The shadows of the ZAKA moved under intense floodlight. One man passing along the street, becoming the next, becoming the next again. A hushed, abbreviated form of communication.
They assembled the corpses together on sheets of white plastic, bagged them and handed them over to the Israeli police. They were meticulous. Rigorous. Precise. Special care was taken not to mix the blood of victims and the bombers.
Within a couple of hours their work was done.
When they walked back towards their scooters they let their arms hang slightly away from their bodies, as if their hands had been exposed to a contaminant. One man washed a trace of blood that had soaked into a stray tzitzit. Another leaned down to remove the plastic booties from his shoes. Carefully he folded them into another plastic bag. They arranged their clothes into the metal boxes on the back of their scooters, put on their helmets, and then they dissolved, once again, into the city, bearing their sorrows.
They didn’t wait around, didn’t exhibit themselves with prayer. No ritual. No closure. It was their duty. Simple as that.
For this the scripture had been written.
109
Seelonce feenee.
110
Two of the ZAKA came back on their scooters the next morning to pick up a single eyeball that had been missed.
The eyeball was noticed by an elderly man, Moti Richler, who, at dawn, looked down from his upstairs apartment on Ben Yehuda Street and saw the piece of severed flesh lying on top of the tall blue awning of the Atara café.
A long string of optic nerve was still attached to the pupil.
111
The workings of the human eye are still considered by scientists to be as profoundly mysterious as the intricacies of migratory flight.
112
With age-related macular degeneration, a patient develops a central blind spot and can generally only see objects on the periphery. Everything at the center of vision appears dark. The patient sees edges: everything else becomes a fuzzy circle. If looking at a dartboard, all that might be seen is its rim.
To combat this, the surgeon removes the natural lens and implants a tiny metal telescope in one eye. The surgery does not repair the macula, but magnifies the patient’s vision. The blind spot might be reduced from the size of a person’s face to the size of his or her mouth, or maybe even to an area as small as a coin.
The operation—which was pioneered in New York and perfected in Tel Aviv—only takes a couple of hours, but afterwards requires a new way of seeing. The patient has to learn to gaze through the tiny implanted telescope and at the same time scan the periphery with the other eye. One eye looks directly forward, magnifying things up to three times their usual size, while the other searches sideways. In the brain the two sets of visual information are combined into a complete picture.
Sometimes it takes the patient months, or even years, to properly retrain the vision.
At the time of the bombing, Moti Richler was in his second month of recovery. He turned from the window and told his wife, Alona, that he wasn’t sure, but he had been looking down on the scene of yesterday’s bombing and thought he saw—through his implanted telescope—something odd lying on the awning below.
113
It looked to Moti like a tiny old-fashioned motorcycle lamp with wires dangling.
114
One of the earliest texts on the eye—its structure, its diseases, its treatments—Ten Treatises on Ophthalmology, was written in the ninth century by the Arab physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq.
The individual components of the eye, he wrote, all have their own nature and they are arranged so that they are in cosmological harmony, reflecting, in turn, the mind of God.
115
The doctors came to Bassam in the corridor of the hospital. They wore ties underneath their crisp white coats. They asked him to sit down. He felt a rush of cold to his arms. He said he preferred to remain standing.
One doctor was Jewish, the other a Palestinian, from Nazareth. He addressed Bassam in Arabic: softly, his voice measured. If Abir were to die, he suggested. If things take the wrong turn. If the worst was to happen. If we are unable to revive her.
The other doctor touched him on the shoulder: Mister Aramin, he said, do you understand what we’re telling you here?
Bassam looked beyond the doctor’s shoulder. Further down the corridor Salwa sat, surrounded by her family.
Bassam replied, in Hebrew, that yes he understood.
The first doctor talked, then, about harvesting organs. Of creating life from life. Her liver, the kidneys, her heart. The second doctor followed.
—We have a renowned eye transplant unit, you know.
—We would take very good care of her.
—There’s a severe need.
—Some people are reluctant.
—We understand that.
—Mister Aramin?
For a moment Abir’s eyes seemed to hover in the room: large, brown, copper-flecked at the core.
—Please take a minute. Talk with your wife.
—I will.
—We’ll be back.
Dreidels spinning on a kindergarten floor. The Aleph. The Torah. A bat mitzvah dress. Military service directives. The checkpoint from behind the glass. Permits and stamps. The blue and white fluttering above her. Yellow-plated cars. Israeli television, Israeli books, Israeli recipes. She might go home for Shabbat and bake the challah and light the candles and make her mitzvahs and wake to her husband and kiss his eyes and raise her children and bring them to the synagogue and teach them the Hatikvah and their kids might have kids and their own ways of seeing, and, yes, there were other ways of seeing beyond Muslim law, he knew—Druze, Christian, Bedouin too—but it was not just that, no, it was so far beyond that, he wanted to explain it to the doctors, there was something deeper here for him, something fundamental, something he needed to say, he wasn’t sure how to explain it, he had always wanted Abir to see the sea, it was the thing he had promised her for so many years, his pledge to his daughter, that he would bring her the short drive to the coast at Akka, along with her sister and brothers, allow them to wade in the blue of the Mediterranean, run along the wooden piers, to give them access to what was denied, and he wondered what it was that the doctors saw when he lowered his gaze and he said, in perfect Hebrew: No, I am sorry, we cannot do that, my wife and I, sorry, we cannot allow that, no.