Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

The term mayday—coined in England in 1923, but derived from the French, venez m’aider, come to my aid—is always repeated three times, mayday, mayday, mayday. The repetition is vital: if said only once it could possibly be misinterpreted, but said three times in a row, it cannot be mistaken.

Seelonce mayday, or mayday silence, is maintained on the radio channel until the distress signal is over. To end the alert the caller says, at least one time, Seelonce feenee, an English-accented corruption of silence fini.

The days hardened like loaves: he ate them without appetite.

If you divide death by life, you will find a circle.

Perdix drones are named after the mythological partridge. The flying machines are small enough to sit in the palm of your hand. They are released from pods mounted on the wings of fighter jets, a cloud of them all at once—like a flock of starlings seeding themselves into the sky. They are sturdy enough to be released at Mach 0.6, almost five hundred miles per hour. After the initial orders are programmed in remotely by human operators, the drones are designed to act autonomously. They are sprayed out in a flock of twenty or more, sending signals to one another, creating their own intelligence as they go along. Theirs is the ultimate in digital communication, a perfect specimen of math and computational intuition, able to tell itself what to do and when to do it. Turn left,

turn right, realign coordinates, hit moving car, engage now, rifle! rifle! rifle! weapon away, reconnoiter, abandon mission, retreat, retreat, retreat. They can make a decision to carry an explosive right through the window of your home.

August 9, three days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a second bomb was slated to be dropped on the city of Kokura on the island of Kyushu. The main target was the Nippon Steel factory, a fulcrum of the Japanese war effort. Kokura had a large military presence, but there was a huge civilian population too. The factory was located by the sea at the head of the Onga River, hemmed in by mountains. 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. The planes took off into clear weather, but by the time they reached Kyushu the sky had clouded. Thin sheets of grey smoke rose from the factory below. The commander of the operation, Major Charles Sweeney, had been told that—despite the sophisticated radar at his disposal—he had to be able to see the target with his naked eyes before the bomb could be unleashed. Sweeney looked out on the landscape of white and grey. He figured they had enough fuel to circle the city a dozen times or more. The plane rose and dropped again, looking for a clear vantage point, circling as it went. The cloud subsided and Sweeney could see the outline of the steel mills, the coast, the seashore, but there was still the problem of smoke billowing from below. The factory spires appeared again, barely visible. A forest. A pier. More factory smoke. A line of trucks. A tanker out on the water. Another thin sheet of cloud. Wisps of white out the window. The fuel indicator dropped. Sweeney ordered his planes to continue circling. He was amazed by the sight of a baseball diamond through his binoculars, immediately obscured by a cloud. A line of fishing shacks appeared along the shore and then were swallowed by smoke. The major scribbled the calculations out on a sheet of lined yellow notepaper: the longer he held on to the bomb the more fuel he would use. The Bockscar had already circled te...

have visuals shortly. The fuel line dropped further. He looked out the window into an unexpected wall of cloud. The call went through on the radio and the coordinates were switched. The...

The plutonium core of the Nagasaki bomb was the size of a throwable rock.

but for an accident of cloud vapor—a small defect in the weave of atmospheric weather—seventy-five thousand lives were lost in one place and preserved, then, in another.

Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.

Countably infinite being the simplest form of infinity. Beginning from zero, one can use natural numbers to count on and on, and even though the counting will take forever one can still get to any point in the universe in a finite amount of time.

The route over Palestine and Israel has long been known as one of the bloodiest migratory paths in the world.

Sir Richard Francis Burton translated Arabian Nights, also known as The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, also known as One Thousand and One Nights.

It struck him early on that people were afraid of the enemy because they were terrified that their lives might get diluted, that they might lose themselves in the tangle of knowing each other.

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.

Bombing operations in Gaza and raids into the West Bank are often referred to by Israeli officials as mowing the lawn.

It will not be over until we talk.

At the World Peace Congress in 1949, Pablo Picasso unveiled a drawing of a dove carrying an olive branch in its mouth. The sketch—inspired by the Biblical story of Noah and the ark, the dove returning with a leafy branch signifying that the floodwaters had receded—immediately became a universal symbol of opposition to war.

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 Hinnom Valley is also known as Gehenna,

Rami too: he carried three-year-old Smadar on his shoulders.

Bassam was in prison.

During the Winter War of 1939 the Soviet Union dropped hundreds of incendiary bombs over Finland. The bombs—a cluster of loaded devices inside a giant container—were lethal, but the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, claimed they were not bombs at all, but food for starving Finns. The bombs became known, tongue in cheek, as Molotov’s bread baskets. The Finns, in response, said they wanted a drink to go along with the food, so they then invented the Molotov cocktail to wash the Russian bread down.

The Separation Wall. Also known as the Separation Barrier. Also known as the Separation Fence. Also known as the Security Wall, the Security Barrier, the Security Fence. Also known as the Apartheid Wall, the Peace Wall, the Isolation Wall, the Shame Wall, the West Bank Wall, the Administration Wall, the Annexation Wall, the Seam-Zone Wall, the Terrorist Wall, the Infiltrator Wall, the Saboteurs’ Wall, the Obstacle Wall, the Demographic Wall, the Territories Wall, the Colonization Wall, the Unification Wall, the Racist Wall, the Sanctuary Wall, the Noose Wall, the Curse Wall, the Reconciliation Wall, the Fear Wall. Also known as the Pen, the Coop, the Trap, the Noose, the Protector and the Cage.

Rami knew full well that they might watch him from time to time. His phone was probably tapped. He didn’t care anymore. He had lost so much more than they could monitor.

Olive wood does not decay even if buried in the earth or placed deep in water.

Abir’s face was soft, tender, dark. Her cheekbones arched. Her eyes were large and sloe-colored. She parted her hair in the middle of her forehead and drew it back some of the time in a ponytail. Her eyebrows were thin and straight. She wore a smile that looked like she was in the middle of a permanent question.

Smadar inhabited any camera that was pointed in her direction. She had the manner of a girl who was in control of what could be seen, her brown eyes flitting about, charged through with a petitioning electricity.

Bassam never knew if Abir had seen the prefab pieces arriving or not, but the border guard who shot his daughter testified that among his orders that morning was to protect the workers delivering pieces of the Wall to the schoolyard.

The border guard remained unnamed in all the court documents, although Bassam got to know him by the initials Y.A.

Israeli Defense Force Order 101, Regarding Prohibition of Incitement and Hostile Propaganda Actions, was put into effect in 1967. It forbade Palestinians to use the word Palestine in official documents, to depict or raise or fly their flag, or to make any sort of art that combined the colors of the traditional flag.

Riot, from the Old French, rioter: to dispute, to quarrel, to engage in argument. Riote: noise, debate, disorder, rash action. Also, perhaps, from the Latin rugire, meaning to roar.

In a letter to Rami, Bassam wrote that one of the principal qualities of pain is that it demands to be defeated first, then understood.

My name is Rami Elhanan. I am the father of Smadar. I am a sixty-seven-year-old graphic designer, an Israeli, a Jew, a seventh-generation Jerusalemite. Also what you might call a graduate of the Holocaust. My mother was born in the Old City of Jerusalem, to an ultra-Orthodox family. My father came here in 1946. What he saw in the camps he seldom spoke about, except to my daughter Smadar when she was ten or eleven. I was a kid from a straightforward background—we weren’t wealthy but we weren’t poor. I got in some trouble at school, nothing big, I ended up in industrial school, then studied art, more or less an ordinary life.

The story I want to tell you starts and ends on one particular day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. For Jews this is the day when we ask forgiveness for our sins, the holiest day of our calendar. I was a young soldier fighting the October ’73 war in Sinai, a horrible war, everyone knows this, it’s no revelation. We started it with a company of eleven tanks and finished it with three.

Smadar. She was born on the eve of Yom Kippur, in September 1983, in a hospital in Jerusalem. Her name is taken from the Bible, from the Song of Solomon, grape of the vine. She was sparkling, vivid,

Then after a while you start asking yourself questions, you know, we’re not animals, we can use our brains, we use our imaginations, we have to find a way to get out of bed in the morning. And you ask yourself, Will killing anyone bring my daughter back? Will killing every other Arab bring her back? Will causing pain to someone else ease the unbearable pain that you are suffering? Well, the answer comes to you in the middle of that long dark night, and you think, dust returns to dust, ashes return to ashes, that’s all. She is not coming back, your Smadari. And you have to get used to this new reality. So in a very gradual, complicated way you come over to the other side: you start asking what happened to her, and why? It’s difficult, it’s frightening, it’s exhausting. How could such a thing take place? What could cause someone to be that angry, that mad, that desperate, that hopeless, that stupid, that pathetic, that he is willing to blow himself up alongside a girl, not even fourteen years old? How can you possibly understand that instinct? To tear his own body apart? To walk down a busy street and pull the cord on a belt that rips him asunder? How can he think that way? What made him? Where in the world was he created? How did he get that way? Where did he come from? Who taught him this? Did I teach him this? Did his government teach him this? Did my government?

Some people have an interest in keeping the silence. Others have an interest in sowing hatred based on fear. Fear makes money, and it makes laws, and it takes land, and it builds settlements, and fear likes to keep everyone silent. And, let’s face it, in Israel we’re very good at fear, it occupies us. Our politicians like to scare us. We like to scare each other. We use the word security to silence others. But it’s not about that, it’s about occupying someone else’s life, someone else’s land, someone else’s head. It’s about control. Which is power. And I realized this with the force of an ax, that it’s true, this notion of speaking truth against power. Power already knows the truth. It tries to hide it. So you have to speak out against power. And I began, back then, to understand the duty we have to try to understand what’s going on. Once you know what’s going on then you begin to think: What can we do about it? We could not continue to disavow the possibility of living alongside each other. I’m not necessarily asking for everyone to get along, or anything corny or airy-fairy, but I am asking for them to be allowed to get along. And, as I began to think about this, I began to think that I had stumbled upon the most important question of them all: What can you do, personally, in order to try to help prevent this unbearable pain for others? All I can tell you is that from that moment until today, I’ve devoted my time, my life to going everywhere possible, to talk to anyone p...

It may sound strange but in Israel we don’t really know what the Occupation actually is. We sit in our coffee shops and we have a good time and we don’t have to deal with it. We have no idea what it’s like to walk through a checkpoint every day. Or to have our family land taken away. Or to wake up with a gun in our faces. We have two sets of laws, two sets of roads, two sets of values. To most Israelis this seems impossible, some sort of weird distortion of reality, but it is not. Because we just don’t know. Our lives are good.

The cappuccino is tasty. The beach is open. The airport is right there. We have no access to what it’s like for people in the West Bank or Gaza. Nobody talks about it. You’re not allowed into Bethlehem unless you’re a soldier. We drive on our Israeli-only roads. We bypass the Arab villages. We build roads above them and below them, but only to make them faceless. Maybe we saw the West Bank once, when we were on military service, or maybe we watch a TV show every now and then, our hearts bleed for thirty minutes, but we don’t really, truly, know what’s going on. Not until the worst happens. And then the world is turned inside out.

Truth is, you can’t have a humane occupation. It just doesn’t exist. It can’t. It’s about control. Maybe we have to wait until the price of peace is so high that people begin to understand this. Maybe it won’t end until the price outweighs the benefits. Economic price. Lack of jobs. No sleep at night. Shame. Maybe even death. The price I paid. This is not a call for violence. Violence is weak. Hatred is weak. But today we have one side, the Palestinians, who are completely thrown to the side of the road. They don’t have any power. What they do is out of incredible anger and frustration and humiliation. Their land is taken. They want it back. And this leads to all sorts of questions, not least: What, then, to do about the settlers? Repatriation? Land swaps? Generous compensation for the Palestinians who had their land stolen? Maybe a mixture of all these things. And then those settlers who wanted to stay could stay and become citizens of Palestine under the rule of Palestinian sovereignty like the Arabs in Israel. Equal rights. Equal rights to the letter. Then after a period of trying to make it work we create a Europe of the Middle East, a United States. Both sides make sac...

We must end the Occupation and then sit down together to figure it out. One state, two states, it doesn’t matter at this stage—just end the Occupation, and then begin the process of rebuilding the possibility of dignity for all of us.

themselves. The Occupation is neither just nor sustainable. And being against the Occupation is, in no way, a form of anti-Semitism.

Others know all this too, they just don’t want to hear it. Sometimes they’re angry to hear it, sometimes they’re sad, and sometimes they turn their world around completely. That’s the truth. It is not any great bravery, it’s just ordinary, it’s natural, it’s what I have to do.

But I refuse to be a victim. I decided that a long time ago. There is one living victim and that is the man who killed my daughter. He was a teenager when he shot her. He had no idea why he killed her. He wasn’t some hero, some champion. Who shoots a girl in the back? I saw him in court. I said to him, “You are the victim, not me. You had no idea why you killed her, you were following orders, you did it without conscience. I want to wish you a long life because I hope your conscience will wake you up.”

we Palestinians don’t exist as humans for many people. I am officially stateless. At your airport. At your consulate. Where do I exist? It’s an absurd question. Maybe one place—in your prison I exist. Or maybe in your imagination I exist as a terrorist, but nowhere else. I have a travel document, a laissez-passer, yes, but they can take that away anytime. I have

been many places. I went to Germany, South Africa, Ireland, all of your countries, I went to the White House, I talked with Senator Kerry, I accused him of murder, but he knew exactly what I was talking about, h...