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-acre 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.