The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  “Bonjour! Tu parles Francese? Italiano? Portugueso?”

  “Speak to me in Arabic,” Frédéric pleads, visibly overwhelmed by this sudden assault.

  The Baron looks horribly disappointed. “Really? Because Je Parle Francese. Italiano. Portugueso. Armeniano. Turki.”

  Oh dear. I may have lost him for the entire day.

  I have traveled out to the monastery every week this month, leaving after my Saturday lessons with the Sheikha to make my way back into the wild, wide-open desert, slowly trying to piece together a spiritual life that makes sense to me. I’ve come to know everyone at the monastery over time—the workers, the novices, bizarre pilgrims who refuse to speak and write all of their sentences on pieces of paper, Sufis and saints and beautiful young children who light candles in wooden boxes before icons of the Virgin. Yet it is Frédéric I’m closest to, and every time I climb that mountain, he is waiting for me at the top of the stairs with a steaming glass of tea cupped between his hands.

  I grew up enough of a Catholic to know a thing or two about the magnetic appeal young men in the clergy can have for women. I seem to recall giggling with my sister in the back of St. Anthony’s Church when I was barely a teenager, both of us infatuated with a certain young priest with blue eyes who looked remarkably like Rob Lowe in the film Oxford Blues. Yet Frédéric manages to remain oblivious to his pop-icon status, and that endears him to me. I have watched lines of young women climb up the mountain to swoon over him, and yet when he appears from his afternoon chores of keeping bees he just waves his bee-swollen hands, rattling on about the queen in her hive, Hafif the donkey, his guilt over an apparent addiction to sugar, or any number of equally bizarre topics, his blond curls flying in the air and his eyes shining. Really, the man lives in his own world.

  Still, I have discovered that this bee-keeping, “Yellow Submarine” singing, very French mystic is perhaps my favorite company on earth, someone I would enjoy passing time with even if we weren’t both in the middle of Syria, because we seem to understand each other intuitively. We take walks in the mountains and chat about the desert fathers, and during the morning prayer we always sit next to each other, trying our best not to burst into laughter as we read the Psalms in Arabic, because we keep making really terrible mistakes, which is embarrassing in the midst of a solemn prayer crying out to God about walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Sometimes during the Mass, he will lean over and whisper in my ear, “What does that word mean?” and I just shrug, because I have no idea either. I haven’t a clue.

  Frédéric never eats dinner. He fasts every Monday and so does not eat at all. I once caught him playing Pink Floyd on the guitar in the church, when he thought no one was listening, strumming an opening number from The Wall. Among his favorite all-time recordings are the vespers of a Russian Orthodox monastery in Finland and Jacques Brel, the chainsmoking, passionate French singing troubadour.

  I do believe that he has become my best friend.

  Now, unfortunately, my best friend is marooned on the Baron’s sofa, surprised and a bit dazed, like a trapped squirrel unsure of what wire cage has just collapsed on his tail. The Baron is busy fixing coffee for all of us.

  “Hi, Frédéric. This is my neighbor, the Baron.”

  “Yes, we’ve met.” His eyes sparkle with amusement.

  The Baron glances back, both slightly annoyed that he is no longer the center of Frédéric’s attention and that we are now speaking English, which is one of the few languages he doesn’t know. “So, are you from America like Stefanito here?” he asks in Arabic.

  Frédéric flinches, momentarily taken aback not only at the fact that he could possibly be mistaken for an American, but also at the unlikely insertion of my Italian name. “No, I’m from France.”

  The Baron’s jaw drops. Sound the alarms—there is a real, live Frenchman in the house.

  “Are you from Paris?” the Baron asks, his cheeks flushed. He asks this in a way that reveals that he is hopeful, madly hopeful.

  “No, I’m from the Alps.”

  “You mean, near Italy?”

  “Yes, just an hour from Torino.”

  The Baron stumbles over himself, coming just short of burning the coffee. “I used to travel to Milano. Do you know Milano? I bought the most beautiful shoes in Milano. Leather. Nothing but leather. I stayed in a hotel owned by a gorgeous woman, and the first time I met her I brought her pistachios from Aleppo.” He looks at Frédéric and raises his eyes, expecting him to intuit that pistachios from Aleppo are both a delicacy and an aphrodisiac. “ ‘What are these?’ she asked me. So I said, ‘You don’t have fustuq halabi in Milano?’ I couldn’t believe it. Can you imagine—no fustuq halabi? You should have seen her.” He moves his hand to illustrate her curves. “Anyway… after that, every time I came to Milano, I brought with me a bag of pistachios from Aleppo, and she was waiting for me. If you know what I mean.”

  It is not a particularly subtle point. Luckily, before he can launch into the opening of his story about how he also seduced a KLM stewardess by laying out a buffet of pistachios, chocolate, and whiskey and playing Tom Jones on his portable cassette player at thirty thousand feet, Frédéric very delicately asks whether he might use the bathroom. The Baron leaves his reverie long enough to motion him across the courtyard to the closet we call our toilet.

  Frédéric has barely disappeared around the corner before the Baron reaches over to pinch my cheek and whistles under his breath.

  “He’s beautiful.”

  I’m horrified. “He’s a monk.”

  He swats his hand in the air, dismissing me with his characteristic if you want to ruin your life by getting bogged down with details, then that is your problem expression. It has become a particular favorite of his.

  We sit for a few moments uncomfortably, finishing off our coffee, until Frédéric appears across the courtyard, apparently having figured out that you can flush a toilet simply by pouring a bucket of water down it. I am self-conscious and eager to leave, the combination of my crumbling room and my seventy-three-year-old protector making me edgy.

  The Baron, however, is trying maniacally to wave him back into his bedroom.

  “Marhaba, Padre! You are most welcome!” he shouts. I motion that we should make our exit.

  “I’m not a priest, I’m a novice monk,” Frédéric objects, and I am already out of my seat and halfway to the door.

  “No problem, Padre.” The Baron shoots him a conspiratorial smile and a wink. “Take care of her.”

  AND HE DOES. Frédéric spends the afternoon escorting me through Damascus, guiding me down hidden lanes that I have somehow always managed to overlook, pointing out pastries coated in honey and cafés with cold beverages served right out of glass bottles, alleys so long abandoned that the houses with their detailed wooden frames and broken windows could collapse upon us at any moment. Nothing is lost on him. He makes faces at every child who passes, wiggling his fingers in the air, he whispers to cats and blushes as complete strangers who recognize him from the monastery cross the streets to kiss his hands.

  “Walking with you is a little bit like walking with a movie star,” I observe. We have just seen an older man whom Frédéric did not recognize dart across traffic to press his lips and then his forehead against Frédéric’s hand.

  He laughs, shrugging. “It’s true. In the Middle East, they treat their monks like movie stars. What can I do?”

  It doesn’t help that Frédéric has also been a real movie star, recently featured milking his goats and pontificating on monasticism in a short film shot at Mar Musa. Still, today he is just a man, on loan for a few hours, and I can’t quite get over the ordinariness of our day together, the wonderful ordinariness, which feels so liberating after the monastery, where life can sometimes feel so existential. We stop to drink sweet Arabic sahlep and eat seasoned bread, to smoke apple tobacco from a glass pipe, and we talk about everything else but God.

  “I feel like I don’t even know you,
and you know everything about me,” I confess.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know what your life was like, before you joined a monastery.”

  “It’s a very long story.”

  “Well, I think we have all day.”

  So he begins his story: “When I was a child in Brittany, I climbed out the window with only a chocolate sandwich to travel around the world…” For the rest of the afternoon he regales me with his adventures, dressing up as Zorro when he was a child and drawing Z’s all over his walls, turning in poems instead of class assignments to the despair of his teachers, and finally abandoning school altogether to wander the face of the earth. He describes the mosques of Iran and the villages of Pakistan, his years in and out of India and his voyages across Turkey, until finally he comes to the afternoon when he wanders to a desert monastery in Syria and his life is changed forever.

  “I was touched so deeply when I arrived at Mar Musa,” he confesses. “I met Christ there.” Normally, I would be annoyed if someone made a statement like that. Yet Frédéric says it with this complete, innocent enthusiasm, so that I imagine the meeting must have been like when I met the poet Seamus Heaney in Cambridge and shyly handed him a bouquet of orchids. “Jésus!” I can hear Frédéric saying in his French accent, leaning forward and kissing Jesus lightly on both cheeks. “I’ve heard so much about you. Am I interrupting anything?”

  The afternoon wears on, and in time I narrate my own travels, through China and Europe and the Middle East, the deserts of the Taklamakan near Central Asia, sailing on the Nile. I describe the month I walked across Spain with only a small yellow backpack, and my own arrival at the monastery for the first time five years earlier, where something in the desert called out to my heart. It is a long, exhausting day, the hours flying by us unnoticed, until finally the sun begins setting in the distance and we collapse on a curb in the crowded market of Salihiya, a Muslim quarter where no one will recognize him. He asks for my passport, compares the stamps with his own, discovering countries and other lives when we just missed each other—by a few weeks in New York, a few months in Egypt, and the space of a few days in Turkey. I remember the first time I ever spoke to him, when he looked up at me in surprise and asked, Haven’t we met?

  Now, he leans over and taps a man on the shoulder, quietly and politely asking for a cigarette, and I watch as this novice monk in human clothes rolls tobacco into paper and then lights the end, inhaling slowly, blowing out smoke into the street. The world passes by us, the two of us almost invisible among green-painted wagons of peanut sellers and fruit stalls brimming with lemons and clementines, a giant yellow sign for Lipton tea scrawled out in Arabic, lines of taxis waiting for passengers, and the view of Qassioun Mountain behind us.

  “Frédéric?” I ask.

  “Yes, Stéphanie?” He looks at me, and for a moment I feel so close to this man, a stranger in this country, who after all of these years of wandering has found himself sitting beside me, here, on this street.

  “Are you ever lonely here?”

  He glances down and quietly puts out his cigarette on the pavement. “Of course I’m lonely.”

  “Me, too.”

  And that is how we become partners in loneliness.

  2.

  TWO WEEKS LATER IT IS GOOD FRIDAY, and I am climbing the stairs to the monastery with my arms overflowing with bouquets of Easter lilies in full bloom, my offering to the church. I like the idea of placing them in a vase of water in a church standing in the heart of the desert, the petals bringing life into that dry place. In ancient paintings the angel Gabriel is seen handing the Virgin Mary this white flower when he appears to her with the news that she will conceive a son. I love that image of Mary, the angel, and the blossom of life blooming in the space between them.

  Holy Week has always been the most sacred week in the year for Christians in the Middle East, this rising again seen as even more important than Christmas. Every year hundreds of Christians flock to the monasteries and the churches, beginning their celebrations on Palm Sunday and continuing a vigil for the next seven days. For weeks I’ve been looking forward to seeing the entire drama acted out here in the desert, my way of completing the journey I set out on in November. I never lived the week of the Resurrection during the Spiritual Exercises, but I think that I’m ready now.

  By the time I arrive in the courtyard the monastery is so crowded with visitors that they spill into the chapel and all of the adjacent rooms. Though we are meant to be anticipating the Crucifixion, there is a chatter of voices as aunts and cousins embrace one another and young children race through the courtyard. Dima smiles at me when she sees me and hands me a slender white candle. Soon the entire courtyard is full of lit candles held in the air, as the sun slowly descends behind the mountains and the sky grows dim.

  Then there is silence. We walk in a single line out of the front of the monastery, each of us ducking one after another through the door of humility, until we emerge in a long necklace of lights snaking through the desert valley. In the front of the procession, Frédéric wears a long white robe and holds in the air a wooden statue of Jesus crucified. We walk his Passion, following the cross through the turns of the valley, the enormous sky a deep gray now and the clouds looming overhead. When we reach the ancient monks’ cemetery deep in the valley, we stop. A young man pushes to the front of the crowd and reads from the Gospel of John in Arabic. Beside him a boy I know, who now, suddenly, looks like a man, delicately removes the body of Jesus from the cross and lifts it against the side of the cliff. Then we hear nails pounding against stone. In the candlelight I can see faint outlines of the body of Jesus, hanging with his arms outstretched, draped with a red cloth, dying. We wait to hear the last words of his life: I am thirsty. Then the quiet gasp: It is finished.

  Yet it is not finished. I know that much now. The monks remove his body, drape it in a white cloth, and carry it back to the chapel in silence so that we can bury him.

  That evening in the chapel, I stand back and watch one of the most touching vigils of my entire life. One by one, people approach the body. Teenaged girls shyly caress his arms. A mother leans down and guides her son’s tiny hand across his chest. Men kneel, rub his hands with oil, and kiss his feet. Many people are crying. For each of us, the body contains something different—the memories of a country that almost collapsed this winter, those we have loved and lost, uncertainty about the future. In that moment, we place all of our suffering into a body, into this man, this truly human man. We anoint him with oil, place flowers on his arms and legs, and kiss his hands. We leave the body in its tomb. And then we go to sleep.

  We sleep, and we dream, and then we live another day in the tomb and we dream again. Sebit al-Noor, the Saturday of Light. A few months ago, I feared death so much that I could not even bear confronting this day during the Spiritual Exercises. Yet now it has become for me the most beautiful day of all, the day in which everything is lost forever, and yet we live it, all the way from morning to evening, believing that a miracle will come, if we only believe.

  It is the end of the month of March, that month that took my grandparents and my aunt and that I grew up hearing was my family’s month of curses. If my mother could be here, I know that she would want me to place all of those burdens into the ground. I do, I bury them all, my grandfather and my grandmother and my aunt. I bury them beside my own years battling death, and the visions I had witnessed in the desert those November afternoons. I take the nightmares of Hassan and I try my best to bury those also, together with the cities the Baron has left behind. I close my eyes, and I allow my Woody Allen Jesus to contain all that has already been taken. Then I bathe him, dress him in a clean blue suit, kiss him on the forehead, and put him in the earth, let him go, and whisper, finally, Rest, rest.

  3.

  ON EASTER SUNDAY, the bells begin ringing shortly before four in the morning. The sun has not yet risen, but the mountains are already beginning to find their shape, ant
icipating it. I rush down the stairs to the chapel in the faint light. The church is already alive with the scraps of hundreds of voices, the faces of saints emerging as though they are trying to arouse their tired bodies from sleep. The Mass begins in clouds of incense and smoke and the clouds of our breath. We read the story of the Resurrection in Arabic. I sit nearby as Paolo gives the homily, speaking softly about the importance of knowing that Jesus rose into a human body that once again walked the earth, a body as weak and as broken as ours.

  When Paolo finishes speaking, he turns to where I am sitting. “Stephanie, I’m tired,” he says. “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind translating that into English for our foreign guests.”

  I shiver. Paolo and I have not been communicating very well lately, and he has taken to speaking to me through the Mass. “Stephanie, pray for peace,” he will tell me after Communion on a day when I feel particularly sad or overwhelmed. Sometimes, when we have not spoken much for a long time, he will simply say at the prayer in the morning, “Stephanie, light the candles,” which is a way of saying, I know you’re here, and that coming back hasn’t been easy. But may your day be blessed.

  And now he is finally confronting me, asking me to declare the Resurrection. I know that none of this is about translation. He wants me to confirm, for him and for myself, that I am well again. That it was true what he told me months ago: “I don’t think that God brought you all the way to the desert to leave you stranded in hell.”

  He nods at me. To my surprise, the words come easily. I don’t summarize all that Paolo said. Instead, I tell the story of a man who died in a human body and was buried in the earth, having lost everything. He stayed there, for a period, in the dark. Then he came back to life again.

  It is not symbolic, I say. It really happens.

  Then all at once the sun rises, flooding light through the window behind the altar, illuminating the frescoes. Paolo declares the Resurrection. We are enveloped in hundreds of voices singing at once. Dima puts out her arms and twirls in circles like a dervish. Frédéric taps me on the shoulder. “Look,” he whispers in my ear, and we stand side by side as a beam of light lands on the face of an angel blowing a trumpet on the frescoed wall of paradise.