by Colum McCann
43
There were times, not long out of prison, when he drove out into the hills of Hebron. Just to clear his head. He avoided his hometown of Sa’ir, drove further until the landscape yawned in every direction. The stars bulletholed above him. He drove the back roads, uneven and rutted. He could make out the small red glow of lights from the military towers. He never once came upon a patrol. He pulled the car down a dirt track and parked when he could go no further. He turned off the headlights and stepped out of the car. It seemed to take a moment for the car to understand where it was. The engine gently ticked. He paused to take in the moon, the stray clouds. Every now and then he could hear jackals yipping in the distance. He walked around the front of his car, hitched himself up on the bumper and lay on the hood. Palestine. It always took a moment for his eyes to adjust and then the quality of darkness deepened. He could feel the heat from the engine pouring through his shirt.
42
The easternmost point in the Big Dipper, Benetnasch, is known in Arabic as the Daughters of the Bier.
41
Bassam was stunned to hold his first grandchild in his arms. He felt the backspin immediately: the same fragrance, the same eye shape, the same dark scatter of hair. Even the coarse hospital blanket was the same color: off-white with a blue and pink stripe along its edge.
He carried Judeh along the corridor and slipped a tiny white shoe onto his foot.
40
Rami’s first thought when he held Guy’s youngest, Anna, was that she looked just like Smadar.
39
In the ninth century the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi wrote The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing.
It was the first book to introduce the concept of algebra to European scholars. Al-Khwarizmi developed a unifying theory which allowed rational and irrational numbers to be treated as algebraic objects.
It focused on moving quantities from one side of an equation to the other in order to maintain balance.
38
The word algebra comes from the Arabic al-jabr, suggesting the repair of broken bones.
37
Traditional bonesetters rely on the touch of their hands. Most of the time they can tell within seconds whether a bone is fractured or broken.
The most difficult bone to figure out by touch alone is the femur, the strongest bone in the body, deeply set in the thigh.
A rubber bullet in the front of the thigh is more likely to break the bone than one from behind. A gas canister with a downward trajectory—shot from a rooftop, say, or a helicopter—will probably fracture the bone, though one shot from a low angle close to the ground might break it in two.
36
The bullet caught Abir in the back of the head, smashing her skull in a radial manner, so that one of the splinters shot inwards and penetrated her brain.
35
The shrapnel obliterated the back of the Blondie T-shirt that Smadar wore.
34
When Bassam went to the AIPAC conference in Washington, D.C., he was asked how it was possible to be an archivist for a country that doesn’t exist.
33
My name is Bassam Aramin and I am from Palestine.
32
In October of 1972, Wael Zuaiter, a poet and translator, was shot dead by agents of the Israeli Mossad. He was heading home to his apartment in Piazza Annibaliano in northern Rome, carrying with him an Arabic-language copy of One Thousand and One Nights.
Zuaiter had adored the book since childhood and had, since arriving in Rome from Nablus in 1962, begun to translate it from his native tongue into Italian. He wanted more than anything to capture the original poetry. Few in Italy knew the real beauty of the stories, he thought—their translations had all come through either English or French but never directly from Arabic. The current translations were a bourgeois dilution: they washed out the color and the wit and the charm of the texts, and put manners and meanings on the myths. The true texture and nuance of the language and humor were getting lost, and this amounted, he said, to a form of infantilization of the Arab mind which made it easier to dehumanize and occupy his people.
Zuaiter was thirty-eight years old, from a wealthy family, but had for years scraped by as a poet, a journalist, a singer, an actor and a painter. He could quote, at length, from the works of Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau, and showed an avid interest in the work of Calvino and Borges. He was a regular at the Arab Bar on Via del Vantaggio where he often read poetry aloud. He liked to organize literary salons around the city. He was often seen strolling the streets, humming the partisan ballad Bella Ciao.
In the early seventies he joined Fatah and set up a small library, the shelves of which were full of revolutionary literature.
On the night of the murder, Zuaiter took two buses across Rome from the house of his girlfriend, an Australian artist, Janet Venn-Brown, and made his way towards his own apartment. He was tired and hungry. He hunched up into his sports jacket and pulled his keffiyeh around his neck. The night was cool. He carried a notebook, several pencils, two bread rolls, wax candles and volume two of One Thousand and One Nights. His phone and electricity had been cut off: unpaid bills. He was readying himself for a long night. In his notebook he had written: To find living marrow in the ancient bones. To uncover. To make real. Feeling without action will shrink the heart.
When he passed the vestibule into his staircase a figure stepped out of the dark brandishing a .22 pistol with a silencer. Zuaiter put his hands in the air and was shot thirteen times.
Twelve of the bullets hit him in the head and chest. The thirteenth entered the book still in his pocket, ripped through the stories, and stopped when it hit the spine.
31
30
The bullet passed right through the Tale of the Hunchback, Smadar’s favorite.
29
Zuaiter was first in a series of assassinations by the Mossad as revenge for the killing of eleven Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympics a month earlier.
He was, they said, a member of the Black September group that had carried out the killings, but in a press conference in Beirut, Zuaiter’s friends testified that he was a pacifist, his capacity for violence was just about nil, he was not interested in revenge and he probably knew more about The Magic Flute than he ever did about the PLO Charter.
28
The assassinations—called Operation Wrath of God—took place in cities all over the world and later became the subject of the Spielberg film Munich. What struck Spielberg was the literary nature of many of the killings both before and after the Olympics: the murder of playwrights, the targeting of journalists, the poets who had their writing hands riddled with bullets, the bombs placed inside the memoirs of Che Guevara, so that if you opened the book it would explode in your face.
27
In 2006 Emily Jacir, a Palestinian artist, went to a shooting range in Sydney, Australia, to teach herself how to handle a .22 caliber Mauser pistol. When she felt familiar with the weapon—the exact type the Mossad had used to assassinate Zuaiter, silencer and all—she collected one thousand blank white books and lined them up, one by one, in a shooting gallery. She fired a single bullet into each of them from a distance of fifty yards. The blank books represented, she said, the untold stories of Palestinians around the world.
She displayed the shot-up books in an exhibition at the Sydney Biennial, alongside photographs of Zuaiter’s copy of One Thousand and One Nights, documenting exactly where in the pages the bullet had traveled until it hit the spine and stopped.
Jacir fired so many bullets that she gave herself a permanent callus on the ring finger of her right hand.
26
To this day an Italian translation of One Thousand and One Nights direct from the Arabic does not exist.
25
One Thousand and One
Nights: a ruse for life in the face of death.
24
At AIPAC he looked out into all the stunned faces. They were all so very white and round. The men wore button-down shirts. The women sat up straight. They were neat and ironed and combed. He leaned into the lectern. He could hear the murmur around the room when he introduced himself. He counted four who walked out immediately. No matter. He had concentrated his mind. He had dressed carefully. Polished his shoes. Creased his slacks. Worn an open-neck shirt, blue. A dark jacket. His hair was cut short. He had shaved closely before he left the hotel. They expected a beard, or at least its shadow, from Palestinians. He had nicked himself on the neck and wore a tiny pink Band-Aid low on his throat. He had forgotten it but could feel it now as he spoke. He wondered if he should remove it, just brush it away, or perhaps stoop beneath the lectern and peel it off out of sight. Every move had a meaning. He wanted to ease into his speech. He had, over the years, learned the rhythm of pause, of silence, of modulation. He had said the word gently: Palestine. He knew they expected some sort of qualifier but he wouldn’t give it. On a tightrope, he thought, you look into the distance. Not down at your feet.
He lifted his hand to shade his eyes, then touched the Band-Aid with his thumb, pressed it down.
He was a child. In the caves. At school. He raised a flag in the yard. Their silence surprised him. No shifting in the seats. No coughing. The lecture room was three-quarters full. A hundred and twenty people. Maybe more. He had been astounded by the invitation. To risk it. To talk into the dark. The congress of the conservative. The difficulty of it thrilled him. To shift just one mind. It was never enough, but it was worth it anyway. He was seventeen years old. In the hills. A lookout. Prison. When he reached the part about the beatings he could tell that one or two of them had begun to shift in their seats, uneasy, but still no walkouts, no shoutbacks. Maybe it was an American politeness. He thought he heard the sound of a phone. It was quickly turned off. The mention of the Shoah vacuumed all other sound. He knew it would. No movement at all. He paused, closed his eyes a moment. There were times he didn’t like his own theater, he was tired of himself, but not today. Even for those things he repeated over and over again. The victims of victims. The quiet one is forever dangerous. Nothing, just a small gun please.
He could hear someone talking, louder now, a sort of buzzing in the back corners of the room, a man and a woman, she was angry, he was calming her down, heads were turning, whispers, shushes. But he had been in much noisier rooms. In Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem. Wait them out. Stare forward. Stay quiet until they quieten too. That was part of the theater. He went on. Some laughter then. The prison belt. Meir Loves Maya.
He leaned further forward. The microphone squawked. A mistake. He leaned back. His jacket was warm. He didn’t want to take it off. A pale blue shirt. It would show ovals at the underarms. He gripped the side of the podium. He had notes in front of him, but he hadn’t consulted them once.
It was Occupation that got them. Just the word. He wasn’t quite sure why it rankled so much, but it did—it was always the word that seemed to slide a little dagger into the rib cage. There was coughing now and someone standing up in the third row, he tried not to look, two people, leaving. Knock us down, we get up. There was another movement at the back. A swing of light from the opening door. Several dark figures were moving about. But perhaps they were coming in? But how could they arrive in the middle of his speech? Security perhaps. Maybe they had come to arrest him. Two hand grenades.
He thought for a moment about the cut on his neck. He reached for the Band-Aid, but it was gone, the cut was dry, he was in control, he had it, he was sure, he didn’t mind that people were arriving or leaving, or both. He was close to the microphone now. Beyond right and wrong there is a field, meet us there.
A curious calm came over him when he spoke of Abir. A breath went through him, he felt it seep through his body, a flow all the way down to the back of his calves. She was shot in the back of the head. She had bought herself some candy. The world’s most expensive.
A red light at the foot of the stage pulsed. He would not let them off. Invest in our peace, not in bloodshed. Spend ten percent of the money differently, five percent, one percent even. They’re your tax dollars, after all. Try it. A half a percent. Why not? The power is yours. Another murmur shot around the room. He stopped and bowed his head slightly. He didn’t want them to think that he was soft, a dupe, an easy mark that they would use later to pretend that they knew what life was like in Palestine. He had come here, as always, to knock them sideways. Don’t get me wrong, he said. We will never give up. It is not our intention to walk away. He was astounded to see that a few of them had risen to their feet, he was not sure whether it was to applaud or leave. He wanted to uproot them. He wanted them to know how it felt. He was not finished. The sweat dripped in his shirt. The lights were so hot. The red stage light was solid now. He let his hands fall along the side of the lectern. Tonight, he said, and then he held their attention with a cough. Tonight I will walk along the Washington Mall and pass by the Lincoln Memorial and I will look up to the stars like I always do when I go back home to Jericho.
23
I am sorry to tell you this, Senator, but you murdered my daughter.
22
At a reception in Dupont Circle he was surrounded. Handshakes. Business cards. Afterwards he could not remember a single thing that had been said, but he would never forget the woman, small, blond-haired, tight-dressed, in front of all these people, she was smiling, her teeth were white, she leaned towards him, there was flesh, the edge of her dress, a shoulder, her fingernails painted a shade of green, she was reaching, it was not to shake his hand, no, her hand was near his chest, near his shoulder, everything was frozen, reaching, so very blond, so very freckled, she was going to touch his cheek, or his neck, he leaned away, embarrassed, but she was still smiling, this American, and someone else was laughing, the room was full of trays, trays of drinks, trays of food, trays to protect you, smashed trays, prison trays, batons, solitary confinement, people were laughing and her fingers were still reaching out, Here, she said, Let me, and she touched him then on the collar of his shirt, he could feel the graze of her fingernails against his neck, at the artery where it pulsed, and she drew away swiftly and she was folding something, a piece of fluff from his collar maybe, a hair perhaps, or an eyelash, something, she was wrapping it in a white napkin, she was still smiling, he knew it, she had lifted it with her bare fingers, the Band-Aid had fallen on the rim of his collar during his speech, draped itself there, he could feel the heat shoot through him, what could he do now?
21
He settled the next day in the Senator’s office. He had shaved closely again but had been careful this time not to nick himself. He wore a suit and tie and he had re-polished his shoes. He was due to talk for only ten minutes and he had only one thing to say, and when he said it he slid a photograph of Abir across the table, a large glossy, eight by ten, You murdered my daughter, and the Senator wasn’t even ruffled, he picked up the photo, nodded, laid it down carefully on the sheet of glass above the desk. He knew exactly what Bassam meant, he said. The American rifle. The American jeep. The American training. The American tear gas. The American dollar. He was aware of the arguments on all sides, he said, but the tide was turning, there were agreements in place, everyone wants the same thing, we approach it in myriad ways, I understand your pain, Mister Aramin, I don’t mean that in any dismissive sense, trust me, I can feel it, as a father, I am learning every day, tell me more about Abir.
The door opened and an aide came in. The Senator waved her away. He picked up the photo again.
It could, thought Bassam, have worked as political sham but there were no cameras there, no reporters, no tape recorders. The Senator looked at the photo: And you, Mister Aramin? Where did you grow up?
—In a cave.
—I mean, said the Sen
ator with a smile, where really?
20
Smadar was born in Hadassah hospital. Where Abir died.
19
One story becoming another.
18
Still to this day John Kerry keeps the photograph of Abir on the wall in his office.
17
The fences along the roadway were painted white. The driveways of the houses were lined with rosebushes, rhododendrons, bluebells. The cars in the driveway glistened silver and black. Children’s toys lay scattered all about. Flags fluttered under the eaves of houses: blue, white and red.
A dread spread through him. Unbidden. There were times this would happen: a hollowness touched him and he would wonder what it all meant, this traveling, these conferences, the infinite repetition, the uselessness of it all. He would go back home. The airport. The interrogation. The strip search. The endless explanations.
He could not shrug off the thought of the woman who had lifted the Band-Aid from his collar.
She had lifted the tiny bandage and had folded it in her fingers, a little round circle of blood.