The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  I thought then that maybe it was time to tell you what I dream of.

  I dream that I could steal you away for a while, so that you could see me as I truly am. Not someone deep in prayer, or walking in the mountains, or meditating in a mosque. But messy, imperfect me.

  I love bad, bad romantic movies, and playing basketball, and drinking Guinness, and climbing mountains, and dancing. I love being in love. I love short skirts, and good cheese, and the symphony, and Chagall, and Rodin, and the way Cézanne makes fruit look more real in a painting than in real life. I love hearing jazz music live, I love the smell of old books, I love the wings of angels in churches, and the scent of bread in the morning, and strawberries, and Roman cities, and the sea. I love hearing poetry out loud, and the sound of rivers, and the color of leaves changing, and the hands of children. And I love you, but not in the way that you imagine. I love you playing “Blackbird” in meditation, and your swollen, bee-stung hands, your breath, your laughter, your deep and salty tears, the way you fall in love with alleys and read the hearts of those you barely know.

  Sometimes I wonder what would happen if you could touch me, if you could hold me, and then you would see that your hands don’t go through me, that I am just a girl. And that I’m not ashamed of this—this is really who I am.

  Do you know what I dream of? I dream that one day we might wake up and not read the Quran together, but read poetry together. Go to the symphony instead of the church. I dream of sitting by the sea and drinking wine and eating chocolate and laughing.

  I know that this is too much for you. But I don’t want you to think that I’m a lie. You see part of me that no one else sees. But there is a part of me that you’ve never been able to see. I wonder if you’ll be able to love all of me. I guess that is my dream—that you’ll love all of me, the me that doesn’t always go to church and who struggles with Jesus, who eats too much sugar and never washes the dishes. Because I don’t want to have to change in order to be good enough for you. I want to know that if I no longer studied theology and instead became a poet, that you would still love me. I guess I am asking you to see my mystery, because I don’t feel that anyone has ever seen it before, no one has ever had the eyes to understand all of me.

  Do you know what I dream of? I dream of being with you in a room, far away, in the dark, where no one can reach us. And I dream of holding you and being held by you—not to make love, but to hold on to your being, not the dream of you. To hold on to the reality of you. Every day I dream of this, of feeling your bone and skin and hair and eyes and breath, of touching your humanity.

  I dream of reading the newspaper and eating cereal and making mistakes with you. I want to simply be human with you. And for that to be enough.

  Love,

  Stephanie

  25.

  September

  MY BAGS ARE PACKED, zipped shut and waiting next to the double doors of my room, vacant as I found it almost exactly one year ago, those two arched windows opened to the sky and the high spearmint wooden beams crossing the ceiling in the most beautiful room in Bab Touma. Soon it will be six thirty, and the two lovebirds will appear from somewhere over the rooftop and settle in the ancient citrus tree, just above our rooms, to rest.

  It is my last day in Damascus. Is it wrong that I have said good-bye to almost no one in my neighborhood? I traveled to the monastery to thank Paolo and Dima, but when the time came to say farewell to Straight Street I couldn’t find the courage. I considered it. I planned on spending an entire afternoon walking from shopkeeper to shopkeeper with my camera, snapping photographs and taking my formal leave of Mohammed the carpet seller, eating my last slices of knaffeh from Nablus, sitting down to endless cups of coffee and gifts. I know that I may never be back here again, and that war might come at any time. Still, I would rather just disappear, keeping everything exactly as it has always been. I need to believe that I can return here, in three years or thirty years, and somehow slide effortlessly into the rhythm of life. The Tin Man will call out, “How is your sikkine?” The Hezbollah pizza vendor will exclaim, “Where have you been? We’ve had the tea on, waiting for you all day!” The rest of the shopkeepers will simply lean out of their front doors and wave, calling out one after another, Al-hamdulillah al-salaami, Thank God that you returned in peace! And the Baron will be waiting in his green track shorts at the door, glancing at his watch and asking just what took me so long.

  Last night, I dreamed that the monastery descended and became part of the world. It unfastened itself slowly from its perch up in heaven and then lightly, lightly fell down, blending into the cars lined up in traffic on Straight Street, the unfinished buildings, the men shining shoes and hawking cantaloupe from rusty carts. For a moment, everything took on a quality of the ethereal, two worlds collapsed into one. When I awakened in the morning, I could not shake myself from the dream, so that I still saw a gleaming beneath my crumbling walls and dust-stained curtains, and for a few moments I lived in two worlds at once.

  Then the Baron was knocking at my door. “Yalla, yalla, Stefanito. It’s time for coffee!” I climbed out of bed and quickly threw on my clothes.

  He was waiting in his room, still wearing a red and blue striped bathrobe, in front of the television, our two cups of coffee prepared.

  “So you’re leaving tonight, Grandfather?”

  “That’s right, Grandfather.”

  “Do you already have a taxi?”

  “I’m leaving from the other side of town.”

  “Because I have an Armenian friend…”

  “No, no, you shouldn’t bother.”

  “Well, well, watch over yourself, do you hear me? You really shouldn’t take such a long taxi ride with a stranger.”

  “Don’t worry, Grandpa. I’ll be fine.”

  “Did you double-check your ticket?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure it’s leaving tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because people can make mistakes.”

  “I checked three times.”

  He searched the table nervously until he secured his hands around a blue box of Gauloises cigarettes, then pulled one out, lit it, and inhaled deeply.

  “Grandfather?” I asked him.

  “Nam…”

  “Why have you been so nice to me here?”

  “It’s nothing, habibti.”

  “It’s not nothing.” The man had taught me a language, stuffed me with Arabic pastries, and fostered an addiction to caffeine and nicotine for an entire year. Had we lived in America, I would have encouraged him to list me as a dependent on his tax returns.

  “Stefanito, in all of my years here, so many people have lived in that room. Boys and girls, old men, young men, you name it. I never had any business with them. Nothing more than sabah al-kheir, good morning, sabah al-noor, good night. But then you came to that room one morning, and I saw that you were different. You couldn’t speak. You were alone. I looked at you, and I thought, We’re the same, you and me.”

  I felt tears rising in my eyes. “How will I know if something happens to you?”

  “Nothing will happen to me.”

  We stared at the television for a long time, a Lebanese pop star singing a love song on silent.

  “Grandfather?” he asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see the padre at the monastery this weekend?”

  “Yes, I saw him,” I said quietly.

  “Did you tell him that you love him?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Did you take him in your arms?”

  “No, of course not, Grandfather.”

  Then he turned and looked me in the face. “Listen, Stefanito,” he pleaded with me. “Look at what my life has become. You turn on the news, and all you see is war, war, war. War in Iraq. War in Palestine. War in Somalia or whatever it is called. Who knows what will happen in Lebanon.”

  I tried to interrupt him, but he wouldn’t let me. “I’m an old man, my life is over,
” he said. “I can’t go back to what it was. But you’re still young. You still have time to live.”

  “Yalla, habibti, Hurry up, my love,” he told me. “Live.”

  26.

  THE NEXT MORNING I left Damascus.

  On my last night, I borrowed a friend’s apartment across town, and Frédéric arrived late, released from the monastery for a single evening, wearing his normal pants and button-down shirt and an unfamiliar glassy look in his eyes. We slept in our clothes, on two mattresses, near each other, and he had never been so close to me.

  All night, there was a wind coming through the window, breathing beneath the curtains, lifting them and setting them down again. My last memory, before drifting back to sleep, is of looking over at him and thinking, This is what life could be like.

  I slept deeply, through the night, and in my dreams I saw that open window, with the wind coming in, as if the dream and the world were the same. I woke up early in the morning to the wind touching my face. Frédéric was sitting beside my bed, looking at me.

  “Who are you?” he whispered. “Where did you come from?”

  He lifted me up and held me in his arms. We were trembling, clinging to each other, like two people who had not been held in such a long time, in perhaps our entire lives.

  I LEFT DAMASCUS on September 1, 2005, almost exactly one year after I arrived. Frédéric rode with me to the airport and sat beside me while I waited for my flight to appear in flashing letters on the large black screen above us. And then he let me go.

  It is hard to know what to say about the days in which I traveled between two worlds. My last day in Damascus, nearly one thousand Iraqis were trampled to death on a bridge in Baghdad, frightened by the warning of a suicide bomber. It was the single highest death toll of any day in the war.

  By the time I landed in America two days later, New Orleans had already begun its long descent under water, the floods consuming the galleries and cobblestone streets, the jazz bars and cafés, the homes with their cars parked out front, and the lives of nearly fifteen hundred people, in what would become another painful chapter in my country’s turbulent entry into the twenty-first century.

  Hassan once wrote that between two successive tragedies, there is always just enough space for “the appearance of a star and a lilac and a forest of mirrors, and words.” Even as I watched those images on television, I tried to remember that we all live in two worlds: the world we physically inhabit, and the world we carry within us. Surely, if those I loved in Damascus had taught me anything, it was that the only way to break free of a story of one death after another is to liberate our own heart. It is the only country that is ever truly ours, after all.

  That September, Frédéric journeyed to India, and I waited for his answer. I waited in a house in New England, where maple trees ripened to yellow and auburn, and the vast open sky changed from blue to rose in the evening. Every afternoon, I walked through the neighboring fields and gathered the leaves scattered into the pasture, pressing them between the pages of books, as if that would allow me to preserve each day entirely, as an offering to him.

  In the evenings, I whispered to him in my room, hoping he might hear me.

  Frédéric traveled to India with only a change of clothes, a small icon, my letters, and an empty book that he wrote in every day. He carried that book with him for two long months, on his journey through the crowded, monsoon-saturated streets of Bombay and on to New Delhi, scribbling on the thin, cream-colored pages his questions about his choice. He wrote in it as he looked at the countryside passing by the windows of the train as he traveled to Varanasi, where he watched dead bodies burned and then set adrift upon the waters of the Ganges. Then, after four long weeks in India, he carried that notebook on to Nepal, where it was pressed against his chest as he climbed five thousand meters into the Himalayas, the warmth of his skin shielding the pages from the snow.

  In my room across the world, I folded and unfolded a last slip of paper he had given to me before I left.

  Maybe God finally spoke, he wrote. I met you.

  He had been hiking with a group for a week in the mountains when they were hit by an unseasonable snowstorm. It fell all morning in thick, heavy sheets, until no one could see farther than the space in front of them. They could only walk through the blinding whiteness, one step at a time. Several people died that day.

  But Frédéric did not die. He kept walking, putting one foot in front of the other, until he finally arrived at the other side of the pass and made his way slowly, slowly back down to earth. Until I woke up one morning in Vermont, packed my bags, and boarded a plane to fly one last time to an airport in Damascus to meet him, following his exhausted voice on the telephone:

  Stéphanie? It’s Frédéric.

  Come soon.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without the love and support of a great many people. First and foremost, I am indebted to all of my teachers in Syria, both personal and spiritual: Paolo Dall’Ogglio, the Sheikha, the Baron, and Hassan. I will always be in awe of your kindness, wisdom, and bravery.

  Julia Meltzer, David Thorne, and David Bender were wonderful friends who helped me maintain my sanity during an intense and often stressful year. Hillary Kalambach is the most generous scholar I have ever met. She shared all of her Syrian contacts with me, introduced me to the world of women and Islam, and often joined me for Quranic lessons. I owe much of what I learned about Islam to her.

  I want to thank my family for their patience, compassion, and good humor throughout my year in Syria and the writing of this book: Thank you Dad, Toni, Lisa, Rob, and Steve, for always pulling me back to the earth. Thanks to the Cantu family for their inspiration, and to my mom, for allowing me to share her story with the world. Many thanks to Barbara Ganley and Larry Yarbrough for their constant support over many years. Thank you to Bernard Masson, who lent me the use of his house in the Alps for much of the planning of this book, and to Suleiman Mourad for his help in my research on Jesus in Islam. And I only wish that Russell Bennett, who was such a strong supporter of my writing and an inspiration to so many, could have lived to see this book in print.

  Judy Heiblum is my agent, but most of all my friend. She gave me the courage to write this book, coached and supported me when it was just an idea, and saw it through every stage of writing. I can honestly say that this book would never have existed without her.

  I was incredibly fortunate to have an exceptional editor, Kris Puopolo, who never lost faith in me and in the story I wanted to tell. Stephanie Bowen was invaluable both as a reader and in ushering the book through its final stages. And Amy Ryan was copyeditor extraordinaire, who not only fixed all of my grammar but also taught me that stallions don’t gallop in city streets and that most plants survive in the wild.

  It was only because of a generous grant from the Fulbright foundation that I was able to travel to Syria in the first place. I must also thank the Syrian government, who, in the midst of very tense times between our two countries, still decided to grant visas to a group of young Americans. I could have written this book no other way.

  Finally, I would like to thank every single person I met in Syria, all of those who welcomed me into their homes, their shops, and their lives. A special thanks to all of my students at the Quranic school for girls, to the entire community of Deir Mar Musa, and to my neighbors in Bab Touma.

  Joseph, I hope that this book helps you to understand how your mom and dad fell in love. Thank you for being you, the fruit of that love.

  This book is dedicated to Frédéric, forever my partner in loneliness. Thank you for saying yes.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.: Excerpt from “La Vie En Rose (Take Me to Your Heart Again),” original French lyrics by Edith Piaf, music by Luis Guglielmi, English lyrics by Mack David, © 1947 Editions Arpege, Paris, © 1950 Warner Bros. In
c., copyrights renewed and assigned to Editions Paul Beuscher, WB Music Corp. and Universal Polygram International. All Rights in the U.S. administered by WB Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.

  Zondervan: Excerpts from the Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ All rights reserved worldwide. Reprinted by permission of Zondervan.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  STEPHANIE SALDAÑA grew up in Texas and received a B.A. from Middlebury College and master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School. She was a Watson and a Fulbright scholar and has won several awards for her poetry. She lives in Jerusalem and teaches at the Honors College for Liberal Arts and Sciences, a partnership of Bard College and Al-Quds University.

  Copyright © 2010 by Stephanie Saldaña

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Saldaña, Stephanie. The bread of angels: a journey to love and faith/Stephanie Saldaña.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Saldaña, Stephanie. 2. Damascus (Syria)—Description and travel. 3. Damascus (Syria)—Social life and customs. 4. Damascus (Syria)— Religious life and customs. 5. Christianity and other religions—Islam. 6. Islam—Religious—Christianity. 7. Americans—Syria—Damascus—Biography. 8. Christians—Syria—Damascus—Biography. 9. Young women—Syria—Damascus—Biography. 10. Damascus (Syria)—Biography. I. Title.