Till Moons Shall Wax and Wane No More

"Where is it?" Maisa asked, chewing the end of her pencil. "Where is the rose?"

We sat on the cold steps outside a mosque, near Damascus University. Maisa held her pencil above an exam booklet with President Assad's picture printed on the cover. I had a slim volume of Faulkner, in English, open to a story I vaguely remembered from my own college lit class: "A Rose for Emily." An old maid and a house that was a tomb. Arsenic, a dead man, and a bed for a bier. Was there a rose? I couldn't remember.

"What is the meaning?" Maisa rubbed her eraser on the page until the sentences blurred to a dark cloud.

Before we had a chance to discuss the story, an old man came out from the mosque and scolded us because my head was uncovered and my sleeves didn't reach far enough past my elbows. Maisa didn't make eye contact with the sheikh, but she picked up her book and pencil and led me away from the building. Whether Muslim or Christian, a woman's head must be covered to enter a mosque—I knew that—but the disgruntled sheikh made it clear that a foreigner should be covered at all times, at least near a holy place.

"It's my fault," Maisa said. "This is happening because of my dream."

Maisa had invited me to sit in on her American literature class earlier that day. It seems that O'Connor and Faulkner speak to the world's university students as much as any foreign policy. Through them, students in Syria get a freaky glimpse of life in the West.

As the students were settling in the lecture hall, Maisa whispered to me that she was not sleeping well. When she prayed, she felt that Allah wasn't listening to her. Earlier that week Maisa dreamed that she'd lost her virginity. A good dream is from Allah, she told me, and some dreams emerge from the events of the day and mean nothing. But a bad dream, such a dishonorable, wicked dream as this, can only come from Satan. The dream defiled her, and she'd been working off the impurity by increasing her prayers from five a day to eight. Then another dream came from Satan, this time a filthy dog leaping to her chest and pushing her down, pinning her to the ground, contaminating her by its unclean parts, by its saliva and feces. The spectral dog canceled out the prayers she'd made as restitution for the earlier dream about losing her virginity. Satan was coming for her, Maisa said. She only hoped he wouldn't come again.

"But it was a dream," I said. "You didn't do anything wrong."

Maisa looked at me, the skin between her eyebrows pressed together in confusion. "Yes, I did. I had the dreams."

She would have to pray faithfully for days—weeks even—before God would hear her. And Ramadan was coming soon. Perhaps she would fast ahead of time, to get ready, she told me. As long as there were no more dreams. . . .

* * *

Maisa lived with her widowed mother in a village outside of Damascus. She invited me to come home with her from the university, to break the fast at sunset and spend the night there in the village.

We stood in stocking feet at the door of the apartment, our shoes lined up neatly with the other empty pairs outside the entry. Maisa pulled off her scarf even before we were through the front door; she dropped it along with her books on a chair as she hurried to the kitchen, where her mother was finishing preparations for the daily sunset feast.

Maisa wouldn't let me help her set plates on the table, so I went to put my overnight bag in her bedroom. Twin beds stood across the room, flanking the window. After setting my bag down on one of the beds, I looked outside. Seven mosques pierced the sky above the flat roofs of the village. Just ten...