Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

Smadar. From the Song of Solomon.

The grapevine. The opening of the flower.

Abir. From the ancient Arabic. The perfume. The fragrance of the flower.

shopkeeper was named Niesha the Ancient, even though she was just thirty-four years old.

On the day Smadar was killed, the television cameras were there even before the ZAKA paramedics.

What he wanted the filmmakers to do was to somehow crawl inside time and rewind

like a Borges story—so

Jorge Luis Borges, when walking with guides through Jerusalem in the early 1970s, said he had never seen a city of such clean searing light.

Sivan Zarka, fourteen years old, was blown into the air alongside Smadar.

So often, thought Rami, the ordinary can save us.

When Rami came back from the Yom Kippur War—long-haired,

he began work as a graphic designer,

he had no politics. No party allegiance. No safe alignment.

He met Nurit: she was a beauty. Fiery. Red-haired. Liberal.

They had kids: one two three four. Beauties.

little wild, all of them. Especially Smadar. A ball of energy, a magnifying glass: she was all focus and burn.

boys too—Elik, Guy, ...

He wasn’t prejudiced, he said, he was just like everyone else, he was logical, he was practical, he simply wanted to be tranquil,

The kids grew. The boys were full of pep. Smadar was a pistol,

then came military service—Nurit didn’t like it, but Elik, the oldest, went anyway.

would describe it years later as his life in a bubble,

his role in a Talking Heads song.

For the first few years after the bombing it worried Rami that he was repeating himself. He sometimes had to tell Smadar’s story two or three times a day.

My name is Rami Elhanan. I am the father of Smadar. I am a seventh-generation Jerusalemite.

The country was, he told them, written on a tiny canvas.

Israel could fit inside New Jersey. The West Bank was smaller than Delaware. Four Gazas could be shoehorned inside London.

Soon they were meeting virtually every single day.

Rami handed over the reins to his partner in his graphic design company. Bassam cut back on his working hours in the Sports Ministry and the Palestinian Archives.

two began working officially with the Parents Circle.

One afternoon, in a souk on Al-Zahra Street, Borges said to his listeners that One Thousand and One Nights could be compared to the creation of a cathedral or a beautiful mosque,

stories existed on their own at first, said Borges, and were then joined together, strengthening one another,

It was what Borges called a creative infidelity. Time appeared inside time, inside yet another time.

Two of the ZAKA came back on their scooters the next morning to pick up a single eyeball that had been missed.

eyeball was noticed by an elderly man, Moti Richler,

A long string of optic nerve was still attached to the pupil.

The workings of the human eye are still considered by scientists to be as profoundly mysterious as the intricacies of migratory flight.

age-related macular degeneration,

The operation—which was pioneered in New York and perfected in Tel Aviv—only takes a couple of hours, but afterwards requires a new way of seeing.

Sometimes it takes the patient months, or even years, to properly retrain the vision.

Moti Richler was in his second month of recovery.

It looked to Moti like a tiny old-fashioned motorcycle lamp with wires dangling.

Shortly after Abir’s funeral—she

Bassam called Rami on the telephone and said he needed to join the Parents Circle.

In the ’48 war Moti Richler guarded a primitive cart that ran on a metal cable strung across the Hinnom Valley

Moti drove a motorbike through the valley underneath the cable to

Moti took out the front light completely

disabled headlamp sat by Moti’s bedside all through the war, the wires dangling.

Years later the French high-wire artist Philippe Petit strung a three-quarter-inch steel wire on almost the exact same trajectory as Moti’s cable, and walked, on an incline, across the

The frigatebird is dark and stealthy, with a hooked beak and a deeply forked tail.

wings can span up to eight feet.