Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

  I didn’t crave a gun. I didn’t want a grenade. For me, there was no return from nonviolence. Not for a split second. At the funeral I said that I would not seek revenge, even though some of the Israelis I knew—Israelis, yes—said that they would seek it for me, they were so angry on my behalf. I wasn’t interested. I knew that what happened next was up to me. I needed to do something. People needed to know what was going on. So I joined the Parents Circle just days after Abir passed away. My life became my message. I flung myself into it. It made perfect sense to me. I began traveling with Rami, all over, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Beit Jala, talking, talking, talking. We had a mission. The force of our grief. We would not use our memories to take revenge. I used to say: The year Smadar was murdered, Abir was born. It was true. But what I didn’t know when Abir was killed is that she and Smadar would keep on living. And we will not let other people steal their futures. Try shutting us up, it won’t work. Say anything you want. Call me a traitor, a collaborator, a coward, call me anything you want, I don’t care, I know who I am. Stand at the school gate, shout, “Death to Arabs,” it won’t get to me. It has nothing to do with collaboration, nothing to do with normalization, it is just pure grief, the power of it, and, like Rami says, it is atomic. To live on in the memory of others means that you do not die.

  It eventually pushed me to try to finish my master’s degree on the Holocaust in a program in England. I had to think differently. I had to put my brain in new places. After all, it was one Israeli soldier who shot my daughter, but one hundred former Israeli soldiers came to Anata to build a playground for her. You have to understand how dangerous it was for them to come to Anata. I had to make sure they would be safe. They built a playground with her name at the school where she was murdered. They dug the ground. They put up the plaque. They put the slides in, a sandpit. It took a couple of weekends to do.

  Nobody got charged with Abir’s murder but I decided to fight it in the civil courts. You can call it madness, and it was, but it took me four more years to prove in the civil court that Abir had been killed with a rubber bullet. Four years. Palestinians have the patience of Job. It was a shock around Israel when I won. When I got the compensation one Israeli said to me: “So, how much did you get?” And I said that it did not matter, the word compensate means nothing to me, no amount of money would ever suffice. But he asked again, he insisted on an answer, so I told him the truth. Four hundred thousand dollars. He had this look on his face. “So, we’re all paid up,” he said, and I said, “What do you mean?” and he said, “Just forget about it,” and I asked him again and he said, “Forget about it.” The very bone of my heart was rattling. And so I asked him, in Hebrew, if he had a child. And he stared at me and said, “Yes, I have a son.” So I said to him that I would give him four hundred thousand dollars and all he had to do was give me his son. “Why?” he said. And I said: “So I can kill him and forget about it.” His face, you should have seen it. “No,” he said, “what you don’t understand is that your child was killed by mistake by the Israeli government, we are all paid up, it was a mistake, we admitted it, there’s a difference, so move on, forget about it, man.” And I said, “Okay, I will give you four hundred thousand and four hundred thousand more and four hundred thousand on top of that, and four hundred thousand more just for blessing, and I will have the government kill your son—and it will be entirely by mistake.” His face went completely white. He was confused. He walked away and then turned around and looked at me from the corner of the room. I think in that moment he was changed too. He was blinking very hard. In the end he threw his hand up in the air and left.

  I try to understand it too. It’s so difficult to explain. I still sit in that ambulance every day. I keep waiting for it to move. Every day she gets killed again and every day I sit in the ambulance, willing it to move, please move, please please please, just go, why are you staying here, let’s just go. Rami was in the hospital, waiting for us. He put his arms to my shoulders. We had no idea what was in store for us.

  Afterwards I would sit in my car and weep against the steering wheel. You remember everything, every little thing. Abir liked to draw. She liked bears and she liked the sea. She would hold a crayon in the corner of her mouth. In my dream I bring her to the sea and she runs along the pier. Show me one father in the world who does not want to bring his child to the sea. I couldn’t do it then, I couldn’t get a permit.

  But I refuse to be a victim. I decided that a long time ago. There is one living victim and that is the man who killed my daughter. He was a teenager when he shot her. He had no idea why he killed her. He wasn’t some hero, some champion. Who shoots a girl in the back? I saw him in court. I said to him, “You are the victim, not me. You had no idea why you killed her, you were following orders, you did it without conscience. I want to wish you a long life because I hope your conscience will wake you up.”

  The thing is, we Palestinians don’t exist as humans for many people. I am officially stateless. At your airport. At your consulate. Where do I exist? It’s an absurd question. Maybe one place—in your prison I exist. Or maybe in your imagination I exist as a terrorist, but nowhere else. I have a travel document, a laissez-passer, yes, but they can take that away anytime. I have been many places. I went to Germany, South Africa, Ireland, all of your countries, I went to the White House, I talked with Senator Kerry, I accused him of murder, but he knew exactly what I was talking about, he understood, and he put a picture of Abir in his office.

  We keep on going. We have to. Rami and me, our sons, Araab and Yigal, are together on this. And we prepare our grandchildren now, Yishai and Judeh. We don’t want to have to prepare them. We don’t want this for them. We would rather they could live in peace and comfort. Once I thought we could never solve our conflict, we would continue hating each other forever, but it is not written anywhere that we have to go on killing each other. The hero makes a friend of his enemy. That’s my duty. Don’t thank me for doing it. That’s all it is, my duty. When they killed my daughter they killed my fear. I have no fear. I can do anything now. Judeh will, one day, live in peace, it has to happen. Sometimes it feels like we’re trying to draw water from the ocean with a spoon. But peace is a fact. A matter of time. Look at South Africa, Northern Ireland, Germany, France, Japan, even Egypt. Who would have believed it possible? Did the Palestinians kill six million Israelis? Did the Israelis kill six million Palestinians? But the Germans killed six million Jews and look, now we have an Israeli diplomat in Berlin and we have a German ambassador in Tel Aviv. You see, nothing is impossible. As long as I am not occupied, as long as I have my rights, so long as you allow me to move around, to vote, to be human, then anything is possible.

  I don’t have time for hate anymore. We need to learn how to use our pain. Invest in our peace, not in our blood, that’s what we say.

  Rami went to Germany with me a few years ago, but that’s a long story, I had to convince him to go, he hated the Germans. He never thought he could go. But he went. And he saw a different place from what he imagined.

  In Palestine we say ignorance is a terrible acquaintance. We do not talk to the Israelis. We are not allowed to talk to them—the Palestinians don’t want it and the Israelis don’t want it. We have no clue what the other one is like. That’s where the madness lies. Put up a wall, put up a checkpoint, write the Nakba out of the books, do what you want. But here’s the key—we are not voiceless, no matter how much silence there is. We need to learn how to share this land, otherwise we will be sharing it in our graves. And we know it’s not possible to clap with one hand. We will, eventually, make a sound, trust me, it has to happen. Darwish said: It is time for you to be gone.

  You can hate me all you want, that is fine. You can build all the walls you want, that is fine. If you think a wall gives you security go ahead, but make it in your garden, not mine.

  I’m a gardener, I love water. In England I was the only one who loved the weather. The ja
nitors laughed at me when I said how much I loved the rain. I used to stand outside and let it fall on my face. I came home to Palestine. It was all I could do. Tonight I will stop my car and stand for a while under the stars. Have you ever seen Jericho at night? If you see it you will know that you will never see anything like it again.

  499

  The engine takes a moment to catch. The evening has grown cold and dark. The windshield fogs with his breath.

  Bassam reaches to turn on the heater, glances out at Rami in the dark, standing next to his motorbike, zipping the side-vents in his riding pants. The lights from the monastery cast Rami’s shadow long across the parking lot.

  He presses the cigarette lighter into place, waits for the coils to catch. The anticipation of the cigarette is sometimes as good as the first pull. Forty years of smoking and still it never changes. He taps the pack into the heel of his hand to tamp down the tobacco, flips the lid, removes one. There were—long ago—so many prison rituals with cigarettes, the careful roll, the rescue of every grain, the twist of the filter, the smoothing of the paper. Sometimes he would pause over an unlit rollie for hours. Later he would keep his eyes closed while he held the smoke in his lungs. It felt to him then like putting on a clean thobe. Always two drags: the second to relax the first. He could feel it re-coating his lungs.

  There are times he wishes he could isolate the inhalation. It begins in the throat and then vaults back into the mouth and down again into the lungs where it seems to pause awhile before it moves around his body. He promised himself three years ago to give them up; so be it, he never did. No alcohol, no other excesses. Avoid that which requires an apology.

  The air from the vents has begun to warm. He cracks the window, blows the smoke out. Next to him, Rami has already put on his helmet and swung his leg across the motorbike.

  The two exchange a nod. The cigarette smoke filters up against the dark.

  In reverse, the dashcam flips into life. The guiding red and yellow lines appear on the small screen. Bassam hits his brakes and the light flares against the red brick of the monastery wall. He takes another drag and allows Rami’s motorbike to pull out in front of him.

  A few stray raindrops slant in the lights above the empty guardhouse at the gate. Nothing more than a light drizzle, but it will slow their journeys home: Rami to Jerusalem, Bassam to Jericho.

  He watches as his friend raises one hand in the air, and together they pass on through into the dark.

  498

  It is often a surprise to travelers that the River Jordan is, in so many places, not much more than a trickle.

  497

  The pools, the crevices, the fissures, the brooks, the streams, the aquifers, the rivulets, the wadis, the creeks, the channels, the canals, the runnels, the brooks, the rills, the puddles, the wells, the spouts, the springs, the sluices, the ponds, the lakes, the dams, the pipes, the drains, the cisterns, the lagoons, the marshes, the surf, the tide, the living seas, the dead seas, the rain itself: water here is everything.

  496

  Parts of the Atacama desert in Chile have never had any recorded rainfall. It is one of the driest places on earth, but the local farmers have learned to harvest water from the air by suspending large nets to catch cloud banks rolling in from the Pacific coast.

  When the fog touches the tall nets, it forms drops of moisture. The water rolls down along the plastic strands and moves through small gutters, collecting at the bottom of the net, where the trickle is funneled into a pipe that leads to a cistern.

  All across the landscape, high metal poles hold the dark nets against the pale sky. The fog is captured early in the morning before the sun burns the clouds off.

  Out of nothing, something.

  495

  The farmers call the nets fog catchers.

  494

  Because of irrigation schemes and dams along the length of the Jordan, the river runs at about ten percent of its natural strength. A large part of the flow is made up of sewage. In summertime, without the effluent and the saline discharge, there would be hardly any river at all.

  The trickle barely makes it to the Dead Sea which, as a result, drops up to three feet every year.

  493

  So that, from above—from the view of a pilot, say, or a bird—the dry, cracked land around the shore looks like a shattered windshield.

  492

  Once, when he was flying back from a trip to Finland, Rami’s plane got caught in a holding pattern over Ben Gurion. A beautiful clear day. He gazed out from his window seat on the landscape below. The West Bank was scattershot with construction, apartment blocks halfway built, warehouses dotted in increments of exhausted grey, roads that seemed to taper off into abandonment.

  The plane tilted. The shadow flicked on the landscape, shortened and disappeared from view as the plane circled in a wide loop.

  Rami could tell exactly where Israel began and ended: it was more ordered and controlled, logical, highways and flyways and byways.

  When the plane curved around in the direction of Jerusalem, he could pick out the settlements with ease: the red roofs, the glimmering solar panels, the cerulean blue of the swimming pools, the perfect rectangles of green lawn.

  491

  An average swimming pool takes about 20,000 gallons of water to fill.

  490

  In the high summer of 1835, a Maltese sailor—a vagabond, a sometime servant—happened upon a young English-speaking traveler in the market of Akka, on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The sailor, eager for work, had just come off a ship carrying spices from Beirut.

  From what the sailor could gather, the traveler was seeking to make a journey by boat from the Sea of Galilee to the Sea of Salt, from where he would, among other things, search out the lost Biblical towns.

  The traveler appeared to be in his late twenties. He was tall and slim and wore wire-rimmed glasses. His light-colored hair was thinning. A Christian cross hung at his neck. His bearing was pious, his voice soft.

  The prospect of the journey confounded the sailor. The length of the River Jordan had seldom been explored by foreign travelers. Lore had it that anybody who ventured upon the Sea of Salt—known to some as the Dead Sea—would never survive. It was the end of July, almost August, the hottest time of the year. The river would be low but swift and wild, and in certain places unnavigable. The boat itself would require the agility of a canoe and the sturdiness of a sailing vessel. The journey between the lakes was, by his calculations, a little short of seventy miles: not only would the traveler have to deal with curious villagers and roving gangs of thieves, but it was likely that they would be set upon by jackals, eagles, scorpions, snakes and all manner of insects.

  The Maltese sailor had spent thirty years on the water, as far adrift as Africa and China. The proposed journey struck him as one of inordinate folly, but the traveler said he would pay handsomely up front for an experienced servant and reward him substantially after the journey was finished. There would also be great reward, said the traveler, in the heavenly sphere.

  The Maltese sailor strode forward and agreed, with a handshake, to join the journey.

  The pair slept that evening in a boardinghouse near the pier in Akka. The traveler gave the Maltese sailor the only bed while he himself slept on the floor. In the morning they prayed together at the foot of the window as the light rose hard and yellow over the Mediterranean. They packed the traveler’s steamer trunk and the sailor’s leather bags, then made their way down to the harbor where they haggled a good price for a sturdy wooden boat with copper trimmings and a tall sail. In the market they bought a few weeks’ worth of supplies.

  The mast was temporarily removed and the hull of the boat was strapped to a camel. Two Bedouin tribesmen accompanied the men on their inland walk. It was their job to look after the boat-carrying camel and to protect the traveling party from thieve
s. The supplies—water, food, maps, provisions and books—were carried down the road from Akka to the Sea of Galilee.

  In the evening, when the sailor and the traveler camped, village children came to sit inside the wooden boat: they rowed in the sand and giggled until they were shooed away by the Bedouin.

  The sailor prepared breakfast before sunrise and together the men strapped the boat to the camel and continued their journey.

  On the evening of the third day, the Sea of Galilee rose in front of them. A strong wind combed the surface of the lake, long scribbles of white under soaring flocks of egrets. The trees along the water were in full bloom: oranges, apricots, palms. The light lay red on the western sky. To the Christian traveler it looked Edenic: he went to his knees and began to pray.

  In the morning the dark lifted generously. The sky seemed to begin at their feet. The traveler settled his account with the Bedouin, dragged the small boat into the water and stepped into the hull. He wanted to get a start before the day’s heat rose. He would, he told the sailor, take the helm for the first part of the journey. He fumbled with the oarlock and it tumbled into the shallows. When he retrieved it, he seemed not quite sure how the oar would fit into the lock.