The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  He shows me a note card covered with islands of green translations floating around a single black Arabic word. “Look. Here is the word gaib, which means ‘hidden,’ concealed. But it is also related to the words for absence, invisibility, and mystery.” He points to the word gaibi, another cousin, showing me how he has written the word secret in French beneath it in green ink, anchoring it. He’ll be okay in the world. In whatever bizarre and unique way he has to chart his travels, he’ll learn to make sense of this place.

  “Stéphanie?” he says suddenly. “I forgot to tell you. This morning when I was on the bus, I finally understood what everyone was saying when they want to get off. Al-yamin! To the right!” He chuckles. Really, it doesn’t make any sense, this phrase. “It was so great. When I wanted to get off I just stood there with everyone else and I called, Al-yamin!”

  “Did it work?”

  “Of course it worked. And then when I was walking to class, I saw a boy on his bike, and instead of calling out and asking people to move in the street, he rang his bell and called, Habibi! Habibi! Habibi! My love! My love! My love!”

  I can’t help smiling. Then we pay our bill and I take him to the mosque for the evening, so that he can watch the children glowing like angels.

  17.

  MY STUDENTS AT THE QURANIC SCHOOL keep me from going completely insane, my classes an unexpected dose of normality in the midst of an otherwise confusing summer. My students have become almost like girlfriends, and our classes in the mosque are, to some extent, simply an exalted form of girl talk. There is Noor, the wisecracking, exuberant daughter of the Sheikha, and Ahlam, a twenty-year-old and one of thirteen children, who often defiantly wears tight long-sleeved T-shirts to the mosque and attends both English school and classes at the Department of Islamic Law at the university. Last week, she took me to eat ice cream after class and asked, “You know that my father has two wives, don’t you? That’s weird, isn’t it?” When I asked her why she wasn’t married yet, she mentioned that her mother and aunts had been parading a steady stream of suitors through her house, but that she had rejected them all out of hand.

  “I’m just waiting for the right man to come along,” she said, shrugging, before digging into her second scoop of pistachio ice cream.

  There is Khadija, an extremely traditional Muslim in her thirties with severe eyebrows and dark features who has also never married, and who made a decision to devote the rest of her life almost exclusively to the study of Islam. While the girls all wear identical white headscarves, she always wears a navy headscarf and a matching coat to class, the habitual black sheep.

  I thought nothing of Khadija’s conservative streak until she invited me to her house one day, and she greeted me without a headscarf, her long, glossy hair falling down her back, wearing a floral shirt and blush on her cheeks. I was shocked.

  “You’re beautiful, Khadija,” I told her. “Why don’t you wear a lighter headscarf when you come to the mosque?”

  She just laughed. “You have no idea! I used to wear a black headscarf and a cloth that covered my entire face. Now I wear a navy blue headscarf. Shwayy, shwayy, Slowly, slowly, Stephanie! Can you imagine if I just moved from having my face covered to wearing a white headscarf? It would be a scandal!”

  There are Hiba and Ismaa, teenagers and members of a prominent Syrian family of Muslim reformers, anxious to learn English so they can become doctors and engineers. There is Zeineb, a young girl from the Emirates with exotic good looks who speaks English with a perfect American accent. Finally there is Wa’fa, my lovely newlywed with her round cheeks, who admitted to me that she sneaks off to the American Cultural Center whenever she can to watch Hollywood movies.

  Together, they have put to rest every image I ever had of life in an Islamic madrassa. They eat chocolate bars between classes, want to be astronauts when they grow up, and know more about Islam than almost any man I have ever met. I thought that I was sent to the mosque to teach them English, but I’ve found myself learning far more from them than I could ever teach them in the few English phrases that I manage to impart.

  For example, last week we had a class discussing the headscarf. Now I must admit that in the last several months I have grown rather attached to the headscarf. I’ve bought dozens, pink scarves and blue scarves, striped scarves and silk scarves. I am a sight to behold during our classes, with all of my students lined up in their perfectly tied white headscarves while I alone have one in very bright pink. I have discovered the headscarf as a fashion statement.

  So much of life in the Middle East consists of reading between the lines, and I’m learning that you can tell a great deal about a girl by how she wears her headscarf. There are traditional, conservative girls (or in some cases, those with very conservative husbands) who completely cover their faces with a black cloth, not even leaving room for their eyes. There are women who wear the niqab, a veil worn over the face but with a space left open for the eyes, so that sometimes a pair of stunning blue or green pools will stare out hauntingly in the streets. There is the traditional white or navy blue scarf, worn often by my students, tied firmly under the chin so that every inch of the neck is covered. But then there are pinks and blues, scarves with glittering threads or even sequins, scarves wrapped around the top of the head instead of tied on the bottom, pinned or unpinned. There are sheer scarves that show the hair beneath.

  I have always been curious about this matter of the headscarf, the perpetual symbol of “Islamic repression” in the American media, and so last week I sat with my girls in a circle on the floor and asked them why it is so important to them.

  Nisreen, a lovely, shy woman with a narrow face and almond-shaped eyes, announced quietly, “People think that we don’t like wearing the headscarf, but we like it. It makes us feel safe. For example, it keeps us from being assassinated.”

  I had to stop myself from laughing. “Are you sure that you mean ‘assassinated’?” I pictured a Muslim superhero sporting a magical, bulletproof hijab.

  “No, no, no, she means being kidnapped,” Ismaa corrected.

  “How does wearing a hijab possibly protect you from being kidnapped?”

  “Well, if there is someone and he wants to do something bad, and he sees that you are wearing a headscarf, then he knows that you are on the straight path and he won’t harm you.”

  This time I couldn’t help but smile. “If some crazy person wants to harm you, I don’t think a headscarf will stop him. I don’t think that’s a very good reason to wear the hijab.” I thought for a moment that this was a very Syrian answer—for in America wearing a headscarf after September 11 was probably more likely to put a girl at risk for ridicule and harm.

  Then Ahlam suggested, “It’s hot here and it protects your head from the X-rays of the sun.”

  Hmm. Another reason I hadn’t considered.

  Ismaa said, “I think my religion is beautiful, and I’m proud to be a Muslim. I want people to know that I’m a Muslim when they see me.”

  I was relieved to finally receive a coherent answer. “Now that seems like a logical reason to wear the hijab.” The others nodded.

  Noor added, “The Quran tells me to wear the hijab, and I want to obey God. All of these other reasons, such as protection from the sun and feeling safe, these are extras. But we don’t need any reason other than doing what God requires.” She paused for a moment before explaining, “Women are very expensive, very precious in Islam. A woman is not something simply to be seen by everyone. She should be protected and seen only by very special individuals.”

  I remember the story of Mary in the Quran, which said that when she removed herself to a place in the East, she had placed a screen, a hijab, between herself and the rest of the world. I am slowly getting used to this extended, intimate world of Muslim women in Syria, so that each time I slip past the curtain of the front door of the mosque, I have the sense that I am entering somewhere precious.

  My girls don’t ask me to change. They watch me cross over fr
om being someone who wears the headscarf in the mosque to the person I am out there in the world. Every day after class, some of the girls walk with me from the mosque out into the street, and they are there beside me as I shyly pull down the scarf from around my head to reveal my long brown hair tumbling from beneath.

  18.

  SPEAKING OF FASHION, yesterday morning, when I was walking down the streets of the Islamic Quarter, a woman passed me wearing a floral skirt that stopped just above her knees, the hemline lifting slightly in the breeze. The sleeves of her lime green shirt ended just after the shoulders, and her two small feet were balancing in open-toed sandals with heels. I just stood there watching her, a tropical bird alighting on the sidewalk, amazed that a woman in a short skirt in Damascus was not bringing about the Second Coming. I looked at her and I decided, I want to be myself again.

  It has been such a long time since I woke up in the morning and asked, What do I want to wear today? My wardrobe doesn’t include what I want to wear. My closet is stuffed with turtlenecks and long skirts, polyester mosque pants and dozens of scarves, every outfit intended to hide my body. I think that Frédéric has probably seen my elbows a handful of times, and frankly I’m tired of it. I want Frédéric to know someone other than the girl who prays in the monastery and teaches in the mosque. It is perhaps time to stop dressing like a pre–Vatican II nun and to try my hand at looking beautiful.

  I spent yesterday afternoon completely overhauling my Damascus wardrobe, pulling the light, airy dress I had brought from Boston from the back of my closet up to the front. I went shopping at a handful of boutique stores for short, filmy skirts and dresses and slid a sheer layer of lipstick over my mouth. I made an appointment at the hair salon for the first time all year, allowing the coiffeur, as their sign proclaims, to layer my hair to rest on my shoulders. So that today, when I approach Frédéric in the conservative, mostly male coffee shop where we often meet, I am wearing a bright pink tank top, a midlength skirt covered with flowers, and a pair of pink open-toed sandals, and the whole room is watching me.

  His cheeks flush red. “Well, look at you. You’re my pink American.”

  “I do believe you’re blushing,” I tease him.

  “Me?” He keeps looking at me, blushing, then glancing nervously at his cup of coffee. “Umm, could you please sit down?”

  The fact is, this also isn’t me. I have never worn pink in my life. Academics don’t wear pink. Yet I want to wear it now, for the fact that I love pink is like the fact that I love bad romantic comedies—a dark secret I have kept hidden in my scholarly life. Now when we walk the streets together, my arms bare and hair loose on my shoulders, he is no longer a novice monk and I am no longer trying to be invisible. We are two lovers, navigating the narrow streets together, our hands briefly touching as he guides me through traffic or passes me his blue glass prayer beads, our steps easily falling in line with one another, until my heart filters out all of the noise and car horns and I can only hear birds and church bells and the wind blowing.

  “Will you sing to me?” I ask him. “Something nonmonastic for a change?”

  He nods and then sings softly:

  Quand il me prend dans ses bras

  Il me parle tout bas

  Je vois la vie en rose

  Il me dit des mots d’amour

  De mots de tous les jours

  Et ça me fait quelque chose…

  “One day I’ll teach you to speak French,” he promises, “entirely through the songs of Edith Piaf.” We walk the streets, my skirt blowing in the wind and Frédéric still singing beside me, and I am falling in love with him and Damascus all at once, with this crumbling city with its old men smoking nargileh and laughing shopkeepers, with its Virgin Mary statues and hands of Fatima hanging from windshields, its carts of roasted nuts, its pigeons released at night, its tea vendors carrying trays and taxi drivers calling out, Amman! Amman! Amman! Homs! Homs! Homs! Beirut! Beirut! Beirut! Beirut! I am falling in love with the Military Museum, displaying jets and cannons outside that hardly look like they could harm a dog, the booksellers with their Islamic books and the cookbook of the Prophet, the music vendors blasting Egyptian pop into the streets. I even love the posters of the president.

  I love the way the edge of Frédéric’s mouth turns up when he smiles.

  We walk together, brushing against each other until the sun begins to set, and we find ourselves facing each other at the curbside on Nasser Road. I also love this curbside, seemingly no different from any other curbside, with its crowds of pedestrians and single policeman stationed, motionless, in his perch. We call it the place where we kiss, because like old French friends Frédéric kisses my two cheeks good-bye before he enters the crowded white minibus that ferries him home each evening. Every night we hold that kiss on the cheek slightly longer, until one of us blushes and pulls away.

  “Did you ever manage to get the buckle on my belt fixed?” he asks.

  I laugh. “Of course not.” Just now giving his belt back is the last thing on my mind.

  “I see. So you plan on just taking away my chastity, I mean my monastic belt?”

  I cough. “It’s not my fault you were allergic to it, is it?”

  I lean toward him, and he kisses my cheek good-bye on the curb of the place where we kiss, and I find the courage to put my arms just barely around him, on what might be the single most beautiful day of my life.

  19.

  I RETURN HOME TO THE HOUSE off Straight Street beaming with that peculiar, utterly transparent glow of a woman in love, still adorned in my pink clothes. The Baron, who had seen me come home from the mosque and change from an entirely black outfit to a pink floral one, is now keeping vigil in his torn-up plastic lawn chair, waiting for me at the door to his room. A cigarette is dangling from his mouth, and he has the stern, somewhat tired look of a father who is waiting up for a daughter who has stayed out past curfew. He motions me over to join him.

  The Baron has never been one to mince words. “So, Stefanito, did you see the padre today?” he asks.

  “Yes.” I look guiltily at the floor, and he gets up and gestures to the sofa, where I take my traditional seat on a cushion with half of the stuffing falling out. He pours himself a glass of whiskey.

  “You know, he’s in love with you,” he tells me. “Why else would he see you every single day?”

  I shake my head. “It’s not true. He’s a novice in a monastery.”

  “Shoo, Grandfather, are you blind? Where is he from again, Spain?”

  “No, he’s from France.”

  “All right then. So he must have had his heart broken by a Frenchwoman and so gone to live in a monastery in the desert. Why isn’t he in a monastery in France?”

  “He likes Syria. He’s touched by the monasticism of the desert.”

  He snorts. “Don’t kid yourself. Have you tasted French wine? And the cheese! A monk in France can eat like a king. Like a king, do you understand me?” He shakes his head again. “Like un roi.”

  He rises from his chair, in full force now. “Yalla, Stefanito. Talk to him. Promise me. He’s dressed up like a monk but he’s just a man. Do you think he can resist a beautiful woman?”

  I stare down at the ground. “I’m not going to talk to him.”

  “Listen, suit yourself. But these are the best years of your life. If I was forty years younger, I would marry you myself.”

  Who knows? At this point it might just come to that. I throw up my hands in frustration. “What do you expect me to do, Grandpa?”

  “It’s easy.” He puts his two arms out, pretending to hold an imaginary partner. “You hold him like this.” He squeezes his arms tightly against himself, embracing his own chest and rocking back and forth. “Then kiss him.” He smacks kisses in the air. “Say, Ya Padre, I love you!”

  I groan. He is still kissing the air when I duck out of that room as fast as I can. If only life were as easy as the Baron’s imaginary, soap-opera-conditioned life. Frédéric has made it
fairly clear that I don’t have a say in the matter. He is waiting for a sign from God that will tell him which path he is meant to take. Though personally I am of the opinion that the magical concept called free will means we can’t lay the burden on God entirely, I cannot choose for Frédéric, and in my heart I don’t want to guide him away from the life he already lives. The world needs those who have the courage to speak on our behalf, to carry us when we do not have the strength to carry ourselves. My world is so much lighter knowing that monks and nuns exist, that they are praying for us, that in some unknown way they are participating in holding the world in place.

  Then there is the other, more ordinary reason I can’t choose. I want Frédéric to choose me all on his own. I want to believe that love is like any other calling. You receive it, and if you have to, you leave everything and go.

  THE END OF JULY APPROACHES, and still Frédéric shows no sign of making a choice. Instead he prepares to return to the monastery and resume his life as a novice in the desert. I can’t comprehend that a man who has lived beside me for a month can suddenly be gone, that I will be exiled from a country that until recently I had not even known existed. I have forgotten, even, that he is a monk. I can’t imagine him simply slipping back into that life, awakening in the morning and sliding on his gray monk’s robes, bowing three times to lead prayer in the chapel.

  At the beginning of Frédéric’s last week in Damascus, I sit down to write the last set of Quranic readings I will ever give him: