by Colum McCann
Petit shook the shop owner’s hand, paid him fifty shekels, walked the caged bird back through the Old City. Nothing, he knew, was ever free.
In his room at the Mount Zion hotel on the Hebron Road Petit practiced releasing the large bird from a specially designed pocket sewn into the thigh of his billowy trousers.
It flapped awkwardly around the room and landed on Petit’s bed.
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As he grew older, the Spanish artist José Ruiz Blasco lost some of the dexterity in his fingers. The blood backed away. He found it hard to grip his paintbrushes. He could no longer properly paint the feet of the rock doves he had become famous for depicting.
In Málaga he had earned the name El Palermo, the Pigeon Fancier, and he kept numerous birds around his house, some in cages, some flying freely in the downstairs rooms.
Saddened by the loss of agility, José asked his young son Pablo to help him complete the delicate work of the feet. The boy had already shown a talent: he could often be found in the Plaza de la Merced, sketching birds in the dirt with a sycamore stick, making outlines in the dust with his bare toe.
When José Ruiz saw the work his son could do—the intricate beauty of the dove’s feet—he gave the boy his favorite palette and brushes.
—Now, go paint, he said.
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At the World Peace Congress in 1949, Pablo Picasso unveiled a drawing of a dove carrying an olive branch in its mouth. The sketch—inspired by the Biblical story of Noah and the ark, the dove returning with a leafy branch signifying that the floodwaters had receded—immediately became a universal symbol of opposition to war.
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In 1974, Mahmoud Darwish wrote Yasser Arafat’s speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations: Today I have come bearing an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter’s gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.
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I repeat: do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.
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On her bedroom wall, just below a picture of Sinéad O’Connor, Smadar hung a Picasso dove. It was positioned on the wall so it angled upwards rather than moving in brisk sideways flight. The beak was exaggerated to hold the olive branch.
Beneath it, a second ghostly dove had bled through the page. On the ghost image the beak was slightly sharper.
The sketch remained on her wall for years after her death until Rami’s grandchildren took it down and put it, along with many of her other possessions, in a see-through plastic box kept at the end of her bed.
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The Hinnom Valley is also known as Gehenna, where, in Biblical times, ritual sacrifice took place in the warren of caves and altars to honor the fire god Moloch. Babies were placed in pyres of olive wood, strapped to stakes, or attached to cantilevered platforms which slowly turned towards the fire, roasting the children alive bit by bit. Loud drums were played by priests to drown out the cries of the children as they burned. The smell from their smoldering bodies reached through the valley.
It was also where Judas bought his Field of Blood after betraying Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Judas later hanged himself from a tree and then fell headlong in the field where his body burst open and his intestines spilled out.
It was said that the gates of hell could be found in the valley, and they were often depicted in monumental works of art.
In the Qur’an, too, the valley was a place of torment for sinners and those who did not believe.
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Petit said that he could hear the sounds of the centuries turning beneath him as he crossed the valley.
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He wore the loose white outfit of a court jester. The right leg was decorated with pale Israeli blue, the left leg with the intertwined colors of the Palestinian flag.
He stepped out from the roof of the Spanish Colony building, just yards from the Mount Zion hotel.
The wire was strung three hundred meters across the valley. He had called the performance Walking the Harp: A Reach for Peace. The profile of the walk appeared to him like a harp: the bowl-shaped depth of the valley, the level edge of the tightrope, the eleven cavallettis strung in place to keep the wire taut.
The walk was three hundred meters long at an incline of twenty meters. The wire was three-quarters of an inch thick. Crowds gathered to watch from all parts of the city, some perched along the walls of Jerusalem, others by the Cinematheque, others gazing up at him from the ground below.
It struck Petit that, because of the incline, he would be ascending into the sky.
Below him was the valley with its pockets of green and its burial chambers and its ancient caves and its stories of hellish sorrow.
A strong summer wind had whipped up. The valley appeared beautiful in the early evening light. Antennae glistened on the distant rooftops. The blimp hovered. Petit stepped off the roof of the Spanish Colony building to huge roars and applause.
His outfit billowed. He held the captive white pigeon in a red silk scarf in the pocket of his trousers.
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As a boy, Picasso liked to draw by candlelight. He had already intuited that the moving shadows cast by the light would instill a feeling of sway in his work.
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Petit paused on the wire and looked back towards the Old City. Out of the corner of his eye he could see several small exuberant figures leaping from building to building, trying to follow the line of his walk.
He had heard that the fastest way to get anywhere in the Old City of Jerusalem was by cutting across the rooftops.
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In 1882 a British foundation, the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, set up an eye hospital overlooking the valley, serving Muslims, Jews and Christians. It was thought to be healing for the patient that his first sight with the bandages removed would be the Holy City, above what were known as the gates of hell.
From the rim of the valley they might then see the Pool of Siloam where archaeologists had uncovered the remains of the Second Temple pool in which Jesus told a blind man to wash in order to restore his vision.
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Later, Petit would recall that, for no particular reason, he had put the pigeon in the pocket on the Israeli side of his trousers. On the sleeves of his outfit the colors were reversed, so when he put his hand in his pocket it appeared as if one territory was reaching inside the other.
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Even with his poor eyesight—and long before the surgery to repair his macular degeneration—Moti Richler went along to the walk and stood down in the valley to see if he might catch a glimpse of Philippe Petit.
The cable was longer than the one he had monitored during World War Two, and went in a slightly different direction, but that hardly mattered: Moti was delighted that the wire was remembered at all.
He waited in the crowd at the bottom of the incline. He could almost hear the throaty sound of his wartime motorbike moving along the valley floor.
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Forty thousand people were said to have watched Petit’s walk across what was once known as No-man’s-land.
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Rami too: he carried three-year-old Smadar on his shoulders.
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Bassam was in prison.
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Every Thursday in Manhattan, just as the sun rises, two Hasidic rabbis drive around the perimeter of the city to check if a high-wire fishing line that runs from Harlem to Houston Street, and from the East River to the Hudson, is still intact.
The thin string—found about twenty-five feet in the air—marks the area of eruv, a ritual enclosure that allows Orthodox members of the faith to carry certain objects that would otherwise be banned on the Sabbath.
The men drive slowly, looking upwards—past the United Nations, along the river, crosstown, up the West Side—following the
string that loops from building to building, hooks from traffic light to pole, snakes its way around corners.
The eruv creates a private space out of a public one and enables the faithful to carry prayer books and keys or push strollers without breaching religious law.
There are other strings too, all over the city, hundreds of miles of them, marking different areas of eruv. The string is almost invisible in places but the perimeter threads are thicker, sometimes a quarter inch of rope.
A strong storm can bring the wires down. A flock of birds. A parade float. A plastic bag tugging too hard in the wind. If the rabbis find a gap in the perimeter wires they call in a special maintenance crew who repair it as quickly as possible before the Sabbath.
In Harlem, the strings are often brought down by kids tossing sneakers in the air to see if they can make the shoes hang. The eruv can be a particularly sought-after target since the lines are near-invisible from a distance and the sneakers, if they catch, seem to hang, perfectly suspended, in midair.
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They stood by the Cinematheque, eight- or nine-deep in the crowd. From a distance it was difficult to see what exactly was going on in the valley. The walker seemed to Rami like a stick figure in an ancient painting.
Smadar shifted on his shoulders and tightened her grip on Rami’s neck. Her tiny feet bounced against his chest. He kept his hands at her back to support her.
When the walker stopped mid-wire Rami could feel her body tense. Smadar leaned forward, her breath uneven, her small heart thumping against his ear.
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Rami knew even then that perhaps part of the role of the watcher involved the desire to see the walker fall: matching the walker’s need to get to the end of the wire.
The crowd applauded as the walker paused midway. Rami felt the weight of his daughter shift at the back of his neck.
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From where they watched it looked perfectly choreographed: Petit walked to the middle of the wire, stopped a moment, paused above the valley.
With tremendous skill, he adjusted the balancing bar and held it in one hand. He reached into his right-hand pocket—decorated with the Israeli colors—and felt for the bird. He had wrapped it in a red silk handkerchief, headfirst, wings combed back.
The small heart beat rapidly against his fingers. He slipped the bundle out from his pocket. He allowed the flap of silk to unpeel itself. He had to be careful. He could feel the wings begin to loosen beneath the cloth. Slow going. The more he freed her, the more active the bird became. He could feel the strength of the wings now. No sound. No chirping. He held the wrapped bird in the air, then shook it free.
The bird hovered a moment as the crowd gasped. The red silk fluttered to the valley floor.
Petit waited to hear the flap of wings. He steadied himself, then felt a sharp pinch on the top of his scalp. A piercing pain. A scraping at his skull.
For a split second the Frenchman had no idea what had happened. Roars of delight filtered up from the crowd. A clapping sound went around the valley.
The bird had perched itself on the top of his head. The talons stung his scalp.
He gripped the bar and shook his head slightly, waited for the bird to take off again. The wind blew. The pigeon didn’t move. Reaching up behind his head—any sudden move could be fatal—Petit brushed the bird away with his fingers. He heard a frantic flapping around his head—Go now, go—took a breath, and refocused. The cheers doubled and redoubled. He could hear the frantic beating of the bird’s wings. The crowd clapped again.
Petit felt a slight tug on his balancing bar and when he looked to his right, in the direction of the valley, he saw the bird had now perched on the end of the aluminum bar.
Another gust of wind whipped. The bird remained on the bar. It was so much more than a distraction: the bird, if it moved too quickly, could unbalance him. He rotated the bar in his fingers. The pigeon turned with the rolling bar, its talons gripping. Petit jolted the bar slightly but still the bird did not move. He rotated the bar again, then quickly reversed the move, but the pigeon held.
Petit knelt down on the wire, bowed and swept out his hand in an arc. The crowd roared again. They were sure he had practiced it all: the kneeling, the showboating, the antics of the bird.
He completed his salute, then bashed the side of his balancing bar in order to make the pigeon fly. It flapped frantically and rose slightly. He glanced away. Another roar soared from the crowd. The pigeon was gone.
Petit stood up slowly from his kneeling position, began to walk once more, one foot carefully following the other, his eye fixed on Mount Zion.
Upwards he went again, along the incline. A cadenced clapping had begun to sound out around the Holy City.
After a few steps he heard another roar. He turned his head to glance behind, and saw that the bird had managed to land on the wire. It was walking back in the direction of the Old City, tottering slightly. It looked to Petit as if the rear end of the bird was mocking him as it swayed along the wire: the bird was annoyed, somehow, that it had to go through the process at all.
Petit went forward once more. All concentration, all intent. He made a drama of each step, in tune with the clapping, a perfectly rhythmic sound.
When he looked around, the bird was gone.
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Once a week, before the Sabbath, Moti brought his brigade’s rabbi to bless the cable out in No-man’s-land. Moti had already ridden the length of wire to make sure there were no loops or breaks in it, no bombs attached, no traps set.
Like Moti, the rabbi was dressed all in black, his hands, neck and face darkened with shoe polish. He sat on the back of the bike, his hands gripping the bottom of the saddle as they sped on a narrow track across the valley, whispering the ritual prayers as they bumped along.
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Petit turned on the wire and looked down over the valley. The wire, the trees, a few puffs of white cloud. He bowed. He had walked three hundred meters, all of it at an incline. The crowd applauded from all directions: in his mind he gave them an inner curtsy.
A helicopter broke the sky above him, guided by a pilot who had once captained a crack commando unit. A winch was lowered and Petit snapped his carabiners in place. His final flourish. The soldier had practiced the lift with Petit’s brother in the desert near Al Rashidah a few days earlier. The helicopter hovered perfectly.
The high-wire artist and pilot exchanged hand signals. Petit tapped on the winch and gave a final signal.
The walker felt a tug and then he was lifted from the wire up in the air, arms apart, flying away from Mount Zion, out over the hills of Beit Jala.
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Reminding some of the watchers of Muhammad’s night flight from Jerusalem up over Mount Zion and beyond.
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In Israel, helicopters are sometimes used to capture golden eagles for ringing and research. The pilots track the eagle in the air until the bird lands on the ground and crouches with its head down. The helicopter lands nearby, drops off the biologist, and returns to hover once more, forcing the eagle into submission.
The bird is then hand-grabbed from behind. The biologist is trained to fold back the wings and to avoid the talons and the beak. Sometimes a net gun is used, but the hand-grab is known to be safer for the bird.
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Large bands are needed to ring the eagles. Their legs can sometimes be three-quarters of an inch thick. If a ring is too tight it will cut off the flow of blood to the bird’s feet.
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Petit’s walk on the wire was captured live on Israeli TV. A Bedouin tribe on the edge of the Al Rasari forest eight miles from Jerusalem sat watching television inside their canvas tents.
When Petit rose on the helicopter they stepped from under the large canvas awnings, away from their television sets, to watch the Frenchman fly open-arm
ed in his jester’s uniform—one leg in Palestinian colors, one in Israeli—across the sky.
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The crowd began to part. Smadar leaned forward. Rami held her aloft as he moved through the crowd back toward the Kakao café.
She was pulling back on his neck now, her hands crossed against his Adam’s apple.
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Seven months after Philippe Petit’s Walk of Peace, the First Intifada began.
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The First Intifada begins like this: the Night of the Gliders, 1987. The gliders are made of aluminum bars and sailcloth. They are powered by lawn-mower engines. They take off from the dark of South Lebanon. One glider is blinded by searchlights from Kibbutz Ma’ayan Baruch, but the other operator—and this is where he might variously be called a terrorist or a martyr or a murderer or a guerrilla or a freedom fighter—manages to fly over the desert to the Gibor Army camp near Kiryat Shmona.
The glider escapes attention by flying at tree level. The night is stark. Moonless. He flies well, he is agile, he can pilot the craft with one hand, his body extended backwards, his feet resting on the glider bars. He wears a black jumpsuit, black shoes, black gloves, balaclava. The exposed portion of his face is darkened with fire ash. The craft glides. The air sharpens. Below, he sees two pencil-swaths of light. Wings extended, he is not unlike a bat.