* * *
When Ori’s shift at Checkpoint 300 is over, the first thing he’s going to do is message his mom to ask if he can get a new phone for his birthday this year. No. Okay, first, he’ll check to see if he’s gotten any comments on the photo he posted—his boots and the muzzle of his Tavor looking out at the view from a guard tower. Caption: Boker tov, Bethlehem. Perfect. Then he’ll message Ima about the phone. Unless he should eat a granola bar first? No, shut up, stick with the plan.
Ori is waving Arabs through the turnstile where they funnel out of the caged corridor, narrow and barred to help control the crowds. Danny the gingie is waving them through the X-ray machine, one by one. It’s such a dumbass arrangement. Anyone can do this—the border patrol girls can do this; a fucking jobnik could do this. It’s stupid and boring and, today, it’s Ori and Danny’s job.
An old Arab is taking forever to put his belt back on after going through the X-ray machine. “Yalla, yalla, yaa Allah,” Danny moans, all red hair and not giving a fuck. Ori looks down the line of Arabs—hijabis with strollers, huge grandmothers with a million plastic grocery bags, which Ori never gets—like, what? They don’t have grocery stores you can go to in Jerusalem? At least he didn’t have to be here early in the morning, when it’s all shabaab coming through—proud and honor-sore—cramming themselves through the cages at four a.m. to go work construction. Someone is always getting trampled and passing out. A total mess. At this time of day it’s more about establishing a presence. That’s what their commander told them. It’s past noon now, but you’d never know it from the fluorescent lights in here.
Ori rolls his shoulders against his combat vest. He’s so tired he could dream on his feet, and he hasn’t had a shit in two days. He’s almost-almost a third of the way through his service. Then it’s India, Thailand, Peru—literally anywhere but here. Anywhere but Checkpoint 300, where the Arabs trickle their way through the turnstiles and the X-ray machine, then bring their paperwork—entry permit, the ID card they call a hawiyya—up to the girls behind the glass. That’s it. Then they’re free to waltz into Jerusalem and steal a car or blow up a bus or sneak into a fourteen-year-old’s bedroom with a knife. That’s not funny. He hears the rebuke in Ima’s voice. That’s not funny. He is here because that’s not funny.
It was Ima’s idea for him to go to the mall last night with Meir and Liran. The three of them go all the way back to grade four, but since Ori and Liran recruited, it’s hard to find time. Meir has it lucky—drafted into one of the Premier League teams for Jerusalem just after high school graduation. Who the fuck becomes an actual professional athlete? Meir, apparently. The army will grant him special athlete’s status. Meir won’t serve combat, but will be a jobnik—sitting behind a desk, working with office girls. Anyway, Ima is always pushing Ori to spend time with Meir—“What about Meir? You boys haven’t hung out in ages!”—because Meir still wears his kippa. It hurts her, Ori knows, that he’s stopped wearing it. He wears it at home: a compromise that neither of them finds particularly satisfactory. Ima’s logic is that Meir—who still wears his kippa despite playing with secular teammates who have tattoos and foreign girlfriends—must be a good influence. A good influence. Given what went down last night, that’s almost funny.
Anyway, Ori might have ignored Ima’s suggestion to invite Meir, but she’s been so sad since the funeral for Yael. The funeral was in Jerusalem, and Ima went with little Tovah and Avital. School was canceled that day. Ori knows they feel everything, his mother and his sisters. All the grief and rage and terror that Ori won’t let himself feel—they feel it, almost as if they feel it for him. Is that what it means to be a woman? The last funeral that Ori went to was like maybe a month ago when a guy from his old yeshiva was stabbed to death while napping on the bus. Because he was in his uniform when the terrorist got him, he was promoted to staff sergeant. It was a huge funeral. Flag on the coffin, his ima throwing herself over it, screaming. If Ori dies in uniform, he’ll get promoted, too. So perhaps Ori wanted to make his mother happy when he said that sure, he’d see if Meir—Meir and his kippa—wanted to hang out at the mall.
Ori watches a small, gray bird fly in the barred window, across the heads of the Arabs in line, and then out another window. Danny is shouting to the girls behind the glass, “Do I have to put on his belt for him?” The old guy with the shaky hands isn’t through yet. He looks up from his belt, not that he can understand most of what Danny is saying.
“Shu?” the old man asks. He’s wearing a dress shirt tucked into slacks.
Danny fucks with the Arabs a bit sometimes. Nothing crazy, nothing physical—just pretending not to understand what someone is saying or making one of them go through the X-ray machine a bunch of times for no reason. “Shu? Shu?” Danny imitates the Arab.
“Shu shu,” Ori answers. His stomach grumbles. Okay. New plan: First thing when his shift ends, he’ll eat his granola bar. Then he’ll check in with Ima. Finally—best for last—he’ll check to see if anyone’s left any comments on his Boker tov, Bethlehem photo.
Don’t check your watch, he tells himself. But of course, Ori checks his watch. Forty-nine more minutes left in his guarding shift.
On the car ride home from the mall, only Meir spoke. He kept calling what happened a “fight.” But it wasn’t a fight. There were, like, twenty of them and one Arab. Ori doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want to think about how Meir walked toward the crowd that had the Arab trapped at their center. He doesn’t want to see photos of the Arab in the hospital, now in a coma. All morning—since Ima dropped him off at the bus, since he got to his base, since he was assigned to spend a few hours guarding Checkpoint 300 before they go patrol the camps—he’s been determined not to think about it. There is a lot not to think about.
“Bravo!” Daniel calls out to the old man. “I knew you could do it!”
Ori laughs and shakes his head, tries to resist the urge to check his watch again.
* * *
At the crossing into Jerusalem, Samar tries to hold on to herself. She edges into the cages of Checkpoint 300—single file in a line of people with permits to cross. She knows she is lucky that she did not have to travel in the morning, when the men arrive as early as four a.m. to cram themselves into the winding walkway of cement and bars. Even now, early afternoon, she has waited over an hour to get to the head of the line. Bodies push against Samar, everyone pushing up to the front, pushing their way to the soldiers—a mass of people constantly at risk of trampling themselves. Nearby, someone’s festering sweat is giving off the overpowering smell of onions. Samar has her hawiyya ready, her entry permit carefully folded. There are only five people ahead of her. Each person waits until the turnstile beeps green. Then you must awkwardly sidestep through the turnstile, never mind if you have a stroller, crutches, a wheelchair. In the autumn, she read a brilliant article in Qui Parle about the nature of the turnstiles at the Israeli checkpoints, how they are specifically designed to be difficult to maneuver—that what seems like a malfunction is in fact a form of tactical degradation.
Samar herself has written about checkpoints. Papers in Arabic, English, German. As an academic, she has read the checkpoint through a variety of theoretical lenses that, if they don’t make the experience mean something, at least communicate the senselessness of her life within the Israeli system. But at the checkpoint itself, it doesn’t matter, does it? It doesn’t matter that she has a brilliant mind, that she is on her way to pick up a visa that will allow her to attend an academic conference in Chicago and present a paper there. It doesn’t matter that her articles on the violence of bureaucracy, memorial, and nation-states are widely cited. It doesn’t matter from inside the moment what she will do later to narrativize the moment. What matters is that she breathes, that she does not panic in the cage of the checkpoint, that she does not turn around and yell at the person behind her, Get your hands off me.
Samar stands tiptoe to see over a large woman carrying her groceries, two teenage
girls with books—high school students, maybe—and a middle-aged man her own age. At the X-ray machine, an elderly man is having trouble with his belt. One of the soldiers keeps asking him the same pointless question. “What?” he asks, one hand on his weapon. “What? What?”
When Samar found out her paper had been accepted by the conference in Chicago, she felt not gratification but a panic that was only made worse by the organizers’ enthusiastic phone calls ensuring her that all expenses would be covered. A nightmare of logistics ensued: an entry permit into Jerusalem to secure an entry visa from the Americans, a transit visa from the Jordanians. Too much approval, too many forms. Not for you, she coaxed herself, but for The Work, trying to imagine it as a separate entity. In measures of minutes and sentences, Samar has tried to build a life for her mind. She tends to The Work; they sustain one another, like a garden, or maybe, like a child.
Of course, Mother does not want Samar to go present her paper at the conference in Chicago. “I almost lost you once,” she says, referring to the years of graduate work in England, as if Samar were leaving not for a few days, but for years, and as if Samar did not come home, come back—back in time to see her father die and the Wall completed, the checkpoints formalized. Now Samar gets by on the scraps of the English department at Bethlehem University—teaching lower-level composition that nobody else wants. It leaves little time for her own research on nationalism and erasure. She pushes her work to the side; she apologizes for it, when a cousin of her mother’s, for instance, eyes her to ask, “And what exactly is ‘comparative literature’?” assessing why she remains unmarried, the excuse of her father’s death long expired, and her eligible years evaporated. Now the men they suggest are divorced, widowed—men who want help with the children they already have.
Samar watches a gray dove fly in the barred window of the long, narrow, caged corridor where she and dozens of others are wedged like livestock to be slaughtered. The bird flies in one window and out another. She closes her eyes and tries to breathe.
When it is her turn, the blond soldier waves her through, and Samar wedges herself through the turnstile. The red-haired soldier watches Samar as she puts her purse on the machine. They are all standing on a concrete floor under harsh lights. Once she passes through this machine, she will bring her papers to the girl soldiers behind the glass up ahead, who will ask her where she lives (Bethlehem), where she is going (Jerusalem, for an appointment regarding her travel visa to America). But when she steps through the body scanner, it beeps.
Samar freezes. She looks at the red-haired soldier. He is as young as the students she teaches at the university. He has his hand on his weapon now as he waves at her to walk through again. The machine must be broken. When she dressed this morning, Samar was careful, not wearing so much as a belt—nothing that would set off these machines. She walks back around to the body scanner. The woman behind her in line—large, with two little girls—sighs with impatience. Samar steps through again. It beeps.
The red-haired soldier motions her to stop. He says something to the blond soldier standing behind Samar, closer to the turnstiles. The blond soldier laughs, says something back. Samar is not moving. She is careful not to move her hands too quickly, not to give either of them a reason to shoot.
The red-haired soldier makes a circular motion with his pointer finger: again.
Samar walks through again. This time, it does not beep. He should let her through, but instead he motions her to stop. “Shuv pa’am,” he says. He makes the circular motion with his finger: again. Samar walks through again. Again, it does not beep. He motions her to stop. She stands in front of him. He is very young, with large, awkward hands. He’s not even looking at her, as he talks to the blond soldier. He’s holding his rifle up. It is pointing at her.
Samar can hear the large woman behind her in line—and all the people farther back, the mothers and grandmothers, sons and uncles—shifting with annoyance, mumbling at her, about her, everyone waiting their turn to go through the screening, to get to the other side of the checkpoint where they will catch a bus, a ride, or simply walk along the highway where the Jewish cars will be speeding by, not stopped, never stopped. Samar breathes. She remembers to breathe. She watches a fly land on her shirtsleeve. She doesn’t move to swat it. She does not ask herself why this teenager is making her stand here because the answer is too monstrous and simple to let herself think: because he can.
What matters, right now, is that Samar does not move her hands suddenly, that she does not swat away the fly rubbing its filthy little legs together, that she does not get shot, does not collapse on this cement floor, does not turn around and scream at the people waiting behind her, her fellow countrymen tsking with impatience—more annoyed with her for holding up the line than at the Jews for training them to accept this ceaseless humiliation, day after day after day after day. What matters is that Samar holds on to herself, just a little longer.
“Go through again,” the soldier says at last, his rifle still pointed at her.
She goes through the white portal of the body scanner again. It does not beep.
Reserve Duty
Ido wiggles forward on his belly to get better leverage, then takes a few more shots at the terrorist. Pop, pop, pop. The target is a paper cutout on a stick. It shudders with direct hits. Not bad, this time. Ido finds he’s getting used to the trigger weight of the Tavor. The shooting trainer, a girl of eighteen, leans over to yell, “Much better,” and when she does, her long, straight hair tickles his ears. They’re advancing as a group of three—he, Yitzi, and Gil—with the trainer following close behind. The three oldest guys in the reserve unit.
It’s day two of reserve duty. Morning in the desert: cold and dry. No work yesterday, no work today, no work tomorrow. “Advance!” Gil cries.
And they all get up, heaving from their bellies to their knees to their feet, then run through the arid field, firing as they go. Down again to their bellies. Time to reload.
“One reloading!” Gil yells out from ten paces away.
“Number two reloading!” Yitzi is between Ido and Gil, about five paces. Out of all the slightly ragtag reserve unit, it’s only Yitzi that Ido has known since they were enlisted soldiers. Nineteen years old. Now they’re both dads. Yitzi is the head coder at some start-up in Herzliya and has the frameless glasses to prove it.
“Number three reloading!” Ido cries out as he fumbles with the new magazine. All around him are the cheerful pops of live fire. He can’t remember the last time he was this happy. When Mayan was born, sure. But that was less happiness than it was wonder and terror—nothing like the simple clarity of reserve duty. Last night, he slept in a tent, and he slept all night. All night! He has changed exactly zero diapers in the last twenty-four hours, smoked half a cigarette, eaten two cans of tuna (straight out of the can). And the best part? Today is war. After they finish the shooting drills, they’ll head over to the fake Arab city for a little more action.
It’s about nine in the morning. Usually, Ido would be at the animation studio now, hunched over his desk and clicking around in Maya, ZBrush, or Houdini—who names this software?—for the Disney contract his boss recently landed. The studio specializes in work that can be consumed by both children and adult stoners, which means its output is saccharine in a way that also manages to be self-referential. Three years working there now. Three years of drawing a sardonic unicorn that shits actual rainbows and turns to the “camera” with an expression that says, Can you fucking believe this? Ido cannot believe it: three years. It’s an impressive job, coveted by graduates of his program, but it’s a job. Real success comes from striking out on your own, subsisting on freelance work while you try to get your shorts into festivals. Working for an impressive studio was like having a rich father, or husband maybe, in that the prestige lent you value but it wasn’t your own.
The three men—all of them in hiking boots, all of them a little heavier this year than they were last year—squat around the portable
gas burner that Ido has set up, sipping Turkish coffee from tiny paper cups. Coffee break. “Not bad with the coffee, Abuya,” Yitzi says. Since yesterday the guys are calling him Abuya, in honor of his firstborn. First it was Aba, but then someone switched to Arabic, and that stuck. “Abuya, Abu-yaya,” they coo over pictures of the baby on his phone. “She doesn’t look like you, alhamdulillah, Abuya.” Ido knows what Emily would say about the way they use Arabic; she calls it casual othering, which sounds to him like a clothing brand.
Nearby, the younger reservists are inspecting one another’s Tavors. The new rifles are fun.
“We’re headed to the urban combat drill?” Ido asks Gil.
“Soon, yes.” Gil runs a hand over his shaved head. Now in his forties, he’s been Ido’s reserve commander for about three years. Every year he balded a little more, until last year, when he shaved it all off. “But listen, the problem is . . .” Gil says, typing hurriedly into his phone—every commander seems to live on their cell phone these days—“The problem is that we have to walk there.” Then almost immediately, he’s speaking into his phone. “Beseder. I got it,” he says flatly, recording a voice memo for whomever is on the other end.
“But why?” Yitzi says. “We already signed out our weapons.”
Ido uses his finger to draw a single line in the dirt. Forehead, nose, lips, chin. Emily’s profile. He wipes it away.
“Nothing to be done.” Gil takes another sip of coffee.
City of a Thousand Gates Page 3