The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  It was, to be precise, a rubber bullet. Or, more exactly still: a rubber-coated bullet, a slug of steel dipped in hard plastic. The term “rubber bullet" connotes non-lethality, harmlessness, a comical form of deterrence—a bouncing ball, a children’s toy, a pea-shooter. Yet anyone who has been struck by these projectiles knows differently. Rubber-coated, metal-cored bullets can flatten people with the force of a swung baseball bat. They can kill at close range. The source of this particular rubber bullet: the Israel Defense Force, the IDF.

  This comes as a shock. Why? Because it is Wednesday.

  We have strolled, Bassam and I, out of a small Palestinian village called Nabi Salih.

  Nabi Salih: a clutch of stucco houses clinging to a sun-hammered hill in the West Bank. Clashes between local Palestinians and the Israeli army are common here. In fact, they are predictable. Every Friday, like clockwork, a ritual begins. After midday prayers, scores of civilians—men and women, old and young—march, chanting, out of the village mosque, usually toward a nearby spring. This spring, a watering hole for cattle, has been encroached on illegally by a nearby Israeli settlement. (Such settlements are themselves deemed illegal by most governments of the world, because they occupy the territory of a proposed homeland for Palestinians.) The Israeli army is waiting. Platoons of soldiers block the crowd’s progress. A provocation occurs. A slur. A shove. And the dance of violence starts. From the Palestinian side: a hail of rocks flung by boys and young men armed with slingshots. From the Israelis: rubber bullets, teargas canisters, stun grenades and, sometimes, a high-pressure stream of “skunk water,” a stinking chemical brew sprayed from a police truck.

  I imagine seeing this battle from the air, a strange diorama, with men, women, and children running about on roads and in open fields, amid white blooms of teargas, to the sound of gunfire: These figures sometimes topple over wounded or, on rarer occasions, fall dead. (Since 2009, two villagers have been killed in the protests.) The green-clad soldiers maneuver in lines, in clusters. Occasionally, one of them may drop out, too, injured. Such weekly violence is a minor set piece in an older, much larger, more layered standoff in the West Bank. In toxic summary:

  The commandeering of the village spring, an ancient trickle called Ein al-Qaws, is to many Palestinians just another outrage in a military occupation that began forty-seven years ago, following the Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The people of Nabi Salih want their waterhole back, but they also wish to be free of checkpoints, of walls, of segregation, of humiliation. The Israelis, meanwhile, demand to be safe from Palestinian terrorism. (A radicalized young woman from Nabi Salih, for example, assisted in a 2001 suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed fifteen people.) Palestinians curse the armed Israeli settlers proliferating in their midst—in a future Palestine. Ultra-religious and nationalist settlers claim the West Bank for themselves, either by right of conquest, or as Samaria and Judea, part of the 3,000-year-old homeland for Jews. Such rival narratives of primacy and grievance have been refined, purified, distilled, faceted, polished, and codified through years of conflict. They are petrified.

  Which is why Bassam and I are caught off guard. The shooting at Nabi Salih happens on Fridays. (It is Wednesday!) Something has upset the schedule.

  We blunder, chatting, around a bend and into the free-fire zone. We don’t hear the pop-pop-pop of the rifles until it is too late. Israeli soldiers, mistaking us for village protesters, begin firing our way. We retreat. We scramble behind a road embankment. We see boys slinging stones. We circle around the battle in a low crouch.

  “I feel bad,” Bassam says, as teargas drifts across the grassy pastures. “Just walking away like this.”

  But I do not feel bad. I have walked away from dozens of conflicts before. Few were mine. Most were obscure bush wars in Africa, the type of bloodlettings that nobody anywhere else much cared about. Once, in Congo, where between one and five million people have perished, I could not pitch a story about a battle that killed one thousand civilians because nine people—Palestinians and Israelis—had died in the West Bank. (The dead Congolese got their due only later, in a special project.) The world’s gaze burns on Israel, on the West Bank, on Gaza. Yet this is no solution. There must be some virtuous fulcrum point—an ideal balancing line between outside concern and utter neglect—at which mass violence can more easily, naturally subside: exhaust itself. Few outsiders witness Somalia’s agonies. In Nabi Salih, perhaps too many do. (Palestinians videotape their clashes. So do Israeli settlers.) These disparate wars grind on.

  In either case, little of war’s madness can ever be accurately communicated.

  “A person who lived through a great war is different from someone who never lived through any war,” wrote the Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski. “They are two different species of human beings. They will never find a common language, because you cannot really describe the war, you cannot share it, you cannot tell someone: Here, take a little bit of my war. Everyone has to live out his own war to the end.”

  Bassam and I walk on.

  The valleys of the West Bank are golden in the low afternoon sun. We stop and brew a pot of tea in a grove of silver-leaved olive trees. Palestine, the West Bank, Samaria, Judea—the tiny enclave that Palestinians and Israeli settlers die for—is one of the most beautiful inhabited landscapes in the world: Its broad valleys, serried hills, orange groves, and bone-smooth deserts are a Middle Eastern California. The only difference, I tell Bassam, are the faint gunshots that can often be heard, mostly from IDF firing ranges, echoing in the distance.

  “Distant gunfire?” Bassam says looking up from his cup. He smiles sadly, nodding. “I never noticed that.”

  Aftertaste

  July 26, 2014

  Nablus, West Bank 32°13’15” N 35°15’15” E

  We are cooking: cutting up zucchinis, rolling dough, stirring pots of boiling yoghurt. We are with the women of Bait al Karama. They are teaching us about the flavors of remembrance—about its frailty, its persistence, its loss.

  What is Bait al Karama?

  It is a cooperative, the “House of Dignity“: dozens of women gather each month in a stone house in Nablus, a trading center founded by the Roman emperor Vespasian around the time of Christ, an ancient town bloodied by the Second Intifada, and famed outside of Arab-Israeli conflict for its olive-oil soap, its baked sweets, its still-vibrant medieval souk. The women teach cooking classes. They are writing a local cookbook. They are reviving their traditional Nablusi recipes, with all the original ingredients. This afternoon, three members, Ohood Bedawi, Beesan Ramadan, and Fatima Kadoumy, are busy making shish barak, a meat dumpling stew.

  “It comes originally from Lebanon, some say Syria,” explains Kadoumy, the coop founder, solemn and soft-spoken in her black hijab.

  “When we talk about Palestinian cooking, we talk about the influences from the outside,” she says. “Our history is mixed into our food. It is the food of a crossroads. It contains migrations. It is about colonialism, conquest. Our sumac [a tart, lemony spice] is a Roman ingredient. Our sweets, called canafe, are Turkish, from the Ottomans. Our bulgur grain is Mediterranean, much older here than rice. Only the akub, a thorny wild artichoke, is native to our hills. Today, we are losing the habit of cooking these things. Now we eat the Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

  So we pitch in, my guide Bassam Almohor and I. We do our part. We have stopped walking. We lay aside the GPS. We pick up a spoon. We pick up a paring knife. We report for duty on the front lines of cultural preservation. It is no easy task. It comes at a price: Our appetites must be sacrificed. We stuff ourselves with delicious Arabic foods.

  Everyone likes to eat. In peace or war, the ultimate refuge—the sanctuary of all that is humane—lies distilled within the warmth of the kitchen. Watching the women of Nablus move briskly, efficiently, purposefully about their tasks, chatting, often joking (about men, politics, life), I am reminded of all the meals that admitted me briefly into the conflicted lives of I
sraelis and Palestinians.

  In the tiny village of Deir es-Sudan, the West Bank: Bassam and I slogged in, exhausted, at sunset, not knowing a soul. We camped on the concrete floor of a half-built clinic. The shopkeepers next door brought us a large platter of treats—eggs, olives, French fries, yoghurt, fresh bread. They waved away our weak, startled thanks. “The innermost chamber of my home”—one benefactor said—“is yours.”

  A side trip to Tel Aviv: My Israeli walking partner, Yuval Ben-Ami, threw together, in a bowl, whatever resided at that time in his refrigerator. What was it? Even he didn’t know—a concoction of cooked beans, of greens, of rice, of mystery sauces. It was like his living space, a bohemian apartment, packed with books, musical instruments, clothes, art. A typical Yuval sentence begins, “The poet Rachel Bluwstein wrote about the Galilee as if it were another planet.” His leftover stew was a reflection of his restless nomad mind.

  On a kibbutz north of Haifa: Dark Georgian wine drunk from a ram’s horn, courtesy of cousins David and Moshe Beery. They emigrated from Tbilisi as children. They have grown up in uncertainty. They have known war and death. Now, they are building hotels. “To live in this place, you got to pay the rent, so to speak, my friend,” says David, ruefully. “But hey—isn’t this meal beautiful?”

  A house in Ramallah, in the West bank: Bassam’s wife, Haya, served a simple, perfect meal of pickles, hummus, sausage, and vermillion tomatoes. The house vibrated with the energy of two small children. The couple lives under Israeli occupation. The daily restrictions on travel, the military raids, the roadblocks, the loss of scarce jobs to political maneuvers by the Palestinian Authority and Israel—all these humiliations are forgotten over the clean taste of olive oil. Bassam looks giddily at his son, Adam, eating. A tightness around his mouth relaxes. A certain loneliness that accompanies him everywhere, even while walking together, dissolves.

  I watch Bassam now. The capable women of Nablus order him about their kitchen. He and I will part ways, soon.

  We will trek north, Bassam and I, atop straw-colored ridgelines and through lemon orchards: a foot-worn landscape once traveled by Abraham, patriarch of the Middle East’s three great religions. (A development organization, Abraham Path, has surveyed such interfaith routes for foreign hikers to walk, thus aiding local communities with tourist dollars.) We will climb the dry wadis. We will part herds of goats. He will talk of the love poetry of Darwish. He will discuss, as everyone does, the mythical peace. (“It’s called a ‘process’ for a reason, Paul,” Bassam mutters. “That’s because powerful interests on all sides don’t want peace. They’re making too much money off the process.”) He will look with infinite weariness on anyone—Israeli or Palestinian—in uniform. We will part ways in Jenin, at night, outside a bakery. I will walk on.

  I watch Bassam. At this instant, in the old stone house in Nablus, he stands with a spoon raised to his lips, eyes closed.

  The Hinge

  September 10, 2014

  Kirit, Turkey 31°04’49” N 34°53’45” E

  “How did you find our mule?” I ask Deniz Kilic.

  “Taxi driver.”

  “You asked a taxi driver where to buy a cargo mule?”

  “I have never bought a mule before. I know nothing about mules. Where do you buy a mule? Who knows? So I asked my taxi driver driving me in from the airport. I said to him, ‘Don’t laugh. This is serious. Where do I buy a mule?’”

  Kilic is my walking partner in Asia Minor.

  We meet in Mersin, a large industrial port in southeastern Turkey. I have just disembarked from a ferry from Cyprus. And Kilic has agreed, based on two emails and one long-distance phone call, to join my traverse of Anatolia—600 to 700 miles on foot across the sprawling Asiatic heartland of Turkey.

  “Crazy people”—he says—“attract other crazy people.”

  Kilic is a professional tour guide, a compulsive world traveler. (Joined by his wife, Elif, he has driven motorbikes through twenty-nine countries.) He is from Bodrum, a resort town in Turkey’s cosmopolitan European fringe. But he is proud of the rustic glories of Anatolia, the little visited eastern peninsula that comprises more than 90 percent of his country. The Trojans, immortalized by Homer in the Iliad, were Anatolians, Kilic informs me. The historic Santa Claus was an Anatolian, too. (The fourth-century patron saint of children and pawnbrokers stood five feet tall and had a broken nose.) The world’s Indo-European languages may be rooted in Anatolia. Anatolian nomads might well have invented agriculture. Their history is complex, bottomless, Kilic says: We will stub our toes daily on artifacts. Moreover, Anatolians are the true Turks—a tough steppe people of varied origins. Kilic is their advocate. He is a man of granite opinions. Of limitless ingenuity. He suffers fools badly: He calls them “geniuses.”

  “Walking in August will be miserable! What genius planned this?”

  “I did.”

  “Nice.”

  We tug the mule over farm roads. (According to her $350 bill of sale, she is prehistoric: twenty-two years old. More about this creature later.) We trudge into amber sunrises toward the dusty Iranian Plateau. We stir the quivering heat waves of molten afternoons. We climb the pleated foothills of the Taurus Mountains. We slog through fields of dried sunflowers. Past hand-pumped wells. Down to the sweltering Cilician Plain, perhaps the oldest continuously farmed landscape in the world. We sleep on village roofs.

  Millions of families still dream outdoors in southeastern Turkey.

  Summer days are a furnace. The earth sizzles underfoot. The humidity of the nearby Mediterranean is smothering: It clogs the lungs; it drenches the skin with sweat. Yet at dusk, on the flat roofs of farmers’ homes, loom hidden refuges: a wisp of breeze, a dip in temperature, a refreshing oasis. Anatolians are like birds. They return to roost atop their houses after laboring in their fields. They recline on baize mattresses twenty or thirty feet above ground. (Houses in rural Turkey are typically two or three stories tall.) They sip tea and stare out across their old, old world through a clutter of water tanks, television antennas and airy clotheslines. On rooftops, they picnic on yoghurt, meatballs, and watermelon. They converse and make love under starlight. Neighbors one house away perform these exact same rituals. This practice, a remnant of open-air life, of camping while settled, has survived in Anatolia since our Stone Age youth. It is an echo of hunting and gathering—from the Pleistocene trails that I follow out of Africa.

  “The villages are dying out,” a farmer named Sami Gortuk says. “The government gives us subsidized fuel. It gives us cheap seeds. It gives us loans for tractors. But our children are moving to jobs in Mersin, to Adana.”

  The young abandon the sky in Anatolia. Only the poor sleep al fresco in the city.

  Wearing baggy peasant pants and clogs, Gortuk and his wife, Hayirli, bring our mule a bucket of ground oats. They lead us to their roof. They set out bowls of fasulye, a bean and tomato stew. They unspool power cords to recharge our electronic devices. We are total strangers. This generosity, this impulsive kindness, is repeated everywhere along our route. Rural Anatolians are the most hospitable people on Earth.

  This is a cheering surprise, given the blood-steeped soil.

  The plains of eastern Turkey are not simply a strategic corridor between Asia and Europe. They are a hinge of history. Civilizations have swiveled violently back and forth atop this plateau for more than 6,000 years. Armed migrations, invasions, conquests, incursions, retreats—books on Anatolia contain numbing variations on this: “and a new wave of Indo-European raiders swept over the land.”

  Because that land is so fertile. Because it ramps westward to four seas: the Black, the Aegean, the Marmara, the Mediterranean. Because much of Anatolia is flat and impossible to defend.

  “[T]he fields of one community came into contact with those of another,” writes Robert D. Kaplan in The Revenge of Geography. What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate. “[C]hronic war emerged, as there was no central authority to settle boundary
disputes, or to apportion water in times of shortage.”

  The Akkadians and Assyrians claimed the prize of Anatolia. So did the Hittites, aboriginal Anatolians whose 3,500-year-old legal code, etched on clay tablets, includes the bylaw: “If anyone bites off the nose of a free person, he shall pay forty shekels of silver.” Then the Phrygians invaded, and then the Scythians, Greeks, Neo-Assyrians, Persians, Armenians, Macedonians, Seleucids, Parthians, and Sassanid Persians. The Romans marched in over stone roads to the Euphrates. Christianity turned them into Byzantines. Then came Arab armies bearing the green banner of Islam. The conquering Seljuks (and their Sultanate of Rum) were overrun in turn by bandy-legged cavalrymen galloping in from the east—the Mongols. Later, the Ottomans cobbled together nearly 600 years of continuous rule. Their aging, multiethnic Sultanate—the “sick man of Europe"—cracked apart in the wake of WWI. The Europeans gobbled up the pieces of Anatolia, but the Turks fought back. Modern Turkey was born here in brutal spasms of ethnic cleansing (Christian Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians were massacred and driven out; Muslim Bosnians, Albanians, and Bulgarians fleeing similar fates beyond Ottoman borders streamed in). Only ninety years ago, a radical Turkish general with a fondness for tuxedos—Mustafa Kemal Ataturk—yanked the fledging country into modernity. He banned sharia, abolished the Caliphate, gave women the vote, and forced Turkish men, on pain of prison, to exchange their fezzes for Western fedoras. (The Hat Law of 1925.)

  The Out of Eden Walk, too, will swing on Anatolia’s ancient hinge. For the next two years, maybe three, I will trek eastward to China.

  We navigate using village minarets, Deniz Kilic and I.

  Blinded by the midday sun, we echolocate our way ahead using the heat-distorted calls to prayer that moan in the steamy distances.

  We stagger past 1,900-year-old Corinthian plinths being used as backyard coffee tables. By new OPET gas stations with “Chat Cola" in their fogged-glass coolers. Past worn limestone mosques that had been churches for half a millennium, and before that, synagogues. Over beaches strewn with a mile of broken Iron Age potsherds. Under the fleeting shadows of KC-135 jets launched from the U.S. airbase at Incirlik. (They were arrowing towards Iraq.) And among hundreds of old Anatolian men sitting on wooden stools in village squares, slapping down numbered tiles in eternal games of okey.