by Colum McCann
The Maltese sailor was astonished to learn that the traveler had never plied the oars of a small boat before.
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It was only the fifth boat the traveler had ever been in. The first had brought him from Kingstown, Ireland, to Southampton, England; the second to Port Said in Egypt; the third from Egypt to Beirut; the fourth from Beirut to Akka on the Mediterranean Sea.
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Known to Israelis as the city of Akko. Known to Palestinians still as Akka. Known beyond Israel and Palestine as Acre: a mosaic town with a low skyline of mosque and flat roof and synagogue, a town of bells and loudspeakers and muezzin calls, where the warm-water wind retreats the tongue and sneaks multiple sounds into the throat: Acre, Akko, Akka.
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Christopher Costigin was twenty-five years old. He had grown up on Thomas Street in Dublin. His father, Sylvester, was a distiller. His mother, Catherine, a bookkeeper. He was studying theology in Maynooth College in the hope of joining the priesthood.
Costigin had read about the Levant in secondary school. He wanted to see for himself the river that Moses had seen from the heights of Mount Nebo, where Jesus had been baptized by John, and where the Israelites had crossed over into the Promised Land. He had a special interest in the Biblical stories that took place in and around the Dead Sea, not least the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, the visiting angels, and Lot’s wife who had been turned into a pillar of salt.
As an amateur geographer, he also wanted to draw maps and to make a series of depth soundings of the lake. Costigin hoped to bring back whatever evidence he could: scrolls, rocks, manuscripts, paintings, stories.
The source of God was, he was sure, to be found at the Dead Sea.
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The Sea—the lowest point of land on earth—is full of salt floes, some of which can be thrown onshore haphazardly by surging waves, calcified and rock-like, hard white surprises.
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Costigin became known as Costigan in the history books. The misspelling stuck when—in the 1840s—a headland on the Dead Sea was named after him.
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The name of the Maltese sailor went forever unknown.
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The sailor plied the boat easily across the Sea of Galilee as Costigin took notes in his leather-bound journal. The sun was high but they had taken the precaution, along with the traditional robes and keffiyehs, of bringing two white umbrellas to shade them. A slight breeze came off the shore. The boat moved easily, following the line of the River Jordan through the lake. Both men were in high spirits. Costigin dropped a weighted rope in the water and took measurements, then filled several small glass jars with water specimens.
When they arrived at the far side—where the Jordan once again took up its natural course—they made camp. Darkness fell. They listened to the howl of wild dogs and the dull thrum of distant rapids.
The next day, on the river, the heat began to rise. They moved through a white rock canyon. They kept to the shadowed side of the water and negotiated the first of the rapids. The river was lower than the sailor had expected. The rocks ran high. They bounced the wooden vessel through some of the faster stretches. The copper band that had been fastened around the side of the boat was already dented and broken.
Costigin seemed buoyed by the early difficulty. It suited him. He wanted to stop the boat to explore some caves, but the Maltese sailor told him to strap the provisions down and keep balance in the boat, that there would be plenty of ruins further downriver.
When they looked behind, after the first major rapid, they saw they had lost a white umbrella: it spun daintily in a whirlpool.
The river grew faster, choppier. By noon the next day, they had to portage the boat around several areas of river rock. They unloaded and reloaded the boat, only to have to unload it again. The Maltese sailor implored a return to Galilee, but Costigin wouldn’t hear of it. They had enough fresh water and food, he said. The river would change. They had to trust in God: they would reach the Dead Sea and the water would bring release.
The men stopped once again to portage out of the river. They had lost their only telescope and a thermometer too. Exhausted, they camped on the riverside, but they ate well and restocked their freshwater supplies.
They began once again at first break of light. Above the river—beyond the bushes and high grasses—they saw bands of Arab horsemen appear and then disappear into the desert. Costigin wanted to scramble up the cliffs to talk with them, but the Maltese sailor begged him to stay on the river. The figures reappeared along the cliff, but they made no contact.
On several occasions the sailor had to prevent Costigin from clambering out of the boat to explore. On the boat Costigin began to recite Biblical verses, every now and then rocking back and forth, back and forth, with the book clutched to his chest.
The river narrowed and the rapids rose. Costigin’s journals were lost overboard. The copper banding around the boat loosened. The heat hammered down. The men dipped their headscarves in the river to cool their boiling skulls. They huddled together under the cloth sail they had rigged above the vessel. The boat was caught against rocks. They used ropes to dislodge it. Costigin’s hands were ripped to shreds.
The sailor said they should abandon the river as soon as possible. Costigin said they would go on no matter what. It was God’s will. They would be given release. It was a holy river. What they needed was a leap of faith.
No animals or humans were apparent on the riverbanks anymore: no insects even, until dusk, when they were enveloped by mosquitoes and flies. Huge dark swarms. In their eyes, their ears, their mouths.
The sailor watched as Costigin snorted a sleeve of dead flies from his nose.
On the fourth day, within minutes of embarking on the river, they were forced to portage yet again. They hauled the boat out of the river and dragged it over the riverbank, through the thick band of riverside bulrushes and palm trees, and began the overland journey towards the Dead Sea.
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Taking the only safe route they knew. North in the direction of Nablus. West towards Jerusalem. South, then, to Jericho. The boat once again strapped onto a camel.
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The suicide bombers camped out for weeks in caves near Nablus. They were brought provisions by kids on horseback: tinned food, water purifiers, clothing, newspapers, matches, kerosene, spices. They had access to a satellite phone but were not allowed to use it unless they walked at least a mile from their camp, disguised as shepherds.
During the day they remained in the caves. There were, they knew, Israeli listening posts all over the landscape, and planes streaking across the sky during the day, taking photographs from above.
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In his night walks from the cave in order to use the phone, the lead bomber, Youssef Shouli, inserted sheets of aluminum foil and silver thermal blankets beneath his clothing in the belief that it would deceive any heat-seeking sensors that might be set up in the hills.
Shouli returned from his satellite calls soaked in sweat, his body baking inside the silver foil.
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Imagine this: Shouli’s hands and face exposed to a heat-seeking camera as he bobs along through the dark.
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The Allenby Bridge, also known as the al-Karameh Bridge, also known as the King Hussein Bridge, spans the Jordan River near Jericho. Barbed wire, security cameras and trigger alarms extend for hundreds of yards along both sides of the riverbank.
For years, when the area around the bridge was less built up, it was a tradition to throw small coins from the banks of the river for good luck when traveling across.
The Jordan was deep enough that the local children could dive for the coins.
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When Smadar was nine she wrote a school report on the most polluted rivers in the world: the Yellow, the Ganges, the Sarno, the M
ississippi, the Jordan.
For her section on the Jordan she used a photograph of herself floating on her back at Ein Bokek at the Dead Sea. The caption read: Where the Jordan ends.
In the photo Smadar, four years of age, wears a pale blue swimsuit and a white cap with a plastic yellow flower on the front. She leans forward, surprised, it seems, by the sight of her toes.
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At the swim competitions in Jerusalem, Smadar patrolled the edges of the pool. Her body looked as if it had been set on springs, always fidgeting, moving, on the go. Before a race she had a habit of placing her finger in the rear of the swimming cap, snapping the latex tight against her neck. It became her signature gesture: a loud popping sound echoing around the pool.
Her best stroke was the butterfly. Rami watched her as she plowed through the pool, arms moving symmetrically, her legs scissoring in and out of the water.
When the race was finished Smadar ripped the swimming cap off and shook her hair out. She had heard a rumor that the chlorine would turn her hair a shade of green.
At home she doused her head in vinegar: she dubbed it the Jordan Treatment.
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After the death of Matti Peled, Smadar got in the habit of winding his watch at bedtime. She didn’t want it to stop while she was asleep lest it signal that her other grandfather, Yitzak, had died during the night too.
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Once she climbed into the pool still wearing the timepiece on her wrist. The second hand froze. She insisted that Rami take her to a jewelry store to get it fixed. He bundled her in the car to a clockmaker’s house, an elderly Armenian woman who lived in the Meah Shearim district.
Rami had heard about the Jewish woman from a colleague in the advertising industry.
While the clockmaker dried out the inside of the watch, Smadar walked around the house amongst the hundreds of working clocks.
Before they left, she nudged up against Rami and tugged his sleeve. Why, she asked, were all the clocks in the back rooms of the house exactly one hour off?
It bothered Rami too until he remembered that there was a one-hour time difference between Israel and Armenia.
Perhaps, he told her, the clockmaker wanted to dwell in her original time. Or maybe the clocks just reminded her of her homeland. Or maybe—he thought later—the clockmaker didn’t want to dwell in that time at all, and she was, in the back of her house, always an hour ahead, so that the things that had happened there might not, yet, have happened here.
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Peled had worn the Timex all through the ’48 war, his days in the Knesset, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the agreement with Sadat, the withdrawal from Sinai, the invasion of Lebanon, and the First Intifada. The timepiece was a talisman of sorts. In his personal diary, in the summer of 1994, he wrote that the only time he wanted not to wear it or consult it at all was at the conclusion of the Oslo negotiations.
The agreement, he wrote, was like a piece of chamber music disguised as a symphony, a temporary salve for the Palestinian ear but designed, in the end, only for the Israeli violin.
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After he left the morgue, Rami had to go to his father’s house to tell him what had happened to Smadar. His father was in the small living room, watching the news. Yitzak did not yet know: none of the names of the dead had yet been announced.
Rami switched off the television, pulled a chair close. His father, almost eighty years old—a thin blanket across his knees—stared at a point beyond Rami’s shoulder. He moved his mouth but didn’t say a word. It was as if he needed to figure out what new taste this might be.
Yitzak put his hand to the bridge of his nose, then rose slowly and said: I’m awfully tired, son, I have to go to bed now.
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As if things that had happened there might not, yet, have happened here.
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From the monastery, Rami’s motorbike goes out in front, trailing its red brake light between potholes.
To Bassam’s left, down in the valley, the landscape is already lit up. The highway—for Israeli cars only—runs through the valley, a blur of yellow on one side, red on the other, some towards Hebron, some towards Jerusalem, some towards the Dead Sea.
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Bassam cracks the window of the car an inch to allow the smoke out.
In prison a single cigarette could be shared among two or three cells. At night, he could look along the length of the corridors and see the pulse of red ash as it swung from one cell to the next. The hands of the prisoners stuck out through the holes in their doors to catch the contraband as it swung. The cigarettes were tied on long pieces of dental floss and in the dark they looked like small universes pulsing.
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The shore around the Dead Sea is pocked with sinkholes. As the salt water recedes, the freshwater aquifers along the perimeter begin to penetrate. The water encounters huge boulders of salt anywhere from five to sixty meters below the surface.
Slowly the salt dissolves and the boulders disappear until all that remains is a giant cavity. The cavities rise to the surface, like air bubbles, until the ground below collapses without warning.
Thousands of sinkholes have formed along the Dead Sea shore in recent years: huge, gaping craters appearing out of nowhere.
Whole buildings have fallen into the holes. Fences. Groves of date palms. Horses. Cars. Portions of road. Bedouin goats.
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One instant there, the next gone. Whisked out of midair.
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Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid, even acid.
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It disrupts the forces of attraction that hold molecules together.
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In many West Bank houses you fill basins, you line up jugs, you top up bottles by the kitchen sink. You brush your teeth with the tap off. You step quickly from the shower. You put a plastic stopper above the drain in the bathroom. You soak sponges in the standing water. You put aerators on the faucets to reduce the flow. You use a broom to clean the steps, no mops. You wipe your car with a dry cloth. You dust the windows of your house. You know the water can be turned off for weeks at a time and then you will have to buy it at four times the price charged to those across the valley. You climb the stairs to the flat concrete roof and you check the black tanks for leaks. You lift the lid to check the level. You pray for rain even if the tank is almost full.
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One of the games played by Israeli soldiers is Shoot the Water Tank: the lower the bullet on the tank, the finer the marksman.
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Sometimes a vindictive Palestinian Authority soldier takes aim too.
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At the end of the Second World War a young Bedouin shepherd of the Ta’amirah tribe went searching for a lost goat in the sandstone cliffs near the Dead Sea.
Clambering up on the rocks, Muhammad al-Dhib came upon a cistern-shaped cave with an opening. The missing goat might, he thought, have fallen into the cave, or was perhaps foraging somewhere in the dark.
Muhammad tossed several pebbles into the hole and thought he heard an odd sound.
When he lowered himself into the cave, Muhammad took a thin tallow candle from his pocket and lit it. Several jars of ancient pottery sat in a row on the ground. He stepped forward and broke a jar open with his wooden staff. The jar shattered into pieces. He smashed the second, then a third. All empty.
The tenth was sealed with red clay. Inside he found several strips of rolled leather. The writing on the leather was illegible to Muhammad, but it struck him that he might be able to use the leather as a strap for his sandals.
Muhammad wrapped the parchment in his cloak and took it back to his camp. The leather turned out to be too brittle for sandal straps, so he hung it in a goatskin bag in the corner of his hut.
He later told interviewers that the sa
ck remained there, hanging from a cedar pole, for at least another year.
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In 1947, Muhammad’s uncle noticed the leather scrolls hanging in the hut. Curious, he took them to a market in Bethlehem. The first trader, thinking they were stolen from a Jewish synagogue, said they were worthless. They were taken to a nearby market where they were examined by a local sheikh and a store owner who enlisted the help of a shoemaker and a part-time antiques dealer.
Together the men returned with Muhammad’s uncle to the caves where the scrolls had been found. They searched the broken jars and found more fragments of scroll.
Eventually a deal was struck: they bought three of the scrolls for seven Jordanian pounds.
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In the spring of 1948 John C. Trever, a Biblical scholar and archaeologist, heard about the scrolls and sent photographs to a colleague of his, William F. Albright, who said the scrolls were the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times.