I arrived from Morocco four days ago, and it was only a matter of hours before Frédéric phoned me, saying my name in his soft French-accented English, both of us laughing in a mixture of nerves and pure relief. We sat on our two sides of the phone line, in awkward silence, neither of us quite knowing what to say. I knew instinctively that he had felt the same rising in his heart, while he was alone in his room in the monastery, that I had experienced in a small hotel room in rural Morocco. It was not a feeling we had created. It had been given to both of us.
Finally he asked, “When are you coming to the monastery?”
I didn’t know.
“Come soon,” he urged. “Come soon.”
I promised that I would.
I attempt to arrive in the courtyard like on any other visit to the monastery, depositing my bag against the walls and retreating to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water. I pull up a seat next to the railing, overlooking the cliff below, and watch the clouds moving and changing shapes over the mountains on the horizon. Then I look up and see him standing in his normal clothes, watching me from the banister of the upper floors. Really, this man should be illegal. He is just beautiful.
“Stéphanie,” he says, and I have never heard my name called like that before. He descends the stairs in his typical, loping way, comes to me, and kisses me on both of my cheeks. I know that this is normal for a Frenchman, but I am slightly weak at the knees from the mere fact of his face so close to mine, the brief feeling of his rough beard brushing against my skin.
I have practiced this moment in my head repeatedly, strategizing how I can approach this situation with at least some amount of virtue. I dig into my backpack, pulling out a thick hand-sewn leather belt I purchased for him in Fez. It still smells of tanning oil, a monastic belt to replace the one he wore so thin that the seams are now tearing apart. I am rather proud of it. It sends the very obvious message, I have gone slightly insane, but despite the fact that I can’t stop thinking of you of course I still want you to remain a monk, which is why I am contributing to your monastic wardrobe. That is the only decent thing to do, after all.
“I brought something for you.”
He tries it around his waist, fingering the metal of the buckle. Then he looks at me apologetically. “I have a, what’s it called? A hassasiyye.”
“A what? You mean you have an allergy?”
“Yes. I have a, what it is it? An allergy to most metals. Do you think that you could take this to someone in Damascus and get the buckle replaced?”
“Of course.” I take the belt back again and stuff it in my bag. Clearly he is not going to make this whole situation easy. He is going to make me carry his monastic belt back down the stairs, back to Damascus, through the neighborhood in search of someone to get it fixed, and back again up these stairs. I will have to carry that weight on my back—he’s a monk, he’s a monk, he’s a monk.
And this is all, cruelly appropriate, because he is, indeed, a monk.
Frédéric stays with me for a few moments and then returns to his chores. I find a room and arrange my things, then try to make myself useful, folding the rows of white sheets that have been left in the monastery courtyard to dry. This is a desert monastery, after all, and this is what religious people do—pray and work. St. Benedict neglected to write a special clause about falling in love with the clergy.
In the afternoon, when I have finished folding sheets and chopping vegetables and he has finished scrubbing bathrooms, we find a few solitary moments to speak together in the farthest end of the church, beneath the frescoes of women saints. I press my back up against a pillar. It is so hot outside in the exposed desert that most of the visitors have retired to their rooms to rest. Frédéric is just nearby, his legs out, crossed at the ankles, as close to me as he ever has been in his life.
We sit in silence. Better to say nothing at all. I have spoken so easily to him for months now, and yet I have finally arrived at the one emotion that is so taboo I cannot give name to it.
Finally, I look up at him. “I can feel you when I’m traveling,” I say quietly. “I can feel you when I’m far away.”
“I know, Stéphanie.” He glances at me shyly and then fumbles in his pocket before fishing out his amber prayer beads. “I can feel you, too.” He appears less worried than surprised, dazed even. “I wasn’t even thinking of this with you.”
“Thanks.”
He blushes. “No, I always thought you were beautiful. But I was somewhere else. God gave me an answer to my calling in the mountain, he gave me an answer to my vocation.”
I remember our conversation after Easter, about his seven-day retreat in the desert. It was the first time I really felt certain that this is where I’m meant to be, he had said.
“It’s a mystery, my relation with you,” he tells me softly. “Do you remember the first time I met you? I’m sure you don’t. It was right when you arrived in Syria. You came up to the monastery one afternoon, looking like you were still in a faraway place. You didn’t even notice me. But I saw you sitting alone in the courtyard, and the first thing I thought was, Why didn’t I meet her before I was a monk?”
Tears fill my eyes. I turn and look at all of those faces staring down at me, this motley crowd of saints and angels. I don’t even know how many times my life has changed in this room by now, losing God and discovering him again, how many mornings I have woken up from my spot sleeping beneath the fresco of hell or paradise to see the light breaking in through the window.
“Frédéric, I think I love you.”
He looks down at his hands. “I know. I feel something too.”
Before we have a chance to say more, the door to the church opens, and a local peasant woman makes her way inside, a scarf tied over her head, to kneel in front of the altar and pray. I wait for her to leave and she does not leave, and I am superstitious enough to suspect that perhaps she is meant to be here, that she has been sent to slip her body into this moment, to slow us down. Frédéric finally stands up to go. I stay behind, close my eyes, and lean my back against the pillar, and I pray.
Dear God, please tell me that I am doing the right thing here. If I have to walk away, tell me how. I have no idea how to do it on my own.
THAT EVENING, I stand back and look at the way Frédéric’s whole face changes when he laughs, the gentle half moon of his arm as he scoops children up from the ground, his hands, where butterflies sometimes come to rest. It is as much a miracle as anything I watched up on the mountain. Life in its essence.
I sleep soundly, and the next morning after the prayer I pack my bags and prepare to descend the steps and return to Damascus. I had planned on saying good-bye to him quickly, but Frédéric stops me and asks me to walk with him into the desert one last time. I leave my bags beside the tiny iron door of the monastery, and we walk until we reach a narrow bridge of earth connecting the opposite sides of the valley. We sit side by side and dangle our feet over the edge.
“Stéphanie, do you remember what we spoke about yesterday?”
I nod, biting my lip. I know this tone of voice, sad and exhausted and vaguely apologetic. I have used it too often myself, fleeing between countries, to be able to escape what it means.
“I was thinking last night. I just want to ask that we remember that this is a spiritual love, a love given by God between two people.”
“Like St. Francis and St. Clare?”
He smiles faintly.
I try to keep my composure. “I always liked to think of us as Francis and Clare.”
He touches my shoulder, softly, and then removes his hand.
“Otherwise I’ll destroy everything. I’ll start to question all that I have chosen. My vocation, whether I should be married or should become a monk.”
“I’m sorry, Frédéric. We wouldn’t want that.” I lift myself up from the bridge, with the little dignity that I have left. Just put one foot in front of the other, I tell myself. Walk away.
Frédéric is still looking ou
t, over the edge of the bridge. “I received an answer in the mountains. I felt it.”
I cross the narrow space to the bank on the other side.
“I’ll call you,” he says, just loudly enough so that I can hear it. I know that he will. I lift my head and take a deep breath.
“I’ll be waiting.”
7.
FRÉDÉRIC DOES CALL DURING THE FOLLOWING WEEKS, many times, to discuss Arabic grammar, the crowds of tourists flooding the monastery, or just to mention that one of the small kittens in a newborn litter has died. Our conversations remain wholly chaste and almost childishly innocent, completely without mention of our conversation that afternoon in the chapel. Still, I can’t ignore the growing sense that we don’t want days in our lives to pass without the other being part of them. Often I know exactly when he is going to call, as if I have asked for it silently in my heart and he managed to hear me and respond. Every time I hear his voice, often slightly trembling, I know: we are not Francis and Clare.
I never call Frédéric, and I stop visiting the monastery almost entirely, sensing that I should give him time and space to wrestle with his feelings on his own terms. Still, he increasingly finds reasons to travel to Damascus—once for a photography exhibition at the National Library, another time to visit friends who are leaving the country—and we steal brief glances across rooms, content ourselves with simply sharing time and space. His religious role means that we often find ourselves in improbable situations, him in his monastic robes and me dressed like any other girl, but purposely brushing up against each other. At a reception crowded with priests and sheikhs, nuns in their habits and monks in long robes, he slips a folded piece of paper into my hand:
How does it feel, to know that every time your heart is moving one centimeter, it is moving a thousand centimeters in mine?
I fold the note in my wallet and walk outside to get some air. When he comes to follow me, we stand together silently and watch the lines of traffic passing on the nearby Damascus highway, my dress lifting slightly in the breeze. I feel so intimate in this silence. I am shy and overwhelmed to find myself on the receiving end of the energy emanating from his body. So it is to be loved by a man who has dedicated his life to the practice of learning to love.
I try to continue life as normal, if there can be anything normal about slowly falling in love with a monk in Syria, and in the metric system, no less. For a few weeks I launch a kamikaze mission I privately call OFOL, Operation Fall Out of Love, doing my best to shake myself free of an affair that I am certain can only end in heartbreak for me and at the very least a spiritual crisis if not a scandal for Frédéric. I tell no one about my feelings for him, and instead I try to date—first a young scholar of Islamic studies who translates Persian and Arabic poetry, then a drop-dead gorgeous Palestinian shopkeeper who speaks Italian and calls me bella. My attempts at dating end abruptly when the Palestinian shopkeeper asks me why we can’t become more serious.
“You’re in love with Frédéric, aren’t you?” he accuses me.
I look at him in horror. Was I so transparent? I had not realized that I had even mentioned Frédéric’s name, except in casual, fully innocent moments when I had spoken of my weekend trips to the monastery. But it seems that I had been mentioning him. Repeatedly.
“Don’t be silly,” I point out defensively. “He’s a monk.”
He laughs. “I never said that he was in love with you.”
Well, ouch. Needless to say it is our last date, my last date with anyone in Damascus, for that matter. It takes time for me to dress my wounds, but eventually I resign myself to the fact that I am indeed in love with a French novice monk in the desert, who unfortunately for me is already engaged to a certain higher being named God and so is currently unavailable. Still, I refuse to believe that the creator of the universe works like an amateur postman delivering packages to the wrong apartment by mistake. Frédéric must have been sent into my life like this for a reason, and all I can do is have the courage to take this emotional roller-coaster ride to its conclusion. I just don’t understand why. Frédéric, who has been clear about the fact that he can never envision himself leaving his monastic life, has hinted that this must mean that I am supposed to become a nun. Somehow I doubt it. Ever since I made a choice in the desert, I’ve been plagued with second thoughts. But I’ve been sure about my feelings for Frédéric ever since that moment in Morocco. Maybe I can’t spend my life with him, but at least I know what it is to be certain about something. Surely a true calling must feel like this.
I visit shopkeepers and drink coffee with the Baron, and I study the Quran with the Sheikha every week. I spend my free hours reading and memorizing Quranic texts in my room every day. On mornings when I don’t want to be alone, I put on a headscarf and sit in a crowd of women in the mosque, praying, until the hum of their voices lifts my heart from the ground.
Now, it strikes me that I was right when I asked to be a novice in love. I’m not sure even how to begin. I was raised with many stories, but they were war stories and ghost stories, stories of how my father’s father was shot down and wounded during the Second World War, or how my grandmother bought a house haunted by suicides in every generation. I was not raised hearing about men and women who fell in love and lived happily ever after, or even men and women who fell in love and struggled to make the best of it. The subject of love is almost entirely absent in my family legends.
I don’t know what scares me more, the notion that Frédéric might stay in that monastery forever or that he might leave for me. He seems too lovely for the world, too good, and I am worried that I will break him in half, that I will fail him by the simple practice of calling him back to the imperfect earth. Most of all, I feel like I don’t deserve him. Not that anyone ever deserves another human being—this is perhaps the central mystery of being given a chance to love. It is a force so much greater, so much better than we can ever hope to be. I want to be worthy of it, and at the same time I feel slightly relieved knowing that I can never be worthy of it. Love has been given to me, like a bird that for some miraculous reason has just alighted on my shoulder.
Yesterday morning, Frédéric came to Damascus with some members of the monastic community to visit a mutual friend, and when the visit was over I walked him, Paolo, Dima, and the others back to their car. The streets of Damascus were buzzing with traffic, and I held the space between Paolo and Frédéric as we maneuvered through the cars in the street, trying not to get plowed over. Paolo turned to Frédéric, his beloved novice monk. “What do you think?” he asked. “I think that Stephanie should spend the afternoon with us.”
I blushed. Well, what was a girl to do?
We reached the station wagon, and by the time Paolo, Dima, two monks, and another nun found places there was no more room left. Paolo opened up the back hatch. “Stephanie and Frédéric, why don’t you sit there? It’s good for humility.” I looked at Frédéric, shocked. Then we climbed in, too awkwardly, stumbling over ourselves, our knees folded up toward our faces, looking between them at each other. Our sandals moved forward, touching.
We spent the afternoon like that, pausing every now and then to disembark, to visit a monastery, to eat lunch. I was only waiting to be back in the car, the greatest station wagon in the world, which should have poems and national songs composed in its honor. The sun set slowly. I watched the Syrian countryside pass me through the windows, starkly beautiful, all wild hills and desert paths interrupted by minarets and church steeples climbing skyward. We were seven in a crowded, beat-up station wagon, but to me there were only two people in the world.
At sunset the car screeched to a halt on the side of the road, beside an open space strewn with wildflowers and scrub brush, burned out already by the heat, wild. In the distance, the sun had reached its fullest, an enormous brilliant red star on the summit, lowering its head toward us. We climbed out of the car to watch.
The wind was blowing. Frédéric took off his black sweater, came up behind me, a
nd placed it over my shoulders, gently. “You’ll be cold,” he whispered.
I watched the sun retreat, a flower extinguishing itself, with the scent of him on my shoulders. I wore that sweater for the rest of the evening, until they drove me to the bus station and placed me on the last bus home. I wore it all the way to Damascus. I wore it all the way to the most beautiful house in Bab Touma, where I climbed into bed and removed it, finally, so that I could cradle it in my arms as I tumbled toward sleep.
8.
THE NEXT MORNING I wake up early and change into long pants and a turtleneck and tie my hair at the nape of my neck. Then I make my way across town again, to meet the Sheikha and study the Muslim Jesus.
The Sheikha and I have grown even closer with time, and by now I can recite the verses more fluidly, having prepared them at home before my lessons. While in the beginning she simply told me the meaning of verses, now we debate and discuss them, in the method passed down in every religious tradition, from rabbis with their pupils to Tibetan masters with their monks. The Sheikha no longer views me as a Christian, but as a searcher. Inti mu’mina, she tells me with affection each time I notice something in the text. It means, in Arabic, You’re a believer.
Today the Sheikha and I are reading one of my favorite stories in the Quran: the story when Jesus creates a bird out of clay and then breathes into it, willing it to fly. The Sheikha reads the verses, and I sing them after her, slowly imagining those wings unfurling into the air, the creature flying out of an open window and into the distance.
The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith Page 29
