by Colum McCann
The fling-back is known, tongue-in-cheek, among rioters as the right of return.
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At the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, flocks of swifts migrating from South Africa arrive back in January or February of each year. They nest in the cracks in the ancient limestone blocks.
Some swifts can be seen entering the tiny cracks in head-on flight, a marvel of speed and agility. Others go into their nesting holes by taking sharp 90-degree turns in the air, one wing tip pointing down, the other slanted skyward.
They share the brickwork with pigeons, jackdaws and sparrows. Feral pigeons sometimes block the entrance to the holes and so the swifts have to wheel about, waiting for a chance to get back into their nests, thirty feet above the ground.
The evening journeys are known as vesper flights. At dusk the birds carve the space above the heads of the faithful, many of whom cram prayers scribbled on tiny slips of paper into the wall while they put their heads against the stone to pray.
Sometimes, in a strong wind, the prayer slips loosen and the notes are caught by the swifts in midair.
Make me a vessel, Lord. Forgive me my sins. Make Dana love me back. Cure my strep. G-d protect me. Beitar Jerusalem for the Champions League! Give Jeremiah hope. Grant true rest upon the wings of the Shechinah.
The swifts fly so low and fast that the men and women below are forced to duck. If seen from the blimp above, it looks like a wave of hats and headscarves, a dip and a rise, a dip and a rise, a dip and a rise again.
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Twice a year sanitation workers remove the tiny slips of paper crammed into the holes of the Western Wall.
The slips are collected in plastic bags and then buried in the cemetery on the Mount of Olives. A large backhoe digs the hole and the prayers are placed inside and covered with soil.
The local gravedigger tends the site which he ritually replants each season with new grass.
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A giant steel key sits on top of a keyhole-shaped archway in the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, a reminder of the houses left behind by Palestinians in 1948. The key is nine meters high and weighs almost a ton. It has been inscribed in several different languages. It is known locally as the Key of Return. A Not For Sale sign is imprinted along its shaft, alongside several bullet marks and scratches from the impact of tear gas canisters.
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In the Cremisan monastery in Beit Jala the vespers sound out when the sun disappears behind the surrounding hills.
In decades gone by, a hundred monks or more would gather in the light-streamed chapel to recite their prayers, the chants slipping around the building, along the stone floors and out the high windows.
After the prayers, the monks would walk out the arched doorway, down the gravel path, toward the vineyard in the gathering dark. They carried dented silver buckets and watering cans. They spread out around the vineyard, pouring small circles of water around the bases of the plants. The best time to water the vines was at night: it decreased the evaporation rate.
Many of the monks were Palestinian. Others were Italian and French and Portuguese. To make wine so close to Bethlehem and Jerusalem was a sacred pursuit.
They sent bottles back to their hometown churches in Tuscany, Sicily, Jura, Languedoc, Umbria, Aix-en-Provence, Porto, Faro.
It was marked in shipping vats as holy wine, the Blood of Christ, to be handled with care.
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Mitterrand said that his last supper—the ortolans—would combine the taste of God and the suffering of Jesus and man’s eternal bloodshed all together in one single meal.
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At harvest time, the nuns from the sister convent, a quarter mile down the road, came to help the monks out.
The women shuffled under the starlight in their long habits, kneeling to pick the ripe fruit. On the darkest nights they carried candles as they moved through the fields, their white robes spectral among the vines.
At sunrise it was not unusual for local children, on their way to the convent school, to see a line of nuns walking back along the road with their dresses stained, small dots of purple at the knees.
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After a decade alone at a monastery in Aleppo, the fifth-century ascetic Saint Simeon proclaimed that God wanted him to prove his faith by becoming immobile: to move as little as possible, to be static, to embrace the mind rather than the body.
He climbed to the top of an abandoned pillar in the Syrian town of Taladah, built himself a small platform, and tried not to move in any excessive way. He lashed his body to a pole with palm fronds to keep himself upright even while sleeping. He remained standing even in the fiercest heat and sandstorms.
He collected drinking water in jars. A rope-and-pulley system was devised to deliver food. Small boys from nearby villages sometimes climbed the pillar to give him bread and goat’s milk.
Besieged by other ascetics and admirers from all over the world, Simeon decided to move the platform higher—his first pillar was said to have been just nine feet tall, but the final one was over fifty feet from the ground. He could not, even in this, find solitude: admirers still flocked to see him.
Simeon’s monastic elders began to wonder whether his desire for isolation was an act of genuine faith. They ordered him down from the pillar under the assumption that if he descended willingly his was a truly holy act, but if he stayed it would be a sin of pride.
Simeon announced that he would come down of his own accord, and they allowed him, then, to stay.
He died after spending thirty-seven years on the pillars.
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The wine-making in the monastery—grape crushing, bottling, labeling—was fully automated in the 1970s, taken away from the monks, and bought by local Palestinian businessmen.
The number of monks living in the monastery began to drop. Those who came to live there were mostly retired. They had the air of exhausted saints. They could be seen wandering the grounds, through the garden and down through the vineyard, their hands clasped behind their backs.
Rami had heard that there once used to be as many as a hundred monks, but now there were no more than five or six.
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Every Saturday, in Bradford, Bassam pulled on a white string undershirt and old tracksuit bottoms. The push mower was kept in a coal shed at the side of the house. He slipped open the stiff metal bolt on the door and wrestled the rusty machine out.
The mower fascinated him. At first it just tore the grass, but he sharpened the blades by running a metal file along the edges. He oiled and tightened the bolts on the side wheels. He rolled the mower back and forth a few times to make sure it was working properly and then set to work: he liked the churning sound the blades made.
The garden was small, so he took to mowing the verge on the service road outside. It took him hours with the primitive mower, back and forth, back and forth.
During Eid al-Adha that year Salwa bought him a pair of gardening gloves. He immediately slipped them on and went out to weed the garden.
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Bombing operations in Gaza and raids into the West Bank are often referred to by Israeli officials as mowing the lawn.
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As a teenager, Bassam learned to carry an onion in his pocket to combat the scorch of tear gas in his lungs.
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When Bassam returned from England to the West Bank—to the apartment on the slopes of Anata—the first person to come see him was Rami. He arrived by taxi to avoid any hassle at the checkpoint.
Rami knocked on the door and they embraced, two kisses on each cheek. The table was laid out: a casserole of maqluba with chicken and savory yogurt.
Later they walked down the hill together to the schoolyard where a memorial playground had been built for Abir: monkey bars, a slide, a sandpit, a spinning whee
l.
Together the two men tended a tiny patch of grass at the entrance. There were no clippers, so they borrowed a plastic-handled scissors from a schoolteacher who sat by the window and watched them as they chatted.
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The motorcycle thrums as he moves through Beit Jala.
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It will not be over until we talk.
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He knows the way through the old section of the town, a steep climb and then a smooth corner up into Area B again: good sightlines, he can take it fast.
He turns the bike at the end of Manger Street, halfway toward Bethlehem.
He adjusts the music on his phone, taps the side of his helmet to seat the earbuds in place, pulls back on the throttle and drives up, alongside the Wall, toward the Everest Hotel.
A cup of coffee, perhaps. Or a bite to eat. Somewhere to sit and rest awhile.
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The bar-headed goose can fly at almost thirty thousand feet, allowing it to migrate over the Himalayas before sweeping south. Pairs of them have been spotted over Mount Makalu, the fifth-highest mountain on earth.
In certain villages the birds are caught and the names of the dead are written in dark ink on the underside of the birds’ bellies.
The geese are said to bring news of the dead to the heavens.
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The hotel, he knows, is now Russian-owned. It was, before the Wall went up, a far busier place—weddings, christenings, ameens, parties, fine meals—but it has in recent years become a little shabby and run-down.
At the top of the hill he passes through the ornate gates, swings right, parks the motorbike away from two large buses. He clicks off his phone, removes his helmet.
A moment of relief. Like emerging from a caisson. He flips open the top box at the back of the bike and places the helmet inside, makes his way toward the hotel entrance.
Never a good idea to walk in anywhere in the West Bank wearing a helmet, even at sixty-seven years of age.
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He is always surprised by the sight of pigeon on the menu.
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They seemed the most unlikely of friends, even beyond the obvious, one being Israeli, the other Palestinian.
They had met first in the Everest Hotel. On a Thursday. It was that time of the evening when Beit Jala willed itself to cool down: the land breathed, the sun dipped, the birds rose, the hills took on a sudden burst of dark green.
They were sitting outside at the hotel picnic tables, a dozen of them, eight Israelis, three Palestinians, one Swedish reporter. Rami had been invited by his son Elik. Rami was curious about Combatants for Peace. The organization had begun to gain traction. He was proud of what his son could stir.
The group had launched into discussion about who was a combatant and who was not: the question mattered to determine who was eligible for membership. What exactly was a combatant anyway? Was it simply someone who had just fought in a war? Was it anyone who had served in the military? What about someone who had served outside the Territories? Wasn’t someone who sat in an army office a combatant too? Why did it matter? Surely a combatant could be in combat for anything at all? Perhaps everyone was a combatant? What about women and children? If Israeli women were combatants because of military service, surely Palestinian women were combatants too? And what if they were Jordanian or American or Lebanese or Egyptian? Who could be a founding member? Who could be a sustaining member? Would the organization be compromised if it cast too large a net? What would happen if the definition was too small? Was it something they should put in the bylaws?
Rami and Bassam were seated next to each other. Rami nursed a lemonade. Bassam drank coffee and chain-smoked. The talk went in circles. Rami could see the shadows of the trees lengthening.
After a moment, he found himself speaking. He wasn’t sure how it had happened. He had come to observe, to hang out, to watch his son in action. He hadn’t intended to speak, but the talk had drifted to his own organization, the Parents Circle, and how they dealt with membership and language. In order to be a member of the Circle one had to have lost a child, to be one of the bereaved, what an Israeli would call the mispachat hashkhol, what a Palestinian might call thaklaan or mathkool. There were a few hundred members already: it was one of the rare organizations that wished they were smaller in number. The bereaved were not just parents, they were brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins too. But, then again, like a combatant, maybe everyone was bereaved, and perhaps there were issues with the word parent too—what if a child were adopted, or what if the parents themselves were dead? What about family members? One could spin through language endlessly, looking for a word or a term, perhaps they should simply all just gather the organizations together under a giant umbrella.
After a while—he didn’t know how long—Rami looked down and was amazed to see that he was smoking. There was an ashtray beside him and he was flicking the ash with a practiced ease. It had been years since he had smoked. He hadn’t even realized that he had lit one. He certainly could not remember having asked for one. Somehow he had just reached for the Palestinian’s box and he had helped himself. Smoking with a stranger, and not just that, but they had reached into the same pack, and not just that, but Bassam was silent, and not just that, but his eyes were closed and he was listening. There was something elemental about it. As quickly as the feeling arrived it seemed to vanish. Rami stopped speaking, the words disappeared from him and the cigarette tasted awful. The conversation went back once again to the question of naming, but he was still sitting there, alongside Bassam, in the Everest Hotel, in this unexpected guild.
Only his son Elik had seemed to notice. He was nodding quietly: he was a smoker too.
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The only other time he smoked with Bassam was two years later, outside the hospital, shortly before Abir’s heart monitor flatlined: they sat quietly, on the benches under the dark trees, sharing one back and forth, the red ash pulsing between them.
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Bassam, when he prayed, touched his head lightly against the ground, but never quite firmly enough to develop a prayer bruise.
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Save us from enormities whether open or hidden.
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Upon arrival in the Ritz hotel in Washington, D.C.—where, in the fall of 1993, his entourage was staying on the entire top floor—Yasser Arafat was given a welcome basket.
In the wicker basket—along with a schedule, a flashlight pen, two bottles of sparkling water, a bag of honey-flavored pecans and a White House thermos—was a carefully wrapped cookie in the shape of a dove. The icing was white and the eyes were two tiny dots of blue.
In the elevator down to the lobby, Arafat—wearing an ill-fitting suit and his customary keffiyeh—turned to his bodyguards, stroked his scraggly beard, and with a straight face said: What am I going to do, eat it?
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In May of 1987 the French artist Philippe Petit decided that a white dove should be part of a planned high-wire performance across the Hinnom Valley.
Petit thought of his walk as an olive branch: he would release the dove midway across the wire, cast it free in the air, watch it fly away.
The day before the walk, Petit scoured the streets of the Old City—market to market, alleyway to alleyway, among the stalls of sweets, herbs, fruit, vegetables, clothes, souvenirs, crosses, mezuzahs, trinkets. He talked to vendors, hotel concierges, butchers, and even searched in upscale delicatessens for anyone who might know where he could buy a small dove to release on the walk. He found parrots, partridges, large pigeons, but no doves.
A part of Petit relished the acute irony: No doves in Jerusalem, but still he continued his search in obscure corners, market to market, spreading the word on the street.
On the morning of the walk, in the streets of the Old City, he was waved down by
an elderly man with a scraggly beard and a dark robe. The stranger spoke in broken English. He took Petit by the arm and led him down a warren of cobbles and corners.
On the counter of a tailor shop, amid bolts of colorful cloth, sat a row of birds in ancient bell-shaped cages. The elderly man began to take the birds out, one by one. Petit recognized immediately that they were useless: too big, too dark, too unwieldy.
—It’s a pigeon, said Petit. I need a dove. Something white. Small. This size. Not this.
Petit turned to leave the shop but the seller held his elbow, grinned, and took out the smallest, lightest-colored pigeon from the cage: it appeared slightly grey but off-white in the light.
The elderly man bowed. As Petit gestured to leave, he felt the bird placed in his hand.
—Take it, said the man. Free.
Petit stroked the belly of the bird. It was still too big, too grey, but at a distance it might actually work.
—Free, the man said again. For you.