Apeirogon Read online

  Apeirogon is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination. Where real-life figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Colum McCann

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to WC Music Corp. and Universal Music MGB Ltd./Universal Music–Careers (BMI) for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Once in a Lifetime,” words and music by Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, David Byrne, Brian Eno, and Jerry Harrison, © 1980 Index Music, Inc. (ASCAP) and WC Music Corp. (ASCAP), published by Universal Music MGB Ltd./Universal Music–Careers (BMI). All rights on behalf of itself and Index Music, Inc., administered by WC Music Corp. Reprinted by permission.

  Illustration credits are located on this page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: McCann, Colum, author.

  Title: Apeirogon : a novel / Colum McCann.

  Description: New York : Random House, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019022848 (print) | LCCN 2019022849 (ebook) | ISBN 9781400069606 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780679604600 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Jewish-Arab relations—Fiction. | Palestinian Arabs—Fiction. | Israelis—Fiction. | Political fiction. lcgft

  Classification: LCC PR6063.C335 A65 2020 (print) | LCC PR6063.C335 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019022848

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019022849

  International edition ISBN 9780593134511

  Ebook ISBN 9780679604600

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Lucas Heinrich

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Apeirogon

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  By Colum McCann

  About the Author

  author’s note

  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.

  2016

  1

  The hills of Jerusalem are a bath of fog. Rami moves by memory through a straight stretch, and calculates the camber of an upcoming turn.

  Sixty-seven years old, he bends low on the motorbike, his jacket padded, his helmet clipped tight. It is a Japanese bike, 750 cc. An agile machine for a man his age.

  Rami pushes the bike hard, even in bad weather.

  He takes a sharp right at the gardens where the fog lifts to reveal dark. Corpus separatum. He downshifts and whips past a military tower. The sodium lights appear fuzzy in the morning. A small flock of birds momentarily darkens the orange.

  At the bottom of the hill the road dips into another curve, obscured in fog. He taps down to second, lets out the clutch, catches the corner smoothly and moves back up to third. Road Number One stands above the ruins of Qalunya: all history piled here.

  He throttles at the end of the ramp, takes the inner lane, passing signs for The Old City, for Giv’at Ram. The highway is a scattershot of morning headlights.

  He leans left and salmons his way out into the faster lane, toward the tunnels, the Separation Barrier, the town of Beit Jala. Two answers for one swerve: Gilo on one side, Bethlehem on the other.

  Geography here is everything.

  2

  THIS ROAD LEADS TO AREA “A”

  UNDER THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY

  THE ENTRANCE FOR ISRAELI

  CITIZENS IS FORBIDDEN

  DANGEROUS TO YOUR LIVES

  AND IS AGAINST THE ISRAELI LAW

  3

  Five hundred million birds arc the sky over the hills of Beit Jala every year. They move by ancient ancestry: hoopoes, thrushes, flycatchers, warblers, cuckoos, starlings, shrikes, ruffs, northern wheatears, plovers, sunbirds, swifts, sparrows, nightjars, owls, gulls, hawks, eagles, kites, cranes, buzzards, sandpipers, pelicans, flamingos, storks, pied bushchats, griffon vultures, European rollers, Arabian babblers, bee-eaters, turtledoves, whitethroats, yellow wagtails, blackcaps, red-throated pipits, little bitterns.

  It is the world’s second busiest migratory superhighway: at least four hundred different species of birds torrent through, riding different levels in the sky. Long vees of honking intent. Sole travelers skimming low over the grass.

  Every year a new landscape appears underneath: Israeli settlements, Palestinian apartment blocks, rooftop gardens, barracks, barriers, bypass roads.

  Some of the birds migrate at night to avoid predators, flying in their sidereal patterns, elliptic with speed, devouring their own muscles and intestines in flight. Others travel during the day to take advantage of the thermals rising from below, the warm wind lifting their wings so they can coast.

  At times whole flocks block out the sun and daub shadows across Beit Jala: the fields, the steep terraces, the olive groves on the outskirts of town.

  Lie down in the vineyard in the Cremisan monastery at any time of day and you can see the birds overhead, traveling in their talkative lanes.

  They land on trees, telegraph poles, electricity cables, water towers, even the rim of the Wall, where they are a sometime target for the young stone throwers.

  4

  The ancient sling was made of a cradle of cowskin, the size of an eye-patch, pierced with small holes and held together with leather thongs. The slings were designed by shepherds to help scare away predatory animals from their roving flocks.

  The pouch was held in the shepherd’s left hand, the cords in his right. Considerable practice was needed to operate it with accuracy. After placing a stone in the pad, the slingman pulled the thongs taut. He swung it wide above his head several times until the moment of natural release. The pouch opened and the stone flew. Some shepherds could hit a target the size of a jackal’s eye from two hundred paces.

  The sling soon made its way into the art of warfare: its capacity to fire up a steep slope and battlement walls made it critical in assaults on fortified cities. Legions of long-range slingmen were employed. They wore full body armor and rode chariots piled with stone. When the territory became impassible—moats, trenches, dry desert gulches, steep embankments, boulders strewn across the roads—they descended and went on foot,
ornamental bags slung over their shoulders. The deepest held up to two hundred small stones.

  In preparation for battle it was common to paint at least one of the stones. The talisman was placed at the bottom of the bag when the slingman went to war, in the hope he would never reach his final stone.

  5

  At the edges of battle, children—eight, nine, ten years old—were enlisted to shoot birds from the sky. They waited by wadis, hid in desert bushes, fired stones from fortified walls. They shot turtledoves, quail, songbirds.

  Some of the birds were captured still living. They were gathered up and put into wooden cages with their eyes gouged out so that they would be fooled into thinking that it was a permanent nighttime: then they would gorge themselves on grain for days on end.

  Fattened to twice their flying size, they were baked in clay ovens, served with bread, olives and spices.

  6

  Eight days before he died, after a spectacular orgy of food, François Mitterrand, the French president, ordered a final course of ortolan, a tiny yellow-throated songbird no bigger than his thumb. The delicacy represented to him the soul of France.

  Mitterrand’s staff supervised the capture of the wild birds in a village in the south. The local police were paid off, the hunting was arranged, and the birds were captured, at sunrise, in special finely threaded nets along the edge of the forest. The ortolans were crated and driven in a darkened van to Mitterrand’s country house in Latche where he had spent his childhood summers. The sous-chef emerged and carried the cages indoors. The birds were fed for two weeks until they were plump enough to burst, then held by their feet over a vat of pure Armagnac, dipped headfirst and drowned alive.

  The head chef then plucked them, salted them, peppered them, and cooked them for seven minutes in their own fat before placing them in a freshly heated white cassole.

  When the dish was served, the wood-paneled room—with Mitterrand’s family, his wife, his children, his mistress, his friends—fell silent. He sat up in his chair, pushed aside the blankets from his knees, took a sip from a bottle of vintage Château Haut-Marbuzet.

  —The only interesting thing is to live, said Mitterrand.

  He shrouded his head with a white napkin to inhale the aroma of the birds and, as tradition dictated, to hide the act from the eyes of God. He picked up the songbirds and ate them whole: the succulent flesh, the fat, the bitter entrails, the wings, the tendons, the liver, the kidney, the warm heart, the feet, the tiny headbones crunching in his teeth.

  It took him several minutes to finish, his face hidden all the time under the white serviette. His family could hear the sounds of the bones snapping.

  Mitterrand dabbed the napkin at his mouth, pushed aside the earthenware cassole, lifted his head, smiled, bid good night and rose to go to bed.

  He fasted for the next eight and a half days until he died.

  7

  In Israel, the birds are tracked by sophisticated radar set up along the migratory routes all over the country—Eilat, Jerusalem, Latrun—with links to military installations and to the air traffic control offices at Ben Gurion airport.

  The Ben Gurion offices are high-tech, dark-windowed. Banks of computers, radios, phones. A team of experts, trained in aviation and mathematics, tracks the patterns of flight: the size of the flocks, their pathways, their shape, their velocity, their height, their projected behavior in weather patterns, their possible response to crosswinds, siroccos, storms. Operators create algorithms and send out emergency warnings to the controllers and to the commercial airlines.

  Another hotline is dedicated to the Air Force. Starlings at 1,000 feet north of Gaza Harbor, 31.52583°N, 34.43056°E. Forty-two thousand sandhill cranes roughly 750 feet over southern edge of Red Sea, 20.2802°N, 38.5126°E. Unusual flock movement east of Akko, Coast Guard caution, storm pending. Projected flock, Canada geese, east of Ben Gurion at 0200 hours, exact coordinates TBD. Pair of pharaoh eagle-owls reported in trees near helicopter landing pad B, south Hebron, 31.3200°N, 35.0542°E.

  The ornithologists are busiest in autumn and spring when the large migrations are in full flow: at times their screens look like Rorschach tests. They liaise with bird-watchers on the ground, although a good tracker can intuit the type of bird just by the shape of the flock on the radar and the height at which it is coming in.

  In military school, fighter pilots are trained in the intricate patterns of bird migration so they can avoid tailspins in what they call the plague zones. Everything matters: a large puddle near the runway might attract a flock of starlings; an oil patch might slicken the wings of a bird of prey, disorienting it; a forest fire might throw a flock of geese far off course.

  In migratory seasons the pilots try not to travel for extended periods at lower than three thousand feet.

  8

  A swan can be as fatal to the pilot as a rocket-propelled grenade.

  9

  In the fall of the First Intifada, a pair of birds migrating from Europe to northern Africa were found in the mist nets on the western slopes of Beit Jala. They were tangled together side by side, their feet caught in a single strand, their wings frantic against the filaments, so they appeared at first to be just one oddly shaped bird.

  They were found by a fourteen-year-old boy, Tarek Khalil, who thought at first they were too tiny to be migrants: perhaps they were blackcaps. He leaned closer. Their agonized chirping astounded him. He untangled the birds, put them in two cloth pouches and brought them up the hillside to the bird-ringing station to be identified and tagged: the wing length, the tail size, the weight, the sex, the percentage of body fat.

  It was the first time Tarek had seen such creatures: green-headed, beautiful, mysterious. He leafed through guidebooks and searched the records. Songbirds, most likely from Spain, or Gibraltar, or the south of France. He wasn’t sure how to deal with them. It was his job to put a tiny metal ring around their legs, using pliers and a numbered band, so their migration could be documented before he let them go.

  Tarek prepared the rings. The birds were so thin that they weighed no more than a spoonful of spice. The metal bands might, he thought, unbalance them in flight.

  He dithered a moment, put the birds back in their cloth bags and brought them to his family home in Beit Sahour. He walked up the steep stone streets, cradling the birds in their bags. Cages were hung in the kitchen. For two days the ortolans were fed and watered by Tarek’s two sisters. On the third day, Tarek took the songbirds back out to the hillside to let them go, unbanded, amid the apricot trees.

  One of the birds remained in the palm of his hand for a moment before flying away. He rolled it around in his fingers. The talons pinched a callus on his hand. The tiny neck turned against the soft of his palm. It rose, unsure, then flitted away.

  Both birds would, he knew, go undocumented. For a keepsake the teenager hung the original aluminum rings—with their sequential numbers—on a thin silver necklace.

  Tarek felt the rings bouncing at his throat two months later when he went down to Virgin Mary Street alongside his older brothers to sling stones.

  10

  The bird-ringing station at the Talitha Kumi school is one of two of its kind in the West Bank: it is part of an environmental center with a natural history museum, a recycling program, a water treatment project, an educational unit, and a botanical garden filled with jasmine, hollyhocks, thistles, Roman nettles and rows of yellow-flowered African rue.

  The center looks down on the Wall coiling its way across the landscape. In the distance the ordered terra-cotta roofs of the settlements step across the hilltops, surrounded by electrified fences.

  In the valley there are so many new roads and bridges and tunnels and apartments that the birds gravitate toward the small section of hillside where they can rest and feed among the fruit trees and long grasses.

  Walking through the ten-ac
re environmental center, amid the tamarisks and olive trees and sabra cactus and the flowering shrubbery of the terraces, is like walking the rim of a tightening lung.

  11

  A white blimp can often be seen rising over Jerusalem and floating above the city, disappearing, then rising again, disappearing. Watching from the hills of Beit Jala—a few kilometers away—the unmarked blimp looks like a small cloud, a soft white welt, a botfly.

  At times birds perch upon it, hitching a lift, drifting lazily for a mile or two before swooping off again: a nightingale celebrating off the back of an eagle.

  The airship, nicknamed Fat Boy Two by its Israeli crew and the radar technicians, usually hovers at about a thousand feet in the air. It is made of kevlar and aluminum. A glass cabin is attached to the bottom of the blimp. The thirteen-man room is equipped with a range of computers and infrared cameras powerful enough to pick out and identify the numbers and colors of every single license plate on the highway, even those passing swiftly along.

  12

  Rami’s license plate is yellow.

  13

  He glances at the clock on the bike, then at his watch. A moment of confusion. A one-hour difference. Daylight savings time. Easy enough to fix the watch but it will, he knows, penetrate the day in other ways. Every year it is the same: for a few days at least, Israel and Palestine are mismatched an hour.

  Nothing to be done about it now. No point in turning home. He could kill some time staying on the highway a little longer. Or scoot around some of the back roads in the valleys. Find himself a little stretch where he can push the bike, instill a little torque in the day.