The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  Yom Kippur passes, and I never tell Michael that he cannot use my room to pray. I am too ashamed to speak to him. Instead, I mark my own quiet Day of Atonement, considering the sins I have carried that year and have not asked to be forgiven.

  As the semester comes to a close, I take a long evening walk, out past the Old City and into the broad streets of new Damascus with its banks and flashy hotels, not far from where Michael and I once sat side by side to watch a film together. Then suddenly, he is there, looking at me, across a lane of traffic, startled and trying to balance a pile of mail in his arms.

  “Stephanie!” he calls out, and he crosses the street, dodging cars, until I have no choice but to talk to him.

  “I’ve been trying to track you down. I want to exchange addresses before I leave.”

  He stops in front of me, and I have a chance to study him. Something looks different. His shirt is still ironed, perfectly tucked in, but something about him looks off.

  We’re standing on one of the busiest streets in Damascus, but I know that this is my only chance to apologize. “Listen, Michael. I’m sorry that I never, um, spoke to you about um, you know.” I look around the street anxiously. “About Yom Kippur. I couldn’t. The neighbors would have had a field day if I gave a man the keys to my room. I’m sorry. I should have said something.”

  I’m ashamed at my cowardice. He smiles weakly. “Don’t worry about it. I understood.”

  We stand there in the street in silence.

  “So, um, for that day.” That day. “Did you find anyone to help you?”

  “There are still Jews in Damascus, you know,” he says softly.

  Yes, I know.

  “I found the address of a rabbi from a contact I have in America.”

  I look at him, standing in the middle of the street, the mail still halfway out of his hands. He looks like the picture of sadness. Like the sadness contained in those van Gogh paintings of shoes, which have walked beyond their capacity and now want to fold, quietly, into themselves.

  “The night before Yom Kippur, I called him up and asked to meet with him, to see if I could spend the holiday with their community. We met for a few moments in the street. He looked frightened. He barely spoke a word to me. He simply gave me the holy books and then asked me to go away and pray on my own. He said that he was too scared to let me pray with them.”

  He stops for a moment, not to look at me, but to look somewhere else, an invisible point in the air. “When he said that, I actually felt tears come up in my eyes. It was the first time in my life I have been turned away by another Jew.”

  I want to tell him, He didn’t turn you away. Neither did I. We were turning away from something inside of ourselves. But I say nothing.

  THEN MICHAEL’S DESK AT SCHOOL IS EMPTY. When classes are over, I don’t have to rush out the door to leave first. There is no one hoping to speak to me.

  So I make my way outside slowly, through the crowds of Syrian students, and instead of fighting for a taxi I stand on the edge of the highway, looking out, until a driver stops of his own accord and rolls down the window. I tell him my address, and then I keep my silence in the backseat, looking at the streets blurring past. After a few moments, he attempts to start a conversation.

  “How do you like Damascus?” he asks.

  “It’s fine.”

  “How long have you been living here?”

  “Just a few weeks.”

  “Oh, really?” His face brightens. “Are you here with your children?”

  “No,” I tell him quietly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t have any yet.”

  He looks confused. “You mean, you’re not married?” he asks. There is a tone of honest surprise in his voice, a tone I’m not expecting, and suddenly, and completely without warning, I begin to cry in the back of his taxi. “No,” I tell him. “Someone in America is waiting for me.”

  But it isn’t true. No one is waiting for me. The driver pulls up to the edge of my neighborhood, bewildered by my tears, and looks at me kindly. He refuses to accept my money when I try to pay my fare.

  12.

  October

  I CONTINUE ATTENDING ARABIC CLASSES, but by early October I simply sit behind my desk, counting the minutes until I can leave. Something has changed ever since Michael left to return to Israel. I sometimes think that, even though I did not let him use my room to pray, he managed to take it away from me anyway. I can no longer live obliviously. All of the conflicts I want so much to avoid press up against me in streets, like beggars who corner me in the most isolated places, hitting me up for all of my spare change.

  By now there is no use avoiding the war in Iraq, trying to pretend that it is someone else’s war playing itself out in a distant country. It appears everywhere. I glimpse it on television screens flashing behind open doors: wounded children, men on stretchers bleeding from the head, a body part visible beneath a pile of rubble. On the front page each morning, funeral processions wait for me, women weeping, cars bombed and smoking on the side of the road, families mourning at the hospital, infants killed by mistake. We are only a day’s drive away from Baghdad, less than the distance between San Antonio and El Paso. It feels almost close enough to touch.

  The more of the Arabic language I understand, the more I can pick up the conversations between shopkeepers, the background noise of the radio in the taxi each morning. Only then do I recognize that the war is slowly closing in on us. We are three and a half weeks away from the American elections—and my neighbors are afraid that if George Bush is reelected, then America will invade Syria, and the war that has been whispered about for so long will come to the streets in which we live.

  Look at yourselves, I want to tell them. Stop waiting. The war is already here.

  BY NOW THE STREETS ARE SWELLING with Iraqi men and women wearing flowing black abayas, carrying their tired eyes and strange accents from the places they fled. I watch them every afternoon, standing in line to buy bread, or disappearing into the Shiite mosque in the Old City to pray, and it often strikes me how easy it is to spot those who find themselves out of place in the world. Hundreds of thousands of them, the neighbors tell me, with still more arriving every day. I hear them speaking in the streets, in their dialect full of consonants we drop in Syrian, calling out greetings I don’t recognize. I try to stop myself from shuddering when I hear that dialect. It sounds harsh. It sounds like war to me.

  My neighbors warn me to keep my distance. “I heard a woman had her handbag stolen by an Iraqi on a bicycle just last week,” the Ustez clucks, shaking his head. “Now when you walk, you keep your purse close to your body. Do you hear me?” In a café, as a man begins strumming the strings on the oud and singing a folk song, the girl next to me leans over and whispers in my ear, “He’s Iraqi. I don’t like the sound of his voice.”

  In my years in and out of the Middle East, I have learned the particular logic of life on the edge of war. An Iraqi from Baghdad once told me that, on the eve of the American invasion in 2003, his neighbors had convinced themselves that war was impossible because they were still drinking tea in cafés and eating pastries. Who would be drinking tea on the night before an invasion? they asked one another. That just wouldn’t happen!

  Yet the invasion came despite their pastries, shocking and awing all of them, just as the bombing of Poland happened in September 1939, despite the fact that locals could not believe that it was possible, for it was such a sunny day.

  I’d like to think that after one man learns that his fluffy pastry is no match for an air raid, he might think to pass on the news, but so far my neighbors remain oblivious. They have honestly convinced themselves that they can hold the world together by maintaining their routines and habits, as though they are the Jewish sages who keep the world from collapsing because of their prayers. The Baron’s routine borders on the obsessive. In the morning he wakes up and drinks a cup of Turkish coffee before watching the news. At exactly noon he makes a cup o
f Lipton tea and eats a piece of cake. In the afternoon he changes into his pressed clothes from Milano and takes a walk through the neighborhood, where he joins his elderly friends for exactly two glasses of tea taken with spiced bread. He returns home, takes a shower at two in the afternoon, and then has a nap. When he wakes up he drinks a single Nescafé. Then, in the evening after dinner, he sips watered-down whiskey and allows himself the pleasure of smoking French cigarettes. Not a single detail varies from one day to another. “I have discipline,” he tells me defensively when I tease him. “Discipline. Do you know what discipline is?”

  The Ustez’s wife washes out her laundry every morning. The bread boys traverse the courtyard, the gaz vendors ride their ribboned horses through the streets, and the two lovebirds come to meet us at six thirty in the evening. We rely on one another’s fidelity, for a change in the routine might mean that something has tipped off balance and that the entire world as we know it might collapse.

  I check my mail every day for letters. Hold imaginary conversations in the morning with Mark. I go to school. I drink coffee with the Baron. Most of all, I’ve started taking photographs.

  Every evening, just before five o’clock, I abandon my notebooks at my desk and snake through the crowded markets of the Old City, sliding past the gold markets and spice shops, carpet stalls and cafés, past the Azem Palace with its inlaid tiles, the sweets stores with their candy-coated almonds and Turkish delight, the curtains of Islamic headscarves hung in long, flowing rows, and down a broad, cobbled street where the western gate of the Temple of Jupiter once stood. At the exact heart of the Old City, I turn right and push through a black metal gate and take a moment to cover my long brown hair with a scarf. I then remove my shoes and allow my bare feet to press onto the cold marble tiles. Sliding my shoes into my backpack, I walk straight ahead until I am staring up at an enormous brass door that stands at least four times the height of my body and is pushed wide open. Once I have crossed the threshold I am within the courtyard of the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque, the fourth holiest site in Islam. It always succeeds in taking my breath away.

  The Umayyad Mosque is the most beautiful place I have ever been in my life. The front facade resembles a Byzantine church, covered in dazzling mosaics depicting paradise, fruit trees and flowing rivers, celestial cities sparkling in the sun. The lower portion of the mosque is covered in marble tiles, the wooden doors carved geometrically by artisans. Yet it is not simply the building—something about the space it occupies seems to form some holy link to heaven, which is why I am not surprised that it has been at different times the site of the Temple of Jupiter, the Temple of Hadad, the Church of John the Baptist, and now one of the most stunning Islamic buildings in the world. For the most part, Syrians do not come here to pray—they come here simply to be, to walk hand in hand through the courtyard, to picnic and play with their children.

  I come to the Umayyad Mosque to witness a miracle. At around five o’clock every evening, the sun begins to set over Damascus, and the light gathers in a pool over the white marble courtyard, illuminating the tiles, until everyone walking on it appears as though they are angels. Light reflects from the ground up into their bodies. They look weightless. Each time I witness it, I am almost moved to tears—at the sight of humans so ethereal, so transcendent that they might have wings, might press their toes against the ground and then lift off, away from all of this madness. Nothing appears sinister in that light.

  Every evening, I remain for an hour or so, sitting anonymously in a corner of the immense courtyard, a sudden quiet and open space in the midst of the crowds of the market. I watch the couples holding hands, the women carrying their husbands’ shoes, the children who open their arms like wings and race out to join the flocks of pigeons taking flight. I snap one photograph after another, of human beings like that, caught in a moment—beneath the marble pillars and great glistening mosaics, near the tomb that still holds the ancient bones of St. John the Baptist, in this beautiful haven where locals say that Muslims and Christians both prayed in the earliest years of Islam. When the call to prayer sounds, it is the loveliest I have ever heard in my life, three voices instead of one, all singing together in harmony.

  For just an hour a day, the war disappears, the war and any possibility that it might come to us. There is only that white space of light, and the laughing faces of children, and the trees and rivers of paradise shining down on me from above.

  When I return home, I enter the images into my computer, and I spend the early evening zooming in on the photographs and trying to discover details I had missed in life. Here in the corner of a photo, a woman clutches her handbag, her fingers holding on with a ferocity that had escaped me earlier. Now I can see a boy walking past, sneaking a forbidden glance at two girls cloaked in white gowns. A Shiite woman, entirely covered in black except for her eyes, lifts a child to her mouth to be kissed, his yellow overalls flashing against her gown. Syrian soldiers walk arm in arm, their heavy army boots filling their empty hands.

  I sometimes smile when I think about returning to America a year from now, armed with those photographs, how I will show them to Mark and to my family. I won’t need to tell them about the other parts of my life—about the loneliness, about betraying Michael, about the refugees in the streets and the war pressing down on us in the air.

  “Isn’t Damascus beautiful?” I’ll say. “I’ve just never been in a place with such remarkable light.”

  Today at the mosque it is raining, and still the light remains. Children are sliding on the wet stones, with their pants rolled up to their knees. I take their pictures.

  A group of four young boys run up to meet me. “Take our photos!” they call out. “Here! Here!” I do, over and over, capturing the ridiculous beauty of them, wet and messy and laughing at the rain, playing hide-and-seek among the red marble pillars of the mosque.

  One of them approaches me. He must be nine years old, and he is absolutely arresting, with blue jeans, a denim shirt, and a look of innocence in his eyes I have rarely seen in anything, human or animal. He sits down beside me, like I have known him all his life.

  “Are you a Muslim?” he asks.

  “No, I’m a Christian.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I like it.” I smile at him. “Do you know that John the Baptist is buried here?”

  “Yes, Yahya, the son of Zachariah. But he’s a Muslim!”

  “He’s also a Christian.”

  He looks at me in curiosity. “Do you pray?”

  I have not thought about prayer in such a long time that his question awakens a sadness from deep inside me, the kind I feel when something reminds me of the dead. “Sometimes, I guess.”

  “Show us how you pray.”

  I am embarrassed. Then he kneels down in the mosque courtyard, makes the sign of the cross, and folds his hands together.

  There are dozens of people in the courtyard. I reach out and touch his shoulder. “Please stop. I don’t want people to think that I’m converting you.”

  He laughs. His friend is standing behind him now. “Can you tell us part of the Bible in Arabic?”

  I only know one part in Arabic, a paragraph I memorized years ago. I take a deep breath, and whisper, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And God said: Let there be light. And there was light. And God saw that the light was good. He separated the light from the darkness. The light he called day, and the darkness he called night. It was evening, and it was morning. The first day.”

  The boys nod their heads. “We know that one. We have it, too.”

  I let them use my camera for a few moments, watching them capturing birds, taking photos of one another, rushing back to see those images appear on the camera screen like miracles, faces called into existence by their own hands. I remember that in Arabic, the word sawwir, meaning “to shape or form,” is the same as the word “to take a photograph.” It is the word used in the Bible when God creates man in his image.
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  The light begins to fade and the children walking darken into shadows. The call to prayer lifts out from the minaret. Before I leave, I turn to the boys one final time. “Can you tell me about Jesus?”

  The boy with the blue shirt and shining eyes points to the sky. “Do you see that minaret? That is where Jesus is going to come at the end of time.” Yes, the famous Jesus minaret, where Syrian Muslims believe that the prophet Jesus will descend at the end of the world.

  “What will happen?”

  “Everyone will be gathered up.”

  “Gathered to what?”

  “To God.”

  I imagine people, like flower petals spilled out over the earth, gathered again into larger hands. It must be nice, to be gathered into the hands of the infinite. “Do you think it will only be Muslims who are gathered, or Christians also?”

  The boys consult between themselves, in a football huddle, then pull apart and smile at me. “I guess it will be everyone.”

  Then I want to embrace them. I feel as though they have blessed me, the way my grandfather blessed me when I was a child, pressing his thumb on my forehead and forming the sign of the cross, to keep me safe.

  They rise to leave. “I hope we see you again,” they call out.

  “You can find me here.”

  The boy in the blue shirt, with all of his startling innocence, turns to me and asks, “Are you a holy person?”

  I don’t think so, I start to say, but then I stop myself. “I don’t know,” I tell him instead.

  13.

  I’M ON MY WAY HOME from the mosque the following evening when I notice a shop I’ve never seen before, a tiny stall displaying colorful oil paintings of the Old City and a few painted portraits. Near the entrance, a thin, slightly nervous man is painting on an easel with a metal palette knife, moving between the canvas and the paints with such speed one might think he was afraid they might dry without warning. Beside him, a heavyset man with thick, wavy black hair slicked down on the side and impossibly dark eyes is inviting passersby into the shop.