by Colum McCann
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Modern-day scholars say that the cross Jesus carried through Jerusalem was possibly not full-size at all. It was more likely that he would have carried only the crossbeam. The beam alone—five feet long—would have weighed about seventy or eighty pounds. Jesus, who had already been flayed and crowned with thorns, would have hauled the weight toward the hillside at Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, helped out by Simon of Cyrene. At Golgotha, the Romans would have already erected a series of permanent upright stakes in their execution zone. Jesus would have been stripped naked and forced to lie down on the ground with the crossbeam beneath him. His stretched arms would have been bound to the beam with henna rope. The executioner would have taken out two six-inch nails with square heads, three-eighths of an inch wide. He would then have wielded a large mallet to precisely hammer the nails into Jesus’s forearm, near the radius and straight through the median nerve. First the left, then the right. The nails would have penetrated his wrists, deep into the crossbeam. The henna rope would then have been undone while Jesus still lay on the ground, his arms stretched and nailed to the beam. The Roman soldiers would then have lifted him up from the ground. They would most likely have used a pulley system and a wooden ladder. Jesus’s full weight would have been on the nails as he was hauled upwards. The thick wooden stake would already have been notched and the crossbeam would have been hefted upwards and slotted into place so that he could hang there, suspended on the nails, his arms wide. His hanging feet would have been grabbed by one of the soldiers and pressed together into a U-shaped wooden block attached to the standing stake. His ankles would have been forcibly turned sideways and his knee would have been bent to the side so that his feet aligned. The executioner could then drive another long nail through both of the heels at once, through the flesh, beyond the bone, into the wood. In order to breathe Jesus would have had to force himself to haul his body weight upwards every few seconds until he no longer had the strength to do so anymore and at that point, just a few minutes after three o’clock in the afternoon—Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani—he would have dropped his head to his chest and suffocated.
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The tightening, then, of his lungs.
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The crown of thorns was possibly made of natsch thistle interwoven with other vines. The Roman soldiers would have bent the stems in a circle and braided the pieces together so that they would pierce his scalp as he carried his cross down the Via Dolorosa.
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In the nineteenth century the Christian women of Bethlehem wore padded hats with heavy coins sewn on. The more coins, the wealthier the family. Their long dresses were stitched with gold and silver thread to create fabulous floral designs, while poorer women embroidered just the breast panels and sleeves.
In the market the shop owners could tell a woman’s history as she approached. An entire life could be glimpsed in a matter of yards: if the woman was married, where she lived, her husband’s lineage, how many children she had, how many brothers and sisters.
A colorful collision of cross-stitching and couching techniques identified a maiden. A blue thread running at the bottom of the dress indicated a widow. If the widow wanted to marry again, she would weave a line of red through the blue. The dresses incorporated amulets in the shape of triangles to ward off the evil eye.
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During the First Intifada the women of the West Bank began to weave other symbols into their handmade dresses: maps, rifles, political slogans. The beads they used to ward off the evil eye were green with a black rim and a white dot in the center.
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In the first century, the most extreme sect of Jewish zealots, the Sicarii, used stealth tactics against the Romans and Herodians. The Sicarii wore long dark cloaks and carried sharp daggers hidden in their flowing robes. They blended in among the crowds at public gatherings in Jerusalem.
As they walked along, they chose their targets, a Roman soldier or an official, even a woman or a child.
The neck was their favorite target, followed by the heart and then the groin and lastly the stomach. They plunged the knife in, snapped it across with a flick of the wrist, hid the blade in the folds of their cloaks, and then dissolved into the crowd, pulled along by the scattering tide.
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The term sicario was adopted by South American drug cartels to describe their hit men in the 1980s and ’90s. One of Pablo Escobar’s most notorious killers, Jhon Jairo Arias Tascón, alias Pinina, who was accused of being responsible for hundreds of murders in Colombia, is rumored to have had the Latin term sicarius, or daggerman, tattooed elaborately in prison ink all down the length of his spine.
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The cloak was more than decorative: swordmasters taught their pupils how to use it to combat the movement of their opponents’ weapons through the agile use of cloth.
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In the spring of 2014, Sigalit Landau, an artist from Jerusalem, placed a long black dress in the waters of the Dead Sea, suspending the gown in a wooden cage at a depth of fifteen feet.
Landau and her husband left the dress in the water for two months. They took underwater photographs at intervals.
After a week, the jet-black cloth began to attract salt crystals; after two weeks the crystals had begun to cling and accumulate; after three, the cloth appeared silver and grey in the water; after four, the buttons and collar had turned a shining white.
The dress—a replica of one worn for a 1920s theater production about a Hasidic woman who is possessed by the spirit of her dead lover—remained suspended for another four weeks until it sparkled with white crystals like a wedding gown.
When the artist’s team went to lift it out of the water, the dress had grown so heavy with salt that they were unable to bring all of it to the surface: pieces of cloth sheared off at the seams and drifted to the sea floor.
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A smaller version of the dress—what the artist called a princess version—was made as a museum piece, so that when, around the anniversary of Smadar’s death, Rami saw a photograph of it in the Bezalel Academy journal, he was so taken aback that he went to his daughter’s room where he sat in silence.
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She would have been thirty years old, a few days from thirty-one.
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One afternoon, from the second-floor window of his apartment in Anata, Bassam saw Abir out rolling a car tire along the street. A simple child’s game. With four other girls her age.
They were happily rolling the black tire from one end of the street to the concrete barricade at the other. It had rained and water had collected in the well of the rubber. Abir was wearing a new dress, blue with a fringed white lace. The tire was small but unwieldy for girls their age. It wobbled so that the standing water in the bottom sloshed around as it was rolled.
Every few seconds Abir and the girls jumped back from the tire to avoid the splashes. When one of the girls got hit with a drop she disappeared for a minute or two, then returned again.
One end of the street to the next. Over and over again. Every few minutes Bassam heard his apartment door open. He listened as Abir went to the basin in the kitchen.
Gradually it dawned on Bassam that she was coming home, time and again, to clean the splotches of dirty water off her dress. Within moments she went out again and joined the game once more, laughing, rolling the tire to the end of the street.
The longer the game went on the less rainwater remained in the well of the tire, so the braver the girls became, leaning in closer and closer, pushing it back and forth, daring each other to see who would get splashed.
When the dirty rainwater was finally gone, they filled the well of the tire again, but the water was cleaner this time and the game fizzled out.
Bassam watched her as she sat on the barricade, in her pale blue dress, swinging her legs back and forth.
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/> They came in cars of four or five. Bassam met the convoy at the checkpoint outside Anata. Together they moved through town, a large van at the rear. It was early Sunday and the streets were quiet.
Most of them had never been in Anata before, or if they had, it was only as soldiers. They drove around the back of the graveyard to the school, got out of their cars. Bassam counted them out: thirty-three men and women. A nervous hum rippled among them. They had dressed conservatively—long-sleeved shirts, jeans, hats. No bare arms, no bare legs. No kippahs of course. They gathered in small groups. They avoided Hebrew, spoke in English. They were within breathing distance of the Wall. They chalked the area and drove stakes into the ground. The men worked the jackhammers. The women worked the shovels. Buckets of dirt went back and forth. They put up a mesh wire fence. Laid down the irrigation pipe. They shared bottles of water in the heat. They lifted their heads at the sound of the muezzin. More cars arrived. Bricks were stacked. Mortar was mixed. Post holes were dug.
By the middle of the afternoon the sun had disappeared behind the Wall and the convoy was escorted out of Anata. At the checkpoint the on-duty soldiers stared at them as they left.
The following weekend they returned. The concrete had hardened and the bricks had set. A soft prefabricated rubber flooring emerged from the back of the truck. It was unfurled and carefully cut, spread on the ground. A dump truck arrived with sand. A cheer went amongst them when the pit was filled. Their numbers had swollen to one hundred now: there was so little work now that most of them just watched. The basketball hoop was put in place. The small red slide was bolted down. The spinning cage was tested. A small area of garden, one meter square, was cultivated in order to plant a tree in the rear of the school. Tins of paint were passed back and forth. The plaque was screwed in place: Abir’s Garden. Another cheer went up. They put their arms around one another. They took photos. They came back the third weekend for the dedication.
All the time a small weather balloon hovered above them about a thousand feet in the air.
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It was the only playground in the town of Anata.
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After he stopped using the candy bracelet as a prop in lectures anymore, Bassam placed it in a bedside drawer beside a small leather Qur’an and a blue pencil Abir had used for her drawings.
When, years later, he bought the house in Jericho, he noticed that he still had the book and the pencil, but somehow the bracelet had disappeared. He rummaged through the moving boxes, his clothes, his papers, his office materials, but after a while he had to give up searching.
He never found the bracelet: there were times he wondered if it had been swept away or maybe even eaten by one of the other children by mistake.
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In the mosque near his home in Jericho, where he prays most days, Bassam volunteers to help clean the outside steps. He uses a broom made from natsch thistles. A simple and rhythmic job, the woven strands rake over the coarse stone steps.
As he sweeps, he looks out to the dry land over which the warm wind undulates.
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The presence of natsch on a plot of land is sometimes thought of as a sign that the soil is not being tilled or used properly.
In Israeli courts, under an interpretation of the Ottoman land law of 1858, the existence of the thistle in rural areas is often used as an argument that the land is not being cultivated and therefore can be declared state land and turned over to settlers.
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Your Oasis Awaits.
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The Valley of Fire Road. The Wadi al-Nar Road. The Kidron Valley Road. The Road of the Burning Brakes. The Road of the Boiling Radiator. Hell Road. Tar Road. Dusk Road.
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After the Nakba of ’48, hundreds of Palestinian refugees, many of them from Beit Jala, boarded steamships bound for South America. They landed in Buenos Aires, crossed the mountains by mule and donkey, carrying what they owned across the border into Chile.
Many families settled in Santiago and Valparaíso and found work in the copper mines and the shipyards, but some continued their travels on to the remote areas of the desert.
Over mountains, through canyon lands, along dry riverbeds. A long, arduous journey, with the dead buried along the way. The bodies were often interred in shallow graves beneath piles of rock. Decades later—after General Augusto Pinochet’s regime went on its massive killing spree, dumping thousands of bodies all over the country—the mothers of the disappeared, out combing the desert for their own sons and daughters, would come upon random piles of bones.
Sometimes the women were perplexed to find that a key—with Arabic letters scratched on it—still remained on a string at the skeleton’s neck or wrist.
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The key belonging to the door of a house back in what had become, now, Israel.
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Scrawled in Arabic on a rock on the outskirts of the ghost town of Santa Laura in Chile: 8,276 miles to go.
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After the second century Hebrew was deemed to be a holy language and was not spoken as a conversational mother tongue again until Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and others began, in the 1880s, to use it with their families and friends. A pidgin Hebrew was in use in the markets of Jerusalem, but among the Jewish community in Palestine the dominant language was Arabic, along with Ladino, French, Yiddish, and a small scattering of English.
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Ben-Yehuda, like Einstein, said that Jews and Arabs were mishpacha, a family, that they should share the land and live together. Many of the new Hebrew words that he helped coin were derived from Arabic roots. The two were, he said, sister languages which, like the people, could live with and alongside one another.
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The bombs went off near the conjunction of Ben Yehuda and Ben Hilel Streets, also known as Hillel Street, named after Hillel the Elder, author, in the first century before Christ, of the ethic of reciprocity: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.
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Once, in a fever, Rami dreamed himself installing a microphone in the ground so he could hear all the answers to the questions he had not yet asked Smadar.
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Smadar liked to play Simon, an electronic game in which four colors light up in bright sequences. Green, red, yellow, blue. The lights were accompanied by a high beeping sound. She practiced it at night in her room in the dark—green, green, red, green, yellow, red, red, blue, green—sometimes bringing the sequence all the way up to twenty or more, so that from outside the house Rami and Nurit, coming home from a walk, were reminded of a small pulsing discotheque.
Smadar was so good at the game that she was able to play two different machines at once.
From her room came a cacophony of beeps.
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During Christmas of 2009 the music students at the university in Bethlehem wheeled a piano down to the central square where hundreds of people had gathered by the Church of the Nativity to sing Christmas carols.
The piano had been prepared with shell casings, tear gas canisters and stun grenades strategically placed between the strings to alter the sound. On the hammers they had placed thin pieces of metal which gave out a high ping.
The students had learned all the traditional carols. O Come All Ye Faithful. Silent Night. I Saw Three Ships. Angels We Have Heard on High. Most of these were sung in Arabic, with occasional English versions.
When the caroling was finished, they wheeled the piano down the hill to the checkpoint near the Wall where they stopped and sang again before being scattered by a cannon firing a yellow mist of foul-smelling Skunk water.
The piano, an old Polish-made Irmler, was abandoned overnight. In the morning the students came to retrieve it. They stuffed their noses with cotton wool as they wheeled the Irmler back up the Hebron Road.
The sound of the trundling piano was recorded by a tall, twenty-six-year-old Palestinian doctoral student, Dalia el-Fahum, who hoped to incorporate it into her dissertation.
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Among the protesters, the Skunk water acquired the simple nickname of Shit. The smell of Shit was known to linger on the body for at least three days. On clothes it could remain for weeks, even months on end.
One of the few ways to get rid of the smell—something close to a cocktail of rancid meat, raw sewage, and full-blown decomposition—was to take an immediate shower and then bathe with tomato juice to mask the stench.
Some of the demonstrators took to shaving their hair, their beards, their eyebrows. Others bought rain-repellent gear and wore black plastic bags over their shirts, jeans and shoes. They smeared mint vapor rub beneath their noses.