Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

  Only on close examination could a visitor see that the head had been reattached.

  430

  What disturbed al-Masri was the faces of those who, when they saw him in his immaculate suits, were surprised that he was Palestinian. The perfect creases. The cuff links. The pocket squares. The monogrammed shirtfronts. They wanted some sort of scruffiness from him, a keffiyeh, a holster, a battle dress, a polyester hood.

  They looked at him as if he had made a mistake about himself.

  431

  The front door of Munib al-Masri’s mansion is four hundred years old, made of oak and steel, and designed to withstand the force of a massive battering ram.

  432

  The house was completely surrounded by Area C, but built in Area A, located up a jackknifed road overlooking the flat roofs and minarets of Nablus.

  From his height, al-Masri had a clear view of the Balata refugee camp. In the distance lay the village of Assira al-Shamaliya.

  433

  434

  Walk by the fields and watch the women carrying bundles of wheat on their backs. See the boys out threshing in the hard bright light. It is all so very yellow and white.

  The women return to the village, past the ancient well, along the cobblestones, under the walls topped with barbed wire, and then they disperse among the shadows of the steep stone staircases.

  You can follow their trail by the wheat chaff that falls from their dresses.

  435

  The village was raided one week after the Ben Yehuda Street bombings. The streets were sealed off. Helicopters hovered. Families were taken outside at gunpoint. The men were arrested and their hands were zip-tied. Women and children were made to kneel on the ground, facing the houses.

  The first squad went in to throw out the belongings: photos, books, bedding, knickknacks, shisha pipes, furniture, ancient clocks, ovens, fridges, saucepans, documents, clothes. A second group loaded the smashed items in an army dumpster and crushed them in front of the watchers.

  When the houses were bare, the women and children were moved away and another group of soldiers—the construction squad—moved in.

  The doors were sealed off, the windows crisscrossed with rebar, the front and back balconies studded with metal spikes. The large spikes were driven in pneumatically. Barrels full of concrete were sealed to the floor so nobody could ever dwell inside again.

  New steel doors were welded tight and reinforced with more metal bars strong enough to withstand a battering ram.

  The soldiers spray-painted Stars of David on the walls, but immediately after the operation was complete, Youssef Shouli’s nephew, Sabri, an eight-year-old gymnast, managed to crawl through the windows where his first job was to scrub the paint away.

  436

  On the walls the kids later scrawled the names of the men who once lived in the houses: Bashar Sawalha, 1973–97, Youssef Shouli, 1974–97, Tawfiq Yassine, 1974–97. Then the children crawled around on the concrete barrels, close to the ceiling, playing war games: Kill the Jew, Kidnap, Bombs in Baghdad.

  437

  A decade later, in Algiers, Sabri Shouli represented the Palestinian gymnastics team in the Pan Arab Games: he came fifth on the parallel bars.

  438

  A medieval battering ram consisted of a wooden beam, often over twenty feet long, to be thrust against the wall of a city, or a tunnel door, or a gate. Some were built with a sharp metal head which could be jammed fiercely between stones and levered back and forth to dislodge the brick. Others were capped with a piece of flat metal to batter over and over again.

  More advanced rams were equipped with wheels and dragged in wagons by large teams of men or oxen—guarded by slingmen and archers—to the place of attack.

  Often a moat had to be bridged or drained before the battering ram could do its work. For the final part of the assault, an improvised track of wooden planks was laid down to make the ram easier to push. The wagon was braked with giant rocks to prevent it from rolling backwards down the steep slopes.

  The forward part of the wagon was open to allow the wooden beam to be swung. The ram was hung from the ceiling of the wagon with a thick rope so that it could become a pendulum. When swung back and forth, it gathered momentum until it was released, slamming forward into the wall, dislodging the bricks or shattering the hinges of the gate.

  Fire rained down upon the attackers, burning oil, arrows, stones, snakes, even rotting bodies.

  439

  As part of a deal to return the corpse of an Israeli soldier, the bodies of the three Ben Yehuda Street bombers were eventually returned to their families. It had taken seven years. The IDF left the plastic blue containers on the steps of the original houses.

  It was a stealth operation, four jeeps running quietly through the steep streets of the village in the dark. No lights in the windows. No patrols on the streets.

  They sped past the Cemetery of Martyrs, beyond the small square, along past School Street.

  A spotlight picked out the steps. The blue coolers were hustled out of the vehicles, each one carted by two soldiers. The bodies were placed near the barricaded doors.

  In the town, lights had begun to flicker on. Dogs began barking. The sound of doors slamming. Some shouting rose in the distance as the jeeps sped away.

  440

  The soldiers nicknamed it Operation Jigsaw.

  441

  The eyeball blown onto the awning of the Atara café had belonged to Youssef Shouli.

  442

  Normally when the string on a suicide vest is pulled, the bomber’s upper body takes the brunt of the explosive force and becomes pure mist. The head and feet are shorn away, yet often still left recognizable as head or foot.

  Because Shouli’s eyeball was found separated from the rest of his head, forensic experts suggested that he probably bent his head toward his chest at the very moment he pulled the string, perhaps to check on a malfunctioning string, or maybe to crouch down in fear from a nearby fellow bomber’s blast, or perhaps even to pray.

  443

  A few experts in the field prefer to call them homicide vests.

  444

  The new houses for the families of the bombers, built on the outskirts of the village, were said to have come as gifts from the Iranian government.

  The payments were funneled through a complicated maze that ended with the local political offices in Nablus, but they had been rumored to be channeled through Ramallah, from Damascus, from Geneva, through another Swiss bank account, all the way back to Tehran.

  The money was earmarked for building as a direct military response to the IDF’s smashing up and sealing off of the old houses. A video was shot and posted on a radical Islamic website: What you make fall, we will rebuild.

  445

  Rami saw inside the new houses in the raw documentary footage. The parents were interviewed sitting on their sofas with an array of knickknacks in the background: teapots, flowers, small glass animals, a pendant, a Qur’an, souvenirs from Mecca.

  The mother of Bashar Sawalha held a framed photo in her lap. She wept into a white handkerchief. She rose from the couch mid-sentence and then sat down again, exhausted.

  The father of Youssef Shouli stared directly into the lens. His wife sat silently beside him. His son had seen the face of God, he said, may Allah have mercy on his soul. When he reached for his water glass the father’s hand trembled. He said he had not slept in peace in many years. He couldn’t understand it. Their sons had been radicalized while in prison, Allah protect them, but they were put in prison for slinging stones.

  —Only this, he said to the camera. Slinging stones. What is this world but stones?

  He stood up and went to the back wall, then walked out of the range of the camera, refused to return.

  Outside—under an eerily blue sky—the foot
age showed the village minaret, the tiled roofs on the skyline, a gulp of swallows above the graveyard.

  Locals were interviewed in a neon-lit café. They praised the great martyrs of ’97 who, they said, had given their lives for jihad. The cousin of Youssef Shouli said he wished he could have taken the place of his blood-kin. He would gladly walk down Ben Yehuda Street again and again and again, blow himself up just to have his cousin back for one more day.

  Rami watched without translation but his Arabic was good enough for him to catch most of it.

  What surprised him most of all, though he did not know why, was that Youssef—the bomber most likely to have blown up Smadar—had studied graphic art.

  446

  At Bethlehem University Youssef Shouli had begun a project using found war items—rubber bullets, gas canisters, ammunition cartridges—as birdcages, door chimes, feeders. He told a professor that he was also interested in making a Star of Bethlehem out of tear gas canisters.

  Two years into his degree, Shouli was arrested outside the Jacir Palace Hotel where he had gone with several other students to collect riot paraphernalia for their artwork. In military court he was charged with inciting protests and throwing stones.

  He refused to recognize the court, making the statement that he had never thrown a stone, not once in his life, but he would now, in the future, whenever and wherever he could.

  Shouli was given a four-year sentence.

  447

  Smadar had cut her hair close and pierced her nose. Thirteen years old, she was just beginning to rebel. She wanted to look like Sinéad O’Connor, dancing around the house, among the flowerpots, singing Nothing Compares 2 U.

  448

  Afterwards Rami would tell people that he didn’t mind the piercing, but the shaving of the hair gave him pause.

  449

  Many elderly Jews had signed Heimeinkaufsvertrag contracts agreeing to pay 80,000 Reichsmarks for the right of residence in Theresienstadt. They were told it was a pleasant Bohemian resort with gardens, fountains, villas, promenades. A perfect setting for retirement. They carried in their luggage all manner of mementos, not least precious mirrors, hair combs, clips and brushes.

  450

  The shaved hair was used to line the boots of U-boat crew members. Also to make rough work clothes. It is also said to have been used to create the long manes on wooden rocking horses, some of which can still be found for sale in the black markets of Kraków in Poland.

  451

  When they slid Smadar out on the metal tray, Rami noticed her grandfather’s watch on her wrist: it was still running.

  452

  After Smadar was born, her grandfather, Matti Peled, sat with her in the garden and taught her English and Arabic both. The General liked the role of grandfather. It softened something in him. He brought her to meetings of community boards, activists, human rights groups.

  Until she was eight, he carried her around on his shoulders.

  453

  On the wall of his office Peled hung Rami’s poster: What will life in Israel be like when Smadar reaches fifteen?

  454

  They worked on their cars together, Rami and his father-in-law. Peled was tall, taciturn, silver-haired. He talked more when he leaned in over an engine block: it was as if he found it easier to address something ordered and logical.

  He fumbled around under the hood. His fingers were thick and clumsy. He cursed as he unscrewed the carburetor.

  Peled said to Rami that he was not one to suffer fools gladly, least of all himself.

  He had been an architect of the Six-Day War. Lightning strikes. Bombing raids. The aura of surprise. He had become a general, revered all over the country—one of the original Jewish idealists: socialist, Zionist, democratic, but after ’68 he grew almost immediately wary of the Occupation. It jeopardized, he said, the moral weight of the cause. It took away from the sense that Israel was a guiding global light. He went to meetings at the Knesset wearing a pin showcasing a Star of David alongside a Palestinian flag. His pale blue shirts showed large oval stains of sweat at his armpits. He was volcanic, temperamental, with a single-minded toughness. His voice seemed to come from his solar plexus. He spoke out on behalf of moderation, toleration, inclusivity, nuance. He was no lamed vavnik, he did not want to carry the sorrows of his country. He had fought for Israel, he said, from ’48 onwards, and he knew a thing or two about military might. He had met with Dayan, with Herzog, with Rabin, with Golda Meir, with others too. Holding on to the Territories was a mistake, contrary to a secure Jewish democracy. They needed to disengage. Get out.

  Rami enjoyed the diatribes: there was something maverick about them. He sat on the bumper and listened while Peled tinkered with the engine.

  The General had fought in Palestine, had witnessed the Nakba, had seen the disintegration of what he called the Arab glue. He had been stationed in Gaza and studied Arabic as a soldier. After the war he launched himself into his studies again. Wrote his dissertation on Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist. Went to the plays of Ghassan Kanafani. Triumphed the work of Fadwa Tuqan. Translated Salim Barakat. Learned the lines of Khalil al-Sakakini. Went to symposiums on language and politics. Took a secret trip to Cairo to meet Mahfouz. Wrote impassioned editorials for the newspapers. Talked with Nurit and her brothers about the primacy of peace.

  He was aware, he said, that humiliation was a deep wound. We are Semitic, both of us, Israelis and Palestinians together. Your generation is in jeopardy, he said to Rami. There was a time for war, I admit it, he said, but no more. He himself carried the burden. He had created so much of it. The Occupation, he said, was a corruption. And the aid from the United States for military equipment had become a plague. Freedom, he said, begins between the ears.

  Peled took a job at the Arab language department at Tel Aviv University, teaching Palestinian poetry. His lectures, like those of Nurit, were packed to the rafters. He drove to the Knesset. On several occasions he went to meet Arafat. The two men tried to broker a deal. The talks sometimes went on for days on end. Arafat hugged him, kissed him on both cheeks, bid him goodbye. In Israel the rancor grew. The right wing, the conservatives, the settlers. His home phone rang. Death threats. He was a false prophet, a pig-eater, a PLO henchman, an Arab lover. He chided the callers, said he would meet them anywhere they wanted, talk with them reasonably, he didn’t care, he wanted only to talk. They slammed down the phones. He went to synagogue with the two-flag pin in his lapel. He toured Europe, Asia, the United States. He was outraged by the Palestinian bombings too, the hijackings, the kidnappings, the moral cowardice, the rhetoric that came from the most radical elements, but nobody should keep his foot on another man’s neck, he said. Peace was a moral inevitability. Neither side could keep the other from it.

  The afternoons drifted.

  Peled raised himself up from the engine of the car. He banged his head on the raised hood.

  —Go ahead, Peled told Rami, crank the engine.

  455

  Matti Peled died of natural causes eighteen months before his granddaughter. It was the only thing, in either death, that Rami and Nurit were thankful for.

  456

  Yasser Arafat sent a personal representative to Smadar’s funeral. The PLO leader had, on occasion, referred to Smadar’s grandfather as Abu Salaam: father of peace.

  Arafat himself could not go: he was barred by the Israeli army from entering Jerusalem.

  From the top floor of his Ramallah compound, Arafat could look out the window, over the rubble, at the Fat Boy Two blimp hovering over the city.

  457

  When traveling in America and lecturing to Jewish organizations and in synagogues about peace and its possibilities, Matti Peled carried a rubber bullet in his jacket pocket.

  Onstage, under lights, he would hold the bullet up, then peel the rubber back to show the
shine of the steel underneath.

  458

  The bullet hit the back of Abir’s skull, fell to the pavement, and was reshaped.

  459

  Lazarus pills: when possible, they can be picked up and used again.

  460

  Upon hearing of the death of Lazarus of Bethany, Jesus of Nazareth is said to have ordered the burial stone to be rolled away from the cave. Lazarus was already four days dead.

  When the stone was rolled away, Jesus approached the cave and stood outside with Martha and Mary. He cried out in a loud voice: Lazarus, come forth.

  Lazarus stepped out, still bound in the wrappings of the dead. Jesus said that he should be unbound and allowed to go.

  The resurrected man was said to have lived on for another thirty years, long after the death of Jesus. Those around him wondered what Lazarus had seen in the underworld, but it was said that he did not talk when he walked through the streets of Bethany, nor smile anymore, and he never mentioned anything of what he had seen during those four days of death.