His accent was thick. He rolled the words around in his mouth. But he spoke softly, musically. He could quote poetry: Rumi, Yeats, Darwish. It didn’t matter if he fractured the story here and there: it was more like a song than story to him, he wanted to get to the deep rhythm of it.
97
A bony structure at the bottom of the trachea—the syrinx—is integral to the voice box of birds. With its surrounding air sac, the syrinx resonates to sound waves created by membranes along which the bird forces air. The pitch of the song is created when the bird shifts the tension on the membranes. The volume is controlled by the force of exhalation.
The bird can control two sides of the trachea independently so that some species can produce two distinct notes at once.
98
At night Rami read Smadar a children’s version of One Thousand and One Nights in Hebrew.
Her eyes fluttered as she listened. Sinbad the Sailor. Julnar the Sea-Born. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp.
Smadar always seemed to wake about three-quarters of the way through each story.
99
Certain birds are said to sleep in mid-flight. They do so in short ten-second bursts, usually after nightfall. The bird is able to switch off one side of its brain in order to rest, while the other side continues its rhythmic vigilance to avoid crashing into a fellow flier and to watch out for predators.
100
A frigatebird can stay aloft for two whole months without touching down on either land or water.
101
One afternoon, in a souk on Al-Zahra Street, Borges said to his listeners that One Thousand and One Nights could be compared to the creation of a cathedral or a beautiful mosque, and perhaps it was even more splendid than that since, unlike a cathedral or a mosque, none of its authors, or creators—the actual builders—were aware that they were contributing to the construction of a book. Their stories had been gathered at different times, in myriad places, Baghdad, Damascus, Egypt, the Balkans, India, Tibet, and from different sources too, the Jataka Tales and the Katha Sarit Sagara, and then were repeated, refined, translated, first in French, then in English, changed once again and passed on, entering yet another lore.
The stories existed on their own at first, said Borges, and were then joined together, strengthening one another, an endless cathedral, a widening mosque, a random everywhere.
It was what Borges called a creative infidelity. Time appeared inside time, inside yet another time.
The book was, he said, so vast and inexhaustible that it was not even necessary to have read it since it was already an intricate part of humankind’s unconscious memory.
102
They were so close that, after a while, Rami felt that they could finish each other’s stories.
My name is Bassam Aramin. My name is Rami Elhanan. I am the father of Abir. I am the father of Smadar. I am a seventh-generation Jerusalemite. I was born in a cave near Hebron.
Word for word, pause for pause, breath for breath.
103
Arrangements for Smadar’s funeral were made immediately. Phone calls. Emails. Telegrams.
Jewish law requires that a body be buried as soon as possible, complete with all its limbs and organs: the soul is considered to be in turmoil until it is in the ground.
104
Muslim law too, though at first the police didn’t return the bodies of the three bombers to their families.
For years afterwards they were stored in blue plastic bags in a locked refrigerator vault in the morgue in Jerusalem.
105
Certain small patches of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling have been purposely left untouched so that future generations can understand the layers of restoration.
As early as the mid-1500s, deposits of saltpeter began coming through cracks in the ceiling. The growths gathered and began to creep across the paintings: crystalline deposits that appeared like small rock formations.
The Italian artist Simone Lagi—hoping to prevent the disintegration of the murals—spent much of his life mopping the accretions away with soft linen cloths and pieces of wet bread.
The untouched areas of the ceiling show what might have happened if the chapel had been left alone.
106
The thirteenth-century Syrian chemist Hasan al-Rammah described the process of making gunpowder: the saltpeter was boiled down and mixed with wood ashes to make potassium nitrate, which was then dried and mixed into an explosive. The gunpowder was known in Arabic as Chinese Snow.
107
In the ninth century, the Chinese accidentally created the explosive mixture—75 parts saltpeter, 15 parts charcoal, 10 parts sulfur—when they were looking for the elixir of life.
108
Seven others were killed on Ben Yehuda Street. Scores of people lay injured. Sirens flashed red and blue against the white stone buildings. The night was raw with raised voices.
The ZAKA paramedics received their calls—mayday mayday mayday—and arrived within minutes of the bombings, on scooters and in cars. Their long beards. Their kippahs. Their hanging tzitzit. They set to work in their orange vests and latex gloves alongside the police and the Magen David Adom.
The night pressed down against them. They aided the living first. They were bulky men, but they moved lightly, absorbed in silhouette. They leaned over the victims, whispered consolation to the still living, careful not to step in the slick blood.
After all the injured or dying were taken to hospital, the ZAKA set to their real work: to collect the body parts for burial. They paused a moment. Theirs was a concentration born from repetition. A form of prayer. They nodded at one another, reversed their vests to forensic yellow, put on new sets of latex gloves, slipped new bags over their shoes.
Silently they went about it. In small groups. Quick and terse through the scattered human jigsaw. A finger. An earlobe. A foot, still in its shoe, leaning, almost brazenly, against a garbage can.
They removed gutter grills, combed the surfaces of manhole covers, pushed open jammed doors. They sifted the glass and debris, looking for any sign of life or flesh. They reached into shattered glass with long tweezers to pick up a severed thumb. They picked bloody shrapnel from the windshields of cars, shone flashlights on the underside of tables, climbed trees to scrape the skin of the victims from the branches, dabbed cartilage from the street signs, coiled intestines back into half-torsos, vacuumed up any available liquid from the pavement into portable machines.