by Colum McCann
218
In the desert the best time to track is the early morning or the late afternoon when the sun’s oblique rays create shadows, darkening a footprint or a tire track.
When the sun is high in the sky the Bedouin use portable paper shades of varying weight and thickness to shadow the ground and to detect nuances in the dirt.
The trackers also pride themselves on what they can learn from the smell and the feel of the wind.
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After the Ben Yehuda Street bombings, a Bedouin unit was sent out to the West Bank to flush out the cave where the suicide bombers had lived for almost a year. The task was called Operation Icarus. One of the hideouts was traced to Wadi al-Hamam, the Valley of the Dove.
220
Amicable numbers are two different numbers related in the sense that when you add all their proper divisors together—not including the original number itself—the sums of their divisors equal each other.
The numbers—esteemed by mathematicians—are considered amicable because the proper divisors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55 and 110 which, when added together, reach 284. And the proper divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71 and 142, of which the sum is 220.
They are the only amicable numbers under 1,000.
221
As if those different things of which they are comprised can somehow recognize one another.
222
On the day he left prison, Bassam cut out his number from the chest of his prison uniform. Later he sent the cloth badge to the prison guard Hertzl.
Hertzl framed the badge—220-284—and hung it on the wall in his office in the Department of Mathematics in Hebrew University where he had begun to work on ideas of harmonic integration.
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Sir Richard Francis Burton translated Arabian Nights, also known as The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, also known as One Thousand and One Nights.
224
One of Smadar’s favorites was the Tale of the Hunchback, the story of an amusing hunchback who was assumed dead over and over again, resulting in a string of confessions from all the supposed murderers, only for it to turn out in the end, as revealed by a barber, that the Hunchback was never dead at all.
225
A few weeks after the bombing, Rami went into Smadar’s room. Everything had been kept exactly as it had been the day she left: her copybook open on the table, the earrings spread out on the windowsill, the photo of Sinéad O’Connor in the corner of the mirror.
He removed One Thousand and One Nights from the shelf and began to read the hunchback story.
You see, cried the barber, he’s not dead at all.
226
Burton was wary of being seen as a spy or a sorcerer: on his pilgrimage to Mecca he did not want to be seen taking notes of any kind, even in Arabic. He carried what appeared to be a small Qur’an slung on a leather cord over his shoulder. The book had three compartments—one for his watch and compass, another for his money and the third for pencils and numbered slips of paper that he could hide in the palm of his hand. He kept a small pistol in a pocket and carried a packet of opium which he smoked when alone.
If Burton had been exposed as a nonbeliever, he would have been beaten with sticks, stoned, disemboweled and left alive in a shallow grave in the unbearable heat, subject to attacks by jackals and vultures, until nothing recognizable was left.
227
Once, during Salman Rushdie’s fatwa, the Indian novelist received a single pebble in the mail, alone in a white envelope with no note included. The pebble sat on his desk for years until a New York house-cleaner mistakenly swept it up and threw it away.
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Burton—who also translated the Kama Sutra—was a notorious liar.
It was said that he killed a young Bedouin boy after the boy saw him lifting his robe to urinate rather than squatting in the traditional manner. The story was that Burton knifed the boy to save himself from being exposed as a non-Muslim.
Burton claimed it was just pure fantasy, a piece of prejudiced apocrypha, but years later, drunk in a brothel in Rio de Janeiro, he suggested to friends that he had once killed a child and he would carry the weight of the guilt with him into the grave.
229
You see, cried the barber, he’s not dead at all.
230
What Bassam hated most about the prison beatings was that the guards would take away the prisoners’ clothes and leave them standing there in the great humiliation of their nakedness.
The guards locked them in the canteen. He soon discovered that it wasn’t the first thump of the baton that was the worst: it was the second or third, when he realized it wasn’t going to stop. By the time the seventh or eighth blow landed it almost felt routine. He balled up, with his hands over his head, unsure where the next blow might land.
He woke up in the prison hospital covered in a thin bedsheet.
Only Hertzl would not take part in the beatings. Once he threw himself over Bassam to prevent the baton coming down. Another guard pinned Hertzl up against the wall, headbutted him, asked him if he had a penchant for camels. Hertzl replied that, yes, he was quite interested in the camel’s ability to spit, without fear, in an owner’s face.
231
During the twelfth-century Crusades, Christian warriors tied naked prisoners—Jewish, Muslim, Turk—to mountaintop rocks and then released trained eagles with sharpened talons upon them.
The eagles worked around the liver, the kidneys and the heart until they pecked the prisoners to death.
Artists were employed to depict the Promethean scene in charcoals, bronzes, watercolors.
232
Godfrey of Bouillon, who became Defender of the Holy Sepulchre, decorated his eagles with a pure-silver cross tied around their necks. They left the perch of his armored hand and flew—sinewy and majestic—toward the prisoner.
233
Imagine, then, the swing of the cross as the eagle approached.
234
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The way of the patriarchs.
236
In the early 1990s, eight New York sandhogs were brought to Israel to work on portions of Highway 60, also known as the Tunnels Road. Hard men, fierce, unflappable, some of the best tunnel workers around. Two were American-born, two were Irish, one was Polish, one was Italian, one was Canadian and the other was Croatian.
They packed up their work on the upstate water tunnels in Poughkeepsie and moved to Jerusalem where they lived together in a seedy hotel in the east of the city.
For eight months it was a steady stream of hangovers for all the sandhogs except the Croatian, Marko Kovačević, who was a teetotaler. He was a tall, brooding man, broad-shouldered, intent. He stayed quiet, living on a separate floor from the others.
Every morning Kovačević drove them all to work in their white van. They worked the dynamite, crimping the fuses, blasting out the rocks, supervising the removal of the rubble from under the mountain.
Kovačević’s specialty was using small precise amounts of explosives in tight situations: the men nicknamed him the Mole.
In the evening Kovačević drove the sandhogs home in a cloud of cigarette smoke and then disappeared to walk the holy city by himself. Kovačević was never around on a Friday or Saturday. He grew his hair out and began a beard. He looped his hair in ringlets. Toward the end of the job he disappeared altogether. The sandhogs reported his disappearance to the Israeli police, but Kovačević was nowhere to be found. Foul play wasn’t suspected: suicide seemed the only possibility. The sandhogs contacted his wife at home in the Bronx but she had heard nothing from him either, nor had any money appeared from him in her bank account for three months running.
A missing persons report went out for Kovačević, but the Croatian was not found.
When the tunnel was finish
ed the sandhogs gathered for a ritual they had performed many times before, in New York, Pennsylvania, Florida. The electricity was cut, candles were lit, and together they paraded through the darkness in traditional fashion, their shadows flickering, carrying the memory of their disappeared colleague, along the Way of the Patriarchs, under Beit Jala, from one end of the tunnel to the other.
237
King Hezekiah, in the year 700 B.C., ordered his men to build a tunnel in Jerusalem to bring water from the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam. The tunnel was a meter wide, half a kilometer long.
The men began on opposite sides of the mountain using chisels and hammers and axes. The two tunnels were due to meet in the middle, but the stonecutters had no way of knowing how or where they might collide. At certain times of the day one team would drop their tools and put their ears and hands to the rock to see if they might hear the other.
When they eventually heard the faint vibration of hammers and chisels through the limestone, the tunnelers swerved toward each other. They kept chiseling, the sounds growing clearer and clearer the closer they came. It took one last final S-swerve to bring them together.
When they broke through, water flowed down the gradient between the pool and the spring.
238
Halfway through the Gilo tunnel, the sandhogs tucked a plaster of paris statue of Saint Barbara—patron saint of tunnel diggers—into a crevice near the ceiling.
They were not surprised to learn that the Palestinian workers had their own rituals too: arrows carved in the ceiling every hundred feet, pointing toward Mecca, and a tiny piece of thread tucked under the paving stones to ensure safety.
239
In the winter of 2010, two Palestinian ornithologists went on a field trip into the scrublands halfway between Gilo and Beit Jala. They were out studying the patterns of the shrike, a small bird known for catching insects and impaling them on barbed wire. The ornithologists—Tarek Khalil and Said Hourani—were careful not to wear anything resembling traditional clothing, and were easily visible in their neon vests.
In the late morning, several shots were fired over their heads. The men had been subject to warning shots before, both from the settlers and from houses on their own side in Beit Jala.
The men lay on the dusty ground and raised Tarek’s white T-shirt on a length of stick. Their cellphones had no signal. The men began to crawl back through the shrub among the hard rocks and stunted olive trees. The area—much of which had become a no-man’s-land—was heavily decorated with barbed wire where the shrikes had left their insects. When the men were fairly sure they had crawled back to safety, near a small clay ridge, they again raised a white shirt in the air. Six more shots were fired.
The two men lay together on the ground. At nightfall they were rescued by a joint force of Israelis and Palestinians.
Where the shots had come from became a subject of debate until six months later a tall, thin settler, Mark Kovack, was arrested after a tip-off. A search of his house revealed several sniper rifles. A further search revealed that he had built a series of tunnels out from the settlement into No-man’s-land, where he could shoot at intruders from any angle.
Kovack, who was known by other settlers as a quiet recluse, claimed to have been born in Jerusalem, but his accent was Eastern European. A quick background check revealed one of his previous jobs: he had worked as a sandhog in the Bronx.
240
The impaling of insects along the wire by shrikes is known to be part of their courtship behavior.
241
Kovack is said to have bought a house in Ariel, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. He is the owner of a swimming pool company. For years a billboard could be seen over Highway 1, a photo of a sparkling pool beside a red-roofed villa, a phone number, and a single phrase: Your Oasis Awaits.
242
During the 2004 operation on Nablus, Israeli soldiers advanced into the city.
Instead of moving through the narrow streets and the densely packed alleyways, soldiers moved through walls and ceilings, cutting holes and blasting their way aboveground, house to house, shop to shop, stealthily worming their way through, painting fluorescent arrows on the walls to show other soldiers behind them which way to go.
When they stopped, they used thermal-imaging goggles in order to see what lay on the other side of each wall. Men and women tucked together in embrace. Sleeping children. Young men with keffiyehs over their mouths.
The burrowing was known to the soldiers as walking through walls.
243
The phone call came in the middle of the evening. Fourteen years after the bombing. Rami was taken aback. A documentary filmmaker. She had been in contact with the families in Assira al-Shamaliya. The mothers and fathers of two of the three bombers were willing to meet with him. In the heart of the West Bank, she said. It was unprecedented. They would allow themselves to be filmed by a Western crew. In their village. In their houses. In their living rooms.
She would arrange transportation, security too. He had nothing to worry about. She could guarantee it. He would have to be smuggled into the West Bank, but he knew already that that part would be easy.
They would be waiting for him, the parents of the men who had murdered his daughter.
244
Rami could see himself in a high-arched house, sitting on a sofa with patterned cushions, a tray of cardamom coffee and sweets laid out in front of him, flowers, pottery, a miniature Dome of the Rock in white mother-of-pearl alongside a careful arrangement of photographs on the high wooden shelf.
245
In the summer of 1932, as part of an exchange of letters between several noted intellectuals, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud.
Einstein praised the Austrian’s devotion to the internal and external liberation of man from the evils of war. This liberation was the profound hope of all moral and spiritual leaders from Christ to Goethe and Kant, universally recognized as leaders who existed beyond their own times and countries. And yet, Einstein asked, was it not significant that these very persons had been essentially ineffective in their desires to change the course of human affairs? That they had, for years, been unable to stem the savagery? That the patterns of violence could not be mitigated, even in the face of the most meaningful pleas?
The essential question that he wanted to ask Freud was if he thought it might be possible to guide the psychological development of humankind so that it became resistant to the psychoses of hate and destruction, thereby delivering civilization from the hovering menace of war?
246
Even as he said yes, Rami knew that it would likely never happen.
247
He drove that night to Bassam’s apartment in Anata. On the motorbike. He peeled off the bumper sticker before he went through the checkpoint. It will not be over until we talk.
They huddled together for hours in the living room. The offer stunned Bassam, but it might, he said, cause more grief than anything it might ever solve. The villagers were simple people. They farmed olives. They cut wheat sheaves. They had no idea how to deal with cameras or microphones. They might be out of their depth. Something could go wrong. Perhaps they wouldn’t understand him, his straight talk, his honesty. He was an Israeli after all, face it, he was loud, he was forceful, he might go too far, his anger could overflow. It might end up a sound bite. Tensions were high. The villagers, too, could get in trouble. They might not follow the proper political lines. Ramifications. Repercussions. Word could spread. They could be called collaborators, accused of normalization. One could never know. It was a minefield. Someone might get hurt.
They walked out of the apartment, down the stairs, into the night. On the horizon a fire was burning in the nearby Shu’fat camp. Another protest. Beyond that, over the Wall, faint stars hung dull over the scrublands. The two men stood on the sloping pavement, silent awhile.
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—Don’t do it, my friend, said Bassam.
248
When the British beat a hasty retreat from Mandate Palestine in 1948, among the things that army corporal Paul Hartingtone left behind were his prize falcons.
Hartingtone, who had been decorated several times in North Africa during the Second World War, had bought and trained two cherished peregrines during his time in Palestine. Sympathetic to the Jewish cause, Hartingtone left a note for a local leader of the underground resistance asking him to take care of the birds, which were kept on the balcony of a large white limestone house in Jerusalem. The prizewinning peregrines had been left in silver cages with enough food to last them a few days. He left veterinary certificates and grooming instructions and even a little money to make sure the birds were looked after.