Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

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

When Bassam was in prison. The words chosen are so careful and apt.

Later Hertzl wrote: If you divide death by life, you will find a circle.

everything held in suspension like in a photograph where he is the only moving thing.

These were the days of small shrouds: she had seen so many of them carried along the streets.

This is so painful.

Being with you, and not being with you, is the only way I have to measure time.

A ball of energy, a magnifying glass: she was all focus and burn.

He had learned that the cure for fate was patience.

He wanted to talk about the use of the past in the justification of the present.

The thing about the Occupation was that it never let you decide. It took away your ability for choice. Banish it and choice would appear.

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.

It will not be over until we talk.

Short streets, long memories.

Freedom, he said, begins between the ears.

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.

This again is so apt.

As I have always said, it’s a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy anymore, he just can’t be.

Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid, even acid.

Once, in a fever, Rami dreamed himself installing a microphone in the ground so he could hear all the answers to the questions he had not yet asked Smadar.

He knew the idea must have sounded exaggerated to his listeners—nineteen years, every minute of the day—but every now and then another parent would come along, or a brother, or an aunt, and he would look at them and recognize the grief carried within them like clocks.

In the hospitality of war, we left them their dead as a gift to remember us by.

The only revenge is making peace. Our families have become one in the unsavory definition of the bereaved. The gun had no choice but the gunman did.

What it meant to remember, as opposed to never forgetting.

And then you waited to out-wait the waiting.

Feeling without action will shrink the heart.