Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

  She took small back roads through the Yorkshire countryside. Stone walls and curves. Mills and church spires. The car flashed underneath the green trees. Sunlight shot through the overhead branches. The tarmac hummed. There was not a single pothole in the road.

  She found a horse farm outside Keighley where Arabian horses stood, sleek and muscled against the green. She leaned on the door of the car.

  When Hiba woke, she propped the child up on the edge of the fence, and together they watched the horses prancing high-legged in the field.

  205

  The Arabian horse has a short, straight back, usually by virtue of having one less vertebra than other horses. Her natural line is revered, and she is famous for her floating trot, a spectacle of beauty and symmetry, all the sinews moving together.

  204

  The Dead Sea is known to terrify horses—if they step into the buoyant water their legs can disappear from underneath them and they get turned over on their sides and sometimes drown.

  203

  In the nineteenth century, Bedouin tribes used Arabian mares for raiding parties. The raids—to capture sheep, camels or goats—depended on surprise and speed. Unlike the male horses, the females, or war mares, did not nicker or neigh when they approached an enemy camp. This silence was venerated.

  Among the Bedouin, no greater gift could be given to an outsider than an Arabian war mare.

  202

  In the hospitality of war, we left them their dead as a gift to remember us by.

  ~ ARCHILOCHUS ~

  201

  The packages unhinged Rami and Nurit. They arrived from the Ministry every Memorial Day. Neatly wrapped in sky-blue paper with white ribbons, and sealed with a silver Star of David. They were left on the doorstep along with a note from the Minister of Defense: Dear Elhanan family.

  A different item every year: a cut-glass bowl with names of the fallen engraved around the rim, a pewter vase with Biblical quotes, a porcelain flag, a pair of silver Shabbat candlesticks.

  Rami unwrapped a book one Memorial Day—Trails: Fall in Love with Israel Again. The book had a different trail for every day of the year: fifty of them were located in the West Bank. The book suggested that Israelis should carry a gun if hiking a trail near an Arab village.

  The note—a special message to the bereaved—was florid. On this momentous Memorial Day we wish to honor Smadar’s memory and the special sacrifice you and your family have made for the eternal State of Israel.

  Nurit was livid: it was not just the vulgarity of the gifts or the saccharine letters, but how they co-opted Smadar as their own, as if the child had been somehow complicit, as if she had stepped selflessly down Ben Yehuda Street into the arms of the bomb.

  She and Rami took a hammer and a wedge to the glass bowl and smashed it to pieces, a small rubble of death and memory.

  They put the pieces in the box, re-ribboned it, and shipped it to Netanyahu with her own note: Dearest Bibi, something is broken.

  200

  She would see Netanyahu sometimes at the swimming pool at Hebrew University, a thin man with a pale blue swimming cap and a little surprise of white flab jiggling above his hips.

  They would nod to each other and pass by in separate lanes.

  199

  He waited for the delivery. On the doorstep. Outside the house. Amid the blooming flowers. Just before noon a young soldier in uniform pulled up in an army car: white, with black plates. He was open-faced, jovial. The box was blue again, the white ribbon neatly tied.

  Rami walked along the garden path, silently took the package. The soldier wished him well, turned and walked back to his car in the hard sunlight.

  On the doorstep, Rami unwrapped the package. A metal globe with a map of Greater Israel raised in bas-relief. It was burnished bronze, hollow, lightweight.

  He dropped the box and called out to the soldier who had just opened the door of his car.

  —You see this?

  The young man turned, startled.

  Rami could feel the heat shoot through him. The globe was slippery in his hands.

  —You think we want it?

  —Sir?

  —This?

  —What about it, sir?

  —You think we actually want it?

  The globe sailed through the air, over the top of the car, bounced on the pavement, rolled and settled in the middle of the road.

  The soldier stared at Rami for a half-minute, then strolled around the front of the car, bent and picked up the globe, wiped it free of dirt, got in his front seat, closed the door, took off slowly.

  The following year, the gifts stopped arriving.

  198

  Still, he and Nurit always stood at attention when the memorial sirens went off.

  197

  The sirens sound out every year in memory of fallen Israeli soldiers and the victims of terrorism. Work stops. Traffic stops. Keyboards stop. Elevators stop. Citizens step from their cars in the middle of the highway. Television and radio stations go silent. All theaters, cinemas, nightclubs and bars are closed. There is no construction noise. Flags are flown at half-mast.

  The sirens blare for one minute at sundown and for two minutes on the following day.

  196

  After his service, Elik threw away his beret and drove on the main road from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea where he camped overnight in an abandoned water park near Ein Gedi. He drank a fifth of vodka, smoked half a joint, wandered among the abandoned lifeguard chairs and the dusty sunshades, then walked alone up and down the dry waterslides for most of the evening.

  In the morning he awoke on the concrete floor of an empty pool.

  195

  194

  Rami threw the arguments around in his head, day after day. Point and counterpoint. Affirmative constructive. Negative rebuttal. Resolution. Refutation. How many times had he gone through this with the other two boys as well? Now here he was with Yigal. Rami woke in the middle of the night, tossing and turning. So, what are you going to say, son, when you’re standing there in the middle of the road and along comes a black Kia and you flag it down, and it’s Bassam inside? I’ll let him go. And what about your buddies? They can make their own decisions. And what if your commander says, Arrest him? I’ll refuse. And what if they arrest you for refusing? Then they can arrest me. And go to prison for it? Yes. So why not do it now and refuse altogether? It’s my duty, my obligation. Tell me this, if you let Bassam go through do you let the next guy through as well? Depends. And what about Araab or Areen or Hiba or Muhammad or Ahmed, are you going to shake them down too? I’ll do the right thing. And what if you’re told to do something you don’t want to do? Like what? Like commandeer a house, shoot a water tank, break a bone. I won’t do it. Everyone says that. I’ll make my choice when it comes. And what if it’s the wrong one? Then I’ll pay for it. Is your mind made up? I don’t know. Sooner or later you’ve got to make a choice, son. If I don’t serve, I have no voice. Your voice is louder if you don’t go. I’m not scared of prison if that’s what you think. I know that, son. You served, you went, you got to do it. Those were different times. That’s what everyone says. Well, it’s true. Why should I rot in prison when I could change things now? Because you won’t be able to change things. That’s what you say. You can’t ignore reality, son. We need protection too, it concerns me to protect my country, we need good people in there. Yes, we do. So what should I do, emigrate? Of course not. I’m not ashamed of my flag, we need a democratic army. You’ll eventually find out that there can be no such thing. A place has got to defend itself. I understand. They’re not all Bassams you know. I know that. There are other people out there. Yes, there are. They blew up my sister.

  193

  There were some things, Rami knew, to which there were no responses, not even to himself.

  192


  The evenings of waiting seemed to occur in geological time. Every air raid siren, every beep on Rami’s telephone, every news alert on the television. Another day of not knowing. He couldn’t shake the dread from his mind. Waiting for the measured knock on the door. The long slow steps from the living room into the foyer. I’ll get it, honey. The pull of the side curtains. The glance out the window. The edge of a shoulder. The shape of a hat. The relief of seeing the postman or a canvasser or a neighbor. He had his response carved out in his mind, like every father did: he would stand there quite still, he would refuse the messenger entry, he would hold the gaze, he would nod, he might even smile, he would reach for the letter, he would slip it in his shirt pocket, close to his skin. He would hold up his hand, his only language, then he would shake his head, close the door, wait for the footsteps to travel along the driveway until the car door was gently closed and the messenger was gone. What to do with light then? What to do with sound? What to do with all the color in the room? He would be calm and measured. He would be in control. He would turn in the foyer and walk back down through the kitchen and reach in the cupboard and run the tap and pour her a glass of water and bring it to the table for her because she, of course, would have already intuited it. And she might lean across and take the letter and gently unfold it and read it and put it back in the envelope and then place it down in the center of the table.

  And even though the knock never came, it seemed to them that no knock was a sort of knock anyway.

  191

  Four years later—after completing his military service—Yigal stood onstage in Tel Aviv in front of seven hundred people, alongside Araab Aramin, in the Alternative Memorial Service, for Palestinians and Israelis both, and together they called out against occupation, segregation and dispossession.

  190

  My name is Yigal Elhanan. I was five years old in 1997 when I lost my sister Smadar.

  189

  My name is Araab Aramin. I was fourteen years old when my sister Abir was shot in the back of the head.

  188

  Seven hundred people heard the boys speak. Rami and Bassam watched from the side of the stage. Bassam stood with his hands locked behind his back. Rami held the edge of the curtain. He said later that what he was hearing was nothing short of nuclear.

  The stage manager sat at the control panel. She hardly moved. The boys stood side by side at the high podium, dressed in open-neck shirts. Afterwards, onstage, they embraced. Their fathers emerged, then, from stage left.

  Rami went first to Araab. Bassam went to Yigal.

  187

  Heavy water—deuterium oxide—is used to keep chain reactions going. The water helps to slow down the pace at which the uranium splits apart.

  186

  The soldier who killed my sister was a victim of an industry of fear. Our leaders speak with terrible smugness: they ask for death and vengeance. The loudspeakers sit atop the carriages of amnesia and denial. But we call on you to remove your weapons from our dreams. We have had enough, I say, enough, enough. Our names have been turned into a curse. The only revenge is making peace. Our families have become one in the unsavory definition of the bereaved. The gun had no choice but the gunman did. We do not talk about peace, we make peace. Uttering their names together, Smadar and Abir, is our simple, unadulterated truth.

  185

  Araab was twenty-three years old, Yigal twenty-four.

  184

  Mordechai Vanunu, a nuclear technician whose job it was to produce lithium-6 in the Dimona nuclear plant in the Negev, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for divulging details of Israel’s weapons program. Vanunu smuggled a 35mm camera into Machon 2 and took fifty-nine photographs despite signing a secrecy agreement years earlier. He divulged the details first to a church group in Australia where he fled. Later, in London, where he went to publish the information, he was seduced in a honey-trap operation by a Mossad agent. He met the female agent again in Rome where he was overpowered, drugged, kidnapped, bound to a stretcher, driven by motorboat out to a spy ship, bundled into a cabin. He was interrogated by Mossad agents, whisked back to Israel to a secret prison run by the Shin Bet. Nearly twelve of his years in prison were spent in solitary confinement.

  183

  Cheryl Hanin Bentov—the honeypot who lured Vanunu to his capture—became a real estate agent in Alaqua, Florida, specializing in gated communities and waterfront properties.

  182

  Rami saw Vanunu sitting in the back courtyard of the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem. He was tall, slim, elegant. The two side-lawns of grey hair accentuated his dark skin. There was something inherently Israeli about him: the way he dressed, an expensive blue shirt, opened two buttons down, a slight crease in the jeans, loafers without socks. Only the thin gold chain at his neck seemed slightly flagrant.

  Vanunu was surrounded by half a dozen listeners, four men, two women. A carafe of water sat in the middle of the table along with a bottle of white wine in a silver bucket.

  The tables were shaded by tall mulberry trees. Ivy on the limestone walls. A slight breeze ruffled the flowers: hydrangeas, rhododendrons, a flowering mint.

  As he walked past, Rami heard a quick volley of Hebrew at the table. It dissolved, then, into English, which surprised him: one of Vanunu’s conditions, he knew, was that he was not allowed to talk to foreigners.

  Rami chose a table far enough away not to draw attention but close enough that he might hear something. Some laughter and then a brief silence. As far as he knew, Vanunu was still under house arrest, living in the cathedral down the street.

  Rami checked his wristwatch. He was ten minutes early for his own meeting. He ordered a beer from the waiter, opened his phone, strained forward to listen to Vanunu’s table.

  It was only then that Rami noticed the rhythm of the fountain, a thin sheet of noise. All the words were somehow softened by the fall of the waterdrops. He had seen the fountain when he came through the lobby but he had not really listened to the sound. It seemed designed exactly to mute the neighboring tables, falling relentlessly, relentlessly falling.

  He thought for a moment about walking over to the table to reach out, introduce himself, shake Vanunu’s hand, look him in the eye. Still, there was a part of Rami that became arrhythmic at times like this: he wasn’t sure quite what he would say. Vanunu too had been called an Arab lover, a peacenik, a traitor. He had been burned in effigy on the streets. He had gone through more humiliation than Rami could imagine. Had his passport taken away. Was not allowed to talk to reporters unless his words were reviewed by censors first. Lived in a small room in the walled compound. Was arrested and rearrested, again and again—once for talking with tourists in a bookshop, another time for refusing community service in West Jerusalem, demanding to do it instead in the eastern part of the city, the Arab area.

  At the table Vanunu had his hand at his mouth, covering his lips. The four men and two women were leaning in intently, listening. What secrets might be filtered there? What ordinary things? What longings?

  When Rami stood to leave he caught Vanunu’s eye and a quick sliver of recognition went between them.

  181

  Traitor: one who betrays a country, a friend, a principle.

  180

  Collaborator: one who cooperates traitorously with an enemy.

  179

  Peacemaker: one who has grown sick of war.

  Peacemaker: one who was sick of war.

  Peacemaker: one who is sick of war.

  178

  One of the primary conditions of aid from the United States, under the Economic Support Fund and Foreign Military Financing laws, designed to promote political and economic stability in areas key to U.S. interest, is that Israel is not allowed now or at any other time to produce weapons of mass destruction.

  177

  I am sorry
to tell you this, Senator, but you murdered my daughter.

  176

  It was Bassam’s job, as commander, to punish the prison collaborators. Those who cooperated, those who conspired, those who squealed, those who broke. The stool pigeons. The rats. The reed men.

  The Fatah network was tight, but the Israelis always managed to infiltrate. There was always a prisoner willing to bend for a small favor: a shortened sentence, a new cell, a supply of cigarettes. Most of all the prisoners broke for their families on the outside. Perhaps the man’s brother had been arrested. Or his son was in trouble. The prison guards came to them—in hospital or in solitary—and whispered a casual deal. It was always a minor thing at first. Find out who toppled the basket of detergent in the laundry room. Identify the prisoner who took salt from the kitchen. Point to the one who was tapping messages on the pipes.

  One single snitch was all it took and then they were snared. They would spend the rest of their time in verbal handcuffs.

  The easiest ones to identify were those who had already arrived as snitches. They had been co-opted early. Bassam could tell from the way they carried themselves: they feigned fear, but the pretense itself belied them. They would always wait a week or two before beginning to squeal. They were punched and kicked in their cells by the prison guards and then hauled away. Bassam knew it was a faux beating, an excuse to get the prisoner off the cellblock. The screams were too loud, the guards too bellicose. Actors in the game. He watched them being taken away on a stretcher. They seldom returned, but if they did, they seemed to mix their anger with a little plumpness: they had been taken care of in custody.