Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

  They removed gutter grills, combed the surfaces of manhole covers, pushed open jammed doors. They sifted the glass and debris, looking for any sign of life or flesh. They reached into shattered glass with long tweezers to pick up a severed thumb. They picked bloody shrapnel from the windshields of cars, shone flashlights on the underside of tables, climbed trees to scrape the skin of the victims from the branches, dabbed cartilage from the street signs, coiled intestines back into half-torsos, vacuumed up any available liquid from the pavement into portable machines.

  The shadows of the ZAKA moved under intense floodlight. One man passing along the street, becoming the next, becoming the next again. A hushed, abbreviated form of communication.

  They assembled the corpses together on sheets of white plastic, bagged them and handed them over to the Israeli police. They were meticulous. Rigorous. Precise. Special care was taken not to mix the blood of victims and the bombers.

  Within a couple of hours their work was done.

  When they walked back towards their scooters they let their arms hang slightly away from their bodies, as if their hands had been exposed to a contaminant. One man washed a trace of blood that had soaked into a stray tzitzit. Another leaned down to remove the plastic booties from his shoes. Carefully he folded them into another plastic bag. They arranged their clothes into the metal boxes on the back of their scooters, put on their helmets, and then they dissolved, once again, into the city, bearing their sorrows.

  They didn’t wait around, didn’t exhibit themselves with prayer. No ritual. No closure. It was their duty. Simple as that.

  For this the scripture had been written.

  109

  Seelonce feenee.

  110

  Two of the ZAKA came back on their scooters the next morning to pick up a single eyeball that had been missed.

  The eyeball was noticed by an elderly man, Moti Richler, who, at dawn, looked down from his upstairs apartment on Ben Yehuda Street and saw the piece of severed flesh lying on top of the tall blue awning of the Atara café.

  A long string of optic nerve was still attached to the pupil.

  111

  The workings of the human eye are still considered by scientists to be as profoundly mysterious as the intricacies of migratory flight.

  112

  With age-related macular degeneration, a patient develops a central blind spot and can generally only see objects on the periphery. Everything at the center of vision appears dark. The patient sees edges: everything else becomes a fuzzy circle. If looking at a dartboard, all that might be seen is its rim.

  To combat this, the surgeon removes the natural lens and implants a tiny metal telescope in one eye. The surgery does not repair the macula, but magnifies the patient’s vision. The blind spot might be reduced from the size of a person’s face to the size of his or her mouth, or maybe even to an area as small as a coin.

  The operation—which was pioneered in New York and perfected in Tel Aviv—only takes a couple of hours, but afterwards requires a new way of seeing. The patient has to learn to gaze through the tiny implanted telescope and at the same time scan the periphery with the other eye. One eye looks directly forward, magnifying things up to three times their usual size, while the other searches sideways. In the brain the two sets of visual information are combined into a complete picture.

  Sometimes it takes the patient months, or even years, to properly retrain the vision.

  At the time of the bombing, Moti Richler was in his second month of recovery. He turned from the window and told his wife, Alona, that he wasn’t sure, but he had been looking down on the scene of yesterday’s bombing and thought he saw—through his implanted telescope—something odd lying on the awning below.

  113

  It looked to Moti like a tiny old-fashioned motorcycle lamp with wires dangling.

  114

  One of the earliest texts on the eye—its structure, its diseases, its treatments—Ten Treatises on Ophthalmology, was written in the ninth century by the Arab physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq.

  The individual components of the eye, he wrote, all have their own nature and they are arranged so that they are in cosmological harmony, reflecting, in turn, the mind of God.

  115

  The doctors came to Bassam in the corridor of the hospital. They wore ties underneath their crisp white coats. They asked him to sit down. He felt a rush of cold to his arms. He said he preferred to remain standing.

  One doctor was Jewish, the other a Palestinian, from Nazareth. He addressed Bassam in Arabic: softly, his voice measured. If Abir were to die, he suggested. If things take the wrong turn. If the worst was to happen. If we are unable to revive her.

  The other doctor touched him on the shoulder: Mister Aramin, he said, do you understand what we’re telling you here?

  Bassam looked beyond the doctor’s shoulder. Further down the corridor Salwa sat, surrounded by her family.

  Bassam replied, in Hebrew, that yes he understood.

  The first doctor talked, then, about harvesting organs. Of creating life from life. Her liver, the kidneys, her heart. The second doctor followed.

  —We have a renowned eye transplant unit, you know.

  —We would take very good care of her.

  —There’s a severe need.

  —Some people are reluctant.

  —We understand that.

  —Mister Aramin?

  For a moment Abir’s eyes seemed to hover in the room: large, brown, copper-flecked at the core.

  —Please take a minute. Talk with your wife.

  —I will.

  —We’ll be back.

  Dreidels spinning on a kindergarten floor. The Aleph. The Torah. A bat mitzvah dress. Military service directives. The checkpoint from behind the glass. Permits and stamps. The blue and white fluttering above her. Yellow-plated cars. Israeli television, Israeli books, Israeli recipes. She might go home for Shabbat and bake the challah and light the candles and make her mitzvahs and wake to her husband and kiss his eyes and raise her children and bring them to the synagogue and teach them the Hatikvah and their kids might have kids and their own ways of seeing, and, yes, there were other ways of seeing beyond Muslim law, he knew—Druze, Christian, Bedouin too—but it was not just that, no, it was so far beyond that, he wanted to explain it to the doctors, there was something deeper here for him, something fundamental, something he needed to say, he wasn’t sure how to explain it, he had always wanted Abir to see the sea, it was the thing he had promised her for so many years, his pledge to his daughter, that he would bring her the short drive to the coast at Akka, along with her sister and brothers, allow them to wade in the blue of the Mediterranean, run along the wooden piers, to give them access to what was denied, and he wondered what it was that the doctors saw when he lowered his gaze and he said, in perfect Hebrew: No, I am sorry, we cannot do that, my wife and I, sorry, we cannot allow that, no.

  116

  Shortly after Abir’s funeral—she was carried, flag-draped, through the rutted streets of Anata—Bassam called Rami on the telephone and said he needed to join the Parents Circle.

  He was, he insisted, ready to get involved. He would start as soon as possible, the next day if needed.

  Bassam put the phone down and went walking through the broken, dusty streets. The smashed sidewalks. The piles of rubble. The pyramids of tires.

  He had seen photographs of Anata in the national archives, how beautiful it once was. The marketplaces. The villas. The mosaic faces. The men in fezes. The women in their long dresses. The cafés.

  Gone now. Walled in. Garbaged up.

  He passed the school gates and slipped around the back of the shop. He held his breath as he walked by the graveyard.

  117

  My name is Bassam Aramin. I am the father of Abir.

&n
bsp; 118

  In the ’48 war Moti Richler guarded a primitive cart that ran on a metal cable strung across the Hinnom Valley in Jerusalem. The cable was two hundred and forty meters long. It ran from a room in the eye hospital to a schoolhouse on the side of Mount Zion. The wire was pulled taut by winches and propped up by makeshift cavallettis.

  The cart, made of wood and reinforced steel plates, ran only at nighttime. It brought injured soldiers and medical equipment from one side of the valley to the other: the soldiers who were still conscious could feel the cart swing and sway as they traveled through the air.

  Every evening Moti drove a motorbike through the valley underneath the cable to make sure the wire was still intact and not booby-trapped. He wore dark clothing and blackened his face, neck and hands with shoe polish so as not to attract Jordanian sniper fire.

  The Italian-made bike was painted dark, even its handlebars and spoked wheels. Mufflers were put on the engine. The rear lights were disabled and Moti took out the front light completely so that the glass didn’t catch the moonlight.

  The disabled headlamp sat by Moti’s bedside all through the war, the wires dangling.

  119

  The morning after the bombing Moti looked out from his apartment window to the awning below.

  —Alona, come quick, he called to his wife over his shoulder. Down there. Look at that. Is that what I think it is?

  120

  Years later the French high-wire artist Philippe Petit strung a three-quarter-inch steel wire on almost the exact same trajectory as Moti’s cable, and walked, on an incline, across the valley.

  121

  In David’s fight with Goliath in the Valley of Elah, David used a slingshot to hit the giant in the forehead with one of five stones taken from a nearby brook. The stones from the valley are made up primarily of barium sulfate, twice as dense as most ordinary stones. They are rumored among throwers to fly quicker, farther and more accurately than other stones.

  122

  The rubber bullet knocked Abir face-forward to the ground.

  123

  Goliath is said to have fallen forward, where he was decapitated by David on the spot, but every sling thrower will tell you that what happens when you hit the enemy with a stone is that he falls backwards, unless you hit him in the lower legs.

  124

  What the British would call a knee-knocker.

  125

  So that Goliath, if conscious, would have been looking straight up into David’s eyes. As John the Baptist might have been looking in the eyes of his killers, at the behest of Salome, in the town of Sebastia, not far from the village of Assira-al-Shamaliya, where the Ben Yehuda Street bombers were raised amid the yellow wheatfields and winding roads and olive groves with rickety wooden ladders leaning up against the trees.

  126

  When a suicide bomber activates his or her belt, his head is nearly always separated from the top of the torso: it is known to the police as the mushroom effect.

  127

  There are two to three seconds of consciousness after decapitation when the brain is still functioning: the mouth can make a sound and there can be ocular movement, a twitching of the eyeball or the opening—or closing—of an eyelid.

  It is said that decapitated men often look surprised as their bodies separate from their heads: as if their final thoughts are in flight, visions of loved ones in Stockholm, in Savannah, in Sierra Leone, in so many small and scattered Samarias.

  128

  The Beit Jala teenagers spent hours on end painting their stones with flags, insignias, the jerseys of their football teams, Shabab al-Khader and Wadi al-Neiss.

  Tarek’s brothers used to paint their stones in the colors of Beit Jala Orthodoxi, and sometimes even in the blue and white of the Dheisheh team from the nearby refugee camp.

  Some of the stones also took on the insignia of foreign teams, mostly Barcelona and Real Madrid, though a few used the colors of Al Ahly in Egypt, or Olympique Lyonnais in France, or Glasgow Celtic in Scotland.

  On occasion a pissed-off Israeli soldier, under orders not to shoot, launched the stones back at the rioters by arm. These stones were picked up again and again, launched back and forth between soldiers and boys, almost comradely in flight.

  129

  130

  The frigatebird is dark and stealthy, with a hooked beak and a deeply forked tail. It belongs to the family of seabirds found in tropical and subtropical oceans. Their wings can span up to eight feet. They cannot dive beneath water or even rest on its surface since their feathers will absorb moisture and they will drown.

  They are known to swoop beneath cumulus clouds where the rising currents of warm air pull them into the heart of the vapor. In the currents they simply open their wings as if in the tube of a sky vacuum, a thunderous swirl of air. As they ascend they sometimes sleep. They are hauled upwards, thousands of feet, like hollow-boned gods through the narrowing gyre.

  High in the air they finally break from the current and flap out of the envelope of cloud. For a moment the buffer shakes them, but then the turbulence ends. In the still air they can glide horizontally downwards for up to forty miles without even flapping, finishing often with an annihilating drop.

  While still in flight, they stay alive by robbing other seabirds for food, or skimming the ocean surface for fish and squid, snatching their prey from the water with their long razor-sharp bills.

  131

  To ancient mariners they were called Men-of-War.

  132

  While camped on Mount Scopus in 1099 the Christian Crusaders perfected a giant slingshot that could fire large balls of flaming pitch great distances through the air.

  133

  In art class, at school in Anata, Abir sketched out a picture of the blue Mediterranean that she had only ever seen from the tops of tower blocks. It was drawn in her childish hand, with a globe of yellow sun, a swath of squiggled cloud, two dark gulls in the upper corner flying over a boxy ship with four small circles penciled in at the hull.

  134

  When designing the forerunner of the Predator drone, Israeli aerospace engineers studied the form and stream patterns of the frigatebird.

  A pair of scientists was sent to the Galápagos Islands in the late 1990s where they filmed flocks in flight. They captured some of the birds and strapped tiny sensors to the undersides of their bodies, tracked the path and the arc of their fall.

  Later the Israeli team journeyed to Seattle where they created a series of computer models and began working to see if they could adapt any of the movements of the birds to the development of their drones and the missiles they would let fall into the twenty-first century.

  135

  The computer graphics were designed to echo popular video games with an intricate mathematical map laid over the cartoon visuals, so the drone lazed in at first, high in the sky, waiting, circling, until the missile zoomed down at the stroke of a key or the tap of a joystick. The models replicated the grace of the frigatebird’s drop.

  The visual landscape was drawn from a number of places, but in particular they used a computerized map of Gaza: the streets, the alleys, the markets, the fishing huts, the patches of farm, the border ditches, the rubble, the refugee camps.

  136

  During Operation Cast Lead in late 2008—also known, at the time, as the Gaza War, also known as the Battle of al-Furqan, also known as the Gaza Massacre—the drones were used to fire Spike missiles into the city, arriving from the clouds into the mayhem below.

  The Spike missiles were of a type known as fire-and-forget.

  137

  Even as a child, Abir showed an amazing gift for memorization. She knew ancient songs, poems, an array of lengthy verses from the Qur’an which she could quote at will.

  Salwa sat by her bed and told her stories that had come down through her own fam
ily, not just the traditional Kalila and Dimna or Clever Hassan or Omar the Just, but other tales that had been filtered through the generations too. Linen cloths with special healing powers. Ancient olive trees that went off walking on night journeys. Silver tea kettles capable of entrancing even the most jaded. Jackals able to turn into tiny hummingbirds.

  The young girl would wake in the morning and ask for a part of the story she might have missed: often she could recite her mother’s exact words from the night before.

  Abir also showed a penchant for mathematics, so that, on the morning just before her death, Bassam had no doubt that she would pass her exam: the multiplication tables tripped off her tongue. She wandered around the apartment creating rhymes from the numbers.

  When she jaunted out the door towards school, Bassam handed her two shekels and told her to make sure that she continued reciting the tables so that her older sister Areen—who had already gone on ahead—could pass the exam too.

  138

  She slid the shekels over the counter to Niesha the Ancient.