by Colum McCann
Nurit showed the guard the photo.
—I’m sorry, no, he said.
She held it out further. He considered the photo, shook his head again.
There were groups on the street: parents, teenagers, soldiers. The darkness buzzed. Rami and Nurit split in different directions. They moved among the clusters, met up again on Shamai Street.
—They’re saying two people—
—Men or women?
—Forty or fifty injured.
—Have you called home?
—Yes.
—The boys?
—They haven’t heard anything.
—Let’s try the hospital.
They hurried past the shuttered shops. Rami wanted to call Smadar’s name along the street. Perhaps, he thought, they would still find her around here, shivering in a café, or maybe she was dazed and had gone to a friend’s house, or she hadn’t been in the area at all, and she hadn’t even heard about the bombing, and she was blithely sitting in some bedroom somewhere, her and four other girls, on a pillowed bed, sharing lip gloss, giggling over magazines.
He clicked the key from far away and the car horn beeped and the hazards lit up.
They had parked by the Music Museum. When he turned the key in the ignition the radio flared. A talk show. He clicked it off. He turned onto Shamai Street.
Nurit punched a series of numbers into her phone. He could hear every intake of breath.
—Oh, she said into the phone. Yes. Okay. Yes.
He accelerated. The city was bathed in light from the streetlamps. The September air seemed yellow.
—She was seen downtown, said Nurit.
—Where?
—With Daniella and a group of girls.
—What time?
—I don’t know. On Hillel Street.
—Who said?
—Elik heard it from Daniella’s parents.
—Where’s Daniella?
—They’re looking for her. Sivan too.
Several cars were parked haphazardly outside the hospital. They pulled in against the curb. Together they ran up towards the circular driveway. Volunteers stood out in front of the emergency bay. They wore makeshift name badges and held clipboards. There was, they said, no access to the emergency room except for the gravely injured. They called on everyone to be calm, said they were there to answer questions.
A man with a clipboard said: Her name, please?
426
A girl emerged from a white door wearing a white bandage on her head: Smadar’s height, Smadar’s weight, Smadar’s hair. Not Smadar. A gurney was wheeled along the corridor with the shape of a living girl underneath the sheet. Not Smadar. There was news of a teenager in an operating room. They begged the nurses to get her name. Not Smadar. They made phone calls to the other hospitals. There was a Smadar, yes, she was lightly injured, released early—she was twenty, blond, with her fiancé. They called the police station. No Smadar. No Elhanan either. Wait a moment, wait. There was a Sam, but sorry, no, no Smadar. They saw Daniella’s parents in the hallway. They hugged. Daniella was injured, severely, she was in the operating theater. They had not heard about Smadar, no, they were sorry, but if Daniella was alive then Smadar surely would be too. They ran to the front desk again. The nurse’s finger went along the list. Samantha, Sarel, Simona.
—Sorry, no, she said, no Smadar.
425
From the Song of Solomon. The grapevine. The opening of the flower.
424
Under the carob trees, where the crowd stood, Rami read from the Kaddish and later from the Song of Solomon.
423
Also known as the Song of Songs. Also known as Canticle of Canticles. Considered one of the most mysterious and beautiful books in the Bible.
422
The light flared. An officer moved from one corner of the dark to the next. He came to the glass and glanced out, then turned and moved back into the watery dark.
They waited. There were dozens of them now: parents, boyfriends, girlfriends, daughters, middle-aged sons.
—Please, said the desk clerk, we’re doing everything we can.
An officer came out. Tall, fair-haired. He leaned over and whispered in the ear of the clerk. She glanced up at him and scrawled something on a sheet of paper. He leaned back in again. She nodded and wrote a second time. The officer tapped the front of the desk twice. They had some sort of code going between them.
They called someone else’s name. A woman sprang up from her seat. A half-door was opened up and she was brought back, behind the glass.
Nurit held tight to Rami’s hand.
There were others in the police station too. A boy from a street brawl. A woman who had locked herself out of her apartment. A man came in carrying a lost cat, white with a black stripe. He left it on the floor of the station and walked straight out. The cat hissed from underneath the furthest bench. Strange to think that there was another world out there too, an ordinary, functioning world.
Another name was called. Then another. And another.
One couple came out of the offices, arms wrapped around each other, laughing. They had found their uncle, they said. He had been drunk in a restaurant. He had been detained, that’s all, wasn’t that wonderful?
They paused, then, in the middle of the station: I’m so sorry, said the woman.
The couple left, heads down.
—Try the boys again, said Nurit.
—My phone’s running out.
—We could try the police. Jaffa Street.
The cat came from beneath the bench and sidled up against a young man on the far side of the room. It arched its back and rubbed against the boy’s calves.
421
She would arrive home jaunty and bright-eyed and jangly. She would stand in the kitchen and let out a patented sigh and say, What’s the big deal, Aba? We were miles away, I’m fourteen for crying out loud. She would make herself a Hashachar sandwich, chocolate spread, and then she would go off to her room, turn up the stereo, begin to dance.
420
Or she would arrive back late at night, in a taxi, saying, Sorry, sorry, sorry, Daniella was close to the blast, we had to go get her eardrums checked, I couldn’t leave her side, I know, I know, I should have called, I will next time, I promise.
419
Or there would be a bandage around her leg where she fell while running away, and she would come home and she would sit at the kitchen table, and they would comfort her and it would all be fine, and Rami would say that it was time for everyone to go to bed, it had been a long day, she needed her beauty sleep.
418
The station was still full when their name was called. They were brought back behind the glass panel. It was strangely bright when they sat down at the officer’s desk. The officer checked Smadar’s name again, spelled it out.
He shook his head and tapped the pencil against the edge of his ledger.
The news was neither good nor bad, he said. She was not to be found anywhere. He wished there was more he could say or do. This was no indication of anything at all, but perhaps, as a last ditch, he hated to say this, it was just a precaution, they had to understand, he wasn’t being definitive, he was very sorry, it was just, maybe, to clear their minds, they should try the morgue.
417
Morgue: the name of a building in early-nineteenth-century Paris where the bodies of those drowned in the Seine were laid out on an inclined platform and subjected to public view, sometimes for a fee.
416
The only interesting thing, said François Mitterrand, is to live.
415
On hunger strike Bassam allowed himself salt tablets and water. The tablets came in 100 milligram doses. He broke them in half and took a piece every hour. The lon
ger the strike went on, the more difficult it was to swallow. Dizziness. Disorientation. Fatigue. By the seventeenth day his vision had begun to blur.
414
On March 12, 1930, Mahatma Gandhi set out from his ashram near Ahmedabad in India on a trek to the Arabian Sea in order to protest the British salt tax.
Several dozen followers walked alongside him. They walked twelve miles or more a day on winding dirt roads, stopping to have meetings and make speeches along the way.
Once, at a well of the untouchables—those deemed impure under the Indian caste system—he stunned onlookers by bathing with them.
By the time he reached the coastal town of Dandi—241 miles away—tens of thousands of people had joined the salt satyagraha.
Gandhi planned to work the salt flats on the beach at high tide, but the local police had crushed the deposits into the mud. Still he managed to defy British law by reaching down and picking up a small lump of natural salt from the mud flats.
—With this, he said, I am shaking the foundations of the British empire.
413
Satyagraha: the revelation of truth and the confrontation of injustice through nonviolent means.
412
The lectures took place in the rear of the canteen. The prisoners gathered in a semicircle. The fluorescents flickered. Bassam introduced the scholar. A student of philosophy at Birzeit. He was young, clean-shaven, tall. He had been given six months for chaining himself to the gates of the Knesset. He spoke in short sharp sentences. The way forward, he said, was nonviolence, a template for action and counteraction.
Gandhi’s idea of civil disobedience was to be broken into its original elements. It took great discipline. The only way to understand it was to take it apart and lay the elements out, rebuild from there.
The civil element, he said, was just as important as the disobedience itself. They had to be considered separately at first in order to put them back together. What it meant to be uncivil. What it meant to be obedient. What it meant to be just. How to achieve the grace of the opposite. The contradictions had to be dismantled and jigsawed back together again. The language of the oppressor, too, had to be taken apart. The civility of the disobedience was part of its power.
The guards hustled them back to their cells. Bassam spent the afternoon reconstructing the talks in his mind. He took notes on sheets, folded them in tiny pieces, secreted them in the pockets of his uniform, the hem of his trousers, the tongue of his shoes, just in case he got sent to solitary again.
411
The phone call came from the principal of the school. Bassam knew her well: always calm, measured. Something had happened to Abir, she said. She had fallen. She had to be taken to the local hospital. He was on his way to work, he replied, he would call Salwa and tell her to pick Abir up. No, said the principal, he himself should probably go now. Was Abir going to be all right? Oh, she was, inshallah, yes.
410
Behind him, the first car horn of the day.
409
He was sure that she had fallen from the top of the school wall. Even from a young age she liked to walk along the length of it. Ten years old. He was afraid that she might have a scar.
408
The apartment was on the fourth floor. No elevator. Bassam took the stairs two at a time. Bare electrical wires hung down from the ceiling of the stairwell. He reached the fourth floor. He stood a moment, hands on his knees, caught his breath.
Further along two very young children pushed a plastic dump truck. They looked up at him, went back to playing with their truck. He stepped along the corridor.
The door was latched with a chain. He knew how to loop it off with a pen: he slipped the chain off and swung open the door.
Inside, the television was on. A Spanish soap opera. Salwa was by the sink, chatting on the phone with her mother.
407
Trauma to the back of the skull. Contusions on the front of her head. A weak pulse, a fluttering of the eyelids, no lucidity. Watch for bradycardia and respiratory collapse.
406
The sort of hospital that needed a hospital.
405
We’re going to switch her to Hadassah, said Bassam.
404
At first she was sure the nurses had made a mistake. No, she said, no. My daughter came by ambulance, from another hospital, she’s already here. They glanced up at her. They spoke to her in Arabic. Not yet, they said. I came by taxi, she said, I know she’s here, she has to be, they left a long time ago. She called Bassam’s mobile. No answer. The nurses checked their computers, made phone calls, went down the corridor to the operating rooms, consulted the doctors. No, they said, there was no child of that name or description. Could you try again? They scrolled through the records. Maybe, said Salwa, they brought her to another hospital, isn’t there another Hadassah at Mount Scopus? Yes, said the nurse, but she wouldn’t be brought there. Can you try? We already did. They handed her a small pack of tissues, then came out from behind the desk and guided her by the elbow to the waiting room. They brought her a hot tea, spooned sugar in it. Calls went out over the intercom. Salwa strained to hear. She tried calling Bassam again. No answer. A man came along to mop the floor. He gestured at her to move her feet. She felt the top of the mop touch her toes. Sorry, he said. Her sister arrived. Together they went back to the desk. There has to be some mistake, they said. Trust us, said the nurses, we’re doing everything we can. Bassam’s brother turned the corner. He had not heard from Bassam, no. He was in his business suit, his tie open. He too went to the desk. Trust us, the nurses pleaded. The crowd swelled. Her aunt. Her cousins. Bassam’s friends from his peace work. Surely there was a mistake. Maybe Abir had woken. Maybe they had taken her back to the clinic. Everything would be all right. A doctor came, a Palestinian from Nazareth. He sat between her and her sister. He had put out a special call, he said. The ambulance was on its way. It’s been nearly two hours, she said. There had been some technical problems, he said, but she was not to worry. Salwa went into a room and knelt to pray. Her sister prayed alongside her. They returned to the corridor. Each time the hospital doors opened, her heart leapt. Another cup of tea came. She cradled it in her hands. Yet more people arrived. There was a buzz in the hallways. Bassam’s Israeli friends were making a fuss at the desk. One of them was shouting. He was standing beside a woman with bright red hair and a young man with a beard. The older man was gesticulating. Who’s that? asked Salwa. Her brother peered over her shoulder. That’s Rami, he said. Rami? She had heard of him, but she had not yet met him. She turned to meet him, shake his hand, but her phone rang. It was a number she didn’t recognize. Where are you, she said, I’ve been calling and calling. We’re coming, said Bassam, my battery died, I’m on the paramedic’s phone, don’t worry. Is Abir okay? We’re five minutes away. Tell me, husband, is Abir okay? Don’t worry, he said again, we’re on our way.
403
It was the fifth-year anniversary of Combatants for Peace.
402
The tenth-year anniversary of Smadar’s death.
401
The eight-year anniversary of Rami joining the Parents Circle.
400
The ancient Greeks used sundials to tell the time during the day and clepsydras, or water clocks, at night.
Stone bowls were fashioned with holes in the bottom so that the water fell through to a vessel below. The vessel filled, drip by drip, and marked the passage of short amounts of time.
A steady water pressure had to be maintained and care taken in order to ensure there was no spillage or evaporation.
399
Rami and his son Elik ran into the emergency bay. The red and blue siren was still spinning. They could hear voices over the radio. The paramedics were hustling the gurney down from the ambulance.
—Out of my way, sir, said one of the medics.
&
nbsp; They stepped back, allowed the gurney past.
Rami saw Bassam step down from the back of the ambulance. Right foot first. He was pale and drawn. Rami reached for his elbow and helped him down from the height.
—Where’s Salwa? he asked.
398
Rami would always remember Bassam’s right foot coming first: as if in a ritual, stepping into a holy place.
397
What froze Rami in place was the sight of three border guards, all women, walking along the corridor of the hospital, past the room where Abir lay unconscious. The guards were in the hospital for no obvious reason, but they were in full uniform, guns strapped across their shoulders. They were the same age as Smadar might have been by then, medium height, slim-shouldered, ponytailed.
396
Abir was carried along the streets of Anata, laid out on a stretcher. A flag was draped over her midriff. A wreath of pink carnations was placed by her head. She was carried shoulder-height, passed from man to man, man to boy, boy to man. Black flags fluttered from balconies. Horns blared. Bassam was jockeyed along, shoulder to shoulder with his brothers, his sons, his colleagues. The streets narrowed. Mourners put their heads to the asphalt. Boys climbed up the light poles. A wail went up. The crowd dragged him forward. In his jacket pocket Bassam could feel the bracelet of candy, the hard round stones slipped onto string.