by Colum McCann
Bassam found them useful for misdirection. Keep your enemy close. Never let them out of your sight.
The more difficult ones to identify were those who broke while in prison. They were real, they were true, but prison took its toll on them. Often it was late in their sentences. It wasn’t possible to tell if prison had broken them, or if it was the prospect of freedom, but something in them was eviscerated. These were the ones to worry about. They knew the cell structure. They knew the names of fighters. They were aware of the operations.
They also knew how to carry their prison bodies: they didn’t squeal too loudly, they didn’t betray themselves.
Bassam tried to keep spirits up in prison with songs, classes, shared cigarettes, but sometimes a man just broke and there was no way to stop it. At the lowest level they were shunned by the other men.
Sometimes the snitches were snitched upon and left to the mercy of the guards.
At the highest level it was Bassam who had to administer the punishment: whether the snitch was to be isolated, or his family threatened, or whether he was to be beaten into submission.
At the worst of times—when the collaborator was high-level—it was Bassam himself who had to do the kicking.
From the beginning the beatings didn’t feel right. He didn’t want to become the jailer. Why do to a fellow prisoner what your jailer is doing to you? The beatings went against proper jihad. A man who requires revenge should dig two graves.
Bassam wasn’t sure how to turn the tables. It kept him awake at night. He wasn’t interested in falling back on the polio or the limp as an excuse not to kick anymore. It was important to remain nonviolent but not to seem weak. He liked the ideas of Doctor King: to find a method to reject revenge, aggression, retaliation. The past is prophetic. Wars are poor chisels. Lightning makes no sound until it strikes.
He turned into the pillow. He tried to sleep. He could not.
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The reed men: those who bent with the wind.
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His favorite instrument in the prison was the ney, a long flute played at an angle to the body’s axis: there was an Egyptian at the far end of his cellblock corridor who played it beautifully. The neys were fashioned from the legs of chairs or tables, hollowed out and carefully carved.
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Smadar owned a pair of headphones with adjustable knobs for volume control. She liked to hold her palms to her ears and splay her fingers wide in the air while she danced around the living room, skirting the flowerpots and the chairs. She was able to control the volume with her palms, sometimes turning it all the way up, playacting and laughing with her brothers: I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you.
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The piercing cry of the zaghareet is made during weddings and other celebrations, to honor the living and the dead.
The sound is created by darting the tongue to both sides of the mouth in rapid succession while an undulating noise is let out from the throat—eleleleleleelelel. The women cover their mouths with their hands and close their eyes while they catch the sound.
The zaghareet lasts approximately the length of one whole breath, although a series of ululations can be pulled together into an ongoing song or keen.
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The zaghareet was famously captured by the filmmaker David Lean in Lawrence of Arabia when the veiled women in black on the clifftop call to the men in the valley below as they head out to battle.
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In 1361—639 years before the third millennium—the first permanent pipe organ was installed in the Saint Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany. Local craftsmen spent years perfecting the design for the Blockwerk organ. Master carpenters were brought in to fashion the wood. The most skilled blacksmiths forged a series of perfectly symmetrical pipes. Clergymen gathered to discuss the purpose and placement of the instrument.
The organ, with its twelve-note claviature, became a local treasure, the pride of the town. It was known among some locals as the Voice of God. Musicians from all around Europe came to hear and play it.
Seven centuries later, a John Cage piece was due to be performed at the cathedral. The eight-page score was titled As Slow as Possible. The aim of the music was to stretch the notes so they would sound out, uninterrupted, for another 639 years.
The project was conceived by theologians and musicians as a tribute to the late Cage and also as a philosophical examination of the helixes of music and time.
The beginning of the performance was slightly delayed but opened with silence in 2001. At first the only sound that could be heard was the whoosh of the electric bellows filling with air.
The first full chord vibrated through the cathedral in 2003. Seventeen months later a note was added and the tone changed. That tone, then, remained steady: a drone.
A special acrylic glass cage was built around the organ to reduce the volume. The bellows was carefully maintained for a constant supply of air. Another chord sounded in 2006 and went on until 2008. At that stage the weights holding down the organ pedals were adjusted and the sixth chord sounded out.
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Each movement of As Slow as Possible lasts about seventy-one years. The music will last until September 5, 2640, ensuring that everybody who hears any of it will never have heard all of it.
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The average life expectancy for a Palestinian is 72.65 years. An average Israeli expects to live almost ten years longer.
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She lay there in a blue smock, the wristwatch on her arm, the blown-apart sections of her discreetly covered. Her face had remained perfectly intact. No cuts, no bruises. For this Rami was grateful. The door closed with a vacuum hiss. Then, silence. He knew even then that all subsequent sounds would derive from this.
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For her tenth birthday Abir was treated to a visit to the Amigo Pita restaurant on Anata’s main street. It was a brightly lit Mexican café with plastic jalapeños dangling from the fluorescent lights and sombreros on the walls. Mariachi music was piped out from the speakers.
In the middle of the party, the owners brought out a piñata in the shape of a donkey.
At first Abir didn’t want to hit the donkey, but when she heard that there was candy inside she put on the blindfold, took the stick and slapped the brightly colored toy.
The sweets scattered and bounced on the floor.
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The sound bomb—also known as the flash grenade or stun bomb or flash bomb or long-range acoustic device—is considered another means of riot control: when thrown into a crowd the tiny canister makes a huge boom.
The Israeli army also uses sound bombs to disable water wells deemed illegal in the West Bank: when they drop a bomb to the bottom, the noise waves are powerful enough to crack the well’s sleeve from top to bottom.
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Most of all, the sound bomb has a percussive effect on the imagination.
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Imagine one rolling in at your feet.
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As slow as possible.
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Current residents near the Saint Burchardi church in the town of Halberstadt complain that the performance of As Slow as Possible now emits—and will continue to emit for the next six hundred years—an unending drone not unlike that of an approaching train.
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Antonin Artaud, the French writer, said that he was interested in liquefying the borders of sound.
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In Borges’s short story The Aleph, a manuscript written by Sir Richard Francis Burton is discovered in a library. The story contains a description of a stone pillar in Cairo in which the whole world of sound is reflected and heard. Anybody who puts their ear to the stone can hear a continuous hum that contains all the concurrent noises of the universe.
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O
peration Opera. Operation Inferno. Operation Gift. Operation Wooden Leg. Operation Solomon. Operation Orchard. Operation Noah’s Ark. Operation Rainbow. Operation Hot Winter. Operation Just Reward.
Rami knew the designations worked. It was what he had done his whole life as a graphic artist, catching the moment, making it memorable, justifiable, clean. It gave people ownership, like a song title or a poem, a melody for the times.
Operation Days of Penitence. Operation Sharp and Smooth. Operation Summer Rains. Operation Autumn Clouds. Operation Sea Breeze. Operation Returning Echo.
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In Paris in 1933, Artaud was invited to speak about his essay The Theatre and the Plague to a packed house at the Sorbonne University. He spoke quietly at first, but then gathered pace. He began sweating and shivering. His eyes rolled back in his head.
His interviewer, a psychoanalyst, sat paralyzed as Artaud began to contort and twist with anguish. Towards the end of the lecture, Artaud fell off his chair and began to writhe on the floor. The crowd in the amphitheater listened nervously as Artaud’s moans grew louder and louder. His eyes were wild, his face was gaunt.
A few audience members—thinking it an act—began to laugh. Soon boos and hisses rose. Programs were thrown onstage. A coin landed at Artaud’s feet. A series of slow handclaps went around the theater. Some of the audience began to drift out.
There was nothing his interviewer could do: Artaud was, it seemed, in the grip of a full fever.
Artaud stayed on the floor until the audience was clear of everyone but a handful of watchers, including the writer Anaïs Nin. Artaud collapsed in silence and then got to his feet, stepped down to the front row, kissed the Cuban-American on her hand. The edges of his lips were darkened, probably by laudanum, she thought.
Artaud brought her out through the theater, into the mist of Paris, towards La Coupole where they sat together and drank.
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Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary that Artaud was shocked the audience hadn’t understood his portrait of death. It was his desire to give the audience the actual experience—short of the plague itself—so that they would awaken from their everyday stupors and be terrified.
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Rami had long learned to embrace the confusion. Chaos was the fuel of Israel. It was a country built on shifting tectonic plates. Things were constantly colliding. Everything led to the edge, the next moment of rupture, but life became most vivid at moments of danger. It was why people drove so fast and so close. It was why they didn’t wait in lines at the airport. It was why the cafés throbbed in the mornings. It was why the markets were so loud and raw. People were chaotic in unison. Molecular in their turmoil. But it worked. Even the polar opposites were attracted to one another. Occasionally they would bash together and it made the ground pulse. There was left and there was right, and there was Orthodox and secular, and there was Arab and Jew, and there was gay and straight, there was high-tech and hippie, and there was rich and fiercely poor. Israel was a condensed everywhere. A tiny country bursting at the seams, but they were in this together. Every dream and neurosis under the sun. The psychoses. The passivities. The pretentions. The pride. The electricity of it all. And the fear too. Everyone wore a loud armor. Always in search of a debate over who and what and where they were. Rami could hear it on the radio. On the TV. In the offices. In the supermarkets. Two Israelis in a room, the old joke went, and three arguments would erupt. He soaked up the clamor. It was apparent in the way he moved: his walk was jittery, shot through with energy. He went straight to the heart of a room. He was seldom one to hang back. Yet there was a quietness about him too, he could hold those contradictions, it was something he had always been good at. It was the Mediterranean part of the soul, the sort of Israel that wanted ease and slumber. At Shabbat, the family gathered, the grandchildren arrived, everyone came indoors, the table was arranged, the arguments were put away for a moment or two. There was nothing religious about it for him, but it was still a cherished ritual. It was not something he could truly explain to an outsider. There was a sort of patriotism here that, try as he might, he could not avoid. He was Israeli. A shameful and powerful thing to be. He bristled a little when outsiders criticized it, but he bristled too when the insiders boasted. Their cellphones. Their medicine. Their make-the-desert-bloom bombast. The miracle of Waze. Yet he had to admit that, at the same time, it sent a little frisson of pride along his spine. He knew that he lived in two Israels: a small one which admired him, and another one, a larger one, bursting with disdain. This was the land of Netanyahu, but also the land of Vanunu. The land of Bennett, but also Khenin, Shaffir, Pappe. It didn’t murder or kidnap its complications, or at least not yet. So many people considered Rami a traitor, a lackey, a turncoat, but in the end he didn’t care: he knew what he was doing, he knew he was getting under their skin, he was peeling it back, exposing the rawness. He was outnumbered, yes, but they would find a tipping point sometime, somewhere, along the way. It was inevitable. He had to keep telling the story. Repeating it again and again and again.
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Rami underlined a passage in Edward Said’s collection of essays Culture and Imperialism, where the Palestinian critic wrote: Survival, in fact, is about the connection between things.
It was one of Nurit’s favorite books and it sat on her bookshelves beside a picture of her father, Matti Peled. In the photo he had his arm draped around Said’s shoulders.
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Bassam knew the corruption. The capitulation. The isolation. The craven talks. The setbacks. The self-pity. The defeats. The resignation. The refusal to acknowledge failure. The false power. The liars, the swindlers, the fakes. The shell jobs. The backhanders. The shame. The riot control of hope. His own leaders applied for permits just to walk into another room. The Palestinian police shot into crowds of their own. Roads were closed to allow the curfews. City planners demolished ancient houses in Ramallah, Jericho, Jenin. The clerks demanded kickbacks. The humiliation ramped up on all sides. It was a slow strangulation, an endless repetition of defeat. Everyone knew just how rotten the system was. He was integral to it himself. Locked in the puzzle. He hated the endless matryoshka-doll boxes his people were shoved into, even among themselves, but he wasn’t going to be reduced to a single idea, a spectacle of disintegration. He was Palestinian. Waiting was a matter of spirit. There was perseverance in the refusal of defeat. He had already lived out his life across a score of slaughters and he, like his people, had survived. He, like them, had been sentenced to live. He had spoken out for peace long before he had lost his daughter. He had decided to resist. He wasn’t immune to criticism, but he had served his time. He was difficult to pick apart: those who criticized him were forced to criticize themselves too. He looked to some, at first, like a pushover. In he came, dragging his foot, head down, slightly smokestale. And he remained that way for a minute or two, until he knocked them off-kilter. His moves were audacious. He made no excuses for them. He went to Israeli schools. He talked to Israeli generals. He even spoke to AIPAC, the lobbying group for Israel. He was prepared to tell the story anywhere. It was, he said, the force of his grief. The weapon he had been given. He could stand up onstage and take the impact. He could smile at them and imagine, at the same time, the knife slipping between their shoulder blades. He had a habit of opening his hands wide when he spoke. Take me on. Try anything at all. The worst has been done to me. Call me names. I have heard worse. No one knew quite where he stood on the issues. He talked around corners. It was part of his talent. He quoted poems. He seemed to wear them as concealment. A rhyme to cover the wounds. A pessimist of the intellect, an optimist of the will. What is closer to my heart, a soldier from my country or one of my enemy’s poets? So many times people would come up to him after his lectures and say that they wished there were more like him. What do you mean? he would ask. Immediately they would realize what they had said and drop their heads. As if he didn’t encounter people like himself eve
ry single day, at every single angle. As if he were the only sort of Palestinian they could stomach.
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Said, who was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1935, was fond of T. S. Eliot’s idea that reality could not be deprived of the other echoes that inhabit the garden.
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In the Himalayan highlands a Ladakhi engineer, Sonam Wangchuk, came up with an idea to counteract the acute seasonal water shortages. He proposed capturing the huge outflows of glacial meltwater, redirecting them, and freezing them into simple conical mounds that resembled local religious structures. The artificial ice stupas—two and three stories high—behaved like mini glaciers. They melted slowly and released millions of liters of water over the planting season.