Dear Frédéric,
According to Muslim scholars, the hoopoe bird had the special ability to discover water beneath the sands of the desert for Solomon and his army to drink.
It was this water in the desert that he was flying in search of when he went beyond the borders of knowledge and instead discovered a woman. And he returned to Solomon, waiting and thirsty in the desert, and said, I have crossed territory you have not crossed.
Maybe the story is not only about love, but about the answer to a thirst. And about what we really need to stay alive.
These next Quran readings are, I think, about being at the border between two realities, between night and day. Or perhaps they are more like those moments when the sun has not gone down and yet the moon is already visible, and we seem to be alive in two worlds at once.
Carry them with you this last week in Damascus, in this time you live in two worlds at once, the desert monastery of the heart and the green monastery of the world, and you feel so small in their midst.
Maybe the soul is a bird in the Quran because he is not limited by the earth, he doesn’t have to choose between worlds. He can keep traveling between them. And so instead of sacrificing one world for the other, he learns to contain them both.
Love,
Stephanie
We spend our last five days walking the streets, drinking lemonade with mint and eating handmade ice cream covered with pistachios, visiting our favorite alleys. The night before he leaves Damascus, I close the windows and the door to my room, a scandalous act for a girl with a man alone, much less with a novice monk. I don’t care. There is something I need to say to him.
“Frédéric, I was thinking—maybe we could just get married.”
He stares at me. Even I am surprised that I have uttered the words aloud.
“I mean, I just thought that I could say it.”
He doesn’t answer. He just quietly takes my hand.
He takes my hand, and for a few moments we are alone in the world. We are somewhere above it, even. I rest my head against his chest.
Then I walk him one last time to the place where we kiss, and we say good-bye. By the time I look back through the swelling crowds of people, he is gone.
20.
August
I TRY THROWING MYSELF back into my daily life, resuming my visits with Mohammed and my coffee with the Baron, spending extra time each day planning my English lessons for the mosque. Yet everything that was easy when Frédéric was here now feels like an effort. Today I walked alone in the empty, hidden streets, searching for the Damascus I had known at his side, the alleys with their wooden awnings and tumbling vines in bloom, the boys with their bicycle bells, and the canaries, singing in their cages. I couldn’t see anything on my own. Instead I found a city of heat and noise and political turmoil.
I miss the city that I lived in when he was here.
Yet once again, the girls at the mosque call me back to earth. Today in the middle of a vocabulary lesson, Ahlam leaned over and handed me a small folded-up piece up paper.
What happened to you? she had written in her childish, awkward English scrawl. Are you okay? Then Hiba sat beside me and gently unfastened my crooked headscarf and tied it again, winding it around my face, taking in every loose hair, and then fastening it neatly at my chin, as if this one gesture could hold the world in place.
For the rest of the lesson, we discussed a single question: What is jihad? The girls sat around me with their lovely round faces and gave me sample sentences for this word we so often misunderstand, which can mean “holy war” but which more often means “to struggle,” “to wrestle,” in the world or within ourselves.
“It’s a jihad to come and study English,” Ismaa said. “Being at home and sleeping, watching television, just about anything is easier than coming to the mosque to study.”
I tried to appreciate the comment.
“Coming to the mosque at all is a jihad,” Hiba said. “It’s hot, and there’s traffic, and we have to wear the headscarf when we leave the house.”
Ahlam, in her typical teenage way, added, “Not taking what we desire is a jihad. For example, I often want to buy tight pants, and then I have to remind myself that this isn’t allowed and so I shouldn’t do it.” All of the girls nodded in agreement.
Noor added, “For me, being kind to people is the greatest jihad. Sometimes I’m tired and it’s hot and I don’t really like that person and I don’t have the patience to be kind, but I have to. I really struggle with this.”
I thought about Frédéric, waiting in the mountain for God to speak to him, to tell him what his life, and mine, might become. That morning I had received a letter:
Last night, I dreamed that I was in France and my life had two possibilities. The first was to go to the city of Nantes, and the other to Marseilles. Nantes is the big harbor on the Atlantic, where I was dreaming of America when I was young. Marseilles is the harbor on the Mediterranean Sea, facing the Arabic world. And I was saying, I need to choose soon, not in one year, but soon…
“Sometimes,” I said, “the greatest jihad is just to wait.”
21.
I LET MORE THAN A WEEK pass before I visited Frédéric at the monastery, and even then I could only allow myself to stay for a day. It was a shock. I climbed the long flight of steps, expecting him to be standing at the summit with a glass of tea in his hands. But he wasn’t waiting. I saw him in the courtyard later, greeting guests in his gray cassock, and in the chapel, prostrating to the floor, his head touching the ground. I couldn’t recognize him anymore.
Christ put on the body, they say of the Incarnation. Now I understood. How it was possible to slip, so quickly, into another and completely different life.
I arrived on Friday evening for Mass and dinner, and in that time we barely spoke at all. When he went to bed he waved to the visitors and disappeared without even looking at me, without so much as saying good night. What had become of the man I loved who leaned toward me on the curbside of the place where we kiss?
The next morning, we took a walk together through the desert, Frédéric leading the way to Madeleine, and we sat side by side in his quiet hermitage in the desert. I sat far away from him, afraid and also ashamed at myself for having been so naïve.
“Who are you?” I asked. “I don’t even know you anymore.”
“I’m still a monk, Stéphanie. Until I make a choice about my life, you have to let me assume this one.”
“You didn’t even look at me when you said good night last night.”
He brushed my hand. “You know that I wasn’t looking at you with my eyes. But that entire good-bye was for you. There’s not a single moment when I’m not thinking of you.”
I wanted to believe him, and at the same time I could only believe what I saw.
“I love you.” Despite all of our time together, these were words we had almost never said aloud, as if expressing them was betraying a contract of silence made between us both. But I no longer had the energy to stay silent.
“I love you too, Stéphanie,” he said. “But I love my monastic life also. I’m not rejecting one life I don’t care about so that I can choose a life that I love. Now I have to choose between love and love.”
“Choose quickly, Frédéric. In three weeks, I’m leaving Syria.”
We sat together, holding hands, Frédéric in his monastic robes and me in my ordinary clothes.
“I’ve run out of Quran readings,” he said finally, as I was getting up to leave. “I wonder if you could send me some more.”
“I can’t, Frédéric,” I told him. “You have to find your own way now.”
22.
THE NEXT NIGHT Frédéric traveled with Paolo to the nearby village of Nebek to visit local families, and they finally made their way back to the monastery in the dark. They walked side by side up the steps from the valley beneath the enormous and deep black sky. As they climbed, Frédéric confessed that he had fallen in love, as he had never lov
ed another woman in his life. He said my name. I can only imagine what happened in Paolo’s heart, to hear our two names mentioned together, I, who he still thought might one day become a nun, and Frédéric, his beloved novice monk.
I had been dreading that moment for months, for the last thing Frédéric or I wanted was to wound the man who had given us both so much. For an abbot, losing a novice can feel much like losing a child. An abbot spends his life passing on all that he knows to his monks, watching over them, teaching them and learning from them in what becomes a monastic family. It is an intimate life, the life of a few people living together in a home in the desert. Yet the vow of poverty rules, even in this. One can only love by allowing those he loves to be free.
Frédéric told him that we had fallen in love while reading the Quran together. “You will become a Muslim then?” Paolo asked.
“No, Abuna, I will remain a Christian.”
“Take your time with this decision,” he said. “Don’t hurry. Take a journey to India and make your decision there.”
So it was decided that Frédéric would wait and make the decision about what path his life would take during two months’ traveling in India and Nepal in September and October, far away from any pulls and pressures of Syria. Then they walked the remaining two hundred stairs in silence.
23.
IT IS MY LAST DAY teaching in the Quranic school for girls. This morning as I fastened my headscarf outside the mosque, I surprised myself by how effortlessly I managed it, winding the blue striped scarf around my head and wrapping it tightly beneath my chin, my face framed inside it. I smiled at that final, veiled reflection staring back at me from the car window. I’ll miss this version of myself.
I’ll also miss my students, more than they will ever understand. I have loved the privilege of giving them words, in the same way I have received so many this year from neighbors and teachers, each new word giving me a sense of power, of belonging. Only say the word and I shall be healed, the prayer says. I taught my students the names of things and collected the looks of radiant surprise that sometimes crossed their faces when they learned how a word translates into my language. I taught them sacred, spiritual, existence. It felt like holding clear pieces of glass up to the light.
I also taught them terrible words, words I never wanted to teach anyone, because that is what is required in telling the truth. I taught them terror. I listened to them forming sample sentences using the word suffering. I taught them extremism. Still, I also loved the quiet miracle of receiving my own words back from them, washed clean and made new. Such as the day when I taught them the word incarnation, so that they could explain, if anyone asked them, that Muslims do not believe in the Incarnation. Yet when I asked for sample sentences, Wa’fa, with her shy, chubby face, blushed and said to the class, “The magnificence of God is incarnate in all of his creatures.” She looked at me with a face full of hope. “Is that right?” she asked.
I nearly cried. “Yes, that’s right,” I told her. “That’s just perfect.”
TODAY, MY STUDENTS HAVE ASKED ME to teach them something about Christianity. I have always been rather private about the subject of my own faith, and it was Noor, the Sheikha’s daughter, who initiated the discussion. “You’ve spent two months learning from us about Islam,” she said. “It’s only fair that we should be able to learn something about what you believe.”
So here we are, me with my new, handwritten worksheets, after receiving permission from the Sheikha herself to give a few words about Christianity in this mosque in the Islamic Quarter of Damascus. There is a light coming in through the windows of the upper story, and a wind. We can’t get the windows to close, so the breeze keeps blowing in on our faces. We all sit close to one another on the floor, and I teach them the words I have known since childhood, but which most of them have never heard before in any language: Old Testament, New Testament, parable, baptism, manger, Mass, Eucharist.
Then I tell them the story of the birth of Jesus as I had known it all of my life, of the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary alone, telling her that she will conceive a child. I detail the long and arduous journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem.
“Joseph?” Ismaa calls out, astonished. “You mean that Mary is married?”
I laugh, recalling my own astonishment at discovering the lonely, contemplative Mary of the Quran. “Yes, Mary is married. But we still call her the Virgin Mary, just like you do.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Noor pushes. “So you’re telling me that no one knew that Mary was giving birth to a miracle except for her husband?”
That had never occurred to me. “In the beginning no one knows, but then I suppose the angels begin telling people.” This explanation sounds flimsy to me, but they all accept it as perfectly reasonable. Angels do funny things sometimes.
I teach them about John the Baptist, whom they believe in as the prophet Yahya in the Quran, and about some of the more touching moments of Jesus’ ministry, such as when a frail and impossibly kind Christ commands us in the Gospel of Luke, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
It’s lovely, they tell me.
Then I lean forward, and I teach them the parable of the lost sheep. They gather around me like children listening to a bedtime story. I begin to read aloud:
“The Son of Man came to save what was lost. What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off?”
“Of course not!” they all call out in unison.
I burst into laughter. “The answer is yes! Of course he will go and find the lost sheep.”
“Well that doesn’t seem very fair to the other ninety-nine sheep,” Noor comments. “What’s going to happen to them while he’s going to look for that one sheep? Then they’ll all wander off and get lost also. And then he’ll really be in trouble.”
“Maybe he’ll take all the other sheep with him while he goes searching,” Khadija suggests, and everyone considers this for a moment before nodding. This seems a clever solution to the problem of leaving all of one’s sheep behind.
I am at a loss, so I simply continue reading.
“And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about that one sheep than the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way, your father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost.”
“Ma’shallah, it’s beautiful!” they all exclaim. Some of them start clapping.
Wa’fa looks perplexed for a moment. Then gradually her face lights up: “We have this! We have this same story in Islam! The prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, said, ‘Allah is more pleased with the repentance of His servant than a person who has his camel in a waterless desert carrying his provision of food and drink and it is lost. He, having lost all hopes of getting it back, lies down in the shade and is disappointed about his camel, when all of a sudden he finds that camel standing before him.’”
“It’s the same!” I say, laughing. Though I must admit that I might even prefer the Muslim parable, for on first hearing, losing a single sheep sounds minimal compared to losing a camel carrying everything that you need to survive. All I know for certain is that they are both stories about what it means to be lost and to be found again for no good reason that we can understand. I suppose that it doesn’t matter if our camel has abandoned us, or if we are the one who has walked away. We are found in the end.
I say good-bye to my students, one by one. They write down their addresses and ask me to keep in touch, kissing me on my cheeks. Khadija hands me a set of prayer beads from Mecca that she had blessed on the Kaaba stone, the h
oliest place in the world for Muslims.
“I can’t accept these,” I tell her.
“Please,” she says. “You’ll remember me whenever you use them to pray.”
On the way out, I say good-bye to the Sheikha. During our last lesson in her house, she had given me a gold ring, adorned with precious stones, as a parting present. Now I shyly hold my hand out to her to show her that I’m wearing it. It looks like a wedding ring. “Don’t stay away from us too long,” she insists and folds me in her arms to hug me good-bye.
Then I walk down the staircase of the mosque. Most of the shoes have been removed, slipped back onto the feet of their owners, so that now I pass only a few scattered pairs—dark black flats on the highest level, pink slip-on shoes in the center, and then the tiny white tennis shoes of children scattered on the bottom floor. Noor walks me to the front door.
“Stephanie?” she says. I smile down at her, already a woman at sixteen, and still so innocent. “You know, it is not important to me what you believe. To me, it is important how you live.”
I stand at the doorway to the mosque for a moment, part of me wanting to go back again and keep my girls in that room forever, to protect them from whatever might be coming to them, to their country, to hold them back from all of the frustrations of growing up. I want to protect them, but at the same time I want them to go. They are going already. I have only caught them for a moment, between places.
Have faith, I whisper to them silently. Then I leave the mosque, remove my headscarf one last time, and disappear into the busy streets of Damascus, on my way home.
24.
Dear Frédéric,
Today you asked me again if I really want to marry you, if I dream of this.
The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith Page 34