39
Folklore has it that, to this day, migratory birds avoid flying over the fields of Theresienstadt.
40
On the Night of the Gliders, in 1987, one of the Israeli guards, Irina Cantor, glanced up at the movement of a faint light in the dark sky. Cantor, who had emigrated from Australia two years before, had just begun her military service.
She was sure that the hang glider was something distant or spectral, a trick of vision against the scraggly cloud.
Afterwards, at the military tribunal, Cantor testified that when the shooting began the sight of the glider confused her so much that she thought that a large bird—something huge and prehistoric—had flapped out of the darkness.
41
Imagine the swan sudden-sucked into the engine of the fighter plane. Mayday, mayday, mayday. The brisk crunch of bone and long wing. A whirl of machinery. Mayday mayday mayday. The stutter of metal, the crush of feather, the rip of ligament, the chew of bones. Fragments of beak being spat out from the engine. Mayday mayday mayday.
42
Imagine, then, the pilot ejecting from the plane, still strapped to his seat, dreideling through the air with a force not unlike that of a rubber bullet.
43
The term mayday—coined in England in 1923, but derived from the French, venez m’aider, come to my aid—is always repeated three times, mayday, mayday, mayday. The repetition is vital: if said only once it could possibly be misinterpreted, but said three times in a row, it cannot be mistaken.
44
The M-16 used to shoot Abir was manufactured near the town of Samaria, North Carolina. Samaria being the name of so many villages and towns around the world: eight in Colombia, two in Mexico, one each in Panama, Nicaragua, Greece, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Venezuela, Australia and Angola.
Samaria also being home of the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Israel.
45
A metal tube is locked onto the muzzle brake of an M-16 service rifle in order to shoot rubber bullets. The tube can contain up to eight bullets. They are powered by blank rounds fired from the gun’s magazine. Inside the attachment are a number of grooves which help the bullets maintain proper trajectory. The grooves are curved like the stripes on a candy cane so that the bullet emerges in a perfect spiral.
46
Seelonce mayday, or mayday silence, is maintained on the radio channel until the distress signal is over. To end the alert the caller says, at least one time, Seelonce feenee, an English-accented corruption of silence fini.
47
François Mitterrand was buried in Jarnac on the banks of the river he played in as a child, a swiftly moving bolt of brackish green crisscrossed with shadows cast by the hanging grape trees.
Shortly before he passed away, his eyes flickered and he said to his doctor: I am eaten up inside.
48
Abir wore her school uniform—a white blouse, a navy cardigan, a blue skirt with ankle-length pants underneath, white socks, dark blue patent shoes, slightly scuffed. Apart from the candy bracelet, her brown leather schoolbag contained two exercise books and three children’s books, all Arabic, although Bassam had contemplated teaching her some words of Hebrew, which he had learned as a teenager, many years before, in prison in Hebron, locked away for seven years.
49
His fellow prisoners liked his quiet manner. There was something mysterious about the seventeen-year-old with a limp, his dark skin, his wiry strength, his silence. He was always the first to step up in the canteen when the prison guards came. The limp gave him an edge. The first one or two baton strikes seemed almost reluctant. Often he was the last prisoner standing: the most brutal beatings were yet to come.
Bassam spent weeks upon weeks in the infirmary. The doctors and nurses were worse than the prison guards. They reeked of frustration. They punched him, jabbed him, shaved his beard, denied him medicine, put his water out of reach.
The Druze orderlies were fiercest of all: they understood the Arab consciousness of the naked body, how aware they were, how close it could come to shame. They took away Bassam’s clothes, his sheets, tied his arms back so he couldn’t cover himself.
He lay there. The ceiling tiles were perforated. He made mental patterns from the tiny holes. Playing cards, diamonds, spades. A form of solitaire. The nurses were unsettled by his quiet manner. They expected shouts, complaints, curses, allegations. The longer his silence, the worse the extra beatings. He could see the weaker nurses begin to twitch with worry. In the end, he thought, he would occupy their brains.
When Bassam finally spoke, his voice rattled the medics: there was something calm about it. He learned the art of the mysterious smile, but he could drop it in an instant, turn it into a stare.
He listened to the doctors talking in the corridor: more and more he understood what they were saying in Hebrew. He decided, even then, that he would one day become fluent.
Word went around that he had become commander of the prison Fatah unit. He grew his beard out. The beatings became more regular.
He turned nineteen years old with two missing teeth, several fractured bones and an empty drip bag in each arm. There were cameras above his prison hospital bed: he angled himself towards the wall so that he could not be seen while he wept himself to sleep.
The days hardened like loaves: he ate them without appetite.
50
After a year in lockup Bassam established a schedule for classes. English. Hebrew. Arab History. Israeli Law. The Fall of the Ottoman Empire. The History of the Zionist Movement. Pre-Islamic Poetry. The Geography of the Middle East. Life in Palestine under the British Mandate.
Know your enemy, know yourself.
51
In Beersheba prison the married prisoners used cardboard blowguns to send love notes to their wives and children waiting outside the prison gates.
As many as twenty toilet-roll cylinders were taped and glued together to make blowguns that could measure up to five feet. Prisoners wrote messages on small scraps of paper, folded them, then extended the cardboard guns as far as possible out the cell windows.
The men filled their lungs and blew the notes out the window.
The prisoners learned to make curves in the cardboard, soft angles for reaching around corners to catch favorable winds. Sometimes it took two or three men to handle a blowgun so the paper pipe would not sag or bend.