by Colum McCann
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In 2012, in the village of Ni’lin, seven young Canadian women—volunteers on a nearby water well project—gathered to protest the use of Skunk. The women wore multicolored rainboots and unfurled white umbrellas with black lettering that read, when lined up together, FUCK YOU.
When they saw the water cannons approaching, they got into position, each on one knee, their faces scarved, the umbrellas held above their heads, glistening lines of vapor rub above their lips.
In images taken at the protest the Canadians were photographed running away, drenched, still under their umbrellas, the letters mixed up so that they read YUCKOFU for a moment and then COKFUYU seconds later.
The photos rocketed around the Internet for days.
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In the following weeks, outside the Israeli consulate on Bloor Street in Toronto, several young protesters—Israelis and Palestinians both—were seen wearing pink T-shirts with variations scrawled across their chests, YOFUCKU, FUCUKOY. The most popular version, which some suggested was anti-Semitic, read OY U FUCK.
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The curators of the museum in the Walled Off Hotel tried to purchase one of the original umbrellas to exhibit alongside other artifacts of the Occupation.
The hotel contacted the Canadians only to find out that the umbrellas had been confiscated at Ben Gurion airport where the women were interrogated for three hours before their return to Toronto.
The Canadians had no plans to return to the West Bank—the water project they had been working on had been shut down due to lack of permits.
Other items confiscated from their luggage included a keffiyeh, a Fodor’s guide, four bottles of olive oil from the Cremisan monastery, a Palestine-shaped key ring, an empty tear gas canister, an Arabic phrasebook, and numerous perishable food items including a shrink-wrapped tray of kanafeh pastry.
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The Walled Off, an art hotel set within slingshot distance of Checkpoint 300, was opened by the graffiti artist Banksy in 2017. It stands within yards of the high concrete barriers.
Even the most expensive rooms only get a few minutes of direct winter sunlight each day: the shadow of the Wall is cast down into the rooms and can be tracked as it crosses the carpet.
The maids can tell the time of day by how much of the carpet is shadowed.
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There were times Bassam would drive past the settlements, and from a distance he would swear they had swollen overnight. He could envision them in time-lapse: they grew redder and wider each time, with roofs and the apartment blocks spreading out, gnawing at the hills, coaxing the desert into form. They were fishlike, swimming.
At night the lights were so extraordinarily bright that it looked as if the towns were breaching upwards. He tried looking away or blocking them with his visor, but there were other settlements on the far side of the road too, smaller ones, feeding, he thought, on the plankton of every small stone.
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The curators in the Walled Off museum once toyed with the idea of including an olfactory exhibit: visitors would lift a flap marked with a warning and then inhale the scent of Skunk. The staff tested the exhibit and quickly realized it would cause most visitors to the museum to vomit.
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The manufacturing company Odortec advertises Skunk as the most innovative, effective and non-lethal riot control material available, designed in consultation with the Israeli armed forces and the police. It is made, they say, using local water and food-grade ingredients and it is one hundred percent eco-friendly—harmless to both nature and people.
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At a major gun show in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2015, Irina Cantor, a top executive from Odortec, stood onstage, packed her nose with cotton wool and demonstrated the harmless properties of Skunk by drinking a shot of it.
She raised the shot glass, toasted the crowd and downed the contents without flinching.
—L’chaim, she said before moving backstage to remove the cotton wool from her nose and vomit.
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Harmless to both nature and people.
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The door of the Walled Off was swung open by a man in a red bow tie. Bassam stood stunned a moment by the sight of a plastic chimp carrying a suitcase. What was it? he wondered. Some sort of ruse? Some sort of colonial joke?
He bent his head and walked into the dark swell of shadow. His eyes took a moment to adjust. The accents behind the desk were Palestinian. He nodded in their direction. They greeted him back. They wore red waistcoats and starched collars. Some of the waiters were women, he noticed. He heard laughter from afar. Trays of drinks were being carted across the hotel foyer. Music came from the piano but there was no player. Bassam could hardly move. He felt as if his feet were rooted in tar.
Everything rattled him. The cameras on the walls, the slingshots, the paintings, the large sofa with a snakehead insignia. He wasn’t sure which way he should turn. It struck him as more Beirut than Bethlehem. He fumbled for his phone. No messages. He peered around the foyer. White teapots on the table. China cups. Ice in tall glasses. Small groups of three and four. Men in shorts, women in low-cut dresses. Sunglasses. Some sounded English, some German, but no Italians: he was here to meet a crew from Naples, it had been arranged for weeks.
Moments like these, they froze him: he always preferred the periphery. So many years in a jail cell had taught him that.
Bassam interrogated himself for cigarettes, patted his shirt, removed the box from his breast pocket.
He could smell smoke drifting from outside. At least there was that: he could smoke. He moved through the room. Perhaps he had the time wrong? He flicked a look again at the mobile phone. Three in the afternoon. On time.
A waiter asked in English if he needed help. He replied in Arabic that he was just fine.
The lobby seemed to him like some sort of preposterous movie set. Cherubs hung from the ceiling, plastic gas masks attached to them. He stood under one and observed it. From the corner of his eye he caught a small red light, a camera perhaps. He tapped the bottom of his cigarette pack. A curtain billowed. There were tables outside. Two of them were full, but the third—no more than a few yards from the Wall—was empty.
Bassam shifted the chair, sat in the shadow of the Wall. He lit up, waited, checked his phone again, caught sight of another red light moving inside the foyer. He tried to recall what had been here before. He had driven past many times. A bakery, perhaps. Or a pottery shop. He wasn’t sure how to feel about the hotel—on one hand it seemed ludicrous, on the other so necessary. At the core of it all was the need to draw attention. There were rumors of settlers trying to move into nearby houses and buildings.
The waiter arrived and spoke, this time, in Arabic. It surprised Bassam, the new politeness, the smile.
—Have you seen a film crew? he asked.
—No.
—Italians. They’re supposed to be here at three.
—They’re all Italians, said the waiter.
—Pardon me?
—They’re all Italians. Especially the English.
Bassam laughed, sat back, lit a new cigarette.
—The Swedish too, said the waiter.
Bassam was halfway through his Fanta when a curtain of hair fell over the table. The woman was tall, dark-haired, clear-eyed. Her teeth were slightly lipsticked. She pointed from the ground-floor balcony into the hotel. Another small red light emerged from the shadows. So, he realized, they had been filming him all along. No matter. What should he expect? He had grown accustomed to it, the constant positioning, the jockeying, the angles. He was a creature, now, of the camera, whether he liked it or not.
They had already set up in a room upstairs. A huge portrait of a pillow fight was drawn on the wall: an Israeli, a Palestinian, hitting each other with feathers flying. He had seen the work before: he w
as repulsed by it. But it was exactly the repulsion, he knew, that made it work. The simplicity, the absurdity, the brazen surprise. To hold these opposite things.
—We’ll have you sit under the painting, she suggested.
Bassam shook his head, went across to the window, opened it, sat on the window ledge. He knew that the angle worked for them: a Palestinian sitting in a window of a hotel overlooking the Wall.
The interview lasted twenty-five minutes: he felt sure they would cut it down to a matter of seconds. So be it. It didn’t bother him. He wanted, quite simply, to tell the story. My name is Bassam Aramin. I am the father of Abir. They went walking afterwards, five of them together, along the Wall. The crew were eager to get Bassam to pass alongside a portrait of the Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni. It was so often this way: they wanted Bassam to fit into their box of ideas. And yet he had agreed to meet them. He had arrived on time. His story was his duty and his curse.
Still, what he really wanted to do now was to disappear, unfilmed, back to his car, go home, close the windows, be silent alongside Salwa.
He shook the hand of the interviewer, thanked the crew. He knew that they were filming him as he walked away. He put his hands deep in his pockets, kept his head raised: he hoped they wouldn’t showcase the limp.
He passed the portrait of the young girl that Rami had once mistaken for Abir. He glanced at it from the corner of his eye. The likeness was remarkably close.
He didn’t linger.
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He saw her one afternoon walking home alone from school. She played a child’s game, trying to move in and out of her own shadow. Normally he would have picked her up and given her a lift, but there was something about her that day, the flick of the foot, the arc of the head, that made him hold back and just watch. He kept the car in first gear and remained close to the curb. Her schoolbag swung.
She ran the final portion of the hill up the broken staircase toward the apartment block until he saw her uniform disappearing behind the grey wall.
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Anata School for Girls, Anata. Spring Report 2006.
Abir Aramin.
Age: 9. Grade 4.
Arabic: Excellent.
Writing: Very Good.
Mathematics: Excellent.
Music Studies: Excellent.
Physical Education: Very Good.
Religious Studies: Excellent.
English Language: Very excellent.
General Comments: Abir does excellently all across the board. She is a model student in all classes.
Participation: Excellent.
Appearance: Clean, tidy, dress neat, fingernails good.
Attention to detail, excellent.
Lateness: 1 (excused)
Absences: 0
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Afterwards neither he nor Salwa could recall the one lateness: if anything, Abir was perpetually early. They wondered if she had come upon an army patrol on her way to school and was stopped, but, if so, they would most likely have heard about it from Areen: they nearly always walked to school together.
Areen too could not recall any morning when her younger sister had been delayed. On Areen’s card there were no latenesses. Perhaps it was just a simple mistake?
They should ask her teacher, said Salwa. But there was something about the question that Bassam wanted to hold on to, the small mystery that he could return to again and again, some form of her, at nine years of age, standing outside the school gates, perhaps to help another student, or to pet a stray dog, or to be intrigued by a cloud, or some other question that would keep her dawdling along the road.
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When they finally moved to the house in Jericho, they packed up their car, hefted their belongings down the steps, and filled a trailer with clothes and furniture. On the way out they avoided the road where Abir had been shot.
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Always for Bassam there was the thought of the near-miss: the bullet just one foot higher in the air and Abir would have been running down the street, the candy bracelet in her bag, the missile skittering on the ground far ahead of her, the multiplication tables still rattling around in her head.
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The tiny swimming pool at the back of Bassam’s house in Jericho holds one thousand two hundred gallons. He fills it only twice a year: once at the start of school holidays, again towards the middle of summer.
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In his lectures Rami told the audience that there wasn’t a minute of his waking life—not a single minute—that he did not dwell on Smadar. He knew the idea must have sounded exaggerated to his listeners—nineteen years, every minute of the day—but every now and then another parent would come along, or a brother, or an aunt, and he would look at them and recognize the grief carried within them like clocks.
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She seemed to forget her body for hours at a time. After her dance classes she would lie in the living room, reading, the book on the floor, her head hanging over the edge of the couch, abandoning herself to gravity. As if she were contemplating some abstract problem.
The longer she read, the more she shifted and the less her body relied on the couch, until she was practically upside down, almost perpendicular to the furniture.
Rami took a photo of her one afternoon when she was twelve years old, her hair still long so that it splayed in a fan on the floor, obscuring the book in front of her. She had propped herself on her elbows and her feet were extended in the air. Only her hips and thighs were reliant on the couch.
When Rami clicked the shutter button she mischievously arched her head and her hair—soon to be cut short—flipped acrobatically in a dolphin move which later would surface and resurface in his mind.
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One afternoon, home from her swimming lessons, Rami tried to get Smadar to towel her hair, and she said to him: I’m not some little kid, you know, I’m eleven.
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At thirteen, she had just begun to take a shine to boys. Rami noticed it first at the swimming pool. He could see it in the way she held herself at the back of the diving boards. She stayed a little closer to the wall, consulted her flip-flops. A little more shy, self-aware.
She flicked her eyes across the pool to where the boys were stretching.
In bed at night he and Nurit read together, chatted. Nurit had spotted a love heart scrawled inside the back of one of Smadar’s notebooks. At the bottom of the heart Smadar had written out a poem or a lyric in Hebrew that she didn’t recognize.
—What was it?
—Can’t remember.
—You’re useless, he chuckled.
He crawled out of bed, tucked his feet into his slippers, stood. He came back moments later with the notebook in his hand, stood at the end of the bed and flourished it.
He leafed through the notebook: it was regular schoolwork. Her handwriting was large and spidery. In the inside back cover he found the small love heart drawn with red marker. Inside the heart it said: Smadar and Zev.
—Who’s Zev?
—He’s in the school jazz club.
—What’s he like?
—A nice kid I think.
At the bottom of the heart, where it dipped to a point, Smadar had written: All the flowers you planted in the backyard died when you went away.
—That’s cute, said Nurit.
—Cute?
—What’s wrong with it?
—Shotgun time.
—Oh shut up, she laughed.
Rami flipped the notebook to the end of the bed, kicked his feet out of the slippers.
—Put the book back in her bag, said Nurit, and come here.
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Prince recorded the first version of Nothing Compar
es 2 U in Flying Cloud Drive Warehouse, a makeshift rehearsal space just off a two-lane highway in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. The studio was small, wood-paneled, badly insulated. The sound of traffic could be heard from outside.
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Prince sprinkled lines from the Song of Solomon on various tracks on his fifteenth album, Come. The lines, originally written for the song Poem, took bits and pieces of the original, shaped them and reshaped them on tracks like Pheromone where he sings about his left hand under a lover’s head while his right embraces time.
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That afternoon, on Ben Yehuda Street, she wore a pair of black jeans, a Blondie T-shirt, Doc Martens, and a simple gold necklace.
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English: 89, Good/Very Good. Cheery demeanor, a pleasure to have in class. Needs to work on punctuality. Still grasping contents of conditional tense, though shows mastery in others. Displays aptitude for Literature Seminar next semester.
Religious Knowledge: 59, Poor/Fair. Often distracted in class. Needs encouragement at home, particularly with Torah studies.
Social Studies: 80, Good. River/pollution report excellent (needs to understand principles of annotation). Is inquisitive and logical. Cheerful. Could focus more. Might benefit from being separated from her friends in classroom. Homework assignments occasionally late. Smadar is not afraid of expressing her opinion in class.