Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

  He clicks back into fourth, watches the red line of the revometer. He shoots past a long truck, then eases into fifth.

  14

  A rubber bullet, when shot from a metal tube on the end of an M-16, leaves the barrel of the gun at more than one hundred miles per hour.

  The bullets are large enough to be seen but too fast to be avoided.

  They were tested first in Northern Ireland, where the British called them knee-knockers: they were designed to be fired at the ground, then bounce up and hit the legs of rioters.

  15

  The bullet that killed Abir traveled fifteen meters through the air before it smashed into the back of her head, crushing the bones in her skull like those of a tiny ortolan.

  She had gone to the grocery store to buy candy.

  16

  For two shekels Abir could have bought a bracelet with He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not imprinted along its rim. Instead she bought two iswarit mlabase: hard pills of pink, orange, yellow, and light blue candy braceleted together on a string.

  She slipped the money across the counter into the palm of the shop owner, who fished the bracelets out of a deep glass jar.

  As they made their way out towards the school gates, Abir gave the second bracelet to her sister Areen.

  17

  Every day since Abir was killed, Bassam has walked to the mosque in the hour before sunrise to join the optional pre-dawn prayers.

  Forty-eight years old, he moves through the dark with a slight limp, a cigarette cupped in the well of his hand. He is thin, slim, fit. His limp imprints him into the world: otherwise he might slip through almost unnoticed. Still, an agility lurks underneath, a wiry surprise, as if he might burst away from the limp at any moment and leave it abandoned behind him.

  He drops his cigarette on the path outside the mosque, scrunches it with his sneaker. In his isolation he smooths his white shirt with his palm, walks up the steps, removes his shoes, enters first with his right foot, kneels at the rear of the hall and bows himself before his limitless God.

  He prays for his wife, his five children, the memory of Abir. Allah, save us from enormities whether open or hidden. One by one, the prayer beads drop slowly from his fingers to the other side of his hand.

  As sunrise claws along the windows, a little splinter of shadow purls along the stone steps. Bassam sweeps the floor with a twig broom and rolls out the mats that stand cylindrical against the east wall.

  The smell of charcoal and hemp drifts in from outside. The thrum of awakening traffic, the comfort of the muezzin, the barking of stray dogs.

  Bassam works methodically down the length of the hall, covering the entire floor with mats, followed by skullcaps and rosaries for the first of the day’s prayers.

  18

  A town of neither here nor there, Anata appears like an odd urban archipelago—a Palestinian town, in the West Bank, under Israeli occupation, within the Jerusalem governate. It is surrounded almost totally by the Separation Wall.

  A few fine homes stand perched on the upper hillsides—white stone, marble columns, tall arches, high windows—but they soon give way to a chaos below.

  The descent is steep and sharp. Satellite dishes mushroom the roofs. Pigeons squawk from cages. Laundry flaps on washing lines strung between apartments. Bare-chested boys swerve their bikes between potholes. Downhill they go, among the overflowing dumpsters and the piles of rubbish.

  The streets are all traffic without traffic lights. Everywhere is neon. Tire shops, bakeries, cellphone repair kiosks. Men feign nonchalance in the shadows. Clouds of cigarette smoke hover over them. Women hurry underneath their hijabs. Carcasses of lamb hang forlorn on steel hooks outside the butcher shops. Pop music slides out from the loudspeakers. Bits of rubble lie everywhere.

  The town shoulders up against the Shu’fat refugee camp. Shu’fat builds itself upwards, apartment block upon apartment block. Nowhere else to go but the sky.

  It is easy to get into the camp—just slide through the metal revolving gate at the checkpoint and walk down the road—but it is tougher to get out. To travel to Jerusalem an ID card or a permit is needed. To get to the rest of the West Bank—which, like Bassam, you must do if you own a green license plate—only a single potholed road allows escape.

  19

  The rim of a tightening lung.

  20

  Think of it like this: you are in Anata, in the rear of a taxi, cradling a young girl in your arms. She has just been rubber-bulleted in the back of the head. You are on your way to the hospital.

  The taxi is stuck in traffic. The road through the checkpoint to Jerusalem is closed. At best you will be detained if you try to pass through illegally. At worst both you and the driver will be shot while carrying the shot child.

  You glance down. The child is still breathing. The driver puts his hand to the car horn. The car behind blares its horn. The car in front joins in. The noise doubles and redoubles. You look out the window. Your car nudges past a mound of trash. Plastic bags whip in the wind. You go nowhere. The heat bears down. A bead of sweat drops from your chin onto the plastic seat.

  The driver blares his horn again. The sky is blue with torn ribbons of cloud. When the car moves, its front wheel sinks into yet another pothole. The clouds, you think, are the fastest thing around. Then there is movement: two helicopters blading the blue.

  A part of you wants to get out and carry the smashed-up child in your arms, but you have to keep her head cradled and try not to move while nothing else on the ground moves either.

  21

  The Biblical Jeremiah—known also as the Weeping Prophet, chosen by God to warn of impending disaster—is said to have been born in ancient Anata. His image can be found on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, painted by Michelangelo in the early sixteenth century.

  In the painting, which appears to the side of the high altar, near the front of the chapel, Jeremiah sits, bearded and brooding, in long salmon-colored robes, his finger extended across his mouth, his eyes cast downward.

  22

  To this day, Bassam is haunted by his daughter’s candy bracelet. In the hospital he was met by the taxi driver and the shopkeeper who had traveled in the back with Abir. Abir’s shoe had been slipped back on her foot, but the candy bracelet had disappeared: it was not in her hand, not on her wrist, not in her pockets.

  In the operating room, Bassam kissed her forehead. Abir was still breathing. The equipment beeped weakly. It was the sort of hospital that needed its own hospital. The doctors were doing everything they could but they had little working equipment.

  It was decided to transfer her to Hadassah in Jerusalem. A twenty-minute journey, beyond the Wall.

  Two hours later—still stalled in an ambulance near the checkpoint—Bassam reached into her schoolbag and found the candy beneath her math book.

  23

  The shot came from the back of a moving jeep. Out a metal flap in the back door, four inches by four.

  24

  The Commander of the Border Police wrote in his report that rocks were being pelted from a nearby graveyard. His men were, he said, in mortal danger.

  25

  Abir was ten years old.

  26

  She was coming out of the tin-roofed grocery store with Areen and two friends. It was just after nine in the morning. The winter sun shone slant. School was in recess for an hour. They were just about to return for a math test, multiplication tables.

  Twelve times eight, ninety-six. Twelve times nine, one hundred and eight.

  The street was cut open with sunlight. The girls passed the concrete bollards set up across the roadway, made their way past the bus stop. Their shadows stretched across the roadblock.

  Twelve times twelve, one hundred and forty-four.

  27

  28

&n
bsp; When the armored jeep turned the corner, the girls began to run.

  29

  The bullet was metal at the core, but tipped with a special vulcanized rubber. When it hit Abir’s skull, the rubber deformed slightly, but then bounced back to its original shape without any evident damage to the bullet itself.

  30

  The soldiers called the bullets Lazarus pills: when possible, they could be picked up and used again.

  31

  In the year after the millennium, a rogue artist in Beit Jala hung hollowed-out rubber bullets as tiny improvised bird-feeders in the trees: the bullets were perforated with small incisions, filled with seed and hung with wire from the branches.

  Dangling in midair, the bullets attracted a number of small birds: yellow wagtails, sparrows, red-throated pipits.

  32

  The border guard who fired the shot was eighteen years old.

  33

  In the 1980s, during operations in Lebanon, Israeli soldiers were sometimes asked to pose for official photographs with their platoon members before they went out on their missions.

  As they lined up the soldiers were told to stand far enough apart that there would be ample space between them in the photo.

  The photographers made no other demand. The soldiers could smile, they could frown, they could turn directly into the camera, or they could turn their gaze away. No matter—the only thing they had to do was to give each other room, a handsbreadth of space so their shoulders wouldn’t touch, that was all.

  Some of them thought it was a ritual, others figured it was a military directive, others considered it to be a matter of decorum and humility.

  The soldiers gathered in groups by tanks, in tents, along rows of bunk beds, in armories, bandstands, canteens, by sheets of aluminum siding, against the green hills of Lebanon. They adjusted an array of berets: olive-drab, pitch-black, pigeon-grey.

  The photos were a theater of expression: fear, bravado, anxiety, unease, bluster. Confusion, too, at the request to stand a little farther apart. After the photos were taken, the soldiers went out on their missions.

  In some cases it was days later, in others weeks, in others months, before the reason became apparent: the space between the soldiers was needed in case the photograph had to be printed in the newspapers, or shown on TV, with the dead identified by a crisp red ring drawn around their faces.

  34

  Ringing a bird involves a simple twist of the metal with a banding pliers around the leg.

  35

  The newspaper editors and TV producers were eager to avoid the optics of intersecting lines. Sometimes there were five or six rings in one single photograph.

  36

  To free a bird from a hanging mist net, the first thing an ornithologist must do is unknot the thin strip of nylon from between the bird’s toes and then—depending on the degree of struggle and the length of time it has spent suspended in the net—to calmly untangle the feet, the knees, the belly, the armpit and finally the bird’s head, all the time holding the wings against its hammering heart, making sure that it doesn’t try to tear open your fingers with its beak or talons.

  It is akin to unlooping a tight knot in a silver necklace that, as you open it, wants to spread itself and thrash alive in your hands.

  Often the ornithologist will slip a pen or pencil beneath the talons to give the bird a grip for its feet. For larger birds they use branches or shorn-off broom handles.

  Some birds, after tagging, have been known to fly off with pieces of broom still held in their talons.

  37

  The prototypes for rubber bullets were discovered in the 1880s when small pieces of splintered broom handle were fired by the Singapore police at rioters in the streets.

  38

  Some Israeli soldiers in Lebanon were killed by French-made Milan anti-tank missiles, many thousands of which had been sold by François Mitterrand’s government first to Syria, then on the black market to Hizbollah fighters.

  Several others were killed by fire from Soviet T-55 tanks, machines that had been considered cumbersome and unwieldy until it was suggested by one general that the tanks should be buried in the ground and used like pillboxes. Only the barrel of the tank’s gun stuck out. They were known to the fighters as coffin tanks. Camouflaged, they were difficult to locate from the air, but when discovered these buried targets were easily blown to smithereens.

  Six soldiers were killed by fighters who—in an operation known as the Night of the Gliders—floated across the Lebanese border on homemade hang gliders powered by lawn-mower engines and attacked an Israeli camp. They were armed with Russian-made AK-47s as well as hand grenades manufactured in the Czech Republic, not far from Theresienstadt, the German-run concentration camp.

  39

  Folklore has it that, to this day, migratory birds avoid flying over the fields of Theresienstadt.

  40

  On the Night of the Gliders, in 1987, one of the Israeli guards, Irina Cantor, glanced up at the movement of a faint light in the dark sky. Cantor, who had emigrated from Australia two years before, had just begun her military service.

  She was sure that the hang glider was something distant or spectral, a trick of vision against the scraggly cloud.

  Afterwards, at the military tribunal, Cantor testified that when the shooting began the sight of the glider confused her so much that she thought that a large bird—something huge and prehistoric—had flapped out of the darkness.

  41

  Imagine the swan sudden-sucked into the engine of the fighter plane. Mayday, mayday, mayday. The brisk crunch of bone and long wing. A whirl of machinery. Mayday mayday mayday. The stutter of metal, the crush of feather, the rip of ligament, the chew of bones. Fragments of beak being spat out from the engine. Mayday mayday mayday.

  42

  Imagine, then, the pilot ejecting from the plane, still strapped to his seat, dreideling through the air with a force not unlike that of a rubber bullet.

  43

  The term mayday—coined in England in 1923, but derived from the French, venez m’aider, come to my aid—is always repeated three times, mayday, mayday, mayday. The repetition is vital: if said only once it could possibly be misinterpreted, but said three times in a row, it cannot be mistaken.

  44

  The M-16 used to shoot Abir was manufactured near the town of Samaria, North Carolina. Samaria being the name of so many villages and towns around the world: eight in Colombia, two in Mexico, one each in Panama, Nicaragua, Greece, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Venezuela, Australia and Angola.

  Samaria also being home of the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Israel.

  45

  A metal tube is locked onto the muzzle brake of an M-16 service rifle in order to shoot rubber bullets. The tube can contain up to eight bullets. They are powered by blank rounds fired from the gun’s magazine. Inside the attachment are a number of grooves which help the bullets maintain proper trajectory. The grooves are curved like the stripes on a candy cane so that the bullet emerges in a perfect spiral.

  46

  Seelonce mayday, or mayday silence, is maintained on the radio channel until the distress signal is over. To end the alert the caller says, at least one time, Seelonce feenee, an English-accented corruption of silence fini.

  47

  François Mitterrand was buried in Jarnac on the banks of the river he played in as a child, a swiftly moving bolt of brackish green crisscrossed with shadows cast by the hanging grape trees.

  Shortly before he passed away, his eyes flickered and he said to his doctor: I am eaten up inside.

  48

  Abir wore her school uniform—a white blouse, a navy cardigan, a blue skirt with ankle-length pants underneath, white socks, dark blue patent shoes, slightly scuffed. Apart from the candy bracelet, her brown leather schoolbag contained tw
o exercise books and three children’s books, all Arabic, although Bassam had contemplated teaching her some words of Hebrew, which he had learned as a teenager, many years before, in prison in Hebron, locked away for seven years.

  49

  His fellow prisoners liked his quiet manner. There was something mysterious about the seventeen-year-old with a limp, his dark skin, his wiry strength, his silence. He was always the first to step up in the canteen when the prison guards came. The limp gave him an edge. The first one or two baton strikes seemed almost reluctant. Often he was the last prisoner standing: the most brutal beatings were yet to come.

  Bassam spent weeks upon weeks in the infirmary. The doctors and nurses were worse than the prison guards. They reeked of frustration. They punched him, jabbed him, shaved his beard, denied him medicine, put his water out of reach.

  The Druze orderlies were fiercest of all: they understood the Arab consciousness of the naked body, how aware they were, how close it could come to shame. They took away Bassam’s clothes, his sheets, tied his arms back so he couldn’t cover himself.