City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  On the radio, a man is singing in a style Vera has recently learned to call Mizrahi. Habibti, habibti, habibti, he sings. My beloved, my beloved, my beloved. Vera is the only white woman in the van. The other passengers are Asian tourists—Korean, if she is not mistaken, from the round sound of their whispered words—and a few Palestinians who will probably catch an Arab bus from Jerusalem to the West Bank. The first time she heard someone refer to an “Arab bus,” she was taken aback. Which Arabs? Meaning the buses were owned by Gulf states? Or Palestinians weren’t allowed on Israeli buses? The truth was at once more boring and more horrifying. Buses that serve the West Bank were called “Arab buses” by Israelis, in keeping with the general aversion to referring to the Palestinians of Jerusalem as Palestinians. “Arab” meant Palestinian, but it also suggested a statelessness. The way they said “Arab” made her think, she couldn’t help it, of the way her grandparents might have said “Jew.” Of all the wars waged here, the ones in language were the hardest to detect. Should she write about that? She’s thought about a potential story angle: something about the violence of language, something about how the language itself conditions you to ignore the “other.” But her ideas remain too vague, too theoretical. This is what the editor at Der Spiegel says every time she pitches an article idea to him. “Where are the characters?” he asks. “What is the story?” He hasn’t published a thing of hers since the gimmicky profile she wrote of Jerusalem’s only tattoo artist: a man who has set up shop in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City, practicing the forbidden art on the bodies of Christian pilgrims who come for elaborate crosses as tokens of their journey. She suspects her editor published the story mostly because he liked the headline he could give it: Holy Ink.

  The air in the monit sherut is stuffy for the first half hour of the journey, but it cools the closer they get to Jerusalem. Non-native pine trees line the highways, planted by refugee Zionists in the last century. Elsewhere, the ghosts of Palestinian villages.

  The Israeli that Vera is currently fucking—this absolutely ripped futballer with horrible tattoos—told her that in Hebrew one literally “ascends” to Jerusalem, a reflection both of the city’s hilly location and its holiness. As if people didn’t throw garbage onto the streets of Jerusalem, didn’t let their toddlers squat and shit on the sidewalk. The entire place has an oppressive and—she’d never used this word aloud, but she thinks it—primitive air. Every woman’s body angrily obscured by various orthodoxies. No wonder all the secular Israelis end up in Berlin. Long before she came to Israel to try her hand at journalism, she’d met more Israelis than she could count: she’d snorted coke with them at four a.m. clubs, sat in their chilly Graefekiez flats drinking instant coffee. She understands why they come to Berlin—to rid themselves of some weight, to escape the demands of their ideology into a city that purports to be allergic to any national ideology. The question is, why did she decide to come to their country, armed only with a few press contacts and a conversational ability in Arabic? What does she want? When anybody asks her, she tells them she wants to write stories that matter. It sounds true, or at least plausible.

  The taxi-van winds up and around until they crest into the city. A wooden sign by the side of the highway: welcome to jerusalem. Welcome to Jerusalem, city of graves. The hills of the city tower above them, covered in graves like broken teeth. Orthodox Jewish men daven and tremble among the markers, their black coats in the early noonday sun flapping like crows.

  Vera shifts her weight from foot to foot. She is on a private terrace—perk of this particular class of hotel suite—as an Israeli PR woman in a pencil skirt and sensible flats talks to her about the thread count of the sheets on the bed inside. She writes down the number 500 in her notebook. The woman and Vera speak English, the shared language between them. “Many guests, they enjoy room service on their private patios,” the woman says as she waves a gray mourning dove off the balcony. The dove takes flight in a murmur of wings. The woman has a bit of lipstick on her teeth. Vera can imagine her commuting each morning from some suburban settlement—her bus crossing the old armistice line without anyone noticing as she texts with her husband about whether or not to buy a rice steamer.

  She looks out over the sun-drenched city. White stone, new construction. On the sidewalk below, women with their hair covered pull market baskets on wheels. An Israeli soldier—red boots, green uniform—leaves a convenience store, his rifle swung casually over his shoulder. Two priests pass in front of him, kicking up their robes as they ascend the steep hill toward the Old City. The hotel—a prominent stone building erected under the Ottomans—is angled with its back, as it were, toward the Old City, instead facing Western Jerusalem. Everything that happens in Jerusalem happens to the east, which is, technically, where the West Bank begins. Somewhere out there, ideology is unfolding in violent, consequential ways. The Israeli settlements continue their steady takeover of Area C. A monstrous, eight-meter-high wall snakes around the city of Jerusalem, with entrances monitored carefully by a series of checkpoints. And in a hospital, high above the city, is the body of a fourteen-year-old hooked up to wires and tubes, alive but barely.

  “Do you have any questions?” the woman asks as they walk back into the hotel room.

  The hotel bed is huge, pristine. Vera, for a moment, thinks of the weight of her Israeli lover on top of her—the way he collapses when he orgasms, almost convulsing into the back of her neck. No matter how loud he groans, she always needs to be louder. Always, it’s the sounds of her own pleasure that make her come.

  Because of course she knows what she is doing here. She came to take note of how plastic bags shudder and shred on all the ubiquitous barbed wire; she came to conduct interviews in stuffy rooms where mothers weep for their sacrificed sons; she came to cross checkpoints armed by teenage soldiers, baby-faced and lethal. She came to watch the beast of this place choke on its own tail; she came to write about it, to narrate it, to publish article after article until her voice—Vera’s voice—becomes a kind of soundtrack that brings poignancy, maybe even beauty, to the most divisive conflict in the whole world. And yet, here is Vera, listening to a woman with a topknot talk about the unconventional light switches in this hotel that costs over four hundred euros a night, more than she will get paid for the review she writes for the in-flight magazine.

  “Please excuse me,” Vera says, stuffing her notebook into her leather backpack. “I must leave.”

  “But the tour,” the woman in flats says, her eyebrows contorting in alarm. “You haven’t seen the spa yet.”

  “Send photos,” she cries over her shoulder as she rushes out of the room and down the hallways of identical doors. She is through the marble lobby, and then she is out. She is going east.

  The hotel is not far from the Old City, which is perfect because it will only take her ten or so minutes to run up past Jaffa Gate then down Sultan Suleiman Road and catch a bus—yes, an Arab bus—at one of the bus depots outside Damascus Gate.

  She runs. The sun hot on her head. Her sandals smack-smacking against the sidewalk. Her lungs are tight. She runs in the direction of the depot—just a parking lot, really—where she’ll catch her bus. It’s late enough that the crush of morning workers from the villages and city outskirts—herded in through the checkpoints, hours given over to waiting in line each morning—will be long gone.

  When she spots a gap in the traffic, she makes a dash across the street, knowing it’s stupid even as she does it, and yes, a car probably almost hits but manages the sudden stop, the driver—Vera turns to see it is a man and his wife—too shocked to even honk. Sorry, sorry, she thinks, still running, her blue scarf loose around her neck, her black backpack smacking against her.

  At the ornate mouth of Damascus Gate, she slows to a walk, the drum of her heart in her ears. Here begins the filth of East Jerusalem: garbage rotting in the strengthening sun, black bile accumulating in the gutters, where old village women with their dresses spread over their knees sell bags of herbs th
at Vera can’t distinguish. Everything looks more or less like mint to her. In the shade of delicate trees, young Palestinian men lean against blocks of ancient white stone and watch her. She adjusts the straps of her backpack, carefully touches her lower back to make sure her shirt hasn’t ridden up to reveal her body. She tugs her scarf—bright blue, bought in Bethlehem—over her shoulders. Although perhaps the young men aren’t watching her at all, but rather the three border police posted at the small traffic island by Damascus Gate, each one facing a different direction. Gray uniforms and green berets. Three men this time, although often there will be a girl, all of them in reflective sunglasses, free hand resting in their combat vests.

  She catches her bus just before the door closes, pays the driver in change, then finds a seat next to an elderly woman whose lap is spread with groceries—at least a dozen plastic bags heavy with cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, cheeses. Nobody in East Jerusalem seems particularly interested in reusable shopping bags. The bus maneuvers through the market area—over collapsed and rotten produce boxes, stopping and honking for pedestrians who pay it no mind. They pass a boy in jeans pushing a cart of dead goats, skinned whole. The goats’ pink, exposed bodies wag perversely as the cart rumbles over the stones. Vera turns to stare. Their eyes remain but without eyelids, like the goats are all horrified by what they see and cannot look away.

  The bus drops her near Augusta Victoria Hospital. She’s read about it, but never been here. It’s often described as an “oasis” of Europe in East Jerusalem, looking more like a cathedral than a hospital. Its most famous feature is the stately bell tower—a grand witness to the entire city below it. The grounds are quiet. Families eat picnics on benches. All the women in hijabs. All the men sit spread across the benches. Vera has read how families from the West Bank—from Gaza, even—bring their children here for treatment, although only if the Israelis give them permission. Somewhere in this hospital is the body of Salem Abu-Khdeir. A boy who is neither alive nor dead.

  She picks at her cuticles, a bad habit she can’t quite shake. She has no plan now that she’s arrived at the hospital. Surely, she can’t go inside and run around looking for the dying boy. But she wants to be here. She wants to be where it is happening—whatever it is.

  She walks among the picnicking families, the frail and unwell children. She walks toward the hospital. Olive trees and white stone. The grand architecture makes a promise—something about order and decency, something about God and empire. It is the kind of promise that white people, her people, truly believed a hundred years ago. She looks up at the windows, all of them shapely like a woman’s upper lip. Where are you? Vera thinks. Where am I?

  * * *

  Ido hasn’t slept more than two consecutive hours since the baby came home, so when Emily rushes into their bathroom holding the tiny poop machine they named Mayan, and says, “I can’t find her sun hat,” he doesn’t hear the English right and finds himself saying, “Son what?” before his brain processes her words. Sun hat. “Doesn’t she have more than one sun hat?” he asks, finishing up his shaving in the mirror.

  Emily gets free stuff all the time from her weirdly successful online presence. Baby gear, mommy gear, organic face serums, activated charcoal everything, crystals. She’s dressed already for the wedding in a startlingly blue floor-length dress, which ripples proteanly as she rushes out of the bathroom and around the bedroom, baby Mayan tucked under one arm, her head at maybe a not-great angle as she wails. Opening drawers, closing drawers. “But this one has SPF in it.”

  “Is she hungry?” he asks from the bathroom threshold.

  Emily doesn’t answer as she kneels to look under the bed. That silk dress costs as much as Ido makes in, like, three days at the animation studio. Not that it really matters—they don’t pay rent on the Jerusalem house his parents let him use, and they don’t have car payments to make, because his parents gave them that, too—but there is something insulting in it. Earlier today, he diligently photographed Emily in their garden, wearing this blue dress and her own floppy sun hat, holding their newborn in the crook of her arm. He must admit that he admires how his wife walks a line between creating an aspirational life—Turkish tiles and copper basins in their bathroom, lemon trees in their yard—and using a tone that is self-deprecating enough for other women to celebrate her for being “brave.” The caption for this most recent photo: Can you tell I’m wearing an actual adult diaper? #postpartum.

  There’s no doubt that it’s working. Since Mayan was born, Emily’s follower count has edged into the six digits, and she’s making real money.

  “Here,” he says, striding across the room to his bedside table, where he opens a drawer to pull out the faded olive-green bucket hat he got in the army and still keeps around, keeping it handy for reserve duty.

  Emily staggers up from kneeling to look under the bed. Mayan is now moaning more than wailing, her useless little hands moving in agitation like a tiny, enraged prophet.

  Ido puts his old army hat over Mayan’s head, fuzzy with black hair. Blue eyes, black hair, and a unibrow that makes her seem a little skeptical at all times. Mayan disappears under the cloth hat, faded from the sun. On the side of that hat is the logo of his old unit, bat wings stitched roughly. He was twenty years old when he got this hat. He wore it in the Negev, in Gaza, in Nepal. For a moment, in the dark, Mayan is silent. Ido watches a gray dove land on their bedroom window ledge, cooing softly. Then Mayan’s screaming snaps him back. The sound claws at the nerves in Ido’s neck.

  “Ew,” Emily says, plucking the hat off Mayan and handing it back to him. “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Ew. No’?”

  “Our baby is not wearing army paraphernalia.”

  “Oh, come on,” he says, keeping his tone light as he takes Mayan from Emily. He holds her close as he sways the way she likes, his body like a ship. “Shh,” he says. “Shh, shh.

  “Mayan is going to be a sniper.” He uses his baby voice. “Aren’t you? Mayan the marksman?” He’s aware of a kind of chasm widening, one that exists in his peripheral vision, that he can’t quite bear to think about—the ideological chasm between him and his foreigner wife.

  “Come on,” she says, pulling the sun hat out of her own underwear drawer, “we’re already late for the wedding.”

  They’ve been in the car less than ten minutes, and Emily is already insisting that Ido pull over so she can nurse Mayan. He’s inching onto Highway 60 near the Old City, the rush-hour traffic into the settlements beginning already. “Nu, Emily.” He turns back to face her in the back seat, where she’s leaning over Mayan’s car seat. Their baby screams at a pitch that may in fact be evolutionarily perfected to make him want to crash this car right into the taxi in front of him. “Ido, I don’t think,” she begins, but before she can say what he knows she will say—that she doesn’t want to take Mayan out of the car seat when they are driving—there is a horrible flash across Ido’s windshield, and he brakes as fast as he can, screaming in English, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” because he’s sure he’s about to hit the body that just stepped in front of the car. The car stops sharply.

  For a long second, silence. The girl—a tourist, with a black backpack and one of those exotically blue shawls that all Europeans seem to wear—glances at him but gives not even an apologetic wave as she continues across the street. Then Mayan is screaming again, twice as loud, and Emily is shouting over the baby’s screams, “Ido!” Mayan’s ridiculously floppy sun hat has fallen over her face. Thank God she’s buckled. “Ido! I told you!” She says it in Hebrew. “I told you to be careful!” Her American accent flattens out the words.

  “Beseder,” he shouts. Both of them are delirious with lack of sleep. It was stupid to think that, three weeks after Emily came home from the hospital, they could make it to a wedding. “At least let me get through the tunnels.” They are moving now in the flow of traffic on Highway 60, soon to be carried through the tunnels that lead them under the Arab villages and out of the Jerusalem peripher
y.

  A few minutes out of Jerusalem, they pull into a gas station on Highway 60. Emily sits in the back of the car, blanket over their nursing baby, while Ido leans against the hood of the car. “Is that nice?” she coos. “Were you hungry? You’re a hungry girl.”

  Emily looks up at him. Freckles, golden hair. His blond, American Jew. His heart grows full and tender. “She’s hungry, ah?”

  “Always hungry!” Emily laughs. She checks on Mayan, peeking under the organic cotton eyelet breastfeeding blanket that she received for free from some hopeful company.

  “Let’s try to time her puking until after the chuppah.” In about an hour, no doubt, Mayan will begin voiding the contents of her tiny, greedy belly.

  The sun is harsh. All around them, families are fueling up. Somewhere, a child yells out, “Mama, I have to go pee-pee.” Down the highway—not far from here at all, but in a world hidden from Emily and their baby—teenagers, kids really, are working checkpoints, bored in the almost-winter sun.

  It was on a settlement not much deeper in that a girl, just fourteen years old, was killed when the fucking terrorist climbed in her bedroom window. The photos he saw on Facebook were horrific. What did that girl, Yael Salomon, do to hurt anyone? Just a girl. Someone’s daughter. “Let’s go,” he says, needing his wife and his baby to be enclosed in the car, needing to get them away from these anxious points of contact from which so much violence springs. Nervous but unwilling to admit that he’s nervous. “Let’s go.”