“SHEIKHA?” I ASK. “Why are there two names for Jesus in Arabic, Yesua for the Christians and `Issa for the Muslims?” I have been too shy to mention this until now. With the Sheikha I only call Jesus by his Muslim name, which makes me sometimes feel that I am discussing a stranger. The prophet `Issa, peace be upon him.
“I don’t know why the Christians call him Yesua,” she says. “We don’t have a reason for calling him `Issa—we simply call him by the name God gives him in the Quran.”
She seems to consider my question further. “Is he similar to your Jesus?”
Yes, I think. Yes and no. Though I can’t even answer the question—I have known the Jesus of the Gospels for such a long time and I am just meeting the Muslim Jesus, so it feels like comparing my childhood best friend with someone I just met at a party. Not only that, after a month in the desert, I feel that the Jesus of the Gospels also knows me. When we first began studying the verses on the prophet Jesus a few weeks ago, I banged my head against the wall in frustration over how different he is from the Jesus I grew up with. He is human, for one thing, not God, and not the Son of God, and he is scandalized by the very idea of a Trinity. I haven’t quite grasped the fact not only that the Muslim Jesus was never crucified, but that he never died, period, that he was taken up by God to be returned before the end of time. When I first began studying his story with the Sheikha, there were so many parts of my Woody Allen Jesus that I missed—the Beatitudes, the scenes with his disciples by the sea, the story of the Garden of Gethsemane. Every few pages I became frustrated. Who are you? I would ask. Who are you?
Then one day, I stopped fighting it. Let him be who he is, I told myself. Not who you want him to be.
It took time. The Jesus I watched appearing every day in the mountain was real. I didn’t want to let him go. I didn’t know how to give this man, with his two contradicting lives, space in my one heart.
So I simply watched him from a distance, and in time he approached me, in all of his otherness, and slowly I have grown used to him. He is not my Woody Allen Jesus—he is much more serious, stern even, sometimes. I have followed his life, from the moment he was born out in the wilderness to when he healed the sick, raised the dead. I have watched him ask God to send a table of food down from heaven. I have listened to Muslim neighbors speak to him in the familiar tones they use to speak of family members: `Issa, Jesus, who will appear any day now in a patch of heaven, just on the other side of the street.
Still the Sheikha’s question is one I haven’t fully answered for myself. What does he have to do with the man I came to know in November? How can a single man have two such different lives?
“Well, some things are the same,” I tell the Sheikha. “Of course our Jesus is also born of the Virgin Mary, only we don’t have the story from his childhood that you have in the Quran, when he speaks from the cradle to save the reputation of his mother.”
“That’s a shame.” She sounds genuinely saddened by the omission. “You should tell more Christians that story. You would think they would be eager to know the earliest miracle in the life of Jesus, peace be upon him. He is your prophet, after all.”
“We also don’t have many stories from his childhood. In the Gospels he is born, and then we don’t hear much about him until he begins teaching to the disciples.”
She nods. “In the Quran, it says that after Jesus was born, Mary sought shelter with him in Rabwa, a mountain with a valley and a stream running through it, just on the outskirts of Damascus.” I have heard this from many local Muslims, proud that Jesus came here in his infancy.
“I suppose he’s not so different from the Muslim Jesus,” I tell the Sheikha finally. “Our Jesus also heals the sick and raises the dead back to life.”
I smile, saying that, remembering Jesus in the desert, placing his hands on the blind and restoring their sight. “They kept shouting my name, even when everyone told them to stop,” he had told me. I think he would approve of me, sitting across from a female sheikh, chatting about him in the late afternoon. He was never one for conventional companions.
Before I leave, the Sheikha says something for the first time. “Pray for me,” she asks.
“Pray for me, too,” I ask her, and I mean it.
THAT EVENING, when I am alone in my bedroom, I try to summon forth the Muslim Jesus into the room. Maybe I simply want company, for these last weeks in Damascus waiting for clarity have been terribly lonely. But I suspect that it is something else—that after so much time in the desert with one Jesus, I need to see for myself the truth of his other life. I know that some Muslims might disapprove of my actions—that the ban on images in Islam makes many Muslims hesitant to imagine what the prophets might have looked like. Still, I can’t keep holding this Jesus at a distance. I need to see him face-to-face.
So I close my eyes, and in the silence I wait for a long time, before imagining the story. Slowly, I am no longer in my room but outside on Straight Street, and he is passing me, this Muslim Jesus.
Assalamu Aleykum, he calls out, and the shopkeepers respond and place their hands over their hearts. I smile at the utter familiarity of the scene; this could be Mohammed with his carpets, gliding through a busy downtown street. Then they are there again, in front of him, lepers, the blind, and he passes his dark hands over them until their bodies go smooth and calm. He gathers the dead beneath his hands, lifting them back to life. Only this time, when he finishes, and having been entirely humbled, he presses both hands to his face and quietly prays in thanks to God.
He walks down the cobblestone alleys of the Old City, exits through the main gate, ascends Qassioun Mountain on the outskirts of town, and then stops on the side of the path to collect earth from the ground. The earth itself is hard—he has to push his hands deep beneath the surface before he hits upon clay, soft and breaking easily in his hands. He pulls out fistfuls, the red earth smearing his palms, pressing beneath his fingernails. He slowly uses his thumbs and forefingers to mold a body, carefully carves out a set of wings. He presses in the eyes with his thumbnails. Then he lifts the bird up to his mouth and blows softly.
The bird unfurls its wings, but they are too heavy and, after a moment, come to rest.
He takes the bird and holds it against his face for a moment, warming it. Then he slowly cups it between his hands and blows a second time. The two wings tremble, until the weight falls out of them and the bird ascends into the open air, disappearing in the distance.
“Ma’shallah,” he says beneath his breath.
“Do it again,” I whisper.
He does. I spend the evening watching him breathing into the earth, over and over, unleashing bird after bird from his open hands.
9.
TEN DAYS HAVE PASSED since I last heard from Frédéric. I know that he has not disappeared forever, because I can still feel him close by, in the mornings when he awakens, when I am uncharacteristically drawn at five thirty from my bed. I can feel him when he falls asleep at night, laying his head against his pillow. I can feel him fasting on his Monday afternoon, his chest filling up with a space we describe as hunger, but which for him is an empty room, asking to be filled with an answer to what he should do with his life.
I know that he senses me, also. He said as much in the last letter he wrote before disappearing into silence:
Stéphanie,
Yes, we are compagnons in loneliness, loneliness as in my mystery of being a monk, being alone, according to the Greek etymology of the word, being black as death to live in the truth of the Resurrection because for us, death is already defeated.
In the Arabic tradition, the monk is the one who is escaping from the world, only to love it more. That’s why I’m able to love you more, the world then revealing its sacred essence. In the French language, compagnon means com, “together,” and pagnion, meaning “bread.” We share the same bread.
For his thirty-second birthday, I bought Frédéric two small hand-blown blue glasses, keeping a matching set for my windowsill. I wanted to giv
e him that color blue—never found anywhere except in hand-blown glass, in certain Italian Renaissance paintings, and in very rare pockets of the sea. I don’t know what to call what I feel for him, but it is that color. That much I know.
We don’t speak to each other, but every morning Frédéric and I awaken in our rooms, and we each fill two blue hand-blown glasses with water. His are on his windowsill looking out into the desert, mine on my windowsill looking out into the courtyard of my house. Before we sleep at night, we fill them again. It is our daily ritual to each other. He is my first thought in the morning, my last before I go to sleep at night. I imagine that when I fill the glasses in the evening that I am softly kissing his closed eyelids and sending him off toward sleep.
In these days without him, I wait in silence. The month of May, which is the month of Mary, passes in the streets of Bab Touma, and women appear wearing Alice-blue dresses, proof, so they say, that they have asked the Virgin for a miracle and have received an answer.
Finally, the phone rings.
“Stéphanie?” He says my name slowly, carefully, pronouncing each syllable.
“It’s been a long time.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He sounds tired. He doesn’t provide a reason for his silence, and I don’t ask.
“I’m calling because I need a favor from you.”
My mind races through all of the possibilities that this favor might be—for me to disappear from his life forever, to become a nun after all, or to carry out some Catholic ritual such as lighting candles for nine consecutive nights in a chapel, asking for answers.
“What is it, Frédéric?”
“I wonder if you might teach me the Quran.”
I am stopped in my tracks. It is the last request I was expecting. I can think of so many reasons why I should not teach him the Quran. I am not a religious teacher, and I am not prepared to carry the responsibility of guiding a Christian monk through the texts of another faith. There are far too many questions I won’t know the answers to.
But I still say yes. It is the first time in all of the many months that I have known him that Frédéric has really asked me for anything.
10.
THE NEXT MORNING I sit down in my room in Damascus, open the Quran, and begin to read the story of the prophet Joseph out loud in Arabic. Joseph is that incredibly beautiful prophet whose story also appears in the book of Genesis, and in the Quran he is so lovely that the women who saw him were so distracted from their work that they accidentally cut open their hands. Adored by his father, life and fate carry him away to an exile in Egypt, where in his loneliness he survives by reading and interpreting dreams. A mystic, a stranger, he lives a life bound by the memory, both powerful and terrifying, of a night in his youth, when his brothers cast him to the bottom of the well to die. He waited for what felt like forever, alone in the depths, the darkness sinking down on him, but he did not die. In that moment, instead, he received a message telling him the future and giving him the secret meaning of his life. He was then pulled from the darkness, alive.
I can’t tell Frédéric that I think that he is beautiful. I can’t tell him that I feel his loneliness, his exile in this land far from his family. I can’t tell him that the secret of what becomes of our lives belongs to God, who sometimes, in his kindness, gives us a glimpse of its promise in that moment in life when we are stranded at the bottom of the well. I can’t tell him that I love him, more than I imagined I could love another human being, and that I miss being with him.
I can’t tell him, and so I send him the chapter of Joseph from the Quran. I add a note, mentioning that this is the story of a beautiful young man, exiled in the East far from his family, who dreams great dreams and through his dreams understands the world.
It is the first love letter I have ever sent him.
11.
FOR THE NEXT MONTH, Frédéric and I court each other through Quranic love letters. I wake up every morning and read quietly at my desk, and far away in his room in the desert, Frédéric opens his Quran and reads the same verses. We rarely speak with each other. We cannot see each other. Sometimes, I read a word out loud, feeling it escape into the air, and my only comfort is in knowing that somewhere he might be saying that same word, that he can sense my voice and hold out his hand to grab hold of it.
I know I may never have the chance to sit with him over coffee, for us to fall in love like two people living in ordinary human circumstances, with our day jobs and dates on Saturday evenings. The Quran is the only, small room that we have been given to meet each other in. So I learn to tell him the story of my life by giving him the stories that have moved me. I send him all of the stories of the prophet Abraham, called al-Khalil in the Quran, the intimate friend of God. Early in his life, he sets out to understand God, and yet each time he feels certain, he discovers that he has been misguided. When the night is covered with darkness, and he sees a star, he becomes certain that this star is God. But then it disappears. When he witnesses the moon rising, he believes again that he has discovered God. But then the moon sets and disappears. When he sees the sun rising, he is sure that he has discovered God at last. But then the sun disappears. Yet he never loses the faith that the majesty of the world holds God’s secret, and in the end of his searching, after all of his mistakes, God reveals himself to him.
I hope that he can read behind the text and witness my own journeys, how many times I have been unlucky in love and other matters big and small, how many false starts I have experienced this year in Syria alone, how many times I have felt sure of the truth but then stumbled at the last moment, realizing my error. Yet I always came back to the mystery I discovered in the desert, and that returning brought me, without knowing it, to him.
I write to him about the prophet Moses, who in the desert asks to see God but is told that the vision will destroy him. So God reveals himself to a mountain instead, and the mountain explodes with the presence of him. The mystics say that we are that mountain, that we have to destroy ourselves and abandon everything that we believed was certain before we are able to confront the true mystery of our lives.
I send him the story of the two angels, one sitting on our left and one on our right, recording all of our deeds. And finally, I send the moment when Abraham, who is quietly going about his life, opens his door one day to see angels, asking to enter. He, too, is terrified.
12.
June
MAY TURNS INTO JUNE, two months since Frédéric and I discovered our feelings for each other. It is a secret both of us have carried in silence. I send Frédéric lessons on the Quran at the beginning of every week, with a new lesson for every day, and he looks up the verses, reads them first in French, then a second and third time in Arabic. Every morning he selects a single sentence to memorize, writes it down on a small piece of paper, and carries it in his pocket for the rest of the day.
Seek what God has destined for you, and eat and drink, until the white thread of dawn appears distinct from its black thread…
I’m not sure at what moment the lessons become too much for him. But by early June, his responses are confused, jumbled. While the rest of the monastic community rests in the afternoons, he paces back and forth in his room, rereading the verses I send him, moved but scared. The Quran feels real, the music of the language working its way beneath his skin. It touches a part of him that has never been touched before. When I receive his letters, I’m frightened, remembering the stories of men who read mystical texts and become crazy, never able to return to normal life.
Am I dying? he asks me. I’m afraid of lies. I’m afraid of nothingness. Is it possible for two things to contradict each other, and for them both to be true?
Yes, I write back to him. I have no idea how. But I think that it can only be so.
NOW AFTER SO MANY WEEKS APART, we are once again walking together into the clear, open desert behind the monastery, which after so many months feels like home to me. This time we have taken a different path than those I know,
a narrow goatherder’s path that climbs steeply behind the woman’s monastery, so that we have to lean forward with our hands prepared, should the stones crumble beneath us. Every few moments Frédéric looks back to watch me, to be certain that I have not lost my balance.
“Are you sure that it’s not a problem, you disappearing into the desert with a woman?”
He shrugs. “No one will notice. Anyhow, I know that people, especially in Syria, like to talk when they see a monk speaking to a woman alone. But I also have my life, I have my French culture, and there are some parts of myself that I cannot give up, just because the world tells me to. It’s natural for me to go for a walk with a friend.”
Of course, I think to myself. Because that is exactly what we are.
We continue ascending until we reach the top of a desert mountain, overlooking the clouds and the valley below. I recognize the place—it is the same wild mountainside I had scrambled over alone in the rain that morning months ago when I escaped the Exercises to wrestle with God, just before the snow and my first confession.
We sit across from each other on the steep incline, close, tucking our bodies behind two huge stones, to catch us and keep us from falling. He turns to me, taking my hands in his, mine small inside his palms, which are rough from the daily labor of monastic life, from years of working vineyards before he ever came here. He holds my hands, firmly, not like a lover, but as someone who wants to tether another in place, to prevent her from slipping away.
“I told myself, if I just held your hands like this, if I just faced you, sitting like this, then everything would be okay.” He looks at me, with that terrible, innocent look of his, of such goodness that it could end civil wars, it could make thieves repent their misdeeds and run home to their mothers.
The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith Page 30
