The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  At first I didn’t understand, but then I remembered. “Thank God for your peace!” they were saying. It is the greeting you give someone who has finally arrived safely after a very long journey.

  THE BARON IS DOUBLY THRILLED THESE DAYS, not only that I am slowly healing from my mysterious illness, but that I am finally learning to speak Arabic like a normal human being. He likes to greet me in the courtyard every morning with a barrage of Syrian endearments: Ya habibti, elbee, eyoonie! My love! My heart! My eye! I have a feeling that it reminds him of his past as a smooth-talking shoe salesman in Lebanon. I might get used to speaking this way.

  The fact that I’m willing to try to speak like a local and not like a foreign diplomat imitating Shakespeare has also begun to endear me to my neighbors. In fact, they seem to have forgotten both my nationality and my bewildering sickness of sadness and now seem positively eager to talk to me. I could have never guessed that so few streets could contain so much scandal and intrigue. The Ustez informs me about the neighborhood girl who might be a lesbian, or another who has a Muslim father and a Christian mother and so has lost her identity. The florist tells me one hundred jokes about the stupid people of the city of Homs, Syria’s version of Polish jokes. He tells me every herb I should use for sadness or heartburn or if I hope to find a lover. I overhear a Christian old woman complaining that the Christians gave the Muslims the idea for the headscarf in the first place, which is pretty obvious when you look at the Virgin Mary adorned by her veil. I have a feeling that it’s no accident that oral history originated somewhere in the Middle East. The Syrians are talkers.

  These days I often sit in the nearby pastry shop of a Palestinian named Ahmed, who spends his afternoons spooning out knafeh, a thick, cheesy Arabic pastry dripping with orange syrup. He resembles a character out of a novel, with shining black eyes, a mustache with no beard, and a pale blue shirt with his name, Ahmed, sewn in English over the pocket. He has designed a trapdoor in the ceiling above his shop, where he conceals himself when there aren’t any customers, so often his shop looks empty. If someone calls out, “Ahmed!” then the trapdoor falls open and he hangs himself out upside down from the ceiling, waves, and then climbs down below to resume his duties.

  Ahmed, whose family originally comes from Nablus in the West Bank, is one of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees whose relatives fled to Syria, most of them in 1948, and are still unable to return home. Like everyone else in Syria, he knows that Nablus is the legendary home of knafeh Nablusi, the most delicious knafeh in the world. But because no one in Syria is allowed to travel there, he holds the status of the honorary ambassador of knafeh. When I taste his sweets, I always like to imagine that I am biting into some far-off exiled place.

  Now, each afternoon, if I happen to pass by Ahmed’s shop and he isn’t hidden behind his famous trapdoor, then he spoons me free servings of dripping knafeh, makes me a sweet cup of Arabic coffee, and pulls up a stool in his shop for me to sit on.

  “Stephanie,” he says, “you know I have a great dream.”

  I feign suspense. “What is your dream?”

  “When I have saved enough money from my shop, then you are going to take me with you to America.”

  I sip my coffee innocently, trying not to smile, imagining him handing out syrupy orange pastries to my neighbors.

  “And when I have reached America, then I will open a sweet shop just like this one, right across from the White House. I will serve the most delicious knafeh and Arabic sweets anyone has ever tasted in America. And when something goes wrong between America and Syria, and the president is tempted to bomb us, then I will send someone over to fetch the president and invite him over to tea.”

  I laugh and then take an extra large bite of knafeh to show my approval.

  “And when Mr. President tastes the incredible sweetness of the knafeh, together with some slightly sugared mint tea, suddenly he will be forced to reconsider. How could I? he will ask himself. How could I bomb a place with sweets that taste like that?”

  Now, whenever I pass him on the street, he asks me, “When are we going to America?”

  “Don’t worry,” I assure him. “I’m leaving room for you in my suitcase.”

  Every morning and afternoon, after I pass Ahmed’s sweet shop, I stop at the neighborhood juice stand a few stores down, where laughing Kurdish teenagers pour me overflowing cups of sweet banana milk, decorating the rims with strawberries and banana slices until no place remains for me to put my mouth. “You’re from America?” they exclaim. “You know, we call your president the Brother of Freedom. He’s going to get us our own country!”

  Every afternoon, a good-looking young man named Fahd invites me into his bakery for tea, pulling up a chair among the fresh bread stuffed with spinach and spicy red sauce. He may be the most gentle soul in the world, which is why I find it strange that Hezbollah stickers are pasted all over the oven. Yesterday, Fahd showed me a tattoo on his arm, which read F+H, proof of an infatuation from the year before that had ended in heartbreak, when H married someone else.

  “Come in, come in—we’ve had the teakettle waiting for you all day long!” he tells me every time he sees me. I know very well that the teakettle is always in the oven, waiting for any guest who might drop by, and yet I’m flattered anyway.

  My new friends are not limited to shopkeepers. I am in hot demand with the retired crowd as well, and in addition to my nightly visits with the Baron, Maurice, a Syrian Catholic in his seventies who lives down the street, has begun inviting me over for after-dinner drinks. He is one of those Christians in the Middle East who never stopped lamenting the end of the French Mandate, when he was the cream of society just for being Catholic. He pours me stiff gin and tonics and wistfully describes the French missionaries who taught the Syrian Christian children about the geography of France but neglected to teach them their own geography. After showing off his dusty French wine collection, his picture of Charles de Gaulle, and a Bible in Latin, he stands in front of me at attention, half drunk, and recites the major rivers of France:

  Seine! Rhône! Rhine! Loire! Garonne!

  And for a moment, he is a child again in his school uniform.

  I have a new favorite language partner. His name is Mohammed, and he is a devout Muslim who owns a carpet shop on a quiet alley deep inside the Old City. I’ve been trying to stop by to see him every afternoon, and I usually find him sitting in a torn plastic lawn chair in front of his shop, tirelessly repairing carpets by hand. He looks just like Groucho Marx, with deep, dark eyes framed by bushy eyebrows, a shock of brown hair, and a mustache.

  “Ahhh, Stephanie! Yalla, ta’al, ta’al, Come in, come in,” he greets me. Then, like everyone else, he hands me a glass of tea and a cigarette.

  Mohammed is religious the way most Syrians I know are religious. He prays in the mosque on Friday and keeps the five daily Muslim prayers during Ramadan. In all other ways he lives as a mystic who always has a cigarette in his mouth and a pair of prayer beads moving through his fingers. He lives his own, informal version of Islam and has no problem speaking with a woman alone. In fact, I suspect that he rather looks forward to it.

  Today, after I settle into drinking my glass of very sweet Arabic tea, the bottom a small lake of sugar crystals, Mohammed takes a carpet from the wall, hidden among the piles of blues and reds and deep forest greens, Bedouin saddles and bits of prayer rugs, to teach me my daily lesson.

  “Now, a carpet is a story, and your job is to learn how to read it,” he tells me, his voice deep and serious. “Take this carpet, for example. You have a region in Afghanistan that takes refugees from all directions. They take a long, long time to arrive, years perhaps. They stop along the way and learn to weave carpets in local traditions, in order to support their journey. When they finally sew this single carpet, they bring with them all of the traditions they know.

  “Now look, Stephanie. Look at this single carpet, and here you will see Iran. Here is Pakistan. Here are countries ac
ross Central Asia, and just the smallest bit of China. Look hard enough, and you will find the story of a people coming together, and all of the cities they had to flee along the way.

  “Now for me, this whole business gets messy. When a carpet breaks, I have to be able to fix it. For a moment I have to put myself inside of that man and sew like someone from Pakistan or Uzbekistan or Iran, so that you cannot see the line where they end and I begin. When I mend a carpet, I have to forget myself.”

  “Thank you, Great Professor,” I tease him, smiling. I think of Mohammed as a Muslim monk who happens to have a job and a serious smoking habit. I have rarely met anyone who gives so much thought to spirituality, or to every aspect of life, for that matter. He possesses remarkable patience, and I suspect that only a man who has spent all of those years slowly and carefully repairing carpets would be able to sustain hearing me day after day, butchering the Arabic language when I speak.

  Mohammed’s shop is almost always empty when I come by, some sad ghost town of a carpet shop, which is why he has so much free time to philosophize. I keep telling him that he needs to raise his prices—that he is the only carpet salesman I have ever met who allows himself to get suckered by customers, but he refuses. “I take what I need,” he always insists. “God will provide the rest.”

  Since the cold spell, there haven’t been any customers at all. Today I ask him, “How is business, anyway?”

  “Al-hamdulillah,” he sighs. “Thank God.”

  “But you don’t have any business, Mohammed. Why thank God?”

  “You have to thank God for everything, good or bad. He knows what is best for us.”

  He quietly rolls a cigarette back and forth between his fingers, before looking up at me. “Did I ever tell you the story of the jihad al-akbar, the greater jihad of the soul?”

  “No, you didn’t, Mohammed.”

  “When the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, was returning from battle, he stopped on the top of a hill before entering the city. He turned to his companions and he said, ‘Now we return from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad.’” He pauses, inhaling from his cigarette. “Do you know what that means, Stephanie? The lesser jihad, the jihad of holy war, is simply to fight in a military battle. But the greater jihad is to work all day repairing carpets without any new business. It is to feed your family. The greater jihad, Stephanie, is just to live.”

  13.

  I HAVE NOT PRAYED IN SIX WEEKS now—by which I mean that I have not meditated or tried to fall down on my knees, I have not spoken to any Woody Allen Jesus, or summoned up angels from the ground. Other than my single, difficult trip to the monastery, I have not been to church. My only way of praying is by passing a set of green jade prayer beads the Baron gave me through my hands while I am walking, my way of reminding myself to breathe, to listen, to pay attention.

  Still, something inside of me is slowly healing. I can sleep through the night again.

  I sometimes wonder if it is not only my life, but also my vision of the world that is healing, if my neighbors are slowly altering it with their conversations and glasses of tea. I can’t help but shudder at how I pictured the Middle East during the Spiritual Exercises, all cities in flames, Beirut studded with bullet holes, refugees fleeing from their homes in the middle of the night, Baghdad burning, and that field of wounded bodies, reaching out for their pieces of bread.

  That is the Middle East. But it is also a caricature of the Middle East, missing all of those human elements that make it possible to wake up in the morning, to go on living here. For years, I convinced myself that I was lucky to escape before things truly collapsed. Now I wonder if it isn’t more difficult to watch such falling apart from a distance. CNN carries stories of the bombings, their news cameras filming crowds lifting caskets through the streets and shooting off machine guns in the air, young men with suicide belts strapped to their waists. I had forgotten long ago that a Palestinian refugee could also be a man hanging upside down from his shop, serving desserts so sweet that they make my teeth hurt, or that a Hezbollah supporter could be a shy baker who blushes every time he hands the nuns from the nearby convent their change. I had forgotten that the Kurds, many without citizenship and also dreaming of their homeland, could be teenage workers joking behind the juice counter in their own language.

  These days, God comes back gently hidden in the Arabic language I am learning how to speak. When someone asks me in Arabic, How are you? I answer, Thanks be to God. When a neighbor returns from a journey, I say, Thank God for your peace. I hear the phrase Inshallah, If God wills it, a thousand times every day, for Syrians don’t like to speak about the future with any certainty. Even to say good-bye, one calls out, Allah maik, God be with you, which I find touching. It reminds me of the Spanish phrase I heard so often from my mother’s family when I was a child: Vaya con dios, Go with God.

  I walk with my prayer beads through the streets of my neighborhood, whispering the Prayer of the Heart beneath my breath as I wave to my neighbors and pass advertisements for Magic Cola and Syriatel mobile phones, trying in my own awkward way to live in the world and still pray without ceasing. And I think that maybe the desert isn’t the only place where we have to clean our hearts before we can take in the visions around us. This Damascus of sidewalk saints and philosophers always existed, after all, this world where people open their doors and invite me in, for all of the years I have traveled in and out of the region. I just didn’t know how to see it until now.

  Today, I walk across town to the National Museum to visit Rania. I’ve been passing by often since I crawled out of bed, Rania being my only girlfriend entirely in the Arabic language. We share a rare friendship for having survived something extraordinary together, and because of our month lived side by side in the desert we might be bound together for life. I have many friends in the world, but they are friends I meet for coffee or after-dinner drinks. I have never huddled in the snow next to them, speaking of visions. I have never shared with them a month in silence, trying to discern my destiny. It makes me feel even closer to Rania that we can speak only Arabic together, this sacred language in my life. I get to talk to her using sentences I have never uttered to anyone else in the world, ever.

  “My love,” she calls out to me when she sees me. “My love,” I answer, kissing her cheeks—not because we are melodramatic, but because Syrians really talk this way.

  We have also been bound together by the difficulties of life after the Exercises, supporting each other in our slow crawl back to normality. Rania, who is already in her mid-thirties, fell even harder than I did after the Exercises. She is in the unenviable position of being a single woman in Syrian Catholic society, and the fact that she is not married or a nun means she is living in between the prescribed norms of the society, not praying or bearing children. She still lives with her parents and had been counting on her ability to make a choice during her second week of the Exercises so that she could change her life. In the end she descended the mountain still undecided, more confused about her life than ever.

  “I don’t feel a calling to be a nun,” she told me, frustrated. “And I’m not in love with anyone, and no one is in love with me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I answered. “You won’t let anyone fall in love with you.”

  The problem with Rania is that she is one of those rare women who is absolutely oblivious to her own beauty. She has short brown hair with blond strands that she often pulls back away from her face, revealing delicate hazel eyes and rosy cheeks punctuated by two deep dimples. She possesses a radiant smile. She is also perhaps the most sophisticated Syrian I know, and the French words that often creep into her Arabic not only hint that she is Christian, but in her case also that she is fairly fluent in French.

  Today I find her hunched in her basement office at the museum, completely natural in a loose white T-shirt, jeans, and canvas tennis shoes, her hair framing her face. In front of her, a series of photographs are spread out over her desk.

>   “Come look,” she says. “I wanted to show you how to restore an icon.”

  I find a place beside her, peering over her shoulder at the odd, unfamiliar face in the photographs. In the first image, a man in an ancient Greek icon lies buried beneath soot and candle smoke, unrecognizable after more than a century of having his face slowly worn away. In the second photograph, the icon has been cleaned enough to allow me to discern the vague outlines of a body. It is St. George, a common sight all over the Middle East, here attempting to ride his horse through smoke as black as night. Slowly, he gallops out of the dark, until three photographs later, the world is intact again and imbued with light, and St. George is healed and slaying the dragon, restored and surrounded by a sky of deep gold.

  “You did this, Rania?”

  “Yes.”

  I can’t believe it. I had known that she restored icons, but I had not exactly grasped what that meant. She is a magician.

  “I just don’t get it. You spend your days literally bringing saints and angels back from the dead, and you were on the mountain asking for a calling?”

  She shakes her head, in her typical you have not lived what I live frustration. “You don’t understand Syria, Stephanie. It’s not like America. This isn’t considered a vocation here.”

  Yet I can’t imagine deriding a brilliant cellist or a world-class sculptor for not having found a calling, much less for never getting married. Why hasn’t anyone told her that working on Byzantine icons might be the deepest form of prayer one could hope to discover, like being born with a miraculous gift to heal? In fact, the original icon painters insisted that they “wrote” icons instead of painting them, breathing and whispering a prayer before every single brushstroke, their hands guided by God. Icon painters were often considered saints, for no one could write an icon unless he had purified his own heart first.

  “Now Rania, habibti, you know that I love Syria. You know how much I adore the people living here. But, with all respect, when I see this work, I’m sorry, but I wish that you were living in Europe somewhere—because if someone in France saw this, they wouldn’t care if you weren’t a nun or married. They would call you a genius.”