Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

Readers familiar with the political situation in Israel and Palestine will notice that the driving forces in the heart of this book, Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, are real. By “real” I mean that their stories—and those of their daughters, Abir Aramin and Smadar Elhanan—have been well documented in film and print. The transcripts of both men in the center section of the book are pulled together from a series of interviews in Jerusalem, New York, Jericho and Beit Jala, but elsewhere in this book Bassam and Rami have allowed me to shape and reshape their words and worlds. Despite these liberties, I hope to remain true to the actual realities of their shared experiences. We live our lives, suggested Rilke, in widening circles that reach out across the entire expanse.

Imagine the swan sudden-sucked into the engine of the fighter plane. Mayday, mayday, mayday. The brisk crunch of bone and long wing. A whirl of machinery. Mayday mayday mayday. The stutter of metal, the crush of feather, the rip of ligament, the chew of bones. Fragments of beak being spat out from the engine. Mayday mayday mayday.

Mitterand scene

To be or not to be with you is the measure of my time. ~ Borges

The plane, the Bockscar, took off from Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands and flew towards Kyushu, accompanied by another B-29, The Great Artiste. On the nose of the Fat Man bomb the crew had stenciled the word JANCFU: Joint Army-Navy-Civilian FuckUp.

During the twelfth-century Crusades, Christian warriors tied naked prisoners—Jewish, Muslim, Turk—to mountaintop rocks and then released trained eagles with sharpened talons upon them. The eagles worked around the liver, the kidneys and the heart until they pecked the prisoners to death. Artists were employed to depict the Promethean scene in charcoals, bronzes, watercolors.

He was an Israeli after all, face it, he was loud, he was forceful, he might go too far, his anger could overflow. It might end up a sound bite. Tensions were high. The villagers, too, could get in trouble. They might not follow the proper political lines. Ramifications. Repercussions. Word could spread. They could be called collaborators, accused of normalization. One could never know. It was a minefield. Someone might get hurt. They walked out of the apartment, down the stairs, into the night. On the horizon a fire was burning in the nearby Shu’fat camp. Another protest. Beyond that, over the Wall, faint stars hung dull over the scrublands. The two men stood on the sloping pavement, silent awhile. —Don’t do it, my friend, said Bassam.

Above his desk he tacked a line he remembered from the Persian poet, Rumi: Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself.

May of 1987 the French artist Philippe Petit decided that a white dove should be part of a planned high-wire performance across the Hinnom Valley. Petit thought of his walk as an olive branch: he would release the dove midway across the wire, cast it free in the air, watch it fly away.

Interesting goes back to petit

Nothing, he knew, was ever free.

In 1974, Mahmoud Darwish wrote Yasser Arafat’s speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations: Today I have come bearing an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter’s gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.

The thin string—found about twenty-five feet in the air—marks the area of eruv, a ritual enclosure that allows Orthodox members of the faith to carry certain objects that would otherwise be banned on the Sabbath.

The interplay between the petit wire and the eruv and the sneakers is SO WELL DONE.

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

Time doesn’t wait for you. You want it to wait, to freeze, to paralyze itself, to go backwards, but it just doesn’t.

Anything can happen now: they can knock the bottle from his hands, they can spill the contents at his feet, they can take him in for questioning, close the checkpoint, freeze all movement for the next few hours. Or they can affirm the smell of the detergent, rescrew the cap, let him go.

The randomness of it No control at all At their mercy

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?

Such an accurate statement about perils of trying to do the right thing...IMO.

The only interesting thing is to live. 52

In terms of language, I think it’s important to note that if the names were turned and the situation was entirely the same—if the Israelis were Palestinians, and the Palestinians were Israelis—that I would feel the same way about the story. This may sound overly simple, but I find it very affecting. I have no skin in the game in the sense that I’m not Jewish, I’m not Muslim, I’m not Arab, I’m not waving the flag for one side or the other. But I do have skin in the game in the sense that I want to understand what is going on, and I am fundamentally interested in ideas in and around peace. It’s always a miracle to me that we have had peace in Ireland now for the past twenty-three years. It’s shaky, but it’s there.