Sabah al-kheir!” they’ll smile and respond, “Sabah al-ward!” “Morning of roses!”
It is so very far from the language I have studied up until now. I need this. When I am struggling for a word and I sift through my trove of possibilities—guns, bombs, politics, explosion, sin, adultery, cross—it is such a relief to finally come upon something as simple as afternoon.
Yesterday, I saw a woman walking through the neighborhood with a newborn infant swaddled in her arms. “Al-hamdulillah al-salaami!” the neighbors called out.
The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith Page 20
