In the operating room, Bassam kissed her forehead. Abir was still breathing. The equipment beeped weakly. It was the sort of hospital that needed its own hospital. The doctors were doing everything they could but they had little working equipment.
It was decided to transfer her to Hadassah in Jerusalem. A twenty-minute journey, beyond the Wall.
Two hours later—still stalled in an ambulance near the checkpoint—Bassam reached into her schoolbag and found the candy beneath her math book.
23
The shot came from the back of a moving jeep. Out a metal flap in the back door, four inches by four.
24
The Commander of the Border Police wrote in his report that rocks were being pelted from a nearby graveyard. His men were, he said, in mortal danger.
25
Abir was ten years old.
26
She was coming out of the tin-roofed grocery store with Areen and two friends. It was just after nine in the morning. The winter sun shone slant. School was in recess for an hour. They were just about to return for a math test, multiplication tables.
Twelve times eight, ninety-six. Twelve times nine, one hundred and eight.
The street was cut open with sunlight. The girls passed the concrete bollards set up across the roadway, made their way past the bus stop. Their shadows stretched across the roadblock.
Twelve times twelve, one hundred and forty-four.
27
28
When the armored jeep turned the corner, the girls began to run.
29
The bullet was metal at the core, but tipped with a special vulcanized rubber. When it hit Abir’s skull, the rubber deformed slightly, but then bounced back to its original shape without any evident damage to the bullet itself.
30
The soldiers called the bullets Lazarus pills: when possible, they could be picked up and used again.
31
In the year after the millennium, a rogue artist in Beit Jala hung hollowed-out rubber bullets as tiny improvised bird-feeders in the trees: the bullets were perforated with small incisions, filled with seed and hung with wire from the branches.
Dangling in midair, the bullets attracted a number of small birds: yellow wagtails, sparrows, red-throated pipits.
32
The border guard who fired the shot was eighteen years old.
33
In the 1980s, during operations in Lebanon, Israeli soldiers were sometimes asked to pose for official photographs with their platoon members before they went out on their missions.
As they lined up the soldiers were told to stand far enough apart that there would be ample space between them in the photo.
The photographers made no other demand. The soldiers could smile, they could frown, they could turn directly into the camera, or they could turn their gaze away. No matter—the only thing they had to do was to give each other room, a handsbreadth of space so their shoulders wouldn’t touch, that was all.
Some of them thought it was a ritual, others figured it was a military directive, others considered it to be a matter of decorum and humility.
The soldiers gathered in groups by tanks, in tents, along rows of bunk beds, in armories, bandstands, canteens, by sheets of aluminum siding, against the green hills of Lebanon. They adjusted an array of berets: olive-drab, pitch-black, pigeon-grey.
The photos were a theater of expression: fear, bravado, anxiety, unease, bluster. Confusion, too, at the request to stand a little farther apart. After the photos were taken, the soldiers went out on their missions.
In some cases it was days later, in others weeks, in others months, before the reason became apparent: the space between the soldiers was needed in case the photograph had to be printed in the newspapers, or shown on TV, with the dead identified by a crisp red ring drawn around their faces.
34
Ringing a bird involves a simple twist of the metal with a banding pliers around the leg.
35
The newspaper editors and TV producers were eager to avoid the optics of intersecting lines. Sometimes there were five or six rings in one single photograph.
36
To free a bird from a hanging mist net, the first thing an ornithologist must do is unknot the thin strip of nylon from between the bird’s toes and then—depending on the degree of struggle and the length of time it has spent suspended in the net—to calmly untangle the feet, the knees, the belly, the armpit and finally the bird’s head, all the time holding the wings against its hammering heart, making sure that it doesn’t try to tear open your fingers with its beak or talons.
It is akin to unlooping a tight knot in a silver necklace that, as you open it, wants to spread itself and thrash alive in your hands.
Often the ornithologist will slip a pen or pencil beneath the talons to give the bird a grip for its feet. For larger birds they use branches or shorn-off broom handles.
Some birds, after tagging, have been known to fly off with pieces of broom still held in their talons.
37
The prototypes for rubber bullets were discovered in the 1880s when small pieces of splintered broom handle were fired by the Singapore police at rioters in the streets.
38
Some Israeli soldiers in Lebanon were killed by French-made Milan anti-tank missiles, many thousands of which had been sold by François Mitterrand’s government first to Syria, then on the black market to Hizbollah fighters.
Several others were killed by fire from Soviet T-55 tanks, machines that had been considered cumbersome and unwieldy until it was suggested by one general that the tanks should be buried in the ground and used like pillboxes. Only the barrel of the tank’s gun stuck out. They were known to the fighters as coffin tanks. Camouflaged, they were difficult to locate from the air, but when discovered these buried targets were easily blown to smithereens.
Six soldiers were killed by fighters who—in an operation known as the Night of the Gliders—floated across the Lebanese border on homemade hang gliders powered by lawn-mower engines and attacked an Israeli camp. They were armed with Russian-made AK-47s as well as hand grenades manufactured in the Czech Republic, not far from Theresienstadt, the German-run concentration camp.