by Colum McCann
73
Lift your fucking shirt, asshole.
72
Among the countries where Rami, by virtue of his Israeli citizenship, was not allowed to go: Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Brunei, Syria, United Arab Emirates and, of course, by order of his own government, anywhere in the West Bank or Gaza.
71
He drove them to the airport: Smadar and his father, Yitzak. She was ten years old. She had just completed her genealogy project. The pair were on their way to Hungary.
It was the first time Yitzak had visited Europe since the war. Smadar’s questions had woken something in him.
They sat together in the back seat as if Rami was the chauffeur.
—Excuse me, Sir.
—Yes, Madam?
—Could Sir please drive a little slower?
—Whatever you choose, Madam.
Rami tipped the brim of his hat and increased the speed.
—Slower, she laughed, slower!
At the airport he carried their bags from the car all the way to the check-in desk, bowed ever so slightly, told them to have a wonderful journey, that the chauffeur service would be delighted to meet them upon their return.
—I expect for you to be prompt, said Smadar.
—Absolutely, Madam.
—No dillydallying.
—Whatever you say.
—And please wear a better cap next time, she said.
—Indeed.
He watched them walk off together, his father, his daughter, towards the departures area. Flight announcements came over the public address. The airport was abuzz. They melted into the crowd.
Somehow he expected that Smadar would break character, turn around and jump into his arms.
She never did.
70
When she returned from Hungary, she asked Rami to go to the Blockbuster store to rent the Zarah Leander film The Great Love.
He was unable to find a copy anywhere until many years later, in Berlin, he went into a video store and discovered a VHS in a collection of historical classics.
69
For most of his life, Rami’s father had not been willing to go back to Gyor. He had worked as a runner. He had been captured at the age of fourteen. He had been put in a camp. He had seen terrible things and had come to Israel to make a life for himself. He felt no compulsion to live on the fumes of the past. He had raised a family. That was enough. There was never any need to say anything more until Smadar asked him to help with her school genealogy project. He took her into his study, sat in the swivel chair and said: Go ahead, bunny, ask whatever you want.
68
What will life in Israel be like when Smadar reaches fifteen?
67
Rami arrived home from the airport exhausted. He walked slowly to the fridge, took out a pint of milk, opened the cardboard container, drank.
He closed the fridge and walked back across the room. Nurit was in her office, typing. He could hear the sound of the keys clacking.
It was strange to think that Smadar was up there, in the air, flying over the sea on her way to Europe, a yerida of sorts, a descent.
He went into his own office, sat down, opened his email: Princess, he wrote, don’t forget to send us pictures.
66
When he flicked through her passport he lingered at the Hungarian stamp. He had never really thought of himself as someone who came from a country other than Israel. In his lectures Rami said that he was the seventh generation of a family from Jerusalem, but also that he was a graduate of the Holocaust. It was an odd word to use, graduate. He knew it rattled people but that it made sense too, that the terror was still there and always would be, but that there was something about moving on, something akin to growing up, leaving a skin behind. Europe was a distant root, far from the branch. He didn’t belong to it in any real sense.
He kept the photographs that she had captured on her camera. He put them on his hard drive and every now and then went into his office and clicked through them.
65
64
Bassam had only ever met one of his grandparents, Abu Abdullah from his father’s side. He too had lived in the village of Sa’ir. He was a bookkeeper for a wealthy family on the outskirts of Hebron that had made its money from grape sugar.
Abu Abdullah had kept his ledgers, with beautiful penmanship, from his days in the Ottoman empire, through the British rule, through the days of the Egyptians and then the Jordanians until the entries abruptly stopped in 1967.
An inkblot marked the end of the journal. Years later Bassam figured out that the blot was not so much a result of the Six-Day War, as of a severe infestation of vine trunk disease in which the leaves and stems of the grapevines had shriveled and the crop had been wiped out by black measles. The owners of the vineyard sold their stake to another Palestinian family and moved to Sweden where they set up a business importing Hebron glass and olive oil.
The land was lost and eventually legally bought in the 1990s by a family of right-wing settlers from Minneapolis who built a tract of red-roofed houses.
63
Dextrose is one of the primary sugars found in wine grapes. The word stems from the Latin term dexter, meaning right. In an aqueous solution of dextrose the plane of polarized light bends toward the right.
62
Frankenthal had told him where the Parents Circle meeting would be: a suburban school in north Jerusalem.
Rami arrived early on purpose, parked the motorbike a block away. He still carried the helmet in the crook of his arm. He leaned against the wall, feigning nonchalance. He stood in the shade where he could not be seen. He had ordered an espresso from a nearby café. He had no newspaper, no phone to look at. He slowly stirred the coffee, sipped it. It was bitter and sharp.
It sounded so corny, so trite. All this talk of justice, of kinship, of reconciliation. Why was the assumption there that he would want to go? Because he was the son-in-law of Matti Peled? Because he was married to Nurit? It was all so patently naïve. He would rather pledge his allegiance to cynicism.
It all felt off-kilter. Frankenthal had come to the shiva. Rami recognized his face from the newspapers. His suit jacket was slightly rumpled. They shook hands. Frankenthal was quiet, soft-spoken, careful with his condolences. He said he had heard that Smadar was a beautiful girl. He was bereft for the loss. It was senseless what was happening. Rami and Nurit would be welcome to visit a meeting, he said.
Rami had felt some sort of immediate distaste. Something oddly intrusive lay in his stomach. He said nothing. He bid farewell to Frankenthal at the door.
He saw Frankenthal again months later in a bookshop on Be’eri Street. Rami felt his teeth clench. The arrogance of it all. The ease too. How could you do it? Rami asked. How could you step in my house just days after she died? What made you think that you had any right to assume anything at all about me?
He was surprised when Frankenthal nodded and held his gaze. He had, thought Rami, an interesting stare. The eyes were a lively blue.
—Come to a meeting some time, Frankenthal said. We have them every week. Stand at the back. See what you think. That’s all.
Rami shrugged, turned, but he couldn’t block it off, even after he left the bookshop. It gnawed at him. He couldn’t sweep it away. Maybe it was the anger itself. He didn’t know how he would react if he went. Maybe he would drop all his vitriol in a heap at their feet. Take this, it is all I have. She is gone. You are useless. Your circle means nothing to me.
He spilled the contents of the coffee out on the ground. It slowly trickled at his feet and spilled off the curb.
A few cars had arrived. They passed through the school gates. He heard laughter from the parking lot. It riled him. They arrived in clumps. Som
e of them he knew. Guterman. Hirshenson. He had read about them in the papers, seen them on television. Strange to be in their vicinity. To be brought together in this way. There was something sentimental here, it wanted to erode him, this little club of self-righteous grief. But he had come this far. He would go to the meeting, he would listen, he would come out, he would go home, job done, never again, no more.
He crushed the coffee cup underfoot, walked towards the school gates.
A bus was pulling in through the narrow gates. The driver had miscalculated and he had to back the coach up. A high beeping sound rang out when the bus reversed, then eased forward again.
Rami stood on the pavement watching the row of faces at the windows. The men were younger than he would have thought. The women too. One of them wore a hijab. Back and forth she went.
Afterwards he wondered how he might have looked to them: a middle-aged man, a silver helmet in one hand, a crushed coffee cup in the other, one foot propped against the wall. He harbored no feeling for them at all: not hatred, not frustration, nothing. He simply wanted the bus to move so he could go inside and get it finished.
61
She stepped off the bus carrying a picture of her daughter clutched to her chest.
60
Deuterium oxide, or D2O, is colorless, transparent, and non-radioactive.
59
Nothing would ever be the same again.
58
Every once in a while Rami and Bassam found protesters waiting for them outside the school gates or the town hall doors.
Mostly it was middle-aged men. They looked to Rami like corkscrews: coiled, silvery, thin men. A town mayor, a city representative, a council member. He knew full well that they needed the attention. In the beginning he tried to reason with them. Hands out, his voice low, his body open: no helmet, no leather jacket. He strode up, held out his hand. They seldom took it. They waved him away. He watched the anger rise in their faces: the veins in their foreheads shone. It was as if someone had turned up the thermometer in them.
He knew his own capacity for rage, his ability to explode. He had to force the anger down, let it implode. He kept his hands wide as if to say I have no other weapon: Look at me, sixty-seven years old, there is no desire for fight in me.
He made a point of watching their shoes. He could tell so much from the polish, the scuff, the laces, the buckle. Any man with a new pair of shoes had other places to go. Those with worn shoes were a little different, they were more likely to push and shove, there was something already ripped in them.
He was not a true Israeli, they said. He did not know the meaning of history. He was sleeping with the enemy. He was contaminated. A yafeh nefesh. He was bringing terrorists in amongst them, poisoning the minds of their young people. Did he have no idea what he was betraying? How could he share the stage with a bomber? Had he no scruples?
He waited a moment, paused, allowed a silence. The more the anger rose, the more he tried to open his body and feign calm. He knew he needed to have the same tenacity as the fanatic. He had learned to breathe: to hold it deep at his core. He had practiced the smile. He unfolded a picture of Smadar, held it chest-high.
Rami watched their eyes dart about. He knew the approaching arguments from the step slightly forward, the shuffle. It was, he knew, their isolation that had made them so vocal. They thrived in the grandeur of their rage. Yet underneath their masks they were riddled with self-doubt. He could sense the fear behind the clenched jaw. He almost knew the coming lines by heart. Once a terrorist always a terrorist. We didn’t ask for them to blow up our children. They deny our very existence. They want to wipe us off the map. We gave them freedom, they gave us rockets. They want to push us into the sea. Security. Never forget.
All the time Bassam waited in the car outside. When the time came, Rami gave him the nod.
Bassam walked in through the gates confidently, trying not to draw too much attention to his limp.
57
Sometimes, in the classrooms, there were boos until they were finally allowed to speak.
56
Whenever either he or Nurit gave a newspaper interview he would arrive home to find the light on the answering machine blinking and he would wonder how many friends he had lost today.
55
She emerged from the dark of the shop. Areen waited outside. Twelve times nine. One hundred and eight. Twelve times ten. A small bell on the door rang. The street outside was dusty. The sunlight swung underneath the metal awning. She tucked one bracelet away, handed the other to Areen. Twelve times eleven. Their shadows bobbed into the street. One hundred and thirty-two. The thud of a wheel near the roundabout. Twelve times twelve. Her schoolbag swung as she ran.
54
One afternoon, in the Dheisheh refugee camp south of Bethlehem, Bassam watched four boys in white jeans and white T-shirts carry a single mattress past the low houses. They moved carefully through the narrow alleyways with the mattress propped high on their shoulders. Placed on top of the bed were four red carnations, arranged in a neat row.
It took him a moment to realize that the boys were in rehearsal for carrying a bier.
53
The only interesting thing is to live.
52
He exits the highway at Jericho. No patrols tonight. No need to stop. The traffic light shines high and green in the dark. He passes a series of billboards and a long row of palm trees. The single headlight catches one of the red signs at the side of the road:
DANGEROUS TO YOUR LIVES AND IS AGAINST THE ISRAELI LAW
He feels an immediate ripple through the steering wheel as the texture of the tarmac changes.
51
Jericho: the oldest walled city in the world.
50
The Oasis Casino Hotel resort in Jericho was, for a short period, at the turn of the twenty-first century, one of the most successful gambling houses in the world.
Built by the Palestinian Authority, the casino was located just off Highway 1. It had over one hundred gaming tables and three hundred slot machines. The casino was open to Israelis and Jordanians and those with international passports. No Palestinians were allowed unless they were working there. There were several back rooms where high-stakes card games took place. Special air filtration systems were put in to combat the cigarette smoke.
It was a place that seemed jaunty with type: it was popular among local settlers who carried large bundles of cash strapped to their stomachs, thin Jordanian businessmen who trailed lines of aides in dark suits behind them, office workers from Tel Aviv who wore their shirts ambitiously open, dark-skinned African women in tight silver skirts.
The casino didn’t last long. During the Second Intifada, local militiamen used the space to fire at Israeli soldiers, and the IDF blew a hole in the front facade, but for the short time it was open it was reputed to have made the highest percentage margin for the house per minute of any casino on earth.
49
Your Oasis Awaits.
48
False stars in the casino’s ceiling were set in exact constellations, operating as cameras. No windows. No clocks. Music was neutral, mostly American pop, though some Israeli tunes were allowed, but nothing with Arabic lyrics. Drinks were sugary. Alcohol, though freely available, was carefully monitored and consumed mostly by international guests. Pimm’s No. 1 was considered the drink of choice among the high rollers and bottles of Veuve Clicquot were kept on ice at the best tables.
47
In the 1930s the British army established three golf clubs in Mandatory Palestine: the Jerusalem Golf Club, the Palestine Police Golf Society, and the Sodom and Gomorrah Golfing Society. The Sodom and Gomorrah course was nine holes long and watered frequently by pumps from the local wells.
Every summer bank holiday the British police played for a marble statuette called Lot’s Wife.
The statue was presented in the clubhouse early in the evening as a round of chilled Pimm’s was served to the men.
Later in the evening a special tongue-in-cheek prize was given for any golfer who claimed a hole in one.
46
When the British left the club in early 1948 the fridges and pantries were ransacked and the clubhouse destroyed, but the menu of drinks was left untouched on a chalkboard on the inside wall: among them were the Holy Moses (one part gin, one part arak, apricot, lime juice and olives), the Virgin Mary (tomato juice, celery, cucumber, baharat), the Jesus Wept (red wine spritzer), the Doubting Thomas (vodka, citrus juice, turmeric, freekeh peppers) and the Adam and Eve (secret recipe, served with a fresh green apple slice).
45
Outside the Oasis, the road is speed-bumped every fifty yards.
44
Bassam taps the steering wheel and guides the car to the side of the road, near the curb, where the bump is less pronounced. A slight sway and then he redirects back into the middle of the road where the tarmac is flat.