by Colum McCann
The path of the Wall had originally been designed to cut off the entire school: the route through the center of the yard was a compromise.
The work was to begin later that night under floodlight: it had been decreed that the noise of the work should not disturb the schoolkids.
Bassam never knew if Abir had seen the prefab pieces arriving or not, but the border guard who shot his daughter testified that among his orders that morning was to protect the workers delivering pieces of the Wall to the schoolyard.
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The border guard remained unnamed in all the court documents, although Bassam got to know him by the initials Y.A.
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The Wall workers were mostly Palestinian. They guided the jackhammers. Drove the bulldozers. Looped the cables. Unfurled their measuring tapes. Chalked the marks in the sections of wall. Three or four times a day their prayer mats were unfurled in front of the Wall where they sought a clean place to pray.
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For five years it was the best-paying construction job in the area: the workers called it the Shekel Wall.
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A plastic shopping bag animated itself above the walls: it popped in the wind and sounded momentarily like a rifle shot. Nobody flinched.
The Peace Walls were still up in Belfast even years after the Good Friday agreement. They stretched high into the grey of the city, topped, here and there, with razor wire.
Bassam paused at a portrait of Arafat with Martin Luther King. Nearby was a painting of the Black September fighters. Smash Zionism. Irish Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Arafat, 1993. No Peace Without Justice.
At the far end of the street, on a gable wall, were the murals of the other side, a portrait of Churchill sitting inside a map of Greater Israel, a painting of Golda Meir. Further along: Golda, we Love You. Bal-Four, Palestine Nil. Rule Britannia: We Support the People of Zion. Chaim Herzog, President of Israel, born Belfast, 1918.
Further along, one of Picasso’s doves of peace with an Armalite, not an olive branch, in its mouth.
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In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture—then I destroy it. In the end, though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.
~ PICASSO ~
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The buildings sat grey. The rain seemed to drizzle with intent. Belfast, to him, was a city of vast surprise. He was taken for a tour. The Crown. The Titanic Museum. The Botanic Gardens. Milltown Cemetery. The Shankill. The Falls.
Late one night he walked around what the locals called the Holyland. Bassam was taken by the names of the streets: Palestine, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus. He scoured a map. Delphi Avenue. Balaklava Street. Unity Flats. Kashmir Road.
He had arrived from Bradford for a three-day peace conference. He curled into the hood of a borrowed blue anorak, lit cigarette after cigarette, kept walking late into the night.
Palestine Street was a row of redbrick houses, dark gates, tiny gardens. Jerusalem Street ran into a cul-de-sac. There had, he heard, been many shootings here. Short streets, long memories.
He marveled at the sight of the flags fluttering over the rooftops. Parts of the city flew the Star of David. Others flew the Palestinian colors. White our deeds, black our battles, green our fields, red our swords. On light poles, bridges, in shop windows.
Still, there was something buoyant about the town too, something cheeky and hopeful. It seemed like the sort of place where he could have grown up. He wanted to whisper to it, to announce his recognition. It was a city with a memory of curfew, a mistscape of ghosts.
He walked to the edge of the dockyards, saw the first of the sun rising over the shipyard, Harland and Wolff. Sitting on a dockside bollard, he listened to the blare of foghorns. Along the shoreline, he strolled alone.
At the hotel, the other conference attendees were finishing breakfast. He slipped in amongst them. Bassam was good at disappearing into crowds. He could make of himself a shadow.
His presentation was at noon. He waited backstage, drinking tea. No matter how many times he told his story, the nerves still cut him raw. Before his presentation he went through a half packet of Silk Cut. He walked onstage, coughed lightly into the microphone, stepped back, put his hand to his forehead to shield his eyes from the light, paused. I am Bassam Aramin, from Palestine. A ripple went around the theater.
Afterwards, most of the crowd gave him a standing ovation. The ones who didn’t made a point of crossing their arms in their seats. He could already see them gathering together in groups.
Offstage, he was slapped on the back. The Irish accents were even harder to understand than the English. He found himself hanging his head, nodding. His greatest wish was not to offend. He did not want to ask them to repeat themselves. Most of all he wanted to talk to those who had kept their arms crossed, but they did not appear.
The conference was abuzz. He was added to panels. Theory and Practice. Conflict Analysis. Reconciliation Studies. The Mercy of Dialogue. He recognized the relative ease of being Palestinian here. He was listened to. He was authentic. He had suffered. It might even be easier, he thought, to be a Palestinian abroad than at home. The notion tugged at him. What might it be if he decided not to return? What might happen if he worked from abroad? Would he have anything to say? It was, he knew, exactly what so many wanted: one less Arab. He knew, too, that if he stayed away three years they might revoke his right to go home. Bassam wanted to take a flight back, that very afternoon, to Jordan, then drive to the West Bank, just to reassure himself.
At night, the participants gathered in groups in the hotel bar and foyer. They sang and drank. There were factions here too. Bassam was called over to meet a group of Norwegian scholars. They had heard he had been a singer in prison. He sat among them, sang an Abu Arab song. Someone put a pint of Guinness in his hand.
—No, no, he said, I never drink.
A minute later a whiskey was put in front of him. He sat back in his chair, laughed and passed the whiskey along the table.
He couldn’t sleep, but found solace in walking. He liked moving through the drizzle. It helped him shape his thoughts. He was a quarter way through his thesis now. He thought of himself as a man traveling in several different directions.
At times he stopped to scribble small phrases in his notebook. Peace without reconciliation. To forgive but not excuse. To colonize the mind.
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He established due east and backed down an alleyway to quietly unfold a mat, to say his prayers.
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In the early 1990s, at least twice a month, Senator George Mitchell bid goodbye to his wife, Heather, and his son, Andrew, a toddler, in New York.
A day later he would land in the Aldergrove airport on the outskirts of Belfast, in order to chair the Northern Irish peace talks. Most of the time he traveled alone with a briefcase and a small bag. In the airport corridors he went largely unrecognized.
At the airport, a car waited to take him to the city. In the back seat he took a nap, one of the few times he could find silence.
Mitchell was known affectionately as Iron Pants because of his uncanny ability to sit for a long time and listen to the stories of opposing factions. The leaders of the parliamentary parties came to his office to sit down and tell him exactly where they stood. He listened quietly, called on himself for patience. The stories seemed, at times, endless. He wondered if he might ever be able to find a language to describe it all.
Eight hundred years of history here. Thirty-five years of oppression there. A treaty here, a massacre there, a siege elsewhere. What happened in ’68. What supermarket was torched in ’74. What went on last week on the Shankill Road. The bombings in Birmingham. The shootings in Gibraltar. The links with Libya. The Battle of the Boyne. The march of Cromwell. The cutting down of trees. The removal of na
ils from the fingers of harpists so they could not play the catgut strings.
Every morning the Senator’s driver slid a mirror on rollers under the car to check for bombs. They drove through the streets to the plenaries where he sat once again, listening. Meeting after meeting. Lunch after lunch. Dinner after dinner. Phone call after phone call. Often he had to fight to keep himself awake. There were times he would press a ballpoint pen into his fingertip: at the end of the day the tip of his forefinger was often studded with blue.
Loyalists, Republicans, Sinn Féin, the moderates, the socialists, the Women’s Coalition, the vast slalom of acronyms: DUP, UVF, IRA, UFF, RIHA, ABD, RSF, UDA, INLA.
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In the 1980s the greatest sale of Israeli flags—outside of Israel itself—was in Northern Ireland, where the Loyalists flew them in defiance of Irish Republicans who had adopted the Palestinian flag: whole housing estates shrouded in either blue and white, or black red white and green.
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Israeli Defense Force Order 101, Regarding Prohibition of Incitement and Hostile Propaganda Actions, was put into effect in 1967. It forbade Palestinians to use the word Palestine in official documents, to depict or raise or fly their flag, or to make any sort of art that combined the colors of the traditional flag.
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On Friday afternoons Bassam and his friends hung the flag from the school gates and waited until the soldiers came to tear it down. Then they pelted the soldiers with rocks and stones.
In return the soldiers fired gas canisters and rubber bullets which bounced off the tin-sided shack at the back of the school. Sometimes the soldiers continued shooting long after the boys were gone.
From a distance, hidden in an alleyway, he listened to the canisters popping off the rusted tin roof, ping after ping, not at all like raindrops.
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When, in 2009, Mitchell was appointed as special envoy to the Middle East, he had a sudden feeling that he was walking into the middle of another smashed jigsaw—PLO, JDL, DFLP, LEHI, PFLP, ALA, PIJ, CPT, IWPS, ICAHD, AIC, AATW, EIJ, JTJ, ISM, AEI, NIF, ACRI, RHR, BDS, PACBI, BNC—only this time it was so much more difficult to find a straight edge with which to begin.
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A countably infinite number of sides.
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Rami finishes his coffee, thanks the waiter in Arabic, leaves the Everest Hotel with fifteen minutes still to spare. Outside, he adjusts his helmet, rocks the bike off its stand, backs the machine out from its parking space. The caffeine has jolted him awake. He would like to rev the machine and push it hard for a while.
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So many West Bank potholes. To swerve left, he gently pushes the right handlebar. To ease right, he applies pressure to the left.
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He glides through the streets on the western edge of Beit Jala, the wind whipping the laundry into gymnastics on the third and fourth floors of the blocky white apartment buildings, the breeze animating one white shirt into arms-up surrender.
On past the downhill curve of Salaam Street—rooftops and balustrades and sandbagged upper balconies. Some of the windowpanes are blacked out.
A small group of men hang outside a garage under their faithful clouds of cigarette smoke. Further along, a low house in the row of apartments, beautiful stained glass in the upper windows.
He rounds a curve and eases past the single olive tree in the middle of the street, past the old villas.
He can sense the ancient architecture of these homes: their vaulting ceilings, their whiteness, the mosaic tiles, the thin candles in the tall entryways.
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Above Nablus—on top of Mount Gerizim, the Mountain of Mercy—is a sprawling mansion owned by Munib al-Masri, the richest man in Palestine.
He built the house on the coveted hilltop in the style of Palladio’s Rotonda in Vicenza, Italy. The tiled cupola—which resembles the roof of the Al-Aqsa mosque—can be seen shining in the sunlight from many miles away.
The gate of the mansion comes from a seventeenth-century French estate. Gravel crunches underfoot. Goldfish ponds line the laneways. The granite steps are polished. A marble statue of Hercules stands in the foyer underneath a high dome. A cruciform central hall has four identical doors, each facing in the cardinal directions. The house is chock-full of precious art and antiquities, including paintings by Picasso and Modigliani, Flemish Renaissance tapestries, Biblical portraits, mirrors from Versailles, manuscripts from ancient Iranian mathematicians, as well as a number of sixth-century Arabic scrolls that originally hung in marketplaces.
Stone steps lead to a glass winter garden once belonging to the mistress of Napoleon III. Nearby sits a Roman amphitheater. Two triumphal arches—one from the city of Poitiers, the other commissioned in honor of al-Masri’s friend Yasser Arafat—stand guard near a grove of cypress trees. A carefully clipped maze with ten-foot-high walls completes the garden.
Al-Masri—a chronic insomniac—built the mansion as a riddle, a mosaic, a metaphor for his country: he called it Beit Falasteen, the House of Palestine. He wanted to build an ark, a scavenge-ship of everything beautiful, a jigsaw of provocative excess. It stunned those who came to visit.
Al-Masri—who made his money through oil and water speculation—poured tens of millions of dollars into the house.
In the process of excavation, his builders uncovered thin beams of olive wood, charred ties, chisel marks, a tiny piece of porcelain, a step, then a stone that seemed shaped like an altar. A mosaic floor. Colored stones. Blue Roman glass. He halted all work on the house, brought in archaeologists from around the world who meticulously sifted the ruins. They uncovered pillars, dug up a stone altar, sorted through shards of pottery: what they had found was an ancient monastery.
They mapped out the monastery as it would have been sixteen hundred years ago, replicated it, and then al-Masri rebuilt the mansion on top—lifting it twenty feet in the air—so that the structure in the basement was perfectly preserved and made accessible to visitors.
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The other mountain that can be seen from Beit Falasteen is called Mount Ebal, the Mountain of Curse.
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In 2011, al-Masri’s grandson, also named Munib, was shot while marching along the Lebanese border to commemorate the Nakba of 1948. He was hit in the back as he walked toward a bus. The high-velocity bullet penetrated his kidney and spleen, then rested near his spine, paralyzing him.
He was taken to hospital in Beirut where he begged the doctors to let him die, but eventually he was air-lifted out to the United States for treatment where the doctors in San Diego put him through years of rigorous rehabilitation.
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Munib still sometimes visits his grandfather’s mansion from his home in Georgia. He guides himself around in his wheelchair, bringing visitors downstairs to show them a large mural where, among scenes of historical carnage, there are several portraits of doves of peace.
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The Nakba. Or the Catastrophe. Or the Hejira. Also known as the Exodus, the Rape, the Cataclysm, the Forcing, the Night We Blackened Our Faces and Left.
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Strewn along the roads in 1948: cigarette cases, letters, locks of hair, silk ties, tarbushes, rag dolls, photographs, reels of film, walking sticks, tennis rackets, crystal decanters, headscarves, prayer shawls, medwakh pipes, lira coins, cricket balls, brass coffeepots, shoes, socks.
Most of the three-quarters of a million Palestinians who were displaced didn’t carry anything too heavy because they were sure they were going to return to their homes in a matter of days: there were legends of soup left boiling on their stoves.
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One of Borges’s favorite stories, overheard in a café in Jerusalem, was about an earthenware pot of soup left simmering for centuries without ever evaporating or changing its taste, a soup that had become an elixir of life for some alt
hough when tasted by others it was bitter and sour and often resulted in an agonizing illness.
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Set me, if ever I return, in your oven as fuel to help you cook.
~ DARWISH ~
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The statue of Hercules arrived at al-Masri’s house from Paris in 2002 in a giant wooden crate. The piece had been carved from a single block of white Italian marble.
A special crane was required to lift the box up the steps to the entrance of the house. The driver miscalculated and released the crate a foot up in the air. The crate wobbled a moment, then toppled over on the steps and smashed wide open in front of al-Masri. The body of Hercules—his left hand gripping a club, his right hand cradling stones—spilled out. The head hit the top stair and separated from the body, then rolled partway down the hill. It had been a time of heavy rains and it took al-Masri’s workers two hours to find the head amongst the mud and bushes.
Al-Masri had the head expertly reattached. He placed the tall statue under a giant dome, the light spreading in a wide nimbus around it.