Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

On her bedroom wall, just below a picture of Sinéad O’Connor, Smadar hung a Picasso dove.

Seven months after Philippe Petit’s Walk of Peace, the First Intifada began.

the Night of the Gliders, 1987. The

Palestinian colors. White our deeds, black our battles, green our fields, red our swords.

It might even be easier, he thought, to be a Palestinian abroad than at home.

Peace without reconciliation. To forgive but not excuse. To colonize the mind.

Above Nablus—on top of Mount Gerizim, the Mountain of Mercy—is a sprawling mansion owned by Munib al-Masri,

richest man in Palestine.

The Nakba.

the Night We Blackened Our Faces and Left.

The village was raided one week after the Ben Yehuda Street bombings.

A few experts in the field prefer to call them homicide vests.

What surprised him most of all, though he did not know why, was that Youssef—the bomber most likely to have blown up Smadar—had studied graphic art.

Matti Peled died of natural causes eighteen months before his granddaughter. It was the only thing, in either death, that Rami and Nurit were thankful for.

Yasser Arafat sent a personal representative to Smadar’s funeral.

PLO leader had, on occasion, referred to Smadar’s grandfather as Abu Salaam: father of peace.

Smadar and her grandfather were buried side by side under a grove of knotted carob trees.

last article Peled wrote for the newspapers, in 1994,

what he thought was the devastating nature of the accords, titled Requiem to Oslo.

dominant movement of Verdi’s Requiem is from crushing loss to outright terror,

December of 1972, Brook led a troupe of actors and a transportation crew from Paris to Algeria and then into the Sahara desert.

performance of an adaptation of The Conference of the Birds, based on an allegorical poem by Farid ud-Din Attar,

story of a gathering of the world’s birds trying to decide who should be their king.

each bird represents a human fault which prevents man from atta...

wisest bir...

the h...

suggests that together they try to find the legendary Persian Simorgh...

Brook felt that theater was bound to be born in empty spaces. He

The Conference of the Birds was written in Persian at the end of the twelfth century.

sixtieth anniversary of the founding of Israel, the hoopoe—loquacious,

was chosen as the national bird.

I repeat: Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.

July of 1994 a young Israeli soldier, Arik Frankenthal, a student of theology and poetry, stuck out his thumb to hitchhike

he was immediately overpowered.

Arik’s battered body was later found in Ramallah. He had been shot and stabbed several times.

Three months later, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Arik’s father, Yitzhak Frankenthal,

examined the newspaper archive—so many ringed faces—to find the names of loved ones who had been lost in attacks since 1948, Palestinian and Israeli both.

Frankenthal sold everything he could to support himself so he could devote his time to the search.

finally found forty-four families who were willing to come together to talk.

He appeared on TV to say that his son’s killers needed to be understood as men born into an appalling occupation.

not interested in absolving the attackers, but he had to admit if he had been born under the same circumstances

he would undoubtedly have become a fighter himself, maybe even the same sort of man ...

Frankethal was, he said, an Isra...

He liked to say that there was no black-and-white in e...

Bassam was twenty-four years old when he was released after seven years in prison.

told his cousin Ibrahim that it was time to find himself a wife.

Her mother was there, her aunts, her cousins, her brothers.

Salwa

They were married thirty-four days later. Bassam had talked to her for a total of two hours.