Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

  Look, I have a bad temper. I know it. I have an ability to blow up. Long ago, I killed people in the war. Distantly, like in a video game. I held a gun. I drove tanks. I fought in three wars. I survived. And the truth is, the awful truth, the Arabs were just a thing to me, remote and abstract and meaningless. I didn’t see them as anything real or tangible. They weren’t even visible. I didn’t think about them, they were not really part of my life, good or bad. The Palestinians in Jerusalem, well, they mowed the lawns, they collected the garbage, they built the houses, cleared the plates from the table. Like every Israeli, I knew they were there, and I pretended I knew them, even pretended I liked some of them, the safe ones—we talked about them like that, the safe ones, the dangerous ones—and I never would have admitted it, not even to myself, but they might as well have been lawn mowers, dishwashing machines, taxis, trucks. They were there to fix our fridges on a Saturday. That was the old joke: every town needed at least one good Arab, how else could you get the fridge fixed on Saturday? And if they were ever anything other than objects, they were objects to be feared, because, if you didn’t fear them then they would become real people. And we didn’t want them to be real people, we couldn’t handle that. A real Palestinian was a man on the dark side of the moon. This is my shame. I understand it as my shame. I know that now. I didn’t know it then. I don’t excuse myself. Please understand, I don’t excuse myself at all.

  Foolishly, at the beginning, I thought I could go on with my life, pretending as if nothing had happened. I got up, brushed my teeth, I tried to lead a normal life, went back to my studio, to draw, to make posters, to create slogans, to forget. But it didn’t work. Nothing was normal anymore. I wasn’t the same person. I had no idea how to get up in the morning.

  Then after a while you start asking yourself questions, you know, we’re not animals, we can use our brains, we use our imaginations, we have to find a way to get out of bed in the morning. And you ask yourself, Will killing anyone bring my daughter back? Will killing every other Arab bring her back? Will causing pain to someone else ease the unbearable pain that you are suffering? Well, the answer comes to you in the middle of that long dark night, and you think, dust returns to dust, ashes return to ashes, that’s all. She is not coming back, your Smadari. And you have to get used to this new reality. So in a very gradual, complicated way you come over to the other side: you start asking what happened to her, and why? It’s difficult, it’s frightening, it’s exhausting. How could such a thing take place? What could cause someone to be that angry, that mad, that desperate, that hopeless, that stupid, that pathetic, that he is willing to blow himself up alongside a girl, not even fourteen years old? How can you possibly understand that instinct? To tear his own body apart? To walk down a busy street and pull the cord on a belt that rips him asunder? How can he think that way? What made him? Where in the world was he created? How did he get that way? Where did he come from? Who taught him this? Did I teach him this? Did his government teach him this? Did my government?

  Then about a year after Smadar was killed, I met a man who changed my life. His name was Yitzhak Frankenthal, a religious Jew, Orthodox, with a kippah on his head. And, you know, we tend to put people into drawers, stigmatize people? We tend to judge people by the way they dress, and I was certain that this guy was a right-winger, a fascist, that he eats Arabs for breakfast. But we started talking and he told me about his son Arik, a soldier who was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 1994. And then he told me about this organization, the Parents Circle, that he had created—people who lost their loved ones, Palestinian and Israeli, but still wanted peace. And I remembered that Yitzhak had been among those thousands and thousands of people that came to my house a year before during those seven days of shiva for Smadar, and I was so angry with him, so confused, I asked him, How could you do it? Seriously, how could you step into someone’s house who just lost a loved one, and then talk about peace? How dare you? You came to my house after Smadar was killed? You took for granted that I would feel the same way as you, just because I was Matti Peled’s son-in-law, or Nurit Peled’s husband, you thought you could take my grief for granted? Is that what you thought?

  And he, being a great man, was not insulted. He understood my rage. He invited me over to a meeting in Jerusalem of these crazy people, they had all lost a loved one, and I was curious. I said okay, I’ll give it a try, I have nothing to lose, I have already lost so much, but they’re crazy, they have to be crazy. I got on the bike and I went to see. I stood outside where people were coming for the meeting, very detached, very cynical. And I watched those people arriving. The first group were, for me—as an Israeli—living legends. People I used to look up to, admire. I’d read about them in the newspapers, saw them on television. Yaakov Guterman, a Holocaust survivor, he lost his son Raz in the Lebanon war. And Roni Hirshenson, who lost his two sons, Amir and Elad.

  To be bereaved in Israel is to be part of a tradition, something really terrible but holy at the same time. And I never thought that one day I would be one of them.

  On and on they came, so many of them. But then I saw something else, something completely new to me, to my eyes, my mind, my heart, my brain. I was standing there, and I saw a few Palestinians passing by in a bus. Listen, this flabbergasted me. I knew it was going to happen, but still I had to do a double take. Arabs? Really? Going into the same meeting as these Israelis? How could that be? A thinking, feeling, breathing Palestinian? And I remember seeing this lady in this black, traditional Palestinian dress, with a headscarf—you know, the sort of woman who I might have thought could be the mother of one of the bombers who took my child. She was slow and elegant, stepping down from the bus, walking in my direction. And then I saw it, she had a picture of her daughter clutched to her chest. She walked past me. I couldn’t move. And this was like an earthquake inside me: this woman had lost her child. It maybe sounds simple, but it was not. I had been in a sort of coffin. This lifted the lid from my eyes. My grief and her grief, the same grief.

  I went inside to meet these people. And here they were, and they were shaking my hand, hugging me, crying with me. I was so deeply touched, so deeply moved. It was like a hammer on my head cracking me open. An organization of the bereaved. Israeli and Palestinian, Jew, Christian, Muslim, atheist, you name it. Together. In one room. Sharing their sorrow. Not using it, or celebrating it, but sharing it, saying that it is not a decree of faith that we should live forever with a sword in our hands. I cannot tell you what sort of madness it seemed. And I was completely cleaved open. It was like a nuclear event. Truly, it seemed mad.

  You see, I was forty-seven, forty-eight years old at that time, and I had to learn to admit it was the first time in my life, to that point—I can say this now, I could never even think it then—it was the first time that I’d met Palestinians as human beings. Not just workers in the streets, not just caricatures in the newspapers, not just transparencies, terrorists, objects, but—how do I say this?—human beings—human beings, I can’t believe I’m saying that, it sounds so wrong, but it was a revelation—yes, human beings who carry the same burden that I carry, people who suffer exactly as I suffer. An equality of pain. And like Bassam says, we are running from our pain to our pain. I’m not a religious person, far from it—I have no way of explaining what happened to me back then. If you had told me years ago that I would say this I would have said you were crazy.

  Some people have an interest in keeping the silence. Others have an interest in sowing hatred based on fear. Fear makes money, and it makes laws, and it takes land, and it builds settlements, and fear likes to keep everyone silent. And, let’s face it, in Israel we’re very good at fear, it occupies us. Our politicians like to scare us. We like to scare each other. We use the word security to silence others. But it’s not about that, it’s about occupying someone else’s life, someone else’s land, someone else’s head. It’s about control. Which is power. And I realized this with the force of an
ax, that it’s true, this notion of speaking truth against power. Power already knows the truth. It tries to hide it. So you have to speak out against power. And I began, back then, to understand the duty we have to try to understand what’s going on. Once you know what’s going on then you begin to think: What can we do about it? We could not continue to disavow the possibility of living alongside each other. I’m not necessarily asking for everyone to get along, or anything corny or airy-fairy, but I am asking for them to be allowed to get along. And, as I began to think about this, I began to think that I had stumbled upon the most important question of them all: What can you do, personally, in order to try to help prevent this unbearable pain for others? All I can tell you is that from that moment until today, I’ve devoted my time, my life to going everywhere possible, to talk to anyone possible, people who want to listen—even to people who will not listen—to convey this very basic and very simple message, which says: We are not doomed, but we have to try to smash the forces that have an interest in keeping us silent.

  It may sound strange but in Israel we don’t really know what the Occupation actually is. We sit in our coffee shops and we have a good time and we don’t have to deal with it. We have no idea what it’s like to walk through a checkpoint every day. Or to have our family land taken away. Or to wake up with a gun in our faces. We have two sets of laws, two sets of roads, two sets of values. To most Israelis this seems impossible, some sort of weird distortion of reality, but it is not. Because we just don’t know. Our lives are good. The cappuccino is tasty. The beach is open. The airport is right there. We have no access to what it’s like for people in the West Bank or Gaza. Nobody talks about it. You’re not allowed into Bethlehem unless you’re a soldier. We drive on our Israeli-only roads. We bypass the Arab villages. We build roads above them and below them, but only to make them faceless. Maybe we saw the West Bank once, when we were on military service, or maybe we watch a TV show every now and then, our hearts bleed for thirty minutes, but we don’t really, truly, know what’s going on. Not until the worst happens. And then the world is turned inside out.

  Truth is, you can’t have a humane occupation. It just doesn’t exist. It can’t. It’s about control. Maybe we have to wait until the price of peace is so high that people begin to understand this. Maybe it won’t end until the price outweighs the benefits. Economic price. Lack of jobs. No sleep at night. Shame. Maybe even death. The price I paid. This is not a call for violence. Violence is weak. Hatred is weak. But today we have one side, the Palestinians, who are completely thrown to the side of the road. They don’t have any power. What they do is out of incredible anger and frustration and humiliation. Their land is taken. They want it back. And this leads to all sorts of questions, not least: What, then, to do about the settlers? Repatriation? Land swaps? Generous compensation for the Palestinians who had their land stolen? Maybe a mixture of all these things. And then those settlers who wanted to stay could stay and become citizens of Palestine under the rule of Palestinian sovereignty like the Arabs in Israel. Equal rights. Equal rights to the letter. Then after a period of trying to make it work we create a Europe of the Middle East, a United States. Both sides make sacrifices. Redefine what we kill and die for. Now we kill and die for simplicities. Why not die for something more complex? There can be no way that one side has more rights than the other—more political power, more land, more water, more anything. Equality. Why not? Is it as insane as theft? As murder?

  Nobody can listen to me and stay the same. Maybe you will get angry, or offended, or even humiliated, but at least you will not stay the same. And in the end despair is not a plan of action. It’s a Sisyphean task to create any sort of hope. And that’s what keeps me going. I tell the story over and over again. We must end the Occupation and then sit down together to figure it out. One state, two states, it doesn’t matter at this stage—just end the Occupation, and then begin the process of rebuilding the possibility of dignity for all of us. It’s as clear to me as the noonday sun. There are times, sure, when I would like to be wrong. It would be so much easier. If I had found another path I would have taken it—I don’t know, revenge, cynicism, hatred, murder. But I am a Jew. I have great love for my culture and my people and I know that ruling and oppressing and occupying is not Jewish. Being Jewish means that you respect justice and fairness. No people can rule another people and obtain security or peace for themselves. The Occupation is neither just nor sustainable. And being against the Occupation is, in no way, a form of anti-Semitism.

  Others know all this too, they just don’t want to hear it. Sometimes they’re angry to hear it, sometimes they’re sad, and sometimes they turn their world around completely. That’s the truth. It is not any great bravery, it’s just ordinary, it’s natural, it’s what I have to do.

  I have been called many things, an insect, an Arab lover, a self-hating Jew. I walk into some places and it’s like walking into a volcano. They say I am naïve, self-righteous, that I exploit my grief. Do I exploit my grief? Yes, I do. They’re right. Yes—but I’m doing it in order to help try to prevent pain. Is that ridiculous? Okay, even if it’s ridiculous, it doesn’t mean it’s not true.

  Somebody, a fellow Israeli, told me once that they wish I had been blown up with my daughter on Ben Yehuda Street. I thought about that for a long time—should I have been blown up? And, after a while, the answer was clear: yes. Yes. Because I had been blown up. It had already happened. And it has happened with so many others since. And we are still being blown up, in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv. And we’re still looking around and collecting the pieces. Every day my mind begs the question, Why?

  You never heal, don’t let anyone tell you that you ever fully heal—it’s the living who have to bury the dead. I pay the price, sometimes I despair, but what else is there to be, in the end, but hopeful? What else are we going to do? Walk away, kill ourselves, kill each other? That’s already happened, it didn’t achieve much. I know that it will not be over until we talk to each other—that’s what it says on the sticker on the front of my bike. Joining with others saved my life. We cannot imagine the harm we’re doing by not listening to one another and I mean this on every level. It is immeasurable. We may have built up our wall, but the wall is really in our minds, and every day I try to put a crack in it. I know that the deeper the story goes, the deeper the engagement, the greater the disappointment when nothing happens, when there is no change. And so I go deeper again. And get even more disappointed. Maybe disappointment is my fate. So what? I will embrace it so tightly that I kill it. My name is Rami Elhanan, I am the father of Smadar. I repeat it every day, and every day it becomes something new because somebody else hears it. I will tell it until the day I die, and it will never change, but it will keep on putting a tiny crack in the wall until the day I die.

  Who knows where things finish? Things go on. That is what the world is. Do you understand what I mean? I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what I mean. We have words but sometimes they’re not enough.

  1001

  Once upon a time, and not so long ago, and not so far away, Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, a Jew, a graphic artist, husband of Nurit, father of Elik and Guy and Yigal, father too of the late Smadar, traveled on his motorbike from the suburbs of Jerusalem to the Cremisan monastery in the mainly Christian town of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, in the Judean hills, to meet with Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, a Muslim, a former prisoner, an activist, born near Hebron, husband of Salwa, father of Araab and Areen and Muhammad and Ahmed and Hiba, father too of the late Abir, ten years old, shot dead by an unnamed Israeli border guard in East Jerusalem, almost a decade after Rami’s daughter, Smadar, two weeks away from fourteen, was killed in the western part of the city by three Palestinian suicide bombers, Bashar Sawalha, Youssef Shouli, and Tawfiq Yassine, from the village of Assira al-Shamaliya near Nablus in the West Bank, a place of intrigue to the listeners gathered in the redbrick monastery perched on the hillside, in th
e Mountains of the Beloved, by the terraced vineyard, in the shadow of the Wall, having come from as far apart as Belfast and Kyushu, Paris and North Carolina, Santiago and Brooklyn, Copenhagen and Terezín, on an ordinary day at the end of October, foggy, tinged with cold, to listen to the stories of Bassam and Rami, and to find within their stories another story, a song of songs, discovering themselves—you and me—in the stone-tiled chapel where we sit for hours, eager, hopeless, buoyed, confused, cynical, complicit, silent, our memories imploding, our synapses skipping, in the gathering dark, remembering, while listening, all of those stories that are yet to be told.

  500

  My name is Bassam Aramin, I am the father of Abir. I’m a Palestinian, a Muslim, an Arab. I’m forty-eight years old. I’ve lived many places—a cave near Hebron, seven years in prison, then an apartment in Anata, and these days in a house with a garden in Jericho near the Dead Sea. My father raised goats and other animals in the hills, my mother looked after fifteen brothers and sisters. They were both born near Sa’ir, a village close to Hebron, their parents, and their parents before them too. I lived in a cave but not a cave as you might think of it—we had shelves full of books, carpets on the walls, it was cool in summer, warm in winter, always alive with voices and good cooking, we were happy there, we had what we wanted.