The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  The tour concludes at my flat. As I open the door, I say, “This is what remains of the Grozny Museum of Regional Art.”

  Voronov and Galina pass the burned-out frames to the pasture. “Is this the one?” he asks her. She nods.

  “A Zakharov, no?” he inquires, fingering his lapel as he turns to me. “There was an exhibit of his at the Tretyakov, if memory serves.” Only now do I recognize clearly the animals I have invited into my home. “When the museum was bombed, the fires destroyed most of the original collection. We sent what was saved to the Tretyakov.”

  “But not this?”

  “Not this.”

  “Rather reckless, don’t you think, to leave such a treasure on an apartment wall guarded only by street urchins?”

  “It’s a minor work.”

  “Believe it or not, my wife has been looking for this painting. She collects art from every region where I drill oil.”

  “Could I offer you a glass of water?”

  “You could offer me the painting.”

  I force a laugh. He laughs, too. We are laughing. Ha-ha!

  “The painting is not for sale,” I say.

  His mirth disappears. “It is if I want to buy it.”

  “This is a museum. You can’t have a painting just because you want it. The director of the Tretyakov wouldn’t sell you the art from his walls just because you can afford it.”

  “You are only a deputy director, and this isn’t the Tretyakov.” There’s real pity in his voice as he surveys the ash flaking from the canvases, the dirty dishes stacked in the sink; and yes, now, at last, I hate him. “I have a penthouse gallery in Moscow. Temperature- and moisture-controlled. The utmost security. No one but Galina and I and a few guests will ever see it. You must realize that I’m being more than reasonable.” In a less-than-subtle threat, he nods out the window to the street below, where his three armed Goliaths skulk beside their Land Rover. “What is the painting worth?”

  “It’s worth,” I begin, but how can I finish? What price can I assign to the last Zakharov in Chechnya, to the last image of my home? One sum comes to mind, but it terrifies me. Wouldn’t that be the worst of all outcomes, to lose both the Zakharov and Nadya in the same transaction? “Just take it,” I say. “You took everything else. Take this, too.”

  Voronov bristles. “I’m not a thief. Tell me what it’s worth.”

  My gaze floats and lands upon the bumper sticker: WWJCD? What would he do? Jim Carrey would be brave. No matter how difficult, Jim Carrey would do the right thing. I close my eyes. “One hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. U.S.”

  “One fifteen?”

  I nod.

  “That’s what—3.7, 3.8 million rubles?” Voronov fixes me with a venomous stare, then turns to his wife, who still hasn’t glanced away from the painting. I look into it, too, to its retreating figures, wondering if we might be reunited soon.

  A single, fleshy clap startles me like a gunshot, and I spin to find Voronov smiling once more. “Let’s make it an even four,” he says expansively.

  The assistant unyokes herself from a mammoth purse and spills eight stacks of banded five-thousand-ruble bills onto the floor.

  “Never trust banks,” Voronov says. “You can have that advice for free. It’s been a pleasure.” He slaps my back, tells the assistant to bring the canvas, and heads for the door. Then he’s gone.

  Galina remains at the Zakharov. Even as I’m losing it, I’m proud that my painting can elicit such sustained attention. She dabs her eyes, touches my shoulder, and follows her husband out.

  I’m left with the assistant, whose saccharine perfume reeks of vaporized cherubs.

  “And you’ll have to give us a curatorial description,” she says. “Something we can mount on a placard.” She passes me the notepad, and I stand at my painting for a long while before I begin.

  Notice how the shadows in the meadow mirror the clouds in the sky, how the leaves of the apricot tree blow with the grass. No verisimilitude escapes such a master. The wall of white stones cuts an angle across the composition, both establishing depth and offsetting the horizon line. Channels of turned soil run along the left flank of the hill, as if freshly dug graves, or recently buried land mines, but closer inspection reveals the furrows of a newly planted herb garden. The first shoots of rosemary already peek out. Zakharov portrays all the peace and tranquility of a spring day. The sun shines comfortingly, and hours remain before nightfall. Toward the crest of the hill, nearing the horizon, you may notice what look to be the ascending figures of a woman and a boy. Pay them no mind, for they are merely the failures of a novice restoration artist, no more than his shadows. They are not there.

  MATEO HOKE AND CATE MALEK

  An Oral History of Abdelrahman Al-Ahmar

  FROM Palestine Speaks

  VOICE OF WITNESS is a nonprofit organization that publishes oral histories of human rights crises. The following is an excerpt drawn from their book Palestine Speaks, which explores the experiences of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.

  AGE: 46

  OCCUPATION: Lawyer

  PLACE OF BIRTH: Deheisheh refugee camp, West Bank

  INTERVIEWED IN: Bethlehem, West Bank

  Abdelrahman Al-Ahmar lives with his wife and four children in a small apartment complex on the edge of the refugee camp where he grew up. The complex is surrounded by trees and garden greenery and is also home to four of his brothers and their families, as well as rabbits, birds, puppies, and even a horse. During the course of several interviews, the house is full of the sounds of his children playing. Sometimes they come to sit and listen to their father’s story, interjecting parts of the narrative they know by heart.

  Abdelrahman’s comfortable house is a retreat from the harsh conditions he has faced his entire life. He was born in the Deheisheh refugee camp, where his family struggled against extreme poverty and regular attacks from soldiers and settlers. He later spent nearly twenty years in prison, most of it in administrative detention, where he was interrogated using torture techniques that have now been outlawed by the Israeli High Court.* In 1999, the court ruled that the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) does not have legal authority to use physical means of interrogation. It found tactics must be “fair and reasonable” and not cause the detainee to suffer. According to the Supreme Court case, a common practice during questioning was shaking prisoners violently enough to lead to unconsciousness, brain damage, or even death (in at least one reported case). However, in a society where 40 percent of men have spent time in prison, thousands of people still bear the physical and psychological marks of these methods.

  Abdelrahman seems reserved at first during our initial meeting—he speaks little and watches us carefully as we ask questions. But as he relaxes, his dark humor and natural gift for storytelling begin to emerge. He switches between English, Arabic, and Hebrew as he speaks, and the only time he becomes quiet again is when talking about the most extreme forms of torture he endured. However, he also tells us about how the most difficult moments in his life have inspired him to become a leader in his community.

  We Didn’t Even Have Coca-Cola

  I’m the same age as the occupation. The war of ’67 started in June, and my mother was pregnant with me at the time.† She and my father were living in the Deheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem.‡ They’d been pushed out of their homes in Ramla during the war in ’48, and that’s when they’d moved to the camp.§ They lived in tents in camp for over ten years, and then my father was able to build a small house in camp in the fifties. Then during the war in ’67, a lot of people fled the camp and ended up living in Jordan, especially in Amman.* But my father said, “We’re not leaving again.” He didn’t want to lose his home again. So during the war in ’67, my father stayed to protect the house while my mother went up in the woods and hid for a few days. She gave birth to me a few months later in the camp, with the help of a midwife.†

  I remember the camp of my childhood was a neighborhood of s
hacks made of cinder blocks and aluminum roofs. Most people in the camp built their own houses, like my father had. We all had leaky ceilings, no plumbing, no bathrooms. There were just a few public restrooms we would all share, and the toilets would flush into the gutters in the streets. We didn’t have showers. We’d heat up water in a basin and wash with that. We depended on UNRWA for clothes.‡ I remember getting clothes twice a year, and they were often the wrong size, and sometimes all that was available were girl clothes. We were so cold in the winter. For heat, we had fires in old oil barrels outside our homes, and families would gather around them to warm up. I remember the fires would get so high, we couldn’t see the faces of the people on the other side of the barrel. And there was so much disease—cholera, infections of all sorts.

  Growing up, we could hear our next-door neighbors every day. We knew their fights, conversations, everything. And there were so many places that you couldn’t get to by car because the spaces between buildings were too narrow. You had to walk between the houses.

  As children from the camp, we’d feel different from other kids when we went out into Bethlehem, the city. We would see kids who had bicycles, but we didn’t have any. They had good clothes, but we didn’t have them. They even had Coca-Cola! My parents weren’t accustomed to the kind of poverty we were living in. They were born in villages with homes on large pieces of land. When I was a kid, my father used to work in Israel. He was a stonecutter. But he wasn’t making enough money for the family—he had four boys and two girls to support. There was no one in Deheisheh with money. So everybody was struggling financially, but at least it gave us this feeling of being equal.

  Our Windows Were Always Open, So We Got Used to the Smell of Tear Gas

  I felt pressure from the Israeli army and Israeli settlers at an early age. The most difficult issue that we had to deal with was the settlers. I was only six years old when the settlers started coming through the camp in the early seventies, so I grew up seeing them. The main road from the settlements in the south runs through Bethlehem to Jerusalem, and it goes right through the camp. I think the settlers who passed through saw Deheisheh as something they needed to control.

  The settlers were led by a man named Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who saw all of the West Bank as part of Israel.* They wanted Israel to claim the land around the camp, and they found ways to make life miserable for us. They would come in buses maybe once a week. They’d get off and start shooting randomly in the refugee camp with live bullets. They’d shout, throw stones, provoke fights. Whenever anyone tried to fight back, the settlers would alert Israeli soldiers, who would chase us through the streets and fire tear-gas canisters. Our windows were always open, so we got used to the smell of tear gas.

  I remember settlers entering my UNRWA school and smashing desks, doors, windows. The teachers couldn’t protect us. There was always a sense of fear and insecurity. When I was younger, these things affected me tremendously. They affected my relationship with my teachers and the way I looked at them. I kind of lost respect for them because I’d seen them degraded. And after some time, other students and I stopped listening to them because we knew they were powerless.

  Then in the early eighties, the military built a fence around the camp. It was twenty feet high, and the only way in and out was a gate leading to the Hebron-Jerusalem Road, the one that the settlers passed through. I once heard that some tourists who came to Bethlehem saw the fence and wondered if it was the wall of a city zoo! In the camp, we had a curfew—we had to be in by seven p.m., or the soldiers guarding the entryway wouldn’t let us back in through the gate. And we couldn’t leave after curfew under any circumstances. Some people died because they couldn’t go to the hospital after the gate closed at seven.

  Around the same time, settlers brought trailers across from the camp and tried to establish an outpost there. I remember being stuck in the camp after curfew and hearing the patriotic music of the settlers blaring through the night.

  The soldiers worked closely with the settlers most of the time. When I was fourteen, I got a backpack—the first I ever owned. Before that, I would carry my books in plastic bags, like most kids in the camp. I was so happy I finally had a backpack. It was green. My dad bought it for me. I was going to school one morning, and a group of six soldiers and an armed man in civilian clothes—a settler—called me over. The settler kicked me and slapped me and then took my backpack and threw it into the gutter. I tried to get it out of the gutter, but the soldiers hit me and threw the backpack back in. My books were wet and ruined, and they still didn’t allow me to get the pack. I watched them do the same thing to some of my friends—they threw their books in the gutter, too.

  At the UNRWA school, they would give us the books for free. I told them what the soldiers had done, and they gave me new books. But I had to put them back in plastic bags again. Of course, the soldiers knew the backpack was important to me because they could see how impoverished we all were and that we were deprived of everything.

  Refugees in the camp would retaliate against the settlers by throwing stones. I started throwing stones at age ten. Kids a little older might be a little more organized. Different groups of kids would decide to do something—a group of five over here, a group of six over there. By the time I was thirteen, I was among them. We started to incite other children to put flags up. At that time, it was illegal to hang the Palestinian flag.* So, we would tell the kids to hang the flag and to write slogans on the walls. That was also illegal then. You could be arrested by the Israeli army and go to prison.

  When they saw us throwing stones, the soldiers or settlers might shoot. When they shot at us, yes, we were afraid. But with time, with all the injustice and the frustration, we were just stuck, and we didn’t care if we died. But we thought throwing stones made a difference. We saw the settlers as the occupiers, and they were the source of injustice and deprivation, so we had to fight back. This was before the First Intifada, but for us in the camp it was already Intifada—it was always Intifada.†

  “What did you do? What did you do? What did you do?”

  Eventually, my friends and I graduated from throwing stones to thinking about throwing Molotov cocktails. It wasn’t hard to make a weapon out of a bottle of kerosene and a wick. We wanted to throw them at the outpost set up by Moshe Levinger and at the soldiers who were helping the settlers to come and wreck our neighborhood. By this point I was fifteen, almost sixteen. Some in our group were younger—one was fourteen. We made a couple of Molotov cocktails and tested them out by smashing them against walls in the camp when we thought nobody was looking.

  December 11, 1984, was a cold, snowy night. I was home asleep, and suddenly soldiers swarmed in. I was cuffed and put in a vehicle with some other boys from my group that had already been arrested. That night they picked up me and four of my friends, and we were driven to Al-Muskubiya.‡

  When we got to the interrogation center, it was very chaotic. There were maybe forty guys in all who had been arrested and brought to Al-Muskubiya that night. For the five of us, they took off all of our clothes, stripped us naked. Then they tightened our handcuffs, took us outside in an open area, and put bags on our heads. The snow was coming down, and we were naked out there. I couldn’t see the others, but I could hear their teeth chattering, and the sound of the handcuffs shaking was so loud. The cold weather still bothers me now—it makes me remember that night. This is where we stayed for forty-five days between interrogations. Our bodies turned blue, we were out in the cold so long.

  My interrogation lasted two months. During the interrogations, they beat me, and there was loud music playing the whole time. We were allowed to go to the bathroom just once a day. They would tie our hands to the pipes. It was really painful for me. After some time, I stopped feeling my arms—sometimes I didn’t know if I still had them or if they had been amputated. There was constant beating, all over my body, to the point where my skin would be as black as my jacket. If I lost consciousness, they would throw water on m
e or slap me so I’d wake up.

  This mark on my wrist is actually from the handcuffs during that time in prison. The handcuffs were so tight, they cut to the bone. I still have marks on my legs from the beatings. They wouldn’t give us any medical treatment. And the interrogators wouldn’t ask you direct, obvious questions. They would just keep saying, “What did you do? What did you do? What did you do?” And that was it. With all the beating, I couldn’t focus anymore, even if I was conscious. I couldn’t remember anything that I did from the time before prison, even if I had anything to confess. Most of the other kids told the police what they’d done—they made some Molotov cocktails and tested them out. I didn’t tell them anything. Not because I was being secretive, but because I was too confused and disoriented from the beatings. It was a very hostile environment.

  Sometimes they would keep me awake for many days straight before they gave me four hours of sleep. And with the pressure of sleep deprivation, I started hallucinating, and I didn’t actually know what was happening around me. I would imagine I was in a kindergarten and there were a lot of crying kids causing all this chaos, but I couldn’t do anything to calm them down. I stopped knowing if what was happening was real or just a product of my imagination.