[This "brilliant act of novel-making," writes reviewer Orringer,
"builds a wholly believable and infinitely faceted reality around" the
experiences of two fathers that each lost a child to war, and the
friendship that developed between them.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

COLUM MCCANN GIVES VOICE TO GRIEVING FATHERS, ONE ISRAELI AND ONE
PALESTINIAN  
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Julie Orringer
February 24, 2020
The New York Times
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_ This "brilliant act of novel-making," writes reviewer Orringer,
"builds a wholly believable and infinitely faceted reality around" the
experiences of two fathers that each lost a child to war, and the
friendship that developed between them. _

,

 

_Apeirogon: A Novel_
Colum McCann
Random House
ISBN 9781400069606

On Sept. 4, 1997, 13-year-old Smadar Elhanan — dressed in a Blondie
T-shirt, her hair cut short, her Walkman playing Sinead O’Connor’s
“Nothing Compares 2U” — was walking down Ben Yehuda Street in
Jerusalem when three young Palestinian men detonated suicide belts,
killing themselves, Smadar and four others. A decade later, and less
than three miles away, 10-year-old Abir Aramin, wearing her school
uniform and holding a candy bracelet she’d just bought, was shot in
the back of the head by an 18-year-old Israeli soldier as his jeep
sped around a corner. The local Palestinian clinic where Abir was
treated had little working equipment, so doctors decided to transfer
her to a better-equipped hospital on the other side of the wall. Her
ambulance was delayed for hours at a border checkpoint, and she died
two days later at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, the same hospital
where Smadar was born.

These real-life events form the seed of “Apeirogon,” Colum
McCann’s powerful and prismatic new novel. An apeirogon is a polygon
with an infinite yet countable number of sides. This novel, divided
into 1,001 fragmentary chapters — a number alluding to “The
Thousand and One Arabian Nights” — reflects the infinite
complications that underlie the girls’ deaths, and the unending
grief that follows. Its primary subject is the fraternal relationship
between the girls’ fathers, Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian Muslim, and
Rami Elhanan, an Israeli Jew. Aramin co-founded the activist group
Combatants for Peace; Elhanan joined up after his son Elik brought him
to a meeting, some seven years before Abir’s death. By the time Abir
was shot, Elhanan and Aramin were close friends. The new loss made
them brothers. Since 2007 they’ve traveled all over the world
together, speaking about what they experienced and why they believe
that a peaceful end to the occupation is not only possible, but
necessary.

The chapters that capture their experience — and convey so much else
about life in the Holy Land — move freely through time and space.
They’re numbered from 1 to 500 and then back from 500 to 1, with
Chapter 1,001, the ending, located at the direct center of the book.
Both Chapter 500s consist of the fathers’ first-person accounts of
their losses and their paths toward activism. Those chapters are
bookended by two pages starkly illustrated with small photos of what
might be desert or ocean: the visual equivalent of a moment of
silence. The text of Chapters 500 and 500 comes directly from the
source material; in the note that precedes the novel, McCann tells us
they’re “pulled together from a series of interviews in Jerusalem,
New York, Jericho and Beit Jala.” Indeed, you can find bits of those
chapters online in articles from The New York Times and The Guardian;
these fathers’ grief-stricken voices are already part of the public
consciousness. By placing them at the center of the book, and by
setting them off formally, McCann indicates their primary importance
in the novel. They’re also the most intimate pages of the book, and
the most difficult to read.

“I still sit in that ambulance every day,” Bassam tells us. “I
keep waiting for it to move. Every day she gets killed again and every
day I sit in the ambulance, willing it to move, please move, please
please please, just go, why are you staying here, let’s just go.”
Rami, recounting the moments before he learns for certain that Smadar
is dead, says: “You find yourself running in the streets, in and out
of shops, the cafe, the ice cream store, trying to find your daughter,
your child, your Princess — but she has vanished. … You go from
hospital to hospital, police station to police station. … You do
this for many long hours until eventually, very late at night, you and
your wife find yourselves in the morgue.”

These stories are so powerful, and so excruciating, that a reader
might wonder what more a writer can do beyond reporting them. Do we
need to hear anything else? What can the 450 surrounding pages
possibly contain? Do those pages draw attention from the source
material, dilute its power — or, worse, stylize its tragedy, as
often happens when an artist tries to capture a conflict outside of
his own experience?

In fact, they do the opposite. McCann’s brilliant act of
novel-making builds a wholly believable and infinitely faceted reality
around Rami’s and Bassam’s first-person accounts, a rich and
comprehensive context that allows us into the fathers’ experiences,
their histories, their minds. Intricate reconstructions of the
girls’ deaths are broken up by stories of what it feels like to
inhabit the Israel of recent decades — what it was like for Bassam
to be imprisoned for seven years beginning at age 17, for example,
after he tossed a broken hand grenade at an Israeli jeep; what it was
like to be beaten daily in jail, and then to learn his captors’
history and lose his ability to see them as his sworn enemies. We
learn about Rami’s time in the Israeli Army, about his experience in
a tank repair unit during the Yom Kippur War, fighting and killing an
enemy he couldn’t see. We learn about his early relationship with
Smadar’s mother, Nurit; about his successes as a graphic designer;
about his desire for a “spectacularly banal” life: “A good job,
a mortgage, a safe street, leafy, no knock on the door, no midnight
phone calls.” We learn, in essence, who Bassam and Rami were before
their daughters’ deaths, and who they became after.

Interspersed with these narratives are fragments that might at first
glance seem merely tangential: lists of migratory bird species,
ballistics facts, quotes from Borges and Darwish, Israeli/Palestinian
bumper-sticker mottoes (“It will not be over until we talk”),
excerpts from school reports, a photograph of a defunct waterpark,
stories of musical performances in Theresienstadt, an account of
Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk over the Hinnom Valley (yes, fans of
“Let the Great World Spin,” he’s here too), and the detailed,
moment-by-moment mechanics of Christ’s crucifixion, among other
things. These pieces, too, quickly argue their own relevance and
necessity. When we learn, for example, the names of 36 species of
migratory birds that traverse an ancient and perilous flight path over
Israel every year, then study the design of the slingshots boys used
thousands of years ago to bring those birds down — and then learn
that Bassam was in the habit of slinging stones in protest before he
threw the grenade that landed him in prison, and finally that the
shooter who killed Abir thought he was under attack by protesters
throwing stones — we understand that the earlier sections weren’t
really about birds or slingshots, but about the millions of factors
— geographic, historical, political — that lead to a senseless
death. Throughout the novel, McCann deftly connects these
micro-narratives to Smadar and Abir’s stories, and to their
fathers’; they are the complex stuff of life in Israel.

Amid this marvelous complexity I found myself listening hard for
women’s voices, especially those of the girls’ mothers. Rami’s
wife, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, is an award-winning philologist, academic
and peace activist; Salwa Aramin, mother of six, is a mystery, though
when she appears in this book, she’s fascinating: possessed of a
teasing sense of humor, intellectual curiosity, fierce purpose, deep
grief. McCann interprets Salwa’s silence as a choice: If the
journalists “could have understood her anger, if they could somehow
have captured it without making a spectacle of it, she would have
talked with them, but she knew, she just knew: a Muslim woman, a
Palestinian, the crime of her geography. She supported what Bassam
did, Rami too, Nurit as well, but she wanted only to pursue the
ordinary. She would find blessing there.” In these pages, though,
her silence isn’t necessary. And, as Salwa notes, Nurit
Peled-Elhanan isn’t interested in remaining silent at all. In the
weeks following her daughter’s death, she spoke to the press about
her belief that Israeli government policies were responsible for the
suicide bombers’ act. The book includes this information, but might
have allowed us more access to Peled-Elhanan’s consciousness, or
perhaps to Rami’s imagining of his wife’s feelings.

Even so, the novel succeeds brilliantly at its larger project. If we
grasp the minute reality of Smadar and Abir’s deaths — if we know
how a suicide belt detonates and how shrapnel flies, if we understand
how a rubber bullet compresses upon impact, and how it fragments a
skull — then we’re forced to understand that history happens to
actual human beings, to our children, to us. And if, as we read, we
experience the fugue-like recurrence of those details and hundreds of
others, we begin to understand what it might be like for the girls’
fathers to have to relive the minutiae of their daughters’ deaths,
day after day, forever. Reading “Apeirogon,” we move beyond an
understanding of Rami and Bassam’s grief from the outside; we begin
to share it. And this, in fact, is what Rami and Bassam want in real
life: for as many of us as possible to feel what they felt, through an
accurate retelling of their story. This is why they told it to McCann
and others, in a scene detailed in Chapter 1,001; it’s why they
travel the world together, retelling it every day. McCann’s book is
a sensitive response to their work. It carries the story forward, and
leads us to experience the urgency of finding a solution to the
underlying problem. “Once I thought we could never solve our
conflict,” Bassam tells us; “we would continue hating each other
forever, but it is not written anywhere that we have to go on killing
each other. The hero makes a friend of his enemy. … When they killed
my daughter they killed my fear. I have no fear. I can do anything
now.”

It’s one thing to read those lines in a newspaper report; it’s
another to feel them from the inside. “Apeirogon” is an empathy
engine, utterly collapsing the gulf between teller and listener. By
replicating the messy nonlinear passage of time, by dealing in
unexpected juxtapositions that reveal latent truths, it allows us to
inhabit the interiority of human beings who are not ourselves. It
achieves its aim by merging acts of imagination and extrapolation with
historical fact. But it’s indisputably a novel, and, to my mind, an
exceedingly important one. It does far more than make an argument for
peace; it is, itself, an agent of change.

“I began to think,” Rami tells us in his central chapter, “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?”

McCann has registered his answer, one so powerful that it impels us to
find our own.

Julie Orringer is the author, most recently, of the novel “The
Flight Portfolio.”

* Fiction
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* Israel-Palestine
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* war
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* grief
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* children
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