Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

  Dark feet, white soles. A long scar on the back of his calf. A blue-and-white striped shirt. Smadar’s age. Younger even.

  The boy’s legs piston. His chest strains against the small swoosh on his T-shirt. The muscles in his neck tighten. The boy grins, an expanse of white teeth. The road rises further. Just beneath a grey light pole—the yellow bulb still shining in the morning—the boy lets out a high yell and then stops abruptly, throws his arms in the air, turns, vaults over a concrete barricade.

  In the rearview mirrors, the other two boys meld into the roadside ruin.

  Rami can’t quite tell if it was the exertion of the run, the yellow license plate, or the sight of the bumper sticker on the front left of the bike——that makes the boy stop so quickly.

  65

  It will not be over until we talk.

  66

  He clicks back to third to accommodate the rising road.

  Further up the hill is the bird-ringing station at Talitha Kumi, the steep streets, the stone walls, the center of town, the Christian churches, the careful iconography, the tin roofs, the high limestone houses looking out over the lush valley, the hospital, the monastery, the small countries of light and dark rushing across the vineyard, all the atoms of the approaching day stretching out in front of him.

  Today, like most days, just another day: a meeting with an international group—seven or eight of them, he has heard—in the Cremisan monastery.

  He turns the corner at the top of Manger Street.

  67

  In the distance, over Jerusalem, the blimp rises.

  68

  He followed the blimp one Sunday, a year ago, for a couple of hours, surveilling it, surveilling him, wondering if he could find a pattern to its movement.

  He went corner to corner, street sign to street sign, out into the countryside, then parked his bike at the overlook at Mount Scopus, sat on the low stone wall, shaded his eyes and stared upwards, watching the blimp drift in the blue. He had heard from a friend that it was a weather machine, gauging moisture levels and checking air quality. There was always a backup for the truth. And, in truth, how many sensors? How many cameras? How many eyes in the sky looking down?

  Rami often felt that there were nine or ten Israelis inside him, fighting. The conflicted one. The shamed one. The enamored one. The bereaved one. The one who marveled at the blimp’s invention. The one who knew the blimp was watching. The one watching back. The one who wanted to be watched. The anarchist. The protester. The one sick and tired of all the seeing.

  It made him dizzy to carry such complications, to be so many people all at once. What to say to his boys when they went off to military service? What to say to Nurit when she showed him the textbooks? What to say to Bassam when he got stopped at the checkpoints? What to feel every time he opened a newspaper? What to think when the sirens sounded on Memorial Day? What to wonder when he passed a man in a kaffiyeh? What to feel when his sons had to board a bus? What to think when a taxi driver had an accent? What to worry about when the news clicked on? What fresh atrocity lay on the horizon? What sort of retribution was coming down the line? What to say to Smadari? What is it like being dead, Princess? Can you tell me? Would I like it?

  Below him, on the slope, young boys lazed on the hillside on the backs of thin Arabian horses. The boys wore immaculate white jeans. Their horses muscled beneath them. Rami wished he could somehow reach out to them, approach them, say a word. But they knew already who he was from his license plate, what he was, just from the way he carried himself. They would know from his accent too, even if he spoke to them in Arabic. An older man on a motorbike. His pale white skin. His open face. The hidden fear. I should go and tell them. I should stride across and look them directly in the eye. Her name was Smadar. Grape of the vine. A swimmer. A dancer too. She was this tall. She had just cut her hair. Her teeth were slightly crooked. It was the start of the school year. She was out shopping for books. I was driving to the airport when I got the news. She was missing. We knew. My wife and I. We knew. We went from hospital to police station, back again. You cannot imagine what that is like. One door after another. Then the morgue. The smell of antiseptic. It was unspeakable. They slid her out on a metal tray. A cold metal tray. She lay there. Your age. No more. No less. Let’s be honest here, guys. You would have been delighted by the news. You would have celebrated. Cheered. And I would once have cheered for yours too. And your father’s. And your father’s father. Listen to me. I admit it. No denial. Once, long ago. What do you think of that? What sort of world are we living in? Look up. It’s watching us, all of us. Look. Look. Up there.

  After a while the blimp began to press down further upon him, like a light hand upon his chest, the pressure growing firmer, until all Rami wanted to do was find a place where he could not be seen. It was so often like this. The desire to vanish. To have all of it gone in a single smooth motion. To wipe it all clean. Tabula rasa. Not my war. Not my Israel.

  Show me, then. Convince me. Roll back the rock. Return Smadar. All of her. Gift her back to me, all sewn up and pretty and dark-eyed again. That’s all I ask. Is that too much? No more whining from me, no more weeping, no more complaints. A heavenly stitch, that’s all I ask. And bring back Abir too, for Bassam, for me, for Salwa, for Areen, for Hiba, for Nurit, for all of us. And while you’re at it bring back Sivan and Ahuva and Dalia and Yamina and Lilly and Yael and Shulamit and Khalila and Sabah and Zahava and Rivka and Yasmine and Sarah and Inaam and Ayala and Sharon and Talia and Rashida and Rachel and Nina and Mariam and Tamara and Zuhal and Riva and every other one under this hot murdering sun. Is that too much to ask for? Is it?

  He felt the bike galloping underneath him as he drove back to his house and sat in his office, closed the curtains, rearranged the photographs on his desk.

  69

  Smadar. From the Song of Solomon. The grapevine. The opening of the flower.

  70

  Abir. From the ancient Arabic. The perfume. The fragrance of the flower.

  71

  He has only ever been stopped once on his motorbike. He had heard that the back road from the West Bank was closed, but it was the easiest and quickest way home. The rain hammered down in slanting sheets. He took the chance. What was the worst that could happen: to be stopped, to be questioned, to be turned away?

  He had, he knew—even at his age—an impish grin, a chubby face, a soft pale gaze. He sat low and throttled the engine. The bike sprayed up droplets behind him.

  A sudden spotlight funneled a shot of fear down his spine. He throttled back, sat up on the bike. His visor was blurry with raindrops. The spotlight enveloped him. He braked in the pool of brightness. The back wheel skidded slightly in the oily rain.

  A shout insinuated itself into the night. The guard was trembling as he ran through the downpour. The light was scattershot with silver spears of rain. The guard pointed his gun at Rami’s helmet. Rami raised his hands slowly, opened the visor, greeted him in Hebrew, Shalom aleichem, shalom, in his thickest accent, showed him his Israeli identity card, said he lived in Jerusalem, he had to get home.

  —The road’s closed, sir.

  —What do you want me to do, go back there?

  A raindrop fell from the barrel of the soldier’s rifle: Go back, yes, sir, go back, right now, this road is off-limits.

  A tiredness had crawled into Rami’s bones. He wanted to be home with Nurit, in his comfortable chair, a blanket over his knees, the simple life, the ordinary mundanities, the private pain, not this forsaken rain, this roadblock, this cold, this shaking gun.

  He lifted the visor further: I was lost, I got lost, and you want me to go back there, are you mad? Look at my I.D. I’m Jewish. I got lost. Lost, man. Why in the world would you want me to go back?

  The boy’s gun swung back and forth wildly.

  —Go back, sir.

  —Are you f
ucking crazy? You think I have a death wish? I got lost, I took the wrong road, that’s all.

  —Sir. I’m telling you it’s closed.

  —Tell me this—

  —What?

  —What Jew in their right mind would go to the West Bank in the first place?

  The boy’s face puzzled. Rami tightened the throttle, gave the engine some throat.

  —Go ahead, habibi, shoot me if you have to, but I’m going home.

  He watched a fault line develop further on the boy’s brow, a little earthquake of confusion as Rami closed the visor, turned on his hazards and drove on, his whole body conspired into the bike, all the time thinking of the gun aimed at him, a bullet slamming into the small of his back.

  72

  When, the next day, in the office of the Parents Circle, he began to tell Bassam the checkpoint story, he stopped short and remembered the shiny blue shoe sailing through the air and the bullet ripping into the back of Abir’s skull. He had no desire to tell last night’s story anymore.

  73

  The shopkeeper was named Niesha the Ancient, even though she was just thirty-four years old. She heard the pops. One, two, three, four. A screech of tires. For a moment there was silence. Her hands remained on the long wooden counter. Then the shouting began: the high pitch of schoolchildren, girls mostly, an unusual sign: the girls were usually quiet. Niesha reached for her keys from the cash register.

  Outside, a commotion. A child on the pavement. A blue skirt. A white cotton collar blouse. A discarded shoe. Niesha dropped to her knees. She knew the child’s name. She leaned down to check the pulse.

  —Wake up, Abir, wake up.

  Screams rang out. A crowd huddled over the child. She was unconscious. Men and women keyed their telephones for a signal. Word went around that traffic had been blocked by the soldiers at the far end of the road. Nothing was being allowed through: no ambulances, no police, no paramedics.

  —Wake up, wake up.

  Minutes passed. A young teacher crossed the roundabout, wailing. A battered taxi pulled up. The young driver waved his arms. Kids streamed from the school gates.

  Niesha helped pick Abir from the ground and bundle her into the back seat of the taxi. She wedged herself into the well between the front and back seats to keep the child from rolling off. The driver glanced over his shoulder and the taxi lurched. Someone had thrown the lost shoe into the back of the car. Niesha slipped it on Abir’s foot. She felt the warmth of the toes. She knew instantly that she would never forget the surprising warmth of the flesh.

  The taxi raced through the heart of the marketplace. Word had already jumped around Anata and Shu’fat. Calls went out from the mosques, the balconies, the side streets. Kids ran from the alleyways, streamed down towards the school. The driver braked only for the speed bumps. He hit traffic on the far side of the market. He laid his hand on the car horn. The cars around them joined in the hellish symphony.

  Niesha lay on the floor beneath Abir, reaching up, keeping the child’s head still. Abir’s eyes fluttered. She made no sounds. Her pulse was slow and irregular. Niesha touched the child’s toes once more. They had grown colder.

  The windows of the taxi were down. Loudspeakers outside. Flags unfurling. The prospect of riot. The car jolted forward. The driver invoked the name of Allah. The tumult rang in Niesha’s ears.

  The hospital building was low-slung and dingy. A team waited on the steps. Niesha took her hand from Abir’s head and opened the rear door before the taxi had even stopped. Shouts went up for a gurney. The front steps of the hospital were mayhem.

  Niesha watched the gurney disappear in a swamp of white coats. These were the days of small shrouds: she had seen so many of them carried along the streets.

  She suddenly recalled that she had forgotten to lock the door of her shop. She put her forearm to her eyes and wept.

  74

  The cameras in the blimp remotely swiveled and the lenses flared. Already helicopters were circling over Anata.

  75

  Down below, the shebab threw stones. They landed on rooftops, bounced against light poles, clattered against water tanks.

  76

  On the day Smadar was killed, the television cameras were there even before the ZAKA paramedics.

  Rami saw part of the footage years later in a documentary: the outdoor restaurant, the afternoon light, the milling bodies, the overturned chairs, the table legs, the shattered chandeliers, the splattered tablecloths, the severed torso of one of the bombers like a Greek statue-piece in the middle of the street.

  Even listening with his eyes closed was unbearable: the rush of footsteps, the sirens.

  After the screening, he realized that he had clasped his hands so tightly together that his fingernails had drawn blood.

  What he wanted the filmmakers to do was to somehow crawl inside time and rewind it, to upend chronology, reverse it and channel it in an entirely different direction—like a Borges story—so that the light was brighter, and the chairs were righted, and the street was ordered, the café was intact, and Smadar was suddenly walking along again, her hair short, her nose pierced, arm in arm with her schoolgirl friends, sauntering past the café, sharing her Walkman, the smell of coffee sharp in her nostrils, caught in the banality of not caring what happens next.

  77

  The sky was a radiant blue. The cobblestone street was crowded with September shoppers. Music was being piped from a raffia-fronted loudspeaker. The blasts ruptured the sound system. The silence afterwards was uncanny, a stunned interval, until the street erupted in screams.

  78

  In Aramaic, Talitha Kumi means: Rise up, little girl, rise up.

  79

  The bombers were dressed as women, their explosive belts strapped around their stomachs. They had shaved closely and wore headscarves to hide their faces.

  They had all come originally from the village of Assira al-Shamaliya in the West Bank. It was, for two of them, the first time they had ever been in Jerusalem.

  80

  Jorge Luis Borges, when walking with guides through Jerusalem in the early 1970s, said he had never seen a city of such clean searing light. He tapped his wooden cane on the cobbles and the sides of the buildings to figure out how old the stones might be.

  The stones, he said, were pink as flesh.

  He liked walking in the Palestinian neighborhoods, around the souks where as a blind storyteller he was treated with particular reverence. There had always been a tradition of the blind among Arabs. The imam in the marketplace. Abdullah ibn Umm Maktum. Al-Ma’arri. Those who were basir, sighted in the heart and mind. Their ways of seeing, their ways of telling.

  Crowds of young men followed Borges, hands clasped behind their backs, waiting for a chance to talk to the famous Argentinian writer, the rawi. He wore a grey suit jacket, shirt and tie, even in the warm weather. He had been given a red fez as a welcome present. He wore the hat unabashedly.

  When he stopped, the crowd stopped with him. He enjoyed the sound of the alleyways, the flitter of laundry, the swoop of pigeons, the remnants of ghosts. In particular he liked the trinket shops in the Old City where he could pick small charms from the trays, attempt histories from the feel of them alone.

  Borges sat drinking coffee in the small shops, amid the smoke and the bubbling water pipes, listening to ancient stories of larks and elephants, of streets that turned endlessly, of pillars that contained every sound in the universe, of flying steeds, of mythical marketplaces where the only things for sale were handwritten poems that scrolled out infinitely.

  81

  Being with you, and not being with you, is the only way I have to measure time.

  ~ BORGES ~

  82

  Sivan Zarka, fourteen years old, was blown into the air alongside Smadar. Her parents were French: she
had lived once in Algeria. They had recently moved to Jerusalem where Sivan was studying, with Smadar, at the Gymnasia high school in Rehavia. Yael Botvin was also fourteen. She had just begun ninth grade at the Israel Arts and Science Academy. She had made aliyah from Los Angeles with her parents eight years before. Rami Kozashvili was twenty years old. He worked as a clerk in the Yehuda Bazaar, selling sports clothes. He had emigrated from Georgia in the Soviet Union. Eliahu Markowitz, an office clerk, a book lover, a pacifist, was forty-two. His family had come originally from the Black Sea coast of Romania.

  83

  To make aliyah: to ascend.

  84

  Markowitz was having lunch in an outdoor café with his eleven-year-old son. The boy was thrown backwards through the air but his fall was softened by a potted palm situated in front of the window.

  85

  So often, thought Rami, the ordinary can save us.

  86

  When Rami came back from the Yom Kippur War—long-haired, blue-eyed, exhausted—he began work as a graphic designer, drawing posters for the right wing, the left wing, the center too. He was a maverick. He didn’t care. If they wanted fear, he would give them fear. If they wanted glamour, he would give them glamour. Controversy, nationalism, pessimism—anything at all. Schmaltz too: no problem, he could easily deliver a bouquet of bullshit. A raised fist for the new Israel. An expansive border, the Nile to the Euphrates. A wide-eyed child. A sinister stare. A wounded dove. A long elegant leg. Anything at all. Make it smart, make it crude, make it rude, he didn’t care, he had no politics. No party allegiance. No safe alignment. To have a house, a family, to be undisturbed: an Israeli life, that’s what he wanted. A good job, a mortgage, a safe street, leafy, no knock on the door, no midnight phone calls. What he wanted was the spectacularly banal. The worst of it would be a long line at the falafel joint, a shortchange at the cheese store, a mistake by the mailman. Rami did what he did best: drawing, sloganeering, provoking with paintbrush and pencil. He started his own firm. Advertising and graphic design. He delighted in ruffling feathers. Most everyone liked him—if they didn’t, he laughed it off, always the clown, the joker, the man at the edge. He met Nurit: she was a beauty. Fiery. Red-haired. Liberal. She didn’t care what others thought. Smart as a whip. From a good family. A general’s daughter, a pioneer, an original, she went generations back. She took the oxygen from the air. He was rougher-edged, raw, more working class, but she liked his charm, his wit, his ability to turn on a word. He was reckless. He made her laugh. He wasn’t going to let her go. She had the brains, he had the instinct. He courted her, wrote her letters, drew pictures for her. She was a peacenik. He sent her red roses. She returned them for white. He was smitten. He had served as a tank mechanic in the army. He fixed her father’s car. The General approved. They were married in Nurit’s house. A rabbi held the service. Together they broke the glass. Mazal tov rang around the house. They had their eighteen minutes of yichud, it was tradition, why not? The years tumbled on. They had kids: one two three four. Beauties. Whippersnappers. A little wild, all of them. Especially Smadar. A ball of energy, a magnifying glass: she was all focus and burn. The boys too—Elik, Guy, Yigal—all of them had their mother’s eyes. Tiger eyes, he called them, something to do with an English poem he couldn’t quite remember. They were extraordinary years. Rami was sharp. Witty. A little sardonic when he needed to be. He knew politicians, artists, journalists. He got invited to parties. Jerusalem. Tel Aviv. Haifa. He played the jester. He developed a taste for motorbikes. Bought himself a leather jacket. Came home bearing colorful dresses and scarves as presents for Nurit. She laughed at his poor taste, kissed him. She let her hair fall. At parties he could hear her talking to her professor friends. Occupation this, Occupation that. Ah, my wife, the liberal, the beauty. She wrote articles. She didn’t hold back. She said what she wanted. It thrilled him. She brought him to the edge. His lungs were bursting. There were more wars, yes, but there were always wars, weren’t there, this was Israel after all, there always would be another war, this was the price the people had to pay. Somehow he was able to slide through it all, one eye open, both closed. Vigilance. That was the word. Vigilance. He knew the routines even if he didn’t like them. Watch for the dark face on the buses. Always know where the exit is. If the Arab bus is beside you in traffic pray for the light to be green. Measure the roll of the accent. Look out for cheap shirts and tracksuits. Flick a quick look for dust on the shoes. He wasn’t prejudiced, he said, he was just like everyone else, he was logical, he was practical, he simply wanted to be tranquil, to be undisturbed. He read the papers, he said, in order to ignore the news. It was the only way to get by. He didn’t want to be pinned down. He wanted to maintain his freedom. He could argue anyone, at any time, in any corner. He was Israeli, after all: he would argue against himself if need be. It was all about appetite. He developed a double chin, filled out his shirtfronts. He didn’t fly flags, but like everyone else he stood stock still every Memorial Day. His work sustained him. He was doing well. His fees were large. He doubled them, tripled them. The more he charged, the more work he got. He was surprised when he won awards. Silver decanters. Cut-glass bowls. Trophies. They lined the shelves of the house. Half the billboards around Jerusalem were designed by him. The phone didn’t stop ringing. The kids grew. The boys were full of pep. Smadar was a pistol, a firecracker. She loved to run around the house. She danced on the table. Cartwheeled in the garden. Skinned her knees. Knocked a tooth out. Girl stuff. Time sauntered on. High school degrees. Theater. And then came military service—Nurit didn’t like it, but Elik, the oldest, went anyway. Shined his shoes and twirled his beret on his finger. It was the done thing. To refuse to serve was to isolate. To isolate was to lose. To lose was un-Israeli. It was duty, pure and simple. Rami recognized it: he had done it and his sons would do it, and eventually his daughter too. Rami took photos of Smadar in her grandfather’s army fatigues and her brother’s red beret on her head and they laughed as she marched, keystone-style, around the room.