The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  I don’t want to be here. I want to be out of this room and back in the house off Straight Street again.

  “You didn’t guess, did you?” he asks.

  “No, I thought you were a banker. I was just wondering why a banker wanted to learn Arabic.”

  “You know, there have been a few times in class when I said words in Hebrew instead of Arabic, and I was scared that someone would notice. But I guess no one knows what Hebrew sounds like.”

  “I guess not,” I say. Or if someone did, he certainly wasn’t about to raise his hand and offer that information in a classroom run by the Syrian state.

  He is clearly oblivious to how uncomfortable I am. “You know,” he continues, “I’m not a spy or anything. I work on dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. It’s just that you can’t speak Arabic for twenty seconds in Israel before someone breaks in with English or Hebrew. Syria is the only place I could ever hope to actually speak the Arabic language.”

  I wish he would stop saying those words. Israel. Hebrew. Doesn’t he know that people are listening? It would only take a bread boy walking past at the wrong moment who was paid to keep an eye out, a neighbor who coincidentally stopped by.

  I turn back to my animal flashcards, flipping through one after another, with no hope of even processing the words. I can feel Michael studying me.

  “Stephanie?”

  I continue flipping.

  “Are you going to be traveling this weekend?”

  “Yes,” I tell him, relieved to remember that this is true and not just a tactic to avoid him. “Actually, I am traveling to some Byzantine sites in the north.”

  He smiles. “Do you see how my room is inside of this house, so that everyone can see everything that I do all of the time?” I nod. Since he had uttered the word Israel, I have thought of little else.

  “Your room has a separate entrance from the other rooms in the house, doesn’t it?” he continues.

  I nod.

  “This weekend is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Do you think I could use your house to pray in while you are out of town? It’s impossible for me to do it here, and I can’t think of where else I might go.”

  He looks down at the table shyly. “I’m not that observant, but I’ve never missed Yom Kippur in my life. For us it’s the holiest day of the year.”

  Yom Kippur. The Day of Atonement, in which God decides who among us will be written in the Book of Life.

  I swallow hard and tell him that I’ll think about it.

  10.

  I KNOW WHAT I SHOULD DO. I have read stories of Jews in concentration camps risking everything in order to complete their prayers, even when their lives were in danger. And I can’t help but be moved by what Michael is asking me. He hasn’t yet lost the ability to believe that prayer matters, that it is worth protecting at all costs.

  I also know what part I am supposed to play. I have been rehearsing this moment since childhood, and it has been reinforced a hundred times since then, through The Diary of Anne Frank and the lives of the righteous among the Gentiles whose trees are planted in Israel, through history lessons and museum displays and the many stories of lives changed and saved by a single human being with the courage to stand up when it makes more sense to stay silent. I am supposed to put myself at risk. I am supposed to hand Michael the key to the door.

  But the fact is, I’m not brave. I want to say, Yes, of course, come, pray in my room, don’t be ashamed of who you are, and yet every voice in my body is screaming, You can’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it! As I walk along the streets, I visualize him in my head praying on Yom Kippur, the outline of his body vaguely visible through my thin curtains as he bows his head over his Hebrew text. I imagine the sound of his chanting leaving his mouth and escaping beneath the door into the courtyard, the voice gathering like water within the fountain for the neighbors to hear. I imagine the frame of the Baron’s face, staring in through the windows, his mouth opening in awe and perhaps even fear. I imagine the horrible visit by Mr. X that would certainly follow.

  I try to convince myself otherwise, and yet I know in my gut that I will not allow Michael to use my room to pray. I try to tell myself that it is for practical reasons. The mere fact of me, a single woman, giving a man the keys to my room would be enough to cause a scandal in a society where many still believe that unmarried men and women should not even speak without a chaperone. If Michael were to come alone, and someone were to look in the windows and suspect that a Jew was praying in my house, then my status in Syria would be at risk. Questions would be asked. Why was he praying in my house, of all places, and not his own? Was I perhaps really Jewish and hiding my identity from my neighbors? Why had I lied? Worse yet, what if they found out that he lives in Israel? My presence as an American in Syria was already suspicious enough. I did not need my neighbors or the secret police suspecting that I might also be a spy aiding a country they consider themselves to be at war with.

  Yet I also know that five years ago, I might have let him pray in my room without thinking about it. But I was a different person then, a better person, and I don’t see how I can go back again. When Michael asked that small, naïve question, he could not possibly understand how much I have worked to make my life in Syria that of an ordinary girl—for all of the strangeness and suspicion to be wiped clean of me. I can’t let myself be found out. I promised myself that, if I ever decided to return to the Middle East, then I would come as a student, not someone who gets caught up in the story. That’s the only way I can handle it.

  When Mr. X had asked me about my past in the Middle East, I had offered up only the bare bones of my years in and out of this complex region. I did not tell him that when I had accepted a fellowship five years ago to travel in the Middle East, I, too, had first arrived in Israel, that most forbidden of countries, alone and lost. I took a flat in the heart of downtown Jerusalem, on the second floor of a loft, just above a recent Russian immigrant who kept her dog chained up all day and taught me how to separate the dishes in her kosher kitchen. A few days later, I walked to the West Bank town of Bethlehem. On the other side of the checkpoint, a local man offered me a lift, and with that brief encounter I entered the Arab world. In the town square I was offered another ride, with a man who took me door to door until a nun answered the yellow gateway of a convent of Palestinian nuns. I heard the man speaking to her in Arabic, what must have been him explaining that I had no place to stay. When he had finished, she nodded and smiled at me kindly.

  “We’ve always thought that we might take guests here,” she said. “I guess that you’ll be our first.”

  I stayed in that convent for the remainder of my days in the city, waking up to the rosary chanted in Arabic in the chapel, and during the afternoons I walked through the city where Jesus was born. On every corner locals spoke to me: the bell keeper at the Church of the Nativity, dozens of Palestinian shopkeepers who invited me in to tea, men carving olive wood. I fell in love with them and their quiet piety and hospitality. I spent the next three months traversing my two lives, between Israel and Palestine, making a home in both worlds at once. It was July 1999.

  In college in Vermont I had been a recluse, a stranger to most of my classmates, usually holed up in my tiny dorm room trying to escape the blistering winter. I had grown up middle class, around men who appreciated beer and bowling, and so I felt largely out of place among my wealthy classmates, many of whom had attended elite New England boarding schools, not a Catholic school in San Antonio whose senior class had been ruled by a group of young men in tight jeans and cowboy boots who called themselves “the Farmers.” At times I was so lonely that I turned in my library books late on purpose, just so I would get late slips in the mail and could pretend that someone had written me a letter from home.

  I never took chances in college or risked failure, and it was the bewildering kindness of those I met in the Middle East who finally shook me out of the protective shell I had learned to wear around myself. I m
ade more friends in a few months than I had in four years. I had grown up dreaming of becoming a poet, and in the Arab world I found a place where everyone dreamed of becoming a poet and even shoe shiners and shepherds could recite poems to me by heart. I felt oddly at home in the Middle East, with its Texas-sized heat and enormous families and huge plates of food at dinner and religious festivals similar to the San Antonio I had left behind, with all of my fourteen aunts and uncles and thirty-something cousins. When I finished traveling in Israel, instead of heading to Italy as I had planned, I moved on to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey. In Egypt, six Israeli boys, on their last trip together before joining the army, invited me to hike with them through the deserts of the Sinai, and we shared meals and slept beneath the sky where Moses once saw God in a burning bush. I felt so free and full of life that I wanted to cry out in thanks. I hitchhiked in Syria and slept in the houses of strangers in Jordan. I made friends at every stop, traveled fearlessly, and in some mysterious way discovered a part of myself that I was not even aware existed. “Little Flame” people started to call me, because I was full of passion. Something in the Middle East awakened the deepest core of me. It made me a better person. It made me the best person I had ever been.

  I left the Middle East in July 2000. Two months later the Second Intifada began in Israel and the West Bank, and I watched the news from my apartment in China as the cities I knew were transformed into combat zones and Israelis and Palestinians went to war. Palestinian militants hid out in my beloved Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where I had so often gone to pray, where I had begun to recover the faith I had lost in my childhood. The pizza shop where I met friends in Jerusalem was bombed, and so was the market where I did my shopping, and the café where I drank hot chocolate. The cities of Hebron and Nablus, which had once showered welcomes on me from the street, became the sites of car bombs and killings and almost daily clashes between locals and the Israeli army. I had found my heart, only to lose it in the most violent way imaginable.

  After my relationship in China fell apart, I moved to Beirut to work as a journalist. Though I wrote about music and art, every now and then work brought me to Palestinian refugee camps, where I walked with my notebook among pools of open sewage, watching young children playing in the streets with toy guns, Hezbollah bands tied around their heads. I visited a man in Tripoli, just after his Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise was bombed, simply for being an American company. Just twenty-five years old, I passed my days walking through that city scarred by fifteen years of bloody civil war, the bullet holes still visible in the sides of buildings, and at night I wrote poems about the city swimming with angels. I still loved the Middle East. I loved it as I had loved nowhere else in my entire life. But it felt like loving a man in critical condition, who could die at any moment.

  At the end of every day at the office in Beirut, just after I filed my story, I used to put aside half an hour and open the news wires to look over the photographs of the day. It was my evening meditation, as the sun was falling down over the mountains and illuminating the houses looking over the sea. I would flip through one photo after another: a boy shot to death in Bethlehem, a mother weeping after a bombing in Jerusalem, the wreckage of downtown New York, the dead in Afghanistan. I filed them away in my memory, where they slipped in between images I had seen myself. At night I dreamed of all of them.

  By the time I returned to Boston, I was haunted at night by those images I collected like icons of the dead. I wanted to forget them. I spent two years in the attempt, passing afternoons in cafés like everyone else, willing myself to fall in love, doing anything I could imagine to get back part of who I had once been—that girl walking between Israel and Palestine, full of passion and poetry, before the world around her began falling down.

  My life was turning out all wrong. Everything had become jumbled, mixed up, the opposite of what I imagined it would be, and it had happened so quickly. I tried not to think about the fact that the first man I ever loved had been recently sent off to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. I tried to disassociate it from my life, to forget about those he was killing, those he loved who were being killed beside him. Yet whenever I saw an image of the war in Iraq, I saw something familiar on both sides. I saw on the Arab side those who let me sleep in their homes. Behind the face of the American soldier, I saw the young man who once slow-danced with me in the middle of a street in Texas, holding me close, before handing me the tiny diamond ring that was all he could afford and asking me to marry him.

  I tried to forget that those Israeli boys I walked through the Sinai desert with were now in uniform, patrolling the streets of the Palestinians who asked me in for tea, or that one of my very closest friends, an Israeli, had carried out her military service near the border of Lebanon. My friends were now all on enemy sides. And now I had become the enemy.

  THERE IS A STORY I have never told anyone before—not Mark, not my family, not my closest friends—one that I have tried to forget until now. When I was a young journalist in Lebanon, after several months of reporting, I was asked to cover a story in the Palestinian refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut. It was the week of the Arab League Summit, and the leaders of Arab countries had gathered to discuss the plight of Palestinian refugees in Beirut. I was sent to see what those refugees thought about the fact that their fates were being bartered and balanced and traded like poker chips.

  At the time I spoke only a little Arabic, and I arrived with my translator. The streets had emptied, with most Palestinians glued in front of their television sets, still hoping that their fate would be decided after more than fifty years in uncertain exile. Security around the camps had been tightened to prevent riots from breaking out.

  After a few minutes my translator led me into a tiny, very poor house. Inside a woman, her husband, and several children were standing together. And in the woman’s arms, a baby was wailing.

  I tried to interview them, but the baby kept wailing, then coughing violently. She screamed herself into such a fit that her face turned bright red and then darkened toward blue.

  “She’s sick,” I told the mother awkwardly, and she nodded.

  “The roads are closed,” she said. “I can’t get her to a clinic until tomorrow when they are opened again.”

  The baby wouldn’t stop screaming. I was suddenly anxious that something might truly be wrong. I thought that with my press pass, maybe I could get them to a hospital. At least I could try.

  But then a voice in my head said, Don’t start getting involved now, Stephanie. This is none of your business. If you start, when will it ever end?

  I left, and I never saw that family again.

  SOMETIMES, WHEN I RETURNED TO AMERICA, I would dream of that baby screaming. Or the thought of it would come at the strangest times, when I was sitting down to coffee in Boston or looking out a window of the library at the falling snow. That child screaming. And it seemed to me so strange, so utterly surreal, that in the same space of time I could be reading a book and somewhere on the other side of the earth a man was being shot, or a child was in pain, when everything in front of me looked so still and quiet and even, for a brief moment, entirely beautiful.

  NOW, TWO AND A HALF YEARS LATER, Michael is asking to pray in my room, asking me to help his name to be written in the Book of Life. But I still can’t do it. Part of me hates him for even asking. I’m exhausted now, too tired from the simple weight of being in this world as it is to go about trying to change it. I’m tired of passing the corner store selling pictures of Hamas leaders alongside posters of Egyptian rock stars. I’m tired of the portrait of Hafez al-Assad staring down at me from the roof of the building across from our classroom window. I’m tired of wondering which shopkeeper is watching me for the secret police. I just want something resembling a carefree day. I want to walk home without thinking about militants in neighboring countries. I want to catch a taxi without being asked why women and children are dying in Iraq. Michael has ruined my last bit of ordinary li
fe, a room in a house with windows and laundry and showers in the afternoon. Mark is gone. Home is gone. Even the Middle East that I once knew is gone. And the person I once was—that girl crossing a desert with her bag on her back, radiant and full of hope—she is gone beyond retrieving.

  So I refuse to give Michael an answer. Every day I slide out of class as quickly as possible and into the street. I know that he must be hurt that his closest friend in Damascus no longer acknowledges his existence. It hurts me, too.

  11.

  AT NIGHT, I walk through the alleys on the other side of Straight Street where thousands of Jews had lived until just over ten years ago, when they were allowed to immigrate, provided that they did not move to Israel. Their streets look ghostly now, the alleys of empty houses with their windows sunken in, full of trash and old wood, the still-bright light of the summer casting strange shadows against their back walls. I cannot blame Michael for coming to Damascus. The Jewish community in Syria was once one of the oldest in the world. Jews had lived for such a long time here that St. Paul himself came to preach to them in the synagogues nearly two thousand years ago. I don’t believe for a moment that he came here to study Arabic—he could have studied Arabic anywhere. Maybe he came here in search of a missing piece from his own past. Or maybe he is just as I was once—young and daring and full of reckless hope.

  I keep walking, turning into an almost invisible street, and after climbing over piles of tree limbs I find myself standing in front of an old abandoned synagogue, locked up behind bars. She looks lonely. Her enormous brass doors are sealed shut. Across them, a menorah stretches out beside an engraving of a Torah scroll, two birds with their wings spread open, as if to embrace me. She is one of the last left. I almost cry, confronted with that empty building, with all that it represents, like the Jewish cemetery I once stumbled across in Beirut on the border between East and West, its tombstones engraved in Arabic, French, and Hebrew, the only remnant of an entire community gone.