by Colum McCann
She was at the kitchen table, writing. The light caught her hair. Something about her seemed ethereal. Out the window a single swallow went by.
Nurit looked up from her computer, gestured with two open hands, and said: And we think the myths are startling.
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Rami had heard the story once that, during World War Two, a series of bombs filled with live bats were designed to make Japan burn. Each of the bombs, developed first by the U.S military, had thousands of compartments, a vast metallic honeycomb.
A Mexican free-tailed bat was placed in each compartment with a tiny incendiary firebomb attached to its body. The controlled detonations took place, at first, in laboratories and large airplane hangars.
The bombs were to be released by a series of high-flying bombers at dawn: they would be let go at five thousand feet. It was anticipated that the casings would open somewhere above Osaka, and the bats would seed out into the air, a flotilla of doom. They would wake from hibernation and drift down into a vast urban area where, at dawn, they would hide in the dark eaves of houses, or sneak under wooden beams, or make their way into hanging paper lanterns, or even enter open windows to nestle in curtains until their timers went off.
Then the bombs—and the bats themselves—would explode.
Japanese houses were largely built of wood, paper and bamboo, and so it was thought that the burning bats would set off a spectacular firestorm.
A mock village was built in Utah with information gleaned from several Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated in internment camps. The Issei, the Nisei, the Sansei. They advised on village houses and shrines and model tatami rooms. Their height, their shape, their position. The shape of the eaves. The curl of the tiles. The height of the walls.
The village sat in the middle of the desert as if dropped from afar, not unlike something from a movie set. The soldiers called it NipTown. Every day different parts of the village burned.
The originators of the project were quite sure it would work, but by late 1943—after spending tens of millions of dollars—the research was running far behind, and instead of bat bombs the focus shifted to a more promising secret operation, the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos.
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What nobody admitted during the testing of the bat bombs was that most of the time when the Mexican free-tails were released in midair, they were still in a state of hibernation. The bats dropped from the bomb casings without waking up.
By the end of the experiment the scientists knew that they might just as well have released a cascade of stones.
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Nurit and Rami were convinced that Smadar would become a doctor: she was always running around the house after her younger brother, Yigal, soothing him, applying poultices to his knee, holding his head back when he had a nosebleed, putting ice on his arm after a bee sting.
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On August 9, three days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a second bomb was slated to be dropped on the city of Kokura on the island of Kyushu. The main target was the Nippon Steel factory, a fulcrum of the Japanese war effort. Kokura had a large military presence, but there was a huge civilian population too. The factory was located by the sea at the head of the Onga River, hemmed in by mountains.
The plane, the Bockscar, took off from Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands and flew towards Kyushu, accompanied by another B-29, The Great Artiste. On the nose of the Fat Man bomb the crew had stenciled the word JANCFU: Joint Army-Navy-Civilian FuckUp.
The planes took off into clear weather, but by the time they reached Kyushu the sky had clouded. Thin sheets of grey smoke rose from the factory below.
The commander of the operation, Major Charles Sweeney, had been told that—despite the sophisticated radar at his disposal—he had to be able to see the target with his naked eyes before the bomb could be unleashed.
Sweeney looked out on the landscape of white and grey. He figured they had enough fuel to circle the city a dozen times or more. The plane rose and dropped again, looking for a clear vantage point, circling as it went. The cloud subsided and Sweeney could see the outline of the steel mills, the coast, the seashore, but there was still the problem of smoke billowing from below.
The factory spires appeared again, barely visible. A forest. A pier. More factory smoke. A line of trucks. A tanker out on the water. Another thin sheet of cloud. Wisps of white out the window. The fuel indicator dropped.
Sweeney ordered his planes to continue circling. He was amazed by the sight of a baseball diamond through his binoculars, immediately obscured by a cloud. A line of fishing shacks appeared along the shore and then were swallowed by smoke.
The major scribbled the calculations out on a sheet of lined yellow notepaper: the longer he held on to the bomb the more fuel he would use. The Bockscar had already circled ten times in ever-widening arcs.
He had three choices: firstly, drop the bomb on Kokura without clear visuals; secondly, switch the mission to a different city; thirdly, dump the Fat Man out at sea.
Sweeney called for another update from his superiors and circled for the eleventh time. The cloud was, he felt, dissipating. He was sure he would have visuals shortly. The fuel line dropped further. He looked out the window into an unexpected wall of cloud.
The call went through on the radio and the coordinates were switched.
There were, Sweeney was told, no clouds over Nagasaki.
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The plutonium core of the Nagasaki bomb was the size of a throwable rock.
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And we think the myths are startling.
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Often Rami thinks of this: but for an accident of cloud vapor—a small defect in the weave of atmospheric weather—seventy-five thousand lives were lost in one place and preserved, then, in another.
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But for a turn toward the book store. But for an early bus. But for a random movement on Ben Yehuda Street. But for a trip to Ben Gurion airport to collect her grandmother. But for a late sleep-in. But for a break in the babysitting routine. But for the homework to do later that night. But for a crush of pedestrians on the corner of Hillel Street. But for a hobbling man that she had to loop around.
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Geography is everything.
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But for an early recess in the Anata school. But for multiplication tables. But for a long wait at the shop counter. But for two shekels in her pocket. But for a pause in the candy store. But for the open school gate. But for a turn of the jeep’s steering wheel. But for the sound of a siren. But for a concrete barrier that forced her to veer out into the street. But for some boys rumored to be rioting near the graveyard.
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From the age of eight, Abir wanted to be an engineer. Her older brother Araab had a plastic see-through ruler and a silver bow compass. She liked to draw circles on the back of her copybooks and then intersect the circles with straight lines.
For her tenth birthday she asked for a book on Galileo.
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Occasionally the motorbike allows Rami a state of flow, present in the moment, his senses keyed in, keen, fully aware. He finds a stretch free of potholes, no litter, no barriers, no slick road paint, no pebbles, no twigs, no ridges, no tar lines, no cracks, just a straightaway with a properly banked curve at the end. Nothing behind him, nothing in front, nothing to slow him down. He passes through a delicate ridge of fear, presses his palm against the right handlebar to bring the machine left, recorrects, adjusts, curls his fingers around the throttle, revs it up. A hum in his ears, a small vault in his lungs. The bike disappears, the heft of it gone, no rubber, no steel, no gravity, no force. The frame of the landscape dissolves and everything is momentarily gone until the road interrupts him once more.
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The white apartment blocks of Beit Jala. The black water tanks. The satelli
te dishes mushrooming the roofs. The flap of laundry from the balconies. The houses fronted with pale Bethlehem stone. The occasional bullet holes. The dusty windows. The young boys, outside, playing marbles on the manhole covers.
Further up the road, he passes the majestic Palestinian villas overlooking the valley, many of them empty now, scantily clad, the families long gone, emigrated, the doors locked, the windows plyboarded up.
The houses like portraits. A different time. More loneliness than rage.
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It is a town that never ceases to amaze him: on the walls outside the restaurants he has often seen thin pink plastic bags of bread left out in accordance with the local custom that no food should be wasted or thrown away.
The bread should go first to the needy, or the poor, so the plastic bags are tied in a knot and placed carefully on the top of any available wall.
Most often the bags are not taken. The food must then be offered to animals, and so it is the tradition of the older men of Beit Jala—Christian and Muslim both—to go around in the early morning, up and down the steep hills, carefully unknotting bag after bag after bag, like small pink purses.
It is not unusual to see a bird swoop down to grab the bread, and on occasion a whole pink plastic bag rising up in the air over Beit Jala.
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When he was young, Rami was the schoolyard jester, the clown. A smirk accompanied his shyness. He ran around at recess, quick, exuberant, his breath coming so fast that he didn’t know quite how he could handle it. He put a can of muddy water on top of the classroom door so when the teacher came in, the can fell from the frame and the water splattered.
At the school gate—on the day he was expelled—Rami clicked his heels together in the air in a Charlie Chaplin move as he walked away.
Inside he was terrified, thirteen years old, no idea what he would do now.
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In the industrial school the only thing that really interested him was graphic design: he found himself taken by ideas of color, of shapes.
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Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.
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Countably infinite being the simplest form of infinity. Beginning from zero, one can use natural numbers to count on and on, and even though the counting will take forever one can still get to any point in the universe in a finite amount of time.
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There always seems, to Rami, to be more dust in the West Bank than anywhere else. Dust on the cars. Dust on the windowsills. Dust on the handlebars. Dust in his helmet. Dust on his eyelashes.
Turning the corner, he brakes gently and comes up against a small jam of cars. A boy with a metal tea-cart is backing out into the street, hitching the cart to the back of a van. The traffic behind waits, the drivers with their elbows out the window, drumming their fingers on their doors, cigarette smoke drifting out their windows.
Normally, in Jerusalem, he would beep his horn and skirt around the cart, but now he waits carefully, the engine idling, the revometer at rest, the engine fan kicking in, the day dull, a little cool, a huge flock of swifts rising over the rooftops.
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Bassam showed him photographs from the archives once: the ancient Palestinian villas on the rim of the valley. They were among the most beautiful houses Rami had ever seen. The Ottoman life. The Mandate life. The Jordanian life.
In one of them a small boy, maybe eight or nine years old, was walking along the edge of an intricate ironwork fence. He was dressed in a crisp white shirt and dark pants, his hair very neatly combed, carrying in his hand a small leather school valise. In his other hand he held a thin switch and he was running the piece of wood along the middle of the metal bars.
In another photo a very beautiful woman, with large black sunglasses, sat on a veranda in the shade of an apricot tree, in a long white dress, her slender shoulders bare, a large glass of iced water held against her cheek, a few sprigs of mint floating. She smiled at the camera as if all the coolness of the world were to be found in the glass.
In his favorite, there was an Arab man in wide white trousers and a billowy shirt, standing on the tiled roof of one of the houses with, for whatever reason, a badminton racket in his hands. The man looked as if he had just returned a shuttlecock to a party below, maybe even, thought Rami, to the woman cradling the ice, or to the boy with the valise running music along the fence.
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On the clearest of days, from the highest vantage points of Beit Jala, you can see all the way to the Mediterranean in one direction and to the Dead Sea in the other.
The eye cannot rest. Down below, in the valley, an orchard, a watchtower, a terraced field, the roof of a synagogue, a minaret, a military gate, a series of mist nets among the remaining trees.
Stay here long enough, looking down into the valley, and you will notice the settlements emerging in a pattern around Jerusalem: red tile, red tile, red tile.
Coming together, a perfect ring: the rim of a tightening lung.
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For the first two years, whenever he was giving a lecture, Bassam slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out Abir’s candy bracelet.
He didn’t want to slip the bracelet over his wrist for fear that the string might break, so he gripped it in his fingers, held it in the air, showed it to the audience: the blues, the pinks, the oranges, the yellows.
—This, he said, is the world’s most expensive candy.
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Driving home alone from the lecture, Bassam was ordered to get out at a flying checkpoint. A hot day. Ramadan. The sun was still up. He stepped forward, his shadow slanting in the light.
—Show me your hands, show me your hands!
The soldier was older, a streak of grey down the center of her hair. She had, he thought, a slight Russian accent. Her rifle swung at her hip and then suddenly she pointed it at him.
—What is that, what the fuck is that?
Bassam turned his lofted hand around, stared at it for a second. It looked like something that didn’t belong to him. His palm was coated in pink. He had no idea why. He brought it to his nose. It smelled sweet.
—On your knees, on your fucking knees!
Bassam knelt in the dust at the side of the road. He made sure to face east just in case they kept him there a long time: facing east at least he could pray.
Three other soldiers ran towards him. Bassam stared at his hand again. He thought for a split second about licking the pink coating off, then remembered he was fasting.
—Lift your shirt! Lift your shirt I said!
For an instant he felt unashamed, even in front of a woman. A surge of anger. A defiance. He hiked his shirt up around his chest. The soldiers stepped forward again.
The butt end of a rifle jabbed the small of his back. He was shoved forward. Dust rose in his face. Black boots. The woman cuffed his hands with zip ties. He was yanked up by his hair, thrown into the back of the jeep.
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In the station later that evening, after five hours of interrogation, she softened and said to Bassam that she was sorry, yes, but that Semtex, too, was known to stain the hands a pinkish-orange color.
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After that, Bassam never again displayed the candy bracelet in his lectures.
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During Ramadan there were always more flying checkpoints than at any other time: random patrols stopping wherever they wanted, jeeps strewn across the road, soldiers crouched down, orange cones laid out, rifles pointed at the oncoming cars.
At dusk, with fasting about to finish, the checkpoints appeared more frequently than ever: at that stage the Muslims were irritable, tired, hungry, ready for a cigarette. The interruptions got under their skin. It seemed to Bassam that the soldiers reveled in the moment. They wanted confrontation. It justifed them, he though
t.
Bassam never knew where or when he would come across a truck or a barricade or even a large rock rolled into the middle of the road. He rounded the corner and his whole day would go on pause.
He knew not to say much when he rolled down the window. No confrontation, no rancor, but he didn’t want to be obsequious either. He nodded, waited for them to speak. Most of them used English. A few of them had Arabic. He seldom showed recognition of any Hebrew, nothing fluent anyway: it could be a sign he had been in prison. He spoke to them slowly and with precision.
Always he kept his hands in view. He knew never to make a sudden move. He drove away carefully, checking the rearview mirror.
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He had learned that the cure for fate was patience.
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The avian migratory paths go all the way from northern Europe over and along the Rift Valley, from Syria to central Mozambique, over the shifting tectonic plates of the world, to the tip of Africa.