The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  Every few hours or so, the Wizard knocked on the window and interrupted me with his gleeful refrain: “It’s time for coffee!” I dutifully abandoned my unpacking to join him in his tiny bedroom, where we sat in front of his television and watched montage after montage of flashing images of the war in Iraq, shampoo advertisements, and Mexican telenovelas translated into Arabic. If we were lucky we’d catch a historical television series set in Damascus in which the characters all wore long Arab robes and had complicated family feuds, sometimes resulting in sword fights. The Wizard couldn’t get enough of it.

  “Do you want me to get you a television, Stefanito?” he asked me a few days after I moved in.

  “No thanks, Juanez.”

  “What are you going to do all year if you don’t have a television?”

  “I guess I’ll study.”

  “Study!” he scoffed. “What is there to study?”

  I was tempted to agree and indulge my self-pity by spending twelve months sulking in front of the television set, watching love affairs and Bedouin swordfights, but I had tens of thousands of words I needed to memorize. “I want to learn Arabic,” I told him.

  “Shoo, majnoun inti? What are you, crazy? Why would you want to study Arabic? English is a perfectly good language.”

  “I like Arabic.”

  “What are you going to use Arabic for?”

  “To study the Quran.”

  He looked at me in horror. “Ya Allah!” he muttered. “Dear God!” He shook his head sadly to himself. “Well, let me know if you change your mind about the television set. I think I can find a way to attach yours to mine if you want to get cable for free.”

  WHEN I FINISHED WATCHING TELEVISION with my neighbor, I liked to wander from my front door deep into the surrounding Old City, where I wove through the hundreds of tiny alleys around the Umayyad Mosque, taking in the smell of olive soap and spices, the endless traffic and the clang of bells just before a bicycle whizzed past, the round circles of pita bread lifted from giant ovens, the prayer beads dangling from store windows and glimmering in the sun. My house was just a ten-minute walk from the buzz and commerce of Souq al-Hamidiye, the main covered market of the Muslim Quarter, which was not so much a place to shop as a total assault on the senses. Women in bright headscarves brushed up against Iranian pilgrims draped in long black robes, and Druze men from the countryside sauntered by in their baggy black pants. Children sold gum and chocolates beside men balancing wooden trays of sesame rolls on their heads. There was something almost theatrical about all of the costumes and colors, and every few meters great beams of light fell through the holes in the arched iron roof of the covered market and landed on the faces of men passing by like spotlights. Sometimes on a side street I would catch a glimpse of a swath of glazed medieval tiles or a caravansary from the eighteenth century casually mixed in among the stalls and pedestrians. It was just stunning.

  My favorite route took me through the perfumed streets of the spice market and past the gold souk until I turned onto a small street near the back steps of the Umayyad Mosque, where a few unpretentious cafés were always full of old men smoking water pipes and reading the newspaper, pausing every few seconds to greet friends and relatives. If I timed my arrival well enough, I could catch the hakawati, or traditional storyteller, regaling men with a tale from One Thousand and One Nights, his arms gesturing emphatically through the clouds of tobacco smoke. At the bottom of the stairs, a group of young, good-looking shopkeepers loitered at the doors of their stalls, chain-smoking cigarettes and trying to look casual in their skintight jeans. They had all slicked back their hair with great quantities of gel and had clearly picked up their fashion sense from Italy, judging by the T-shirts hugging the muscles of their chests and the gold chains hanging around their necks. Every time I walked past they leaned out of their shops and called out in various languages, trying to guess my origins:

  Ciao, bella!

  ¡Hola!

  Bonjour, madame!

  Do you remember me?

  Sometimes one of them even called out in Japanese, just to see if I would crack a smile.

  AS THE SUN BEGAN FALLING in the late afternoon I made my way home via Straight Street, the thoroughfare that has connected the Eastern Gate outside my house to the city center since Hellenistic and Roman times. It turned out that Straight Street was not straight at all, but a winding boulevard dissecting the sprawling alleys of the Old City into parts and lined by antique dealers, carpet sellers, and coppersmiths. My house was on the part of Straight Street called Bab Touma, or Thomas Gate, the city’s so-called Christian ghetto. Though the walls around the Old City had largely collapsed, two tall gates of white Roman stones still flanked the neighborhood, and old wooden houses and artisans’ workshops filled in the surrounding streets. Here, in what must have been one of the most ancient and diverse Christian neighborhoods in the world, thousands of Arabic-speaking Christians still lived in houses piled on top of one another, near the patriarchates for the Eastern churches. They were Catholics, Protestants, Assyrian Christians, Armenian Christians, Greek Orthodox, and Syrian Orthodox Christians, and in the mornings bearded priests in long, flowing robes and tall hats passed me on the streets.

  It took me a few days to realize that my house off Straight Street was not only “the most beautiful house in Bab Touma,” but that it also managed to contain, in a single building, many of the Christological controversies of early church history. In order to keep my neighbors straight, I had to remember the details of the Christology courses I had taken at divinity school, which I had assumed covered religious communities that had largely died out during the Byzantine Empire. Yet apparently these Christian churches were still alive and well in Damascus, and the fact that my neighbors now washed their laundry side by side was a minor miracle, considering that their leaders had spent much of early church history calling one another heretics.

  After a few days of coffee with Juanez I knew enough gossip about my neighbors, including the man himself, to fill an entire issue of People magazine. Juanez was an Armenian Orthodox Christian, a proud member of the sizable Armenian population spread across Syria and Lebanon, many of whom arrived from Turkey seeking refuge during the massacres and expulsions of Armenians that began in 1915. I never saw him attend the Armenian Orthodox church just ten steps from our front door, but he held all Armenians in high esteem and spoke as though he knew every single Armenian in the entire country, if not the world. He maintained an endless series of Armenian connections, known in local parlance as wasta, and he frequently urged me to limit myself to the Armenian cabdrivers and shopkeepers he knew. “Go get yourself a sandwich at Little Armenia, and tell them I sent you,” he barked whenever I told him I was grabbing lunch. “He’ll give you a discount, and the food is clean. Clean, do you hear me? Ndif! Do you know what clean means?”

  Across the courtyard and to the right of Juanez’s room, a skinny, mustachioed man and his family occupied the section of the house closest to the citrus tree. We called him “Ustez” or “professor,” because he was a professor of Arabic literature at Damascus University. The Ustez was a Greek Orthodox Christian and married to the embittered and middle-aged Roman Catholic woman I often saw lurking in the courtyard each morning in her bathrobe. My guess was that when the marriage happened it had been a rather unusual event in both Orthodox and Catholic circles in Damascus, neither church having completely recovered from the split between them in 1054. So great was the tension between the churches that most years they even celebrated Christmas and Easter on different days. Still, my neighbors’ Orthodox/Catholic union in our crumbling house spoke less of Romeo and Juliet than of the dismal salaries that university professors in Syria were paid. He wore the same brown suit to work every day, and in the mornings she washed out their tattered undergarments by hand in the marble fountain and left them hanging on the clotheslines for the rest of us to see.

  On the second floor of the opposite side of the house, to the right of my room and a
bove my kitchen, a family of Roman Catholics kept mostly to themselves, and I knew little about them save that they had picked up smatterings of English and French in their Catholic-school educations. They were excessively proud of their limited French vocabularies and insisted on dropping French words into their greetings even though I couldn’t understand them. “Bonjour!” they called out cheerily when they passed me in the courtyard in the mornings. “Marhaba!” I called back in Arabic, until I saw them again and they called out, “Bonjour!”

  Finally, in the rooftop apartment overlooking the city a family of Assyrian Christians lived, members of a Christian sect who survived largely in Syria and Iraq and who still spoke Syriac, a late dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Assyrians, as well as the other Syriac-speaking Christian minorities of Syria, were rather proud in those days because they could watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ without reading the subtitles. I, on the other hand, had the privilege of witnessing on a daily basis what Jesus might have sounded like if he were gossiping with his family about the neighbors.

  As an American living in Syria during the Iraq war, at a moment when my country was largely despised in the region, I could at least find comfort when I remembered the historical circumstances of the company I kept. Most of my neighbors belonged to sects that had at one time been embroiled in regional scandals. The Armenian Orthodox Christians, of which Juanez was a member, rejected the council of Chalcedon in 451 by declaring that Christ had one incarnate nature, which meant that for centuries they were accused of denying Christ’s humanity. On the other hand, my upstairs neighbors the Assyrians, pejoratively referred to by many as Nestorians after their most famous heretical member, Nestorius, rejected the Council of Ephesus in 431 for the opposite reason, emphasizing that Christ had a duality of natures and a duality of hypostases, whatever that meant, but that these were contained in a single person. They were accused of denying the divinity of Christ, which managed to offend even more people than denying the humanity, and were still unfairly criticized as heretical in much of the Orthodox world fifteen hundred years later. A Greek Orthodox professor at my divinity school had once remarked sarcastically to our class that he wasn’t surprised that Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein’s deputy prime minister, “happened to be a Nestorian.”

  The Greek Orthodox Christians such as the Ustez seemed to be safe on the theology front, but they still had their hands full lamenting the fall of Constantinople, the disintegration of the Byzantine Empire, and the fact that many of the Orthodox Christians in the region had converted to Islam over the centuries. Finally, we Roman Catholics were considered suspect due to the unfortunate fact that we happened to share a history with the country’s former French colonizers, as well as, not incidentally, the Crusaders.

  I guess that all of us were outcasts, living in a neighborhood of exiles, for I was hardly the only foreigner in Bab Touma. As Arab Christians emigrated abroad in increasing numbers, their empty rooms were filled up in turn by hundreds of foreign students flooding Damascus to study Arabic after September 11. We made our homes among Christian families who had been catered to under the French Mandate and were now left between cultures, not French and yet not always feeling completely Syrian, minorities in a secular country that each day grew increasingly Muslim. Bab Touma maintained its own rules, and the shops sold wine and the storefronts advertised short-sleeved clothing; the women in the streets flaunted their uncovered, highlight-streaked hair. Mothers scoffed at Arabic names and instead called their sons George and Michel. Though Syria’s official day off was Friday, the Muslim holy day, the shops in Bab Touma stayed open on Friday and closed on Sunday. The Christians filled their alleyways with statues of the Virgin Mary and makeshift shrines to her, and pedestrians automatically made the sign of the cross over themselves as they passed by, often barely finding time to rest their arms on a short walk home.

  I had landed in a small world, a microsociety, and there was something unsettling about that life, for like everyone in Damascus we lived in the remnants of a palace in disrepair and full of vacant rooms, at the end of an era, but this was perhaps inevitable when you find yourself living in the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. And the city was teeming with these microsocieties. Ten minutes away by foot in the Muslim Quarter, shopkeepers sold prayer beads and Qurans, threading religious verses into their business transactions. A five-minute walk across the road, the Jewish Quarter was half populated, full of the ghosts of abandoned houses recently left vacant by Jews who fled to America, the inhabited houses occupied, in the irony so typical of Syria, by Palestinian refugees.

  From Straight Street I began to feel like I had access, in some form or another, to almost every story that had ever existed in that part of the world, from holy books and holy lands. Any Arab could enter Syria without a visa, and many non-Arabs ended up there just because it happened to be the easiest place to land. The unfortunate ones from across the region fled their homes during various conflicts over the centuries and made new homes in those neighborhoods: Christians, Muslims, and Jews; Armenians, Kurds, Circassians, and Palestinians; militant jihadis going to and coming from the war, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fleeing their homeland, and finally, little old me.

  SO HERE I FIND MYSELF, in the twenty-seventh year of my life, living in a rambling house in what my government has declared to be a rogue nation. We are almost eighteen months into the war in Iraq. In two months, Americans will decide whether or not to elect George Bush to a second term as president. In the meantime, I have been sent as a “scholar-ambassador” to a country we have just passed sanctions against, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so out of place in my entire life.

  My only friend here is Juanez, my seventy-three-year-old knight in shining polyester pants, whose door is literally two steps across from mine. In this country women live with their families until they are married, and so he seems convinced that the reason I’m alone is that I’ve been cast off by my relatives and possibly left at the altar, thus prompting my flight to the other side of the world. As a result of his pity and his retired status, he’s made taking care of me his full-time job.

  In Syria, the tradition is to call your son or daughter by your own name, suggesting that you are so close to them that, as though bound by a cosmic force, you can no longer tell the difference between your child and yourself. A mother might call her daughter “Mother,” a father might call his son “Father.” In the same spirit, Juanez has begun calling me “Grandfather.” In fact he calls it out all day long, from morning until evening, as he increasingly forgets that I’m American and insists that I live by the morals of a Syrian girl.

  “Grandfather, I saw that you didn’t come home last night until eleven o’clock. Where were you?”

  “Grandfather, a neighbor told me you were speaking with that boy who works in the flower shop this afternoon. What do you want with him?”

  “Grandfather, did you get your glasses fixed at that Armenian shop like I told you? What did he charge you?”

  “Grandfather, don’t you want to stop studying and come drink coffee?”

  “Grandfather, you aren’t going to wear that dress outside, are you? You can see your legs!”

  While I call my neighbor and guardian “Juanez” and occasionally “Grandfather,” the rest of the neighborhood knows him by his Armenian title, “the Baron.” The Baron carries himself as a man who was once debonair and who now comforts himself by imagining that he still lives in another era, in his case the early disco era of the 1970s. Every afternoon he changes out of his regular outfit of tight green track shorts and a white undershirt and puts on neatly pressed polyester trousers and Italian shirts to take his daily promenade through the neighborhood. If I compliment him on his clothes, he flashes a smile and says, “Yes, they’re beautiful, aren’t they? You know, they were imported from Milano.”

  I don’t believe that his clothes are actually Italian, and yet I sense that the only thing of importance is that everyone can
pretend that they are. And they oblige. I’ve watched him saunter through the narrow streets of Damascus in his pressed shirts, smoking a cigarette nonchalantly, the shopkeepers leaning out of their windows and calling out to him, “Marhaba, ya Baron!” He may as well be the prince of Straight Street.

  Every day over coffee, the Baron tells me another segment of the glamorous story of his life. He grew up in northern Syria, where his grandparents fled the massacres against Armenians in Turkey, and at home as a child he spoke Turkish and Armenian, learning Arabic in the streets. In his youth, the Baron played semiprofessional soccer in Aleppo, a city near the border with Turkey known for its famous medieval markets and olive oil soap and containing a sizable Christian minority. He traveled throughout the Middle East in a life he recounts as if he were a celebrity, wowing spectators as he starred in soccer matches in Jerusalem during the British Mandate and in cosmopolitan Tehran, encountering stunning women at every turn. Later he married and lived with his family in Lebanon, where he made a fortune owning an upscale shoe store and had the luck of passing his afternoons sliding imported Italian heels onto women’s slender feet. In his small, squalid room in our house in Damascus, just next to a poster of the Virgin Mary and Child, he has posted a black-and-white photo of himself in his late thirties in a flashy suit and wide tie posing with a beautiful curly-haired woman in front of a storefront window lined with rows of Italian pumps. He assures me, winking, that she is not his wife.

  “I was gorgeous, wasn’t I?” he asks every time he shows me that photo, and then he pinches my cheeks playfully. “You know, in the shoe business, you are always in touch with women… and their feet. Ah, ha!”