Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

  248

  The song was played a few times on the student radio station until callers complained that they recognized the voices of loved ones in the looping lyrics.

  247

  Most of the hackers in Unit 8200 are under twenty-three years of age. They search through phone calls, emails, satellite messages and sift through the vast debris of data that comes their way, mining for any suspicious patterns. They use satellites to track cars and trucks. Information from jets and weather balloons. They intercept communications from universities and hospitals. They employ facial recognition software. Search for mathematical flashpoints in the data. Look in every available electronic corner, creating algorithms to bring the new information together in a nugget. A repeated word, a code, a series of numbers, a phone call at the same time from the same place every day. Even a strange hiccup among the patterns can alert them to an operation or a rally or a protest. Most coveted of all is material of a sexual nature—an affair, a homosexual encounter, a lurid photograph, a suggestion of an illicit relationship—to bribe the hacked subject into becoming a collaborator.

  246

  Combing the signals like moisture from the air.

  245

  Bassam nudges the car forward. Only one soldier left, but he is soon joined by another, a tall young man in spectacles, Ethiopian perhaps, maybe Somalian. They glance down at Bassam’s license plate and wave him through without even looking at his identification card.

  244

  A one-cigarette checkpoint. A tiny slice of good luck. Always then the little private joy, the trivial victory, of driving away, switching off the roof light as he goes.

  243

  He has seen it before, the flying checkpoint, the extra jeep waiting a half mile beyond. It’s a numbers game. Maybe every fourth car tonight. Or every blue car. Or every car with a woman in it.

  His single headlight makes him a likely candidate but in the chill and the dark, he feels calm.

  A mile past the checkpoint he presses down a little further on the accelerator. Nothing in the rearview mirror. Nothing up ahead. Even the light rain has stopped.

  242

  Permission to resume my life again.

  241

  Out now, through Bethany, towards the roundabout, with Jerusalem at his back and Maale Adumim on the other side. Turning, then, onto the modern highway where he is, for the first time since Beit Jala, allowed to accompany Israeli-plated cars on their way back and forth to the settlements.

  On the back of a street sign, in thick red marker: Bye bye, Apartheid Road.

  240

  The walls of the valley are vertiginous. The caves in the cliff faces have for centuries been a perfect hiding place for archers, lookouts, gunners, marksmen, snipers.

  239

  The military bow evolved to incorporate several natural materials—wood, animal horn, tendons, sinews and glue—into the powerful composite bow. The skeleton was not made from a single block of wood but combined pieces of different trees with varying degrees of pliability to maximize draw distance and strength.

  The back of the bow was covered with bands of sinews. The belly of the bow was reinforced with sections of animal horn.

  The composite bows had an effective range of around four hundred yards. For the first time in history it was possible to surprise the enemy and attack from beyond the range of retaliation.

  238

  The arrow was composed of three parts. The arrowhead was made of the hardest available material—metal, bone or flint. The slender body was harvested from wood or reed. The tail, designed to keep the arrow in straight flight, was made from the feathers of eagles, vultures, kites or sea fowl.

  237

  The feathers were known as the messengers of death.

  236

  The Yom Kippur War struck Rami out of nowhere. He was twenty-three years old. He felt pushed suddenly onto a ledge. He tottered there. In a sketchbook he drew a pencil portrait of a soldier dragging a tank behind him on a piece of string.

  235

  He went to war in his civilian clothes. They didn’t have enough uniforms for those who had been called up. A green khaki shirt, a pair of old trousers and worn boots. He was given a long-barreled rifle, an FN Herstal. The tip of the barrel was flaky with rust. The firing pin was unoiled. It was the only weapon around. Others in his reserve unit carried nothing but old revolvers.

  He was in a tank repair unit. There were no transporters around. No spare parts either. The warehouses in Jerusalem were empty.

  They began their drive out into the Negev. On top of the tank they only had a light machine gun, a .50 caliber. The darkness clamped down. They were due to go all the way to Suez. He knew that the tracks would get ripped to bits on the road, but there was nothing he could do: they were under instructions. They drove through the night. His jaw shook. His cranium shook. His collarbone shook. They consulted their maps. At least fifty miles still to go. Halfway through the night the caterpillar tracks on the left-hand side of the tank snapped. They pulled to the edge of the road and stumbled out into the dark. The tracks lay in the dirt. The sprockets were torn. They tried a quick repair but it was useless. The tank couldn’t move. All the supply trucks had already gone ahead. He almost laughed. The war was inside out: the tank repair unit couldn’t repair its own tank.

  Distant tracer fire went across the night. Other tanks rumbled past, jeeps, military cars. Rami shouted out for spare parts. There were none. The radio, too, was jammed. They would have to wait until morning. He crawled under the tank and laid out his bedroll. Yom Kippur. The last of the ten days of penitence. He couldn’t sleep. He walked a short way into the land. He crouched in the hard dirt. Twenty-three years old. He had just met Nurit. The stars shone their shrapnel above him.

  In the morning a small red aspirin of sun rose. Reports were coming from the front. A surprise attack. They were being decimated. The Arabs had made huge gains. The Bar-Lev line was broken. Israel was in danger of being overrun. He could hear booms further up ahead. The road was jammed with army vehicles. A supply truck came shortly after dawn. The faces of the drivers were hollow, pitted, drawn. They set to work immediately. The tank was fixed within an hour. A transport came. They loaded the tank. He sat by the turret. Ambulances went in the other direction, sirens spinning. Close to the border, smoldering vehicles began to appear. Shattered jeeps. Tanks. Oil trucks. Makeshift hospital tents. Nurses ran to and fro. Soldiers walked about in a havoc of white bandages.

  He knew right away that if not for the breakdown the night before, he would have been killed: the snapped tread had saved his life.

  They stopped at a village to gather themselves. He was given a uniform, but no new rifle. He had to hold on to the FN Herstal. A young nurse handed him a plastic glass of cold lemonade. He held the cool empty plastic against his forehead. A shout went out from his commander. Time to move on. He climbed back onto the tank, his feet dangling over the side, his rifle placed across his lap. The heat bore down upon his skull. They pushed on. He sketched the sky in a notebook, a picture of a few birds wheeling in the emptiness.

  Instructions were given. Dozens of tanks had already been lost. Their job would be to hold the line. The whole of Israel was dependent on this. God would protect them.

  They reached the front late in the afternoon. The foul odor of war: cordite and flesh. He knew these smells from ’67. They joined the rear of the front line. It was his job to go forward and repair the tanks, bring in ammunition and then to take out the dead and injured. He hefted the weight of the stretchers. Boys younger than himself grasped his arm. Blood ran from their mouths. He gathered them up.

  The war was turning. They could hear it in the reports. Israeli planes streaked the sky. The Hatikvah played on the radio. There were rumors that they would cross the canal soon. Rami’s unit moved backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. The nights
bled into days. The days bled into nights. Supplies came. Boots, shirts, American-issue MREs. Still no new rifle.

  They huddled and spread maps at the rear of the tank. They would attack here, here and here. Reinforcements would come from there, there and there. They would be supported from the air. He blackened his face with soot from a saucepan. He wrote Nurit a letter. He couldn’t finish it. It was stupid, pathetic. He tried to sketch, but it too was useless. He tucked the letter into his breast pocket. He tightened his new uniform, opened the tank hatch, climbed in. His team took the rear of the line, behind the other tanks. Soon they approached the canal. It was one o’clock in the morning. There was no such thing as darkness here. The far side of the canal was encased in smoke. The outside of the tank pinged. He was in a shooting box. A shell exploded in front of them. The driver panicked, the tank swerved, hit a guardrail. The tank stopped on the precipice. A shout went up. Out, out, out. He jumped from the turret to the bridge, crouched behind the tank. He aimed his FN at the other side. Save me. Where’s the radio, grab the radio. Incoming, incoming. Tracer fire arced above. They called for the engineers to pull the tank back from the precipice. Other jeeps and tanks flowed past. The night quietened. Israel was crossing the Suez. The bridge was theirs. The dark was lit with bombsmoke. He had a momentary thought of just walking back home through the fog of it all, the war, the filth, the stench. The engineers pulled up. Quick, brusque, efficient. They attached a chain to the rear of the tank. More bullets. Keep your helmet on. Watch for planes. They pulled the tank back from the precipice. He was on his way again, inside the tank, over the Suez, enemy territory, pushing up to the front of the line.

  They crushed a roll of barbed wire, reached a massive berm. Nowhere else to go. They turned the tank sideways. Rami opened the hatch again, jumped out, hit the sand, crouched, ran, found cover. The FN Herstal bounced at his chest. He lay on the ground. This fucking rifle. My death warrant.

  He could see movement in the distance. Lights. Flares. He shot into the dark. The radio ordered another advance. He followed the coordinates, ran in a crouch. They moved forward, dozens of them together. Still the bullets came.

  A large rock rolled against his boot. He looked down. Not a rock, but a helmet. Further along, he found a scrap of bloody clothing.

  And then the bodies. He could see them on the ground, isolated at first and then in clumps, jigsaws of men, arms bent, legs blown off, torsos severed. He leaned down to pick up a discarded Kalashnikov. It was cold to the touch. It had not been used in hours. Ammunition too. He picked up clips, dropped them into the pockets of his trousers.

  He threw the FN away and moved forward. He would not need it anymore.

  234

  Rami fought the rest of the war with the enemy’s gun.

  233

  It was, he would say years later, like being inside a video game. He was walking forward with the Kalashnikov. He had burned his hand on the hot barrel. He could hear shouts and screams in the distance. And then, in an instant, one shout was isolated. He turned toward it, pulled the trigger, held it down. He saw the shape disintegrate: it crumpled, dissolved, fell.

  232

  He never told Smadar that he had killed at least one person, probably more, perhaps several. He told the boys about it, individually, at different times: but it was clear to him that they already knew. There was always the sickening feeling when he wondered if they too knew that moment of nothingness that exists between the bullet and the fall.

  231

  In science, the hard problem of consciousness is the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to our subjective experience of the mind and the world.

  From a purely objective point of view we can seem to scientists to be akin to robots governed by the elemental triggering of synapses in our brains. Our minds register the experience. The neurons fire. The brain receives a form of documentary cinema which rolls onward.

  In war, for example, we can shoot bullets as we move forward over the dunes in the dark of night. We move on. We crouch. We take aim. We fire again.

  From a subjective point of view, however, it becomes a matter of how we feel. We see colors, we see the shape of bodies in the air, we apprehend the dead in their hideous contortions as we step along with the rifle in our hands.

  In these moments we are moved to consciousness in the dimensions of sight, of sound, of touch, of taste, of odor, of thought, in order to create a pattern that we will remember in any number of ways, be it glorious or terrifying or humiliating or just a matter of simple survival.

  230

  On his deathbed Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov asked the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church if he was responsible for the deaths of those who had been shot as a result of the design of his AK-47.

  Kalashnikov was worried about his legacy: he had wanted to be remembered as a poet, not a gunmaker.

  The patriarch wrote back to say that the Church’s position was well known and if a weapon was used in defense of the Motherland, the Church would support its creators and those who used it.

  229

  When the British took control of Mandatory Palestine they used the Russian compound in Jerusalem as a prison for members of the underground resistance.

  The Jewish prisoners were paramilitaries who used bombings, assassinations and lightning raids to fight the British and the local Arab population. The aim of the Irgun and the Lehi was to evict the British from Palestine and to create a Jewish state. They were known to the British as terrorists.

  The cells were cold and spartan. Rag mats covered the floor. Punishment beatings took place in solitary confinement. In the execution room a single noose hung down from the wooden platform.

  In 1947 two Jewish fighters, Moshe Barazani and Meir Feinstein, were scheduled to be executed in the prison. Barazani was charged with conspiracy to murder. Feinstein had been arrested for planting three suitcases filled with explosives in a Jerusalem train station.

  The two men refused to acknowledge the authority of the British court. Hours before they were due to be executed, a basket of oranges was delivered to the prison. Inside the hollowed-out oranges were pieces of a grenade to be assembled.

  Feinstein and Barazani requested a private moment of prayer with no rabbi or military presence.

  Alone, they assembled the grenade, stood close together, lodged it between themselves, lit the fuse, put their heads on one another’s shoulders, embraced, prayed and waited.

  228

  With a rubber bullet, kinetic energy is converted to elastic energy, then converted back to kinetic energy, whereas with an explosion it is an inelastic collision: momentum is conserved, but the kinetic energy is not.

  227

  Feinstein wrote in a letter before his death: There is life worse than death, and there is death greater than life.

  226

  On the morning after the bombing, Netanyahu called. The shrill ring of the phone seemed louder than other calls somehow. Nurit picked it up. She knew Netanyahu from school. They had been college friends. A journalist in the house overheard the conversation. No, Nurit said, he was not welcome in her house. Not now, not for shiva, no, please do not show your face. She put the phone down, then tipped the receiver over so it was off the hook. The next day the conversation was news. She was interviewed again later in the week. The killing was not the fault of the bombers, she said. The bombers were victims too. Israel was culpable. The blood was on its hands. On Netanyahu’s hands. On her own hands too, she said. She was not immune, everyone was complicit. Oppression. Tyranny. Megalomania. She was shown on national TV. Pundits said she was just in shock. It wasn’t shock at all, she replied. The only shock was that the Palestinian bombings didn’t happen more often. Israel was inviting its own children to be slaughtered, she said. They might as well put Semtex in their schoolbags. It would never be at peace until it rec
ognized this. Cartoons were drawn in the conservative newspapers: Nurit in a university classroom, wearing a general’s uniform, a keffiyah wrapped around her head. On the right-wing radio stations it was said that she wasn’t properly Jewish at all, she had been brainwashed, her father had become a peacenik after all, he had betrayed Israel, he was a friend of Arafat’s. She turned the dial on the radio. It broke her heart to hear Sinéad O’Connor.

  Days passed, weeks, months. They were inundated with phone calls. Reporters from all over the world. Europeans mostly, French, Estonian, Swedish. They wanted to make documentaries featuring her. It disturbed her how fond many of them were of her point of view: she feared becoming a mouthpiece, a pawn. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore. No more television, no more newspapers, no more prodding of the wound.

  She took a sabbatical and went to London for eleven months. She wanted to be as far from Israel as she could get, to cleanse herself of the noise, the rancor, the pity. Invitations to speak still came from all over the world but she didn’t want to talk publicly about Smadar anymore, she was done with that for now—she would talk about racism, apartheid, prejudice, yes, but not what had happened to her daughter. It simply hurt too much. She took Yigal with her. Rami and the two older boys stayed behind. There were whispers of course, but she and Rami didn’t care: it was what she needed to do. The open sky of London buoyed her. The city had an order to it, a natural flow. She and Yigal stayed with a family in Hampstead—the bottom flat of a three-story Tudor, yellow roses out the back, the branches of the trees gently scraping the windowpane. She read books, wrote articles, took long walks. Translated Memmi and Duras into Hebrew. On Saturday afternoons the smell of freshly cut grass drifted from nearby gardens. Yigal was five. He guided a football at his feet. Nurit walked alongside him, afraid that the ball would roll out into the middle of the street. She didn’t want to let him out of her sight. He was the youngest. She doted on him. They dialed Rami from a telephone box in the village. There was something reassuring about the red phone box: ancient, glass-paneled, a gold crown above the door. They had a phone at home, but the visit to the box became a Sunday ritual. She allowed Yigal to roll his small fingers in the rotary dial. Hi, Baba, it’s me. After a moment she eased the phone away from Yigal, bent down and held her arm around his waist as she spoke. She didn’t want news of Jerusalem, or Israel, or anything else, she simply wanted to hear that her boys were all right. Will Elik be home next weekend? Did Guy get the book I sent? Did you water the petunias? Did you see what Miko wrote? Did the university papers come?