Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

  A single bird can travel from a nesting site in Denmark to Tanzania, or Russia to Ethiopia, or Poland to Uganda, or Scotland to Jordan in a matter of weeks, even days.

  Whole flocks of them, up to three hundred thousand strong, sometimes blot the sky over the bottleneck of land.

  Six out of every ten don’t make it because of high-voltage lines, pylons, factory chimneys, spotlights, skyscrapers, drilling rigs, oil pits, poison, pesticides, diseases, droughts, failed crops, repeating guns, baited traps, poachers, birds of prey, sudden sandstorms, cold spells, floods, heat waves, thunderstorms, construction sites, windows, helicopter blades, fighter jets, oil spills, rogue waves, bursts of sewage, islands of debris, blocked drainpipes, empty feeders, fetid water, rusty nails, shards of glass, hunters, gatherers, bird-dogs, boys with slingshots, the plastic rings from six-packs.

  193

  The route over Palestine and Israel has long been known as one of the bloodiest migratory paths in the world.

  194

  In parts of southern Africa bird bones are used for musical instruments, the theory being that the ancestral memory is regained when you blow air along the hollow bone.

  195

  In prison, Bassam’s cellmates made musical instruments out of anything they could find: strips of wood and metal shower rings for riqs, tightened canvas and shaped metal strips for dafs, even the ligaments from chicken carcasses rolled together, stretched and then varnished to approximate the strings of a primitive lyre.

  Any time a prisoner got his hands on fishing wire or dental floss, they were immediately put to use. Any nylon string was considered to be a treasure.

  If nothing else could be found, music was played on canteen trays or tapped out rhythmically on the side of empty soup cans.

  196

  There was a reek to the prison. In the canteen, the shower stalls, the phone booths, even in the tiny prison mosque. Mice fell dead in the corners. Cockroaches. Lizards. The place was ripe with decay.

  The days stretched out on a rack. The prisoners pondered the anatomy of boredom. Time was endless and hollow. They rolled messages to each other along the floor, played games of shatranj by knocking out codes on pipes. Rolled tobacco skittered along the ground. They shaped horses, camels, rooks, pawns from chickpeas to make chess pieces.

  They were not allowed any traditional dress. They improvised keffiyehs from whatever they could find, kitchen rags, dishtowels, elastic from their underwear. They spent weeks stitching them together, had them confiscated straightaway.

  At night, along the corridor, verses from the Qur’an rang out. Nor will they enter the garden until the camel can pass through the eye of the needle. Have you no faith in Him who created you from dust? Classes were organized in poetry and song, shouted along from cell to cell. Antar, Abu Zayd al-Hilali, Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan, Marx and Lenin too.

  The poems of Mahmoud Darwish were chanted with the regularity of prayers: A prison cell with a cold window. A sea for us, a sea against us. I work with comrades in a stone quarry. Perfume me with basil water.

  Bassam was able to handle the beatings. Mostly in the canteen. The guards came in full riot gear. They lined the prisoners up. They were told to take their clothes off. They stood there naked. Bassam used a plastic food tray as a shield. It split perfectly in the middle, right above his head.

  He limped into the shower fully dressed so he could wash the blood from his clothing, then hung the clothes from the bars of his window. He got down on his knees and prayed into the damp of his shirt.

  Much of his time was spent in solitary confinement. Ritual called on him to pray on a clean prayer mat. He used a blue cloth upon which he drew a mihrab. The prison guard, Hertzl, risked giving the cloth to him. Bassam rolled it up meticulously and put it away without drawing attention.

  They had fought at first, he and Hertzl. Hertzl was tall and thin and sharp-faced with a prominent Adam’s apple. He was raised an Orthodox Jew and had studied mathematics as a student in Tel Aviv. He was taken by the fact that Bassam’s prison number was 220-284. Something to do with what he called amicable numbers.

  Bassam tried to remember a school lesson about al-Khwarizmi and the House of Wisdom. He couldn’t recall it entirely, but told Hertzl that all good math had come from the Arabs, everyone knew that. The two started talking. Quietly and insistently, at the door of his cell.

  —Hey, Hertzl, we’ve been doing your math for a thousand years, who’s the settler here now, tell me that?

  He learned Hebrew because he wanted to know the enemy. Ivrit hee sfat ha’oyev. Keep him close. Learn how to bury him. Read the Torah. Know his foul idolatry. Break his jail down. Imprison him with his imprisonment.

  Just about everything that surrounded Bassam was enemy. The food he ate. The plexiglas windows he scratched. The air he breathed. The way it shaped his lungs. Even someone like Hertzl was an enemy.

  It was only in the fourth year of his seven-year sentence—after watching a documentary in the prison theater—that Bassam’s balance got all knocked to hell.

  197

  —Why did you leave the horse alone?

  —To keep the house company, my son.

  ~ MAHMOUD DARWISH ~

  198

  The prison guard arrived with two bottles of Coca-Cola in a grocery bag, hid them in a water tank in the warden’s office to keep them cool. He brought them to Bassam in the dead of night, tucked under his shirt. He made a special presentation of a glass cup.

  The next day Bassam distributed one swallow of Coke to every prisoner in the unit. He cut the empty bottles apart, crushed them into tiny pieces, flushed them down the toilet.

  The glass cup smelled syrupy for days: the prisoners came to his cell simply to inhale the scent.

  199

  None of the leaders in the prison block ever mentioned that one of Darwish’s lovers was a Jewish dancer, Tamar Ben Ami. He had written the poem Rita and the Rifle about her. Later Bassam would think of the great dark-eyed Palestinian poet pulling the covers back from her long white body, the strap-mark of a gun, an M-16 or an M-4 perhaps, still across her shoulder.

  She accompanied Darwish when he reported to prison once, kissed him at the gates, went off to rejoin the Israeli forces: she was part of the Navy’s performing troupe.

  She wrote Darwish letters from the decks of frigates and gunboats and carrier ships—in one photo she is perched in front of the railing of a submarine chaser.

  Without you, she wrote in Hebrew, I am without any depth, I am on the surface here, waiting.

  200

  Bassam was six years old when a helicopter bladed the sky in the hills outside Hebron. He had never seen a machine quite like it before. The soldiers, when they leaped out, looked to him like green insects, crouching and running up the hillside, fabulous with fear.

  His mother ran down from their home in the hillside caves, grabbed his sleeve, shooed him home along the rocky path. He knew every pebble underfoot.

  She ripped across the curtain of the cave, blew on the candle that swung in the glass lantern from the rock ceiling.

  The light clung a moment to the handmade rugs on the wall, then all went dark.

  201

  The caves outside Hebron were some of the most coveted places for farmers to live—cool in summer, warm in winter, fragrant with olives kept in ornate pots on rows of carefully built wooden shelves.

  Bassam was one of fifteen children. In summer he slept outside on a straw mat under a tarp alongside his father, a privileged position, coveted by his brothers.

  It was, Bassam knew, because of his father’s guilt: of all the children, Bassam was the only one who had missed the polio vaccine.

  202

  In a shallow cave, Bassam found the stashed grenades he and his friends used for the assault. When they explored further in
side the cave they found the rifle.

  The grenades were the size of large stones. The rifle, when his friends cocked it, flaked dust.

  203

  The army jeep crashed through the cactus, the shrubs, past the fence. Engine-roar. Shouting. A bird he couldn’t name swung low past his ear. His right foot dragged. He felt a blow on the side of his head. He crumpled while still running.

  The ground was dry and hard. The dust came up to his nostrils. A sand-colored lizard darted in front of his eyes.

  He tried to rise. A foot landed on his neck. The soldiers wore black boots, square-toed. The boots made them seem as if they had something wrong with their feet: as if they would limp badly if they were to walk long distances in them.

  His arms were pulled behind his back. A blow to the back of his neck knocked him out.

  204

  He was tied to a chair, hooded and beaten. The hood was coarse, brown, dirty, with a smell of burnt straw, not sleek and black like the ones that were used later in Beersheva. He whispered his prayers into the hood. I invoke the perfect words of Allah from which neither a good person nor a bad one can escape.

  They lifted him up from the chair with a rope tied around his neck. They looped the rope over a steampipe and stretched him in the air while he stood on the chair. They rocked the chair back and forth. He took a blow to his kidneys, his stomach, his groin.

  He invoked the name of God again. He was thumped several times in the side of the head until he collapsed.

  When he woke he was in a cell, six feet by three. His testicles were so swollen that he could hardly move his legs to swing himself out of bed.

  205

  He was seventeen years old.

  206

  When he was thirteen he hoisted a flag in the school playground: green, red, black, white. Just to piss the soldiers off. So he could throw stones at them when they came to tear it down. To see the cords in their necks tighten. To have them blaze around the corner, jolting to a halt.

  What he liked most of all was the sound of the jeep tires when they plowed past the school gates. Not the soldiers anymore, not the vehicle, not the guns, just the noise of the spinning tires: there was something hungry about them.

  The sounds of his boyhood.

  207

  The silence, then, afterwards, while out walking in the dusty hills.

  208

  Another cave in southern Hebron had a small shaft open to the sky. When he was young, Bassam lay there under the moving stars, watching the pinpoints turn above him.

  Occasional flocks of night birds darted across the face of the opening, disorienting him a moment.

  In prison he tried to replicate the memory. Poems and stories slid from cell to cell among his fellow prisoners: the tale of a mechanical vulture, a herder of giant ostriches, the flight of a centaur, a weeping lion, the sacrifice of virgins along the banks of the Nile.

  209

  Memories hit Rami, too, all the time. A closing door. A beeping sound from the motorbike. The bristle of a razor against a chin. The call for a stretcher. The sound of the metal rollers in the morgue.

  210

  During the first of his three wars Rami drove an army truck for a technical medical team. He brought in the ammunition and carried the Israeli dead out from the Sinai desert.

  One night in an abandoned warehouse in El-Arish, on the north coast of Egypt, the Commander of Rami’s unit sat down in the middle of a pile of grain. They had already lost eight of eleven tanks. The Commander counted out the pieces of grain, dropping them from his fingers one by one. Three, four, five. He dropped the ninth grain by mistake. It seemed to Rami like a brutal piece of theater.

  He walked outside into the dark. Streaks of bomblight went across the sky, an aurora borealis.

  He thought of the war afterwards as a sort of awful artwork: the stretchers went in white and came out red. The beds were hosed down and put back in the truck and he drove into the desert again to pick up men whose faces would soon be ringed in the newspapers.

  211

  When he returned from the war he said to Nurit that he wasn’t sure that all of him had come home.

  212

  From great distances come the starlings

  Beating to these death-ponds: always they come.

  ~ ELISHA PORAT ~

  213

  In the late nineteenth century, rare falcons could be found for sale in the markets of Bethlehem.

  The falcons were captured in the desert by Bedouin boys who dug deep pits at night, covered them with brush and interlaced twigs, and concealed themselves underground. They tied pigeons on long straps as lures, and made the terrified birds fly about in the air at the end of the leather, making slingshot circles in the air.

  The boys waited, peeking out from beneath their camouflage. They knew it was best to capture the birds at sunrise when the winds were calmer and, because of the angle of the light, the traps were less likely to be seen.

  The boys held the long straps in their hands. They wore long camel-hide hand coverings that reached to their elbows. Every now and then they jerked on the straps to distress the pigeons, causing them to flap about.

  The birds of prey, noticing the anguish below, circled on the thermals, then began swooping lower and lower, in careful circles.

  As the falcons descended, the boys pulled the screaming pigeons closer and closer to the hole.

  When the falcons were near enough to the pit—about to swoop upon the tethered pigeon—the boys exploded upward from the hole and grabbed the falcons by both legs, hauled them into the pit, quickly folded back their wings, tied their beaks, hooded them, subdued them.

  The neck of the pigeon was immediately broken and it was fed to the captured falcon in order to calm it down.

  The boys caged the falcons and strapped them to the sides of camels, then moved in caravan through the scrubby hills, wary of ambush. They hurried the camels along, slapping their brindled hides, feeding them grain from their hands.

  The birds commanded considerable money, especially among British aristocrats who put bells on their legs and trained them for game-hawking around Jerusalem.

  214

  Sir Richard Francis Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer, was a keen falconer. Born in Torquay, he learned his craft at Oxford in the 1840s, where he studied Arabic, one of his twenty-nine languages. Tall and thin, he had famously dark eyes, not unlike those of his adored birds. In the army in India he was known as the White Nigger. It was rumored that he was of mostly Romany, or Gypsy, blood. Burton could pass himself off as a trader, diplomat, dervish or holy wanderer.

  He had a penchant for fighting and was known to his fellow soldiers as Ruffian Dick. Sometimes, in the middle of a fight, he would stop and twirl the ends of his thick dark moustache, then continue the scrap undaunted. He took to calling himself the Amateur Barbarian.

  Burton traveled the world in pursuit of gnosis: he wanted to discover the very source of meaning and existence. He made a hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in 1853. He knew full well that non-Muslims were not allowed in the city, under pain of death. He developed what he said was an Arab gait: what he liked to think of as a surrounded walk where he appeared at ease, long-limbed, dismissively nonchalant, while acutely aware of everything that was going on around him. He considered himself a follower of the tariqa, or the mystic path, which was to lead to heaven. He studied Islamic law and learned to play the rubab. He worked on his accent, grew out his hair, darkened his skin with boiled grass, applied kohl to his eyelids, wore flowing muslin shirts, practiced squatting on the ground for hours on end. He apprenticed himself to a blacksmith to learn how to shoe: he thought he might eventually find a trade in Arabian horses.

  Burton made a point of praying five times a day. At night, in the caravan of two hundred worshippers, he l
ed the prayer ceremonies. He rode the camel at the front of the procession, using a giant yellow umbrella for shelter from the brutal sun.

  On the way to Mecca, he managed to help stave off several attacks from roving bands.

  He was well known among his fellow travelers for his ability to spot those places where water might be found in the desert: it wasn’t simply his sensitivity to the flight of the desert birds, but an ability also to intuit smaller clues in the landscape, the slant of the dunes, the dart of a lizard, the coarseness of the sand.

  215

  One of the few all-Arab units in the Israel Defense Forces is comprised almost entirely of Bedouin trackers: they are known among themselves as the Khamsin Unit. A volunteer unit, they are reputed to be able to follow or track even in the middle of pelting sandstorms.

  216

  The Khamsin winds are named after the Arabic word for fifty. They blow from the south to the northwest—hot and sand-filled—for fifty days.

  217

  Imagine the terror of the captive pigeon as the falcon descends. A cloud of dust as it is pulled toward the hole. The tightening of the strap around its leg. The collapse of the camouflaged twigs. The sudden swell of air. The disappearance underground. The darkness. The silence of the boys. A hand reaching up. The shriek of the falcon, its wings folded back. An underground burst of feathers.