The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  Unfortunately, stories of luck in the Middle East usually don’t have a happy ending, and the Baron’s life is no exception. When the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975, he fled with his family to Turkey, where he managed to keep working due to his fluency in Turkish. A few years later, he returned to Lebanon, only to flee again after his village was raided by the Druze—yet another of the dozens of religious sects scattered throughout the region. He might have forgiven them had they not also raided his shoe store and stolen his entire stock of Italian heels and delicate flats, ending his career in shoes forever. To him looting a high-end shoe store was as barbaric as looting an antiquities museum, and he has never fully recovered from the scandal of it. Twenty-five years later, his ravings against the Druze are a staple of his afternoon lectures, as he invents more and more crimes they have committed.

  “They worship goats!” he fumes to me. “Can you believe that? Goats!”

  After he lost everything, he returned to Turkey, and then like many Lebanese refugees he moved to Brazil, finally splitting the last ten years of his life between Brazil and the decaying room he inhabits in Damascus next to mine. And yet in some way I’d like to think that his fall from grace is an illusion, for he has convinced himself that we live in the finest house in all of Bab Touma and the neighbors still address him as a gentleman.

  It was the Baron who first discovered the final tenants of our humble, decaying house. They are two lovebirds, with beautiful color-stained wings, who together each afternoon descend from their hours of circling the city and come to nest in the highest branches of our citrus tree in the courtyard at exactly 6:30 p.m. If they are late, the Baron starts to worry, peeking out to look for them from the doorway every two minutes or so, afraid that they have become estranged. If more than ten minutes have passed, he knocks at my window frantically, calling, “Grandfather! Grandfather! One of the birds hasn’t arrived! There must be a problem!”

  Half an hour later, he inevitably returns and lets himself in, certain I have also been beside myself with worry. “Oh Grandfather, you don’t need to worry anymore,” he assures me. “The other bird came.”

  3.

  THE DAYS HERE LAST FOREVER. The sun rises early and stays at full force over the city until around five in the afternoon, when it finally begins its slow and gradual retreat behind Jebel Qassioun, the mountain in the distance where locals believe that Cain killed Abel by casting his head against the stones. Because daylight is excruciatingly hot, some of the shopkeepers close their stores in the afternoons, and after sunset there is again a brief silence for dinnertime across the city. Then the markets open up again in the evenings and fill with crowds of people seeing one another and being seen, the Middle Eastern version of the great Italian passeggiata. By the time the streets quiet down completely I can only catch a few hours of sleep before it starts all over again.

  I find it hard to fill my days, and so I’ve started to develop a routine. In the morning after coffee I wander to the Internet café across the neighborhood to see if anyone has written to me. The café is situated in a tiny alley just beyond the only mosque in Bab Touma and is nothing more than an ancient room filled up with cheap computers and young men hopefully instant-messaging women across the globe. By now the man who works the front desk recognizes me and gives me the best computer. I never stay long though, and after seeing my empty mailbox and writing my daily letter back home I make my way toward Straight Street again. By the time I arrive at the house it is time for a second cup of coffee and a chat with the Baron. When we’ve finished I grab a sandwich and fries, often from the Armenian place around the corner, and then I return to my room to spend a few hours drilling myself with Arabic flash cards. I take a hot shower, have another cup of coffee with the Baron, and then wander for a few hours in the Old City, looking for a chance to try out some of the new words I’ve memorized.

  The problem is, my attempts at learning Arabic aren’t working. I’m just terrible. The words feel unnatural coming out of my mouth, and I sometimes think that my tongue isn’t the right shape to pronounce them. I’m like a child learning to speak again—in an alphabet full of letters that don’t exist in English, the guttural kh and the strange g, the two different letters that both sound exactly to me like the letter t, two more that sound exactly like d, and even two that sound like th. The k sounds like q, and I can’t differentiate the two s sounds for the life of me. Even when I manage to sort out the letters, I can’t get any of the new words to stick in my brain, because they don’t sound like any words that I already know.

  Almost every day I’ve made embarrassing, even offensive mistakes. Last week I went to buy a toothbrush from the pharmacy, and instead of asking the pharmacist if he was open, I asked him, “Are you a virgin?” Later, struggling as always to differentiate between the h and the kh, I complained to the Ustez that I was having difficulty pronouncing certain sheep (kharuf) instead of certain letters (hruf) and was confused when he howled with laughter. When trying to make a passionate point, I told Juanez that I was speaking with my dog (kalb) instead of with my heart (qalb). Worst of all, I keep repeating what I hear other people say to me, which always worked fine in English. Yet along with its impossible alphabet, Arabic has separate grammar for speaking to men and women, and all adjectives are gender specific. I’ve picked up the unfortunate habit of speaking to all of the men around me as though I’m speaking to a woman, insulting their manhood in the process. This is driving the Baron crazy.

  “Grandpa!” he ranted to me after I told him that he looked pretty yesterday. “I am a man. A man. Why do you speak to me like that?”

  It is time, I’ve decided, to return to Arabic school.

  SO IT IS THAT THIS MORNING I climb out of bed earlier than usual and gulp down my cup of coffee on the run. On the corner of Straight Street I flag down a taxi and hand the driver an address scribbled on a piece of paper, where the Ustez has helpfully scrawled in blue ink the Arabic words The College of Literature, Damascus Autostrade. A moment later we snake out of the intimate, known world of Bab Touma and into the traffic of the highway circling Damascus, crammed in the early hours with yellow taxis and old, exhausted buses, hordes of minivans with destinations written on placards on the roof, bicycles and brave pedestrians who put their heads down and dart between the cars. On the side of the road, a man is selling tea in plastic cups to drivers who have slowed down to pay through their rolled-down windows and chat with him, causing the cars behind them, including us, to back up. The driver turns around.

  “Damascus University?” he asks for confirmation. I nod.

  “Do you want to try to keep taking the highway or cut through the Old City?”

  The conversation is quickly getting ahead of my ability to respond in Arabic. “I have no idea. You know better than I do.”

  He laughs. “At your service. Where are you from?”

  It takes me a minute to understand his question, which sounds to me like he is asking not What is your country? but What is your civilization? It’s the first time I’ve ever heard the question asked like this, and it makes me feel like an alien who has landed from another planet.

  I look at him steadily in the rearview mirror. “I’m from America.” I finally say in Arabic. I make sure not to say it defiantly. I just want to be careful not to sound ashamed.

  An almost imperceptible look of surprise flashes in his eyes, like he has accidentally touched a light socket.

  “America? You mean you’re from the America?”

  “That’s right.”

  He breaks into a broad grin. “Welcome to Syria.”

  He shakes his head in bewilderment, and he continues to look baffled for the next minute or so, glancing in his rearview mirror as if to confirm that I am actually there. I imagine that he can’t quite believe the first person he has ever met from the country that embodies such raw power has turned out to be an awkward, bumbling girl on her way to her first day of school. I try to imagine what would happen if I were driving
in downtown San Antonio and I picked up an Iraqi refugee speaking Chaucerian-accented English.

  Which brings me to another point: in addition to jumbling letters and forgetting vocabulary, I speak a kind of medieval Arabic. I mean this quite literally—the hours of Arabic I studied in graduate school were unfortunately limited to classical Arabic, which is a language not actually spoken by ordinary people anywhere in the world. I speak the Arabic of the Quran, the Arabic of newspapers and of the newscasters of Al Jazeera, but one that barely resembles the colloquial Arabic spoken in the streets. Me showing up in Damascus speaking this Arabic would be like a tourist landing in Rome and trying to get by speaking Latin while everyone else is speaking rapid, slick, and vibrant Italian. I sound ridiculous, like those people who dress up in costumes and attend Renaissance festivals, which is perhaps why when people hear me speak, they very often burst into laughter. This has not been very encouraging.

  But the taxi driver, to his credit, is remaining tactfully silent despite the fact that a girl from an enemy country has just climbed into his taxi and addressed him in a dialect from the thirteenth century. In the meantime I discourage further conversation by staring out the window at Damascus flying past, and as we cross the city the ancient alleys around my neighborhood disappear and are replaced by grim apartment buildings and hotels, banks and towering mosques, all of the suburban sprawl of any Arab capital trying to contain a population of several million people.

  Yet even this ordinariness is somewhat refreshing, considering the fact that ordinariness is something relatively new to Damascus. The first time I came here for a visit, in 2000, the country was still recovering from the death of President Hafez al-Assad, the man who had kept the country firmly under his thumb for nearly thirty years. The Internet was still illegal, the secret police were everywhere, and the streets were full of yellow classic cars serving as taxis that sailed down the road, flaunting their tail fins. Damascus in 2000 looked like most other countries in the 1950s.

  Much has changed in four years, and now Internet cafés are visible on corners and the streets are crowded with modern taxis. On a billboard a shampoo model shows off her cascading hair, and Western-style coffee shops have opened near fashion boutiques. Outside I can see women in headscarves mixing with men in suits, all chatting on their cell phones, and old devout Muslim men still wearing traditional clothes. Yet not everything has changed, and the face of Hafez al-Assad has been largely replaced with that of President Bashar al-Assad staring down at me from everywhere, the British-trained ophthalmologist who took over from his father after he died. Here he is, smiling from the backs of taxi windows, from giant billboards: Bashar in his military uniform, Bashar posing with his wife and children, Bashar against a billowing Syrian flag, Bashar with a mountain scene reflected in the shades of his aviator glasses. The sight of him peering down at me from everywhere makes me slightly nervous.

  My driver must have noticed my discomfort, because when we pull up near the curb at the university he turns around and faces me through the space between the seats and smiles reassuringly, like a father dropping his little girl off for her first day of school.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he tells me. “You know, we love the American people here. I mean it. We just hate your government.”

  My shoulders relax, and I manage to smile back at him. “Well, I don’t much like it right now either,” I reply in my medieval Arabic.

  “We know the Americans can be like that! You see?” He holds up his hand and counts off his fingers one by one. “A hand has five fingers. This one is big, this one is small, this one is in the middle. Not all of them are the same.”

  I hand him the equivalent of a dollar and he hands me my change, the cheapest cab ride of my life.

  “Do you need me to pick you up after school?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Then God be with you.”

  “Go with peace.”

  “God keep you well.”

  Then I close the door and enter the gates of Damascus University, to a sea of unfamiliar faces.

  A LARGER THAN LIFE-SIZED STATUE of former president Hafez al-Assad is waiting for me on campus, standing in the center of the courtyard at attention in his suit with his hand placed over his chest. It takes me a while to identify which of the drab Soviet-inspired buildings around him is the Arabic Language Center. Finally I see a circular concrete building with a flight of stairs and an English sign over the doorway. The Old City where I live is beautiful, but hell must look like this.

  Damascus University has a reputation in the world of Arabic language students for being one of the cheapest and most intense places in the world to study. Here, native Arabic-speaking teachers drill students in four hours of reading, writing, and speaking Arabic a day, allowing students to learn in a few months what would normally require years of studying. It is a matter of learning by osmosis, of being subjected to such a torrent of Arabic that eventually some of the words sink in. No one is allowed to speak any language other than Arabic during classes. Famously, the university does not care who comes to study at their institute, as long as the students have passed an official blood test given by the Syrian government certifying that they do not have AIDS. As a result, poor students from across the globe flock here for the chance to learn Arabic for around two hundred dollars a month, about what it costs for a single day of the best intensive Arabic course in America.

  When I arrive, the corridors are already crowded with Shiite Muslims from Iran with full beards mixing with European doctoral students, young Western journalists checking grammar with long-robed Sufis from West Africa, Muslim women wearing niqabs, full veils covering their entire faces except for their eyes, chatting quietly with Mormon students in starched white shirts. It may be the most bizarre mix of students I’ve ever seen.

  I take a placement test and am assigned to level three, which means that after two years of studying Arabic I can barely form a sentence. I stomach two hours of listening to the names of the parts of the body before I excuse myself and sneak into level four. At least I was under the impression that it was level four. I may also have accidentally entered Chinese class by mistake. I can barely understand anything the teacher is saying. It seems that in the space of a single level, students jump from talking about their fingers to discussing the finer points of quantum theory.

  The teacher, a rather handsome Syrian man wearing khaki trousers and a red plaid shirt, is busy pacing back and forth in front of the chalkboard like a military sergeant. Every few moments, he taps the blackboard with a piece of chalk to command our attention.

  “Today, we are going to discuss irregular plurals,” he announces, scribbling a sentence in Arabic on the board.

  “Now suppose you have a single dog who is chasing you down the street. How would you say ‘dog’ in the singular?”

  “Kalb!” the class sings out in a chorus.

  “Now suppose you have two dogs running after you. What is that?”

  “Kalban!”

  “And in the genitive?”

  “Kalbeen!”

  “Now what if you have a substantial number of dogs running after you?”

  A devout Shiite from Iran raises his hand: “Kilab!”

  “Now what if you have a really enormous number of dogs running after you?”

  His eyes turn toward me expectantly. At which point I feign taking notes with great concentration, then stare out the window, at the floor, gaze at the portrait of Hafez Al-Assad hanging across the street, and pretend to possess the legendary powers of the Invisible Man, until at last a Turkish Quranic student jumps in and shouts, “Ikalab!”

  And then, for a moment at least, I am safe.

  4.

  HERE IS THE CAST OF CHARACTERS who have joined me to study Arabic at Damascus University. There is a young American from California whom the other students secretly call “Jihad Johnny,” after the American John Walker Lindh, the Californian discovered fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Sporti
ng a beard, a skullcap, and a long robe, Jihad Johnny has recently converted to a radical version of Islam, and despite his American roots, he dominates our class discussions by angrily denouncing American imperialism, quoting the Quran, and suggesting that America deserved September 11. He accomplishes this all in very poor, broken Arabic, which makes the entire spectacle that much more surreal. Our teacher Adel, whom I suspect to be a secular member of the Baath Party, also finds JJ’s behavior ridiculous. Each time he makes a point about Islam in class, he wryly turns to Jihad Johnny and asks, “What do you think about that, Abdullah?” Abdullah is not Johnny’s real name. In Arabic, Abdullah means “the slave of God.”

  Then we have a blond Canadian teenager named Christine who has somehow become fluent in an extremely religious strain of colloquial Arabic while growing up in Hezbollah-dominated south Lebanon. I am only guessing that she is blond: she possesses a Nordic face, but she has also converted to Islam, along with her whole, presumably blond Canadian family, and so covers her hair with a tightly fastened white scarf. She volunteers to read every sentence in class and, unlike Johnny, reads so quickly and flawlessly that I cannot fathom why we are in the same Arabic level. I also can’t figure out what might have led her family to move from Canada to the south of Lebanon, which until recently has been the site of frequent conflicts between the Israeli military and Hezbollah, but I don’t dare ask her.

  There is a gorgeous Iranian student named Leila with striking green eyes who wears her sheer blue scarf draped loosely over her head and leaves wisps of hair falling from beneath it. According to the hallway gossip, she had recently been imprisoned in her country for fighting for human rights, and rumor has it she was forced by the Iranian embassy to wear the veil, even in Damascus, where it is not required, under threat of deporting her home again. Then there is the magnificent Suleiman, a Nigerian Muslim studying to be an imam, who wastes no time before announcing that he wants four wives. There is a Turkish madrassa student named Aisha, who wears a floor-length Islamic robe to school every day and has fiery opinions, and a handful of staunchly secular and verbally anti-American European doctoral students, including a German named Frida with predictably perfect grammar. Finally, a Japanese girl looks so overwhelmed by the lot of us that I keep expecting her to burst into tears at any moment. I am one of only three Americans, the others being Jihad Johnny and Michael, a quiet banker from Washington, D.C., who rarely speaks at all.