I stop in front of the store and they greet me excitedly.
“Welcome, welcome. Come in! Come in!” The skinny, nervous one pours me a glass of sweet tea before I have time to stop him.
“You’re new here?” I ask. “I never noticed your shop before.”
The heavyset man walks over to shake my hand. “We’re fresh from Iraq,” he announces. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Hassan, and that there is Ali.”
Ali salutes me. “At your service.” Hassan pulls a stool from the back of the shop and places it in front of me, and I take a seat.
“Where are you from?”
“From America,” I say shyly, looking down.
He doesn’t even flinch. “Then welcome,” he responds, with his great eyes gleaming. “It’s very nice to meet you.”
Hassan and Ali’s place looks less like a shop than a walk-in storage closet, with every available surface covered except for the ceiling. On the walls, paintings of old Ottoman houses stare in on me, their roofs folding onto one another like those in my neighborhood. Piles of old postcards are stacked behind an easel in the back. It smells like oil paint and cardamom and cigarette smoke, mixed in with the faint scent of their two bodies, sweaty from sitting in that small room all afternoon in the heat.
Hassan fetches me a cigarette, lights it, and hands it to me, and I accept it gratefully, despite the fact that I don’t really smoke. Silence seems less awkward with something in my mouth.
“How’s Iraq these days?” I ask hesitantly.
He whistles under his breath. “It’s fawda, chaos. Every day there’s another kidnapping, another car bomb. That’s Iraq.”
It’s what I’ve already suspected from the flood of images I’ve seen on the news at night. When I’d first arrived here, there had still been the faintest possibility that Iraqis might be better off because of the American invasion. But lately insurgents had been setting off bombs in the cities, so that people in Baghdad could no longer walk to the market without worrying what might happen on the way. From their first names I could guess that Hassan and Ali were Shiites, which meant their neighborhoods might be particularly at risk of falling prey to bombs from Sunni insurgents.
“You still have family there?”
“Of course, all of my family and friends are still there.” He shrugged sadly. “What do you want me to do? Thank God I talk to them once a week to know that they’re okay.”
I want to apologize, but I don’t know how to begin. Nothing in my life has prepared me for sitting down to tea with a man from a country my country is at war with. I drink my tea quietly. “How is life in Damascus treating you?”
Hassan avoids my eyes, and I know then that I have asked the wrong question. “I feel a bit lost here,” he answers, finally. “In Baghdad, I was a poet and a professor, an artist. If you mentioned my name to intellectuals, it would mean something.”
He casts a resigned look at the paintings of Damascus surrounding him. “I never would have believed that I would one day be working in Damascus, selling cheap paintings to tourists.”
I stand up to examine Hassan’s “tourist paintings” hanging in long rows, the lines of houses and streets forming a kind of neighborhood on the wall of their shop. Each painting has been made with extraordinary attention, emphasizing some small detail that one might normally overlook—a lantern hanging in front of a doorway, or a blue shirt drying on a line of white laundry. I can almost imagine opening the canvas and walking inside.
“They’re beautiful,” I insist.
“That’s not painting,” he says, and I am surprised by a sudden bitterness in his voice. “That’s just making enough money to survive.”
Until this point Ali has simply been listening, but now he jumps into the conversation, trying to change the subject.
“I’m sorry. What was your name?” Ali asks me.
“Stephanie.”
“I’m sorry, Stephanie. Please, let us give you a painting as a gift.”
I shake my head.
“We want to,” Hassan says firmly. “It’s nice to speak to an American trying to learn Arabic.”
I wonder then if I am the first American they have ever spoken to who is not in the military, not occupying their country and carrying a gun. They, too, are the first Iraqis in Damascus I know like this, smoking cigarettes, drinking tea. Not the anonymous, exhausted refugees I pass in the streets, or the wounded children I glimpse on the news at night. Just people.
I scan the paintings on the wall, my eyes settling on a painting of a narrow, cobbled street winding through an Arab market, with a few vaguely outlined figures rushing home. “I want this one,” I decide. “Where is it?”
“That’s this street, here.” Hassan points outside.
I peer out the door to the street outside. The painting looks nothing like it.
Ali glances up from his easel. “Don’t be ridiculous, Hassan. That’s not Damascus. That’s Baghdad.”
He shrugs. I point to another painting of a cityscape. “Is that Damascus or Baghdad?” Hassan examines it closely.
“Damascus?” he asks helplessly. Ali shakes his head.
Then Hassan shrugs his great, broad shoulders again and laughs. “Do you know what the truth is? I can’t tell anymore which ones are of Damascus and which ones are of Baghdad. I start painting a main street in Damascus, but then one of the alleys off the main road belongs to my old neighborhood in Baghdad. A courtyard in Damascus might suddenly belong to a house from Iraq. A window might be from Damascus, a door from Baghdad. After a while, the two become one city in your head.”
Ali fastens a new canvas onto his easel. “Listen—let me paint a picture especially for you, so that you’ll never wonder if the painting hanging in your living room is one of Damascus or of Iraq.”
He squeezes a tube of burnt sienna onto his palette, and then dipping his knife into it, he begins to gently press one spiral on top of another on the canvas. Soon I can see a tower, built in a spherical cone pointing up toward the sky, and in time I recognize the famous Malwiya Minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra, built in the ninth century in Iraq and one of the masterpieces of Islamic architecture. He moves the tip of his knife swiftly, until an old man trudges across the landscape in front of it, leaning on his cane.
Ali smiles and salutes me once again. “Always at your service, ya Stephanie,” he announces playfully. “Come back and see us in a few days, when the paint is dry.”
14.
I DO COME BACK. I return to retrieve my painting, then the next day to smoke a cigarette, until soon I find myself stopping by Hassan and Ali’s shop every afternoon on my way home from the mosque. Hassan is always waiting in the same place, pacing in front of the storefront chain-smoking, looking out with a worried and slightly perplexed expression on his face, as though he can’t quite remember where he is.
The second time I came to visit the shop, I realized that Hassan and I were both slightly limping through our conversations with each other, trying to speak in a foreign language, since I wasn’t fluent in Arabic, and he didn’t know the Syrian dialect.
“Now, if we are going to be friends, then you will have to teach me how to speak the Iraqi dialect,” I told him.
“Moo ma’oul!” he laughed. “Impossible! An American speaking Iraqi?”
“I insist.”
“Okay then. Every time I see you from now on, I am going to call out, Shlonitch!”
I grinned, hearing the colloquial greeting colored by the famous Iraqi itch at the end of words addressing women. “Then what do I say in return?”
“You say, Zweena! That means ‘I’m beautiful.’”
“What if I don’t feel beautiful?”
“It doesn’t matter. Say you’re beautiful.”
So, whenever Hassan sees me approaching from down the street, he calls out Shlonitch!
I’m beautiful, I answer, and take my place beside him.
Until just a few years ago I had imagined that I would one
day be a poet, and Hassan reminds me of that former life. Since he was once a literature teacher in Baghdad and a published poet, imprisoned under Saddam as a dissident, we feel right at home with each other. All he needs is a tweed jacket and we could be two old friends, drinking cappuccino and sharing poems at a New England coffeehouse.
Today, like every other day, we sit down to discuss poetry, switching between three dialects of Arabic and English, which he speaks almost as formally as I speak Arabic, with an Iraqi, slightly British accent. With one eye out on the street to look for potential customers, he turns to me and says, “I’ve been meaning to ask you: Who are your favorite poets?”
For the past years, I haven’t read much at all other than the front page of the newspaper and academic texts, but I try to dig back to the poems I used to read in another life. “I don’t know. I’ve always liked T. S. Eliot and Rainer Maria Rilke, CzesIaw MiIosz. From the Arabs I like Mahmoud Darwish and Nizar Qabbani, and of course, Abdul Wahab al-Bayati.”
He knows all of them well—in fact I have never mentioned a poet that he isn’t familiar with. But his eyes shine when I say the name of the Iraqi poet and master of Arabic free verse al-Bayati, who recently died in exile, right here in Damascus.
“And you, Hassan?”
“Me, I love Baudelaire and Rimbaud. But you know me. I read Yannis Ritsos and Nazim Hikmet.”
I laugh. The Greek writer Ritsos composed many of his stories from exile on an island in Greece; Hikmet had written much of his poetry from a prison in Turkey. Two perfect companions for a man who once spent time in an Iraqi prison cell, waiting to see if he would emerge dead or alive.
HASSAN IS SLOW TO TALK ABOUT HIMSELF, but I’m fascinated by his history, and my delicate prodding slowly uncovers the miraculous story of his past. His life was literally saved by poetry. In Baghdad he had been an intellectual dissident who protested against the reign of Saddam, which not surprisingly landed him in an Iraqi prison. Yet instead of collapsing into despair, he had transformed the prison into his own private classroom. Every night he gathered the prison guards around him, and he spoke to them about poets like Shakespeare, Dante, and Cavafy, filling the cold cell rooms with the sound of his voice, singing out verses.
In Arabic, the word for “home,” beyt, is the same word used for a line of poetry, and Arab poets often speak of making a home in language. Maybe that is what led Hassan to begin giving his daily lessons—whatever the motivation, those poetry sessions gave him the strength to remain sane. Eventually he became very close to one of the young guards, who came to him alone and asked him about poetry. The relationship between guard and prisoner gradually changed into that of student and teacher and, finally, to one of friendship. It was this guard who finally helped Hassan to escape. One day the guard gave him permission to leave the prison grounds and go for a walk but said that in the evening he should return again. So Hassan left, wandering through the landscape near the prison, but in the evening he returned. The next day, he did the same. Day after day, he walked out of the prison gates and into the free world, and in the evening he returned and spoke to the guard about Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree” or the way Qabbani described the women passing him on the streets, who smelled of jasmine. In the evening he finally fell asleep in that lonely cell. And I think that it must have been this—the fact that he always returned at the end of the day, that he remained faithful, even when he could have simply disappeared—that made the guard decide to let him go free.
One morning the guard came to see Hassan in his cell. Please, he said. Today do not return. I cannot bear any longer to participate in holding you here. But I cannot set you free myself. I can only let you escape on your own.
So Hassan walked out of the prison that afternoon and never went back again.
That afternoon he walked into exile. As long as Saddam was in power, he could never feel safe in his former life. Now Saddam was no longer in power, but the insurgents had forced everyone else he knew into exile. The streets of his paintings are the only home he has.
It would be easy for me to dismiss Hassan’s story as fantasy, and maybe it is. Perhaps it is a story he tells himself because the truth of his past is much too difficult to bear. Or maybe in the telling of a story in three languages, it is I who misunderstood the details. But I don’t think so. I think the story is just as he tells it, and just as I understand it. Long ago I decided that war is a collection of stories that don’t make sense. Besides, Hassan doesn’t seem proud of having survived Iraq. He seems ashamed of it.
“Exile is my homeland,” I quote from al-Bayati. “Words are my exile.”
“No, you, habibti, you make my exile so much easier,” he tells me. “I had no one in Syria to talk to about books before I met you. Please come by more often, if you can. I miss talking about art and literature when you are gone.”
I quietly finish my tea, and he excuses himself for a moment, to sell a tourist painting for ten dollars.
“What is this painting?” the man asks, inspecting the alley of blue and white laundry hanging over roofs.
“That’s Damascus,” Hassan answers.
Now I know that he is lying. He only paints Baghdad, all day long.
15.
I HANG ALI’S PAINTING OF THE MOSQUE OF SAMARRA in my room. Soon I buy a second painting from Hassan, of an anonymous alley in old Baghdad mixed with an alley in Damascus, and I set it on the sill of the window looking out toward the Baron’s. For now, those paintings are the only decorations I have on my walls. Before I go to bed at night I look at them one last time, a final reminder that we can’t run away from our lives. They follow us. They show up in the most unexpected places—in front doors, in alleys, even in someone else’s laundry hanging out to dry.
It’s been almost ten years now since I left home, and in one way or another I’ve been running ever since. I’ve even tried escaping into other people. Maybe Damascus is the end of the line—maybe this is where we all end up when we’ve run out of places to disappear. The legend says that when God created the world, he made Adam from the clay of the nearby Barada River, and that it was to somewhere near Damascus that God cast him and Eve after they lost paradise.
Sometimes when the Baron has finished one of his stories, about kissing a blond customer in the storage room of a shoe store in Lebanon, I ask him, “What are you doing in Damascus? Your children are still in Lebanon. Your city is there. Your entire life is there. Why are you here, in this tiny, forty-dollar-a-month room in Damascus, in a neighborhood that has nothing to do with you?”
“Forget about it,” he tells me. “What do I want with that place anymore?”
It’s not that he no longer loves Lebanon. It’s just that he can never forgive it for having once been so good.
HERE IS THE DREAM I sometimes dream at night in the house off Straight Street: I am twelve years old again, vacationing on the Texas coast, on a pristine expanse of beach, and everything is still as it should be. My grandmother Elida is sitting behind me on a blanket, tanning her long, beautiful legs and braiding my hair. I lean back and kiss her cheek, and for a moment our faces touch each other and I can sense the resemblance between us. She points in the distance where my grandfather Enrique, with his shiny silver curls, is building a sand castle, digging his fingers deep into the sand. Behind them my aunt Loretta is holding hands with my mother, and they are walking together in the low tide, bending every now and then to gather seashells. My mother, thin and lovely in her red bathing suit, notices me watching her and smiles.
I know it is a dream, because almost all of the people in it are dead. It can’t be real because my mother is happy. Still it keeps coming back to me, my mother looking up from the beach beside her sister and smiling an honest smile at me, a smile I don’t think I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
16.
TODAY THERE WERE BOMBS IN BAGHDAD. I heard about them on the way home from school, on the radio in the taxi, the word Baghdad and then infijar and then the number of the d
ead, the taxi driver shaking his head sadly in the midst of traffic. I always remember the word for “explosion” in Arabic, infijar, because it sounds just like mufaja’a, the Arabic word for “surprise.” And I imagine that they must be the same, a walk down the streets and then the feeling of surprise as the world around you explodes into a thousand pieces and suddenly goes dark.
Lately there have been bombs every day—car bombs in Baghdad, in Mosul, in Samarra, in cities I’ve never even heard of until I learn that they have filled up with the dead. Five churches are bombed in Baghdad. Woman and children waiting at checkpoints are thrown from the earth by roadside bombs. Iraqi officials are executed, foreign and Iraqi journalists kidnapped and killed. Translators are shot as collaborators. Dozens of Iraqi recruits are murdered in an ambush on their way back from training. A British engineer is beheaded. Mass Kurdish graves are uncovered. A roadside bomb kills eight American marines. An explosion kills Iraqi policemen relaxing at a snack bar. In Falluja American forces bomb from the air, while families flee for their lives.
Today it was a car bomb against an Arab television station that made the news. As happens so often, it didn’t kill those it was meant to kill. Instead the gardener died, a security guard, and members of the kitchen staff. And so it goes, all of this horror finding its way into sunflowers and gardenias, kitchen forks and spoons.
WHEN I ARRIVE AT HASSAN’S I find him smoking on a stool in the corner of his shop, letting his ashes collect in a small gray pool on the floor. He looks exhausted, and I know that I should not have come. I can almost feel the dead in the air around him, unmentioned and heavy.
The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith Page 9