Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

The borders imposed between things here are many. One must pay attention to them, and navigate them, which ultimately protects everyone from perilous consequences. This grants a person a sense of serenity, despite everything else. There are some people who navigate borders masterfully, who never trespass, but those people are few and I'm not one of them. As soon as I see a border, I either race toward it and leap over, or cross it stealthily, with a step. Neither of these two behaviors is conscious, or rooted in a premeditated desire to resist borders; it's more like sheer stupidity. To be quite honest, once I cross a border, I fall into a deep pit of anxiety. It's a matter, simply put, of clumsiness. Once I realized that I inevitably fail whenever I try to navigate borders, I decided to stay within the confines of my house as much as possible.

In the Negev Desert, in 1949, the officer of a platoon is bitten by some kind of animal in the night. The bite festers and becomes infested; he cleans it and keeps it a secret, though his body is racked by fevers and pains. The platoon comes across a group of Bedouins; they shoot them all, except for a girl, whom they take back to their camp. She's raped, first by the soldiers, then the bitten captain, and then she's taken out to the desert, shot, and buried. In the present, a Palestinian journalist becomes obsessed with her story. The journalist makes her way to the remote spot in the Negev where the murder occurred, hoping to find some kind of information that remains there. But to do so, she must travel illegally, go where she isn't supposed to go, with credentials borrowed from those who are allowed to travel freely--and so knowledge comes at the risk of great violence--yet she goes anyway.

Minor Detail is most notorious these days for having a prize retracted by the Frankfurt Book Fair in the wake of the October 7th attacks in Israel. To read it is to become only more indignant at the injustice of the act, because it is, in part, about the dogged lengths to which Palestinians must go for the kind of free expression that is granted to others without question. The journalist, who perhaps is and is not Shibli herself, cannot explain why she is so drawn to the story of the Bedouin girl: why this one story of injustice and not others? The lengths she goes to in order to find the truth--she must borrow an ID and a credit card, meaning that she puts others at risk as well--suggests a principled determination, but that's not quite right. Like the borders she crosses without premeditation, her obsession with the story seems to be below the level of logic; it drives her on past the point of sense.

But I was drawn, too, to the image of the platoon leader, suffering in stoic silence while also perpetrating terrible crimes of passion. He tries to impose order on his men, forbidding their mistreatment at riflepoint, before raping her himself. The festering animal bite is a mark of rottenness, something that eats at him from inside, even as he tries to hide it; his rape of the girl, perhaps, comes from that secret and shameful place, too. When he goes through his tent, hunting down every possible spider, scorpion, and reptile hiding in every corner, the imagery speaks loudly: he is eradicating the vermin, making the space clean. Later, he captures that desire in a speech to his men. There's been a lot of chatter recently about whether Zionism is a form of settler colonialism, but if this speech--and I have no doubt it is accurate to some of the ideas of early settlers--doesn't fit that term, nothing does:

We cannot stand to see vast areas of land, capable of absorbing thousands of our people in exile, remain neglected; we cannot stand to see our people unable to return to our homeland. This place, which now seems barren, with nothing aside from infiltrators, a few Bedouins, and camels, is where our forefathers passed thousands of years ago. And if the Arabs act according to their sterile nationalist sentiments and reject the idea of us settling here, if they continue to resist us, preferring that the area remain barren, then we will act as an army. No one has more right to this area than us, after they neglected it and left it abandoned for so long, after they let it be seized by the Bedouins and their animals. It is our duty to prevent them from being here and expel them for good. After all, Bedouins only uproot, they do not plant things, and their livestock devour every bit of vegetation that lies before them, reducing, day by day, the very few green areas that do exist. We, however, will do everything in our power to give these vast stretches the chance to bloom and become habitable, instead of leaving them as they are now, desolate and empty of people.

Strangely, what Minor Detail reminded me of most, at least in an aesthetic sense, is the stories of Gerald Murnane. It's in the plainness of the language, which is rooted in repetition. The scenes of the platoon leader fastidiously unwrapping, cleaning, and re-wrapping his bitten thigh over and over are as engaging and tension-filled as anything I've read recently. The scenes in the Negev of 1949 are so tense that we are not surprised when violence erupts--we have been waiting for it with held breath. In the modern day, we hope that things will be different, that violence is a thing of the past, but we fear--perhaps even know--that we're mistaken. There's little hope in the way the book ends, perhaps only a sense of grim inevitability, of recognition. The two years since its publication have only proved, despite what a bunch of dumb Germans might think, how true it is.

With the addition of Palestine (damn right I'm counting it), my "Countries Read" list is up to 85!

The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark

Arabs lived in the shelter of the eighteenth-century ruined fortresses, and even now in the years of the establishment of Israel, burning with its mixture of religion, hygiene, and applied sociology, the poor Arabs still hung their washing on the battlements, so that it fluttered all along the antique sea-front, innocent of the offence it was committing in the eyes of the seekers of beautiful sights and spiritual sensations, who had come all the way from the twentieth century, due west of Acre. Indeed, the washing draped out on the historic walls was a sign or progress, enlightenment, and industry, as it had been from time immemorial; it betokened a settlement and a society with a sense of tomorrow, even if it was only tomorrow's clean shirt, as against the shifty tent-dwelling communities of the wilderness; and however murky the cave-like homes along the shore, nad however indolent the occupants, they were one up on the Bedouin, at least in their own eyes if not in the sight of the tourist cameras which photographed the Bedouin shepherds continually but deplored the hung-out washing at Acre.

The Mandelbaum Gate is Muriel Spark's longest book (at a whopping 320+ pages), and bears few of her trademarks. It is surprisingly compassionate toward its protagonists, short on death and tragedy, though the subject matter might have easily invoked Spark's more violent tendencies, and at times borders on florid (the above passage is two sentences!).

But then again, its protagonist, Barbara Vaughan, is the most like Spark of all heroines, so perhaps it's unsurprising that Spark felt kindly disposed toward her, and her attention captured for longer. Like Spark, Vaughan is a half-Jewish, half-Protestant convert to Catholicism. The setting is Jerusalem, 1961, a city separated into an Arab and a Jewish half by the title gate, which is closely guarded and travel restricted. Barbara's fiance, an archaeologist, is working on the Arab side of the border, and Barbara undertakes to pass through, knowing that her Jewish blood puts her at danger even though she is a British citizen.

Such a premise threatens to devolve into a very Graham Greene-like spy caper, but Spark slyly buries the most espionage-like elements into b-plots and isolated moments. Instead, Barbara lingers at the Christian shrines in Jordan, disguised as an Arab woman, catches scarlet fever, and lingers in a sick bed--in short, there is simply too much lingering for The Mandelbaum Gate to qualify as a caper of any kind.

Instead, what Spark delivers is an uncharacteristically deft exploration of the multifarious perspectives on the Holy Land. One of my favorite passages is the one above, which describes the way that the residents of Acre struggle to maintain a present existence against the expectation of tourists and pilgrims, whose in their faith paradoxically seek to deaden and ossify the shrines they visit. In another passage, a collection of friars at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre look on in horror as a visiting priest cautions his congregation against trusting the claims of every shrine:

The three friars gazed at the priest as with one gaze. They had known it. The incipient defroque was undermining the Holy Land, as he went on to enumerate for practical purposes the shrines which his pilgrimage might well skip and the dubiety of their origins, their thoughts went to their brethren, the custodians of the Holy Land to whom these places were their whole heart and life; tears came to the eyes of the eldest friar as he thought of the venerable Franciscan, well past ninety, who kept the house where Our Lady was conceived by St. Joachim and St. Anne, and who had wanted nothing for himself all his life but to show it to the pilgrims and pray with them as they came, and collect alms for the poor of the place, and die there on that spot.

Again we are faced with the essential oxymoron created when the word Holy collides with Land; without a doubt the priest is the more literally correct, but his neatly ordered faith leaves no room for the lives of those that still live in Israel--or, as the Arabs in the book call it, Occupied Palestine.

In a broad sense, the Mandelbaum Gate itself provides a symbol of this conundrum, illustrating the difficulty of moving from one's own perspective into another's:

He followed the ancient walls of the city and Temple, past the gates of historic meaning, sealed and barred against Israel--the Zion Gate, Dung Gate, Jaffa Gate, New Gate. Then St. Stephen's Gate opened within the Old City to another medieval maze of streets--Damascus Gate, that gate of the Lord's triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and HErod's Gate. He walked round the city until at last, fumbling in his pocket for his diplomatic pass, he came to the Mandelbaum Gate, hardly a gate at all, but a piece of street between Jerusalem and Jerusalem, flanked by two huts, and called by that name because a house at the other end once belonged to a Mr. Mandelbaum.

But then again, the Mandelbaum Gate carries a different symbolic charge for each character. For the Arab Abdul Ramdez, the gate is the division of his family, as it separates him from his beloved sister, Suzi. For the normally staid English diplomat, Freddy Hamilton, who helps Barbara pass through into Jordan against his character, it is the inaccessible wall that prevents him from recovering his memories of the pilgrimage, through which he seems to inhabit some sort of fugue state. For Barbara, it is the artificial barrier between her Jewish self and Gentile self, that if only it were opened, may provide a total sense of identity:

She had thought then, but who am I?
I am who I am.
Yes, but who am I?

Spark is both canny and blasphemous enough to note the echo of Jehovah's words in Exodus, "I am that I am." If Barbara, made in God's image, cannot get a picture of herself, what then of God? The Holy Land is fractured, Spark maintains, because our view of God is fractured. Just as uncharacteristically, Spark ends the book optimistically, in the passage just above, as Freddy wanders through Jerusalem looking at the gates. Most are shuttered, but the Mandelbaum remains--the only entry way from one side of Jerusalem to the other--and it seems very small and mean, "flanked by two huts," and perhaps even comic. Can such a barrier really be insuperable?