It was late spring when Frédéric finally told Father Paolo, the abbot of the monastery, that he had fallen in love with me. Paolo had the distinct weakness of believing that everyone he cared for was called to be a monk or a nun, and he was as set on my becoming a nun one day as he was on Frédéric’s taking his final vows the following year. But he let us go. He had no choice. Since he was not at all certain that Frédéric was really in love with me, he suggested that he travel to India on pilgrimage. I would return to America and wait for Frédéric to contact me.
“These decisions must not come quickly,” Paolo warned. He thought it better to send Frédéric across the world to decide.
Paolo might have left it at that. But he couldn’t hide his disappointment. “But don’t you love the monastic life?” he protested.
“It isn’t that,” Frédéric responded. “Now I have to choose between love and love.”
So Frédéric left, an act of obedience, boarding the Syrian Air flight from Damascus to Mumbai, remembering as he flew across the continent the promise he had made to himself, a monastic promise. He had given his life to God. Of this he was certain. The only event that could undo that offering was if God decided to send him a miracle, telling him that he was free to spend his life with me.
He landed in the monsoon. He wore his civilian clothes. And for two days he walked, lost in Mumbai, among millions, thinking, This I did not even find in a monastery in the desert—to be entirely invisible to the world.
• • •
Now he was sitting next to the window, and the train was departing Mumbai and moving toward Kerala, the landscape becoming increasingly remote as the train left the outskirts of the city. The hills, coated with water, took on an unearthly sheen, and for a while Frédéric watched each successive hill approach the train, the trees shimmering as the pocket of light in the sky grew wider. He opened the notebook on his lap and began writing:
C’est comme si un miracle allait bientôt se produire…
It is as though a miracle is about to happen…
Then he turned again to the window.
Three hours later, the train slowed down for the station at Pune, the wheels grinding against the rails and then softening to silence. Through the window he could see the waiting passengers pushing toward the train doors impatiently. The door to his compartment slid open, and two Indian nuns climbed inside, followed by a young Indian woman looking at her feet.
How strange to see them here, he thought, for it was as though his life in Syria had burst in, unexpectedly, from a remote train station in India. Then he remembered his civilian clothes, the simple tan shirt and linen trousers, and his monastic robe folded and concealed at the bottom of his bag. They won’t recognize me now.
But, somehow, they did. The nun in the front kept looking at the ticket in her hands and walking up and down the aisle. Then she stopped next to Frédéric.
“Are you traveling toward Cochin?” she asked.
He nodded.
She gestured toward the girl. “Will you take care of her? She’s never traveled alone.”
He nodded again, glancing at the girl long enough to let them know he understood, though he had no idea why they should trust him. It occurred to him that he might tell them who he really was, that he was a novice monk traveling in civilian clothes, to reassure them, but he thought it would be too complicated to explain and so said nothing. The girl took her seat across from him. She folded her hands neatly in her lap. The nuns waved, solemnly, it seemed, before departing from the train and disappearing into the crowded platform below.
Frédéric turned again toward the window, watching the trees pass. The wheels slowly found their rhythm, moving beneath them with a sound that resembled a man trying hard to breathe.
Several minutes passed before he turned to the girl.
“Where are you going?”
She hesitated. “I’m going back home. I was a novice to become a nun for three years in a Carmelite monastery. And now I am leaving, to return and live with my family.”
Beneath them, the train wheels continued to strike against the rails. He considered what he should say, what anyone should say in response to such a moment.
“Me too,” he finally answered, only understanding as he spoke the words out loud that it was true. “I’m leaving the monastery too.”
• • •
So it was that my life—and your life too, my Joseph—was determined by an angel who appeared on a train. As the carriage passed through the countryside, your father told her about his life: about a childhood in rural France, years traveling through India, a strange calling that had carried him all the way to the deserts of Syria, to a monastery in the clouds. And then he told her about me. They prayed together, in seats forty-one and forty-two of a moving train between Mumbai and Cochin. The next morning, he descended two stops before hers, leaving her with his wooden icon of the Virgin Mary, a rosary, and five hundred rupees that he quietly pressed into her hand, for she was an angel who appeared on a train, but a poor angel. Two weeks later, he entered a small store with just enough money to purchase a simple ring of green stones. He sent me a message in America:
My choice is deeply here. And I’ve chosen you.
He traveled for eight weeks. Your father carried that ring with him until he flew back to Damascus, where I was waiting for him at the airport, and he asked me to marry him.
A Monastery in November
Every month in the desert holds its own quality, as though an entirely new world begins at its onset and disappears when the month is done. The monastery of Deir Mar Musa in October still contained the last heat of the summer; in December it was already freezing and alive with snow. But the monastery in November was neither summer nor winter, but a month of transition, of leaving behind one season and approaching another, with the air just cold enough so that the wildlife retreated and the stones were left in silence. Hardly anyone visited, so the sound of every falling branch interrupted a valley asleep.
It was into November that Frédéric and I returned for our first week back in Syria, looking out the windows of the minibus as it turned down a remote road and toward the monastery. We had left our bags in Damascus, carrying with us only enough clothing to hold us over until we could say good-bye to the monastic community, not enough for the force of habit to tempt us to stay longer. The driver deposited us at the bottom of the stairs. We began to climb. The world was so untouched that it felt as though we were disturbing it, simply by parting the air.
• • •
I had not wanted to return to Frédéric’s former monastery. It seemed like tempting fate, as in a film in which everything is heading in one direction until the final, unlucky scene. I was worried that once Frédéric walked into the chapel, he would lose the nerve to leave it again. But he insisted. He was not the first novice who had left the monastery, and he knew full well the tendency of locals to gossip that such leavings were the result of fear, of running away, or even of tensions with Father Paolo, who was famously temperamental. No, Frédéric would not let it be said that he was escaping. He wanted to say a proper good-bye.
So we climbed, and the silence between us was made noticeable by our breath, increasingly visible in the cold desert air as we ascended. At the top of the stairs, we turned to the front of the stone monastery, each of us ducking in succession through the door of humility, entering the monastic courtyard, where Father Paolo was waiting for us, all six feet four of him. Frédéric had informed him of his decision to leave the novitiate by post from India, along with the date of our arrival to say our last good-byes. He embraced us both at the same time, sighing with disappointment, and I thought that even though he had lived in the Middle East for decades, when he decided to be dramatic, he was still very much an Italian.
Then he looked us up and down: a father, sizing up his children who had come home after being too long away.
It might seem strange that I speak of Father Paolo as my father—particul
arly as my real father was larger than life and needed no replacement. But Father Paolo is just as essential to this story in his own way. Over the years he had become my spiritual father, guiding me through decisions that had shaped my life. Though it had been many centuries since Christians had regularly spoken of spiritual fathers and mothers in the desert—referring to those early monks and nuns who had lived as hermits in the remote landscapes of Egypt and Syria—Paolo seemed to belong to another time. He was a Roman and a Jesuit with a giant frame, always clothed in a long, gray, belted robe and ill-fitting sandals, and he could be found at any given moment calling out in French and English and Italian and Arabic, all the while gesturing with his hands, adapting his language and manners to whomever happened to walk through the undersized Byzantine door. The thousands of people, both Muslims and Christians, who walked through that door every year, did so as much to see Paolo as for the medieval frescoes that graced the church’s walls. They called him, simply, Abouna. In Arabic, “Our father.”
Father Paolo was a complicated figure, towering, proud, and with a terrible temper, yet unexpectedly fragile, like those beasts of fairy tales who turn out, by the final pages, to be the most sensitive creatures of all. He appeared to experience every emotion more intensely than other people, so that each instance of joy or anger possessed him entirely and threatened to overwhelm him. He was also prone to adopting those he met as his own, and it was a sight to witness him calling so many of the monastery’s thousands of visitors by name. Like many Jesuits, he was dedicated to helping others decipher their vocation in life, believing in what they call the magis, “more,” or “greater” in Latin—the idea that there is always something more each one of us can do in the world to serve God. His magis had led him to restore the ruined monastery in the desert more than two decades before, transforming the abandoned church in the desert to a sanctuary famous for its dedication to Christian dialogue with Islam, and founding a community of Arabic-speaking monks and nuns. And he was always ready to help others discover their calling. My early meetings with him, as a twenty-three-year-old traveler, had inspired me to return to America to study Arabic and Islam in graduate school, to travel to Syria years later to research the Prophet Jesus in Islam, and to find my way again to him and to Deir Mar Musa. He had seen me through prayer and heartbreak and a month of silent retreat, through discernment and disenchantment, and now he was seeing me as I set off with the man who had been his novice, and would be my husband.
I imagine that he was not entirely thrilled that this was what it all had come to.
Frédéric and I parted ways in the courtyard, and I found my old monastic cell and unpacked my bag, aware that I might not return to the monastery again for a very long time.
As night fell, the bell for the evening meditation rang out in the courtyard, and I could hear the footsteps of guests and nuns and monks scampering on stairs, down from mountaintops, across the courtyard. I traversed the bridge that separated the women’s section of the monastery from the chapel. The night came early in winter, and the moon was already visible above the courtyard. Father Paolo was waiting for me, but instead of leading me into the chapel, he motioned me up to his office.
We climbed up the stone stairs together, the railing a long wooden branch worn down by a thousand hands, cracked and full of knots and held in place by rope, so that I barely trusted it to hold us. At the top, we continued on to the office situated above the chapel. Through a window, we could see those gathering for prayer below. We sat down across from each other, separated by a gasoline heater, and warmed our hands over the blue flame. I took a moment to look at him: his beard almost fully gray now, his monastic cassock thinning with age and held together with a leather belt, the black scarf of the Syriac order draped across his shoulders. His hands were massive, and I noticed the ring from his final vows, like a wedding band.
He removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes wearily, and then pinched the frames between his thumb and forefinger, twisting them back and forth.
“Do you remember when we spoke about crucifixion?” he finally asked.
I smiled. He remained the same Paolo, after all.
By virtue of the fact that he lived in the middle of the desert, Father Paolo had developed a remarkable ability to carry on a single conversation, interrupted frequently, over the course of months or even years. It was this ability that allowed him to stay faithful to friends spread across languages and countries, most of whom could rarely make it to the monastery. I had seen him carry a letter in the pocket of his cassock, pull it out, read a few sentences, and then return it to be finished later. He would repeat this over days, and compose an entire response in his head before he ever wrote it down.
We had initiated the conversation he was referring to now, about the nature of crucifixion, ten months before, a few days after I had told him that I had changed my mind about becoming a nun. I had decided that I wanted to get married. I wanted a family. I wanted to write. I wanted to try to make my way in the messy, inhabited world, and could no longer imagine growing old in a monastery in the middle of the desert.
Paolo had been immediately suspicious. In his mind, it made little sense that God would send an American Catholic scholar of Islam all the way across the world, to his specific monastery, so that she could decide to get married and become a writer somewhere else. No, he suspected that I was merely afraid of the rigors of the monastic life—of what he called crucifixion. I remembered his look of disappointment when I disagreed.
Now, ten months later, I reminded him of our previous conversation. “You quoted Simone Weil,” I said. “‘Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ,’ she’d written, ‘I commit the sin of envy.’”
Paolo laughed. Even he could recognize when he’d crossed the borders of melodrama. “At the time you were angry with me,” he added. “You said that I had made an idol out of unhappiness.”
I nodded. “I told you that God does not want us to suffer.”
“Perhaps you were right,” he said quietly. “But I told you that you shouldn’t make an idol of this happiness either, that you shouldn’t run away from unhappiness.”
He looked at me with tenderness.
“I know that you always thought that the monastic life would be hard. But marriage will also be hard, Stephanie,” he cautioned. “You and Frédéric have so many differences between the two of you: cultural, spiritual, even personal. Do not think that this will be easy.”
I studied him. “I know, Paolo,” I told him, though I did not know at all.
Later, I would remember that conversation, on afternoons when I thought that the monastic life and family life were not unlike each other after all—very different people attempting to live together, with all of their quirks and habits, in the middle of the desert, and despite the romantic ideal, it was often dishes and laundry and silence, not to mention weeks where it felt like the same food over and over again.
He embraced me. We descended the stairs together, into the dim light of the courtyard, beneath a sky full of thousands of stars. He bent down in order to enter the low entrance to the chapel, and I followed behind him, watching as he donned the green robes of a Syrian Catholic priest. Then he made his way behind the altar, and the room filled up with incense in a ritual that had been carried out in that same desert for some fifteen hundred years. The monks and nuns lined up in front of the iconostasis and began their prostrations. Frédéric, who was not a novice monk any longer, seemed not to know where to stand.
The mass finished an hour later. Paolo blew out the candles, removed his liturgical vestments, and walked toward the door. He had such an immense presence that it often seemed to me that rooms emptied out the moment he left them, even if he was the only person who had departed.
Frédéric called out his name. “Abouna,” he said. “My father.” I could hear his voice tremble.
Paolo turned.
“I need you to bless us.”
There it was: Jacob wrestling w
ith the angel until the break of dawn. The sun rises, and the angel struggles to break free. But Jacob insists: I will not let you go unless you bless me.
There it was: a son kneeling in front of his spiritual father.
For a moment, there was only silence in the chapel. Father Paolo took a deep breath. “Of course.”
He was so tall that he covered the space between us in three long strides. We followed him to the ancient baptismal font in the corner, where we could stand. On the wall nearby, a fresco of an angel was holding a towel, as if to bless us. Paolo held the hand of his almost monk, and his almost nun, and he watched as Frédéric took the engagement ring and placed it once again on my finger, and then he whispered the words of the blessing ceremony in the ancient Syriac tradition.
He blessed us.
If I had known then what I know now, I would have locked the door to the church, and remained in that corner until morning—Frédéric holding my hand beneath the worn frescoes, Paolo blessing us.
That moment would enter into eternity. It would print itself into everything that happened afterward, for better and for worse.
• • •
The next morning, we awakened early to leave. Father Paolo quietly slipped Frédéric five one-hundred-euro notes—enough money to see us home. Then he embraced him and kissed me on the forehead, and he said good-bye to him in French and to me in English, and then finally to both of us in Arabic, as though he couldn’t tell into which world to place this parting, and we began the long journey down hundreds of stairs and toward a new life. I looked back once, to see the monastery hanging over us in the distance.
A few days later, we caught a bus from Damascus to Aleppo, and from there we boarded a train to Istanbul that stretched on for some thirty hours, snaking through ancient Antioch and along the coast, past olive groves and rocky hills and finally the coastline. From Istanbul we would purchase tickets to fly to France, though I had no idea where in France we were going. That had been my promise: that if Frédéric left the monastery, then I would follow him anywhere in the world.
A Country Between Page 2