“Do you think so?”
“I know so. They would tell you that you are one of the lucky people in the world who has discovered a calling.”
She examines the final icon again, looking at the restored face of St. George with familiar affection, and then smiles at me. I see her now, so calm and self-assured, completely unlike the defeated girl I knew in the desert, pacing back and forth in the valley on winter afternoons. I remember one morning, when she had been too frightened to climb up the mountain, I had taken her hand to lead her there. I’m scared, she had whispered. Don’t be scared, I whispered back. You should never be afraid of anything.
Though now I think she had no business climbing that mountain. She was looking for something that was already waiting for her here on the ground.
14.
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN JEALOUS OF PEOPLE skilled with their hands. I never even learned to hold my pencil correctly, much less blow glass or build my own chair or restore hundred-year-old icons. Now I live in a neighborhood of artisans, furniture makers, coppersmiths, boys who carve swords from camel bones, bakers. Most of these skills have been passed down from father to son, one generation after the other, so that more than one neighbor has told me something like “Sword carving is in my blood” without a hint of irony or jest. The more I watch men bending over their workbenches in total concentration, the more I can’t escape the notion that what they are engaging in is a form of prayer.
Today I ask Mohammed the carpet seller, “Do you remember the story you told me, of the jihad al-akbar?”
“Yes, the jihad of the soul.”
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I was wondering if you could teach me a little more about what this jihad means.”
“Let me tell you a story instead,” he says. Syrians like to answer questions by telling a story—which makes me laugh, because it is so much like my Woody Allen Jesus, stuck in his parables, going off on tangents about lost sheep and mustard seeds (the fact that half of my neighbors are carpenters only encourages me). “There was once a very simple, poor man, whose job it was to wash the hands and feet of the faithful as they came to the mosque to pray,” Mohammed starts. “Every day, he stood at the door of the mosque, making sure he washed the feet of the sheikh when he entered. Now, one day, the sheikh was about to walk inside when he was suddenly distracted by a very beautiful girl who happened to pass by, and his eyes wandered. The poor man immediately stood up and poured the water directly over the sheikh’s head!”
He chuckles to himself. But, like most parables in Arabic, this one is lost on me. “I don’t get it, Mohammed.”
“The poor man washing feet was a much better Muslim than the sheikh—he was focused on serving God, not on some girl with a short skirt.”
He smiles and then stops to inhale from his cigarette. “Stephanie, if you want to find prayer, you don’t need to go looking far. Just look to the fallaheen, the people of the countryside, or the street sweepers and the men in the marketplace, trying their best to take care of their kids. That’s where you’ll find the jihad of the soul.”
He reaches to the top of a pile of carpets and pulls down a beautiful carpet from Iran I had often admired, with a very detailed geometric design. “Look at this carpet, for instance.” He turns it over and shows me the tiny knots, tied one next to another. “This can tell you something about life. You could just as easily use another carpet. It would still cover the floor. But a carpet like this one takes months to finish. Others with even smaller knots take years. You have to have a lot of patience to tie every single knot in place, which is why such a carpet is so precious. That is jihad.”
I sit drinking my tea, mulling over his words. Then he reaches into his desk and pulls out two enormous tomes, each one at least six inches thick.
“I bought you a present.”
“A present? What for?”
“What for? For Valentine’s Day,” he says, trying to hide his smile.
“Very funny, Mohammed.” Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and he has been teasing me all week for being the lone American in Damascus still without a valentine. He can tease me only because his situation is even grimmer than mine, as his family is pressuring him to marry a particularly unattractive cousin.
“I’m just kidding. I thought I would buy you a gift to celebrate you finally getting over your sickness of sadness. Here.”
He hands over two Arabic dictionaries, each one several pounds, like the Arabic version of the Oxford English Dictionary. I open the translucent onionskin pages delicately. Inside, hundreds of intricate drawings describe every kind of plant, flying machines, forest creatures, and ships with their sails extended, each example lovingly labeled with its unique Arabic word. They are magnificent. They must have cost Mohammed an entire week’s salary, money I know he doesn’t have.
“Your Arabic is good enough now,” he says with affection. “If you ever feel lonely or sad again, you can open them up—and you’ll have the names of everything in the world, right there waiting for you.”
I remember the story from Genesis, when God asks Adam to name all the birds and the beasts, and in doing so briefly bestows on him the power of God himself. In the Old Testament, what someone was called was always deeply tied to who they are, their deepest essence. Words were creation, which was how God created the world with his own speech: he named the world, and then each thing responded in turn by existing.
God said: Let there be light. And there was light.
I fall asleep that night with a dictionary in my bed, murmuring new words to myself until my eyelids slowly fold down into the dark.
15.
I SLEPT DEEPLY. Then the next day, an enormous car bomb explodes in Beirut, and Rafik Hariri is dead.
Of course, the day began normally. I had always been warned that it would. I woke up in the morning and drank my single glass of strong Arabic coffee with the Baron. When I went to catch a taxi on Straight Street, I saw bouquets of roses spilling from buckets outside the flower shop. Menus were set up in front of restaurants, and plush stuffed animals were on display in the store windows. A man rolling up the metal frame of his storefront whistled a tune softly to himself.
It was Valentine’s Day in Damascus, a holiday that Syrians, with their affection for terms of endearment such as my sun, my moon, my stars, my eyes, their devotion to soap operas, and their fondness for syrupy music in which every third word is “my love” could not help but celebrate. This was a country, after all, where I had seen macho-looking bus drivers hang plush hearts from their dashboards. Where a very devout Muslim girl had gushed to me of the president, “He’s just so handsome!” This was the country where Nizar Qabbani, the famous twentieth-century Arab poet, had written hundreds of love poems celebrating the women of Damascus (and Damascus itself, the woman he adored most). Where Ibn Arabi, the famous medieval Islamic mystic who once wrote, “I am the slave of passion and the slave of the beloved,” was buried.
I made my way across town to gather my mail at the American Cultural Center, subconsciously, I suppose, hoping that some long-lost secret admirer had tracked me down from across the world and decided to send me a valentine. I was just retrieving my envelopes when all of the phones began ringing at once, the television set switched on, and I found myself staring at live images of a charred car in flames. The windows of the car were blown out and the roof was collapsed in. At first I couldn’t tell what happened. The picture was all fire and white smoke and blackness, bodies too burned to recognize being pulled from the vehicles.
Then the voice in Arabic in the background announced, “Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon, has just been killed.” But that wasn’t possible. I stood there, staring at the television, waiting for the announcer to say it again.
At the front desk the secretary’s face was locked in mute horror. She couldn’t take her eyes off the television. “It’s just like the 1980s,” she whispered, not so much to me but to the walls. “What will happen next?” I didn
’t want to think about the answer. The 1980s had been an entire decade lost in Lebanon to civil war.
I returned home to find the Baron in front of his television set, his eyes glassy and a single tear staining his cheek. When he saw me he wiped his face with a handkerchief and then thrust it into his pocket in frustration.
“Hey, Stefanito, they’re animals, they are…,” he trailed off, forcing a smile. “They’ll make another civil war.”
I put my hand on his shoulder, remembering that his two children still lived in the Armenian Quarter just outside of Beirut. “Let’s drink coffee,” I suggested, and he nodded, slowly getting up to make it, studying the dark liquid until it reached boiling before he removed it from the flame, stirred it, and then set it to boil a second time.
We sat drinking the coffee silently, as if that act alone could hold the world in place.
I wonder if this is what my parents felt like when Kennedy was assassinated. Rafik Hariri is supposed to be an untouchable, a larger-than-life personality so tied to the story of the modern Middle East that I can’t get my head around the fact that he is dead. A billionaire Sunni Muslim with strong ties to both Saudi Arabia and Europe, Hariri took power in Lebanon following the civil war, intent on building a country out of the ruins and devastation of the conflict. He served as prime minister from 1992 to 1998 and again from 2000 until his recent resignation, investing his own money in rebuilding downtown Beirut, and in the process becoming an international symbol of Lebanon’s ability to miraculously come back to life after fifteen years of sectarian violence. By regional standards he was certainly the most important public figure to emerge from Lebanon since the war, possessing a rare ability to appeal across sectarian lines. Yet he also had his enemies—chiefly the Syrian government, which he resented for keeping thousands of Syrian troops and secret police in Lebanon, constantly interfering in Lebanese political affairs, and fixing elections in what by international standards amounted to a foreign occupation. Just months before, he had finally resigned from his post in frustration after Syria insisted on extending the term of the pro-Syrian Lebanese president, guaranteeing that Syria would continue to manipulate matters of state from the back room.
During my time living in Beirut, I had watched the spirits of my friends and colleagues slowly rising as their city was rebuilt, as each new month passed without violence. I had watched tourists cautiously trickle back into the city that had once been called the Paris of the Middle East, full of outdoor cafés, seaside resorts, bars, and discotheques. And now Hariri is dead, and the fine sectarian balance of postwar Lebanon is in danger of once again collapsing. I know where he died so well that I can close my eyes and transport myself in space to that charred, burning car. I can picture it perfectly, ten minutes from my old home, on a strip of road beside the sea, smelling of salt. Nearby, sailboats come to moor, Mercedes line up outside of the Phoenicia hotel across the street, and a street vendor sells steaming corn on the cob from a pushcart. I often used to stand there in the early evening to watch the sun falling over the distant Lebanese mountains, catching on the windows of houses, so that the sky became a hundred small, shining lights. It was my favorite place in Beirut.
Now, in Damascus, there is the initial gasp that Beirut might once again be lost, the romantic capital that Syrians fawn over and flock to whenever they can afford it, relaxing at restaurants and buying the American blue jeans and electronics that are under sanctions in their own country, breathing. For this, there is an outpouring of grief. The darker realization settles in more slowly. Syria will be blamed for his death.
By late afternoon, Lebanese are gathered outside of Hariri’s home in Beirut, chanting, Syria out! Syria out! The next day, America removes its ambassador from Damascus in protest, coming just short of directly blaming the Syrian government for Hariri’s death. I wake up an American in Damascus, a “scholar-ambassador” tied to an embassy without a real ambassador and now hailing from an official enemy country.
And I’m scared.
16.
WE’VE BEEN WAITING DAYS TO HEAR if there will be retaliation, but then another morning passes and nothing happens. I’m learning how waiting can turn people mad; it might be worse than actual war. At least war is tangible. At least it involves real events, objects, human beings living and dying. My neighbors have been left only with their minds, everyone imagining what might happen. The mind, I’m learning, contains its own wars.
Every day Straight Street crumbles a bit more. It is a sad, slow falling apart, and it reminds me of watching my mother grieving after her father was killed, the way she would forget things in the kitchen, leave pots of beans on the stove until they burned so badly that the bottom of the pot seared off. Here, everyone is trying so hard to be brave, but fear breaks through the surface. I first notice it under their eyes. Merchants continue on with their daily habits of carving wood, selling jewelry, and baking pastries, and yet very distinct black circles begin rimming their eyes. Then neighbors who always wore impeccable ironed shirts begin to appear with their collars wrinkled, folding up at the edges. Storekeepers fumble with their change, handing out the wrong coins. Keys refuse to catch in door locks. Everything in the world seems just slightly off balance.
It’s not only Straight Street. The entire city is deteriorating, silently, just beneath the surface of ordinary life. I keep checking the stores, expecting my neighbors to stock up on canned goods, but the stores are empty of shoppers. I wonder if this is perhaps because such blatant planning would amount to a betrayal, an admittance of defeat before anything has gone wrong. No one has bombed us yet, after all. Still, some aren’t waiting. Today I passed by the diplomatic quarter, and I saw lines for visas snaking around the buildings and onto the sidewalks as Syrians with any connections at all try to escape before retaliation from Lebanon or America. In the meantime the streets downtown are flooding with new refugees, Syrians who worked in Lebanon for years fleeing home again, frightened and bitter after being spat on in Beirut or refused rides in taxis. “Those Lebanese are Jews, they are,” a woman down the street muttered to me in disgust today, just after her brother returned from his job in Lebanon. “They’ll shake your hand with one hand and use the other to stab you in the back.”
As for me, I’m lost. I can’t quite fathom why I’m still here, but as no one has asked me to leave I stay put. By now I’m fairly certain that I am being followed. I hear my voice, echoing twice, on all of my phone calls, cluing me that someone is probably listening. I can’t log on to my e-mail account without confirming the password several times—which can only mean that someone has been trying to hack into my accounts. I don’t feel alone when I walk down the streets, and I sense that my neighbors are increasingly afraid to talk to me, worried that I might be a spy, or worse, that by simply liking me they might be labeled collaborators.
When I do get out, I walk down the street holding imaginary conversations with the secret police, fielding their questions, practicing my answers in Arabic. I keep mental schedules of the places I have been so that I can tell them if they ask. This morning, when I returned home from a cautious walk through the city, the Baron was making a great spectacle of pacing back and forth in front of my door, looking worried.
“What’s wrong, Grandfather?” I asked him.
“Where were you?” He threw his arms in the air in frustration. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere! Condoleezza Rice came searching for you!”
I sighed in relief. I thought there had perhaps been an explosion. “Very funny.”
“Do you get it? Condi?”
“I get it, Grandpa.”
“Condi,” he spat onto the ground. “That little prostitute. That Satan.”
With no proof of who was responsible for the killing, rumors fly thick and fast. Taxi drivers warn me that America was behind it and will now invade Syria, filling the skies with Apache helicopters and the streets with tanks, killing even more innocent women and children, seizing this opportunity to finally weed out
the last bastion of Baathism in the Middle East. Journalists worry that internal forces will be pushed into action, either leftist political dissidents or the Muslim Brotherhood, forcing a coup that could eventually lead Syria to an Iraq-style civil war or to the creation of an Islamic state, a hellish thought for my Christian neighbors. So far, I have heard agreement only on two things: one, that the Syrian regime is innocent, the victim of a conspiracy, and two, that nothing good can possibly emerge from any of this. Though I have no idea if the Syrian government is innocent, there is some comfort in my neighbors believing that it must be. We might be bombed from the outside, but as long as the local population supports the government, at least we don’t have to worry as much about a coup.
The only person I can imagine who might still be sane is Mohammed, who can repair a torn rug sewn by several hands and has the presence of mind to thank God even when he is almost starving. I find him sitting alone in the back of his store, next to a space heater with thin orange rims giving a faint heat. He is restless and sleep deprived, and for the first time, he is not repairing a carpet or smoking a cigarette, so that his hands are idle and nervous. In the back of his shop, a portrait of Bashar al-Assad is staring down at us in a suit and tie, smiling confidently. Mohammed has always admired him, calling him a “strong, smart man,” one of the few leaders in the Middle East who hadn’t sold himself and his people out to foreign leaders, one who maintained his principles.
But today he doesn’t look confident. He forgets to offer me a cigarette or tea, and so I pour a glass myself and then grab a cigarette from the pack he has left on the table. I am practically chain-smoking these days.
The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith Page 22
