by Colum McCann
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One of the first photos he saw in the library was of the camp in Theresienstadt. It showed a young man in a tuxedo and a white bow tie in front of a music stand, busy putting rosin on a violin bow, staring straight at the camera, about to play.
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Later he would meet Englishmen who rolled their eyes when he mentioned Bradford and he could almost see their disdain, nothing like Oxford, nothing like Cambridge, nothing like Edinburgh, nothing like Manchester, but he and Salwa loved it, the openness of the town, the space, the green park, the clean path along the river, the rows of low redbrick houses, the chimneys, the bright tinny shops, the music in the elevators, Manor Row, Mirror Pool, North Parade, Tumbling Hill, Rawson, the stretches of neon, the cafés, the shops, the waft of vinegar, the falafel stall, the red double-decker buses, the men in bowler hats, the women in burqas, the fire engines, the rubbish trucks, the ringing of church bells, the call of the muezzin, the postman, the Indian cop on Cheapside with the dreadlocks, the slack-wire walker outside the Peace Museum, the walk home along Pemberton Drive, the quiet street, the grass verge, the lopsided gate, the yellow climbing rose along the wall, the blue door, the white bell, the silver letter slot, the hatstand, the creaking stairs, five bedrooms, their own bedroom looking out to a small patch of garden, the ticking of radiators, the kids allowed out in the afternoon to the park without worry, watching them run along the water, ripping bread to feed the ducks—the surprise of it all, even under the bowl of grey English sky—walking through the rain, and, yes, even the rain itself, the slanting sheets, the sun showers, the night drizzle, the hammering storms, and the endless jokes about umbrellas, some of which Salwa, brand-new to the language, found quite funny.
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What goes up, Salwa, when the rain comes down?
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In the library he read Primo Levi. Adorno. Susan Sontag. Edward Said. He watched Schindler’s List, searched out other films, documentaries, combed through reams of news footage. Dug out pictures of the camps. Found everything he could about Theresienstadt. He read, too, about the effects of trauma and its intersection with memory; Adler, Janet, Freud. The acquisition of fear. The disintegration of memory over time. The task of language.
At times it seemed to him that his brain had caught fire. He would come home to Salwa late at night, exhausted, thrilled: he would fall asleep on the sofa, books open on his chest, feet propped up on the coffee table.
He began work on his master’s thesis: The Holocaust: The Use and Abuse of History and Memory. He wrote it in longhand. He thought in Arabic, but wrote in English. He was aware that these were not new ideas, just new to him. Still, it felt as if he were in the territory of the explorer. He had cast himself out to sea. Most of the time he ended up crashing back on the shore, but every now and then he chanced upon a small rumor of land. Still, when he tried to find purchase, the land disappeared before his eyes. This was the true terror, he thought. His was a responsibility not to diminish. He wanted to talk about the use of the past in the justification of the present. About the helix of history, one moment bound to the next. About where the past intersects with the future.
He was the oldest in his class. Peace Studies. He sat in the second-to-last row of seats, to the side of the room, kept as quiet as possible. Hardly ever spoke above a whisper. He seldom volunteered, but if he did it was slow-spoken, soft, considered. He left class with his head bowed. Smoked alone, away from the buildings. Kept his prayer mat out of view.
Still, the word leaked out: he was a Palestinian, an activist, he had lost his ten-year-old daughter, he was studying the Holocaust.
He knew the names of the janitors, the groundsmen, the canteen ladies. He nodded to them as he went along. They were open and jovial. They wanted to know what football team he supported. He wasn’t interested in the game, but he began to wear a blue-and-white Bradford scarf. They loved the way he pronounced the town, his thick Arabic English. Brr-ad-a-fort. They nicknamed him Kayser Söze for his limp. They told him he looked a bit like Kevin Spacey, an Arab version. He had no idea what they were talking about so he rented the film and watched it with Salwa. They laughed at the idea of him being one of the Usual Suspects. The life of a Palestinian. The small ironies.
He was invited out to parties, to dinners, to symposiums. He accepted the invitations, one in Glasgow, one in Copenhagen, one in Belfast. It was his curse: he hated to disappoint people, he could never say no.
He had one simple answer to the questions that inevitably came his way. There was no symmetry between the jailer and the jailed. Destroy the jail. The Occupation was based on the fallacy of security. It had to end. Nothing else would be possible until that happened.
A sort of haze drifted over his listeners. He knew that his answer disappointed them. They wanted something else—one state, two states, three states, eight. They wanted him to dissect Oslo, to talk about the right of return, to debate the end of Zionism, the new settlements, colonialism, imperialism, hudna, the United Nations. They wanted to know how he felt about armed resistance. About the settlers themselves. They had heard so much, they said, and yet they knew so little. What about the strip malls, the stolen land, the fanatics? He demurred. For him everything still came back around to the Occupation. It was a common enemy. It was destroying both sides. He didn’t hate Jews, he said, he didn’t hate Israel. What he hated was being occupied, the humiliation of it, the strangulation, the daily degradation, the abasement. Nothing would be secure until it ended. Try a checkpoint just for one day. Try a wall down the middle of your schoolyard. Try your olive trees ripped up by a bulldozer. Try your food rotting in a truck at a checkpoint. Try the occupation of your imagination. Go ahead. Try it.
The listeners nodded, but he wasn’t quite sure if they fully understood. The thing about the Occupation was that it never let you decide. It took away your ability for choice. Banish it and choice would appear.
Still, his listeners pressed him. Where was his moral line on violence? Were his politics not obsolete? What sort of concessions would he make to the right of return? What sort of territorial swaps? What would happen to the town of Ariel? What about the Bedouin? The unrecognized villages? Why would he not study the Nakba instead of the Holocaust?
The questions exhausted him. He changed, then, the tone of his voice. He leaned in. He whispered. Their questions were valid, and he would answer them, he said, but give me time, give me time, the only way I can work towards it is to leverage the power of my grief, do you understand? He no longer wanted to fight. The greatest jihad, he said, was the ability to talk. This is what he did now. Language was the sharpest weapon. It was a mighty thing. He wanted to wield it. He needed to be careful. My name is Bassam Aramin. I am the father of Abir. Everything else rose out of that.
He felt himself so often back in prison: that moment when he saw the documentary, the naked bodies above the ditches, the wrist numbers, the freezing cold snapping the branches in midair. How he left prison, not so much a man of peace—even the word peace itself was awkward at times—but a man who wanted to pit himself against the ignorance of violence, including his own. The irony, then, of the years that followed: his marriage, his children, the apartment in Anata, the peace work. And then that rubber bullet flying through the air, on an ordinary January day, out of the blue, the smash of his daughter’s forehead against the pavement.
Sometimes he left the symposiums early. He wanted to be home. To be quiet. To be undisturbed. He was amazed to open the back door of the house and see Salwa out weeding the garden, her headscarf down among the rhododendrons.
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A community of feeling. A mythology of the instincts.
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Late at night he walked around the streets of Bradford, reading. There were cul-de-sacs, alleyways, roundabouts. He began to carry a notebook. He stood under globes of uneven lamplight and scribbled, walked on and on, a flat
English hat on his head. He avoided the center of town: it was loud with alcohol. Sometimes he circled the park endlessly. When he got home, the hieroglyphics of his notebook were difficult to decipher. Sometimes the pages were damp with mist. He unpeeled them and began to transcribe. Memory. Trauma. The rhyme of history and oppression. The generational shifts. The lives poisoned with narrowness. What it might mean to understand the history of another.
It struck him early on that people were afraid of the enemy because they were terrified that their lives might get diluted, that they might lose themselves in the tangle of knowing each other.
There was a sort of burn to the ideas, he thought, a scorching. After a while he wanted to stop writing altogether and just read. At every turn of a page there was something new to discover. He liked the notion, now, of being thrown off balance.
He immersed himself in the library. He was often the last one to leave. He sat in stillness. The lights flickered off. He gathered the books and scattered papers. His backpack was full to bursting. He bent toward home. His body felt lighter somehow, his limp less pronounced. He could see a change come over Salwa too. She was looser, happier. She hired a tutor, a young French girl, to teach her English. He could hear them together in the kitchen, giggling over the pronunciation of words. Um-ber-ella. He went walking with the children in the park.
Bassam knew that it would not last, it was temporary, he would have to go back, the scholarship moment would run out. He found himself one night out walking the streets in his long white sleeping thobe and sandals. This was not Anata, this was not East Jerusalem, this was not the West Bank: this was England. It was not his. He knew that in his happiness he had grown ready for return.
Above his desk he tacked a line he remembered from the Persian poet, Rumi: Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself.
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One of the things that Steven Spielberg knew—even as a young filmmaker in Hollywood—is that history is in constant acceleration, but sooner or later a force, any force, must hit a curve: that curve, then, is a story that must be told.
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If you divide death by life you will find a circle.
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Rami was in his car when he heard the news. On his way to Tel Aviv to pick up his mother-in-law at Ben Gurion. The traffic was light. Early afternoon. He was listening to the radio. The Beatles. The music stopped abruptly. A man’s voice. Breaking news. Within the past half hour. Ben Yehuda Street. A café. Unknown number of casualties. Police on the scene.
It was always the same: a dip in the stomach, an awareness of his throat, a travel of dark behind his eyes. He performed the quick mathematics of where everyone was—Nurit at the university, Smadar at home babysitting with Yigal, Elik on duty, Guy at swim practice. All accounted for, good, yes. Breathe.
Some drivers in front of him touched their brakes, like they had just heard the news too, a flash of red. Already there were sirens on the other side of the highway: police and ambulances on their way.
He calculated again. Thursday. Nurit in university, yes. Smadar babysitting, yes. The older boys safe, yes.
Take it easy. Breathe. Just breathe.
Up ahead, he saw a clutter of cars moving toward the exit. He hit the blinker, pulled back into the lane again, touched the blinker a second time. The car drifted. It felt like it was operating apart from him. There was something here, he couldn’t quite locate it, a tingle of doubt, that faint gnarl in the gut. There was always somebody who would know somebody. Nobody in Israel lived unbombed.
He hadn’t charged his phone. He should find a phone booth, he thought, give Nurit a quick call. He hit the blinker again and nudged halfway into the lane, halfway out.
An eruption of car horns sounded behind him.
Rami reached for the dial, flicked through the stations. Bomb in Jerusalem. Bomb in Jerusalem. Bomb in Jerusalem.
Breathe. Keep calm.
He left it on 95.0 FM. A woman’s voice this time. They were waiting for a live update. It was believed now to be two bombs. Police activity. The city was on alert for other incidents. Traffic chaos. Stay tuned for more updates. Dozens injured. Possible fatalities.
A horn blared. He was surprised to see so much space in front of his car. He lifted his foot from the clutch and the car lurched forward, off the ramp. What exit was this anyway? He couldn’t remember. So many of them looked the same. He scanned the horizon for a gas station or a fast food joint. Anywhere with a telephone. Just for reassurance. To tell them that he was okay, no worries, no need to panic, he was on the road, three-quarters of the way to the airport. The routine check-in. Hi honey, everything’s fine.
Two bombs for certain, said the radio again. Possibly three. A number of casualties. The street was thronged with shoppers. Back-to-school time. The area was in full lockdown. Unconfirmed reports now of a death, possibly several.
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Back-to-school time.
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He saw a row of three telephones at the side of a Paz station. He pulled to the curb, locked the door, dug deep in his jeans for his wallet, his Telecart. Two of the phones were taken. The third was free. A row of business cards was stuck haphazardly along the edge of the phone: a strip club in Tel Aviv, computer repair, lawn mower service, dog walker. He lifted the receiver. No dial tone. A second time, a third time. Come to Where the Baby Dolls Play. Ariel Landscaping. Mobile Repair ₪ 50. We Have You On Our Leash. Pussycat, Pussycat, Where Have You Been?
He slammed the receiver. The phone slipped off the cradle, dangled down. He stepped back off the curb.
At the middle phone stood a young girl, not much older than Smadar. She tossed her hair and laughed. Rami paced behind her. Just get off the phone please, he wanted to say, I have to call my wife, I just want to check in, can’t you hurry?
The caller at the other phone was young too. Mid-twenties, dark-skinned, a tracksuit top, sunglasses on his head. He was leaning close to the phone, his hand cupped over the receiver, whispering. Rami paused a moment. Was he talking in Arabic? Rami stepped along the curb, leaned forward, listened. No, it was Hebrew, he had no accent at all.
Rami felt a faint flush of shame in his stomach.
Two other cars had pulled up quickly. A man in one, a woman in the other. The woman—tall, thin, curly-haired—was first to the bank of phones. She picked up the dangling cord.