“Please, just say it. Tell me that you can’t leave the monastery. Tell me that you have made your choice.”
“My entire life, whenever I needed something, God has sent me a sign.” His voice is so low that I can barely hear him. “How many times have I said that—that God would never give a man stones if he asks for bread?”
I pull my hands from his. I am sad and exhausted and not up to the task of begging a man to love me. “What do you want, Frédéric? He sent me. We fell in love. What more of a sign are you waiting for? Are you waiting for it to be written in the clouds? For an airplane to fly by and write GO WITH STEPHANIE in the sky? I’m here, Frédéric. I’m right here in front of you.”
He won’t look at me. I can scarcely recognize the young monk I met on his way back from Athos, his eyes glowing and a shining coming from his body. Now he looks worn out, uncertain about everything. “I don’t think that you understand,” he tells me. “You have no idea what my life would be like if I left this place. When I came to the monastery, I came in order to become a stranger, to be nobody, to be invisible. If I leave here I don’t exist. I don’t even have my French identity card anymore. I gave all of my possessions away. I don’t exist in the world, Stéphanie.”
“You exist for me.”
“Do I?” Finally, he turns to look at me. “You fell in love with a monk, Stéphanie. You fell in love with a man who comes shining out of the mountains.”
“That’s not fair.”
“But it’s true. Do you know what happened to me last week? Some guests came up the stairs, and I greeted them with my simple little pot of tea, wearing my normal clothes, my working clothes. I offered them something to drink. They didn’t even look at me. They treated me like a servant.”
He is quiet. “Then, I returned later, wearing the robes of a monk. And they ran up to me, horrified, and kissed my hands. ‘Oh, Abuna! Abuna! Father! Father!’ they called out.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. But I have a place here, now. I have my life to live here. What are you going to do if I leave this place and I can’t become anyone in the world?”
I had never allowed myself to even imagine Frédéric and me together in the world. Now I try to picture him, in his ordinary human clothes, navigating the city streets. Where would we go? How would we live? As it was I had little to offer him—no plans for the future, nothing more than a few thousand dollars left over from my fellowship in the bank. Who knows how we would survive? To be poor, to trust that everything will be given to you, to not think about where your food or shelter or clothing will come from—to offer everything you have to those in need—in the monastic life, these are considered the actions of a saint. In the world, they are the actions of a failure and a fool.
“You were the one who told me about resurrection,” I tell him. “You were the one who said that with faith, we can reach the other side of what is difficult. I believed your words.”
“Yes, I told you those words as a monk.”
“But I didn’t receive them as a nun. I received them as a human being. And is that your resurrection then? Does it only work in a monastery? Because I don’t want anything to do with it if that is resurrection.”
A tear runs down my cheek, and I brush it away, angrily. He can’t do this to me now. After everything I have believed, after all of the conversations from this past year that I have taken to heart. If all of this has been rhetoric, for months now, then I am right back at the beginning, I am nothing more than some foolish girl who was in fact born with a curse and who will leave Damascus to fall into depression, get hit by a train, or die in a freak plane crash a few months down the road.
But it is true. I no longer need him to tell me that. His hand is on my hand again, differently now. I look up at his face. He also has tears in his eyes.
“If resurrection exists, then you can take it with you,” I whisper. We sit like that, for a long time. He squeezes my hand. “I know.”
13.
TWO WEEKS LATER, I am traveling alone with Frédéric up the coast of Syria, preparing to meet the monastic community in Antakya, or Antioch, the cradle of Christianity, for the feast day of Saints Peter and Paul. This morning he was waiting for me at the monastery, wearing his single ordinary man outfit, loose khaki trousers with big pockets and a long, brown hand-tailored shirt from France. His hair has become absolutely wild, like a lion’s mane, and for once his beard is close to full. I think that my heart might just fall through my chest.
“What time do we have to meet the community?” I ask him on the way to the bus station, and he blushes.
“We have all the time that we need, Stéphanie.” And because, for the first time ever in the time since I have known him, it is true, I smile as he buys two tickets to Homs, then from Homs to Latakia, from Latakia to Kassab, the longest road possible north, stopping in a hundred places and always pressing us up against the sea.
We spend our day side by side in cheap Arab buses, staring out the windows to the water lapping up against the coast, the sailboats nestled in their ports of azure Mediterranean sea, and I can’t believe that I have lived so long nearby without paying it notice. He slides open the window beside me, and we let the wind come through, smelling fresh and full of salt, until we climb into the pine-forested mountains of the north, that land of Crusader castles, where it is more like Italy than any other Arab country that comes to mind.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you”—he smiles, with his wicked smile—“I just found out that I’ll be studying Arabic for the entire month of July in Damascus. Which I think means we’ll see each other every day.”
It is too impossible to be true. Like that moment on a game show when you had hoped to win a washing machine and instead you find out you won fifty thousand dollars and a dream house and a vacation to Europe, and that you get to come back next week for more prizes. Frédéric in Damascus for an entire month. I had been thrilled to be granted an afternoon with him.
But then I remember. The Sheikha has asked me to teach English in her Quranic school for girls this summer, an incredible honor for a Christian. It means that my summer mornings will be all tied up in an Islamic madrassa and my afternoons tied up with a desert monk. I can’t quite imagine the two worlds colliding.
“Are you ready to see me in my mosque clothes?”
“I can’t wait.”
The bus groans to a halt near the Turkish border, at a makeshift bus station that seems to have evolved in a no-man’s-land on the side of the road. Frédéric climbs out of the bus and speaks alone to a taxi driver, handing him change through the open window of the front seat. Soon we are driving into the forest on a detour to a tiny Armenian village in the mountains called Kassab, a scattering of quaint old houses in a forest overlooking a rugged, untouched coastline. The wind catches the scent of the sea and pine, compressing them into one.
“I was here five years ago, and I can swear that there is a tiny restaurant owned by two brothers, hidden somewhere in the back of this village,” he tells me, grabbing my wrist gently and guiding me forward. He begins asking strangers in the street, and sure enough before long we are cutting through backyards and hidden alleys on the way to the house of so and so Galikian, where two brothers pour us house wine and cover our table with fresh cheese and grape leaves stuffed with rice and lamb, grilled fish and salads, and for once in my life Frédéric is not a novice monk, he is simply the most charming man I have ever known, sitting across from me at a table near the Mediterranean Sea, to the sound of people speaking Armenian in the background. My God, if he only knew, the Baron would be so proud of me.
We laze away our day, drinking red wine and swinging our feet near one another beneath the table, until I don’t know if I am drunk from house liquor or just from the look of him. Then, the almost inevitable happens. A young woman sitting at a table nearby begins to eye us curiously.
“Aren’t you a monk at Mar Musa?” she asks Frédéric. He smiles, his eyes shining at me
, and then answers, “Yes.”
By then the waitress, a middle-aged women with a large waistline and a laugh to match, is nearby, fussing over us. “You’re from Mar Musa?”
“It’s amazing,” the first woman insists. “I was there just a few months ago.”
Frédéric turns to the waitress and teases her gently in Arabic. “So you know that I’m a novice. Don’t give me too much food—we monks have very small stomachs.”
Soon we have piles of food we didn’t order scattered around the table, extra bottles of wine and house-made arak, grilled eggplant and kebabs of ground lamb minced with spices and parsley, an enormous platter of fresh fruit. By three o’clock we have to leave or else we’ll never make it to Turkey. So we stumble back to the center of the village and catch a taxi to the border, passing men selling oranges on the side of the road, winding our way through lush rolling hills. Frédéric takes my hand, and I link my fingers in his. We have never touched for more than an instant. But after a few moments, he drops my hand abruptly.
“You’ll hate me for this someday,” he says sadly.
Then I gently take hold of his hand a second time. “I won’t ever hate you for any of this, I promise.” His fingers feel warm against mine, and we hold them like that, all the way to passport control, where we stop at the small border crossing and turn over our two passports, stacked on top of each other, and the jolly, cigarette-smoking Syrian guard stamps them: June 27, 2005.
Then we walk. We cross over to that place between countries, a wild landscape full of pine and open sky and the sound of water flowing. We are in no one’s country, and for a few moments no one on earth can claim us.
We hold hands, tightly now, until we reach the other side.
14.
IDEALLY, I WOULD HAVE STAYED with Frédéric forever in that coastal town, sitting next to the sea. Yet after two days in Antakya I have to rush back to Damascus early, so that I can become a teacher at an Islamic school.
My first concern about teaching at the Quranic school for girls is not the job itself, but that I might actually throw my entire house off Straight Street into scandal. I can just hear the upstairs neighbors clicking in disapproval. Syria may be a model of religious coexistence, but people tend to keep matters of faith to themselves.
So far I’ve been discreet about my lessons with the Sheikha and my trips to the mosque, sneaking away my headscarves in my backpack and pinning them on in the backs of taxis, using the rearview mirror for guidance. But I doubt I’ll be able to conceal my destination this summer. I am certainly the only Christian in my neighborhood leaving the house in the middle of July covered from head to toe in dark clothing, only my hands and feet revealed. It’s a hundred degrees out.
Today I dress carefully for my first day of school, selecting long, loose black pants, a long-sleeved maroon shirt, and slip-on black shoes. I pull my hair back away from my face and hang a scarf loosely around my neck. I stick a few safety pins beneath the corner of the scarf in case I need backup when the time comes for tying it into place, a skill I haven’t yet managed to perfect.
As I am crossing the courtyard, the Baron intercepts me. “Where are you going?” he asks suspiciously.
“I’m going to visit a friend,” I tell him.
“Wearing that? Isn’t it a bit hot to wear long sleeves and pants?”
“I don’t mind.”
“And black? Black will only absorb the sun.”
The Baron knows very well that I am going to the mosque. He has been following my immersion into Islam with a combination of confusion and alarm these past months. More than once, he has come to the window and stared at me reading the Quran.
“The Quran?” he asks. “What’s wrong with the Bible?”
Today he is once again trying to torture me, part of his job as my self-appointed mentor. Just as I had to learn the art of Syrian colloquial Arabic from him, the Baron has insisted on teaching me the art of “what should not be said,” another exact and very fine science in Syrian life. A girl, for instance, never goes out on a date in Syria—she “goes to a friend’s house.” One should never decline an invitation outright but should excuse oneself because “aunt so-and-so is in the hospital” or “so-and-so cousin just died, and we have to prepare for the mourning,” which is difficult for me, as I have no nearby relatives. Certainly, a girl who is dressed from head to toe in very formal dress should not tell her Christian neighbors that she is on her way to teach in a mosque. She is shopping, or taking a walk, or going to church to pray for forgiveness for her many sins. Even if everyone knows where she is really going, for some reason it isn’t very polite to admit it aloud.
This is why I am lying to the Baron quite openly, and he is reacting like a proud parent. “Why don’t you ever wear denim?” he presses. “I’ll take you to get some nice denim skirts this afternoon if you want.”
“I’ll let you know, Grandpa.”
“Dir balik,” he warns me as I finally leave. “Take care of yourself.”
Half an hour later, I am standing across from the mosque, using the reflection in a parked car to monitor my progress as I struggle to fasten my headscarf. Pedestrians stare at me, perhaps worried that I have pinned the cloth around my neck too tightly and am suffocating myself.
After several minutes I manage to cross the mosque courtyard with my scarf firmly safety-pinned beneath my chin. Beside me, two women walk with their faces entirely covered with black cloth, not even their eyes visible, leading their young children by the hand. We all enter the mosque together, and I try not to stare as they each lift up their scarves to reveal their faces, both of them pale and lovely and younger than I am. As I turn away from them, I notice the lines and lines of tiny shoes in front of me. Tennis shoes, barely the size of my palm, with lights on the heels that ignite each time a step is taken inside them. Dressy white shoes with buckles, tiny black flats, sneakers with their Velcro straps left hanging to their sides.
Slowly, up the stairs, the shoes climb one beside the other, hundreds of them, steadily increasing in size and weight. Pair by pair, they grow darker in color, more conservative, the second floor a collection of navy and black dress shoes in muted leather, modest and unassuming, barely distinguishable from one another. They stand side by side, like hundreds of mouths open to the sky. And behind them, the buzz of young girls’ voices saturate the air:
Qal hu Allah Ahid
Allah al-Sumid
Lum ulid wu lum yolid
Wu lum yukun lahu kufuan ahid.
Say: He is God, the One and Only
God, the Eternal, Absolute
He begets not, nor is he begotten
And there is no other like him.
I close my eyes. Collectively the voices hum like a generator, the sound hanging in the air with its own particular weight, as though I could simply walk forward and part them in half with my own body. One thing is certain—they don’t sound at all like ordinary human voices. The throat must give off a special trembling when it believes it carries the word of God.
The Sheikha founded her school when she was only seventeen years old, a brilliant student of Islam who had already memorized the Quran and spent years studying Islamic law. At the time, the idea of an Islamic madrassa under the secular Syrian government was considered revolutionary. Just as revolutionary was the idea that young women should become experts in the study of Islam, a field that was traditionally dominated by men. After all, there were those Muslims who even said that women were not required to pray five times a day, much less memorize and study the holy books. Yet the Sheikha insisted that women had always had a place of learning and teaching in Islam, dating back to the life of the prophet Mohammed. Study, she told her students, is one of the highest forms of prayer.
Today hundreds of girls study every summer at this mosque, beginning to memorize verses when they are just four years old. They learn every single word of the Quran, and only when they have finished do they learn it a second time with tajwid, a precise
science of reciting each letter of the Quran perfectly. Tajwid is familiar to me as the beautiful singsong rhythm the Sheikha had taught me when she recited the verses in her home. Though they do not begin studying the meaning of the texts until they are slightly older, the young girls understand that language—sound—communicates its own meaning.
I stand against the wall and close my eyes, listening to them reciting, until I feel a hand on my shoulder shaking me from my reverie. It is Noor, the Sheikha’s precocious sixteen-year-old daughter, bringing me to my senses. I have met her several times at her house, and on more than one occasion we have followed my Quranic lessons with trips into the neighborhood for ice cream. She knows a slightly different Stephanie, one with her hair down.
“I like your scarf,” she laughs, teasing me in her almost fluent English. “Thanks, it’s new.”
“Wow, you even pinned it? Soon you won’t look like a foreigner wearing hijab.”
Very funny. I will always look like a foreigner in hijab.
She gestures to a circle of girls chanting in a corner and smiles. “So, what do you think?”
At nine in the morning, the bottom floor of the mosque is already alive with what must be a hundred young girls sitting cross-legged in circles around their teachers, repeating Quranic verses in unison. In a circle of five-year-olds, girls with their heads still uncovered and their hair tumbling bounce anxiously from one leg to the other as they repeat the shortest chapters of the Quran, numbering just a few verses in length. Other circles are scattered throughout the room, the girls six, seven, eight years old, most of them quietly repeating the firm classical Arabic of a teacher in earnest. I can hardly believe the ease with which they are studying one of the hardest Arabic texts in existence.
Noor, having memorized the Quran by the age of twelve, has already been promoted to the role of teacher. Soon she is sitting again with her students in a corner circle, quizzing them one by one, occasionally gently correcting their pronunciation and marking their progress on charts. In other corners of the room, girls are pacing back and forth with pages in their hands, reciting lines quietly over and over to themselves, sometimes placing their hands on the pillars of the mosque and circling around them like ballerinas. I have been so conditioned to imagine a madrassa, or Islamic school, as oppressive that I do not know how to process these images.
The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith Page 31