The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  My neighbors were ecstatic. Merchants played the speech of Hassan Nasrallah over and over again, so that from street to street I was greeted by that image of the leader in his beard and turban, shouting and holding his fist in the air. When I returned home, the Baron was shaking his fist in proud imitation.

  “Did you see Nasrallah?” he asked, beaming. “He’s strong, isn’t he?”

  I never expected to see an Armenian Christian with a passion for Italian heels cheering on a radical Shiite.

  The next day I walked downtown to watch tens of thousands of Syrians march in the streets of Damascus, my friends and neighbors among them, to demonstrate their support of the Syrian government. They raised signs in the air and shouted, “With our souls and with our blood, we sacrifice for you, O Bashar!” The streets pulsed with schools of young Muslim girls in headscarves marching together, crowds of boys chanting in unison, civil servants, groups holding Communist flags, and other groups holding Hezbollah flags. Above all else, thousands upon thousands of Syrian flags and giant posters of Bashar al-Assad swam in the distance, the president smiling in a suit jacket and tie beneath the words “All of us are with Assad.”

  I found a place in the crowd near the Umayyad Square and watched as those thousands passed by me, proud and waving, like Americans asked to march in a parade on the Fourth of July. After weeks of the we-might-be-bombed-at-any-moment sentiment in the air, the mood was ecstatic. The march was doubling as a protest against the American government, and though perhaps this should have frightened me it seemed only surreal, those teenage boys holding up signs that read “No to Bosh” and “Boosh, get out.” A young doe-eyed teenager carrying a Syrian flag removed himself from the crowd and paused in front of me.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “I’m from America.”

  “From America? Welcome!” he gushed, enthusiastically shaking my hand. Then he merged again into the crowd and continued demonstrating against America.

  I watched them flooding through the streets, merging together, until they amassed in a great circle around a statue of former president Hafez al-Assad, climbed up on top of his body, and draped it with their flags.

  I remembered Mohammed and the many cabdrivers, shopkeepers, and neighbors who had angrily criticized the government in the weeks before. We would now sweep that quietly under the carpet and not speak of it again; I understood that much. Now those same people were in the streets, cheering on their leader. The cynical would tell me that they were forced to be there, but when I looked at those faces they didn’t look forced at all. They looked proud.

  I caught a cab home, and as we sat stuck in traffic the driver turned to me.

  “Where are you from?”

  “I’m from America,” I answered.

  “Really? So what do you think of Syria?” I had been asked this question so many times, but after watching a demonstration against my country it rubbed me differently.

  “It’s beautiful,” I told him, finally. “There’s this tight social life like I have never experienced in a country before. They’re the kindest people I have ever met, the Syrians. But the problem is that there’s just no freedom. You can’t even read a newspaper and believe anything that it says.”

  He laughed. “That’s true. It’s all lies, lies, lies. But, anyway, what do I need a newspaper for if I can’t walk across the street to buy it without getting shot? Syria is the safest country in the world. I can walk home in the middle of the night with a bag full of money and nothing will happen to me.” He shook his head. “I have my family, and I have my work, so what else do I need? George Bush wants to take over the whole world.”

  I thought about that question for a long time: What else do I need? Perhaps war and revolution only sound romantic in the ears of those unfamiliar with death, with those of us content to put Live Free or Die bumper stickers on our cars as we drive through safe suburban neighborhoods. I could understand how my neighbors could have changed their minds so quickly, marching in the streets in favor of a government I knew they neither always loved nor supported, but which had come to mean stability in a region where simply surviving was a triumph and where no other power existed to take its place. Perhaps there is something brave, noble even, in the collective insistence on staying alive, on having the patience to believe that change might come slowly, from within. Still, I don’t know what to feel. I am uncomfortable with my own sense of relief, relief that my neighbors were spared invasion or coup or war, even if this comes at the expense of my friends in Beirut, who had glimpsed for a moment a better, freer life. I am confused that I could feel anything other than anger at a man like Hassan Nasrallah holding his fist in the air. None of this is as easy as it looks from a distance. I know that from now on, I won’t judge so quickly what people will do to protect themselves and their families. If I criticized my neighbors, it was only because I had one thing none of them possessed—a passport that allowed me to leave.

  As we drove through the streets, I looked out the window at life continuing on as normal, the women walking with their children in tow, the cars lined up in traffic, the men selling cigarettes on the corner. Maybe this is a resurrection I can believe in. I had never considered what a miracle an everyday morning could be—a walk down the street, uninterrupted, to pick up the newspaper, a mother walking her little girl to school—when you are surrounded on three sides by countries falling apart.

  25.

  THEN, AFTER THE LONGEST WINTER IN MY LIFE, I wake up and light is flooding through my front window, and it is finally spring. The neighbors are removing their carpets and washing their floors with buckets of soapy water, the merchants are hanging cages with tiny singing canaries outside their shops, and green furry almonds and peaches come into season. I drain the petroleum out of my heater with triumph and open my windows to finally let the air in.

  I climb from my bed, pull on my clothes, and wait for the Baron’s knock on the window. I drink my coffee. Then I walk into the streets, waving hello to the man with the knives. “How is your knife?” he asks me. I buy a drink from the man who taught me the word for “straw.” I wave to the pizza guys, and the knafeh man hanging upside down, and Mohammed mending his carpets, I salute the woodworkers pressing mother of pearl into the backs of chairs. When I slide into the counter of the juice stand, the young Kurdish vendor asks me, “The usual?” I nod and laugh out loud, because I have been waiting to be asked that all of my life.

  It’s all still here. None of it has vanished. There are no American tanks in the streets. No helicopters dropping bombs from overhead. No one has fled to a safer place. Everything remains. Everyone is still alive.

  “Shoo fi? Ma fi?” a shopkeeper asks me as I walk by. “What is there? Is there anything?”

  “Ma fi, shoo fi,” I answer, grinning. “There’s nothing. What is there?”

  I pass by the florist. “Sabah al-kheir, Morning of goodness,” he calls out.

  “Sabah al ward! Morning of roses!” I answer, smiling.

  “How’s life today?”

  “Like paradise,” I tell him. “Like paradise.”

  26.

  BUT THAT IS NOT THE ENTIRE STORY. Or perhaps I should say that it is the entire story, but only the version of the story that I lived. That March, the Sheikha finally taught me about the Muslim Jesus. She said that he was a human being, just like the rest of us. He performed miracles and raised the dead, just as the Gospels said he did. He lived the Passion leading up to his death, and was betrayed by one of his own. But at the last moment, when he was supposed to be killed, God put someone in his place, and he did not die. It was not Jesus on the cross at Golgotha on Good Friday. It was a copy of him.

  “But who was it?” I pressed. “Who died that day?”

  “The scholars say many things,” she answered me. “Some say that it was Judas, the one who betrayed him. Some say that it was no one, just a shadow. We don’t know.”

  A curious sensation was rising in my stomach, relief m
ixed with confusion. So in another story, Jesus didn’t die. He was raised up alive to heaven at the last moment, just when he was expecting to be killed. Part of me wanted to preserve the story in my memory, like that.

  And part of me was haunted by the vision of a man on a cross who looked so familiar, and yet whom I could not identify, whose name I did not know.

  Who is he? I kept asking myself. Who really died that day?

  I cannot stop asking myself that question, even now.

  27.

  IT IS ONLY AFTER THE CONFLICT has passed that I find the courage to seek out Hassan again. I have not spoken to him for many months, have invented excuses to avoid his shop on the way home and memorized alternate paths from the Old City so that I would not run into him. Long ago he had stopped being simply a man to me and had come to embody in my thoughts the war in Iraq in its entirety, the daily news of bombings and cars exploding in marketplaces. I was afraid of him.

  Yet in these last months the war in Iraq has become more real to me, more tangible, no longer a distant horror on the news or a story that a single person can contain within him. I have met many other Iraqis like Hassan, stranded in Damascus, as this city continues to be a desperate refuge between places. There is my friend Ghaith, an Iraqi photographer who had been the only survivor of an American air strike several months before and who now wears a deep, jagged shrapnel scar on his face. I had often watched him walking through the marketplace dazed, taking photographs of beams of light falling through holes in the roof. “I’m sorry,” he once apologized to me when I lost him in a crowd. “It’s just that there is this terrible white light in Baghdad, overexposing everything. Here, I feel like I’m discovering light for the first time.” In Baghdad, he photographed the dead, and in his photos I see the light he speaks of behind the corpses, covering them, making it hard to look at any one photo for long without needing to look away. Though he does not believe in God, Ghaith says that just before they die, the dead often reach into the air, trying to touch someone invisible. He wonders who it is.

  There is the Iraqi translator for the American military whom I met at a party, who fled Iraq after eight of his colleagues were assassinated for being collaborators and who was now waiting fitfully as the American embassy continued to deny him sanctuary abroad. There are priests and parishioners who left Iraq after a series of church bombings, their migration dismantling one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Each one of them reminds me of the fabled messengers in the book of Job, who stumble into the room to give news of the dead and then finish by saying, in farewell, “I am the only one who has escaped to tell you.”

  Like everyone here, I have spent many hours trying to understand why some of us are taken and others of us are left to live. I’ve made my uncomfortable peace, in part because I don’t think that the dead would want us to spend our time left walking on earth absorbed in such questions.

  But they would want us to notice. To at least give thanks. For the simple miracle that my childhood prayer, Give us this day, our daily bread, has been answered.

  I have missed Hassan in these months. The image of him hunched over on his stool, in his heavy leather jacket and with his dark, black eyes, has haunted me. Every time I considered coming to visit him I was embarrassed by how long I had stayed away. Yet now I feel ready. I have heard from other shopkeepers that he has abandoned his closet-sized shop with Ali beside the mosque to establish his own small gallery—no longer content to reproduce the “tourist art” that marked the first months of his exile. So today I go looking for him in the Old City, passing the stands of pomegranate juice and the rows of antique stores and bakeries selling fresh chocolate croissants, until there he is, sitting in front of me in a tiny stall, still larger than life. This time he is boxed in by color, dozens of canvases of strange geometric patterns and cubes of light hanging on every inch of the walls around him and stacked on the floor. He has propped a blue canvas to sit beside him like a person, sad and quietly beautiful.

  “Shlonitch, Stephanie!” he calls out, dropping his paintbrush abruptly to fetch a chair. “I missed you. How are you?”

  “I’m beautiful,” I say, wishing I had other words to give him. “I’m beautiful.”

  I don’t bother to explain why I have been absent, and he doesn’t ask. I take a seat on the small straw chair he has placed next to his own and examine the colors and patterns surrounding me on all sides. They are fierce and abstract, bearing no resemblance to the scenes of city life that he had painted when I first met him.

  “You’ve been busy.”

  “I haven’t been sleeping,” he answers. He smiles, but his eyes look more raw and worn out than I’ve ever seen them, the black rims beneath them almost the same color as his dark leather jacket. “These days I sometimes wake up at three in the morning to paint.”

  I sit there silently for a moment, thinking of the hellish news we hear of his city every day now. “How is your family?” I ask.

  “They’re fine,” he says. “Thank God they’re still okay.”

  When I met Hassan, he was still in his first, awkward months of exile. Yet he, too, has changed. Before he would have rushed to explain his paintings, to read me poetry, to express a theory on the violence rocking his city. But today he is humbled, I think, by life. I look up at the shapes on the walls, how dark and wild they are. He is finally painting the city that he loves as he lived in it, and even in its abstractness it is far more recognizable than the endlessly repeated alleys and laundry of his previous paintings, the women without faces. He is truly painting Baghdad, a city falling apart.

  I stand up to examine the canvases more closely, but my eyes keep settling back on that singular blue painting propped up on the easel nearby, like a third person sitting in the room, mute and yet taking the space of everything.

  “Something’s happened,” I whisper.

  “Yes,” he says. “Something’s happened.”

  A week before, Hassan had awakened in the middle of the night, his dreams possessed by a bright, strange vision of blue. He understood immediately that a close friend of his, an Iraqi artist, had just been killed in a bombing. Now he was being given his friend’s last vision to be recorded on canvas. Hassan had stayed up all night, copying it down, the luminous boxes and subtle changes in color.

  So this is what the dead see when they are dying.

  The news arrived by telephone a few days later. It was true. His friend was dead. His body had been shattered, his briefcase of paints erupting onto the sidewalk.

  I look up at Hassan, lost in his thoughts, and I feel a sudden tenderness for him. He no longer seems frightening to me. He looks more like a mythical hero. Like a man who has spent all night wrestling a pearl from a demon’s hands.

  We sit side by side for a long time, watching pedestrians pass in the street in front of us. Finally, Hassan touches my shoulder and points to a picture I had overlooked, hanging in the top left-hand corner of his shop. He smiles at me.

  “Do you know what that picture is?”

  I get up and walk over to it, surprised that I hadn’t noticed the painting until now. Among the canvases cloaked with cubes of blue and black, all of those dreams of the dead, here a round shape shines in the center of a yellow background like the sun, sparks of orange and gold light emanating from its center. I look closer. No, it is not the sun. It is the face of a woman, just beginning to smile, the line of her mouth gently turning up. She is somewhere between human and star. In her ears, two earrings hang loosely, small pearl beads at their ends.

  I touch my ears self-consciously and feel the same earrings with my fingertips.

  “It’s you,” he says, but it couldn’t be. She’s radiant. “That’s you, as I see you.”

  My eyes fill up with tears. He removes the painting from the wall and hands it to me. I turn it over and read the inscription on the back, in Arabic: To Stephanie.

  “Every day people come in here and want to buy it,” he says. “But I tell them th
at they can’t have it. It already belongs to someone.”

  I cradle it gently in my arms. Then I carry my canvas home through the streets of Damascus, this unexpected gift of my own face emerging in the ruins, and here of all places, shining and alive.

  Part Four RESURRECTION

  If you want to witness the resurrection, then be it.

  For this is the condition for witnessing anything.

  –RUMI

  1.

  TODAY IS A LOVELY, breezy day in March, and Frédéric is knocking on the window of my room in the house off Straight Street, waving to me with this small fluttering of his hand like I have seen him make to wave to birds. I hardly recognize him. He has abandoned his monastic frock in favor of ordinary human clothes, a tan-striped button-down linen shirt, a brown leather bomber jacket, and khaki trousers, the perfect combination of St. Francis earth tones and French style. It is a look we often referred to as “monastic chic” in divinity school.

  I run to answer the door, but it is like a scene in a bad movie where a mother sees her child walking in front of a dinosaur from a distance and rushes to save him, only to see him snatched away before her very eyes. Before I can manage to push open the double doors, the Baron gets to him.