Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

  —Yes.

  —If you don’t hit me with a stone, I am going to go and throw one myself. And then you know exactly what will happen to me. Is this understood?

  Bassam stood not ten paces away, his eyes shut firmly: Throw it, he said. Throw it now.

  He heard the stone whistle far past him.

  —You’re supposed to hit me with it, ya.

  He could hear the boy weeping.

  —Do it again, he said.

  —No.

  —We don’t leave here until you hit me.

  485

  What the British might call a knee-knocker.

  486

  What he feared most of all was that Araab would end up in prison. When they got home that night Bassam made his son put his hand on the Qur’an and promise that he would never again take part in any sort of riot.

  487

  Riot, from the Old French, rioter: to dispute, to quarrel, to engage in argument. Riote: noise, debate, disorder, rash action. Also, perhaps, from the Latin rugire, meaning to roar.

  488

  In the early 1990s Palestinian riot paraphernalia became popular among a small clique of Japanese teenagers. They collected rubber bullets, gas canisters, batons, kneepads, helmets, groin protectors, shin guards, tactical goggles, masks and especially the painted stones flung by the shebab during the First Intifada.

  A stone in Palestinian colors, if properly documented and tagged, could sell for over one hundred dollars. A used plexiglas shield with an IDF insignia could command one hundred and fifty if signed and verified by a soldier.

  A pop-up shop, The Spoils of War, appeared in the Shinjuku neighborhood, a tiny little store with a battered shutter and lopsided shelves, but it went bust shortly after the Second Intifada began, and the riot gear fell out of fashion.

  489

  The first time they spoke in a Parents Circle meeting, it was difficult for Rami to understand Bassam’s accent. Bassam’s English was rapid-fire and the stresses came from Arabic. He began to talk about his friends throwing two hand grenades at a jeep but it sounded, in his Hebron accent—two han-d-eh-gre-nay-des—like two hundred.

  It became one of their jokes: Hey brother, go ahead and throw two hundred grenades.

  490

  In a letter to Rami, Bassam wrote that one of the principal qualities of pain is that it demands to be defeated first, then understood.

  491

  Rami pauses for a moment at the top of the monastery road. He opens his visor, removes his glasses, takes off his helmet, shakes his head free, wipes the glasses on the end of his scarf.

  To the left, the monastery. To the right, the road down toward the center of town. He glances at his watch.

  The sun out now, over Bethlehem. The flocks of birds in their vaulting overhead arcs.

  492

  While in flight, birds position themselves in order to gain lift from the bird in front. As it flies, the leading bird pushes down the air with its wings. The air is then squeezed around the outer edge of the wings so that, at the tip of the wing, the air moves and an upwash is created.

  By flying at the wing tip of the bird in front, the follower rides the upwash and preserves energy. The birds time their wingbeats carefully, resulting sometimes in a V-shape, or a J, or an inversion of one or the other.

  In storms and crosswinds the birds adapt and create new shapes—power curves and S-formations and even figure eights.

  493

  On the hour, he catches sight of a black Kia climbing the hill. At first he is not sure if it is Bassam or not, the wintry light hard and bright on the front windshield.

  Then there is the quick beep of the car horn and the shape of a waving arm in the front seat.

  Bassam stops next to Rami, pulls the hand brake, powers down the tinted window. The inevitable cigarette in Bassam’s mouth.

  —Brother.

  —Hey.

  —How long you been here?

  —I mucked up. I forgot about daylight saving time.

  —What do you mean?

  —We have different daylight savings, brother.

  Bassam shakes his head and half-grins: Ah, Israeli time, he says. He pulls hard on his cigarette, taps the ash out the window and a small rush of smoke fills the air.

  —I drove around, says Rami, got a coffee in the Everest.

  —How many have we got today?

  —Seven or eight.

  —From all over?

  —Think so, yeah.

  —Why the monastery?

  —No idea. They rented it, I suppose.

  —How far down the road?

  —Quarter of a mile or so.

  —Ever been here before?

  —Not inside.

  —One hundred and fifty years old.

  —Right. Go ahead.

  —No, no. You. Go.

  —You first.

  —Hey, haven’t we suffered enough?

  Rami smiles at their familiar joke, beeps his motorbike horn and tucks in behind the Kia. He passes a hedge of rhododendrons. A few wild rosebushes. A row of apricot trees.

  On one side of the road a wire mesh fence stretches and he can briefly see all the way down to the valley floor, the roofs of houses, the terraces moving in quick succession, Jerusalem in the distance.

  494

  At the closed wooden gate of the convent Rami pauses the bike. Hard to fathom that one day the Wall may appear between here and the monastery. A watchtower here. A farmer’s gate there. A rim of barbed wire just beyond.

  495

  End the Preoccupation.

  496

  It doesn’t matter to them where they speak. Most of the time they meet in hotel conference rooms. Or in the auditoriums of schools. Or the back rooms of community centers. Every now and then in vast theaters. It is always the same story, heard differently in each place. Finite words on an infinite plane. It is this, they know, which keeps them going.

  497

  The gate is swung open and Bassam’s car nudges through. Rami hits the throttle and catches up, parks, removes his helmet. In the shadow of the monastery the two men approach each other and embrace.

  498

  In Constantin Brâncuși’s bird sculptures—considered by some to be among the most beautiful works of art of the twentieth century—the wings and the feathers are eliminated, the body of the bird is elongated and the head becomes a smooth oval plane.

  The Romanian artist cast sixteen examples of the Bird in Space, nine in bronze and seven in marble.

  In 1926 one of the bronze sculptures was stopped by U.S. Customs officers who refused to believe that the piece of metal amounted to art. The sculpture, along with nineteen other Brâncuși pieces, was due to appear in galleries in New York and Chicago. Instead, the customs officials imposed a tariff for manufactured objects. A court battle ensued. At first the U.S. Customs agreed to rethink their classification and released the sculptures on bond under the heading of Kitchen Utensils and Hospital Supplies.

  The art world was delighted until a customs appraiser backtracked and confirmed the official classification. The appraiser, F.J.H. Kracke, a key figure of the Republican party in Brooklyn, claimed that he had sent photos and descriptions of the sculptures out to several well-known people high in the art world.

  The responses he got suggested that Brâncuși’s sculptures were little more than dots and dashes that could have been dreamed up by a simple bricklayer. As such, said Kracke, they left far too much to the imagination.

  499

  They are greeted in the vestibule by an older monk. He is, he says, honored to meet them. He has heard much about their work.

  The monk bows slightly, guides them through the corridor, towards the chapel. The ceilings are vault
ed. The woodwork, intricate. The floors are stone.

  He speaks in Arabic with a South American accent. He is from a family that once lived in Haifa. They left, he says, like so many others, in ’48. Exiled.

  It feels to Rami as if his breath operates differently here. The air is cool. The light filters through the stained-glass windows and falls in slanted rows among the pews.

  The monk genuflects near the altar and then guides them into a room at the rear of the chapel. On a wooden table sits a jar of water with slices of lemon and two empty glasses.

  —The green room, says the monk with a half-smile.

  On the wall is the painting of a saint in a carved wooden frame. Alongside it, several photos of the monastery in decades gone by.

  The monk turns on his heel. His cassock swishes. They follow him down a high corridor, the emptiness brimming with echo. The walls, he tells them, are several meters thick. The local stone is known as royal stone. The meleke is so soft, he says, that it can be sliced from a quarry with a small knife. It hardens, then, upon contact with the air. Like so much else, he says over his shoulder.

  —Many generations have, he says, scrubbed this floor clean. If it could sing it would.

  It feels to Rami that they are walking through a watery candlelight. They pass several small rooms. The doors are built of oak with dark iron brackets. Small windows in the doors, chapel-shaped with a cross of white wood between the panes. The rooms themselves each have a table and a bed.

  They reach the end of the corridor where the ceiling vaults upwards again. The air is again cooler here. The monk turns slowly and looks along the length of yet another corridor.

  —Come, says the monk, your group is waiting, we have a table set for ten.

  500

  My name is Rami Elhanan. I am the father of Smadar. I am a sixty-seven-year-old graphic designer, an Israeli, a Jew, a seventh-generation Jerusalemite. Also what you might call a graduate of the Holocaust. My mother was born in the Old City of Jerusalem, to an ultra-Orthodox family. My father came here in 1946. What he saw in the camps he seldom spoke about, except to my daughter Smadar when she was ten or eleven. I was a kid from a straightforward background—we weren’t wealthy but we weren’t poor. I got in some trouble at school, nothing big, I ended up in industrial school, then studied art, more or less an ordinary life.

  The story I want to tell you starts and ends on one particular day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. For Jews this is the day when we ask forgiveness for our sins, the holiest day of our calendar. I was a young soldier fighting the October ’73 war in Sinai, a horrible war, everyone knows this, it’s no revelation. We started it with a company of eleven tanks and finished it with three. My job included bringing in ammunition and taking out the dead and wounded. I lost some of my very close friends, carried them out on stretchers. I emerged from the war bitter, angry, disappointed, with just one thing on my mind—to detach myself from any kind of involvement or commitment, to block myself off from anything official at all. I was a sort of anarchist, not really an anarchist even, I had no political involvement, I just wasn’t interested at all, the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, Timbuktu, I didn’t care, I didn’t think about them, I just wanted a normal quiet life.

  I got out of the army and finished my studies at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. I got married to Nurit, and we had four kids. One of these children was my daughter, Smadar. She was born on the eve of Yom Kippur, in September 1983, in a hospital in Jerusalem. Her name is taken from the Bible, from the Song of Solomon, grape of the vine. She was sparkling, vivid, joyful, just very beautiful. An excellent student, a swimmer, a dancer too, she played the piano and loved jazz. We used to call her Princess, a cliché of course, but that’s exactly what she was to me, a princess, every father knows this feeling, things aren’t such a cliché when you’re living them.

  My three boys and this little princess, we lived what seemed to be a perfect, sheltered life in Jerusalem in our secure house in the Rehavia neighborhood at the time. Nurit taught in the Hebrew University. She was radical, left-wing, stunning, brilliant. She went to the best schools. She was the daughter of a general. The Israeli elite, really. In a way, you could say that we lived inside a bubble, completely detached from the outside world. In this tiny country, smaller than New Jersey, you could drive from one end to the other in a day. It had its problems of course but what place doesn’t? I was doing graphic design—posters and ads—for the right wing, for the left wing, whoever paid money. Life was good. We were happy, complacent. To be honest it suited me.

  On and on and on this went, month after month, year after year, until the fourth of September, 1997, just a few days before Yom Kippur, when this incredible bubble of ours burst in midair into a million pieces. It was the beginning of a long cold dark night that is still long and cold and dark and will always be long and cold and dark, until the end when it will still be cold and dark.

  I have told this story so many times, but there is always something new to be said. Memories hit you all the time. A book that is opened. A door that is closed, a beeping sound, a window opened. Anything at all. A butterfly.

  That day, in 1997, three suicide bombers blew themselves up in the middle of Ben Yehuda Street in the center of Jerusalem, three bombs one after another. They killed eight people—themselves and five others, including three little girls. One of these girls was our Smadari. It was a Thursday, three o’clock in the afternoon. She was out buying books for school and later she was going to sign up for jazz dance lessons. A nice quiet day. She was walking down the street with her friends, listening to music.

  I was driving to Ben Gurion airport and I heard about the bombings on the radio. At first when you hear about an explosion, any explosion, anywhere, you keep hoping that maybe this time the finger of fate will not turn toward you. Every Israeli knows this. You get used to hearing about them, but it doesn’t alter the skip in your chest. You just wait and you listen and you hope that it isn’t you. And then you hear nothing. And then your heart starts to pound. And you make a few phone calls. And then you make a few more. You ask and you ask and you ask for your girl. You dial and you dial. But nobody has heard anything. Nobody has seen her. Then you hear something else. The last anyone saw her, she was near Ben Yehuda Street, downtown. And your heart, you can hear it thump in your ears now. You and your wife, you drive into town. You drive so fast, you think no, it can’t be happening this way, no no no. You leave the car and you find yourself running in the streets, in and out of shops, the café, the ice cream store, trying to find your daughter, your child, your Princess—but she has vanished. You shout her name. You run back to your car. You drive even faster. You go from hospital to hospital, police station to police station. You lean over the desk. You plead. You say her name over and over. And you know, you just know, deep in your heart, by the way the nurses look at you, by the way the policemen shake their heads, by their hesitance, by the silences, you know, but you won’t admit it. You do this for many long hours until eventually, very late at night, you and your wife find yourselves in the morgue.

  This finger of fate, it points at you. Right between your eyes. The morgue staff guide you through. They bring you to a room. You hear the slide of the tray. The metal rollers, the rubber wheels. And you see this sight which you will never be able to forget for the rest of your life. Your daughter. On a steel tray. And you will never be the same.

  Her funeral was held in Kibbutz Nachshon, on a green hill on the way to Jerusalem. Smadar was buried next to her grandfather, General Matti Peled, a true fighter for peace, a professor, a Knesset member. He was much loved on both sides and people came from everywhere in this mosaic of a country, Jews and Muslims and Christians, representatives of the settlers, representatives from the parliament, representatives of Arafat, from abroad, everywhere. And then she was buried beside him.

  You come back home, the house is filled with hundred
s and hundreds of people coming to pay respect, offering condolences. These are the seven days of shiva. You are enveloped by these hundreds of people, thousands actually—they lined the pavement, they had to put up orange cones to close the street off. Traffic cops for your daughter. But on the eighth day, everybody goes back to their normal, everyday business, and you’re left alone. Without your daughter.

  You wander the house. You say her name, you whisper it, and when you’re alone you shout it. Smadar. Smadari. You touch things. Her books on her shelf. Her music tapes. You listen for her. She’s not there.

  Time doesn’t wait for you. You want it to wait, to freeze, to paralyze itself, to go backwards, but it just doesn’t. You need to wake up, to stand up and face yourself. She is gone. Her chair at the table is empty. Her room is empty. Her coat is on the doorknob. You have to make a decision. What are you going to do now, with this new, unbearable burden on your shoulders? What are you going to do with this incredible anger that eats you alive? What are you going to do with this new you, this father without a daughter, this man who you never thought could have existed?

  The first choice is obvious: revenge. When someone kills your daughter you want to get even. You want to go out and kill an Arab, any Arab, all Arabs, and then you want to try to kill his family and anyone else around him, it’s expected, it’s demanded. Every Arab you see, you want him dead. Of course you don’t always do this in a real sense, but you do this by asking other people to kill this Arab for you, your politicians, your so-called leaders. You ask them to slam a missile into his house, to poison him, to take his land, to steal his water, to arrest his son, to beat him up at the checkpoints. If you kill one of mine, I will kill ten of yours. And the dead one, naturally, has an uncle or a brother or a cousin or a wife who wants to kill you back and then you want to kill them back again, another ten times over. Revenge. It’s the simplest way. And then you get monuments to that revenge, with mourners’ tents, songs, placards on the walls, another riot, another checkpoint, another piece of land stolen. A stone leads to a bullet. And another suicide bomber leads to another air strike. And it goes on and on. And on.